3

Thursday, 9:10 P.M. to 10 P.M.

Detective Sergeant Mullins nudged the group on the platform away from the big chair behind the lectern and the sprawled body in it, and the police photographers moved in. There were two of them and they ignored the audience, talking jargon between themselves, but talking it a little more audibly than was their custom. Even police photographers, Pam thought, watching them, played up before an audience. They shot the body from the sides and from above, they pictured it in relation to the lectern; one of them backed out and took a wide-lensed view of as much of the stage as could be got in, with the body at its center.

Lieutenant William Weigand, watching with a kind of attentive abstraction, also listened to Mr. North. Mr. North told him about the little dark man who had run so fast and Bill Weigand agreed that it was odd and cried out to be looked into. However—

“You’ll admit, Jerry,” he said, “that you can’t give us much to go on. By way of description—little and dark. Little I’ll give you; dark perhaps only because you saw him in the dark. It would take in thousands.”

“Obviously,” Jerry agreed. “Millions. But if you saw a little dark man running out of the building you could stop him.”

Bill Weigand agreed with that, and that they would. For the moment, at any rate, they were stopping anybody who tried to leave the building—running or walking, tall or short, without regard to color. But that, obviously, had a time limit.

“There’re five or six hundred out there,” Weigand pointed out, waving toward the audience. “Some of them left before we came. We can’t hold the rest.” He looked at the audience. “Or want to hold the rest,” he said. “Our man wasn’t killed from the audience.”

He looked at Jerry, consideringly.

“As a matter of fact,” he added, “we don’t know he was killed at all. It’s even money, or thereabouts, that he merely up and died. Thrombosis. Apoplexy. Cerebral hemorrhage. Klingman says he can’t tell.”

“He also,” Jerry North pointed out, “says it could have been a drug. A narcotic—opium or something.”

That, Weigand agreed, was what kept them there. That was why they took pictures; why—now Weigand nodded—they took fingerprints of the body. Two men were rolling the dead fingers on pads; rolling the inked fingers on slips of paper, clipped in order. The men finished as Jerry and the lieutenant watched.

“O.K.,” one of the men said. “What else, Loot?”

Weigand hesitated. What else indeed? There was no weapon to be powdered and examined, no heavy object or light object which might have played a part. Jerry, considering too, jerked his head toward the door which led to the speakers’ room. Weigand nodded and gave directions. Everything, he told them.

“Perhaps your little dark man will show up,” he said to Jerry. “Perhaps—”

“There ought to be a glass in there,” Jerry North told him. “He was drinking out of one. Before we came out here.”

Weigand was interested. Jerry told him what he remembered, or thought he remembered. It was, he agreed, only an impression. He told of looking for the glass after Sproul died and failing to find it. He thought of something.

“Maybe the little dark man was looking for it, too,” he suggested. Bill Weigand nodded. Again, he agreed, it was interesting. It might be more than interesting when they knew where they were. The detective’s eyes roved over the scene as he talked to Jerry, noting, sorting, rejecting. Dr. Dupont was sitting in a chair, now, with Dr. Klingman beside him. Dr. Dupont was staring at the floor. Mrs. Williams was standing off to the side and Dorian Weigand was near her, but they did not seem to be talking. The photographers were packing equipment; the fingerprint men were crossing toward the speakers’ room door. Sergeant Mullins exercised general supervision, waiting.

It was the lull, Weigand thought. It might be the lull before the storm; it might be a lull which would merge into a larger lull. The machine was set up, the materials which would be fed into it stacked in readiness. Only the switch needed to be thrown. Had Sproul been killed? Or had he merely, if publicly, died? It was an appropriate time for the entrance of science.

Science, taking her cue, entered in the shape of Dr. Jerome Francis, assistant medical examiner. He came through the door from the speakers’ room and sneezed.

“Damn that powder,” he said. He looked at Weigand, and then at Sproul.

“What,” he said, “have we here?”

Weigand asked him what he thought.

“Corpse,” Dr. Francis told him, succinctly. “And you want to know when he died. Down to the half minute.”

“We know when he died,” Weigand said. “He died when North here finished introducing him.” Bill Weigand looked at Jerry North. “No necessary connection,” Weigand added, reassuringly. He turned back to Dr. Francis. “He died just as he was about to make a speech,” he told the assistant medical examiner. “But we don’t know of what.”

“Probably,” Dr. Francis told him, crossing to the body, “probably the intervention of Providence. It could happen oftener.”

Dr. Francis looked down at the body. He looked at Klingman, still beside Dr. Dupont; to the eyes of another professional, in professional attendance.

“You examined him, Doctor?” the assistant medical examiner asked. Klingman nodded, and moved a step nearer. The two physicians withdrew into the medical world, symbolically taking the body with them. They nodded over it. Klingman pointed at the eyes and Francis nodded. Francis flexed the dead fingers, and Klingman nodded. The lay world waited. The physicians nodded again, now evidently in agreement, and unexpectedly shook hands. Dr. Francis came over to Weigand and Mr. North, who waited anxiously.

“Well,” Dr. Francis said, “he’s dead, all right.”

“Good God!” Bill Weigand said. He looked at Dr. Francis without approval. “Do tell,” he said. “Dr. Klingman and I find ourselves in agreement,”

Dr. Francis went on. He was very grave—it seemed to Jerry North that there was a faint touch of amused malice in his gravity. “We agree he might have died of a lot of things.”

“You’re a big help,” Bill Weigand assured him. “Both of you.”

“Mark it ‘suspicious death,’” Francis directed. “That’s my report.” Bill Weigand looked at the doctor carefully.

“And—?” he prompted.

“Look for somebody who gave him an overdose of morphine,” Dr. Francis said. “Without quoting me. Or find out that he took an overdose himself.”

“Addict?” Weigand wanted to know.

“No,” Dr. Francis told him. “I shouldn’t think so. On the contrary.” He looked at Weigand, seriously grave now. “You want me to guess, Bill?” he inquired.

“Right,” Bill Weigand told him. The physician nodded.

“For a guess, then,” he said. “He was one of those people who are abnormally susceptible to morphine. Maybe there was something wrong with his arteries. Maybe he was just naturally sensitive. Susceptibility varies a lot. Maybe somebody knew that and gave him a dose of morphine, figuring it to kill him. Maybe somebody didn’t know it, and gave him a dose of morphine figuring to put him to sleep. Maybe somebody didn’t want to hear him make a speech.” He looked thoughtfully at the detective. “I’ve heard guys—,” he offered.

Bill Weigand and Jerry North smiled in appreciation of the hinted jest. When the smiles ran their brief course, Bill Weigand took it up again.

“Probably morphine,” he said. “Right? Probably—how long ago? How long ago was it given?”

Dr. Francis shrugged. That was where susceptibility set in. Suppose the normal person took morphine by mouth. In half an hour, more or less, he might feel mental exhilaration and physical ease; objectively, his pulse would quicken. He might appear elated; might grow talkative. This condition would pass, but how soon it would be hard to guess. Susceptibility again. Then he would go to sleep, and sleep would become a coma, and, if nobody did anything, he might die. If he had taken enough morphine. He might die in a couple of hours, he might live ten hours.

“But—,” Jerry said.

“Right,” Weigand said. “He walked out here less than an hour ago. He died within a quarter of an hour.” He looked at Dr. Francis.

“It could be,” the doctor said. “We’re granting remarkable susceptibility. Like that of a child. Or of a person with arteriosclerosis. Or some other circulatory trouble. Or both together—a naturally highly susceptible person with circulatory trouble. In other words, a special case.”

“But a possible case?” Weigand said. “Right?”

“We think so,” Dr. Francis said. “I told you it was a guess. Maybe he died of a blood clot on the brain. Maybe somebody held a pillow over his head and suffocated him. Medically. But somebody would have noticed if Mr. North, here, held a pillow over your corpse’s head. Not very private up here, was it?”

“Somebody would have noticed,” Bill Weigand agreed, gravely. “We can count out the pillow, or poison gas.” He stared over at the body of Victor Leeds Sproul. “Natural causes,” he said, thoughtfully. “Or morphine? Anything else?”

Conceivably, Dr. Francis told him. Opium, of course. But that was morphine all over again. Possibly cocaine, although that, in view of Sproul’s behavior before he died, was not indicated. Call it suspicious, he repeated. Work tentatively on the assumption of an overdose of morphine, not self-administered—unless they had a suicide on their hands. Assume peculiar sensitivity on the part of Sproul, wonder whether he had displayed it in the past and recovered and left a confession of weakness as a small, curious fact in the mind of someone unidentified.

“How much morphine?” Weigand asked. Francis shrugged. Susceptibility again. Addicts could stand a lot; people had died from less than a grain. Grown people; children from less still. If injected hypodermically, the drug might give three times the effect, in a third the time of the same quantity taken by mouth. Also it might not.

He was helpful, Lieutenant Weigand told him bitterly. It would be impossible to get on without him. Francis ostentatiously snubbed the sarcasm, and said he was very glad. He said he would now help further by having the body taken away and opened up. Then he might know something. He’d run LeFort’s test and if it was morphine they’d know. Meanwhile—

Far be it from Dr. Francis to tell the Lieutenant his business. But if he were detecting, he would be interested in anything Sproul had had to eat or drink within a couple of hours of his death, and in the persons who gave it to him. He would report “suspicious death” and go on the assumption of “homicide.”

Bill Weigand nodded and stood for a further moment in thought. Then he said, “Right” and “Thanks.” He crossed to the lectern and rapped on it with the gavel. Everybody looked at him.

“As you’ve gathered,” Lieutenant Weigand told the audience, “Mr. Sproul has died very suddenly. The police are in charge and I see nothing to be gained by keeping you here. So most of you may go. But I want to talk to any of you who knew Mr. Sproul personally—knew him here or in Paris, recently or even a number of years ago. I’ll ask any of you who did know him, even slightly, to remain. Is that clear?”

The members of the audience looked as if it was clear enough.

“Right,” Weigand said. “I might add that we have the means of making a fairly complete check on those who did know Mr. Sproul, so I’d advise anybody who might think he was saving himself trouble by not admitting acquaintanceship to abandon the idea. Is that understood?”

It seemed to be. Weigand looked at the audience with grave severity, hoping that nobody would suspect how hard it would really be to sift out such of Sproul’s acquaintances as did not elect to be sifted. He held them a moment and turned away. The audience began to eddy out. Weigand wondered if Sproul’s murderer—always assuming a murderer—was in one of the eddies. He wondered—yes, already there were counter eddies pressing against the departing. The press was coming in, with cards in its hat-bands and folds of copy paper in its hands for notes and—It made Weigand think of something. Sproul probably had notes.

He crossed to the body and ran long, nervous fingers into the inside coat pocket. Nothing. He felt a side pocket. Something. A sheaf of folded papers. Weigand flipped the fold open. He had Sproul’s notes for the first lecture of his de luxe tour. They began without preamble:

“Tell you Paris meant to me. One American. That way what meant ENTIRE WORLD. Paris symbol of civilization in peril—little ways men lived there—big things happened there—things tourists saw—residents saw—right bank, left bank … try picture what world has lost—”

The notes went on, but Bill Weigand broke off. They would come later, for what help they might be. But before words written down, dead now as the man who was to have spoken them, came people. Bill Weigand turned to the people.

And Pamela North looked at the watch which dangled around her neck and said, unexpectedly and quite clearly, “Oh!” She crossed to Jerry, still looking. “Oh!”

“Jerry,” she said. “The girls!”

“What?” Jerry said. “What girls?”

“The nieces,” Pam said. “What girls did you think?”

“I didn’t think any girls,” he said. “I forgot all about them.”

“One of us,” Pam said. “The Penn Station in—in five minutes, really. But they’ll be late, of course. They’re all late, nowadays.”

It puzzled Bill Weigand, through his major puzzlement.

“Nieces?” he said.

“Trains,” Pam told him. “The war, somehow. They’re coming to visit us, because their mother is going to the hospital and their father can’t get away. The war, you know.”

Bill Weigand sorted it out. Trains—no, nieces—were coming to see Pam North because, obscurely, of the war. They were going to be late in arriving, also because of the war. But Pam went on. She was addressing both men now—Jerry and Bill Weigand.

“I hate to,” she said. “Leaving you with it. But I’ll come back and help as soon as I put them to bed. Martha is going to stay and look after them anyway.”

“Listen,” Jerry said, “I thought—are you sure about their ages?”

“Of course,” Pam North said. “Little girls. I’m sorry about the murder, but I’ll hurry.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “I wish you could wait for me,” she said. “But I suppose you can’t?” Bill smiled at her and shook his head.

“Do you think—?” Pam began again, and stopped because both men were grinning at her, and because Dorian had come up and was smiling at all of them in an amused way.

“We’ll do our best,” Bill Weigand told her gravely. “Naturally, it will be—”

“You?” Pam said. “All of you.” She looked around the stage, and seemed a little wistful. “What a time for nieces!” she said. “I wish—”

She did not say what she wished. She looked around again and accepted the situation with evident decision and went to the edge of the platform. She put a hand on the edge and dropped down without waiting for help and hit solidly and said “Ugh!” She did not pause, however, and went up an aisle, rubbing the dirt from her left hand with a handkerchief.

Mrs. North’s steps were brisk but her spirit was reluctant. Here, she thought, is what looks like being one of the best murders we’ve ever had and I’ve got nieces. Little nieces. The thought filled her with rebellion.

“It’s always women,” she thought and the taxicab driver, pushing the door open from inside, looked at her.

“Huh?” he said. “Where’d you say, lady?”

Pam realized that she had thought out loud again and sighed. Apparently there was, after all, nothing to be done about it. She couldn’t even be scared out of it, she decided. “Like hiccoughs,” she thought and, hearing the words, realized that she had done it again. She looked at the taxi driver a little anxiously and discovered that he was looking at her wildly.

“Listen, lady,” he said. “I heard you. Do you want to go some place, that’s all I wanta know? Or do you just want to talk about hiccoughs?”

“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “It comes over me sometimes. I plan not to but I do in spite of it. Penn Station.”

“Do what?” the taxi driver asked.

“Penn Station,” Pam said. “Talk to myself.”

“I don’t get that about hiccoughs,” the driver said, in a rather gloomy voice. “Which side?”

“Hiccoughs?” Pam North repeated, in apparently honest puzzlement. “Both sides, usually. Right in the middle, really. What about hiccoughs?”

“What about—” the driver began, reaching back to push down his flag and stopping, bemused. “How should I know what about hiccoughs, lady? They’re your hiccoughs.”

“I haven’t got the hiccoughs,” Pam said. “I want to go to the Pennsylvania Station.”

The driver turned around and stared at her.

“Listen, lady,” he said. “Can we just start over? You get into the hack and you say—what do you say, lady?” His voice was beseeching.

“Oh,” Mrs. North said. “I was thinking about the murder. Pennsylvania Station.”

“O.K.,” the driver said. “Pennsylvania Station. What murder? Murder!”

It seemed to reach him slowly.

“Back there,” Pam told him. “That’s why all the police cars. And if you’ve got to talk, can’t you do it while we go? Because they’re little girls and I’ve got to meet them. It’s always the woman who has to; while men do interesting things.”

“Your—,” the taxi driver began. He lapsed, staring straight ahead for a moment. Then he shrugged, lifting both hands from the steering wheel. He lowered his right hand to the gear shift level, still staring ahead, and pulled. There was a grinding clash which seemed to please him, and the cab started. The driver stared straight ahead, a little wildly. Mrs. North dismissed him from her mind.

It was true, she thought (and this time she thought silently) that when there were dull things to do, women were ordinarily chosen. If it came to a choice between murder and nieces, men got the murder and women got the nieces. And you couldn’t deny that murder was more interesting than nieces. Murder was tremendously, engrossingly interesting.

Realizing how interesting it was, Pam North felt a little worried about herself. Probably, when you came down to it, it wasn’t good for you to be so interested in murders. “Habit-forming,” Pam thought. You started out able to take murder or leave it alone—never dreaming of taking it, really. And one murder led to another, and it became—well, a sort of game. And it should never be a game; not really a game. Or, she corrected, not essentially a game, because it would always be in the nature of things a kind of game. A dreadful kind of game, at bottom, but still a game. It would be—Pam tried to think of a simile—it would be like tennis, if, after the set was over, the loser was shot. That would make tennis a rather horrible game, but it would not keep it from being a game. The strokes would be the same, the maneuvering for position, the sparring for openings. Watching it, you would still be watching a game. Only you would care more.

And would it, Pam wondered, be morbid to watch tennis of that sort? She grabbed the handstrap at the side of the cab, which seemed to be going very rapidly, even for a cab—which seemed to be progressing toward the Pennsylvania Station with a kind of desperation. The driver was certainly in a hurry to get there, Pam thought, in parenthesis. But would it be morbid?

I don’t really know what being morbid is, Pam thought. Of course you’re more interested in things which are important, like life, than in things which are not really important, like tennis cups. Is that morbid? And you are more interested in murder than in nieces, and there is no use pretending that you are not. Because, Pam told herself, murder is always important. Maybe it is the most important thing in the world, because it is the most final thing in the world.

“You can’t be interested in life without being interested in death,” Pam told herself and realized that, this time, she had again thought out loud. She realized it because the driver bent a little lower over his wheel, as if he were shrinking from something. She was sorry she had spoken aloud, but after all it was true. That was one reason why almost everybody was interested in murder—everybody who was alive. It was because, however you thought about it, it was in itself a thing of major importance.

It isn’t morbid, Pam thought. Not really—not being interested in it isn’t. People always are, as long as they’re interested in anything—anything human. Some people pretend not to be, but it is either pretense or they aren’t interested any more, in anything. Even uninteresting murders are interesting and you read about them in the newspapers. You read enough, anyway, to find out that the details are not interesting. But you read that much, always, because murder is interesting. It is horrible and frightening and dangerous, and perhaps it is morbid. But it is interesting.

“And,” Pam thought, “what really is morbid is not to be interested in things which are interesting.”

The taxi driver spoke. His voice was uneasy, tentative.

“Which side, lady?” he said. “Penn or Long Island?”

“Oh,” Pam said. “It doesn’t matter, really. I’m meeting … Either side—Penn, I guess. Or right in front.”

“Thanks, lady,” the driver said. “Right in front all right?”

He seemed to be a very odd taxi driver, Pam thought. He wasn’t like most taxicab drivers, really. He was—sort of subdued. Which was inappropriate in taxi drivers. The cab stopped and she left it and paid her fare and looked thoughtfully at the taxi driver. He was inappropriate, although he looked appropriate enough. It was—

The word “appropriate” seemed to have done something to her mind; it had stirred her mind and found a lump in it, of which Pam had not a moment before been conscious. It was a lump of something she ought to remember, or think about; it was a lump of something odd, not yet arranged in its proper place—not yet resolved by her mind. It was a lump about something else which had been inappropriate and not what she expected, although both what had been at odds with expectation and what the expectation had been were only uneasy feelings, not ideas.

It did not, Pam thought, walking along the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station toward the stairs leading down to the concourse, apply essentially to the taxi driver. He was clear in her mind, and he was inappropriate, and that was that. This was either before the taxi driver, or was to come after him. The inappropriate thing was either in the past or in the future—something which had been wrong, or something which was going to be wrong. Like going to the Penn Station to meet people coming in at the Grand Central. Although it wasn’t that, because the girls were coming from Philadelphia, and that was Penn Station. So it couldn’t be that.

It was in the past, Pam decided, and, because it was now bothering her noticeably, she went into the past to look for it. It felt like being in the very recent past—today’s past, probably. She went over her day—over breakfast with Jerry worrying about his speech, and over luncheon with Dorian at the French place in Radio City, where they had taken up the outdoor tables and were laying a kind of floor, probably for the ice skating which ought to begin before long, now; over cocktails at Charles with Jerry and dinner afterward at home—dinner early because of the lecture, and with Jerry still not eating anything much, and turning every topic of conversation into something about the introductory speeches he had to deliver. (Jerry is so foolish about things, Pam thought. He’s so sweet, really.)

There was nothing inappropriate in the day up to then, or at the Today’s Topics Club. Nothing until Jerry had turned, after a really very nice little talk, and invited Mr. Sproul to get up. And Mr. Sproul hadn’t got up—that was inappropriate, all right. Pam thought about it, going down the stairs, and shook her head. That was a big thing; this which bothered her was a little thing. It wasn’t about Mr. Sproul—or, anyway, not about Mr. Sproul’s being dead. It was a little thing, perhaps afterward, which was at odds with expectation. It was—Pam tried again to make it come clear—it was as if a picture you had once seen and now saw again had subtly changed in the meantime; it was as if the tree in the right foreground had turned, between the two times of seeing, into a bush.

Pamela North went through the doors which always seemed to her to open by magic, and in whose opening she never trusted, always reaching out hands to push just as the doors receded of their own miraculous accord. She went downstairs to the arriving train level, still trying to identify the discrepancy which continued to bother her.

It felt right, she decided, for the discrepancy to concern one of the people she had encountered on the platform after the murder—or encountered somewhere between the time that Mr. Sproul failed to stand up and the time she got into the taxicab to come and meet her sister’s little daughters. It felt right that she had met one of those people before, or seen one of them before, under conditions which did not accord with the conditions under which she had seen them this evening. If she had, for example, seen Dr. Dupont turning cartwheels in a vaudeville show, that would account for it. “Although,” Mrs. North admitted to herself, “a little extremely.” If she had seen that other doctor—the real doctor—acting as a traffic policeman on Fifth Avenue, that would explain it. Or if she had seen the woman who had preceded Mr. North at the lectern, and was presumably the program chairman of the club—Mrs. Williams or something—performing as a ballet dancer, that would be the sort of thing it was.

But it was not any of these things, and it was not, Mrs. North decided, anything she was apt to get straight until something else resuggested it to her mind. Eventually, perhaps, something would happen which would throw an oblique light on her puzzlement and give sudden illumination. Or it might be, of course, that nothing would happen until the puzzlement had slowly faded away.

She was ten minutes late for the train, Mrs. North observed as she passed a clock. But on the other hand, she saw on the arrivals blackboard, the train was twenty minutes late for itself. She lighted a cigarette and waited, wondering about Mr. Sproul. Red caps went down the stairs, which meant the train was coming. Mrs. North could have gone down; but she decided that that way there would be greater danger of missing the little girls. She could stand here, between the two stairways—the Pennsylvania Railroad had certainly arranged things awkwardly—and look in both directions and pretty soon see them.

The stairway leading to the rear of the train probably was the better bet, she decided, because her sister would have sent the little girls in a Pullman, and asked the porter to look after them. So she stood nearer the stairway leading to the rear and looked down it and saw people beginning to come up.

She could not see any little girls coming up the stairway, so she hurried to the other and looked down it. More people were coming up it, including what was evidently a large part of the army, and no little girls. “Damn the Pennsylvania Railroad,” Mrs. North said, and dashed back to the other staircase. Still no little girls. She took a place between the staircases and vibrated her head as rapidly as she could, making her neck hurt. Still no little girls. And now the stream of arriving passengers was reduced to a trickle—two trickles, specifically. Mrs. North began to be worried.

And then there was a glad young voice behind her. It said:

“Auntie Pam! Auntie Pam!”

That was one of the girls. Margie or—or the one you mustn’t call Lizzie, but must remember always to call Beth. Somehow they had got around her.

Mrs. North turned quickly, with a welcoming smile. There were no little girls. There were—

One of the two young ladies confronting Pam North beamed and gamboled forward.

“Auntie Pam!” she said. “Darling!”

Mrs. North gasped. They were not little girls; they were almost grown up girls. And attached to each, with a kind of firm hopefulness, was a sailor. The sailors were looking at Mrs. North with anxious doubt, like uncertain puppies. They were very young sailors.

“But not that young!” Mrs. North thought a little frantically, as she started foward. “Not nearly young enough!”

“Children!” Mrs. North said. For the first time in my life, Mrs. North thought, I sound like a mother. “Margie! Lizzie!”

“Beth,” said the foremost of the children, and she let her sailor slip away to meet, it was evident, this new and greater emergency. “Beth, Aunt Pam.” There was a kind of wail in her voice. “Not Lizzie!” She blushed furiously, then, and looked back at her sailor in evident anguish. The sailor, however, merely looked uneasily at Pam North.