Murder Is Suggested (15 page)

“Jerry?” Pam said.

He slept.

“
Jerry?”

And nothing happened.

But this was absurd.

“
Jerry!!
”

Professor Elwell said, without qualification, that there was no need to fear that a hypnotized person would not awaken, when instructed. He said it emphatically.

“Wake up,” Pam said. “Wake up, Jerry.”

“Nice doggy,” Jerry said. “Here, fella. Nice dog.”

He reached down. He began to pat—
nothing.
But it was precisely as if—

“
Jerry!
” Pam said, and now there was a wail in it. “Jerry.
Darling.
Wake up. There isn't any dog. And I didn't—”

She stopped abruptly. He wouldn't be patting a nonexistent dog unless she had—

“
You!
” Pam North said. “Of all the things—”

Jerry North opened his eyes.

“
You!
” Pam said.

She reached down. She picked up the martini from the table beside Jerry's chair and carried it to a table beside her own.

“You're strong enough,” Pam said, firmly. “Make your own drink, my ever playful friend.”

9

If I had gone on at Columbia, Bill Weigand thought, patiently, not happily, driving his Buick through the clotted traffic of late afternoon—if I were a lawyer now, it would be almost time to be leaving the office, going home. Or if I were an accountant, or an office manager—or, for that matter, a shoe salesman, a bookkeeper. I would be going toward home now, instead of away from it; toward Dorian instead of Sergeant Aloysius Mullins. I would be flicking the job off my hands, dusting it off, saying sufficient unto the day. There would be glasses chilling in the refrigerator, and Dorian curled waiting in a chair and all as right as right could—

On the other hand, Bill thought, stopping behind an out-of-town car which had, unexpectedly, decided to turn left—on the other hand, would I, if I had turned out to be—say—a shoe salesman, ever have met Dorian? Would she have come in to buy a pair of shoes and would we have gone on from there? It seemed somewhat doubtful. For one thing, as a shoe salesman—settle for that—it seemed unlikely he would have met Pamela and Gerald North, because what would it have mattered to him that they had found the body of a naked man in a bathtub? And if he had not met them, then how Dorian at that odd, attractive colony the Norths had frequented in other, earlier years?

And would I, Bill wondered, turning, finally, right into Twenty-first Street, have been contented as a nine-to-fiver, without a revolver in a shoulder holster—a revolver I haven't, actually, used in years? Without wondering whether—say—a man named Arnold Ames is really as amused as he seems to be; a man named Carl Hunter as straightforward? And, whether—say—it is really possible to arrange, by means of hypnosis, one's own death when one decides it is time to die and, dying, resolve a long-moot question?

Bill Weigand parked his car and climbed stairs to the squad room and nodded to Mullins, who got up from behind a desk, carrying papers, and followed into the cubbyhole which was Weigand's office at Homicide, Manhattan West.

“Ames thought it was all quite comical,” Weigand told Mullins. “He may have been right. Do you bring in any choice sheaves? Oh—and did you remember to bring the professor's book along?”

Mullins had. He laid it, with every evidence of distaste, on the desk in front of Bill Weigand. He also said, briefly, what he thought that whole business was a lot of. “Now sergeant,” Bill said. “Further?”

“Ballistics says yes,” Mullins told him. “Same gun. Thirty-two Smith and Wesson. The professor's was a little nicked, on account of a rib, but there was enough. Hunter's was nice and clean. Of course, it figured.”

It had. More than one .32 would have been superfluous.

“The Connecticut boys sent the dope along,” Mullins said. “Nothing in it we didn't know, far's I can see.”

The dope was a copy of an accident report—the report on the fatal accident of 26 April, resulting in the deaths of Elizabeth Elwell, 24; Ernest Bainbridge, 58, and Doris Bainbridge, spouse, 54. Weigand skimmed through it and put it on the desk.

The lawyer of the late Jameson Elwell confirmed—after some legal hemming, and ethical hawing—that the provisions of his client's will were as stated by the decedent's brother. In all that was important. After thises and thats, residue in equal shares to two nephews, a niece, and Faith Oldham, spinster. The will was dated two months earlier; it superseded a testament of some years' standing, in which Faith Oldham was not mentioned.

“Looks,” Mullins said, “as if he had seen a doctor, don't it?”

It suggested that. It need not prove that. Wills are changed otherwise than in the immediate expectation of death.

“Sure,” Mullins said. “So I went to see Miss Oldham and her mother. Want to read about it or—?”

“Tell me, sergeant,” Mullins's official reports are sometimes a little rigid.

“The girl says she was at the house,” Mullins said. “Waiting for her boyfriend to show and take her out to lunch. Mrs. Oldham wasn't. She—”

Mrs. Oldham had left the house at about a quarter after eleven to do the marketing. “Somebody has to,” she said, and looked at her daughter, who sighed slightly, as one who encounters a too-familiar remark. “Somebody has to do the errands,” Mrs. Oldham said, in case she had left doubt in the mind of Sergeant Mullins. Mullins said, “Yes'm.”

She had not, walking up the street in the direction of Broadway, seen “that” Mr. Hunter. She had gone to a chain store and carried groceries home. “Somebody has to,” she said. “They don't deliver for nothing, whatever they pretend. It just gets added on.”

“She's not a very nice woman,” Mullins said, in parenthesis, to Bill Weigand. “Way she looked at the girl, I mean.”

Faith had got home a little after noon. When some time later, Carl Hunter had failed to arrive, she had first called his apartment and, getting no answer, gone to the front door and looked up and down the street. The patrolman still on guard outside the house next door had come down the street and said good morning and then, “Man just got shot up the street, miss,” which was the first she had known of it. When she found out who the man was she had gone to the hospital. Hunter was still in surgery and she had waited until he came out of it—until he regained consciousness and could smile at her; until she had been told, several times, that he was not badly hurt.

Her mother had returned when Faith got home and said, on being told what happened, “I never did trust that Mr. Hunter. And your rushing off to the hospital that way!”

“That,” Mullins said, “is what she said she said. And the girl said, ‘Oh,
Hope
.'”

Mullins had said that his questions were formalities to be gone through; that in such cases as this there were a lot of forms to fill out. “Which,” he said, a little moodily, “God knows there are, Loot.” With the formalities observed, he had stood and then said, “Oh, by the way. Congratulations on the silver lining, Miss Oldham.”

They had both, he told Bill Weigand, stared at him as if he had gone out of his mind.

“The inheritance,” Mullins said and, when they continued to stare, “in the professor's will.”

Faith Oldham had shaken her head, then, and looked at her mother. Then they had both looked at Mullins and both had shaken their heads.

Now Bill Weigand raised his eyebrows.

“I think they were leveling,” Mullins said. “Or they both oughta be on the stage. Which makes it interesting, doesn't it? Because if the girl didn't know, then Hunter didn't know and—well, there we are.”

“You told them?”

Mullins had. It was no secret, or wouldn't long be.

“From the way they acted,” Mullins said, “I'd say it pretty much knocked them over. Particularly Mrs. Oldham; particularly at first. Then she came out of it enough to say something about its being the least he could do. And the girl—she started to cry and said
‘Hope!',
all broken up like, and went out of the room. Makes you feel sorta sorry for the girl. If she didn't kill him, of course.”

“Right,” Bill said. “If she didn't kill him. And—if she didn't know about the money, she didn't have a motive, did she? Unless—”

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. “Not that hypnotism stuff.”

“And if she didn't have one,” Weigand said, “Hunter didn't and mama didn't. Unless Elwell—” He did not finish.

“Looks like it,” Mullins said. “Be nice if it was mama. What I mean is—”

“I know,” Bill Weigand said. “We must avoid prejudice, sergeant. Have the boys finished in the laboratory? Elwell's office?”

They had finished—that was, they had removed from laboratory and office all that they thought might conceivably be of value. They were going over it elsewhere. So far they hadn't found anything that looked like being anything, except for the payments to Investigators, Inc., of which they already knew.

“The trouble with us,” Mullins said, “is that nobody ever leaves us any clues.”

“I know,” Weigand said. “If they've finished there we may as well put this with the rest of the stuff.”

This tinkled on the desktop. This was the key to the laboratory which Weigand had taken from Faith Oldham the day before. Mullins, custodian of physical objects, picked it up and looked at it and started to clip it to a sheaf of papers and looked at it again.

“Looks new,” Mullins said, and Bill Weigand reached for it. It did look new. Bill ran a finger along the wards. The sharpness of the cutting had not yet worn smooth.

“We were talking about the key when Hunter almost remembered something,” Mullins said, but Weigand had already reached for the telephone. He told the operator whom he wanted to talk to, and where the wanted man was. “Of course,” he said, as he put the telephone back, “what he almost remembered may have been about something entirely different.”

They smoked and waited. The telephone rang. A woman was saying that Mr. Hunter was under partial sedation and should not be disturbed, and then a man said, “Let me have it, please,” Hunter's voice was, Bill thought, a little muted, as if Hunter were a little groggy. Bill said he wanted to ask only one thing, but that if Hunter didn't feel up to it—

“In a few minutes,” Huner said, “I'll probably be asleep. So—what?”

“The thing you almost remembered when we were up there,” Bill said. “Was it about the key to the professor's lab? About a key having been lost, perhaps, and another one made and—”

“Hell,” Hunter said, and his voice was fading, “I don't even know if it was that. Could have been—wait a minute. Faith lost her key two-three weeks ago. She was standing over a subway grating and took something out of her purse—tissue, probably—and the key came out too and dropped through the grating.”

“Was that what you remembered? Almost remembered.”

“I don't know,” Hunter said. “Seems to me that there was somthing more. Something—relevant. That losing the key was only—” Then there was a long pause. “Maybe when this stuff they've given me wears off—” Hunter said, and his voice was vague. And then a woman said, “Mr. Hunter must be allowed to rest now,” and put a receiver back in a hospital room. Weigand put his back, and told Mullins what Hunter had said.

“So all it means, probably,” Bill said, “is that Miss Oldham borrowed the professor's key long enough to have another made. Which doesn't seem—”

He stopped. He drummed briefly on the desktop with his fingers. He said, “Let me have that a minute,” but, when Mullins started to hand him the key, “No. The accident report.”

Weigand flicked back the first page of the stapled two-page report. He read what he had previously skimmed. He said, “Un-huh” and, “Listen to this, sergeant,” and read:

“‘Small evening purse on seat of car; gray silk with metal clasp. Contents: compact, lipstick, handkerchief initialed EE, coin purse containing single five-dollar bill, vial of perfume (Arpege), driver's license No. 5280846, NY, made out to Elizabeth Elwell, Age 24—'”

“And,” Bill said, “etcetera. What's missing, sergeant?”

“Cigarettes,” Mullins said, promptly. “Lighter. Social security card.”

“I don't know she was employed,” Bill said. “Or would carry a card in an evening purse if she were. And cigarettes and lighter might be pretty bulky for an evening purse. Particularly when you're with a man who has pockets. Anything else?”

“I don't—” Mullins said, and tapped the desktop with clenched fist, self-punishing. “What we were just talking about,” he said. “Keys.”

“Right,” Bill said. “For everybody there's a door some place.”

“Well,” Mullins said, “not everybody.”

“Everybody who might conceivably drive a Jaguar,” Bill said. “To one's own front door, sergeant.”

“Looks,” Mullins said, “like we'd better go and talk to this Mr. Flinch.”…

Rosco Finch was about to go out to dinner. He had a date for dinner. Also, he had told them everything—

“Told you,” he said to Mullins. “I don't know who hired those detectives. And, I don't give a damn. It's all water under—”

He stopped and looked at Bill Weigand through narrowed eyes. He said, “Wait a minute,” and then, “You say your name's Weigand?”

Bill had. He nodded his head.

“You're Homicide,” Finch said, and spoke accusingly. “And Professor Elwell's been murdered.” He turned on Mullins. “Which,” he said, “you were damn careful not to tell me, weren't you?”

“Yes,” Mullins said.

“So all this business about the accident,” Finch said. “About checking up on this private detective. A lot of hogwash.”