The Dishonest Murderer (8 page)

The Norths thought it over. Jerry shook his head first. He said he had spent most of his time with, or near, Admiral Satterbee. The admiral seemed to be worried chiefly about the protective storage of warships. “Shop talk,” Jerry said. “I don't remember any talk of Kirkhill. I did gather he was expected and hadn't arrived.”

“She was worried,” Pam said. “Mrs. Haven. About as you'd expect. I mean, I didn't know then because I didn't know why, but now it seems about what I'd have expected if I'd—heavens! Where am I?”

“Right,” Bill said. “I didn't suppose you'd have seen anything. I was passing by, did see the lights. It was a coincidence you had been at the party Kirkhill—missed.” He grinned. “I got more than I expected,” he said. “Unofficially.”

There was a long pause.

“Well,” Jerry said, “she is worried about someone else. Needlessly, probably. And you're suggesting we look into it? Find out what we can? Tell you what we find out?”

“If you like,” Bill said. “Forget it if you like. Or—look the ground over and then make up your minds. If you feel you'd be in an untenable position, drop out.”

“Subtle,” Pam said. “Very subtle. If we drop out, it's because we've found something to make us suspicious of Mrs. Haven. Then, whatever you say, we have to tell you what it is.”

Weigand merely smiled.

“Or,” Jerry said, “we tell you now what she told us when she had no reason to think that what she said would go to the police.”

Bill Weigand smiled again.

“Of course,” he said, “you'd be helping the daughter of an author. An author you've bet money on. Who ought to have peace and quiet for those revisions you were talking about. Right?”

Jerry North said “Damn!”

“Anyway,” Bill Weigand said, “I'll tell you what we know so far. It's an odd setup; Mullins will say it's screwy.” He smiled. “He'll say, ‘Look, Loot, this is one for the Norths.' Your public.” He paused again. Then he said here it was, so far as they'd got.

The body was found a little after eleven o'clock that night, the last night of the year. A patrolman, working north on lower Broadway, below Canal, cold and bored on a deserted street, flashed his light in a doorway, as he had, expecting nothing, finding nothing, in fifty doorways. This one, the doorway of a cheap lunchroom which had been closed for hours, was different. A big man was sitting in the entry, his legs stretched out, his back to the door. He looked like a drunk; the patrolman said he smelled like a drunk. But he was dead. Snow had begun to drift over his outstretched legs.

It looked like a routine thing. A man with no place in the world, except a flop house when his luck was in, a saloon on the Bowery when he had a dollar or two, had had a dollar or two that last night of the year. He had drunk it up; he had had enough to get too much of the stuff they sold across a dirty bar in a dirty room to hopeless men; to men who had not even the pathetic human hope that a new year would be a better year. He had used up his money, gone out of the bar—out of smelly warmth into biting cold, into a harsh wind—and walked in no direction. He had got sleepy, tried to get into the lunchroom, in his muddle not realizing it had closed, gone to sleep as he stood there and slumped down, and then had frozen. That was what it looked like, at first.

The wagon was summoned, came for him. At the morgue, they might well have done nothing about him for hours had not a doctor, starting home after a late post mortem, stopped by the body and looked at it idly. The doctor had thought vaguely that the man had been eating well, for a bum from the Bowery. Then the doctor had noticed the man's hands, looked at them more closely and let out his puzzlement in a statement that he would be damned.

“He'd had a manicure,” Weigand said. “Probably yesterday.”

It was enough to start things moving. Once they began to look, almost nothing fitted the obvious picture. Even the clothes, which at first seemed part of the picture, did not really fit in.

The overcoat was worn, but had been recently cleaned. It did not fit the man; he had picked it up, presumably, in a second-hand clothing store. He had, at a guess, worn it only a day or so, if even for a day or so.

The suit under the overcoat was even more at variance with the picture. It was a very cheap suit, it fitted very badly. But it appeared to be almost new. But, although almost new, it was noticeably, almost flagrantly, unpressed. It almost seemed, the medical examiner's laboratory reported, that someone had deliberately stretched the shoddy material out of shape, pulling it, crumpling it, possibly using an iron on it to remove the original creases. Both cuffs of the trousers were frayed, although most of the suit showed no signs of wear. Somebody could have frayed the material with a file, even scraped at it with a knife. “Phoney,” a lab man said, briefly, unofficially.

The shoes were worn and scuffed—and were too large for the feet. But the socks were silk, and new. The underwear was of medium weight wool and had cost money. It had been washed several times, but there were no laundry marks. The shirt had been worn a long time, washed often and it, too, had no laundry marks. But it fitted perfectly, as if it had been made for the wearer.

The body was that of a large man, weighing a little over two hundred pounds; the man had been an inch over six feet tall; he had eaten well, taken care of himself, once might have been an athlete. When he slumped down in the doorway of the cheap restaurant and began to die, he had been in his middle forties.

It was strange; it required looking into. Appearances apparently had been created which were at variance with facts. So the police machine started; a report of suspicious death went to the Homicide Squad; fingerprints, measurements and description went to the Missing Persons Bureau. A coded description of the fingerprints went on the wires to various cities, including Washington. A check of the prints was made in the department's own records.

An autopsy was begun at once. There were no injuries discernible. The man had been drinking before he died; he had eaten some hours before. And he had died, not of exposure, but of an overdose of chloral hydrate.

“Knockout drops,” Weigand said. “Very tricky stuff. They use it sometimes to put a man out while they rob him. It's too uncertain to be used often in homicides; I don't know that I remember a case. But—if a man has a weak heart, even a normal dose may kill him.”

“That happened this time?” Jerry said.

Bill Weigand nodded. He said the doctors thought so. The heart was impaired. Not seriously; with normal care, the man need not have died of the impairment. He would merely have had to be careful.

“Of course,” Bill said, “on a night like this, there was a good chance he'd die anyway. If you could get him out of doors, follow him, maybe, to see that he didn't find shelter—he'd have been dazed and sleepy within a short time; probably out within half an hour—the cold would finish your job for you.”

A preliminary report of the post mortem was ready by a little after one o'clock that morning. “Three and a half hours ago,” Jerry said, rather morosely, looking at his watch. Bill said he knew; said that he wouldn't be long. At almost the same time, identification had come through from Washington.

The man about whom PD, NY was enquiring had been a lieutenant colonel in the Army during the war. His name was Bruce Kirkhill. And—he was presently the junior senator from a western State. They woke Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley up, then; they notified the commissioner.

“And,” Bill said, “they got me. They showed up at the Plaza just after we'd all left; they caught me at home. Got me down to the morgue to talk to Mrs. Haven and her father. They'd already sent Blake up to the Satterbee apartment.”

The Washington police had cooperated efficiently, which accounted for Blake's early appearance at the apartment. They had found Kirkhill's secretary—“his typing secretary,” Weigand said. “A girl. His official secretary, if that's what you'd call him—is a man named Phipps.” The “typing secretary” had been able to tell the Washington police that the senator had gone to New York, that he was planning to attend a New Year's Eve party there at the home of his prospective father-in-law, Admiral Satterbee; that his nearest relative, his daughter, would be at the same party. So, in Weigand's absence, Sergeant Blake had been sent to the Satterbee apartment to get someone to make the identification.

“Where's Mullins?” Pam North wanted to know.

“On his way in,” Bill told her. “He lives out on Long Island. He was—having an evening out.” He dosed tired eyes and reopened them. “As weren't we all,” he said.

There was a pause, then.

“And there we stand,” Bill Weigand said. His voice was suddenly dull. “A United States senator dresses up like a bum, drinks chloral hydrate in rotten liquor in a cheap bar, dies in the doorway of a fourth rate lunchroom while his fiancée is waiting for him to come to a party on Park Avenue.” He sighed. “The papers will be very, very happy,” he said. “And the inspector will spin.”

“Tomorrow,” Pam North said sleepily, “we'll talk to the ad—” She paused and then went on—“miral's daughter,” she said. “Won't we, Jerry?”

There was a very long pause indeed.

“I guess so,” Jerry North said, finally.

IV

Saturday, 4:30 A.M. to 2:20 P.M.

The police sedan moved slowly northward in a world turning white. The air had the misty whiteness of a snow at night; snow was accumulating on the pavement. The car stopped for lights, skidded a little, started again with the lights, the rear wheels spinning before they caught. In the light from street lamps, the snow blew like a curtain; in the headlights of the car it danced and swirled, its pattern as confused, its movement as dizzying, as were the pattern and movement of Freddie Haven's thoughts.

The car moved through a city which had grown empty. The most dogged of those who welcome a New Year on a city's streets, taking confidence from their own multitude, roaring down their own doubts, had sought shelter now, had sought the warm safety of bed or the fantasy life of late-open bars. Up Fifth Avenue, an occasional taxicab, an occasional private car, went shuttered through the storm, boring into it, swept by it. A Department of Sanitation truck, a monster in the luminous darkness, trundled ahead of them for a block, its plow lifted, like some great reptile from pre-history looking for a place to graze. Around a fire on a corner a group of men, bulky in heavy clothing, clustered, their long-handled shovels momentarily idle, waiting for something—some perfect moment, some direction, the arrival of something or somebody.

The car turned east in Twenty-third Street. It went around a bus which moved slowly, hesitantly, into the northeasterly wind. The bus seemed to be full of people, some of them standing; passing it, looking into the lighted bus, Freddie Haven felt that the people were frozen there, or dead there. She shivered, momentarily, in the warm car. It had all gone wrong; everything had gone wrong.

It had been wrong to go to the Norths', to seek from strangers some contact, some reassurance, in a world which had become obscure and baffling. It had been an impulse, a movement made without consideration. Her father and the man with the fat face, the fat voice, had gone into the library and, even after the door closed behind them, she had continued to go up the stairs toward the second floor of the duplex. Then, almost without knowing it, she found herself going down the stairs again, finding a coat in the foyer closet, going out into the outer foyer, ringing for the elevator. It came, after a little. Ben, the operator, had looked at her (she thought now, had not thought then) strangely. “It's snowing, Mrs. Haven,” he said. “Snowing hard.” He had meant it, she thought now, as a warning, as a caution. But she had only nodded. When the car stopped at the ground floor, and the door opened, Ben had started to speak, had said, “Well, Hap—” and had stopped and seemed embarrassed. “Happy New Year, Ben,” she had said, and tried to smile and gone across the lobby and nodded again when the doorman had asked if he could get her a taxi. “Try to,” he had said.

She had been lucky, if being expedited in error could be considered luck. He had got a cab almost immediately and then, only when she was in it, had she realized that she did not even know where these strangers lived. It had been precisely that unplanned, that meaningless. A slight woman with wide eyes, with a kind of interested eagerness in her manner, had conveyed—by the movement of her lips? by the expression around her eyes?—that she knew something to be wrong, that she felt sympathy. And because of that, because of that nothing, Freddie Haven was in a taxicab, not knowing where she was going, seeking a contact which could not help in a world suddenly shaking around her.

She had had the cab driver stop at a drug store; she had had him wait while she looked in a telephone book. Against all probability, she had found Gerald North listed, and an address near Washington Square. She had still been lucky, thought herself lucky at the moment. She had gone on in the cab.

And it had not been lucky. She could not think, now, what she had expected, had hoped for, what kind of help she had thought Mrs. North, Pamela North, could give her. Whatever she had hoped for, that, certainly, the had not got. She had, she thought, given herself away, and was surprised by the shape the thought took, by the implication that she had something to conceal. To conceal from whom? The answer was evident—from Lieutenant Weigand, the Norths' friend; the detective who was trying to find out who had killed Bruce.

The police car stopped for another light. It waited there, in the storm, its lights falling on swirling flakes, isolated. The man at the wheel, a tall man, now hatless, did not turn or move. She saw only the back of his head, but suddenly she remembered his face. It had been thin and sensitive, troubled by the message he had brought them. Remembering his face, she found that he became, in some curious fashion, a companion in the car, a sharer of this isolated small area of warmth.