Murder Comes First (11 page)

“I,” Pam North said, with sudden decision, “am going to the Logan house. I want to talk to young Mr. Logan.”

That was, Bill told her, between her and young Mr. Logan, who had, however, already been talked to. Pam said she had to start somewhere.

“And he's closest home,” she said. “He's
at
home.”

She was told by Bill Weigand, in a worried tone, to watch herself. Bill was told that that meant he didn't think it was finished.

“Since,” Pam told him, “I don't have to watch myself from the aunts. Obviously.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, and then that he would, thus unexpectedly relieved, try to make a date with his wife for dinner. He started again toward the telephone booths, and Pam called after him. He returned.

“Why,” Pam said, “don't you take Dorian to Gimo's? Then, if we can, Jerry and I'll join you.”

Bill had never heard of Gimo's.

“A little place in the East Fifties,” Pam said, and gave him the address. “Very nice.”

Bill looked doubtful, feeling apparently that Pam North was up to something. He was told he would love it; he regarded her for several seconds and then said, “Right.”

“The place I went with Mr. Sandford,” Pam North told her husband in the taxicab. “The place I was followed from. I thought Bill might just as well case the joint.”

She was told her idiom was showing lamentable indications of collapse, and that it came from associating with policemen. This Pam denied. She said it came from things she read.

“Like Aunt Lucy,” she said. “Her mind must be full of jacks.”

“Jacks?” Jerry said. “Oh, jack
straws
.”

It was, Pam told him, no time to quibble. They came to the Logan house. There was no longer a policeman there; there was no crowd there; it was again merely a house standing with its elbows cramped tight against its sides.

And Paul Logan was not, at that moment, in it. For a time there appeared, as Jerry pressed the doorbell, to be nobody in it. Then, as if from a distance, a square woman in her middle fifties, with blond hair pulled tight, with red cheeks packed tight and bright blue eyes, came to the door and opened it partially. Pam asked for Mr. Logan.

“He's not at home,” the square woman said. “He went out to dinner.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

The square woman began the closing of the door.

“Wait a minute,” Pam said. “I remember. One of my aunts said something about you once. About hot rolls spread with something. Lobster newburg. You're—” Pam paused, having run out of a dim memory.

“Hilda,” the square woman said. “Hilda Svenson.”

“The Misses Whitsett,” Pam said. “They're my aunts. They used to come here and have teas—wonderful teas. The most wonderful they ever had.”

“That's nice,” Hilda said. Then her round eyes grew rounder. “The Misses Whitsett,” she repeated, the name sounding a little different on her tongue. “They were here—here—” Then the blue eyes filled with tears.

“It's so dreadful,” Pam North said. “You were with her such a long time.”

“Fifteen years,” Hilda said. “Fifteen years last
March
. The Misses Whitsett are your aunts?”

“Yes,” Pam said.

“Such nice ladies,” Hilda said, blinking at the tears.

“The poor things,” Pam said. “Now the police think they were the ones.”

“Please?” Hilda said.

“That they gave the—the awful poison to Mrs. Logan,” Pam North said. “At least, that one of them did.”

“That iss not possible,” Hilda said. She paused momentarily. “Nonsense, that iss,” she added.

“And I thought perhaps Mr. Logan would remember something that would help them,” Pam said. “I'm so sorry he isn't—”

“You come in,” Hilda said, and opened the door wide. “This man. He is?”

“My husband,” Pam said.

“A quiet one,” Hilda said. “You both come in.”

They both went in. They went to the upstairs living room and were asked to sit down, but Hilda stood. After persuasion, she sat too, to the relief of Mr. North. Pam North and Hilda agreed that the death of Mrs. Logan was a dreadful thing; Hilda's round blue eyes filled again with tears.

“They should be punished,” Hilda said. “Whoever.”

Mr. and Mrs. North agreed to this.

“We keep feeling,” Pam said, “that there must have been something nobody knows about, or recognizes. Something before, you know, Hilda. Living here in the house, being so close to her, perhaps you can remember something?”

“What something?” Hilda asked, and Pam said that that was it, one couldn't tell. Perhaps Mrs. Logan had said something that now, remembered, would be important; perhaps she had seemed not herself.

“Worried,” Hilda said. “She was worried. About that Sally. You know about that Sally?”

Pam did; Jerry did.

“She left that nice Mr. Sandford,” Hilda said. “Some foolishness. When my husband was alive, there was no such foolishness. In the old country.”

“Of course it is,” Pam said.

“You young ones,” Hilda said, and looked at Pam North with skepticism. She looked at Jerry North. “Don't let her,” she told him. “Foolishness.”

“I won't,” Jerry promised.

“Listen, Mrs. Svenson,” Pam said. “Was Mrs. Logan just worried about the whole thing? About Mrs. Sandford's foolishness? Or about something she was afraid had happened?”

“Please?” Hilda Svenson said.

“That something had happened to Mrs. Sandford,” Jerry said. “Like being hurt, or ill?”

It was something about the typewriter,” Hilda said. “There was something not right about the typewriter.”

It took time to get more, and then it was not clear. At first, Grace Logan, Hilda thought, had merely been worried because of the foolishness of Sally's prolonged escapade. Later, the worry had apparently taken a different form. Hilda sometimes had to be guessed at; the Norths could guess that something had happened, three or four weeks earlier which, to Mrs. Logan, had given new, and more significant, meaning to her niece's continued absence. It was something about a typewriter.

“A machine one writes on,” Hilda explained.

“Mrs. Sandford wrote her aunt on a typewriter,” Pam said. “Was that the one she meant?”

Hilda did not know. Mrs. Logan had been elliptic; had said, as Hilda remembered it, that there was something wrong about the whole business. “The typewriter most of all.” She had not amplified and Hilda had not asked more.

“I was cooking,” she said. “She came to my kitchen and talked and sometimes I had to go on cooking. Things will not wait while people talk.”

But, since Mrs. Logan's death, Hilda had been thinking and remembering, and that incident she remembered. After it, although letters continued to come from Sally Sandford, Mrs. Logan mentioned her more frequently, and seemed more worried about her. She had not, however, again mentioned the typewriter.

Hilda had not spoken of this memory of hers to anyone else, even to Paul Logan. For the rest she could add nothing to what she had already told the police, which told them little, except that Mrs. Logan's bathroom was much used by guests, was available to anyone in the house, so that almost anyone who got into the house could have substituted the concentrate of death for what Mrs. Logan had called “concentrated health.”

It was almost eight o'clock when the Norths left the Logan house. Jerry, pointing out that they were drinks behind, suggested the Plaza, as no more than around the corner.

“Gimo's,” Pam said. “We've got to tell Bill.”

Jerry was doubtful.

“Don't you see?” Pam said. “It was the
wrong
typewriter. Whatever the police thought.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said.

“What
ever
they thought,” Pam assured him, and told Jerry the address of Gimo's, to relay to the taxi driver when they found him. They found him then. “The one Mrs. Sandford is writing on,” Pam explained, when they had started. “Mrs. Logan noticed it.”

It was a very short distance to Gimo's and when the cab stopped Jerry was still explaining that the police did not make mistakes about things like that, and Pam was unpersuaded, pointing out that anyone could make mistakes or take too much for granted.

The maître d' appeared to remember Pamela North, which was flattering. He offered an immediate table, but, told they wanted to look for somebody—“a Mr. Weigand,” Pam told him—helped them look. They found Bill and Dorian Weigand, sitting opposite one another in a booth upstairs, eating veal scaloppine, and joined them.

“Bill,” Pam said, “it's the wrong typewriter! Mrs. Logan found out and—and—” But there Pamela North stopped, and was puzzled. “Only,” she said, “what does it mean? What difference would it make?”

When the Norths had been served drinks and had ordered dinner, when Pam North's suspicions had been explained, that question still remained. What difference did it make? There remained also Bill's complete assurance that the police had not been wrong. There was only one typewriter involved. All of the letters initialed by Sally Sandford and found in the Logan house had been written on that one typewriter. The defects were unmistakable, not to be overlooked.

“They stick out a mile,” Bill told her. “The letter ‘r' alone would be enough. Look, Pam, you could pretty near see it across the room.”

“Tweezers!” Pam said. “That's what it is!”

The three of them looked at her. They looked at one another. They looked again at Pam North.

“All right,” Jerry said, “I give up.”

“It's obvious,” Pam said. “It's the woods and the trees again. Not seeing whichever it is for the other. The one that's too obvious, of course.”

They all waited.

“Bill,” Pam said, “did real experts make the comparison? Of one of the typed letters with another? Or did somebody just notice the letter ‘r' and the other thing—what was it? Oh, the letter ‘e' out of alignment—and jump? Because either of those could have been done with tweezers and people see what they expect to. Or are expected to.”

“Pam means—” Jerry began, but by then Bill and Dorian saw what she meant, and Bill nodded slowly. The imperfections which could be seen across the room, which were the obvious ones, could perhaps, be faked. If not with tweezers which, Bill had years before discovered, Pam considered the universal tool, the inventive apex of the machine age, then with almost anything else. Possibly, in point of fact, with the fingers only. Identity in typescript would so be achieved, to the casual glance. With no reason for suspicion, none might enter the mind. If, nevertheless, suspicion had entered Mrs. Logan's mind—

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I see what she means. As a matter of fact, I don't know. I'll find out.”

He elected to find out then, although Dorian urged that he finish dinner. “He never finishes dinner,” Dorian told the Norths, after Bill had gone to find a telephone. “He's supposed to be on his forty-eight. He—”

He had, Dorian told them, been telling her all about it. It had not been a restful dinner. Dorian wished Pam's aunts had stayed in Cleveland.

“Or,” she said, “that Inspector O'Malley would go there and take the district attorney with him, and leave Bill alone to do his job. Or that he had a different kind of job.”

“You've always wished that,” Pam told her. “Only, not really.”

“I—” Dorian began, and then stopped, her almost green eyes shadowed for a moment. Then she smiled and nodded and said Pam was right.

“You have to take them as they come,” she told Pam, and the two women smiled together about the way they came.

“If you two would be happier alone,” Gerald North said, formally.

“The way they come,” Pam repeated, and both she and Dorian seemed momentarily amused. But then Bill Weigand came back from the telephone. There was an odd expression on his face and for a moment he said nothing. They waited. Bill did not at first seem to notice this; he seemed to have forgotten the errand on which he had gone.

“The typewriter?” Dorian Weigand said and seemed to be examining her husband's face.

“Oh,” Bill said. “That.” He seemed to shake himself out of abstraction. “I'm sorry, Pam. The idea's no good. They didn't stop with the obvious similarities. As a matter of routine, they made a thorough comparison. Everything they found at the Logan house from Mrs. Sandford was written on the same typewriter.” He smiled faintly. “Nobody used tweezers,” he said. “I don't know what bothered Mrs. Logan, but there was only one typewriter.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

“What else, Bill?” Dorian said, still with her eyes on her husband's face.

“Else?” Bill repeated. “There isn't anything—” He looked at Dorian.

“Oh,” he said. “I saw a man I know slightly. Didn't expect to see him here, is all.”

But his tone was not convincing, and now all of them looked at him and waited.

“There's more—” Pam began, and Bill shook his head. Nevertheless, they continued to wait.

“All right,” Bill said. “This much—and I don't know any more myself, and won't unless I'm told, and won't be told. The man I saw works for the government. He made a point of not seeing me, so he's probably working now. There's no reason to think it has anything to do with—with anything we're interested in. And—we make a point of keeping hands off, unless we're asked. They want it that way.”

There was another pause.

“This is where Sandford brought Pam for lunch,” Jerry said, his voice casual.

“Right,” Bill said. “I gathered that. The martinis are only fair, so I imagined—” He broke off. He started again. “By the way,” he said, “did you gather that Sandford came here often, Pam?”