Curtain for a Jester (7 page)

“Well,” the doctor said. “He's dead enough. Got him in the heart or close to it. Lost consciousness within seconds; probably died within seconds. You want an estimate?”

“Right,” Bill said. “The usual.”

The doctor looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past eleven.

“After midnight,” the doctor said. “Before—oh, say six.”

They waited. Dr. Foynes was a cautious man. He felt them waiting.

“Narrower?” he said.

“If you can, doctor,” Bill said.

“Never give up, do you?” Foynes said. “All right—between two and four, at a guess. With margin of error as indicated. Death almost at once after the wound—probably. Didn't move around much—probably. Stabbed from in front by right-handed person—probably. Conceivably, from a quick look, he could have done it himself. No hesitation marks I can see, though. Suspicious death.”

“Very,” Bill said, looking at Wilmot.

“No prints on the knife,” Rothman said. “We got that far. Prints all over everything else. Been a lot of people around recently. Looks as if—”

“He had a party last night, captain,” one of the precinct detectives said. He had just come in from the foyer. He had waited. “Maybe twenty-thirty people here. Two from an apartment in the building. Name—” he checked his notebook—“name of North,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. Gerald.”

“Right,” Bill said. He was not surprised. Rothman raised eyebrows at him.

“You'll be in charge, lieutenant?” the assistant district attorney said. “Of your side, I mean, of course.”

“Inspector O'Malley,” Weigand told him. “You know that, counsellor.”

“Oh,” the attorney said. “Sure. Well, get us something, lieutenant.”

“Captain,” Mullins told him. “Captain, counsellor.”

“All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, but his lips twitched toward a smile. “We'll do what we can, counsellor.”

The assistant district attorney went toward the door. The detective from the District Attorney's Homicide Bureau went with him.

“Sometimes,” Rothman said. Bill Weigand said, “Right.”

“You start with the squeal?” Rothman said. It was rhetorical—the police department started everywhere, with photographs, with fingerprints, with the patient work of a score of men, if necessary of a hundred men. It started with laboratory reports, and interviews, and searches into the past. It started everywhere. But it started also with the “squeal,” which was to say the complaint, which was to say Pamela North.

The photographers were packing up. The sketch artist looked at his work, looked at the room, changed a line. He checked a measurement. The fingerprint men had worked their way into another room. All this went on without the need of direction; it had begun when Weigand, hearing Pam North's receiver cradled, had waited a moment and made the first of several calls which started the machinery. Much more would go on, now the starter had been pressed.

“Come on, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said.

They went down in the elevator to the fourth floor. They went to a door which was familiar and pressed a doorbell.

“Hello, squeal,” Bill Weigand said to Pamela North. “This time you found quite a body.”

He and Mullins went in.

IV

Thursday, 12.05 PM. to 1:25 P.M.

The strangest thing, Pamela North insisted, was that the dummy had had red hair. At that, Sergeant Mullins sighed audibly.

“All right,” Pam said, in answer. “Why did it? Give me one good reason.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “The hair had to be some color. Black, brown, gray, platinum blond.”

“It was a male dummy,” Pam said. “Not platinum. Who ever saw a dummy with red hair?”

Bill Weigand had, he said. He had seen a lot of them. Dummies in show windows, wearing the latest things in things; with red hair, sometimes with green hair.

She was not, Pam said, talking about fashion dummies in shop windows. They, of course, might have red hair—or green hair. But they were different. They were made to
look
like dummies in show windows, and to go with clothes. Whereas, this was meant to look like a man. That, she said, was the point.

“This one was meant to be somebody,” she said. “Else why the red hair?” But when she looked at her husband, at Bill Weigand, last of all at Mullins she saw only doubt in faces. “You don't think so?” she asked Bill.

“No,” Bill said. “I think the dummy was just a gag. Intended to enliven the party.”

“Then why kill it twice?” Pam asked. “Shoot it once, defenestrate it once.”

“I wish,” Jerry said, “you would use some other word.”

“It just keeps coming out,” Pam said. “It's a surprise to me, really. What—”

The bell rang, announcing someone at the door of the Norths' apartment. The man at the door was large, he looked sleepy. He said, “Excuse me, is Captain Weigand here?” and then, with Weigand produced, “Fox, sir. Eighth precinct. About this damn dummy. I talked to him”—he jerked a thumb toward the ceiling, toward the penthouse—“about it. They”—he jerked the same thumb in the same direction—“said you were the one to tell about it.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Go ahead, Fox.”

Sergeant Fox went ahead.

“You didn't see him?” Weigand asked, when Fox had finished. “Talked to him through the door. At about two-thirty this morning?”

“Yes. I'd know his voice if I heard it again.”

“He said he was Wilmot?”

“That's right, captain.”

“Then you won't hear his voice again, Fox. He said the dummy had fallen off the terrace by accident?”

“Yes sir. I tried to get him to open up but—well, he sounded drunk, sir. It looks now as if I should have made him open up but—well, I didn't, captain. It didn't seem that important, nobody being hurt. Figured they could send somebody around later to get a statement and give him a summons or whatever.”

It didn't matter, Weigand told him. It gave them a time. Wilmot was alive at two-thirty. He was drunk. It cleared up the question of the falling dummy.

“Mr. Fox,” Pam North said, “the dummy did have red hair, didn't it?”

Fox said, “M'am?”

“Red hair,” Pam said. “You saw it.”

Fox looked at Weigand. Weigand nodded.

“There was a red wig in the—the debris,” Fox said. “I suppose it came off the dummy.” He waited. He said, “Anything else, sir?”

There wasn't, for the moment. He could go home and back to bed. He went.

“If there's a red-haired man in it somewhere,” Pam said, “it would all tie together, wouldn't it?” She looked around. “Well,” she said, “it might.”

Without that, Bill said, they had enough. He counted on his fingers:

A young woman named Martha Evitts, who had been cruelly held up to ridicule at the party; who had reappeared that morning; who had been at least some minutes in the penthouse; who had left in excitement; who had not reported her employer's murder.

“She was terrified,” Pam said. “You don't even know she was in the penthouse.”

“No?” Bill said. “What terrified her, then?”

Pam thought; Pam said, “We-e-ll.” They waited. “All right,” Pam said, “it doesn't prove she killed him. Anyway you say he was dead by then. Long dead. Why would she go back?”

“Right,” Bill said. “We don't know, of course. We'll ask.”

He resumed counting.

There was the man who had dressed as a small boy. The man named Baker. He had been angry at the—joke?

The Norths thought he had. Pam was sure, further, that he was in love with Martha Evitts.

There was Wilmot's divorced wife.

“A snake in her bed,” Pam said. “Didn't she say that, Jerry?”

She had.

There was Wilmot's nephew. Bill looked at Mullins, who looked at his notes. “Clyde Parsons.” He had come to a party not knowing it was a party, which had been a joke on him. What might underlie that they had yet to discover.

“He got drunk,” Jerry said. “Got drunk very quickly. He's a nasty drunk, I think.”

“There were a dozen others,” Pam pointed out. “More than a dozen. A girl in a white dress which looked like somebody's original, and a man with a big nose—I just remember him—and the comic butler, except he probably was just hired for the occasion.”

Bill shook his head at that. The butler was named Frank-Sylvester Frank. He had been, years before, a comic butler, free-lancing at parties. But for five years he had been Wilmot's butler, prankish only for Wilmot's guests.

“Wilmot wanted a monopoly, apparently,” Bill said. “We've sent a man for him. Of course, there's no particular reason to suppose the murder grew out of the party.”

“It must have,” Pam said. “It was the kind of party it would.” She considered the sentence. “Grow out of,” she added, cleaning it up. “I mean—”

“Yes, Pam,” Jerry told her.

“There was Mr. Monteath,” Pam said, and Jerry ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. Jerry said, “Listen, Pam.” He said, “Monteath is a second secretary or something. Maybe a first secretary. He's just come back after ten years in Europe; hadn't seen Wilmot in that long. Also, he left here last night while Wilmot was still alive. We know that.”

Bill raised eyebrows. Jerry told him how they knew. Bill nodded.

“The only thing is,” Pam said, “he killed the dummy. The first time, I mean.” There was a long moment of silence. “Well,” Pam said. “I suppose all of you are right.”

The doorbell rang again. Mullins half rose; stopped and looked somewhat sheepish. “Regard this as a squad room,” Jerry told him, and Mullins attended the door.

“I was told—” John Baker said, and spoke uncertainly. Dressed as a man, Pam North thought, he still looked boyish. His face was round, pink from recent shaving. His expression candid. Even if they were the same age, Pam thought, he would for years look younger than Martha Evitts, which was unfair. “I came to see whether—” Baker said doubtfully, and stopped again. “My name's Baker,” he said, and this with more assurance. “I thought perhaps—”

“There might be something you could do?” Bill Weigand said. “I don't know, Mr. Baker. Is there?”

“I'm sorry,” Baker said. “I don't suppose so. Captain Weigand?”

“Right,” Bill said.

“We felt at the place,” Baker said. “That is, I mean Mr. Wilmot's place. The Emporium, you know?” Weigand nodded. “That someone ought to—well, to see whether there was anything we could do. To help, you know.” He looked expectant, but Weigand waited. “We could hardly believe it when we heard.”

“No,” Bill said. “How did you hear, Mr. Baker?”

When Mr. Wilmot did not telephone the Emporium at nine-thirty, which he always did when he was not going in, and still had not called almost two hours later, someone had telephoned the apartment. Mr. Dewsnap.

Weigand repeated the name, doubt in his tone.

“Mr. Dewsnap is the manager,” Baker said. “Someone—a policeman, I think—told him what had happened.” He paused. “Was Mr. Wilmot really—
murdered?
” Baker said then. His tone put marks of quotation around a strange, improbable word.

“Yes,” Bill said.

“You don't know by whom? Why?”

“Not yet,” Bill said.

“He was such a jolly sort of man,” Baker said. “Full of fun, you know? It doesn't seem possible. It really doesn't, captain. Not to any of us.”

“It seldom does, Mr. Baker,” Weigand said, and Pam North said, “Won't you sit down, Mr. Baker?” He looked at her. “We met last night,” Pam said. “At the party. You were dressed up as a little boy and the pretty girl with you—Miss Evans, wasn't it?—”

“Miss Evitts,” Baker said.

“Of course,” Pam said. “As a witch. So—” She paused. She looked at Bill Weigand, who smiled slightly with his eyes, whose eyes said, “Yes, Pam, I remembered.”

“One of Mr. Wilmot's jokes,” Baker said. “We—we certainly fell for it, didn't we?” He smiled, somewhat ruefully; a man remembering when he had been the butt of a famous jest. He sobered. “When you think that all the way home—to Miss Evitts's, I mean—we were laughing about it.” He shook his head, noting the irony of laughter under such conditions.

“You took it so well,” Pam told him. “I'm afraid most people—for example Jerry and I—” she indicated Jerry, for the record—“would have been—put out.”

“Oh,” Baker said, “we both know-knew-Mr. Wilmot. If you knew him, you couldn't be—put out, as you say. But—this doesn't help, does it?” The last was to Weigand.

“Well,” Weigand said, “while we're on the subject. You and Miss Evitts left the party together? You took her home? When was that, about?”

“Why—” Baker said, and paused. He looked at Weigand for a second, his face blank. “Oh,” he said. “We left, I'd say, a little after one. You were getting ready to go then, Mrs. North. Wouldn't you say a little after one?”

“Yes,” Pam said.

“We found a cab and I took Martha home,” Baker said. “She lives up near Columbia. It was—oh, almost two when we got there, I think. She lives with two other girls in an apartment, and I went to the door with her. Then I went home. That is, I'm living in a hotel down in the Chelsea area. Convenient to the shop, you know. I went down by subway and I got in—oh, about two-thirty. The clerk will know, because I had to pick up my key.” He stopped. “Is that what you wanted to know, captain?” he said. “You don't think either of us—?”

“We have to check on everybody,” Weigand told him. “By the way—Mrs. North has told me about the masquerade costumes you and Miss Evitts wore. She got the impression that you were quite upset about it. Even angry, perhaps. You say you weren't?”