Murder Is Served (23 page)

We didn't go far enough, Bill thought. It was too easy; it was handed us on a platter.

If Peggy Mott was not guilty, it had been handed them on a platter, Bill realized. They had bungled; they had merely been too innocent, too naive. The apparent facts were sufficiently substantial but they had not gone far enough underneath to see what was holding them up. If Peggy Mott was innocent, the real murderer was holding them up. He had, to some degree, created them. Mrs. Peggy Mott had been very neatly, very expertly, framed. Or she was a killer. In no case was the evidence against her accidental, or the result of misinterpretation.

And, Bill thought with his tired mind, Leonard was the one who first brought her into it. He was the one who started it. Bill checked over, one by one, the things which must have been done if Peggy Mott were a victim, not a killer. Nobody could have made her write the essay on hatred. He stopped himself. Conceivably, of course, someone could have suggested it to her; said something like, “I know how you feel. Write it. Get it out of your mind.” For all Bill Weigand knew, that might be sound psychology. It was interesting that Leonard was a psychologist.

But it was not necessary to suppose that Peggy Mott had been worked upon and proved suggestible. Things did not need to be that perfect. It was more likely, if you wanted to build a case against Leonard, that he had seized an opportunity he had not created. Getting the essay from the girl, he had seen a way to use it. He had got in touch with the Norths, planted suspicion, paved the way. He had, if this was correct, two victims: one primary, the other cynically chosen for purposes of his own safety. (And the essay might have been the germ of the whole plan, of the murder itself.) His next step would have been to pick a place and a time. Hence his telephone call to Mott, at Mott's office; hence, presumably, an appointment with Mott for, say, eleven forty-five. With that done, he would telephone Peggy Mott, pretend to be Mott—a little mimicry would be required, but Leonard, as a university lecturer, was a trained speaker—and make an appointment with her, at the office, for noon. (If she were not at her apartment when he called, the whole thing could be postponed. But she had been.)

So far it added. Too well, Bill thought, a little gloomily. He was building up a hard case, tearing down an easy one. O'Malley would disapprove. Bill himself disapproved. But it began to look as if, going into court with their case against Peggy Mott and this case against Leonard not broken down, they would as Leonard had said, be sticking their necks out.

Bill kept on adding. So, minutes before Peggy was due for her appointment, Leonard showed up for his. Presumably he had taken his own weapon, opportunistically switched to the knife which apparently had lain ready on Mott's desk. He killed Mott. Presumably he had entered from the street, not through the restaurant, and had gone out the same way. Obviously, he might have been seen. (Had he been? Another thing to dig for.) But you cannot murder without taking certain chances. (He had had to take a chance that Peggy would show up for her appointment before Mott's body was found, but that was not so crucial. Involving the girl was merely a special safeguard, not his only safety. And if he timed it right, his chances were excellent to involve her.)

After that, Leonard must have waited for the newspapers. They said nothing about Peggy Mott's presence at the scene, which merely made it certain that she had not found,
and reported
, the body. That would have been encouraging; knowing that a background of suspicion against her was already in existence, the girl would have been apt to do what she said she had done: look and run. Leonard would still not know whether she had actually gone to the office. But he would have enough to go ahead on, and, when the later editions of the afternoon papers reported, guardedly, that Mott's pretty wife was being sought for questioning, he would have felt he had more.

Then what had he done? Reported the theft of the essay from his office, leaving the police to draw the obvious inference. Faked an attack on himself, to make the inference even more obvious. (Who else but Peggy Mott had anything to gain by theft or attack?) So far you could make it hang together. But then came the murder of Elaine Britton, and that did not fit. Did the case against Leonard fail on that point? Bill looked at it and began to suspect that it did. At first glance, it fitted perfectly—an additional, ruthlessly created, piece of evidence against Peggy Mott. But, Leonard could not have known that, because he did not know that Elaine Britton had put Peggy at the scene. At least, Bill Weigand did not see how Leonard could have known that since it had not been published. (The fact of Elaine's murder had been printed that morning, and printed large. But the police had not connected it with Mott's murder, and the newspapers, hurried to make editions, had not independently dug a connection up. They would have it by now, but there were no papers until the first editions of the mornings.) It would be difficult to fit the murder of the slim show-girl into the plot against Peggy.

But—and Bill's fingers tapped more briskly on the desk—there was always another possibility. Elaine had seen Peggy going into the building next to the restaurant, on her way to Mott's office. Might she not also have seen Leonard coming out? If she had, if she recognized him, perhaps tried to cash in on what she had seen, Leonard had a valid motive for killing her. (Just as Peggy Mott had.) This, obviously, was speculation; it was also entirely possible. The whole thing, the whole case against Leonard, was entirely possible.

But, looking at it, Bill realized that it was no more than that. It was merely possible. It was strong enough to weaken the case against Peggy Mott, but it was not strong enough to stand on its own feet against John Leonard. It was weak on facts, but facts might be found to fit it. They would have to look for them, certainly. But there was, Bill decided, a more fundamental weakness. The case as it stood forced the conclusion that John Leonard was two entirely different men with radically different emotional responses. Motive and method did not accord; they were even violently disparate.

Bill Weigand was, he realized, asking himself to believe that Professor John Leonard was emotional to the point of instability, and at the same time calculating as a chess master. Even tired as it was, Bill's mind boggled. Leonard had killed the man who had done an injury to his sister, killed him years after the event and under the compulsion of an emotion engendered by the recent sight of the sister in a condition worse than he had expected—a condition, it might be assumed, which put a period to hope. A flare of bitterness might be expected, under those conditions, against the man who had caused that condition. It was conceivable, given a man of a certain sort, that that bitterness might have carried over into action.

But the action would, almost certainly, have been violent, unbalanced, like the emotion which occasioned it. The action as Weigand postulated it, and as the facts presented it, had been precisely the reverse. It had been shrewd, contrived and, as it concerned Peggy Mott, entirely merciless. (And Leonard was, Bill thought, rather fond of Peggy than otherwise.) If Leonard had done both things, he was two men, in which event he was, almost by definition, psychopathic. Bill tried to think Leonard was that, and failed.

He had argued himself into it and through it, out on the other side. But that did not alter the fact that it was still there, and that as long as it was still there the district attorney—and Bill himself, for that matter—would be very reluctant to proceed against the pretty widow of Tony Mott.

Bill Weigand shook his head. I need a fresh mind for this, he thought. He wished he knew where he could get one. Or I need fresh facts. And then, as that thought came to him, his eyebrows drew together, and lines formed between them. It began to look as if that might, indeed, be the whole trouble.

What had happened, Bill thought now, was what now and then did happen, and was difficult to guard against. A problem had been presented and, almost simultaneously, a solution which appeared to be in all respects neat and adequate. Under such circumstances it was desirable, as always, to keep an open mind, but it was very difficult. The digging you would do, the police machine would do, was still done, but almost unavoidably in perfunctory fashion. The machine had its answer, the machine's heart was not in further research. The machine was, after all, humanly susceptible.

With Peggy Mott so obviously meeting all the requirements—with her motives abundant, her opportunity demonstrated, her flight in itself almost convicting—they had merely not been as thorough as usual. Part of it, Bill thought, was his fault; part of it was nobody's fault. It was almost by chance that the evidence against Leonard, the hypothesis against Leonard, had been noticed at all. To a man who prided himself upon thoroughness, upon the way he did his job, that thought was disquieting. If there was a case, even this much of a case, against Leonard, if he had come upon it by accident, what might there be in other corners, so far only partially explored?

Bill wondered if he were creating difficulties where there were none: if a tired mind were inventing phantoms. Nine times out of ten, perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred, the obvious was the true. O'Malley had had a long and reasonably successful career merely by playing on those odds. You could not very well miss, granted you were bright enough to see the obvious. Justice might miscarry here and there, but justice would in any case. Not for the first time, Bill Weigand wished he could adjust his behavior to this evident logic. But it was no good.

“All I can do,” he had told Dorian once, “is to convince myself. I can't act on anything less, and I can't hold out for anything more. I don't know any other way to play it. I've got to use the mind I've got and try not to cheat it. Right?” They had been relaxed in front of a fire, with drinks. They talked most freely then, quite often about themselves, saying more than they would often have said, but not often anything they did not mean.

What it came to now was that his mind was not satisfied. The case against Peggy Mott remained good and probably—nine to one the probabilities ran—it was true. But Bill Weigand was no longer certain in his own mind. If O'Malley had been in the habit of using the word, he would have told Bill Weigand that he was being squeamish. Bill could not see any help for that.

The practical outcome of all this was that Bill no longer wanted very badly to have Peggy Mott, and her angry rescuer, brought in. If she was picked up now, her presence would raise an issue—an issue with O'Malley, eventually with the press—for which Bill decided he was not ready. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought—and was interrupted by Mullins, who appeared at the door with a rather odd expression on his face. Bill Weigand said, “Yes?”

“The Norths are here,” Mullins said, and it occurred to Bill that Mullins's tone was somewhat dazed. “They've—ah—got people with them.” Mullins's voice reflected his own awe of his understatement. “They've—” He waved a hand then, and Pam North came in, and after her came Peggy Mott. Bill Weigand merely looked at them and waited, and a small, vivid girl with red hair came in after Peggy Mott. Then Weldon Carey came in, thrusting toward Weigand, wearing his shoulder chip proudly, and after him a slender youngish man with what appeared to be an amused smile, and then Jerry. Mullins stood aside to let them in and then looked past them at Weigand and slowly shook his head.

“That's all, Mullins,” Pam North said. “Just the six of us. Hello, Bill,”

“Only six?” Bill Weigand said. “Close the door, Mullins. Stay in.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He looked at the crowded office. “O.K.,” he said again, doubtfully.

“Bill,” Pam said, “Mrs. Mott wants to give herself up, but you're wrong just the same. We've gone over it and over it, and she didn't.”

“All right, Pam,” Bill said. He looked at Peggy Mott. He looked at Weldon Carey. “You've made trouble,” he said to both of them. His voice, however, was mild. “What was the idea?” This last was to Carey.

“So what?” Carey said. “She's back.”

“I'd like to let Sergeant Stein answer that,” Bill said. “I really would, Carey.”

“Any time,” Carey said, and was angry.

“I can't,” Bill said. “But I'd like to. Stein was a paratrooper, Carey. He knows some very interesting tricks.”

“I—” Carey began, but Bill Weigand shook his head and, rather surprisingly, Carey did not continue. Bill said, and his voice still was quiet, that they might go into that later.

“Let's,” Pam said. “Bill, you didn't hear me. Mrs. Mott didn't do it.”

“No?” Bill said. “Who did, Pam?”

“Somebody else,” Pam said. “We haven't quite worked it out, but it wasn't Peggy.”

“Why?” Bill said, and was told by Pam North to look at Peggy Mott. Bill looked at her. He looked back at Pam.

“Can't you see?” Pam North asked him, with something like indignation in her voice. “
Look
at her, Bill! Listen to her!”

“I have,” Bill said. He turned to Peggy Mott. When he spoke next his voice was without any particular expression. “I listened to her for quite a time,” he said. “She lied and got caught in it. She ran down rat holes.”

Watching the blond girl with long eyes, Bill saw the eyes go blank. He had not expected that; he saw her shudder, almost imperceptibly, and had not expected that, either.

“The holes are all stopped up,” the girl said, not as if she were speaking to anyone. “I—” She swayed, this time perceptibly. Instantly Carey was beside her, an arm around her, and almost as quickly, and very gently, almost reluctantly, she moved out of the circle of the arm. “All right, Wel,” she said, softly. Then she looked at Bill and her eyes were no longer blank.

“I came back,” she said. “The Norths said I had to. But I think—I think I would have come back anyway, Lieutenant.” She looked at him for a moment without speaking. “I didn't lie about what counted,” she said. “I know I—I ran down rat holes. But not when it counted.”