Murder within Murder (31 page)

“The book?” Flanagan said.

“An argot,” Stanton said. “Our own clichés. A magazine's a book to the people who get it out.”

“So you see—” Helms started, and Flanagan shook his head.

“I see he was a friend of yours, Mr. Helms,” Flanagan said. “He was, wasn't he?”

“The best,” Helms said. “For years. Hell, he got me in here. And before that—oh, skip it.”

“So naturally you'd rather it weren't suicide,” Flanagan said. “It's very natural. But I think it was. I think, if you look at it from the outside, you'll agree with me. I think he was planning it when he made his change of plans, a change which meant that from this evening you more or less took over in his place with Mr. Stanton here. I think he was giving you a break, knowing he was out anyway and hoping you'd—” He stopped.

“O.K.,” Stanton said. “He knew Helms here was moving in.”

“And,” Flanagan went on, “you say he had always been devoted, very devoted, to his mother. Lived with her all his life. And that she died a couple of months ago?”

“Yes,” Helms said.

“I don't know how many things like that—losing his job, a morbid sorrow about his mother, maybe a dozen things we don't know about—added up for him,” Flanagan said. “I'm a policeman, not a doctor. But I think a lot of things did and—well, the window was open. He stood there and maybe said, ‘The hell with it,' and jumped. Maybe.…”

Helms shook his head. He still seemed unconvinced. Flanagan stopped and waited.

“I can't believe he was planning anything like that,” Helms said. “Even thinking about it. He—he was planning ahead. Not just for this weekend. As if he—I mean, planning the way everybody does.” He paused, his face thoughtful, remembering.

“For example,” he said, “only Wednesday—day before yesterday—he spent the afternoon at his oculist's, getting a checkup, getting a prescription for new glasses. Would he have done that sort of thing if—”

This time it was Helms who stopped because of Flanagan's expression, and the nodding of Flanagan's head.

“You're trying to be logical,” Flanagan said. “What you don't understand, Mr. Helms, is that suicide usually isn't logical. It sort of comes over people, apparently. As I said, suddenly a man says, ‘Oh, the hell with it,' and jumps out a window. Maybe just before he's to go to dinner with his girl. Maybe when he seems to have laid things out for weeks ahead. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it happens.”

He seemed very sure. Helms shrugged.

“All right,” Helms said. “I don't know. Maybe it's the way you think. Anyway, he's dead. It doesn't make much difference.”

Flanagan nodded and said that was right.

“Not much difference as long as he wasn't pushed,” he said. “He jumped, I think. He fell, you'd rather think. It's all the same, except on the records.” He smiled faintly. “We have to keep a lot of records,” he said.

Dorian looked at her hair in the mirror and decided that, taking everything into account, she preferred Mr. Henri to Mr. Armand. He was better at the back, even if perhaps not quite so good at the front. The balance was in his favor. She looked at the watch on her wrist, said “Hmm!” because it was later than she thought, and left Bonwit's rather rapidly. Fortune beamed upon her and a taxicab driver smiled. He looked at her more closely and smiled again, pleased and brightened. Dorian filed in her memory his name and hack license number, having learned that it was well to remember such matters and being, at any rate in small things, obedient. Then she said, “Is your name really Thomas Jefferson?”

“I'll tell you about that,” the taxi driver said, and did, all the way to the house in Thirty-seventh Street. It was not, Dorian reluctantly decided—at Forty-eighth and Madison—as interesting as he thought it was; it was merely a story he told people when they asked. Even taxi drivers could be, on occasion, long-winded. But she told him it was very interesting when she tipped him, and went up the brownstone steps. It then was ten minutes after five.

She had closed the outer door behind her, and was digging her keys out of her purse before she fully realized that there was somebody in the vestibule—somebody merely standing there, waiting for something, smoking the end of a cigar which had filled the vestibule with acrid, choking fumes. Presumably it was the fumes, she thought, that made her feel strangely and very suddenly uncomfortable. It was not clear in that quick moment whether the discomfort was of mind or body, or of both. It was merely that something intangibly unpleasant seemed to have happened when she closed the door behind her.

It had been bright outside—in the taxicab with its glass roof, on the sidewalk as she crossed it. It was much dimmer in the vestibule and she had at first only a feeling that the man who leaned against the wall opposite the mailboxes, and looked at her without saying anything, was bulky and, somehow, mussed. Then she realized that he was wearing a seersucker suit, which hung on him loosely—hung loosely over a large, loose body.

She looked away after her first glance, and started to make the two steps or so which would take her to the inner door. The man did not move, or make any sound, but she knew that he was going to speak. Without entirely realizing what she was doing, she hurried with the key, and it made a clinking, metallic sound against the plate of the lock. For no reason, absurdly, it became necessary to put the door between herself and this bulking man in seersucker, this man with the large, soft face. But even as she hurried, she knew that she was not going to accomplish this before he spoke.

His voice was heavy—softly heavy like the rest of him—when he did speak. But there was nothing inimical in what he said. He merely repeated her name, questioningly, for identification.

She turned immediately, facing him.

“Yes?” she said. She said only that much and waited. He moved away from the wall, but there did not seem to be any threat in his motion. He even smiled, displaying a broken tooth in his lower left jaw.

“Headquarters,” he said. He smiled again. “Police Headquarters, Miss Hunt.” He put his hand in his coat pocket and took it out and showed her a shield cupped in his hand. He smiled again, more obviously. “You want to see Lieutenant Weigand,” he said, as a statement, not an enquiry. “You've got something to tell him?”

“I—” Dorian started, and stopped. Her greenish eyes narrowed a little, but the man did not seem to notice this. He went on, his voice soft and low and rumbling.

“You came here earlier,” the man said. “But our man missed you. Then he lost you. They sent me here on the chance you might come back, see?”

“Yes,” Dorian said. “But I don't understand—”

He broke in again, easily, reassuringly.

“Sure,” he said. “At this magazine now—this
Esprit.
Where the guy jumped out the window. You saw something. You wanted to tell the police about it and you thought of Weigand. Friend of his, maybe?”

Dorian Hunt's curved lips curved a little more, for an instant, in the beginning of a smile. Then the smile vanished.

“Yes,” she said. “So you're a detective too? Homicide?”

“That's right, miss,” he said. “Detective Farno.”

“That's—” Dorian began, and again she stopped. When she resumed her sentence took a different shape. “You're one of Lieutenant Weigand's men?”

“That's right, miss,” Detective Farno said. “The lieutenant sent me to ask you to come down—to come around.” He paused and nodded heavily. “May as well tell you,” he said, “we think maybe it wasn't suicide, see? Or accident. Somethin' came up, see? After you left. So Weigand sent this other guy—a guy named Piper—out to ask would you come around so we could check up on a coupla points. And Piper missed you.” He smiled again, showing the broken tooth. “Reticent, see, this guy Piper. Don't like to horn in.”

Dorian Hunt had moved a little away from the door. Now, very inconspicuously, she began to edge toward it again. The key was still in her hand, and she moved so that the hand with the key was screened from the detective by her body. He did not seem to see her movement.

“I'll tell you, miss,” he went on, and his soft voice—a voice which seemed to paw at her gently, like a soft hand—was ingratiating. “Weigand thinks maybe you saw something important without realizing it, see? Without giving it a real tumble, see? He wants to ask you questions, see?”

“What questions?” Dorian said. “I don't know, really, whether I saw anything or not. That was why I came here, instead of going to Lieutenant Weigand's office. I wanted to see whether he thought it was important before I did anything officially.”

The words covered her continued, almost imperceptible, movement toward the door. They covered the time it took to raise the hand with the key in it toward the lock. Still Detective Farno did not seem to notice her movement, still he smiled. But now he moved a step closer to her.

“That's what he figured,” Farno said. “That's exactly how he figured it, miss. But don't ask me what questions, see? I'm just a messenger.” He paused and she thought he was thinking, planning what to say next. “You see, miss,” he said then, “Weigand ain't at his office right now, see? He's interviewing a guy who might know something, at the guy's apartment. He wants you should come along there, so he sends me to take you there, see?”

“Of course,” Dorian said, and now the key was almost in the lock. But now, also, he was much nearer … and now she saw his eyes away from her face and knew that he saw the hand which held the key, was just pressing it into the lock of the door.

“Look,” he said. “You don't live here, miss? Because—” His eyes swung toward the names over the mailboxes.

“But I do,” she said and then, and only then, she seemed to get the point of his glance at the names. “Oh,” she said, “I see why you wondered. I'm here with a friend, you see. Just temporarily. That's how I happened to meet the lieutenant. He came in to see my friend.”

“Yeah?” Farno said, but then he smiled again. “Sure, miss,” he said. “Sure, I see how it is.” He was very close, now. “But you don't need to go up. This won't take only a few minutes and then we'll bring you back here. If we wait, the lieutenant might be gone some-wheres else, see?”

And then he reached out and took her arm.

“You want to come right along now, don't you, miss?” he said, and it was not really a question.

The fat hand on her arm exerted pressure—light pressure, hardly more than a suggestion of pressure. And then she looked at the very pale blue eyes of Detective Farno, which were unexpectedly small in his round face. The eyes, too, exerted pressure. And the eyes belied the softness of the voice, the gentleness of the pressure on her arm.

“I just wanted to tell my friend I'd be late,” Dorian said. “It wouldn't take—”

“Now, miss,” Farno said, “we can't keep Weigand waiting. You wouldn't want to do that, would you?”

“No,” Dorian said, and her voice had an odd note in it. “No, I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Farno.”

The soft hand propelled her. The pressure was still light, the force was only implied. But the implication of force, the now unwavering regard from the small blue eyes, were almost more frightening than violence would have been. They told her that she did not really have any choice; that all of their talk, all the explanations, meant nothing. This man Farno had come to get her. He had her. She was going with him. She had to go with him.

Farno's left hand, which was not on her arm, was in Farno's coat pocket as they turned down Thirty-seventh Street toward Fourth. It stayed in his pocket when, perhaps fifty feet from the steps of the house, his right hand directed her toward a Pontiac coupe at the curb. He did not say anything, or need to. He did not open the door for her; he let her open it for herself.

Under the compulsion of that soft right hand, Dorian climbed into the Pontiac and sat in the seat next to the driver's. But then the big soft detective hesitated and, looking up at him, Dorian saw an odd flicker in his eyes for an instant. Then it was gone, as he solved his problem.

“You drive, miss?” he said, and Dorian nodded. “You drive,” he said again, this time as an order. She slid under the wheel and he sat beside her. He produced the ignition key and leaned back against the side of the car, so that he could face her. He sat twisted enough so that she could see the left hand in the coat pocket.

Under his instructions, without conversation except for his briefly spoken directions, they went downtown on Fourth Avenue and then, at Twenty-third, east. On Second Avenue they went south again for several blocks, turned into a side street and stopped. Dorian parked the car, and did not need to be told to leave it by sliding across the seat toward the big man as he stood on the curb. She said nothing, and he did not say anything. They went through an entryway with metal walls painted a dingy brown and up a flight of stairs. Then they went up another and down a narrow hall. Farno stopped them in front of a door on the right.

“This is it,” he said.

“Lieutenant Weigand's here?” Dorian said, and looked at Farno.

“Sure, miss,” Farno said, and then he laughed, almost soundlessly. His soft body in the seersucker shook with the laughter. He knocked on the door and a smaller, dark man opened it. It took Dorian a moment to remember where she had seen him, and how she had thought she remembered seeing him even before that and then decided that it was because he looked like so many other people—in a sense, like all other people.

“Did you get it fixed?” she said, unexpectedly to herself. The small dark man looked at her and was clearly puzzled. Then he looked at Farno and shrugged.

“But of course,” Dorian said, “you weren't really fixing anything at Bonwit's. You were following me.”