Curtain for a Jester (20 page)

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “But you don't have to say anything without a lawyer.”

“I know,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “Well—I didn't come straight home from the party, sergeant. I—”

She had, she said, tried to get Clyde into a cab with her, planning to bring him home to Forest Hills. That was true enough. He had wrenched away; that, also, was true. But, Mrs. Wilmot had not given up so readily.

She had followed him, in the cab. In the cab, she had waited outside barrooms. Once, when he had been in one bar for some time, she had started to go in and look for him, but by then he was coming out. He had been very drunk; apparently he had not even seen her.

Mullins looked at Parsons, who shook his head slowly.

“I don't remember any of this,” he said. “But—it's the sort of thing Trudie would do.”

“Anybody would do it,” she said, and went on.

She had kept the cab. “Of course, I had to make it worth the man's while.” From the last bar, Parsons had gone toward the apartment house where his uncle lived.

“Wait a minute,” Mullins said. “Did he have a coat on? A topcoat?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “I thought I told you that. Such a chilly night and I was afraid—well, that he'd just lie down somewhere and—”

Parsons groaned slightly.

But Parsons had not lain down somewhere, there to acquire pneumonia. He had gone, not steadily but persistently enough, back to the apartment house. Mrs. Wilmot had trailed him, seen him go in.

“There was another man there,” Mullins said. “Anyway, he says he was. Your hus—Mr. Wilmot's butler.”

“Sylvester,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “Was he? I didn't see him.”

That made it even, if Frank had told the truth. And if Mrs. Wilmot was telling it. They might both be; Frank might easily not have noticed a cab, following a little way behind a walking man, when his eyes were on the man.

When her nephew had gone into the apartment house, Mrs. Wilmot had paid off the cab driver, and gone in after him. She did not say why she did this; it was not necessary for her to say why. By the time she had reached the lobby it was empty. The elevator door was closed and she could hear the sound of the car's movement in the shaft. At first she thought the elevator had stopped at the fifth floor, since the indicator which should have marked its progress pointed there. But then she noticed that the indicator did not move, although the car, from the sound, still did. She was certain Clyde Parsons was in the elevator, and certain she knew where he was going.

“I knew he wouldn't do anything,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “But—Byron had been so mean to him and—”

“You can never tell what a drunk will do,” Clyde Parsons said from his chair. “There's no accounting for drunks.”

“Clyde,” Gertrude Wilmot said. “I
do
know. Anyway, what you wouldn't do.”

Clyde Parsons had been holding his head in both hands. He lowered his hands for a moment and smiled, a little crookedly. He put his hands back. He'd really tied one on, Sergeant Mullins thought, with sympathy.

Mrs. Wilmot had pressed the button to bring the elevator down. After some time, it came. She got into it and went up to the top floor, climbed the stairs toward the penthouse.

She met her husband's nephew coming down the stairs.

“Won't let me in,” Clyde said. “Want to get my coat and the old—” Mrs. Wilmot paused in her quotation, and evidently chose a word. “The old gentleman won't let me in. Says I didn't leave any coat. S'drunk, that's what he is.”

He might have been, Mullins thought. That fitted. On the other hand, the intoxicated notoriously see drunkenness around them. On another hand, there might be no truth in any of it.

“You left with Mr. Parsons,” Mullins said. “When you left the party, I mean. Did he have a topcoat then?”

“No,” Mrs. Wilmot said, quickly. “He didn't. I remember thinking he ought to have.”

“Another thing,” Mullins said, “you went up immediately after Mr. Parsons?”

“As soon as the elevator took him up and came down again.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “How long would you figure that was, Mrs. Wilmot?”

She paused, seemed to reckon.

“A minute or two,” she said.

Mullins also reckoned. “A minute or two” was obviously an underestimate. But even if one made it five minutes, over all, Parsons could hardly have been more than three minutes on the top floor and above, since part of her waiting time he would have spent in transit. It didn't look like being long enough—if she was telling the truth.

And it did explain the presence of the topcoat in the penthouse apartment, assuming Sylvester Frank had actually found it there.

“You don't remember any of this, Mr. Parsons?” Mullins said.

Parsons uncovered his face. He said, “No.” He shut out the light again with protecting hands.

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “Then what?”

Then, Mrs. Wilmot said, she and Parsons had gone down again. Outside the apartment house, she had again tried to persuade him to go home with her. But again he had wrenched away and gone off, and this time there was no convenient cab to help her. She had tried to follow him but, although his progress had not been steady, it had been rapid. She had lost him within a block or two. Only then—only some minutes after she had realized he had disappeared in the night, in the tangled streets of the Washington Square area—did she find a cab driver willing to make the long trip to Forest Hills.

“And I don't remember anything about the cab, I'm afraid,” she told Mullins.

It had come full circle; they still needed to find a taxicab which had made a trip. If one had, they would find it in the end.

Mullins considered. He looked at his watch, found that the time was almost eight-thirty. Parsons and Mrs. Wilmot would have to be talked to further; the captain would want to talk to them; the assistant district attorney of the Homicide Bureau would want to talk to them. But it was late, with no more than they had—with, specifically, no wedge of fact with which to crack the story—to take them in. Material witnesses or not, Mullins decided, they might as well spend the night in the comfortable house.

“The Loot—I mean the captain—will want to talk to you,” he told them both. “A lot of other people will. I could take you in and have you both booked as material witnesses. If I don't, will we find you here tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wilmot said. Mullins waited. “Sure,” Parsons said.

Mullins did not precisely leave it at that, although he left Mrs. Wilmot and Parsons in the comfortable house, in the chintz living room. Back in the police car, he used the car's radio telephone. The local precinct would provide a man to cover the Wilmot house for the night, to see that the birds remained nested. “Two men would be better,” Mullins said, “front and rear.” He was told that, if he wanted to be that sure, he had better take his people in.

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “One man, then.”

He drove back to Manhattan, stopping at a diner.

Weigand was not at the office of Homicide West. He expected to be back shortly; Mullins was to wait. Mrs. North had called, asking for the captain, then for Mullins.

“And,” the detective on duty said, “there's another thing. This man Frank you took in. He's out again. Lawyer showed up with a writ.”

Things like that were to be expected. “O.K.,” Mullins said. “We'll get him when we want him.”

“They say Frank seemed sort of surprised,” the detective said.

X

Thursday, 8:55 P.M. to 10:18 P.M.

It is absurd for a captain of detectives, Police Department, City of New York—even an acting captain—to get himself lost in the City of New York—even in the Borough of Brooklyn. It is true that Brooklyn, once the area around Borough Hall is uneasily ventured from, is a labyrinth for Manhattanites, best traversed with a lifeline trailing out behind. It is true that duty infrequently takes Acting Captain William Weigand across the East River, and that pleasure takes him there hardly more often, and then by the most direct route to Ebbets Field. It is nevertheless ridiculous for a police officer to get lost in his own city.

Against the realization that he was lost, Bill fought a dogged, rear-guard, action. It was not until he discovered that he had once more, and for the third time, got himself on what was too evidently the wrong side of Prospect Park that he decided to ask a policeman. It was some time before he found one, and he approached with the hope that he would not be recognized. After all, convertible Buicks are not standard equipment in the police department; Bill's was his own, operated by dispensation—and at considerable saving to the department. Of course, there was the matter of the auxiliary red headlights—

“Yes sir,” the patrolman said, and saluted. “What can I do for you, inspector?”

Patrolmen are expected to be observant. This one was, in addition, tactful—a policeman in plain clothes, in a Buick Road-master, might be expected to be an inspector. (Cadillac, chief inspector.)

Bill identified himself. He supplied the address he sought. It was something of a relief that the patrolman had to look it up in a small book; that, having found the name of the street, he looked at it with mild reproach.

“Can't say I blame you, captain,” he said. “Well—first thing, you get back to Flatbush Avenue. Then—”

Bill listened, and remembered. He gave thanks, U-turned, and followed directions. It was nevertheless almost nine-thirty when he stopped in front of a house—detached certainly, but rubbing shoulders with houses on either side—in a narrow street. The house was unlighted, so far as he could see from the curb. Mr. Dewsnap did not welcome with illumination.

Bill left the car and walked up to the glass-paneled door and pushed a doorbell button. There was no answering sound. He raised his hand to knock and lowered the fisted hand.

There was a light inside—a thin, hard pencil of light, sharply white. It moved this way and that, questingly, in a room to the right of the entrance hall. It was a furtive light, stealing about the room.

Bill Weigand raised his hand again and now knocked sharply on the door. The little light went out. There was no sound from inside.

Bill Weigand knocked again, and waited. He stood close to the door, with an ear to the glass panel. Faintly, now, he heard movement in the house. The sound was surreptitious, as the light had been.

Bill tried the door, and the knob turned. He tried to open the door quietly, but it stuck in the frame and, when pressure released it, it opened with a sharp, protesting sound. Then, in the dark house, Bill heard the footsteps of a hurrying man. Bill started toward the sound and ran into a chair and the chair toppled to bare floor. The crash of the chair on wood drowned out any other sound, if there was any other sound. Bill swore softly, and reached for a cigarette lighter. But he paused; there was no good reason for getting himself shot.

He groped along the wall, and found a doorway leading to his right. He felt along the wall near the door jamb and, after exasperating delay, found what he was after. He pressed the tumbler of the light switch and, as light came on, swung to flatten himself against the wall. And then he felt somewhat foolish in a bare entrance hall, empty of adversary—empty of almost everything; furnished only by a small table, with a telephone on it.

Then he heard the sounds again, and they came from the rear of the house.

“Dewsnap?” Bill called, and waited and got no answer. But then he heard another door being opened, somewhere. “Hold it,” he called.

The only answer was the sound of the door closing.

Bill switched on lights ahead of him and went toward the sound—went through what was evidently a living room, through a small dining room, into a kitchen beyond. He took his revolver from its shoulder holster as he went.

A kitchen door led out into the rear court. Bill opened the door, and the court was empty. But now, again, he heard footsteps.

They were the steps of a man hurrying, but not quite running, and the man was hurrying on cement—along the driveway between the house and the one next to it, toward the street. Bill ran down a short flight of wooden stairs, and along the driveway.

He reached the sidewalk and, as far as he could see in either direction, it was empty. Bill swore, realizing what had happened. The man, on reaching the sidewalk, had merely run to the next driveway—but to right? or to left?—and then down it to another rear court. And then, for all Bill knew, had gone over a fence.

It would be possible to spend the rest of the night chasing this quarry up and down driveways, over fences. Probably, it would be a waste of the rest of the night. Bill put his revolver back in the holster and went into the house by the front door. On the chance, he turned out the lights and stood by the door and looked out of it through the glass panel.

A car came along the street, slowly, eased into the curb in front of Bill's Buick, hesitated there for a moment. A man came out from between houses, crossed the sidewalk and got into the car, which started up immediately.

There was a street light there, and Bill saw the man's face; he saw, and memorized the license number of the car—a not recent Ford sedan.

So, he thought, John Baker was a jump ahead. He seemed quite a man to jump ahead.

Bill turned from the door and regarded the telephone. It would be interesting to see what happened if he directed a pickup of the Ford sedan. After thought, he decided against it.

“Is a puzzlement,” Pamela North said, quoting the king of Siam, without permission of the copyright owners. “There's too much of everything.” She used fingers to note those things of which there was too much, one finger for each superfluity. “Mr. Monteath killing the first burglar,” Pam North said. “Mr. Behren, with an ‘H' being killed in New Guinea, but Mr. Barron with two ‘R's' being at the party and being the other Mr. Behren. Mr. Frank finding Mr. Parsons's topcoat, but I don't believe for a minute there was blood on it.”