12

Saturday, 9:30 A.M. to 12:10 P.M.

Mrs. Paul Williams, seated behind her desk in her law offices in Forty-fourth Street, was more corseted than ever. She had sent word that she was engaged. Weigand had promised to take only a few minutes. She had, testily, agreed to allow him a very few. When Weigand sat across from her in an uncomfortable chair, dedicated to clients, she sat in her own chair as if Weigand were about to leave at any instant. She said, “Well, Lieutenant?”

Weigand wasted no time.

“You lunched at a place called the Roundabout yesterday,” he told her. “You met a man named Jung—Bandelman Jung—at the bar. He stole a telegram from you. What’s it all about?”

The way to find things out was to ask, Weigand believed. If that failed, of course, you had to use other means.

“Jung?” Mrs. Williams repeated. “Oh, the funny little man. Is he one of your men, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Weigand said. “He’s not one of us. What did he want?”

“He was ridiculous,” Mrs. Williams said. “He wanted to know if I killed Mr. Sproul.”

Weigand looked at her.

“Just like that?” he said.

“Just like that,” Mrs. Williams assured him. “He sat down beside me at the bar and said, ‘Mrs. Williams, please. Did you kill Mr. Sproul?’”

That was remarkable. Weigand said it was remarkable.

“It was preposterous,” Mrs. Williams corrected. “Such things shouldn’t be allowed.” She stared at him. “Such things aren’t allowed,” she said. “He could have been arrested.”

“Yes,” Weigand agreed. “Was that all he said? I take it you told him you didn’t kill Mr. Sproul, by the way?”

Mrs. Williams looked at him hard and decided to skip it.

“No,” she said. “He kept insisting. Was I sure I hadn’t killed Mr. Sproul? I ordered him to quit bothering me.”

“And—” Weigand prompted.

“He said that he was asking everybody,” she said. “Everybody who was there—at the club. He said they all denied it. He was entirely ridiculous; he was—plaintive about it. As if everybody was in a conspiracy against him.” She shook her head. “Obviously,” she said, “he should be committed for observation.”

It did, Weigand thought, sound as if Mr. Jung’s mind would bear looking into.

“Your secretary brought you a telegram while you were there,” he said, guessing a little. “We have reason for thinking Mr. Jung stole it. Did he? And why?”

“You mean,” Mrs. Williams said, “that that Mrs. North thought somebody stole it. Don’t you? She’s irresponsible.”

Weigand, unruffled, agreed that Mrs. North thought Mrs. Williams had received a telegram, and that Jung had stolen it. He saw no reason for correcting Mrs. Williams’ impression of Mrs. North’s responsibility. The point, he repeated, was whether she had received a telegram, and whether Jung had stolen it.

“I got a telegram,” Mrs. Williams agreed, coldly. “From an out-of-town client, making an appointment with me for this morning.” She looked at her watch. “For ten-fifteen,” she said. “Which is five minutes from now, Lieutenant. And I fail to see that it concerns you in any way whatever.”

She half rose, to end the interview. Weigand obediently stood up.

“I gather,” he said, “that Mr. Jung didn’t steal the telegram?”

Mrs. Williams entirely rose.

“Certainly not,” she said. “Why should he? Nobody stole it. I brought it back here, had my secretary make a note of the appointment, and threw the telegram in the waste basket. And you’re wasting the time of both of us, Lieutenant.”

Weigand said, in a voice without particular expression, that he was sorry. He added that it was something detectives often did, always with regret. But it was sometimes necessary. He moved toward the door and then turned, remembering something.

“By the way,” he said, “Mrs. North said you fainted, or almost fainted, after you got the telegram. But obviously the message couldn’t—”

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Williams said. “It was—it is a physical peculiarity, Lieutenant. Sometimes when I eat or drink hurriedly, or when I’m nervous, a—a pressure results which seems to affect nerve ganglia, so that I momentarily feel faint. That happened yesterday. It had nothing to do with the message, of course.”

Weigand said he saw, and that she was very kind. He left the office and closed the door behind him. There was no one in the stiff chairs in the outer office, where visitors presumably would wait. Mrs. Williams’ out-of-town client had evidently not arrived. Weigand looked at his watch, found it still lacked a minute or two of ten-fifteen and went on.

He stepped into the elevator and started down. Mrs. Williams’ secretary reached the elevator corridor just in time to see the top of the elevator disappear. She returned to the office and picked up the telephone and said that she was sorry, she had been unable to catch Lieutenant Weigand. She looked up in time to smile at a rotund gentleman from New Darien, Connecticut, who was coming in, and to tell him that Mrs. Williams was free to see him now.

It was almost ten-thirty when Weigand pushed a button beside the name of Loretta Shaw in the vestibule of a walk-up apartment behind Altman’s in the Murray Hill area. It rang a bell; Weigand could hear the bell. Nothing else happened, so Weigand pressed the button again, and the bell rang again. Still nothing happened. Then a telephone began ringing, and it sounded as if the telephone bell was in the same apartment with the doorbell. The telephone bell kept on ringing. Then Loretta Shaw opened the outside door of the vestibule and came in from the street and said, without pleasure, “Oh. You.”

“Were you coming to see me, Lieutenant?” she said and Weigand, because it was obvious to both of them, merely nodded. The telephone bell kept on ringing and Loretta Shaw listened to it.

“It sounds like mine,” she said, and began groping in her bag for keys. It took her a woman’s time to find her keys. Weigand, for reasons not entirely clear, but probably having to do with Dorian’s similar gropings, was somewhat disarmed. But Loretta Shaw found her keys and opened the door and ran ahead up the stairs to the second floor apartment in front. Weigand came after her. She unlocked a second door, ran across a wide, comfortable room to a telephone and reached it just as it stopped ringing. She took the telephone from its cradle and listened and said, “Damn.”

“Why is it—” she began and then, evidently remembering who Weigand was, stopped.

“I don’t know,” Weigand told her. “It always does.”

She did not respond. She threw hat and light, fuzzy coat on a chair and faced Weigand and said, “Well, Lieutenant?” She did not welcome him.

“You’ve been having me followed,” she charged, when Weigand said nothing, waiting.

Weigand said, “Right.”

“Yesterday,” he said. “Up to last night. A man saw you home. Then I called the man off.”

He had not wanted to call the man off, or any of the other men off. But Inspector O’Malley had had other notions; he had wanted to know how many men Weigand thought he was entitled to, and where he thought the men he was using were getting him. So the men had been called off.

“Why follow me?” Loretta Shaw wanted to know. “Do you think I killed Lee?”

“I don’t know,” Weigand said, “Did you?”

“I was going to marry him,” the girl said. “Why should I?”

Weigand said they might as well sit down. This was evidently going to take time.

“You’re making it hard for everybody, Miss Shaw,” he told her. “Including yourself. You weren’t going to marry Sproul. You were—are—going to marry Mr. Schwartz.”

The girl looked at him and sat down. Weigand sat down where he could see her face, and nodded at the expression on it. “Yes,” he said.

Loretta Shaw said he was crazy. He had things mixed up. She had been married to George Schwartz. A long time ago, in Paris. She had divorced him.

“I know,” Weigand said. “And Thursday you and he got a license to marry again. While you were still pretending to be engaged to Sproul. And before Sproul was killed.”

The girl said there must be some mistake, but she aid not say it with conviction. Weigand merely smiled and shook his head and waited. He was good at waiting.

“Suppose we did,” she said, when he had waited her out. “What then?”

“Then you’d get married to Schwartz,” Bill Weigand explained. “Instead of to Sproul. The inference is that you knew Sproul wouldn’t be marrying anybody, because Sproul would be dead.”

The girl looked at Weigand with contempt. She said that, if she understood what he was saying, he was assuming that she and George were fools. “Utter damn fools,” she said.

Weigand nodded, rather affably.

“We’re not,” she said. “If we had known what was—what was going to happen, that’s the last thing we would have done. Obviously.”

“People do foolish things,” Weigand told her. “We often find the things they do helpful. If you and Schwartz weren’t fools, what were you? If you didn’t know Sproul was going to die, what did you plan to do about him?”

The girl looked at him; he could feel her trying to get under the surface and find out about him. You could only guess at her purpose. Perhaps she was trying to discover what she could get away with; perhaps she was trying to decide if he would recognize the truth if he heard it. She would, whatever her purpose, pretend it was the latter.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she told him. It was the inevitable opening. Weigand made the inevitable answer to it. “Try to make me.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t clear enough. It—it isn’t one way or the other. It was the way I felt at the time, after George and I—after we talked. It seemed simple and we were just going to tell Sproul. It was—” She broke off and stared at him. “People feel one way at one time and another way right afterward,” she said. “Or I do. Do you understand that?”

Weigand was tired of being led carefully by the hand through the kindergarten of psychology.

“Look,” he said. “The only way to talk to people, Miss Shaw, is to assume they can follow what you say—that they have enough experience to understand simple things. Maybe you find out they haven’t. That’s just too bad. But if you want to tell them anything, you have to try to get across. Suppose you just assume I can understand. You felt Thursday afternoon some time that you would rather marry George Schwartz than Mr. Sproul. You agreed to apply for a marriage license with him. Then afterward you weren’t so sure. Right?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “It’s like being different people. Or going around and looking at things from another direction. And finding they look different.”

Weigand felt himself being sucked into it.

“Everything,” he told her, “is more complicated than the simplest words for it. Tritely, we feel more than we can say. And so the person we’re talking to has to help. You say, ‘I thought Thursday afternoon I wanted to marry Schwartz. Later I changed my mind, or almost changed my mind.’ All right—that isn’t all of it. I know that isn’t all of it. But we can’t spend the day on it.”

“I know,” she said. She smiled for the first time. “Isn’t it awful?” she said.

Weigand did not intend to smile in response, but he almost did. He said, “Right.”

She said she would try to explain, then. She and Schwartz had been married. In Paris. Weigand knew that? All right, then. Something had happened and they thought they didn’t want to be married any longer. Perhaps they didn’t; perhaps they were right then. Perhaps they shouldn’t be married. “Lee said we were wrong for each other,” she said. They—she and Schwartz—came back to the United States at different times, and met again only a few months ago. And then she was engaged to marry Sproul. And then she discovered that she was not really sure.

“And Schwartz?” Weigand said.

“He was sure,” she said. “Or thought he was sure. He wanted us to get married again. He said it was all Lee Sproul. All our trouble. He had—he had a theory.”

She looked at Weigand a little helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds crazy. Like something in a—in a psychological novel. Maybe it is something George just—made up. Without knowing he made it up.”

Weigand shrugged. They were going back into it.

“Just tell me,” he said.

She looked at him doubtfully. She didn’t, she said, quite see why she was telling him what she was. Weigand simplified that for her. She was telling him because she had to explain an action that looked, from a police point of view, very strange. She was telling him so much because the explanation was, from her point of view, complex. She nodded.

Schwartz’s theory, as nearly as she could understand it—“and express it”—was that Sproul had deliberately broken up their marriage. He had worked on both of them, persuading each separately that their marriage was wrong. He had done it, not primarily to get her—“although he wanted me, in his way”—but to prove a point.

“We were living—oh, call it simply,” she said. “With emotional simplicity. We were contented. Sproul didn’t believe in that; didn’t believe people could live simply and contentedly. He thought—oh, that the emotions were a turmoil. Like Freud. And we violated a theory; maybe a theory he’d built his whole life on. But if we stopped living simply, his theory would be all right again. So he—he tried to unsimplify us. And apparently he was right, because it worked.” She listened to herself doubtfully, and looked at Weigand with the doubt in her eyes, “There was more to it than that, the way George said it,” she said. “He talked for hours. He said there was malice in it too, and jealousy—not jealousy of him, but of the fact that we were happy with each other.” She broke off. “That makes us sound like children on a honeymoon,” she said. “We weren’t. Things went wrong, and we had doubts, and we did and said things and—but underneath we were happy to be together, and didn’t want it changed. And Sproul changed it. Anyway, that’s what George thought.” She paused again. “I guess that’s what I think too,” she said. “The way I felt Thursday. I’m talked into it again.”

She examined Weigand’s expression.

“I’m a fool,” she said. “I get to talking. All this hasn’t anything to do with what you want to know.”

It had, Weigand thought. More than she realized at the moment. He was sorry about that.

“How did Schwartz feel about all this? About what he believed Sproul had done?” he wanted to know.

“He hated Sproul,” she said. “He said he was—oh, a lot of things. A vivisectionist. That—that people like him shouldn’t—”

She understood then, and broke off. And this time her eyes were frightened, and she tried to hide it.

“Shouldn’t be allowed to what?” Weigand said. “Live?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “You don’t understand.”

But she was too hurried. Too emphatic. Schwartz had said something like that. He would have to get it out of her, which wasn’t going to be pleasant. Or easy. And then the doorbell rang.

The girl didn’t move. She did not seem to hear it. But she heard it all right. Weigand guessed, not thinking it was a hard guess.

“Let him in, Miss Shaw,” he said. “Get it over with.”

She seemed about to rebel, but she went across the room and pressed a button behind a door. They could hear the downstairs door open when the catch was released, and hear it close again with a small, heavy bang. They could hear feet on the stairs. Weigand stood behind the girl when she opened the door. She said, “George!” in a tone of warning and Schwartz looked over her head at Bill Weigand.

“Hello, copper,” Schwartz said. “Bullying women?”

Weigand looked at him.

“Just until you got here, Schwartz,” he said. “Just until you got here.”

Schwartz stood for a moment with an arm around the girl’s shoulder. He said, “I’m sorry, honey.” He led her across the room to a chair, and put her in it and turned to face Weigand.

“Well, copper?” he said.

“Well,” Weigand said, “I hear you threatened to kill Sproul.” Weigand’s tone was conversational.

“No!” the girl said. “No, George. I didn’t—you know I didn’t!”

“It’s all right, honey,” Schwartz said. “These cops! Smart boys, these cops. Aren’t you, copper?”

“Enough,” Weigand said. He waited. “So Miss Shaw was lying?” he said. “Maybe she threatened him?”

Loretta Shaw looked at Weigand and hated him. Weigand was not, for the moment, particularly fond of himself. However—

“So I said I’d like to kill him,” Schwartz said. “So you arrest me and knock a confession out of me. It must be swell to be a cop. All right. I said I’d enjoy killing Sproul. I would have enjoyed killing Sproul. Intensely.”

“But of course you didn’t,” Weigand said. His tone was intentionally weary.

“I didn’t,” Schwartz said. “There’s no of course about it. It just happened that I didn’t. Maybe I would have, some day. If he got in my way again. I hated the bastard.” He said the last without emphasis, but in a way which made it sound as if he had hated Sproul a lot. It was rather startling, the way he must have hated Sproul.

“I’ll work it out for you,” Schwartz said. His tone had contempt in it. “I was violently jealous of Sproul because he had taken my wife. I hated him and wouldn’t have minded killing him. I found out that my wife—my former wife—was really going through with marrying him, although I felt that she still loved me. I—I threatened to kill Sproul if she didn’t remarry me and to keep me from doing that she went so far as to get a license to marry me. But I got to thinking it over, and I thought I’d better kill Sproul anyway, to be on the safe side, and so I gave him a dose of morphine. Is that enough for a jury, copper?”

“Plenty,” Weigand assured him. “Do you want to say that was the way it was?”

“It wasn’t that way!” the girl said. “You know it wasn’t that way! Tell him it wasn’t!” The last was to George Schwartz.

Schwartz looked down at her and smiled a little.

“What’s the use?” he said. “That’s the way the copper wants it to be. That’s a nice, easy way for it to be. Isn’t that right, copper?”

Weigand looked at him and felt tired. All melodrama and complexity, these people were. But easy to see through. Childishly easy. He was supposed to reject this theory because it came from Schwartz, who would not advance it if it were true; who advanced it as if it were an absurd theory, gauged to the immature mind of a policeman. Weigand was supposed to be stung by the reflection on his mind, and to reject the theory with annoyance. Whereas the theory might be true, and all this an intellectual’s obvious game. Weigand’s temper frayed at the edges; he knitted it up again before he spoke.

“I’d like an easy solution,” he said. “Obviously, Mr. Schwartz. Would you like me to accept yours?”

Weigand did not sound angry. He did sound a little as if he were speaking to a small boy. Schwartz did not seem to notice it, but the girl did and she looked at Weigand with eyes which held speculation.

Schwartz’s mind had room only for its own emotional subtleties. He told Weigand what it was he didn’t give what Weigand thought.

“You ought to,” Weigand advised him. “You really ought to, Mr. Schwartz. Do you want me to accept this as a confession that you killed Sproul?” He was patient, now. Schwartz was listening, now; he heard tired patience in Weigand’s voice. He looked a little embarrassed, suddenly; Weigand suspected that he was looking at himself, and being a little surprised by what he saw.

“Am I to take it that you really want to find out?” Schwartz said. It was an effort to get his feet under him, and sounded like it. “Or are you just asking?”

Weigand said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“All right,” Schwartz said. “Maybe I was wrong. No, I didn’t kill Sproul, Lieutenant. And Retta didn’t. But I worked out some very fancy ways to kill him, from time to time. In my mind. In day dreams.”

“George!” Loretta Shaw said. “You mustn’t—”

“Very fancy plans,” Schwartz insisted, but his tone was light and amused. “Sealed rooms and everything. One of them was new.”

Weigand went along.

“I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt it, Mr. Schwartz.”

“So,” Schwartz said, “you read them too. Carter Dickson?”

“Sometimes,” Weigand said. “Only it’s John Dickson Carr for sealed rooms.” Schwartz shook his head.

“I don’t see that it makes any difference,” Loretta Shaw said. “I really don’t.”

Atmospheres changed rapidly with these people, Weigand thought. Now they were both very amiable. Which proved nothing; murderers could be amiable when not a-murdering. None of this proved anything, one way or the other. But while the atmosphere lasted it was worth utilizing. Weigand relaxed and lighted a cigarette and gave the impression of a man who had concluded his business and was about to go, but was in no hurry to go.

“Right,” he said, and then after a pause, during which Schwartz and the girl looked at him with mild interest, he went on.

“Frankly,” he said, “and without prejudice—you people puzzle me a little. All of you—you two, Sproul as was, Mr. White and the Akrons. Particularly Mr. White.”

“Do we?” Loretta said. “Why? And why Mr. White particularly?” She paused, smiled and said: “Not that I can’t see how he might.”

The three of them shared appreciation of Mr. White, needing no words.

“Right,” Weigand said, after a moment. “That’s precisely it. Here is Mr. White and he is—well, what he is. Apparently he strikes the two of you much as he strikes me. One of you didn’t like Sproul, the other was going to marry him. There was tension between the two of you about him. Akron doesn’t seem to like anybody—except his sister. Little Mr. Jung—” He broke off and started over. “What I’m trying to say,” he said, “is that you formed a group which wasn’t—well, well assorted. And yet you formed a group. You all, even you, Schwartz, went to a dinner celebrating Sproul’s lecture tour. And all the time I’ve felt that you were—well, sticking together. However you felt about one another. It makes a kind of disunited united front.”

Weigand invited confidence; I am, he thought, being very lulling. Without prejudice.

“Not Jung,” Schwartz said. “Definitely not Jung. As for the rest—well, I know what you mean. I’d never thought about it, particularly, but I know what you mean. It’s a hangover from Paris, I suppose.”

“Yes?” Bill Weigand said, and waited.

“It’s merely,” Loretta Shaw said, “that we were a little group of roughly one kind of people in a much larger group of another kind of people. Isn’t that it, George? We went around in little circles.”

“Concentric,” Schwartz said. “Yes, Retta, I suppose so. And when we came back we—well, brought our difference with us. Along with our differences. Our difference from other people, I mean. Although it was imaginary here. I suppose that it is merely that we had shared certain experiences and felt that we knew one another better than we knew other people.” He paused and looked abstractedly past Weigand. “Sometimes it seemed as if only that was real,” he said. “As if afterward we had been only playing out the string. Or it felt that way at first. Now it’s wearing off; we haven’t been as united lately as we used to be. After this I suppose we won’t be united at all. But I can imagine how we would seem to an outsider.” He smiled, and looked at Weigand. “My use of that word explains the whole business,” he said. “Doesn’t it? It even includes Mr. White, who’s certainly a funny guy if there ever was one.”

“Very funny,” Weigand agreed. “Do you suppose he would steal somebody else’s work and pass it off as his own?”

There was a pause. You can hear the brick drop, Weigand thought. Schwartz and Loretta Shaw looked at each other and then at Weigand. She left it to Schwartz, who said he wouldn’t know.

“But there was a story to that effect?” Weigand said. It was not really a question.

“There were a lot of stories,” Schwartz said. “About everybody. Our friend Mr. Sproul was a great spreader of stories. I may have heard one about White. I wouldn’t know whether it was true. He may have heard stories about me. He wouldn’t know whether they were true, or what the truth about them was.”

He stared at Weigand. The atmosphere was changing again. But the interlude had been useful; maybe it had been useful. Weigand twisted out his cigarette.

“I got the story from Sproul’s notes,” Weigand told them. “I got several stories.” He let it lie, for what they wanted to make of it. He took up another tack.

“How long were you planning to marry Sproul, Miss Shaw?” he wanted to know. “How long were you engaged to him?”

The girl thought a moment and said about a year, more or less. Weigand registered surprise.

“Wasn’t that a good while?” he asked. “I mean—I should have expected you to marry as soon as you thought it would be a good idea. Being sensible people.”

And, he did not add, informal people. He thought of Mullins’ description of the group and did not let his face show what he had thought.

“She really knew better,” Schwartz said. “When it looked like coming to the point, she had more sense.”

His tone was resolute; more resolute than convincing. Loretta Shaw shook her head slowly.

“No,” she said. “Not honestly. In the last few months, yes. But there was a while before that when I would have married him any time. Only he wasn’t in any hurry.” She looked at Schwartz. “That’s how it was, George,” she said. “I’m glad now, but that’s how it was. He kept putting it off. I didn’t.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I have to be personal, you know. I may as well go on. Did Jean Akron have anything to do with it? His hesitancy, I mean?”

The girl flushed. But she looked at Weigand, and her voice was calm.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I think so now, anyway. I didn’t then. I thought—oh, that there were some arrangements he had to make first. But perhaps it was Jean.”

Weigand nodded. He said Jean’s brother seemed to think so. He added that they were devoted, for brother and sister.

“He is,” Schwartz said. “I don’t know about Jean. Lately. I think she’s—well, been noticing Y. Charley a good deal.”

“This devotion—?” Weigand said.

Schwartz shook his head.

“She keeps house for him,” he said. “She’s useful to Herbert Akron, and Herbert Akron is very devoted to people who make him comfortable. He doesn’t want things upset. He can be pretty violent about it, because he’s a pretty violent guy, apparently. We never knew him very well; he dropped in and out, seeing his sister, coming on business mostly. He wasn’t one of the group. Neither was Y. Charley, for that matter. But a lot of people you haven’t heard of were.”

Loretta Shaw picked it up. She said there was no reason why it should be somebody from the group, or that part of the group Weigand knew.

“A lot of other people didn’t like Lee,” she said. “A lot of them may be in New York.”

Weigand nodded and said, “Right.” He added that they would broaden it out later, if they had to; that it was early days yet.

“We merely take people up as they come along,” he said. “Without prejudice.”

He stood up.

“We’re still suspects, I suppose?” Loretta Shaw said, her voice carefully light.

“Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “Maybe one of you did it. Maybe you, so you wouldn’t have to marry Sproul. Or for some other reason. Maybe you, Schwartz. So she couldn’t marry him. Or for some other reason.”

“Naturally,” Schwartz said, and his tone matched Weigand’s. “Naturally we deny it.”

“Naturally,” Weigand said. “Why not?”

He started toward the door and the telephone bell rang. He hesitated and Loretta Shaw answered it. She said, “Why, yes, he is,” and turned to Weigand. “It’s for you,” she said. Weigand took the telephone and listened and said, “Right.” He looked at the two a moment, speculatively.

“I’ll probably be back,” he said, in a different voice. He went out and down the stairs and into the Buick. He went downtown fast.

Weigand read the letter again. It was written on the stationery of a Pittsburgh hotel, in long hand, and the signature was legible enough. It was addressed to “Officer in Charge, Homicide Bureau, Police Headquarters, New York City.” It read:

Dear Sir:

I believe I have information which may help you solve the murder of Mr. Victor Leeds Sproul. Since before giving you that information, I must conduct certain investigations of my own, I am leaving for New York tonight on the 11:15 train. I will come to your office some time during the morning and I would appreciate an interview with the officer in charge of the Sproul investigation.”

The writer was “sincerely yours.” He was Robert J. Demming. And he was dead, per the report of Detective Lieutenant Fahey. Weigand looked at the envelope, clipped to the letter. He was dead because it had rained heavily the day before; so heavily that airplanes between Pittsburgh and New York were grounded; so heavily that a letter marked for air-mail had come through by train. And as a result neither air-mail postage nor special delivery stamp had got the letter to men who would have known what to do about it until Mr. Demming was dead.

If the letter had come by air-mail it would have reached him the evening before, Weigand thought. And if it had reached him the evening before, Mr. Demming would not have been left to his own resources. They might have thought that Mr. Demming was probably a crank; they would have thought that Mr. Demming was probably a crank. But a crank who brings his crankiness personally from Pittsburgh to New York is not a crank to be ignored by policemen very anxious for information. As God knows we are, Weigand thought, with annoyance. So Mr. Demming would have been met and safeguarded.

And that, Weigand thought immediately, would have done them no particular good, because Mr. Demming would have been dead by the time they had met him. Unless they had gone to North Philadelphia, where they would not have gone. Or—wait a moment—to Newark. They would not have gone there either. But—

“Yeh,” Lieutenant Fahey said, as Weigand looked up at him. “A hell of a note, ain’t it?”

Weigand agreed. He asked Fahey a question. Fahey shrugged.

“That’s what they say,” he told Weigand. “They’re pretty positive. Whoever killed him must have ridden with him from at least North Philadelphia. Sure the train stops at Newark. And sure nobody could have got on there. That’s what they say.”

He shrugged slightly.

Weigand tossed him a sheaf of reports and shrugged in turn. Fahey leafed through them and said it was sure a hell of a note.

The reports were from watching men who had had eyes on certain people until six o’clock that morning, when their tours of duty ended. They had not been replaced, because Inspector O’Malley had decided it wasn’t necessary; because, Weigand admitted honestly, he had himself been fairly sure it wasn’t necessary, and had made no argument. The reports showed that at six o’clock that morning, barring devious exits from their apartments and furnished rooms, and homes in Westchester, the people being watched had been under observation in New York City. They had not been in North Philadelphia. At 6:40 the train on which Robert J. Demming was riding, bringing information to the police, left North Philadelphia for New York. At that time Mr. Demming was alive.

If the murderer of Mr. Demming got on the train at North Philadelphia, he was not George Schwartz, at home in his hotel in the Forties, or Loretta Shaw, at home in Murray Hill; it was not either of the Akrons, nor Mr. White nor Y. Charles Burden. It was not Mrs. Paul Williams nor, on the basis of another report, this time from an F.B.I. man, the little dark Mr. Jung. It was, in short, not anybody who had so far entered the sprawling, unsatisfactory picture of the Sproul investigation. And if that was true, Weigand had so far got precisely nowhere, which was discouraging.

But if it were Newark, now—there had been time enough to get to Newark by tube train and to meet the train which was bringing Mr. Demming. A murderer would have had to move briskly, but murderers must expect to make some sacrifices.

Weigand called Mullins and gave Mullins instructions. Mullins looked grieved and said, “Newark?” in a certain tone. When Weigand nodded, Mullins said, “O.K., Loot, but how about using a department car?”

“So long as it isn’t connected with you, O.K.,” Weigand said. “But remember, you’re not a cop. You don’t show any badge. Remember, you may have to testify, eventually.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “If you can get it in. Which you can’t.”

That, Weigand told him, they would let the D.A.’s office worry about. When and if. The D.A.’s office could tell it to the judge. At the least, they would have the information.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. Mullins departed.

Mullins consulted time-tables and ordered a car from the police garage. He drove discreetly through the Holland Tunnel and followed signs to the Pulaski Skyway. He followed a sign which said “Newark Business District” and dropped down an incline from the elevated highway into the turmoil of New Jersey traffic. In Newark he had time to find a parking lot and deposit the car, and afterward to walk a block to the Pennsylvania Station. Mullins bought a Hudson and Manhattan ticket to New York and noted the cost down in the notebook which was sacred to the expense account.

Mullins climbed stairs to the platform. A multiple-unit train waited, with doors open and a few passengers sitting disconsolately inside, to the right of the platform as he faced in what was, he decided, the direction of New York. Mullins sauntered along the platform, lighting a cigarette; looking, he trusted, like a passenger stretching his legs until the last minute. He paused by the open door of one of the cars and gazed in abstractedly. (And a small, furtive man, who knew the build of the Mullinses through long, and rather unsatisfactory, experience, arose with an air of great preoccupation, kept his face averted, and sauntered back through two cars. Reaching the third, he sauntered out, stood for a moment abstractedly on the platform and, being sure Mullins was looking the other way, darted down a flight of exit stairs. The small furtive man didn’t know whether they were after him again, but usually they were. Mullins, pleasantly assuring himself that nobody would take him for a policeman, continued his ambling patrol of the platform.)

Red caps appeared on the platform and began to look up the line. The head end of an electric locomotive appeared, and pulled a string of cars slowly along the platform, on the left as Mullins faced New York. Doors began to open and porters in white coats peered out. Red caps ran with the train along the platform, having picked their doors. The train stopped and porters began shoveling bags to the platform. Mullins loitered near one of the doors, well back in the train and in the Pullman section.

There was only a little luggage to come out of the car he had picked, and red caps clustered around it hopefully. Several people came out, pointed at bags and went off with porters following them. At the doors of the Hudson and Manhattan cars, trainmen began to call, “This train for downtown New York. This train for downtown New York.” Mullins moved up half the length of a car, toward the locomotive, and then walked down briskly toward a door. He reached it just as the porter was stepping back inside. Without hesitation, Mullins followed the porter inside. The porter looked at him.

“So this is Newark, huh?” Mullins said, with heartiness. “Doesn’t look like much, George.”

“No, suh,” the porter said, continuing to look at him. Mullins remained bland.

“You don’t stop long,” Mullins said. “Didn’t have time to get back to my own car.”

The porter looked at him and quit looking at him.

“No, suh,” he said. “Jes’ for people to get off. You goin’ to the Pennsylvania Station, suh?”

“That’s right,” Mullins said. He walked past the Negro, now moving rapidly. He moved forward in the car and was half way along it when the train started. He reached the door ahead and found a porter closing it.

“Hold it, boy,” Mullins said. “I want to get off!”

The porter shook his head and said, “Sorry, suh.”

“Can’t open it now,” the porter said. “We’s started, boss. Guess you’ll jes’ have to go on to New York, boss.”

Mullins guessed so too. He remembered the police car parked in Newark, realized he would have to go back to Newark and get it, and said, “Damn.”

“Yes, suh!” the porter said. Mullins, thinking with exasperation about the return trip to Newark, went to the men’s lounge at the end of the car and sat down and lighted a cigarette. Anyhow, it had worked. He wouldn’t, he decided, have to tell the Loot about getting caught on the train and having to go back to Newark for the car. It had worked without too much difficulty, but probably with the maximum difficulty to be expected. With more luck, he might have avoided conversation with the first porter, who might be expected to remember him. But he did not see how, without hopeless bungling, he could have had worse luck, and he was on the train.

So anybody could have boarded Car 620 in Newark by going to the trouble of pretending that he was a passenger on the train, and got off when the train stopped to stretch his legs, and had boarded it again before it left, entering through any car and pretending that his assigned accommodations were on another car. Anybody could then go to Bedroom C, assuming he knew Mr. Demming to be in Bedroom C, walk in, smother Mr. Demming, walk into the lounge—either lounge, depending on sex—or walk through to another car, get off at New York and go about his business.

But how would you know the room in which your victim was waiting? Mullins puzzled over that. Then he remembered that, while he stood on the platform, the Pullmans had crept by slowly, and that he had had time to look in the windows. If he were looking for someone, and watched carefully, and took his position far enough back along the platform so that most, at least, of the Pullmans would pass him before the train stopped, he would have a fair chance of spotting his man. But only, Mullins thought, a fifty-fifty chance, since the person you wanted might be sitting on the opposite side of the car.

Mullins shook his head at that. A fifty-fifty chance wasn’t, he thought, as good a chance as a murderer would want to have. That wasn’t good enough. Mullins, utilizing the fifteen minutes from Newark to New York with furious intensity, tried to think what was good enough. His mind stuck. He tossed the cigarette into an ash receiver as the train began to come up out of the tunnel and walked forward through the next car. Then it came to him.

The next car, unlike the one through which he had passed previously, was a room car and the corridor ran down one side. All the passengers, therefore, were on the other side and, if the windows went by slowly enough, you could look into their rooms. And Mr. Demming had been killed in such a car; it was only possible to kill him, as he had been killed, in such a car. So—

At the Pennsylvania Station, Mullins left the train, unchallenged. He pursued a new thought to the information booth in the center of the station, and got a folder of Pennsylvania trains. He followed hieroglyphics to trains between New York and Pittsburgh, east-bound, found the 11:15 and, in another column, found the paragraph concerning its “Equipment.” He read:

Pittsburgh to New York:

Fourteen sections, one drawing room

Ten double bedrooms.

He also found a note:

“Cars ready for occupancy, 10:30 P.M.”

Mullins, leaning against a convenient section of the wall, continued his researches gladly, if a little laboriously. He discovered that, as nearly as he could tell, the train on which Mr. Demming had arrived, dead, had come through from St. Louis, although Mr. Demming had not. Mr. Demming had got on a made-up car in Pittsburgh—one of two cars ready for occupancy at 10:30 P.M.—gone to sleep, been picked up in his car by the train from St. Louis and ridden on to death. So the person who wanted to spot Mr. Demming, and was willing to go to a little trouble, would have only to look in the windows of two cars. If he knew Mr. Demming well enough to know his habits, he probably would be able to decide whether to seek him in the room car, or in the open-section car. And if he wanted to go to still more trouble, he probably could find out, by asking, where in the train the two cars picked up at Pittsburgh would be. Probably, Mullins thought, at the end of the train.

Mullins, impressed with his rapid progress, found the station-master’s office, identified himself, and asked questions. It would be possible for a person with a plausible story—the desire to meet an invalid relative, for example—to find out through the information service in New York where the cars from Pittsburgh would be in the train from St. Louis. It probably, a clerk told Mullins, would be possible to find out whether anyone had sought that information by interviewing the men on the telephone information service.

Mullins thought of pressing his quest, thought better of it, decided the car would be safe for a while longer in Newark, and went down to Headquarters by subway. He felt that the Loot would be pleased with him.

Weigand had watched Mullins set out for Newark and, for the first time he could remember, felt a little envious of the sergeant. Mullins was, at any rate, up and about things. He, Weigand, had only to sit, and look at papers, and think. He found the prospect uninviting. Now, he decided, would be a fine time for a hunch. He made himself receptive to hunches and waited. No hunch came. He lighted a cigarette, drummed his desk with tired fingers, and decided that logic would have to serve. He looked for a crevice in the case through which logic might creep. He saw none.

He went back to reports, checking the dossiers of those involved. He read again that Schwartz was not really wanted by the police in Cincinnati; he noted once more that Sproul had lived, and presumably flourished, during his youth in Iowa. He noted that Mrs. Paul Williams had been born in a Boston suburb and was a widow with two children; he observed that Burden lived in Westchester and had offices on Madison Avenue and was highly thought of in the lecture business—was generally, indeed, considered the man at the top of the heap; he saw that—

Then he stopped and turned back to the report on Burden, and a statement that his eyes had slid over first now caught and held them. Mr. Y. Charles Burden had, some weeks earlier, insured the life of Victor Leeds Sproul for $50,000, showing his contract with Sproul to prove an insurable interest.

The detective investigating—Stein, Weigand noted; good man, Stein—had continued his inquiry further on this point, had dug up the agent who had written the policy, and had made a separate report on the facts elicited. Weigand looked up the second report.

Burden had applied for the insurance on Sproul three months previously, a few days after he and Sproul had signed their contract. He had submitted that he had made at that date considerable expenditure preparing for the tour, and was preparing to make further expenditure; he had submitted that $50,000 would be only adequate recompense, in the event of Sproul’s unanticipated death, for moneys already expended and to be expended, profits presumably to be derived and loss of prestige and confidence involved should Sproul be unable to complete the tour. The insurance agent had doubted whether it would go through and had suggested certain changes in the Sproul-Burden contract.

These had been made. The revised contract set up a partnership, limited in scope to the tour in question, between Sproul and Burden. Under this contract, reciprocal policies had become possible and had, in fact, been written. But, in view of the permanence of Burden’s organization, and the evident fact that it would continue, even after his death, to direct the tour on which Sproul would then have embarked, the insurance taken by Sproul on Burden had been in the comparatively nominal sum of $5,000.

That covered the ground, Weigand decided. It also opened the view. It gave Burden the simplest and most obvious of motives, assuming he wanted $50,000 badly enough; assuming he needed $50,000. Weigand looked at the other report and sighed. There was no evidence that Burden did need $50,000.

But the evidence that he did not need $50,000 was, when you came down to it, hearsay evidence. Everybody thought that the Y. Charles Burden Lecture Bureau was in fine shape, hitting vigorously on a multitude of cylinders. But that was merely what everybody thought; they might be thinking what they were supposed to think. The Y. Charles Burden Bureau might be going fast on the rocks. And the Sproul tour, which promised to pay off, might be running into trouble.

After all, Weigand thought, Paris in the old days was getting a little old days itself. And Mr. Sproul was not, after all, quite an Elliot Paul. Perhaps since the tour was planned, and contracts for appearances signed, clubwomen had found a new interest in newer and more immediate things. Perhaps they were all listening to returned war correspondents, and being urged to shake off a lethargy which they, and not the correspondents, were assumed to feel. In that case, they might be canceling Mr. Sproul—assuming that they could, legally. That would have to be looked into.

By assuming enough, it appeared, you could assume a motive for Mr. Burden; a motive with a dollar sign in front of it, which was after all the most conventional juxtaposition. Weigand found himself brightening somewhat. He filed this new information in his mind and continued. He read that Herbert Akron had knocked down a man at a party because the man was, in the opinion of Herbert Akron, paying insulting attention to Jean Akron; he read that Jean was generally reported to have been much in Sproul’s company some months earlier, but less in recent weeks, and that people had wondered what was between them; he learned that, four nights before he died, Loretta Shaw had suddenly slapped Sproul’s face when they were dining together at a rather prominent table in a rather prominent restaurant, and then had burst into tears and gone out of the place almost at a run.

“Well, well,” Weigand said. “Well, well, well!”

The telephone bell rang and Weigand said, “Yes?” into the transmitter. He said, “Who?” and jotted down a name. “Emmanuel Burkholdt.” He said, “Yes?” again, listened, said “Thanks, Mr. Burkholdt” and cradled the telephone. He turned back to Sproul’s dossier and made a notation:

“Sproul’s lawyer, Em. Burkholdt, reports Sproul recently inquiring about steps to be taken to get divorce. Indicated would go on with later.”

That would remind Weigand, when he looked at it again, that Mr. Burkholdt, anxious to help the police as a sworn officer of the court, and noting that nothing had been said about Sproul’s having been married, had thought the police might be interested in knowing that Sproul was talking about getting a divorce. Sproul had inquired how long it was likely to take, what specific evidence was necessary in New York State and whether Burkholdt would want to handle the action for him, if he decided to bring it. Burkholdt had said he would want to. Sproul had said he would let him know in a few days. But instead of letting his lawyer know, Mr. Sproul had died of an overdose of morphine.