Death Has a Small Voice (4 page)

But a bellboy came in and said, “Telegram, Mr. North,” and brought the familiar envelope across the room. Jerry signed and left money on the tray; he opened the telegram as the boy closed the door behind him. He read:

“Mrs. North come home last night went away again somewhere and not back this morning to feed cats stop no message either stop worried because not way she is stop thought you ought to know stop best wishes—Martha.”

Contentment vanished as he read. He knew Martha; also he knew Pamela. Like Martha, he envisioned only disaster. Pam had got herself into something again. He re-read the telegram. Feeding the cats—that was the crux of it. Otherwise, one might envision a sick friend or importunate relative, of whom Pam had one or two. But Pam's conviction that cats should be fed on schedule was equaled only by that of the cats themselves.

“Damn!” Jerry said to himself. “Oh-damn!” He stubbed out his cigarette. But, sitting on the bed, reaching for the telephone, he lighted another. He got the porter's desk. It was an emergency. The porter's desk would do what it could and call him back.

He waited, looking across the room, through the window, seeing nothing of what he saw. He jabbed out the new cigarette; almost at once he lighted another. He tried to reason with his feeling; tried to tell himself that there were a dozen explanations—and thought of half a dozen. He did not believe any of them.

He called himself an emotional fool. He said, and now he spoke aloud, “Damn it. Why don't you ever wait? Why don't you—?” He spoke across a continent to Pamela North. The telephone rang and he snatched at it. The porter's desk had managed a reservation on a TWA plane leaving in a little less than an hour. It was, Jerry told them, hearing the tightness in his own voice, good of them. Would they arrange to cancel his reservation on the streamliner? They would send up for the tickets.

Jerry called off a luncheon date. He packed. He found that he was picking things up before he had a hold on them; he found the lock on his suitcase resistant to too hurried fingers. He was being a fool; he was being all kinds of a fool. Of course, Pam would be all right. She was always all right. She—

“Damn!” Jerry said, and yanked at the strap of his suitcase.
Be careful, Pam. Be careful!

There was no real connection. The little man who had lived in these two bare rooms, chilly and dark even on a day so bright and warm for late October, had decided he was a writer. He could write a book about what had happened to him. Actually, he had written it; one could say that, if one felt generous. He had a manuscript to prove it, or had had. Bill Weigand had it now, and read a few pages. The poor guy, Bill thought, and put the manuscript down. It would have to be read, he supposed; conceivably, there might be something useful somewhere in it. It would, however, be a job for—He looked at Mullins thoughtfully. Well, then, for Sergeant Stein. But there was no real connection.

The little, inept burglar named Harry Eaton had sent his book to publishers, having somehow discovered that that is what one does with books. He had sent it to four publishers, North Books, Inc., among them. North Books, Inc., had sent regrets, polite but brief, on—Bill looked at the letter again—August 18. The letter was signed “Gerald North, per E.C.” Jerry had written a memo “Tell him no” and clipped it to the manuscript. Bill could see him doing it. It was no connection at all. There was no conceivable reason why Bill Weigand, Acting Captain, Homicide, Manhattan West, should feel the beginning of that nagging sense of urgency, that need to run to keep up, he so inevitably felt on cases with which the Norths were involved.

There was not much else in the room. Another suit; two shirts and three pairs of underwear shorts in a drawer, a stained tie hanging over a nail on the inside of the closet door. They were printing the place, as a matter of routine. They would, as a matter of routine, check serial numbers on the Voice-Scriber—the only shining object in the dusty rooms—and so, in time, determine the owner. It was as routine as it had seemed. Routine would solve it. Routine was automatic; it would be followed without direction.

“Suppose you get on to the people who make these things,” Bill Weigand said to Mullins, indicating the Voice-Scriber. “Get a line on who owns it.”

“Me?” Mullins said. “You want I should?”

It was not really a job for Mullins. It was a job for the precinct; it hardly rated a detective, first grade, let alone a sergeant.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I mean Captain. I guess you're right. It'll be a screwy one.”

He hadn't, Weigand pointed out, said that. “As good as,” Mullins told him. Weigand thought a moment; then he said, “Right. Perhaps I did. Hurry it up?”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Weigand said. “Get going, Sergeant.”

Mullins got going. So, leaving routine in experienced hands, did Weigand. He went to a telephone; he called North Books, Inc. He found that Mr. North was still in San Francisco. He was expected back Friday morning. Was there anything Miss Corning could do to help the Captain?

A man named Eaton, who had written a book called—called
what?
“My Life in Crime?” She didn't remember any Eaton.

There had been a letter, Bill told her. The letter rejected Mr. Eaton's life in crime. She had signed Mr. North's name, initialed under it.

But that she did all the time. No doubt she had this time. She would look it up in the files. In August? August 18? She would look it up.

“I wish you would,” Bill told her. “Not that it means anything in particular, so far as I know. What I'd really like to know, did Mr. North have any personal contact with Eaton, do you know?”

So far as Miss Corning knew, he had had none. But she was uncertain about it. She did not remember that Eaton had come personally to the office, but she was not sure he had not. She did not, in short, remember anything whatever about Harry Eaton. This was reasonable. Bill Weigand said, “Right.”

He had work to do, Bill Weigand told himself. He was a policeman, on the city payroll. Routine was reaching his battered desk in the West Twentieth Street station house and stopping there, dammed up by his absence. A petty burglar was strangled instead of shot; it developed that he once had had his reminiscences rejected by, among others, North Books, Inc. In a day when every candlestick maker had a book in him and most let it out, this was not surprising.

Already, Bill Weigand told himself, sternly, he had wasted a morning on a case for the precinct, merely because the name of North had occurred in it. Now he would—

But there was no great harm, Bill decided, in wasting another ten minutes or so, merely to allay that nagging sense of urgency. He dialed another telephone number, this one familiar. If Jerry North had had any contact with little Harry Eaton, any contact of even remote interest, he would have mentioned it to Pam. The Norths mentioned all things to each other. Jerry would not dream of concealing a small burglar, or a book titled: “My Life in Crime.”

The telephone signaled that it was ringing in the North apartment. Then it was answered.

“Hello, Martha,” Bill said. “This is Weigand. Is Mrs. North—?”

“She's gone,” Martha said. “That's what it is. Something's happened to her. You can't tell me.”

“Listen,” Bill Weigand said. “What? Who's gone?”

“I tried to get you,” Martha said. “You weren't there. So I wired Mr. North. He's in San Francisco.”

“Please, Martha,” Bill Weigand said. “You mean Mrs. North isn't there? You don't know where she is?”

Martha told him, then. She told him all of it, with special reference to the hunger of the cats. “You better come right here and do something,” Martha ended.

No doubt there were a dozen explanations. The absence of Pam North from her apartment at one-thirty of a Tuesday afternoon did not spell disaster.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I'll be over.”

He drove downtown. He did not drive like a policeman in a hurry, but he did not loiter. Martha let him in. She told the story again. She had it ready, now. She had finished cleaning the apartment in mid-afternoon of the day before. She had gone home to Harlem. Mrs. North had already telephoned that she would not be home to dinner. Mrs. North had come home during the evening. She had fed the cats. She had opened letters from Bergdorf and Saks and Lord & Taylor. The captain could see the envelopes and the enclosures. She had put her weekend bag in the bedroom, leaving it packed. Then she had gone somewhere. She had been gone all night. And—she had not returned in the morning to feed the cats.

“Maybe she went to spend the night with a friend,” Bill Weigand said.

“The cats,” Martha said.

“Perhaps something's happened to Mr. North and she's flown west,” Bill said.

“Even then, she wouldn't forget the cats,” Martha told him. “You know that, Captain. What you pretend for?”

He did not know why he pretended. He went through the apartment and found nothing Martha had not found. He went through Pam North's desk, and found only what one might expect to find. (This included two rather lengthy colums of figures, added to totals which failed by a considerable margin to coincide. Idly, Bill Weigand added one of the columns. Pam had been wrong. He resisted the temptation to add the other column. Pam had been, he supposed, balancing a checkbook or working on a budget.)

There was nothing. She had come home, fed cats, smoked a cigarette, looked at the mail and then—

It was, at a guess, something in the mail. He called Martha back from the kitchen. She had, he assumed, brought the mail up that day. Or had Mrs. North brought it up herself?

Martha had brought it up, with the morning papers.

“Try to remember,” Bill said. “The papers. These letters for Mr. North. The three she opened. Was that all the mail?”

“Don't seem like I remember—” Martha began, and then broke off. “Seems like I do,” she said. “There was something else. Bigger.”

“A package?” Weigand asked. “A bigger envelope?”

“Seems like it was another letter,” Martha said. “Jus' not the same shape.”

She had not paid much attention. She tried now to remember. Another envelope, almost certainly. She thought it had been square. She hadn't put her mind to it.

She could not come closer, however she tried. But perhaps, Bill thought, it was something. There had been a squarish envelope in the mail; Mrs. North had taken it with her when she went. But where one went from there he didn't, at the moment, know.

He called headquarters and got the Missing Persons Bureau. He said, “Look, Joe, this could be important.” He gave a description of Pamela North, speaking rapidly. With Martha's aid, he described what she probably had been wearing—a beige woolen dress with brown cuffs; a brown suède coat, no hat on her bright hair. He was asked to hold it, and did. It took a few minutes. Then Joe said, “Nope, sorry. No report.”

“You'll get it out?” Bill asked, and was promised that it would go out with expedition. He hung up, then dialed his own office.

There were two things. One was a telegram from Gerald North. “Martha says Pam missing. Flying back. Will you do what you can?” The other was Sergeant Mullins, in person, reporting progress.

They had been lucky, for once. A Voice-Scriber with the serial number as given had been sold directly by the regional sales office of the company and not, as might have happened, by an agency anywhere in the east—or in the country, for that matter. This had made the check easy.

The machine had been sold to a Miss Hilda Godwin, of 2 Elm Lane, Manhattan.

“It's in the Village, somewhere,” Mullins said. “Want I should drop around? If I can find it?”

“I'll meet you there,” Bill said. He told Mullins where he was, and why.

“Jeeze,” Mullins said. “Like I said. A screwy one.”

Bill did not argue it. He did what he could to reassure Martha, which was little. She was to get in touch with his office at once if anything turned up—preferably, Mrs. North. He said a brief goodbye to Sherry, who would permit it, and to Gin, who remained across the room. Martini had disappeared as completely as her mistress. Bill Weigand walked from the Norths' apartment to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, where he consulted a traffic patrolman as to the probable location of Elm Lane. He walked through Christopher Street to Seventh Avenue, where he consulted another traffic patrolman. He walked part way back through Christopher Street, turned left, turned left again, and was back on Seventh Avenue, this time at Greenwich. He consulted another traffic patrolman there and went west into a labyrinth, and came on Elm Lane just when he had abandoned hope. It was a short street, and no elms grew on it. No. 2 was on a corner. Acting Captain Weigand stopped in front of it and looked at it in astonishment.

He knew New York, which is various, particularly below Fourteenth Street. But he could not remember he had ever seen a house quite like this little house.

Its smallness was the chief thing. It was, he thought, the smallest house he had ever seen and been inclined to call a house. In width, it could hardly be more than fifteen feet; there seemed scarcely space for the flight of stairs up to the doorway, for the polished brass rails on either side of the stairs. Yet there was space for the door, and for two narrow windows, leaded, holding glass fabricated in another day. There was a brass knocker on the white door.

Along the intersecting street—Brock Street—the little house ran for perhaps forty feet. The lot ran deeper by some distance; a wooden fence shielded what was no doubt a garden. Midway of the fence, there were double doors.

The little house was two stories high. It had, of all things, a mansard roof. It was proud and dainty amid taller, square buildings, most of them the conventional brick dwellings of older New York; all of them neatly flattened after the appropriate four floors; all of them, obviously, divided now into apartments. All but the little house. There was not, surely, enough of it to divide.