2

TUESDAY, 6:10 P.M. TO 7:20 P.M.

The police photographers took their last shots and were reluctant, like all photographers, to admit that they had had enough. They stowed cameras and withdrew to stand by. The Assistant Medical Examiner was a thin, studious man in his forties and he knelt beside the body, took its temperature and examined it. Three slugs had gone into the chest, and any one of them would have been enough. There were no powder burns. The Assistant Medical Examiner said that whenever they were done with it, he was done with it—in its present place and position. For the record, he said, it was dead. Recently dead. Within an hour or so. That was as close as they need expect him to come, now or later, although he would look it over at the morgue.

The detective captain from the precinct said, “Thanks.” He nodded to two detectives with weathered, out-of-doors faces, and they knelt by the body. They rolled dead fingers on an ink pad and on strips of paper, and made notations. They finished with ten fingers, and a man in a white coat from the morgue put a tag on the body. He and another man stood up and looked waitingly at the detective captain from the precinct. The captain knelt by the body and turned out the pockets. He gave the man from the morgue a scrawled receipt. The man from the morgue and his assistant put the body in a long basket and carried it out.

“They walk in and we carry ’em out,” the man from the morgue observed to his assistant as they went down the narrow hall to the door. “Yeah,” said the assistant, without emotion. He indicated he had heard it before, a touch of philosophy appropriate to the circumstances.

Bill Weigand, getting off the elevator, had to flatten himself against the wall to let the basket pass. They were hurrying it up, he decided, not pleased. When the basket passed he went into the apartment and raised eyebrows slightly at Sergeant Mullins, who raised shoulders slightly at the man from Homicide. His shoulders said that the precinct was in charge and where the hell had Lieutenant Weigand been? Weigand looked at the precinct captain and said, “Hiya, Jim,” in a tone which expressed no interest whatever in Jim’s health.

“Hi,” Jim said. “You want it now?”

“Any time,” Weigand told him. “Any time. Assuming somebody plugged him. You moved it right along, didn’t you?”

“Well,” the precinct captain said, “you wanted to look at it? Particularly? We made some mighty pretty pictures.”

It would be all right with him, Bill Weigand thought, if nobody got killed in Capt. James Florini’s precinct—with, possibly, the exception of Capt. James Florini. However—

“Can’t leave them lying around all night,” Captain Florini pointed out.

“Right,” Weigand said. “I was tied up.”

He hadn’t been. It was hard to imagine any way he could have got there quicker, not being at precinct headquarters around the corner. But there was no sense in debating it. He turned away from Captain Florini, just not pointedly, to Sergeant Mullins.

“Well, Sergeant?” he said.

“Well,” Sergeant Mullins said, “we just got here ourselves, Loot. Me and Stein and the other boys. The captain here had it pretty well taped out.” He looked at the captain blandly. “Expeditious,” he pointed out. “Like the man says.”

“Right,” Weigand agreed.

“Very high-class corpse,” Mullins told him. “Only full of holes. Somebody did very nice shooting, Loot. From in front.”

“Here,” Captain Florini said. He pointed to objects laid out on a table. “Out of the pockets. You want to give me a receipt, Lieutenant?”

Weigand gave him a receipt. Captain Florini put it in his pocket.

“In your lap, Weigand,” he said. “We’ll send the stuff through. You can have it.”

The tone was mildly pleased. Bill Weigand looked at him and waited.

“Merle,” Captain Florini said. “George Merle. As the sergeant says, very high class. They picked it up in the press room and AP local’s flashed it. You’ll have company, Lieutenant. Also, he was a friend of the commissioner’s. And of the mayor’s. And probably of the governor’s and for all I know of Mr. Big.”

He looked at Weigand and smiled.

“So there it is,” he said. “On a platter. Nothing in it for us precinct boys.”

Weigand’s face showed nothing. But his “Right” could be taken any way you chose. He crossed the little room to the table and looked down at the objects on it without touching them. Keys, a little pile of change, a notebook, a billfold which was comfortably swollen, a card case, a cigarette case, a silver lighter, two envelopes which had been slit open, a gold pocket watch, a case for glasses, a folding handkerchief, a fountain pen, two match folders, a folding checkbook in a case, a small pile of pieces of paper of anomalous purpose. He pulled a chair over and sat down.

“They haven’t been printed,” Florini told him.

“Right,” Weigand said.

He handled them gingerly, touching only edges and protuberances. The billfold first. Its bulge was attributable to tens and twenties, which Weigand did not count. There was a secondary bulge of identification cards and papers. There was an operator’s permit made out to George Merle of Elmcroft, Long Island; there was George Merle’s owner’s license for a Cadillac, 1942, convertible sedan. There was a sixty-trip commuter’s ticket to Elmcroft, if Mr. Merle’s gas ran out, but there was a folder of C gas coupons, so it probably wouldn’t. There were a number of cards which testified to Mr. Merle’s membership in a number of institutions. It looked as if the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle. The card case held engraved cards in two compartments, social and business. Unquestionably, the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle—of George Merle, President, Madison Avenue Bank and Trust Company. Everything beautifully in hand, beautifully in order. Except for the three holes in Mr. Merle.

It was enough to go on with. He turned from the desk, and Captain Florini and the precinct men had gone. Weigand looked at Mullins and smiled slightly.

“Phooey,” Mullins said. “And double phooey.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Coöperation, Mullins.”

He looked at the girl for the first time, although he had seen her from the first. She was sitting in a corner of a little sofa and she made herself small. She looked at him and her eyes were wide and shocked.

“Now,” Weigand said to her. “You found him? You’re”—he looked at a slip of paper from his pocket—“Mrs. Richard Hunter? This is your apartment?”

The girl opened her mouth to speak and her voice caught. She swallowed and said, “Yes.”

She was a pretty girl—slender, with blond hair cut boyishly but twisting slightly in a wave; her eyes were blue and she wore a dress of a paler blue. Just now she was pale; just now her eyes were wide and shocked. Her slender hands held tightly to one another and moved in a clenched embrace. Weigand noted but did not comment. A pretty, frightened girl. With a dead man in her apartment.

“You live here alone?” he said. It was hardly a question.

“Yes,” the girl said. “Did you get my message?”

“That Pam North told you to call me—me, personally? Yes. You know Pam?”

“No,” the girl said. “Not really. I met her and her husband at a party. I talked to her some. But they told, me about her—about her experience with—this sort of thing. About her knowing the police.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “You live here alone, Mrs. Hunter. Your husband is—away?”

You could guess her husband was away. Husbands of girls her age were mostly away.

“He’s—dead,” she said. “Rick was killed in the Pacific. It was in the papers, about him. He—.”

Bill Weigand said he remembered. He did remember. It had been memorable.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know, of course. So you do live here alone?”

Mary Hunter told him about that. As of yesterday—technically, if you preferred, as of Saturday. She had slept in the apartment the night before but only today was really moving in.

“They aren’t my things,” she said, looking around. “Nothing here is mine.” She paused. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know about any of it.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “You walked in and he was lying here. You’d never seen him before?”

She hesitated. After the hesitation she did not need to say she had seen him before.

“A long time ago,” she said, “I knew his son. Years ago, before I met Rick.”

“And you knew Mr. Merle, too?” Weigand said. It was a statement.

The girl nodded.

“He was Josh’s father,” she said. “I went there weekends a few times. That was the only way I knew him.”

Weigand looked at her, waiting.

“The only way,” she said. “I know how it looks and—.”

“It’s just a coincidence?” Weigand said.

“It’s got to be,” the girl said. “I haven’t seen him in—oh, for a long time. Except—.”

She stopped and Weigand waited.

“Not for a long time,” she said. “Two years, anyway. I think Rick and I ran into him once at a restaurant somewhere. That’s all.”

It was all for now, anyway, Weigand decided. He asked her to tell him about finding the body.

She had, she said, come home with some things and walked into the hall and there he was. You could see him from the hall. He had fallen in full view from the hall—on a straight line. And she had dropped the package.

“And screamed?” Weigand said.

“Yes,” the girl said. “I must have. But I don’t remember.”

“And recognized him?” Weigand said.

The girl nodded, without speaking. She had a fine head, Weigand noticed.

“And then,” Bill Weigand said, “you called Mrs. North. Why?”

“Because—I told you,” the girl said. “I had met her and they said she—”

“No,” Bill said. “I mean why did you call her? Instead of the police. How did you happen to think of calling her first? When you’d met her only casually, and knew only casually that she knew me. She’s not a policewoman, you know. And her husband isn’t a detective. They’re just friends of mine.”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I guess I thought they were detectives. Private detectives or something.”

“He publishes books,” Weigand said. “Didn’t you gather that, at the party? When people were talking about them? And she—oh, works for the Navy League and things like that. Who told you they were detectives?”

“I don’t know,” Mary Hunter said. “Maybe I didn’t think they were really detectives. I—I just thought of them.”

Bill Weigand let it lie. He let it lie heavily.

“When did you recognize Mr. Merle?” he asked, after a moment. “When did you know it was somebody you knew? From the first?”

“No,” the girl said. “Not from the first. Not until I went in and—and looked. Closely. Then I recognized him.”

“And you didn’t scream,” Weigand said. “Or did you.”

“I must have,” she said. “I—I was frightened. And—I guess horrified.”

Weigand looked at Mullins. Mullins shook his head.

“Not according to the guy on the elevator,” Mullins said. “He’d just brought her up. He says he would have heard her and he says he didn’t.”

“Would he have heard you, Mrs. Hunter?” Weigand asked. “If you had screamed?”

The girl shook her head and said she didn’t know.

“How can I tell?” she said. “What difference does it make?”

“Well,” Bill Weigand said, “look at it this way. Here you are, a young woman coming home with things for dinner. You walk into your apartment and a man is lying dead on the floor. With blood around him. Why wouldn’t you scream?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said.

“You wouldn’t scream if he were still alive,” Bill pointed out. He spoke softly. “Now would you, Mrs. Hunter? If he were—just standing there and you recognized him.”

“And then shot him,” the girl said. “Is that what you mean?” She paused. “And I suppose the elevator man would have heard a scream, but wouldn’t have heard three shots?”

Weigand smiled. His smile was not friendly.

“Not if he had gone on down,” he said. “If there had been—say two or three minutes intervening. As probably there would have been.”

“Wherever he was, he would have heard shots,” the girl insisted.

Weigand shook his head.

“The trouble with that is that he didn’t,” he told her. “I don’t know why, but he didn’t. He thinks he wouldn’t if he were four floors down, or if he did would mistake the sound for a truck backfiring. In any case, he didn’t. And shots were fired. Obviously.”

The girl showed spirit.

“Not by me,” she said.

“Right,” Weigand said. “It’s all a coincidence. You rent an apartment, a man you used to know picks it to walk into, somebody else shoots him. You’re not connected at all.”

“I don’t care how it sounds,” Mary Hunter said. But there was desperation in her voice. “Mrs. North will—”

“Mrs. North,” Bill Weigand said, “is a very charming young woman who does work for the Navy League and is married to a man who publishes books. She is not—”

“Bill,” Pam North said from the door. “How nice of you. Are we late?”

Bill looked at her and beyond her at Jerry. He said, “Hullo, you.” He said no, they weren’t late.

“It’s nice to be charming,” Pam said. “Where’s the body?”

“In the morgue,” Bill said. “Where would it be?”

“I don’t know,” Pam said. “As you were saying, I’m not a detective. Hello, Mrs. Hunter. This is Bill Weigand.”

“We’ve met,” the girl said. “He thinks I did it. He thinks because I called you I—.” She stopped.

“Yes,” Pam said. “I wondered about that too. It wasn’t wise of you, if you didn’t do it. Or, if you did.” She paused and looked from Mary Hunter to Bill Weigand and back again. “Not that we’re not interested,” she said. “This is Jerry.”

She gestured over her shoulder.

“Aren’t we, darling,” she said.

“Oh,” Jerry North said. “Very, of course. How do you do, Mrs. Hunter?”

The Norths seemed to have animated her.

“Terribly,” she said. “Your friend thinks I killed the old—Mr. Merle.”

“The old what?” Pam said. She sounded interested.

The girl flushed.

“The old boy,” she said. “Not what you think. Josh used to call him that and I—I did too. Because Josh did. Josh is his son, you know.”

“Look,” Jerry said, “we don’t even know who got killed, or anything. Perhaps we’d better just go along and—.”

Pam shook her head at him. She turned to Bill and said, “All right, Bill.” Bill looked at Sergeant Mullins.

“O. K., Loot,” Mullins said. “Sooner or later. Hullo, Mrs. North. Mr. North. They’ll want to know.”

Weigand looked at the Norths.

“Yes,” he said. He said it with a certain inflection.

Mrs. North crossed the room and sat on the sofa with Mary Hunter. “All right,” she said. Jerry still stood inside the door.

Weigand told them, economically, what he knew. He was impartial about Mary, telling what she had said. He told about the scream which was not screamed. When he had finished, Pam North’s forehead was wrinkled. She looked at Mary Hunter and waited.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “I seem to remember screaming, but maybe I merely screamed in—in my mind, sort of. If the old man was where he would have heard me, and says I didn’t, then I didn’t. Maybe I’m not the screaming type. I didn’t scream when I—when I heard about Rick.”

“Nobody knows, Bill,” Pam North pointed out, looking at him. “Although if I came in and saw—what she saw—I’d scream. Wouldn’t I, Jerry?”

“For the record,” Jerry said, “you didn’t. When it was in the bathtub. You just kind of made sounds—it was a kind of incredulous moan. But of course, it wasn’t our bathtub.”*

“Didn’t I?” Pam said. “I thought—. You see how it could have been, Bill. And where’s the gun?”

Bill Weigand said he didn’t know. He added that there had been time enough to do something with a gun.

“Such,” Pam said, “as what? What do you do with a gun? Mary hasn’t got a gun. Or have you?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “In my trunk. Under things. It was Rick’s and when he left he—left it with me.”

“Is it?” Pam asked, of Bill Weigand.

It was the first he had heard of it, Bill told her. They were in at the beginning.

“I could—” Mary began, but Bill shook his head. He nodded to Mullins and Mullins held out his hand. Mary Hunter found her keys and gave them to Mullins and pointed at a key and at the trunk. It was a steamer trunk and Mullins unpacked it methodically, thinking that women certainly needed a lot of underwear. He got to the bottom and looked at Bill and said, “No.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “there we are. No. Well, Mrs. Hunter?”

The slender girl with the short blond hair merely looked blank. She did not, so far as Bill Weigand could tell, look frightened.

“Then I don’t know,” she said. “I thought it was. I never used it.” She paused. “For anything,” she said. “Not since Rick—taught me to use it. I must have put it in something I stored.”

“Anyway,” Pam said, “she didn’t have it today.”

“Why?” said Jerry.

“Where?” said Pam. “I mean—where? In with the groceries? In a holster? Where?”

Jerry looked at the girl in the close-fitting blue dress. He saw what Pam meant. He looked at Bill Weigand. Bill shook his head.

“Obviously,” he said, “if we decided she didn’t find the body as she says, then we don’t need to believe anything she says. It may have been—oh, in the icebox with the soda and she may have gone out ostensibly to mix a drink and come back with it. And she may—hell, she may have thrown it out the window.”

He broke off and looked at Mary Hunter who merely looked back, with an expression which was half shrug.

“Drop that, for the moment,” Bill said. “We can only guess until we look. The boys will look.”

They could, he said, take up something else. She had rented the apartment on Sunday, day before yesterday. She had moved in—when? Yesterday afternoon? Very well, she had moved in yesterday afternoon, and everything was ordinary and routine. Right?

“Yes,” the girl said.

“Who did you rent the apartment from?” Weigand asked. “An agent?”

The girl shook her head.

“A man I knew,” she said. “A man I used to know in—in an office.”

She hesitated and they all noticed it.

“What office?” Bill Weigand said.

Mary Hunter wanted to know what difference it made.

“I don’t know,” Bill told her. “Apparently it makes a difference. To you.” He stopped a moment and looked at her.

“Listen, Mrs. Hunter,” he said. “I’m not trying to trap you. I’m not trying to do anything but find out the facts. If you didn’t kill Merle, don’t make me drag facts out of you. If you did—well, if you did, there’s the telephone. Call a lawyer.”

He waited as if he expected her to cross the room to the telephone. She did not move.

“All right,” she said. “It was at the bank. Mr. Merle’s bank. Right after Rick went away I—I had to find something to do. Everybody was working at something. It wasn’t much of a job, because I couldn’t do anything.” She paused. “But I can now,” she said. “I’m a secretary now. I went to school.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Go on.”

“Mr. Murdock worked there,” she said. “He was sort of an assistant to Mr. Merle. Like a—like a secretary, but not a stenographic secretary. That was—oh, a year and a half ago. Right after Rick went. When I—heard about Rick I didn’t go back. I didn’t want to go anywhere.”

She paused, as if waiting. Nobody said anything.

“I don’t have to work,” she said. “For the money, that is. Father left me some money.”

There was another pause and she did not go on.

“Right,” Weigand said, after they had waited. “Now about the apartment. You had kept in touch with this—Murdock, did you say? And you asked him if he knew anybody who had an apartment to rent?”

The girl shook her head. She said it hadn’t been that way, exactly. She had run into Murdock quite by accident and he had asked what she was doing and she had said she had a new job, beginning Monday.

“That was last week,” she said. “Yesterday was the Monday I meant. And he said, ‘You don’t want a new apartment to go with it, do you?’ And I said I might, and did he know of one. He said he was just moving and wanted to sublet his and that I could have it Sunday if I wanted it. And I went and looked at it and it was all right, because of the way I wanted to live for a while. And so—this is it.” She paused and half smiled.

“Only,” she said, “it isn’t the way I planned.”

Under other circumstances, Pam thought, Mary Hunter would be gay. As she must have been gay with Rick, from the way her voice changed when she spoke of him. Not, Pam decided, that she wasn’t getting over that, in a way.

Bill Weigand did not appear to notice Mary’s last remark.

“So until day before yesterday, this apartment belonged to a man named Murdock,” he said. “Any first name?”

“Oscar,” Mary said. “Mr. Merle called him Ozzie, but his name was Oscar. On the roster. Oh!”

“Yes, Mrs. Hunter?” Bill Weigand said.

The girl’s eyes seemed brighter, more animated. She leaned forward a little and spoke eagerly, in a very young voice.

“Couldn’t Mr. Merle have come to see Mr. Murdock?” she said. “Couldn’t that be it? Perhaps not knowing Mr. Murdock had moved? I mean—isn’t that the real connection, somehow? Mr. Murdock did all sorts of things for Mr. Merle—confidential things.”

Jerry North, half leaning by the door, nodded slowly. The girl saw his nod. Her eyes appreciated it. Jerry discovered that his eyes were appreciating her.

“It could be,” Bill Weigand told her. “Obviously. We’ll have to see Mr. Murdock. We’ll have to see lots of people, Mrs. Hunter.”

She was confident again, Weigand noticed, or at least not frightened. She had hold of herself. So there was to be no quick break, which would annoy Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, a man easy to annoy. And a man who would not approve of this—this social method of investigation.

“At the moment,” Weigand said, “there are too many people right here. I’ll want to have you tell me some more things later, Mrs. Hunter, but for the moment we’ll let them go. Unless you can tell me Mr. Murdock’s new address?”

She shook her head.

“Right,” Weigand said. “We’ll find him. Now, for the moment, I don’t want you any longer. But I do want your apartment. For an hour or so. Would you mind—?”

“Look,” the girl said. “I live here, Lieutenant.”

But her voice was not combative. Weigand said he knew. Also, he said, he could take her downtown for more questions and look at the apartment—or have it looked at—while the questioning went on. On the other hand, more simply, she could go somewhere to dinner or something, and come back later, when perhaps she could have the apartment. Although probably she had better count on living in a hotel for a few days.

“For always,” the girl said, and suddenly she was staring at the floor where the body had been and she began to tremble. For always, so far as this apartment was concerned.

It was coming home to her, now that the words pressing against her had ended; now that Bill Weigand’s mind let hers up again. The others could see that; Weigand had seen it often enough before, and the Norths had seen it a few times. Pam North put a hand on the girl’s arm.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.” She looked at the men, and both had seen her expression before. “It’s going to be all right,” she repeated, in a different tone and for a different purpose.

Jerry North and Bill looked at each other. Pam had, not for the first time, extended asylum to the frightened. Pam had become an advocate.

And now, Jerry thought—and suspected that Bill thought too—there would be that further complication; a psychological complication which would affect him a good deal, and Bill not a little. With a gesture, because a girl was trembling, Pam North had decided that the girl was innocent. And now they would be plagued by an uncertainty whether Pam was working on intuition, and hence could be wrong—as she had been several times in the past—or was working on something which was, in an obscure and glinting fashion, logic. In the latter case she might not be entirely right but she was unlikely to be entirely wrong. And in any case she was to be reckoned with.

“And probably,” Jerry said aloud, “get herself into trouble again.”

“Probably,” Bill agreed, evidently with no difficulty at all in understanding what Jerry was talking about.

“Or,” Pam said, “keep you two out of it. Which also happens.”

Mary Hunter looked from one to another of them and she was puzzled. Pam smiled at her.

“They’re talking about me,” she said. “It’s a way they have. Why don’t we all go to dinner or something?”

“I couldn’t,” Mary said.

“Well,” Pam said, “you’ve got to go somewhere, and it’s time for dinner. Or almost. It’s almost seven. And Jerry and I didn’t find a body and while we’re both very sorry, there it is. Isn’t it, Jerry?”

As far as he was concerned, Jerry admitted, there it was. Although, he added to himself, you couldn’t deny that they might be about to dine with a murderer. Which, also, had happened before.

Mary Hunter looked from one to the other again, and stood up. She stood up to an inch or two over five feet and even Pam was taller.

“All right,” Mary said.

She looked at Weigand, who nodded.

“Right,” he said. His eyes met those of Jerry and he nodded again, almost imperceptibly. “Where?”

“Oh,” Pam said, “I think Charles, don’t you, Jerry. Or somewhere.”

“Make it Charles,” Bill Weigand suggested. It was something more than a suggestion.

“Charles it is,” Jerry agreed.

Charles it was. Gus made martinis from a bottle on a shelf behind him and they tasted like the old martinis of another year. Gus’s dignified cordiality was encouraging, relaxing. Mary Hunter, sitting between the Norths, sipped her drink slowly and was still unfinished and shaking her head when Jerry ordered a second round. But she had quit trembling in the cab which brought them from Madison Avenue to lower Sixth and she was not trembling now.

She was not trembling until a telephone had rung, somewhere, mutedly, and Hugo had gone to answer it, and gone out into the restaurant, and after a minute or two come back with a tall, dark young man who limped slightly.

Mary looked up, turning toward Pam to answer something Pam had said, and she stiffened and her left hand, moving convulsively, brushed her cocktail glass. Jerry, beyond her, caught it as it tottered and his eyes followed hers. The tall young man did not see them, and he was nobody Jerry had ever seen.

Mary turned as the young man limped past, keeping him in view, but not speaking. Her eyes were large and—Jerry thought—frightened. The young man went into a telephone booth and still she looked at him. He had closed the door behind him before she spoke, and then her voice was so soft and tremulous that the Norths could hardly hear her.

“Josh,” she said. “Oh, Josh.”

The young man came out of the booth and his face was changed and his eyes were far away. It had not been good news.

Without a hat, without looking at anybody, the limping young man went out of the restaurant.

Mary then came back and the Norths were waiting. She looked at Pam, and her eyes were very wide and frightened, and she was trembling again.

“Josh,” she said. “His—his son. Joshua Merle.”

The girl was not, Pam knew—the girl’s voice utterly revealed—talking about someone she knew only casually. As, it occurred to Pam, she had seemed to be when, earlier, she had mentioned that George Merle had a son named Joshua, whom a long time ago Mary Hunter—before she was Mary Hunter—had known and who had taught her to call his father “the old boy.”

* The Norths found a body in a bathtub in The Nortlis Meet Murder. It was their introduction to murder, and to Lieut. William Weigand.