14

Saturday, 2 P.M. to 3:20 P.M.

Bill Weigand turned Pam’s last few remarks over in his head, decided that they looked much the same upside down as right-side up and telephoned his office from a drug store booth. Mullins was back from Newark and reported himself full of news and was Weigand coming in? Weigand said that, on the contrary, Mullins was coming out. Weigand hung up and walked up Sixth Avenue to Charles and sat at the bar and waited for Mullins, taking time over a rye and water. Mullins came, by subway, sat on the next stool and said, by way of introduction:

“Damn it, Loot, I’ve got to go to Newark.”

“You’ve been to Newark,” Weigand told him. “Think, Sergeant.”

Mullins looked at Weigand’s glass, looked up at the clock and shook his head sadly. He said he oughtn’t to, because he made it a rule not before five o’clock, but since the Loot insisted, Mullins ordered an old fashioned.

“I left the car,” he said. “I thought I could get on and get off again, but by the time I’d proved it they’d closed the doors and we were out somewhere in the meadows. So I gotta go back and get the car.” He looked at Weigand with sudden hope. “Unless you want to send somebody else, Loot?”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I’ll send somebody else—maybe. You got on all right?”

Mullins told him about getting on the train all right and said that anybody could do it. Weigand listened and nodded slowly.

“Without being remembered?” he asked. Mullins thought it over and nodded. With luck—with a heavily loaded train, enough people getting out at Newark, an air of assurance which raised no questions which might later rankle in minds. Weigand nodded again.

“Assuming,” he said, “that nobody recognized you as a cop. Defense counsel could raise a doubt there.” He looked at Mullins, looming beside him. “Quite a doubt,” he added.

“O.K.,” Mullins said. Mullins was equable. “I look like a cop. So what? I am a cop. Only I didn’t bull my way on the train. Didn’t have to. It’s a cinch.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I think it is. I think that’s the way it was done. And when we know a little more, maybe we can prove it. Maybe we can dig around and find somebody who will remember seeing the guy who did it.”

“Guy!” Mullins repeated. “It was a guy?”

Only, Weigand told him, in a manner of speaking. In other words, he was still guessing.

“Guy or gal,” Mullins said, and Weigand nodded and said, “Right.” Mullins thought.

“If it was a gal,” Mullins said, fishing out a piece of orange and nibbling at it, “would she of dressed up like a man?”

“Why?” Weigand wanted to know.

Maybe, Mullins suggested, so that if somebody saw her coming out of Bedroom C and remembered that the occupant of Bedroom C was a man, that somebody would think she was the occupant. It sounded more complicated as Mullins put it. Weigand thought it over and shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It would be an unnecessary refinement; it would amount to doing it the hard way. The chance of a woman’s raising questions merely because she was dressed like a man would be greater than the chance of raising them because she was the wrong sex to come out of the bedroom. If it was a woman, I think she looked like a woman. And—” he broke off, thought, emptied his glass, shook his head at the barman, and continued.

“Maybe,” he said, “Demming expected whoever it was. Maybe he wrote a letter to the guy or girl in question, saying he was coming east to spill the works. Maybe the murderer wired back, arranging to board the train in Newark and explain how Demming was all wrong. So then, when the train was slowing down at Newark, Demming stood up and waved or made some sort of motion so that the person who was meeting him would know where he was.”

“Sure,” Mullins said. “Just sort of beckoned—come on in and kill me.”

Weigand stood up and Mullins, looking a little wistfully at his glass, obeyed. As they went to the door, Weigand said that Demming had been, obviously, too trusting. But he had not thought he was being too trusting; he had merely underestimated. Weigand led the way to the Buick and slid under the wheel.

“And,” he said, starting his car, “what do we know about Demming? Has Pittsburgh come through?”

Pittsburgh had, to a degree. Demming had lived there for about ten years, working as the assistant head of the bond department of one of the banks. He had come from a bank in Chicago and, preceding that, had worked in a bank in Des Moines. During the last two years of his life he had been a semi-invalid and, although he sometimes went to his office, he was constructively on pension. He was a widower, his wife having died before he came to Pittsburgh from Chicago. He had been in his late fifties when he died—the bank records listed him as fifty-eight. He had lived in a hotel in Pittsburgh and his social life had been limited. It had proved difficult to find anyone who knew more about him than the bare facts which were on record.

Weigand listened, guiding the car northward. He nodded slowly when Mullins finished.

“Des Moines,” he said. “That’s the tie-in.”

Mullins repeated the name of the city and there was a note of inquiry in his voice.

“Des Moines,” Weigand repeated. Mullins said, “Yeah.”

“Where the WAACS come from,” he said. “Only I don’t get the tie-in.”

“Iowa,” Weigand told him. “Des Moines, Iowa. The metropolis of the state. And Sproul came from Iowa.”

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “You call that a tie-in?”

Weigand admitted that it tied nothing tightly. But it tied a loop around at least two of the people involved—the two people who had died. They both came from Iowa; one was coming to tell something about the other’s death when he himself was killed. It was tenuous, but perhaps it helped. It might indicate that the motive for Sproul’s murder lay in Sproul’s past. If they could find another person, still living, who also was tied in with that past—well, they would have something to think over. So—Weigand called on his memory. It would be pleasant if memory recalled that someone else had come from Iowa.

It did not. The Akrons came from New Jersey, south of Atlantic City. Schwartz came originally from Minnesota; Ralph White was born and grew up in Rhode Island and Mrs. Williams also was a New Englander. Y. Charles Burden came from—Weigand’s memory pricked up its ears. Mr. Burden came from Nebraska, which was close to Iowa. As was, on second thought, Minnesota. Loretta Shaw came from the south and, as he remembered that, Weigand noted that it showed not at all in her speech. She came from Georgia, where the climate has an extreme influence on the English language. But it was no longer evident when Miss Shaw spoke. Bandelman Jung had been born in Java, by his own report. But the birthplaces of all concerned were, so far, by their own report. It might be worth checking on the accuracy of these reports, Weigand thought. It would take time; it would be neater to know first and prove afterward, if for no other reason than that, if you knew already, you would have to prove only what you knew; you would seek only corroboration, not illumination.

It would be pleasant if things were neater, Weigand agreed with himself, crossing through Fifty-seventh Street to Park, left-turning there and continuing north. The Akrons lived on Park in the Sixties. Weigand wheeled into the space immediately in front of the apartment house and looked blandly at the doorman who was keeping it open. He promised not to be long and mentioned that he was police. The doorman looked shocked and worried. He was relieved when Weigand let him announce them to Miss Jean Akron. At any rate, his manner said, it was not coming to the battering down of doors.

Miss Akron was at home and would see Lieutenant Weigand. Weigand and Mullins waded through carpet to the elevators and went up. The Akrons lived handsomely in a penthouse at the top, where the dim-out restrictions would cause them the most trouble. Weigand, waiting in the long, windowed living room, saw the blackout curtains waiting at each window, only partially hidden and marring the room. Some of the joy had gone out of living high, he suspected. Nervous people were already climbing down out of penthouses. But the Akrons were not, it appeared, that nervous.

Jean Akron, when she came across the room and watched Weigand and Mullins get up, did not appear to be nervous in the least. She was only polite and distant, as if plumbers had unexpectedly come to call. It was an unimportant, although faintly perplexing, intrusion, to be met with poise. Jean Akron, looking very handsome, met it with poise.

She was built to show poise, Weigand reflected, watching her cross the room. She was fair and tall and slender and moved easily; her broad forehead was smooth and without trouble, her taffy-colored hair was relaxed and quiet in its braids. As she greeted them—but would you call it a greeting?—her eyebrows lifted just perceptibly. She told Lieutenant Weigand that he wanted to see her.

About odds and ends only, Bill Weigand assured her; about this and that and Mr. Demming—Mr. Robert J. Demming, the “J.” being, not for James or John, but for Jasper. Mr. Robert Jasper Demming.

Jean Akron showed nothing; she did not even show that she was showing nothing. She shook her head.

“Should I know Mr. Demming?” she asked. “I don’t remember. Is he somebody—important?”

“Now,” Weigand said. “I don’t know about earlier. Now he’s important because he’s dead.”

The composed young woman said “Oh” in a tone which might mean anything and was grave enough to acknowledge Death. Then she shook her head. She said she didn’t think she had ever heard of him. Weigand said, “Right.” He added that it was part of his job to ask people such things; part of his job now to find who had known Mr. Demming in life. Because, he told her, somebody had; apparently the person who had killed Sproul had.

“He was killed, then?” she said. “He didn’t take something himself?”

Weigand told her Sproul had been killed. That much, he said, they were sure of. If they had not been sure before, the removal of Mr. Demming made them sure now. And nothing they had discovered, in any case, gave motive for suicide. Or did she know of something? The last question was casual, almost random. It touched, Weigand’s attitude told her, on a point entirely academic, but not without historic interest of a sort.

“No,” she said. She was sitting, now, on a low sofa, pliant and relaxed. “I don’t know of anything. Anything specific, that is. But poor Victor was always so involved.” She paused, lighted a cigarette. “With things and people,” she said. “He was—oh, call it restless.” She was reminiscent. “Nothing was ever settled for Victor,” she said. “Nothing assured.”

Weigand said “hmm.” But it was a mistake, because the sound was an interruption. She dragged deeply on her cigarette and exhaled the subject with the smoke.

“But somebody killed him,” she said. “So it doesn’t matter that he might have run into some involvement he couldn’t solve, and killed himself.” Her tone ended the divagation.

Sproul might, Weigand pointed out when she passed the conversation to him, have run into some involvement that couldn’t be solved by someone else, who had as a result killed him. It was, he told her, interesting to find out what could be found out about Sproul from people who had known him.

“Men arrange their own murders,” he said. “By being what they are, doing the things they do, meeting the people they meet.”

She smiled a little, and told Weigand he was a philosopher. Mullins moved uneasily, the leather belt which aided his suspenders in the task of supporting the Mullins trousers creaking. The creak said that Mullins thought all this was pretty silly. Weigand smiled faintly to himself, and to Mullins. Then, to Jean Akron, he shook his head.

“A policeman,” he told her. “Merely a policeman, asking questions. So—”

She had known Sproul well, he gathered. At one time she had known him well. How well? She shrugged to that one, as if the question were beyond answer. She looked at Weigand and answered.

“Not that well,” she said.

“How well?” Weigand was patient.

“At one time,” she said, “very well. Almost that well. We were—we thought we were—well, we talked about marriage.”

“And something happened?” Weigand said.

She shrugged. Nothing had happened, in any tangible sense. It was merely that nothing did happen. She was very casual.

“We drifted apart,” she said. “We—we each met other people.”

Sproul, Weigand assumed, had met Loretta Shaw. She nodded. And she—?

“Other people,” she said. “Just other people.”

And now, Weigand thought, watching her, she is too casual; now she is showing that she is showing nothing. He was blunt.

“Were you in love with him?” he said.

A kind of blankness came in her calm eyes. She said she did not understand.

“I was quite clear,” Weigand told her. “Were you in love with Sproul? Did he—well, to put it bluntly, did he drop you for Miss Shaw?”

She said, “Really, Lieutenant!”

“Because,” Weigand said, “it would be interesting to discover that you had been very much in love with Sproul, Miss Akron. And that he had, perhaps, pretended to be in love with you and that he wanted to marry you. And that he had left you, suddenly, for Miss Shaw.”

“And,” she said, “that I killed him?”

It was, Weigand told her, her own conclusion to the series. To such a series, she would admit it was an apt conclusion.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know people like that—violent people. I suppose such things happen.”

Such things might happen, her tone made clear, among the people with whom Weigand associated; of whom, her tone almost suggested, he was one. Crude people.

“Such things happen,” Weigand assured her. “To people of all sorts, Miss Akron. Violence is no respecter of persons.” He looked around the apartment, making it obvious. “Or of incomes,” he added.

The girl stood up.

“I think there is no point in this,” she said. “I think you and”—she looked at Mullins—“your man had better go.”

Mullins started to get up, but Weigand’s gesture stopped him.

“We’ll go,” he promised. “Quite soon. When we’ve finished. Do you deny you were in love with Sproul, and that he left you for Loretta Shaw?”

“In love?” she said. Her tone rejected the phrase as sentimental. “I was fond of him at one time. At that time I might have married him, if he had been in a position to marry. But it was not a—not a violent attachment. When we lost interest—when we both lost interest—we drifted apart.” She looked down at Weigand, who was still sitting. “You can’t make melodrama out of it,” she told him.

“Right,” Weigand said. “I’m not trying to make anything out of anything. I’m trying to find out who killed Sproul. Why don’t you sit down and help me, Miss Akron? If you want to help.”

“I can’t help,” she said. “I don’t know anything. And I don’t kill people.”

Weigand let that lie. It did not seem a point to bicker over. He smiled faintly, accepting that much as read. He let a pause punctuate, and began again.

“Why wasn’t Sproul in a position to marry, Miss Akron?” he asked. She looked at him suspiciously, said that he probably knew already. However—

“He was married,” she said. “He had married somebody when he was very young—back in the west somewhere. They were still married. She was some—some sweet little thing from a small town. It was a mistake for Victor, of course. She was—oh, a homebody. At any rate, that’s what I gathered. She wanted a house and a yard, and Victor mowing the yard, and babies and—and the Middle West. Victor used to talk about her, and laugh—laugh rather oddly. As if he were laughing mostly at himself.”

Weigand nodded. He could see the picture Sproul had painted; the picture of himself as an impetuous youth, long ago, his youthful ardors stimulated by a pretty girl, of the home town, perhaps—and this hinted—a girl’s premature surrender. And after that, by the mores of the community, marriage and respectability. And, for them both, maladjustment, as she did not “grow” with him. Weigand nodded.

“And she never divorced him?” he said. “I assume he deserted her?”

Jean Akron’s shrug was detached. About that, it and her words told Bill Weigand, she did not know. She assumed certainly that there had been no divorce, since Sproul said they were still married. Possibly he sent her money; possibly it had been, through the years, merely a separation and nothing final. She smiled faintly.

“And, for Victor, a protection,” she said. “In the old days. But lately he wanted to marry and—settle down. The small town boy was coming out, I think.”

She was calm, again, and detached. Since the questioning had turned, finally, from her own relations with Sproul, she was detached. She was trying to be helpful. She did not recall that Sproul had ever said so, in direct words, but she had got the impression that Mrs. Sproul still lived back in the Middle West, where she and Sproul had met. With a little house and a little lawn and a little garden, but without Victor Leeds Sproul. It seemed the inevitable thing to happen to Mrs. Sproul, as described.

Weigand let the questioning drift from Sproul to others in the group—the Paris group, but his questions were idle and her replies were not freshly illuminating. It was lulling and Mullins stirred restlessly. He knew what the Loot was up to. He was listening to the girl’s voice, watching her eyes and her hands, trying to decide how she felt and thought and how she might act. “What makes the wheels go round,” Mullins thought to himself. The Loot was wondering if she was the sort of dame who would get sore at being ditched and knock off the guy who had ditched her; if she would pretend and smile and put morphine in the soup. Or, more likely, the drink. Mullins knew what the Loot was up to. Which didn’t keep it from being, to Mullins, dull. He looked at the dame and wondered would she? and thought maybe she would. He thought she had nice legs and curved well where she should, and that in general he liked the little ones. You wouldn’t, Mullins decided, call Jean Akron a cute trick, and cute tricks were the best in the long run. In the short run, however—Mullins found himself looking at Jean Akron with speculation and sighed. It was too bad, in a way, that she had so much jack.

Mullins’ mildly pleasant day-dreaming was interrupted. Weigand got up and said, “Thank you, Miss Akron,” and started to move toward the door. Mullins got up, and Weigand turned around.

“By the way, Miss Akron,” Weigand said casually. “For the record. Where were you this morning? About eight o’clock?”

“When your Mr. Demming was killed?” the girl said. She was quick. Weigand nodded. “Here, Lieutenant,” she said. “In bed. Just waking up and getting ready to ring for breakfast.”

Weigand said, “Right” and nodded. It was the inevitable answer; probably the maid would confirm it; possibly both Miss Akron and the maid would be telling the truth. True or false, it was the story to be expected. He said, again, “Thanks,” and again started for the door and again appeared to think of one more question.

“And your brother, Miss Akron,” he said. “He lives here?”

She nodded.

“Do you happen to know where he was around eight o’clock?” Weigand said. “This morning?”

“On his way to the plant,” she said. “He commutes—in reverse. He lives in town and works in the suburbs—his factory’s in the suburbs. He leaves here every morning about seven-thirty and goes to the plant, and he comes home every evening. Usually fairly late. About eight o’clock he was—oh, I suppose on the train.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Where is the factory, Miss Akron?”

His tone was still casual, indicating merely routine interest.

“In New Brunswick,” she said. “Just outside New Brunswick.”

Mullins’ eyes opened and his lips parted. But Weigand looked at him and his lips closed. They opened again outside in the car.

“Well!” Mullins said. “There’s a guy could of bumped Demming. He was right there, if he wanted to be. He gets his usual train to New Brunswick, gets off at Newark, rides back and kills Demming, gets another train to New Brunswick—hell, it’s a setup.”

Weigand nodded slowly, agreeing. But to Mullins, Weigand seemed a long way off. He watched the fingers of Weigand’s left hand beating a tattoo on the steering wheel; noticed the moment of abstraction during which Weigand sat staring at the dashboard and making no effort to turn on the ignition; saw the sudden decision of movement which sent the lieutenant’s lean right hand out toward the key on the dash and brought his foot down on the accelerator pedal. The motor started with a snarl. The car, suddenly alive, moved forward with a little jump.

Mullins knew the symptoms. The lieutenant had a hunch. So it was about over. Mullins shook his head and wished he knew how the lieutenant did it. To Mullins, he admitted reluctantly to himself, it was still just as screwy as it had been when it started.

The car turned left at the first westbound street; it crossed Madison and turned left again on Fifth. It moved right along.