Murder in a Hurry (28 page)

“Oh,” Bill Weigand said. “No—not more than usual. He'd lived for years on his wife, who lived on her father, but he wasn't particularly broke. The hurry was that Halder would have died in a few months. The income from him would stop and, if the will change went through, the Whitesides wouldn't inherit. Halder might, actually, have died the next day—or the next week. And, somehow, Whiteside had found out about it. Probably the old man told him. We found out, of course, from the autopsy.”

Pam said, “Oh.”

“Quite possibly,” Bill said, “Halder had summoned the family to tell them that—perhaps even to say he had decided to come home for his last few months. We'll never know. And it doesn't matter. He never got around to telling them at the dinner; he may have told Whiteside that night—something like ‘Don't think I'll change the will back; I won't live long enough.' So—the colonel hurried.”

He had killed his father-in-law and, to make it appear suicide—“while insane, presumably”—he had put the body in the pen; put the poison left over in Halder's medicine cabinet; pressed Halder's fingers on his own hypodermic.

“The strychnine?” Jerry asked, and Bill shrugged. He said they were trying to trace it; expected to, in the end.

“At a guess,” he said, “Whiteside got it a couple of years ago to kill a cat they had. At least, they had a cat and—” He looked at Brian Halder.

“A yellow cat,” Brian said. “They said it died. I don't know. Come to think of it, the cat disappeared very suddenly.”

“Right,” Bill said. “That's hypothesis. We'll find out more. Anyway, he had it. And used it. And, at some stage in this, Felix Sneddiger looked in the window and saw him. Here again we have to assume—Sneddiger's dead, Whiteside doesn't talk. But I'd assume that Halder had described the members of his family, that from the description Sneddiger thought the man he had seen was Whiteside and—well, went up to be sure.” Bill paused. “He found out,” he said.

Sneddiger might, before he died, have insisted he had told what he knew to someone else, Bill Weigand went on. That in an effort to save his own life by making his murder useless. He didn't save his life, but he alarmed Whiteside. Later, when Whiteside found out that Sneddiger and Liza had been together when the body was found, he jumped to the conclusion that Sneddiger had talked to her.

“He didn't,” Liza heard herself say. “I've kept saying he didn't.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Early on, I decided he hadn't. But—Whiteside couldn't take the chance. He followed you to the shop, Miss O'Brien, tried to kill you; would have if Mr. Halder”—he indicated Brian—“hadn't come back at a fortunate time. I presume he hid in the shop momentarily, ducked out when Mr. Halder went for a pillow, and hid in the passageway. I presume he was the person Mr. Halder heard—and was afraid was Pine or his mother. Or both of them.” He smiled faintly as he looked at Brian Halder. “You did think that?” he said, but then said, “Never mind,” before Brian had time to answer. If, Liza thought, he needed to answer. Poor Brian. Dear Brian. Again she pressed his hands. He smiled down at her.

Again Jerry North made the rounds with a cocktail shaker; Liza smiled and shook her head. The others let their glasses be filled, and Bill Weigand drank from his and went on.

“Incidentally,” he said, still to Brian Halder, “you didn't drop into a bar after you found your father's body and telephoned us. You tried to find your mother. Right?” Brian merely looked at him, but failure to deny was affirmation. “Called the house, probably,” Bill said. “Found she wasn't there. Tried Pine's apartment. Not there either?”

“Nobody was,” Brian said. “They'd—they'd stopped by the theater to pick up Pine's mail. Fan mail.” The last was ironic; Brian was not, Liza realized, likely ever to achieve enthusiastic regard for the man who was evidently to become his step-father. Poor Brian. She would have to explain to him—somehow, as time went on—that neutrality in such matters was possible; that things were not always, not necessarily, so desperate. His hands are so strong, she thought then, with profound irrelevancy.…

Whiteside, finding that Liza had remained alive, must have been at first frightened and afterward puzzled, Bill Weigand said. He spoke slowly, formulating it in his own mind; speaking as much to clarify things for himself as to explain them to the others. No doubt, Whiteside expected Liza to tell, at once, what she knew. But when there was no evidence she had told anything, when the police did not show by action that they had new information, he was left to guess whether she really knew nothing or, knowing something, was keeping quiet for purposes of her own. Liza herself had come back by then, was listening again.

“What purposes?” she asked. “Why wouldn't I have told what I knew? Since, that is, it was about Mr. Whiteside and not—” She broke off, and flushed slightly.

“Because,” Pamela North said, “he could have thought you were going to blackmail him. Because what we think about other people is because of what we know about ourselves and he would have.” She paused a moment, and looked slightly worried. “Only,” she said, “how do I know that about
him?
I mean, if—”

“We know, Pam,” Jerry told her. “It's all right. We like you anyway.” He went to mix another round; the sound of ice against glass was, for a few moments, a pleasant obbligato to Bill Weigand's low voice. Then Jerry passed drinks again, and this time Liza did not refuse.

“—uncertainly,” Weigand was saying. “It showed all through the last few hours. Not knowing which way to turn. The absurd attack on Pine, for example. It was supposed to complicate matters for us; gives us something difficult to fit into a logical case against Whiteside himself. Why should he try, apparently, to kill Pine? No reason. Why should Mr. Halder here?” Bill indicated Brian. “We had a choice of reasons. Mr. Halder thought Pine had killed his father and was trying to get revenge. We'd been directed to Greek tragedy—which was more or less extraneous incidentally—by Mr. Halder's father. We could think of Pine as Aegisthus—the character, not the pooch—and Mr. Halder as Orestes. Or—Pine knew something which would involve Mr. Halder, and had to be silenced. Whiteside evidently saw you two”—now he indicated both Brian and Liza—“coming from the stage door, guessed accurately you were trying to see Pine. Guessed, again rightly, we would—find out about it. Or—” He paused.

“Ever so many others,” Pam North said. “Brian was trying to make it appear he thought Pine was guilty, although he was guilty himself, which would make you think—where was I?” She looked at her empty glass, with something like reproach.

Most of the glasses were empty, then. And most of it, Bill Weigand's attitude revealed, was told. He seemed abstracted, now; he would be, Liza thought, thinking of the next steps, of the things which, for him, for other detectives, for the district attorney's men, would go on and on, far beyond this, more intricately than this, more—

“He didn't try to kill Pine, then?” That was Jerry North, as if from a distance.

“Right,” Bill said. “No use to him dead. He and his wife were at the theater, you know. He left his seat after the lights were out—our man missed that—went down the aisle to the door Mr. Halder used later and—”

But for us it's over, Liza thought. All that matters is over. For us it's just beginning and there ought to be lots of time. Please, make it lots of time for Brian and me—oh please.… And then she thought, he takes things so hard, so desperately, and there will be so many things to understand … and it was such an odd way to start but now I know so much more and …

Why, Liza O'Brien thought, I'm going to sleep. Brian put his arm around me and I'm going to sleep. What … a … nice … place … to … Liza O'Brien thought.

“The nice thing about an evening with the Norths,” Pam said, her voice very low, for Jerry's ear, “is that it's so stimulating.”

About the Authors

Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the
New Yorker
turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances's death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1950 by Frances and Richard Lockridge; copyright renewed 1978 by Richard Lockridge

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3133-2

This 2016 edition published by
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THE MR. AND MRS. NORTH MYSTERIES

FROM
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA