The Norths Meet Murder (12 page)

Force of habit is a compulsion, particularly when you are fifty-seven and tired; when your feet are tired and your shoulders ache, a compulsion which sends you home at the end of the day is an easy one to accept. The rather stooped man in the gray-blue uniform, with its official buttons, almost went his usual way down the stairs leading to the uptown platform of the subway at Fourth Street. Then he remembered what he had decided that noon, sitting at the tiled lunch-counter and reading a newspaper while he drank pale, sweet coffee from a white mug. He remembered it and sighed and wished he had never thought of it. But he had, and there you were.

You were an official of the government—yes, you could call it that. When you knew something that ought to be known by authority the duty on you to tell authority what you knew was a little more exigent than on an ordinary man, a layman. When you had seen something that might be important and remembered what you had seen you had to go and tell about it, because there was no likelihood that anybody would come and ask you about it. You nodded over the newspaper and made up your mind, and finished the last cup of pale coffee, sweetest toward the bottom, and went back to duty until your time was your own and you could go to authority and tell what you had seen a little before four o'clock on Monday afternoon at 95 Greenwich Place. It might be nothing; probably it was nothing, except for the strange, direct look you had got. But perhaps the suitcase was important, too; you never knew.

The man of fifty-seven had thought about it off and on all afternoon, as he grew tireder, and once or twice he almost persuaded himself he could let it go until the next day. If he had been only a layman and not, in a way, a government officials—yes, you could say a government official, really—he probably would have put it off until the next day. Then he would have gone down the stairs leading to the uptown platform and got a Grand Concourse express and got off and gone home to the second floor of the frame duplex house far up in the Bronx and had dinner and told the wife about it. He and the wife would have talked it over and agreed that he should go in the morning and tell authority about it, and then, perhaps they would have talked about the days which were to come in a few years, after he was retired and the pension started, when they would leave the Bronx and go to a small town upstate and have a garden. He had never had a garden, but he had often thought about having a garden. Flowers, he thought.

Every now and then he could remember, with sudden clearness, how things were when he had been a boy in a smaller town and had helped his father in the backyard and how daffodils started to come through the ground in the early spring while there was still snow in sheltered places.

Even although he had decided definitely what he was going to do, he almost failed to do it, because habit guided him imperceptibly to the stairs leading to the uptown platform. He remembered when he had gone down only a step or two, however, and went back to the sidewalk and crossed the street to the downtown stairs on the other side. The downtown platform was crowded with people going home to Brooklyn, and going down to the Hudson and Manhattan terminal for New Jersey, but it was not as crowded as the uptown platform across the tracks. That was jammed, as always—well, there was that, anyway. By the time he was ready to go home the crowd would have thinned and he might even get a seat. That would be a novelty.

There were plenty of people on the downtown platform, but not so many that he could not get into the front rank, waiting in a long line along the edge for the downtown express to come in. If the door opened, by chance, where he was standing he would only have to step through and, inside, he might get a seat—a seat even for one station was something, when you had been on your feet all day. It shouldn't, he thought, take long to tell what he knew, and make a statement, and then he could go along home, knowing that duty was done. He shifted his weight from one tired foot to the other and, with the others, looked up the track to see if the train was coming.

It was; its red lights were already at the end of the platform, the rails were clacking in front of it, and its individual roar was dominant over the roar of other trains. He started that recoil which is the safety gesture of all subway riders who have got near the edge of the platform and see the train coming; that subconscious gesture toward safety which is the New Yorker's almost invariable response to the juggernaut under the streets. He shrank back—

But something stopped him as he shrank; somebody was pressing against him, ending his retreat. Ending his retreat; then pressing him forward—forward into that perilous, inches-wide margin between his feet and the edge. Somebody was in an almighty hurry, he thought; somebody had better watch out. Some kid who didn't know any better, but it was dangerous, all the same. Even now—but now the pressure was increasing, now, suddenly, it was resistless. He tried to turn in protest, to cry a warning.

“Hey!” he cried. “What—”

But then the pressure suddenly stiffened, grew hard and purposeful. His arms flailed wildly and there was a strange, horrible scream through the station. The scream hit the low, concrete ceiling and reverberated down; it glanced from pillars and echoed in his ears; it rose terrifyingly, madly, above the roar of the train and it was tearing in the ears of the man who was falling, and detached from him. His hands clutched momentarily, desperately at nothing and he had time to think, “This isn't me—this is somebody else—this isn't happening—” before he did not think; before he died with his own scream in his ears.

The motorman of the train did everything a man could do, and then shut his eyes. The wheels of the train screamed against the brake-shoes and against the track. Standing passengers were swung helplessly on their straps and several fell. But there was not time for a man to do anything of real importance. The train was, to be sure, going hardly five miles an hour when the first wheels cut through the gray-blue uniform. The screaming, mercifully, had died an instant before; falling, the man had hit his head on a rail, and had so been spared that last appalling second of hopeless consciousness.

There were screams on the platform, and men and women ran and shouted; the crowd knotted where the train had stopped, and people struggled out of it, white and with their faces working. The dispatcher in his booth at one end of the platform set signals against following trains, reported to the district operations office, telephoned the police. The motorman of the train set his whistle wailing; its sound reached the street through ventilating gratings, and after a moment, brought a traffic policeman from Eighth Street running down the stairs. He had hardly reached the platform when the first radio car spewed out two more uniformed men; within ten minutes everything was under control and within fifteen ambulance surgeons, who did not need even a glance to tell them there was nothing for them to do on the track, were reviving several women who had fainted and quieting the several more who were hysterical. A crowd collected on the street above and stared at the radio cars and ambulances.

The police cleared the platform and turned people back at the entrances. Behind the stopped train, traffic was rerouted from express to local tracks and proceeded, after some delay, almost at normal speed. Orders to accomplish this went out by routine; the New York subways provide a devastating agency of destruction for many who decide against further living.

No reporters accompanied the police. Volunteers called the afternoon newspapers and reported that service was interrupted; the newspapers investigated by telephone and ran short accounts. The New York City News Association sent out, after a time, a brief report, stressing, as was natural, that the disturbance of traffic had occurred during the evening rush hour.

Weigand came out of Goody's Bar when it was hardly any time at all after six o'clock and noticed that something had happened at the subway station down the avenue. Uniformed men were standing around waving people on; radio cars half blocked the street and two ambulances were wedged among them. He looked a minute and shrugged.

“Some poor devil,” Weigand said to himself, glad it was a precinct job. He crossed Sixth Avenue and found Grove Street after a moment's search. He went along it looking at numbers. He was getting near, he realized, when a couple of cats began fighting in the middle of the street and he stopped to watch. They went at it with savage yowls, tangled and rolled in a whirl of yellow and gray. Weigand, who liked cats, was wishing he had a pail of water to douse the fighters before they did serious damage to each other, when a car turned the corner ahead, moving at a moderate speed, and came up the street.

A man with an angry face was driving. Weigand could tell by his expression when the man in the car saw the cats; the expression, strangely and unpleasantly, was a gloating one. The car suddenly leaped at the cats, and the cats disappeared under it.

“Why, you—!!” Weigand yelled, whirled and noted the number. Then he whirled back to look for the cats. There was, miraculously, only one cat and it, with every hair bristling and a furious tail, was staring after the car. The other cat was a flash of movement in an areaway across the street. Both, amazingly, had been missed by the wheels.

Then, from the door of a three-story red brick house near where Weigand was standing, a tall, angry man burst, yelling.

“You—!” he yelled. “If I could—!” He was, Weigand saw, yelling after the man in the car. He was, Weigand thought, as angry a man as he had seen in a long time, or wanted to see. The angry man ran a few steps toward Weigand, and after the car, and then stopped. His rage was cooling, Weigand decided. Now he could see the detective.

“That—” the angry man said, describing the motorist grimly and, Weigand felt, rather exactly.

“Yes,” Weigand said. “I agree with you. But they came out all right—the cats, I mean.”

“No fault of his,” the angry man said. “That—”

“Well,” said Weigand, “you find all kinds about.” He glanced quickly at the number of the nearest house, checked the probable address of the red brick house, and took a chance.

“Would you be Mr. Fuller, by any chance?” he said. “Benjamin Fuller?”

“Well,” the angry man said, anger still under his voice, “as a matter of fact I am. Yes.” He looked at Weigand more carefully. “I don't know you, do I?” he inquired.

“Weigand,” the detective said. “Lieutenant William Weigand, of the Homicide Bureau. I was coming along to see you.”

Fuller did not seem greatly surprised, or, for that matter, greatly pleased.

“I thought you would,” he said. “Or somebody. About that——Brent, I suppose.” He described Brent unfavorably.

“Well,” said Weigand. “About Brent, yes. No friend of yours, I gather.”

“No,” Fuller said, “no friend of mine. Come along in.”

They went along to the red brick house which was, Weigand discovered, apparently occupied entirely by the Fullers. “In the money,” Weigand thought. “Pretty well in the money, anyway.” Aloud he said:

“Was one of those your cat?”

“No,” Fuller said. “I keep a dog. I don't like cats, much.”

Weigand said, “Oh,” and decided that Fuller must have a bit of temper.

“But any animal,” Fuller said. “The louse.”

Weigand nodded, and they went into a living-room which seemed to run the full length of the house, and was furnished in substantial modern blocks. The chairs looked as if they had been made by sculptors, chiseling out hollows and shaping forms from cubical masses. There was a table all of glass, and the rear wall of the long room was of glass brick. The lamps were hooded in metal and glass, and Weigand, who had always assumed he disliked modern furniture, found his dislike subsiding. He took the chair Fuller gestured toward and was pleased with it.

Fuller lighted a cigarette and said, “Drink?” inquiringly. Weigand, after a moment of temptation, said he didn't think so.

“Not with suspects, eh?” Fuller said, sharply. He stood in front of the frosted glass fireplace, with a space for a real fire, and looked down at Weigand.

“Not on duty,” Weigand said. “Rules. Sit down, won't you?”

Fuller grinned. He had rather a crooked, attractive grin. He seemed about to say something, decided against it and sat down.

“Well,” he said. “Where do we go from here? Did I kill Brent? No, the answer is. I didn't kill Brent. Did I have a motive to kill Brent? Yes. Did I have opportunity? I don't know. I don't know when he was killed.”

“Well,” said Weigand. “We can go on with this the rest of the night, I suppose. Or I can ask you some questions and you can give me some answers. Or we can go down to Headquarters and we can ask some questions there. Or whatever you want. Right?”

“Right,” Fuller echoed. He stared at the detective a minute. “All right,” he said. “I'm keyed up, probably. Wipe it out, and we'll start over. Did I kill Brent? No.”

“But you're just as well pleased somebody did?” Weigand said. Fuller thought it over a moment.

“Well,” he said, “literally, no. Of course not. He was a nuisance to me and I didn't like him, any more than I like the man who tried to run down the cats. That doesn't mean killing, or being glad of killing. People don't kill, really, nowadays.”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “Yes, they do, sometimes. For some reasons. Somebody killed Brent, for example. There seems to be a pretty general impression going around that you didn't like him. Why?”

“That,” Fuller said, “seems to be my business.”

Weigand nodded and said if Fuller chose to take it that way, certainly.

“If you choose to take it that way,” he said, “I'll get along. I'll go along back to Headquarters and send up a couple of the boys. They'll bring you down there. And then you don't have to talk without a lawyer. And then we'll lock you up as a material witness. No third degree, or anything. Just lock you up a while, until your lawyer springs you. Then we'll lock you up on suspicion. Then, maybe, we'll sort of keep you from getting the sleep you'd like to have, and half a dozen of the boys will take turns questioning you. It's just as you like. Why didn't you like Brent?”