Murder within Murder (7 page)

By the time an operator at Headquarters was fingering the description out on the teletype, Weigand and Mullins were back in Weigand's office. And they were waiting for Mr. Gallahady, who had been sitting placidly in his room in the West Fifties, reading
PM
. He had not seemed surprised when a detective from the precinct said that there were one or two points they would like cleared up, and would he mind being run downtown to offices of detectives in charge of the case. Gallahady had said he did not mind in the least; he had been very cheerful about it. He had also agreed that his name was Philip Spencer, confirming the statement of his landlady.

Bill Weigand did not wait long. They brought Gallahady-Spencer in to him and, invited, Gallahady-Spencer sat down. Mullins, at a nod from Weigand, got a notebook ready.

“By the way,” Weigand said, “why Gallahady?”

The man who sat, easily and with apparent confidence, was in his middle forties. He needed a shave and a haircut; he needed a new suit and new shoes; he needed, Weigand thought suddenly, a new life. There was a laxness about his face, a kind of hopeless softness, and he smelled a little as if he had been drinking a good deal for a long time.

But nothing in his manner apologized for any of this; nothing in his manner admitted any of this. If he had fought it once, he was no longer fighting it.

“A jest,” he said, answering Bill Weigand's question. “Possibly pedantic. I borrowed it from—”

Bill's nod stopped him. Bill said he knew where the name had been borrowed from. He perceived the jest. Spencer raised his eyebrows as he listened; he seemed surprised.

“Aside from Caxton's little error,” Weigand said, “why any false name? Why not your own name, Mr. Spencer?”

Spencer said it was a whim. He said he didn't know why. He pointed out that he had, in any event, given his correct address.

“Probably,” Bill told him, “because it is difficult to think of a convincing address in a city you don't know very well—when you are talking to men who know it very well.” And Spencer could skip the whim part of it.

“Do you know, Lieutenant, I think you may be quite right about the address business,” Spencer said. He spoke with a kind of detached interest. “I wondered why I didn't give a fictitious address. I think you have explained it.”

Bill held him to it. It wasn't a whim, he pointed out again. He pointed out, also, that they were investigating a case of murder.

“Why,” Bill said, “did you go to the trouble to hide your identity, Mr. Spencer? Has your identity something to do with the case?”

Spencer hesitated, clearly making up his mind what to say. Then he said that Weigand might think his identity had something to do with the case.

“I knew Amelia,” he said. “Naturally, I say I had nothing to do with her taking off. But you would expect me to say that.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. He waited.

“It was a very unfortunate coincidence, for me,” Spencer said. “Very unfortunate. I might have been almost any other place. I might have been in the South Reading Room instead of the North Reading Room. It would have made no difference to Amelia, believe me. But oh, the difference to me.”

Weigand waited.

“I wish you would believe it was entirely a coincidence,” Spencer said. He spoke almost wistfully.

Still Weigand said nothing. Spencer looked at the detective lieutenant's face and then he shrugged. They might as well have it, he told them, and waited until Mullins was ready.

“Name,” he said. “Philip Spencer. With one ‘1.' Philip Spencer, Ph.D. Age, 43. Occupation, former associate professor of English at Ward College, Rushton, Indiana. Dismissed for unbecoming conduct with one of the students—one of the girls. Because a spiteful little fool told a lot of lies to a spiteful old bitch who—” He broke off. He smiled, and the smile was contorted. He began again.

“Too much coincidence,” he said. “Even for me. And yet it's true. The girl, who I swear misunderstood something which was entirely innocent, went to Miss Amelia Gipson—Gipson with a
p
, mind you—who was head of the Latin Department and also a sort of unofficial censor of morals. And Amelia went to the president of the school, who was a friend of mine but not—well, not that good a friend. Understandable—the school was all he had. It had to be above suspicion. Well—I wasn't. So he had to let me go. He was as, quiet about it as he could be—as decent. But Amelia saw the word got around.”

He paused and looked off at nothing.

“Schools are touchy,” he said. “Big schools and little schools. Faculty members of girls' colleges who are suspected of—molesting—their charges don't find it easy to get jobs. And teachers in their forties—just good enough teachers—don't find it easy to get other jobs.”

He looked at Mullins. He asked Mullins if he was getting it all. Mullins said, “Yeah.”

“I was married,” he said. “My wife was not in good health. Possibly that is one of the reasons I had remained at Ward; because of the security. My wife died about six months after I—left the faculty. Our living conditions weren't what they had been and, as I said, she was not in good health. I have been somewhat—somewhat detached from life ever since. I had even almost forgotten Amelia until I saw her at the library last night. You will hardly believe that, but it's true. I heard she had also left the faculty. It seems there were—other cases. Rather like mine, except that in the end she seems to have been imagining them. She made one or two mistakes—imagined one or two impossibilities, I suppose—and the head suggested that she leave.”

Spencer was silent for a moment, regarding the past as if it were in the room.

“There was a suggestion that I might return to Ward after Amelia left,” he said, at length, quietly. “It seemed rather late. Rather too late.”

He stopped speaking again and this time he did not resume. Weigand waited and after a time asked whether that was all of it.

“That's all of it,” Spencer said. “I was there. You could make a motive out of what I've told you. There isn't anything else. I can't prove I didn't give her whatever she died of. I don't even know what it was. I didn't see anything suspicious, so I can't put you on a trail.”

This time it was Weigand who established the silence and let it lie in the office. And it was Spencer who suddenly leaned forward in his chair.

“Well, Lieutenant?” he said.

Bill Weigand looked at him, with no particular expression, and shook his head.

“It's not that easy, Mr. Spencer,” he said. “You can see that. You know what the truth is, so far as you are concerned. You have the advantage of me. I don't know. All I know is what you say.”

“Which,” Spencer said, “you see no reason to believe.”

It was not a question. But Bill Weigand said it was not even that easy.

“Which,” he said, “I have no grounds to form an opinion on. At the moment, it is equally possible you are telling the truth and lying. There is nothing impossible in your story, as you know. Since you are not, so far as I can see, a fool, there wouldn't be anything impossible in the story. I'll have to look into it.”

“And let me know,” Spencer finished.

He need have no doubt of that, Weigand promised him, and there was a certain grimness in his promise. Meanwhile, Mr. Spencer would—

“Hold myself available,” Spencer finished. “Or do you hold me available?”

Weigand smiled pleasantly, and told him the former, by all means.

“Of course,” he said, “we might take a hand if it became necessary. I assume it won't. I assume we'll be able to find you at your room when we want you.”

Spencer stood up. Weigand looked up at him, saying nothing. Spencer hesitated a moment, as if he were about to say more, and then said, “Well, all right” in an uncertain fashion, and then, “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Spencer,” Weigand said, politely. “Probably I'll be seeing you.”

Spencer did not look happy. He went. Mullins, looking after him, shook his head.

“O'Malley,” Mullins said, “ain't going to like it, Loot. Next best to suicide, this guy Spencer is. Opportunity, motive, present on the scene, false name—hell, he's made for it.”

Bill said he gathered Mullins wasn't buying Spencer's story. Mullins shrugged. He said it wasn't him, it was the inspector. He looked at Weigand.

“How about you, Loot?” he said.

Weigand's fingers were drumming gently on his desk. He did not look up. For a moment he did not speak. Then he said he didn't like coincidences.

“It needs a lot of believing, Spencer's story,” he said. “But, as I told him, it's possible. And we can't hang him on it. O'Malley couldn't, I couldn't. The commissioner couldn't or the D.A., so we waits and sees.”

Again Mullins waited. He saw Weigand look at the watch on his wrist, and then up at the clock on the wall. Weigand said they ought to be hearing from Stein. Mullins looked enquiring. Weigand said Stein was at the lawyers' office.

“Williams, Franke and something or other,” he said. “Miss Gipson's attorneys. Attorneys for the estate she was handling. The people who know—”

The telephone on his desk rang and he spoke into it. He said, “All right, Stein, come along up.” He replaced the receiver and said, “Speaking of coincidences.”

They waited, looking at the door, and Detective Sergeant Stein came in. He was a trim, slender man in his thirties, with dark, absorbed eyes. He sat down where Spencer had sat. He said he had seen a man named Mason. He said Mason had given him the dope.

Amelia Gipson was the daughter of Alfred Gipson, Stein said, checking with his notes as he talked. Alfred Gipson had died, leaving a good deal of money, in 1901. He had left it to his wife in trust and, on her death two years later, it had been divided between the two children, Amelia and Alfred Gipson, Jr. Each had received around three hundred thousand dollars. Amelia had put hers, for the most part, in bonds; a good deal of it in government bonds. She had lived on the interest; until recently, when taxes went up and interest down, she had done a little better than live on the interest. But say she left about the same sum she had inherited.

“To?” Weigand said.

Stein said he was coming to that. He said it wasn't, he thought, the most important thing. But she had left the bulk of it to a nephew and a niece, in equal shares. To get back, he said.

Alfred, Jr., Amelia's brother, had been about ten years older than Amelia—he had been born in 1883, and had been twenty when his mother died. And at twenty, apparently, he had started making money. He had made it, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, but almost always consistently, until he died in 1940. He had also found time to marry and beget two children. His wife died when her daughter was born in 1922, which made the daughter twenty-three. The son was two years older. That was John. The girl was Nora. But no longer Nora Gipson. Now Nora Frost, wife of Major Kennet Frost.

“Air Force major,” Stein said. “He's been in the Pacific. But he got back Stateside yesterday, Mason thinks. They expect him in New York today some time. Everybody's all steamed up—or everybody was yesterday. The aunt's death—made a difference, Mason supposes, to get back.”

Alfred Gipson, who had dropped the junior when his father died, had brought up the children with some advice from his sister, who, however, had apparently exercised a rather distant supervision, except in the summers, when she had joined the family at a place they had in Maine. She and the children, with enough servants, had spent most summers there when John and Nora were growing up, and Alfred had come up for long weekends and sometimes for a week or two at a time.

Alfred Gipson had had almost a year's warning of his death. He had drawn up his will when John was nineteen and Nora seventeen. He left his money—which ran to about a million and a half after taxes—to his sister in trust for the children, with the proviso that it was to be divided between them when Nora was twenty-five. Stein paused and looked up.

“Or,” he said, “upon the death of Amelia Gipson, whichever should occur first.”

Weigand nodded slowly.

“So the children cut up a million and a half,” he said. “Plus Amelia's share.”

“Less tax,” Stein said.

“Less tax,” Bill Weigand agreed. “Still all right, I should think. The next question—are the children hard up?”

Mason said not, Stein told him. Major Frost had some money—not the same kind of money, but some.

“And John's probably in the Army,” Weigand said. “Or the Navy?”

Stein shook his head.

“Apparently not,” he said. “John's a chemist—for his age, Mason thinks a pretty important chemist. Too important to get killed, unless he blows himself up. Mason seemed to think there was a pretty good chance he would, although the stuff he's working on is all very secret. Has been right along. Mason thinks now it may have had something to do with the atomic bombs, but he still doesn't know. And John's still working at it. Up in Connecticut somewhere, apparently a good way from other people except the people he's working with. Only he's in town now.”

“Why?” Weigand wanted to know.

Stein shrugged. He said he had asked Mason. He said Mason didn't know.

“Mason says if anybody knows, it's Backley,” Stein said. “Backley is another member of the firm. He's out of town, but's expected back this evening. Mason says Backley is the man who has really handled the Gipson affairs and had most of the personal contacts with them. He says we'll want to talk to Backley.”

Weigand nodded. He said they would.

“And,” he said, “with the children.” He tapped his desk gently. “Rather soon,” he added.

5

W
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