Curtain for a Jester (14 page)

“Yes.”

He looked at her, his eyes again narrowing.

“You
are
a rather inconvenient person, Mrs. North,” he said. “You manage—or will manage—to focus a good deal of attention on me, I'm afraid.”

“You don't want that, do you?”

“It's inconvenient,” he said. “Not, suppose we say, according to plan. But none of it is, I'm afraid. It's all—”

“
John!
” Martha Evitts said. “You don't—you don't know anything about Mr. Wilmot?
Tell me!
”

“Why yes,” he said, “I know quite a bit about Mr. Wilmot. But—that isn't what you mean, is it?”

She shook her head, the soft hair swaying.

“No,” Baker said. “I didn't kill him, Martha. I'd have been the last man to do that, just now.” He smiled at her, and this time smiled more gently. “Not that he's a great loss,” he said. “To anybody.”

“You didn't go back to your hotel this morning,” Martha said. “I called and called. I was—you were so angry—so—so different. Because of what he did to us.”

“I was,” Baker said. “That was personal, Martha. We can't help having personal—” He stopped. “No,” he said, “I wasn't at the hotel. I went there but—it was necessary to leave again. But I didn't go to Wilmot's place. Not then. I rather wish I had.”

They both looked at him.

“Not to kill him,” he said. “He's no use dead.”

“Use?” Pam North said. “No use?”

“None at all,” Baker said. “Of course, that may have been the idea. Probably was.”

Pam didn't, she said, understand what he was talking about. She was told there was no reason she should; that none of it concerned her. “Directly,” John Baker added. It would be a good idea for her to remember that.

“It would be a very good idea,” he said, and again his voice had a peculiar lack of any emphasis whatever. “You don't want to get hurt.”

It was not a threat; it was no more than a statement—a statement of the obvious. But detachment can, in its fashion, be threatening.

“I—” Pam began, but John Baker did not listen. He put a hand on Martha Evitts's arm, and the touch did not seem to be a caress. He turned her toward the door. She said, “Wait, John, we can't—” but by then he had opened the door, was shaking his head.

“Come on,” he said. “There's nothing to do here.”

Martha did not obviously hold back against the compelling hand. But Pam North felt, nonetheless, that she went reluctantly with Baker, went with doubt and in uncertainty.

In the hall outside Baker turned to speak over his shoulder. He told Pam to take care of herself. It might have been a cliché of parting. Perhaps, Pam thought, that's all it is.

VII

Thursday, 4:55 P.M. to 6:10 P.M.

The telephone rang. Mullins reported from the Waldorf—Arthur Monteath was registered there, but did not answer his room telephone. John Baker was not to be seen in the public rooms. Should he have Monteath paged?

“No,” Bill said. “Leave a message. Ask him to give us a ring. All very polite, sergeant. Then come in.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I mean—”

“Right,” Bill said. “Come in.”

Bill returned to reports. The technical men, and the others, had finished at the Wilmot apartment, the door of which had then been sealed. Dust from the floors, from the furniture, was under microscopes. Fingerprints of a dozen people—of twenty—were being checked. The former occupant of the apartment was in the morgue, perhaps under knives of pathologists. Papers from the apartment—Bill's eyebrows went up. A man who had an office in Foley Square had appeared, had talked briefly with an assistant commissioner of police, had departed, taking with him the blueprints which had been among the papers, and certain of the carbons of Mr. Wilmot's correspondence.

The last will and testament of Byron Wilmot, if any, was not among the papers in his apartment. It was not in his private file at the Emporium. His lawyer's name had been. His lawyer had drawn up no will for Byron Wilmot. So far as the lawyer knew, Clyde Parsons was Wilmot's closest—indeed, his only—blood relative. If no will turned up, no closer relative—yes, Parsons would inherit. Bill changed the order of the reports, took up the one concerned with the movements of Clyde Parsons the night before.

A gap remained. Mr. Parsons disappeared from view at a little before two in the morning, when he went thirsty—if one could believe the bartender—from a grill in Eighth Street. He reappeared, something over two hours later, at the outside door of the building, west of Eighth Avenue, in which he rented a two-room flat. He appeared there, swaying, and found the outside door locked. He discovered, apparently, that he had lost his key.

“Locked after midnight,” the superintendent explained. “Got to in this neighborhood.” He had waved his hand to indicate a neighborhood which, to the enquiring detective, had looked quiet enough. The detective knew neighborhoods—

“Tenants got their own keys,” the superintendent said. “See?”

The detective saw.

“Except this guy Parsons, he's got to lose his key,” the superintendent said. “Got to lose it four o'clock in the morning. Got to stand there, leaning on the button, till he wakes me up.
And
the wife. So there he is, stinking drunk, saying something you can't make out about the key. And his coat. No coat either.”

“Topcoat, you mean?”

“What else'd I mean? No topcoat. So he thinks, as I make it out, the key was in the topcoat and—phooey. No hat, either.”

“You let him in?”

“Sure I let him in. He falls going upstairs. Man, was he drunk!”

“And that was?”

“Four-ten. Fifteen, maybe. Somewhere around there.”

The lost key unlocked not only the outer door of the building's entrance hall, but the door to Parsons's flat. The superintendent had climbed with Parsons—three flights—and let him in there. It had been, not in short, “a hell of a thing.”

“Seems to have been,” the detective had said, and gone to simmer it into a report.

So—two hours unaccounted for; a significant two hours; two hours which Parsons himself had been unable to account for. So—a missing topcoat Parsons had not mentioned. So—Parsons inherited, probably. There was twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty to inherit, to begin with.

Bill reverted to the report on that. The money had been in old bills. It could not in any fashion be traced. Inside the safe there had been Wilmot's fingerprints, recently made. There had been, further, a set of fingerprints, probably even more recently made, which were not Wilmot's. Nor were they the prints of the expert who had opened the safe. They were not the prints of anyone known to the New York City police. A code description of them had gone to Washington.

Bill Weigand looked at nothing, and let his fingers tap the desk. Somebody—but when?—had had his hands in Wilmot's safe. (The right hand, at any rate; three fingers of the right hand.) The somebody—but why?—had not been interested in twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars. Or, had there been more money there? Had part of the hoard been taken?

The questions were obvious. It would be pleasant, Bill thought, to find a few of the answers. He went on with it.

Sylvester Frank, Wilmot's servant—the butler who had trained himself to annoy, because he knew it teased—was as annoying now as he had ever been. He teased by the most simple method—that of complete disappearance. At a little after ten that morning he had gone to the penthouse. He had, obviously, found his employer dead. If he had done anything about this, it did not appear. He had gone from there. It was possible, but unlikely, that he had merely gone to look for another job. A pickup was out on him, he was wanted for questioning. Bill Weigand thought about him. He wondered whether, until then, he had thought enough about him. He read again what others had found out about Sylvester Frank.

Frank was thirty-four years old. He had been born in Hoboken. He had started as a waiter, in Hoboken, when he was nineteen. He had become a comic waiter some five years later. And, as a comic waiter, he had enjoyed a certain renown. He had made a very good thing out of insulting those he served; he had been inventive at it, and in demand at public dinners of a certain kind. Yet, five years before, he had abandoned a career which combined profit with innocent merriment, and had gone to work for Wilmot. It was to be assumed that he had been comic only at Wilmot's parties; it was unlikely that, dining alone, Wilmot had encouraged his servant to serve soup with a thumb in it. In short, Frank had abandoned a career and gone to work.

It would, Bill decided, be interesting to know why. It would be interesting to know whether Frank had, in the end, found his employer too trying to be put up with. It would be interesting to know what Frank had been about between two-thirty and, say, six that morning. But you cannot question a man you haven't caught. Bill put Sylvester Frank aside. He turned to Martha Evitts.

Miss Evitts had reached her uptown apartment a little before two, arousing one of her apartment mates, a girl who was “waked up by the least little thing.” The light sleeper, one Paula Thompson, had gone back to light sleeping, only to be again awakened, after about half an hour, by the sounds of Martha Evitts's departure from the apartment. “Where you going at this time of night?” Paula asked, but was not heard, or at any rate not answered. Martha had come back at about three-thirty, awakening Paula once more. Then, after breakfast—of which she ate little—Miss Evitts had disappeared, so it had been impossible for Paula to ask what had made her so restless in the night, or where she had gone in the night.

The telephone rang. Was this Captain William Weigand? Then, one moment please, Mr. Monteath was calling. After the moment, Bill confirmed his identity to Mr. Monteath, confirmed also that he had asked Monteath to telephone. He explained that, in connection with the unfortunate death of his friend Wilmot—

“Not my friend particularly,” Monteath said. “But go on, captain.”

The police liked, Bill went on, to find out all they could, even from people who knew little. He wondered whether he might stop by and see Mr. Monteath, and ask the few routine questions, necessary.

“Now?” Monteath said.

“Right,” Bill told him. “As good a time as any for me, Mr. Monteath.”

Monteath hesitated. He was at someone's office. He could not tell exactly when he would be leaving. If Captain Weigand was going to be at his own office for a time?

Indefinitely, Bill thought. For an hour or so, he told Monteath. Then, Monteath would come around as soon as he could manage. “Get it over with,” he said. “I want to get down to Washington tomorrow.”

“Right,” Bill said, and told him where to come.

Bill returned to the reports. The night clerk at John Baker's hotel had been pursued to his small room near the top of the building, near the elevator shaft, and, awakened from hot sleep, had remembered Baker's return that morning. Baker had got in at about twenty minutes after two, and had picked up his key.

But—Baker had not remained in. Fifteen minutes later he had gone out again, taking his key with him. He had not returned by the time the night clerk went off—of that the night clerk professed himself certain. “Probably accurate,” the precinct detective noted. “Have to pass the desk to get to elevator or stairs.” Bill pictured the hotel lobby in his mind. If the night clerk had been at his station, and awake, he would almost certainly have seen Baker, had Baker returned. It was not, however, a point provable beyond reasonable doubt. (They were a long way from a place where reasonable doubt mattered. Bill was not certain that they were, at the moment, getting appreciably closer.)

Bill remembered John Baker as he had come a little after noon—had come fresh-faced, open-faced, to offer his assistance, and that of the staff of the Novelty Emporium. Baker had not looked like a man who had spent the night out. He had been freshly shaved, had appeared rested. He could have been to a barber, obviously; he could be physically resilient. He could also have other lodging, or what amounted to other lodging. Baker, Bill Weigand decided, was becoming a man of discrepancies. It would be necessary, before long, to reconcile him.

Simultaneously, the telephone on Bill's desk rang and Sergeant Mullins came into the office. Bill acknowledged the arrival of Mullins, identified himself to the telephone. A voice said, “Saul Bessing, Bill.”

Bill Weigand said, “Hello, Saul. How are all the wonder boys?”

“Fine,” Saul said. “Just fine. How's good old Arty?”

“Inspector O'Malley,” Bill said with great formality, “is on a brief and well-earned leave.”

“Must make things nice and quiet,” Bessing said. “Hear you've got a tough one, Bill.”

“Um-m-m,” Bill said. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Saul said. “About that first print your people sent through to Washington. Negative, Bill.”

“Well, thanks,” Bill said. “You're quick about it.”

“Cooperation,” Saul said. “We always cooperate. Cooperation between the various agencies of law enforcement is the sine qua non of—”

“Come off it,” Bill said. “Washington goes to the trouble of hurrying things up. You go to the trouble of telephoning. In a rush to say you haven't got a print that went to Washington through routine channels—wait a minute. You do mean that?”

“What else?” Saul said. “In re, subject print. No information available.”

“You know, Saul. I rather like ‘available.' A nice evasive word.”

“And here,” Saul said, “we go to all the trouble of cooperating. And the thanks we get.”

“Look, Saul,” Bill said. “Tell me this much. You people are in on the Wilmot kill?”

“I hope not, Bill,” Saul said. “We all hope not. We hope it was a nice personal job—so somebody could inherit his money, say. Nothing we'd care about. Nothing that would have—well, let's say have ramifications.”