Curtain for a Jester (12 page)

“See what Maine can tell us, sergeant,” he said. Mullins groaned faintly, pointed out that Maine was large, the shooting of a stray burglar far in the past. But he got on with it.

Bill asked for a familiar number, heard the sound symbolic of a telephone's ringing, heard Pam North's voice. He listened.

“No,” he said, “we haven't anybody following Baker.” He listened again. He said, “You're sure?” He listened. He said, “All right, Pam, I know you do. You do look at things.” Once more he listened to a clear, quick voice. “I haven't the faintest idea,” he said. “I'll try to get one. You said the Waldorf?”

That, Pam told him, was what Mr. Arthur Monteath had said to the cab driver, as he left to be followed by Mr. John Baker.

“I—” Pam said. “Wait a minute. Somebody's at the door. Shall I call you back?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “No—wait a minute, Pam. I'll call you. Right?”

“Right,” Pam North said, and the receiver clicked to Bill Weigand's ear. He looked toward Mullins, at another desk. Mullins was regarding a telephone with the expression of one who awaits a summons.

“Pam says our friend Baker is following Monteath,” Bill said. “And that Monteath took the Norths to lunch to pump them. That Clyde Parsons wanted to get into the diplomatic service and didn't. That Monteath would like us to ask him whatever questions we have so he can go to Washington. That she forgot to ask him whether he knew anybody with red hair.”

“Jeeze,” Mullins said. His telephone rang. He said, “Mullins speaking.” He said, “O.K., keep trying.” He hung up.

“Put Stein on that,” Bill told him. Mullins brightened. “Get up to the Waldorf. Find out if Monteath's stopping there. Find out if he is there. If Baker's there.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He was pleased; detectives should not be chained to telephones. He went in search of Stein. Bill sat for a moment, his fingers tapping his desk, his eyes narrowed. If Pam North was right—and Pam was very often right—people were up to things. That was, he hoped, a good sign. He nodded to Stein, who came to attend Mullins's telephone, who would already be briefed. Bill Weigand got his car, drove to the Novelty Emporium. There he sought, and found, Mr. Dewsnap—Mr. Bertram Dewsnap.

Mr. Dewsnap was a small, gray man, and there was no merriment in him—among false faces of most hilarious design, tricks designed to convulse the most dour, Mr. Dewsnap gave no indication that he was amused, or ever had been. He sighed deeply when Bill identified himself.

“I can't understand it,” he said, and tears trickled in his voice, although his sharp gray eyes remained entirely dry. “Mr. Wilmot was always so—so full of life.” He sighed again. “Why, only yesterday—” He paused, he shook his head, he sighed once more. Bill waited. “But there is no use remembering,” Mr. Dewsnap told him. “We must learn to face it.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I'd like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Dewlap.”

“
Snap,
” Dewsnap said. “
Dewsnap,
captain.”

Bill apologized; was told, in a tone of resignation, that it often happened. He was told, also, that there were already men going over the company's books. “Men from the police,” Dewsnap said, and added a sound akin to “tut.” Bill knew that; that was routine. He sought more personal background—specifically, the background data which might be available on Martha Evitts and John Baker.

Neither of whom was there, Dewsnap told him. He sighed again. He could not understand it. Baker had been there that morning; had gone to offer the police, in behalf of the staff, any assistance he could. (“I talked to him,” Bill said.) Baker had not returned. Miss Evitts had simply not appeared. They had tried to get in touch with her at her apartment. They had failed. (“Right,” Bill said. “So did we.”)

“I can't understand it,” Dewsnap said. “It's all quite—quite beyond me, captain.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “It's very difficult. Do you have personnel files, Mr. Dewsnap? I suppose you have?”

Mr. Dewsnap, without happiness, agreed that they had. He left the little office, which was on a mezzanine, with its only window overlooking a sales floor filled with the preposterous. He returned, after a few moments, with two folders. He proffered them to Weigand, suggested that his desk be used, left again. He reappeared on the floor below, moving among counters, among costume racks, his head turning from side to side as he walked.

Evitts—Martha Jean. Age 29. Employed at the Emporium for the past three years. An uptown address. Two former employers, with one of which she had remained three years, with the other two and a half. Letters of recommendation from both. High school graduate, two years' college, business school course completed. Parents—William and Martha Evitts—both deceased. Religion, protestant. Social security number—Bill made a note of it. Salary—the Emporium paid rather well. Next of kin—a cousin, one Mrs. Ralph Simpson, living in California. Bill made a note of her address.

He put the folder aside. It did not appear to have told him anything of importance. He took the other.

Baker—John. Age, 25. Address, a midtown hotel. Employed since the previous August. Salary—$50 weekly.

And—that was all. The folder held only a single file card, only so much information as might, without crowding, go on three lines of the card. Well, Bill Weigand thought. Well. Well. He went to the window which looked down on the sales floor. Mr. Dewsnap was looking up at it, which was convenient, if perhaps a little odd. Bill beckoned. Dewsnap came upstairs to the mezzanine, into his office. Bill abandoned the desk to its owner. He said, “Oughtn't there to be more than this about Mr. Baker?”

He showed Dewsnap the card. Dewsnap looked at it.

“Of course,” he said. “Much more. I—” he paused. “I don't understand it,” he said. “I don't understand it at all, captain. Unless—I'll look.”

He went. He returned.

“I thought the rest might have slipped out,” he said. “I can't find anything more. It's very—irregular.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “By the way—is that his present salary?”

Dewsnap looked at the card again. He said he would suppose so. He said that Mr. Wilmot had fixed salaries.

“It isn't much,” Bill said.

Dewsnap looked at it again.

“No,” he said. “It isn't very much, is it? He must have to live very carefully.”

Bill Weigand nodded. He considered. Were the personnel records kept in a locked file? They were not. Then anybody—any employee, certainly—could examine them? If he wished, add to them, subtract from them?

“Why?” Mr. Dewsnap asked. “I suppose so. But I don't understand, captain.”

The area of Mr. Dewsnap's non-understanding seemed large. Did he really, Bill wondered, fail to understand what was surely obvious—that Baker, if he chose, could have taken from his record such information as he preferred the police, under these circumstances, not to come upon? Bill looked at Dewsnap with some care.

“You mean Mr. Baker might have taken out part of his records?” Mr. Dewsnap asked.

“Right,” Bill said. “Mr. Baker. Or—someone else.”

Mr. Dewsnap shook his head. He shook it worriedly, to all appearances a man out of his depth. “Why would anybody do that?” he asked.

Bill abandoned it. He said there was another thing.

“We found carbons of correspondence in Mr. Wilmot's apartment,” he said. “Several in German, apparently arranging for the manufacture, in Germany, of certain devices. Do you know about that?”

Mr. Dewsnap's face cleared. That he did know about. A number of what the captain called “devices”—and the word was well chosen, certainly—were manufactured in Germany on designs developed by Mr. Wilmot or other inventors. Devices in which precision was of great importance, for the most part. Bill raised his eyebrows. Didn't the import duties—

“Mr. Wilmot apparently thought not,” Mr. Dewsnap said. “He is—was—a very astute businessman, captain.”

“He would send the designs to Germany?” Bill said. “Those were the blueprints, I suppose?”

“I haven't seen the ones you're talking about,” Dewsnap said. “But—yes, that was the way it was done. The designs, and specifications. Chiefly for magic devices.” He paused. “To western Germany, of course,” he added.

Bill said, without emphasis, that he had supposed so. He went to talk briefly to the men who were going through files. One of them shrugged. “Did a good business,” he said. “What are we looking for?” Bill could not tell them that, beyond what they knew of that. “Anything that doesn't fit,” he said. “Incidentally—if you come across personnel records of a man named John Baker, I'd like to see them. Some stuff seems to be missing.” He got an, “O.K., captain.”

From the floor below, on his way elsewhere, he looked up at the window of the office on the mezzanine. Mr. Dewsnap was looking down intently. Bill raised a hand, but Dewsnap did not appear to notice it. He was looking, Bill realized, not at a departing detective but at a man who had just come through the door from the street. Bill looked at the man.

The man was of medium height, medium build. There did not seem to be anything in his appearance to occasion the intent scrutiny Dewsnap was giving him. Nevertheless, on the chance, Bill himself committed a face to memory—a long face, thinnish, an almost imperceptible scar-tracing running diagonally through the left eyebrow, irregular teeth. Hair, gray. Bill had passed the newcomer by then, but the picture remained with him. Hair, not altogether gray. Probably had been red.

For an instant, Bill checked his stride. Then he resumed it. It was true that, some years before, the man he had just passed probably had had red hair. So, however, had a very considerable minority of the population, even if red-haired mannequins were not included. Still—

He crossed the street to a drugstore, made a telephone call. He sat at a soda counter, drank coffee, watching the entrance to the Novelty Emporium. After about ten minutes, a man came in and bought cigarettes. He lighted one. He became interested in a display of pocket-size reprints. He was a man with time on his hands—time to waste. Well, Bill thought, he was almost certainly wasting it. Bill smiled to himself. Pam North would be pleased, when he told her. She had thought red hair so important.

Bill retrieved his car and drove across town to a residential hotel in the Chelsea area. Mr. John Baker was not in. Several people had been trying to get in touch with him.

The hotel was small; it was well kept. Bill indicated that he might be looking for a place to stay, perhaps for several weeks. A room with bath, by the week or, possibly, by the month? A very pleasant room, in the rear, where it was quiet, would cost a hundred and twenty-five a month. A room similar to Mr. Baker's? Quite similar. Mr. Baker did, of course, have a corner room. Such a room, if one were available—none was, at the moment—would naturally cost a little more.

Bill would let him know. He would get in touch with Mr. Baker at his office.

It appeared that Mr. Baker had a private income or a very small appetite. He was spending considerably more than half his salary for lodging. It also appeared, at the moment, that Mr. Baker had no past. It was possible, of course, that he was carrying his past in his pocket.

Bill went back to his office. Sergeant Stein had been efficient, and lucky. The Maine state police had been efficient, and cooperative. Stein stopped typing his report and gave Weigand an oral summary.

At about one in the morning of July 28, 1940, Arthur Monteath had been alone in his cottage, near the sea, near Pemaquid. He had been awakened by the sound of someone trying to force the door—someone who, apparently, had thought the cottage empty. Confronted, the man had turned threatening. Monteath had fired one shot from a .32 automatic, intending to miss, to frighten. But, half asleep, nervously upset because of his wife's sudden illness—for whatever reason—Monteath had not missed. He had shot the intruder through the forehead. Discovering what he had done, he had at once telephoned the police, told them the story, produced a permit for the pistol.

There had been nothing, no uncertainty in the story, no physical evidence, to lead to doubt. There is no law which says a man may not defend his home, himself. All that Monteath said, all he showed in manner, convinced the police that only a warning shot had been intended. Monteath had not been arrested, there had been no court action.

The dead man had been identified as Joseph Parks, twenty-four years old. He had lived in New York. He had a police record—juvenile delinquency, 1932; a charge of grand larceny, 1936, acquitted; extortion, 1938, sentenced to three years, on parole at time of death. There was nothing to make it improbable that he had taken to burglarizing summer cottages. He had never been a particularly successful outlaw.

Mrs. Monteath had, as Mrs. Wilmot had said, died in a Portland hospital the morning of the twenty-ninth. She had had a heart attack at the cottage, and a second at the hospital. She had been twenty-eight years old. The Monteaths had been married only two years.

“Things piled up on the poor guy,” Stein said.

Weigand agreed that they had indeed. And it was, presumably, of those few tragic days in late July of 1940 that Byron Wilmot had elected to remind Monteath. Or—had he?

“Parks have red hair?” Bill asked. “Look like this mannequin of Wilmot's?”

Stein had not seen the mannequin. Neither had Bill Weigand, and the Norths' description had not been detailed—beyond the red hair. Stein went through his notes. He shook his head. Parks had been a heavy-set young man, black-haired, ruddy complexion.

“How did they identify Parks?”

“Prints. Oh yes—somebody who'd known him showed up. Man named”—he returned to the notes—“Behren.” He spelled it. “Alexander Behren.”