5

Monday, 5:20 P.M. to 8:35 P.M.

Gerald North crossed the living room hurriedly when he heard Pam’s key in the lock, and they turned the knob together from opposite sides of the door. Pam came in quickly, pushing the door to behind her, and said, “Jerry! The most awful—” precisely as Jerry said, “Pam! For heaven’s sake—” Then they both stopped.

“Shopping!” Jerry said then, looking at his wife, who was wearing a rust-colored woolen dress and a hat he had never seen before. “While—”

“No,” Pam said. “Oh, Jerry. Not really. It was just that I had to. Jerry, I’ve been being followed! It rubbed off on me!”

“Rubbed?” Jerry said. “Off?”

“The medium man,” Pam said. “From Mr. Sandford. At lunch, apparently. As for shopping, what else could I do? Because he couldn’t get into a trying-on room, naturally.”

Jerry ran his right hand through his hair. He said, “Listen Pam.”

“That way I shook him,” Pam said. “Because, you see, he was expecting a blue dress and no hat, the way I had been, so this was really a disguise.” She looked down at the dress. “Of course,” she said, “it does do something for me, don’t you think?”

“Listen Pam,” Jerry North said. But he looked at her.

“It’s a swell dress,” he said. “Not that you needed anything done. Pam, is there a beginning?”

There was. Pam began at it; she took it step by step.

“Then of course,” Pam said, “when the girl found he was still outside, waiting for me to come out of the trying-on room, I couldn’t leave. So I had to look at more dresses. And then the hat department came around and I realized I didn’t have anything to go with this one”—she indicated the dress—“so I looked at hats. The afternoon dress you’ll love, Jerry. It’s the very newest old-fashioned-looking and—”

“Listen Pam,” Jerry said. “This was all while you were hiding from the man who was following you? I mean, the dresses and hat—” He paused. “Hats?” he asked, doubtfully. Pam shook her head.

“Only a new girdle,” Pam said. “Except for the stockings, which I already had, and your handkerchiefs, of course. Oh yes—a slip. But the stockings and the handkerchiefs haven’t anything to do with the rest of it. The disguise part.”

“You went into the dress salon to get away from this man,” Jerry said, a little as if he were counting. “You went into a dressing room because he couldn’t follow you there. And, because you happened to be there, you bought two new dresses and a new hat and—”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “You want me to have clothes. And for all you know wearing the wool one out saved my life!”

“Listen, dear,” Jerry said. “I think the clothes are fine. I want you to have clothes. It’s just—” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “I guess it’s just so damned impromptu,” he said. “So—” Then he grinned at her. He told her the hat was swell too.

“All right,” Pam said. “If you’d been me, what would you have done? Where would you have gone he couldn’t come?”

Jerry told her.

“You can’t stay in one of those for hours,” Pam objected. “I mean, what would you do?” Jerry continued to grin at her. “And,” Pam said, “what would I have done about a disguise?”

There was, Jerry agreed, always that. He thought, he told her, that she had acted very wisely. It had been, he told her, quick thinking. She looked at him.

“Really,” Jerry told her. “And when you were disguised? So—becomingly?”

She had left the dressing room, gone down a long corridor, come out through another exit into the main salon. It had been empty by then, or empty of what mattered—the medium man. Pam had moved fast to the elevator, on the street floor fast again to the Forty-ninth Street door and a cab. So far as she knew, the medium man had not seen her or, in her new outfit, recognized her. She had come home.

“What we’ve got to do now,” Pam said, “is get hold of Bill and—”

But now Jerry slowly shook his head. They’d get hold of Bill Weigand; in fact, he was then on his way to the apartment. They would tell him. But—

“You see, Pam,” Jerry said. “Something else happened, while you were being followed. The aunts—it looks like the aunts are in trouble, Pam. For all I know, they’re in jail. Aunt Thelma, anyway.”

Pam said, “Jerry!”

“You see, Pam,” Jerry said, “a couple of men from the D.A.’s Bureau dropped around on a hunch. Figuring they might find something. The aunts were out some place.”

“Wanamaker’s,” Pam said. “How perfectly ridiculous. I mean, what did they think they’d find?”

“I don’t know precisely,” Jerry told her. “But, what they did find was cyanide. In capsules, in a bottle, marked poison. And—in Aunt Thelma’s suitcase.”

Pam’s eyes were wide in her awakened face.

“Jerry,” Pam said, “it can’t be.”

Apparently, Jerry told her, it was. The aunts had returned to find the district attorney’s detectives waiting. The aunts had been taken to the district attorney’s office. Possibly they were still there, being questioned. Inspector O’Malley was there. Bill was, or had been. And, it was pretty much out of Bill’s hands. For all Jerry knew, the aunts might by now be in the House of Detention for Women on Sixth Avenue. Unless by some miracle they had been able to explain—

The doorbell rang then in a characteristic rhythm. They let Bill Weigand in. He looked tired; he also looked worried. He admitted he needed a drink, and Jerry mixed martinis.

“He just told me,” Pam said. “I just got home. The poor old things. But they’ve explained, haven’t they?”

“How?” Bill asked her. “They’ve said they never saw the stuff before; that somebody must have put it there. In other words, it’s a frame-up. Miss Thelma Whitsett appears to suspect the police; Miss Lucinda Whitsett is certain it was the murderer himself. Miss Pennina has no suggestions. Thompkins won’t have any part of that argument, naturally. Neither will the inspector.” He paused. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s not so damn good, is it?”

“But of course that’s what happened,” Pam said.

She was told she was loyal.

“Why wouldn’t it be possible?” she asked

Bill Weigand shrugged to that. Of course it was possible. Almost anything was almost always possible. Perhaps a jury would—

“No!” Pam said. “You can’t let it go that far, Bill.”

Bill Weigand accepted a glass; he drank.

“My dear,” he said, “I’m a lieutenant, acting as captain. The inspector will settle for Thelma Whitsett; I imagine Thompkins will. For practical purposes, I’m out of it. Even if I believed your aunts, Pam—well, if the inspector and the D.A. decide they’ve got a case, what can I do?”

“You do believe them,” Pam told him.

But then he shook his head. He said that, probably, the inspector and Thompkins were right. To this, Pam shook her head firmly.

“Right,” Bill said, and his voice was tired. “So—I’m not satisfied. Too pat in places, too obscure in others. The motive doesn’t convince me. But the situation is the same. It’s pretty much out of my hands.” He finished his drink. “You see,” he said, “O’Malley can call me off. And will.”

“Listen,” Pam said, “let them fit this in, Bill. I was followed all afternoon, starting with having lunch with Mr. Sandford.”

She told her story. As she told about her lovely new disguise, Bill looked quickly at Jerry and they smiled companionably.

“Although,” Jerry said, in reply to nothing spoken, “I don’t know why I’m amused.”

“You two!” Pam North said, and continued. “And,” she concluded, “I didn’t make it up. You know that, Bill. I don’t do things like that.”

“Right,” Bill said. His tone was puzzled. “I suppose,” he said, “they thought you were the other woman. Wanted to identify you. As a matter of fact, probably they did.”

“How?” Pam said.

Bill told her. She had ordered, and charged, handkerchiefs at a counter. Without her charge-a-plate, she had given her name orally. The medium man was—how far away?

“But after that,” Pam pointed out, “he still followed.”

There was that, Bill admitted; there was that that didn’t fit. He was told that none of it fitted; that, further, Pam did not believe it was merely a divorce investigation.

“All of it,” Pam said, “has got something to do with it. Even the inspector would see that. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll—”

“I wouldn’t, Pam,” Jerry said. “You know the inspector.”

“What needs doing,” Pam said, “is finding Mrs. Sandford. Instead of chivying poor old ladies merely because—” But there she stopped.

“Right,” Bill said. “Because they carry cyanide around. And another poor lady died of it.”

“All right,” Pam said. “Why carry it around? Say Aunt Thelma used it and killed Mrs. Logan. So she keeps a whole bottle of it handy—for anybody who wants to look—in her suitcase. Labeled.”

“I know,” Bill said. “I said I wasn’t satisfied. I’ll admit I haven’t been called off—yet. Also, I’d like to talk to Mrs. Sandford. She’s in Kansas City, now. Or she was Friday.”

Both the Norths waited.

“A letter came this morning,” Bill told them. “Addressed to Mrs. Logan; signed merely with an ‘S.’ It said, ‘Dear Aunt Grace: I’m driving on West. Don’t worry about me. Tell Bart I’m all right and still thinking.’ The envelope was postmarked in Kansas City, twelve noon Friday. We’ve asked the K.C. police to see if they can find her. Of course, she may have gone on by now.”

“Actually,” Pam said, “she may be any place by now.” Pam pointed out the existence of airplanes. “Not that I would on a bet,” she added. “They run into things. The ground, mostly.” She paused. “Speaking of airplanes,” she said, “why didn’t the letter get here Saturday?”

That one had an easy answer. The letter had not been sent by air mail.

“Just signed with an ‘S,’” Pam said. “But I suppose you checked the handwriting?”

The letter, Bill told her, had been typed. Only the signing initial was handwritten. But, before Pam got ideas, they had no doubt the letter was from Sally Sandford. Grace Logan had kept her niece’s recent letters and several older ones, written before Mrs. Sandford had left her husband to think about whatever she was thinking about. The letters were all typed, and all, at the most casual glance, on the same typewriter—an old one certainly, a machine with the letter “r” canted to the right and the letter “e” perceptibly below alignment.

“We’ve checked with Sandford this afternoon,” Bill said. “Showed him the letter. This was before we were told about the finding of the cyanide, incidentally. He identified the letter as from his wife; said the signature “S” was characteristic, and that he’d recognize the typescript anywhere. He said she always typed letters, on a portable Underwood she’d had for years.”

“Of course,” Pam said, “anybody who had the typewriter could write the letter. And anybody could forge a single initial, I’d think.”

“Right,” Bill agreed. “So?”

Pam didn’t, she admitted, see where it got them. She merely said it was strange that there was a mystery about Sally Sandford, and at the same time a mystery about her aunt’s poisoning, and Sandford’s being followed.

“And my being,” she said. “Also, about why Mrs. Logan and Mrs. Hickey quarreled. Mr. Sandford thinks he knows that, incidentally.”

She told Bill about that. As she repeated what Barton Sandford had suggested, she suddenly stopped.

“Look,” she said. “Suppose Mrs. Logan was right. Suppose the girl is, as Mrs. Logan thought, ‘hard’—hard enough to—to eliminate obstacles. Particularly since, I suppose, Paul gets his mother’s money?”

“Right,” Bill said. “Sally Sandford gets fifty thousand. He gets the rest. Perhaps another two hundred thousand.”

“Then,” Pam said, “why not? The girl. Or the girl and Paul. Or the girl and her mother. Oh, when you come to that, just her mother?” She began to tick off on her fingers. “Or Sally, for the money or something we don’t know about,” she said. “Or even Sandford, so his wife would get the money? Or—”

“Because,” Bill Weigand said, “your Aunt Thelma had cyanide in her possession, opportunity, a motive of sorts.”

“Planted,” Pam North said. “Anybody could have got into her room. I could have. There’s a little suspicion on her, and the murderer wants there to be more, so he does.”

Jerry pointed out that they were going in circles and went to make more drinks. The cats jumped to the chest to assist. Sherry put a paw on Jerry’s hand, apparently to stop the movement of the mixing spoon; Gin happily smelled lemon peel; Martini made herself into a chunky boat, paws curled under her chest, and watched with enormous, unblinking blue eyes. Jerry spoke to her and she closed the eyes slowly and then reopened them. Gin, after apparently considering it, decided not to join the humans in a drink.

“All the same,” Pam said, when Jerry had passed the drinks, “they are my aunts. If nobody else is going to help them, I am.” She paused. “Oh dear,” she said. “Probably they tried to telephone me when they came back and found the men there and I wasn’t here, but out being followed. I’m sure Aunt Pennina would try to call me. Or Aunt Lucy. If they knew our number.”

They did know that, Bill told her. Aunt Thelma had written it down, identified Pam’s name, in firm, neat figures, on a pad by the telephone in her room. Whether they had, in fact, tried to call Pam, Bill Weigand didn’t know. He doubted whether they would have been given the opportunity.

“Then—” Pam began, and the telephone rang. She answered it, handed it to Bill Weigand, who listened, said, “Right,” said that they might be asked to keep at it for a bit. He put the receiver back.

“The Kansas City police don’t find Mrs. Sandford at any of the likely places,” he said. “They don’t find evidence she’s been at any of them, under her own name, anyway. They’ll keep on checking. She ought to be told about her aunt’s death.”

Pam nodded. She said, “Bill, can I see my aunts?”

Bill was doubtful. He used the telephone again, Gin assisting. He asked, listened and looked a little surprised. “Well, that makes two of us, Tommy,” he said. He listened. “Not the right two, as you say,” he agreed. He replaced the receiver.

“Thompkins isn’t satisfied entirely,” he said. “He can’t quite swallow the motive. The inspector’s satisfied; the D.A. himself is satisfied. However, Thompkins has managed to get this much—the Misses Whitsett have been taken back to the hotel. More or less because they’re too respectable for jail until everybody’s damn sure. They checked Cleveland for the respectability.”

“Of course they are!” Pam North said. “They’re my aunts!”

The aunts would be watched in the hotel; had been advised to stay in it. Meanwhile, two detectives from the D.A.’s Bureau had flown to Cleveland to dig there into the past of Thelma Whitsett and Mrs. Paul Logan. So, Pam North could see her aunts.

“We’ll all go,” Pam said, and started up. Bill Weigand hesitated a moment. But then he said, “Right,” and they finished drinks and went.

The aunts were having dinner in Aunt Thelma’s room. Aunt Thelma offered coffee to Pam and Jerry; after a moment of, evidently, somewhat dour consideration, she included Bill Weigand.

“Although,” she said, “it’s nothing but hotel coffee.” She paused. “New York hotel coffee,” she added.

“Thelma thinks none of this would have happened except in New York,” Aunt Pennina said calmly, buttering a roll. “I keep telling her—”

“Nonsense, Pennina!” Thelma Whitsett said, sharply. “There is no cause to defend New York. What I say is perfectly true. There would have been no such nonsense in Cleveland.”

She looked sharply at Bill Weigand, ready to pounce upon any disclaimer of this obvious fact. Bill merely nodded with interest.

“In Cleveland,” Aunt Thelma said, “the person is considered. That inspector of yours, young man!”

It appeared that, in regard to the inspector, words failed Thelma Whitsett.

“It’s all just like a play,” Aunt Lucy took the opportunity to say. “The trial of somebody or other. There was this young woman who was suspected of murdering somebody and the young district attorney—”

“Lucinda!” Thelma Whitsett said. “That inspector of yours, young man. An entirely preposterous man! Merely because I decided, after consideration, not to marry Paul Logan.”

“Aunt Thelma,” Pam North said. “The cyanide.”

“Someone put it there,” Thelma Whitsett said. “Obviously, the man who killed poor Grace for her money. Anybody could see that.”

“I read the most fascinating book once—” Lucinda Whitsett offered. Thelma rejected her offer sharply.

“Well, young man?” she said to Bill Weigand. “Let him speak for himself, Pamela.” Now her voice, suddenly, seemed strained.

“Inspector O’Malley is an excellent policeman,” Bill Weigand said. “He has every reason for suspecting you, Miss Whitsett. He has, in fact, every reason for charging you with homicide.” His voice was mild. “I have no idea what would be done about it in Cleveland,” he said.

“If this were not so inconvenient,” Thelma Whitsett said, “it would be laughable. Has this inspector of yours any idea of the difficulty in obtaining suitable reservations in Palm Beach?”

“Listen, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. “Listen all three of you. You mustn’t pretend this way. Don’t you see?”

And then Jerry North saw what Pam had no doubt already seen; what probably Bill Weigand had seen. Miss Thelma Whitsett was frightened. She was very frightened.

“Don’t you see,” Pam North said, “it won’t just go away, my dears. It—” She looked at Bill. “Tell them,” she said.

“Mrs. North is quite right, Miss Whitsett,” Bill Weigand told Aunt Thelma. “It won’t just go away. You can’t push it away. It isn’t laughable at all.” He stood up and looked down at Thelma Whitsett. “Grace Logan is dead,” he told her. “You were there. You saw her die. You could have killed her.”

“No!” Thelma Whitsett said, and for a moment her resolute face seemed about to crumble. “Grace was—young man—Grace was—”

“Grace was a friend of ours,” Pennina Whitsett said, when her sister’s voice broke. “We wished only good things for Grace, Lieutenant Weigand. We were all girls together. We—we are old women now.”

Her voice was very quiet. She looked at Weigand gently, very steadily.

“I’m sure you will understand,” she said.

“—someone else,” Lucinda Whitsett was saying then, and nobody had heard the start of her sentence. “It is like something I read once. There was this Mr. Gribland or some such name—”

Thelma Whitsett had recovered her composure. She said, “Lucinda!” in a sharp tone. Lucinda Whitsett said, “Yes, Thelma,” and stopped.

“Miss Whitsett,” Bill said. “A minute ago you said that it was you who decided not to marry Paul Logan. ‘After due thought,’ you said, or something like that. Wasn’t it really that he—well, wasn’t it he who changed his mind, after he met your friend Grace Rolfe? Whom he then married?”

“I—” Thelma began, but stopped when Pennina Whitsett spoke.

“Don’t dear,” she said. “Poor dear Paul—he wasn’t what you thought, you know. It’s been better as it was. But—but everybody in Cleveland knows, dear. There’s no use going on with it. Not with Pamela and Gerald and—and their friend.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Not with anybody, if it isn’t true. Logan left you for Grace Rolfe, you hated her then and for years and—”

“And,” Thelma Whitsett said, “went insane because I was jilted a quarter of a century ago? Bought cyanide somewhere? Killed one of my best friends?” Her voice was firm again, almost derisive. She turned to Pam.

“I’m sorry, Pamela,” she said. “I’m afraid your friend’s a fool.”

“It’s because,” Lucinda Whitsett said, “all men think men are so important. It’s in all the books you read. So if a woman doesn’t—”

Aunt Thelma’s “Lucinda!” must have come then by force of habit, Pam North thought. Because in a way Lucinda Whitsett was making perfectly good sense. She was even making very useful sense.

It was Bill Weigand, however, who answered. He smiled slightly at Lucinda Whitsett.

“You may have something there, Miss Lucinda,” he said.

“Of course she has,” Pennina Whitsett said, and found another roll and began to butter it.

But none of them was able to explain the cyanide. Miss Thelma Whitsett no longer, to be sure, insisted that the police had themselves planted the poison, being now inclined to join Lucinda in suspecting the real murderer. It was clear, however, that police chicanery remained, in Thelma Whitsett’s mind, a distinct possibility. “Things happen in this town,” she pointed out, adding that it wasn’t like Cleveland. Pennina Whitsett said, reasonably, that she supposed it was the murderer, since who else would gain, and that it was too bad they had stayed so long at Wanamaker’s, since otherwise they might have caught the man in the act. (All three of the Misses Whitsett seemed firmly to assume that a man had poisoned their friend.)

“If you hadn’t insisted on stopping in the middle to have lunch,” Thelma told her sister, “we might have.”

“I got hungry,” Pennina Whitsett said, equably.

But the three admitted that nothing was disturbed in any of their rooms; that, except for the poison tucked under clothing in Thelma Whitsett’s suitcase, there was nothing to indicate an intruder. It did develop, however, that none of the Misses Whitsett had locked her door when she left the hotel, all of them assuming that the doors locked automatically behind them. “They do in Cleveland,” Miss Thelma said. “It’s the proper way.” It was not, however, the way of the Hotel Welby.

“As a matter of fact,” Bill Weigand said, “none of the doors was locked when the boys got here. There’s that. It’s a point for the—” He stopped abruptly, having too obviously been on the verge of continuing, “for the defense.”

“It won’t come to that,” Pam North told her aunts. “I won’t let it.”

But when, having thus reassured the aunts, Mr. and Mrs. North and Weigand went down in the elevator, Pam found herself wondering just how she was going to avoid letting it come to precisely that. She was not encouraged when Bill, after checking in by telephone, reported that he had been told to take off the two days he had coming. If not official notice that the Logan case was considered closed with what they had, this was the next thing to it. “Ouch!” Jerry North said, and Bill said, “Right.”

“I,” Pam North said, with sudden decision, “am going to the Logan house. I want to talk to young Mr. Logan.”

That was, Bill told her, between her and young Mr. Logan, who had, however, already been talked to. Pam said she had to start somewhere.

“And he’s closest home,” she said. “He’s at home.”

She was told by Bill Weigand, in a worried tone, to watch herself. Bill was told that that meant he didn’t think it was finished.

“Since,” Pam told him, “I don’t have to watch myself from the aunts. Obviously.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, and then that he would, thus unexpectedly relieved, try to make a date with his wife for dinner. He started again toward the telephone booths, and Pam called after him. He returned.

“Why,” Pam said, “don’t you take Dorian to Gimo’s? Then, if we can, Jerry and I’ll join you.”

Bill had never heard of Gimo’s.

“A little place in the East Fifties,” Pam said, and gave him the address. “Very nice.”

Bill looked doubtful, feeling apparently that Pam North was up to something. He was told he would love it; he regarded her for several seconds and then said, “Right.”

“The place I went with Mr. Sandford,” Pam North told her husband in the taxicab. “The place I was followed from. I thought Bill might just as well case the joint.”

She was told her idiom was showing lamentable indications of collapse, and that it came from associating with policemen. This Pam denied. She said it came from things she read.

“Like Aunt Lucy,” she said. “Her mind must be full of jacks.”

“Jacks?” Jerry said. “Oh, jack straws.”

It was, Pam told him, no time to quibble. They came to the Logan house. There was no longer a policeman there; there was no crowd there; it was again merely a house standing with its elbows cramped tight against its sides.

And Paul Logan was not, at that moment, in it. For a time there appeared, as Jerry pressed the doorbell, to be nobody in it. Then, as if from a distance, a square woman in her middle fifties, with blond hair pulled tight, with red cheeks packed tight and bright blue eyes, came to the door and opened it partially. Pam asked for Mr. Logan.

“He’s not at home,” the square woman said. “He went out to dinner.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

The square woman began the closing of the door.

“Wait a minute,” Pam said. “I remember. One of my aunts said something about you once. About hot rolls spread with something. Lobster newburg. You’re—” Pam paused, having run out of a dim memory.

“Hilda,” the square woman said. “Hilda Svenson.”

“The Misses Whitsett,” Pam said. “They’re my aunts. They used to come here and have teas—wonderful teas. The most wonderful they ever had.”

“That’s nice,” Hilda said. Then her round eyes grew rounder. “The Misses Whitsett,” she repeated, the name sounding a little different on her tongue. “They were here—here—” Then the blue eyes filled with tears.

“It’s so dreadful,” Pam North said. “You were with her such a long time.”

“Fifteen years,” Hilda said. “Fifteen years last March. The Misses Whitsett are your aunts?”

“Yes,” Pam said.

“Such nice ladies,” Hilda said, blinking at the tears.

“The poor things,” Pam said. “Now the police think they were the ones.”

“Please?” Hilda said.

“That they gave the—the awful poison to Mrs. Logan,” Pam North said. “At least, that one of them did.”

“That iss not possible,” Hilda said. She paused momentarily. “Nonsense, that iss,” she added.

“And I thought perhaps Mr. Logan would remember something that would help them,” Pam said. “I’m so sorry he isn’t—”

“You come in,” Hilda said, and opened the door wide. “This man. He is?”

“My husband,” Pam said.

“A quiet one,” Hilda said. “You both come in.”

They both went in. They went to the upstairs living room and were asked to sit down, but Hilda stood. After persuasion, she sat too, to the relief of Mr. North. Pam North and Hilda agreed that the death of Mrs. Logan was a dreadful thing; Hilda’s round blue eyes filled again with tears.

“They should be punished,” Hilda said. “Whoever.”

Mr. and Mrs. North agreed to this.

“We keep feeling,” Pam said, “that there must have been something nobody knows about, or recognizes. Something before, you know, Hilda. Living here in the house, being so close to her, perhaps you can remember something?”

“What something?” Hilda asked, and Pam said that that was it, one couldn’t tell. Perhaps Mrs. Logan had said something that now, remembered, would be important; perhaps she had seemed not herself.

“Worried,” Hilda said. “She was worried. About that Sally. You know about that Sally?”

Pam did; Jerry did.

“She left that nice Mr. Sandford,” Hilda said. “Some foolishness. When my husband was alive, there was no such foolishness. In the old country.”

“Of course it is,” Pam said.

“You young ones,” Hilda said, and looked at Pam North with skepticism. She looked at Jerry North. “Don’t let her,” she told him. “Foolishness.”

“I won’t,” Jerry promised.

“Listen, Mrs. Svenson,” Pam said. “Was Mrs. Logan just worried about the whole thing? About Mrs. Sandford’s foolishness? Or about something she was afraid had happened?”

“Please?” Hilda Svenson said.

“That something had happened to Mrs. Sandford,” Jerry said. “Like being hurt, or ill?”

It was something about the typewriter,” Hilda said. “There was something not right about the typewriter.”

It took time to get more, and then it was not clear. At first, Grace Logan, Hilda thought, had merely been worried because of the foolishness of Sally’s prolonged escapade. Later, the worry had apparently taken a different form. Hilda sometimes had to be guessed at; the Norths could guess that something had happened, three or four weeks earlier which, to Mrs. Logan, had given new, and more significant, meaning to her niece’s continued absence. It was something about a typewriter.

“A machine one writes on,” Hilda explained.

“Mrs. Sandford wrote her aunt on a typewriter,” Pam said. “Was that the one she meant?”

Hilda did not know. Mrs. Logan had been elliptic; had said, as Hilda remembered it, that there was something wrong about the whole business. “The typewriter most of all.” She had not amplified and Hilda had not asked more.

“I was cooking,” she said. “She came to my kitchen and talked and sometimes I had to go on cooking. Things will not wait while people talk.”

But, since Mrs. Logan’s death, Hilda had been thinking and remembering, and that incident she remembered. After it, although letters continued to come from Sally Sandford, Mrs. Logan mentioned her more frequently, and seemed more worried about her. She had not, however, again mentioned the typewriter.

Hilda had not spoken of this memory of hers to anyone else, even to Paul Logan. For the rest she could add nothing to what she had already told the police, which told them little, except that Mrs. Logan’s bathroom was much used by guests, was available to anyone in the house, so that almost anyone who got into the house could have substituted the concentrate of death for what Mrs. Logan had called “concentrated health.”

It was almost eight o’clock when the Norths left the Logan house. Jerry, pointing out that they were drinks behind, suggested the Plaza, as no more than around the corner.

“Gimo’s,” Pam said. “We’ve got to tell Bill.”

Jerry was doubtful.

“Don’t you see?” Pam said. “It was the wrong typewriter. Whatever the police thought.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said.

“Whatever they thought,” Pam assured him, and told Jerry the address of Gimo’s, to relay to the taxi driver when they found him. They found him then. “The one Mrs. Sandford is writing on,” Pam explained, when they had started. “Mrs. Logan noticed it.”

It was a very short distance to Gimo’s and when the cab stopped Jerry was still explaining that the police did not make mistakes about things like that, and Pam was unpersuaded, pointing out that anyone could make mistakes or take too much for granted.

The maître d’ appeared to remember Pamela North, which was flattering. He offered an immediate table, but, told they wanted to look for somebody—“a Mr. Weigand,” Pam told him—helped them look. They found Bill and Dorian Weigand, sitting opposite one another in a booth upstairs, eating veal scaloppine, and joined them.

“Bill,” Pam said, “it’s the wrong typewriter! Mrs. Logan found out and—and—” But there Pamela North stopped, and was puzzled. “Only,” she said, “what does it mean? What difference would it make?”

When the Norths had been served drinks and had ordered dinner, when Pam North’s suspicions had been explained, that question still remained. What difference did it make? There remained also Bill’s complete assurance that the police had not been wrong. There was only one typewriter involved. All of the letters initialed by Sally Sandford and found in the Logan house had been written on that one typewriter. The defects were unmistakable, not to be overlooked.

“They stick out a mile,” Bill told her. “The letter ‘r’ alone would be enough. Look, Pam, you could pretty near see it across the room.”

“Tweezers!” Pam said. “That’s what it is!”

The three of them looked at her. They looked at one another. They looked again at Pam North.

“All right,” Jerry said, “I give up.”

“It’s obvious,” Pam said. “It’s the woods and the trees again. Not seeing whichever it is for the other. The one that’s too obvious, of course.”

They all waited.

“Bill,” Pam said, “did real experts make the comparison? Of one of the typed letters with another? Or did somebody just notice the letter ‘r’ and the other thing—what was it? Oh, the letter ‘e’ out of alignment—and jump? Because either of those could have been done with tweezers and people see what they expect to. Or are expected to.”

“Pam means—” Jerry began, but by then Bill and Dorian saw what she meant, and Bill nodded slowly. The imperfections which could be seen across the room, which were the obvious ones, could perhaps, be faked. If not with tweezers which, Bill had years before discovered, Pam considered the universal tool, the inventive apex of the machine age, then with almost anything else. Possibly, in point of fact, with the fingers only. Identity in typescript would so be achieved, to the casual glance. With no reason for suspicion, none might enter the mind. If, nevertheless, suspicion had entered Mrs. Logan’s mind—

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I see what she means. As a matter of fact, I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

He elected to find out then, although Dorian urged that he finish dinner. “He never finishes dinner,” Dorian told the Norths, after Bill had gone to find a telephone. “He’s supposed to be on his forty-eight. He—”

He had, Dorian told them, been telling her all about it. It had not been a restful dinner. Dorian wished Pam’s aunts had stayed in Cleveland.

“Or,” she said, “that Inspector O’Malley would go there and take the district attorney with him, and leave Bill alone to do his job. Or that he had a different kind of job.”

“You’ve always wished that,” Pam told her. “Only, not really.”

“I—” Dorian began, and then stopped, her almost green eyes shadowed for a moment. Then she smiled and nodded and said Pam was right.

“You have to take them as they come,” she told Pam, and the two women smiled together about the way they came.

“If you two would be happier alone,” Gerald North said, formally.

“The way they come,” Pam repeated, and both she and Dorian seemed momentarily amused. But then Bill Weigand came back from the telephone. There was an odd expression on his face and for a moment he said nothing. They waited. Bill did not at first seem to notice this; he seemed to have forgotten the errand on which he had gone.

“The typewriter?” Dorian Weigand said and seemed to be examining her husband’s face.

“Oh,” Bill said. “That.” He seemed to shake himself out of abstraction. “I’m sorry, Pam. The idea’s no good. They didn’t stop with the obvious similarities. As a matter of routine, they made a thorough comparison. Everything they found at the Logan house from Mrs. Sandford was written on the same typewriter.” He smiled faintly. “Nobody used tweezers,” he said. “I don’t know what bothered Mrs. Logan, but there was only one typewriter.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

“What else, Bill?” Dorian said, still with her eyes on her husband’s face.

“Else?” Bill repeated. “There isn’t anything—” He looked at Dorian.

“Oh,” he said. “I saw a man I know slightly. Didn’t expect to see him here, is all.”

But his tone was not convincing, and now all of them looked at him and waited.

“There’s more—” Pam began, and Bill shook his head. Nevertheless, they continued to wait.

“All right,” Bill said. “This much—and I don’t know any more myself, and won’t unless I’m told, and won’t be told. The man I saw works for the government. He made a point of not seeing me, so he’s probably working now. There’s no reason to think it has anything to do with—with anything we’re interested in. And—we make a point of keeping hands off, unless we’re asked. They want it that way.”

There was another pause.

“This is where Sandford brought Pam for lunch,” Jerry said, his voice casual.

“Right,” Bill said. “I gathered that. The martinis are only fair, so I imagined—” He broke off. He started again. “By the way,” he said, “did you gather that Sandford came here often, Pam?”

Pamela North nodded, her face thoughtful. Then an idea crossed her mind and crossed, at the same instant, her expressive face.

“No,” Bill Weigand said, “he’s not here now.” Pam’s expression faded. “You can’t have everything,” Bill told her.

It looked, Pam North said, as if this evening she couldn’t have anything. But then the waiter served her scaloppine.