Death of a Tall Man (16 page)

Nobody had anything to say to that. Smith looked at all of them, said morosely and to nobody in particular that it was water under the bridge, and went off with a guiding trooper. They looked after him for a moment. Pamela's gaze was oddly speculative. She continued to regard the place where Mr. Smith had been for some time after the others had turned away.

“You look,” Jerry said, after they had contemplated her preoccupied face for a moment, “very speculative. Like Teeney when she sees a cigarette package, which maybe somebody will empty for her.”

Pam started. She looked at Jerry and said, “Oh!”

“Well,” she said, “I do want him.”

“Hey!” Jerry said.

“Platonically,” Pam said. “As a murderer. Is that platonic?”

Bill Weigand shrugged. Not platonic, he thought. “Hopeless” was the word.

“Don't set your heart on him, Pam,” he said. “Because he couldn't have killed Gordon. And whoever killed Gordon, killed the nurse.” He paused. “I hope,” he added, with some fervor.

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Heimrich said. “No doubt about it.” He was relaxed, contented. “So you can work it out all nice and clean for both of us, Weigand. We'll make the motions and you do the work.” He was almost purring. “Different from that other time,” he said. “This time you shake the tree and we'll catch the apples. O.K.?”

“Right,” Weigand said, “and I think we'll leave you to your motions, Lieutenant.”

“O.K.,” Heimrich said, still contented. “You'll hear from us.” He smiled at Weigand, and his smile was a police smile. “Naturally,” he said, “we'll do a little tree shaking, too.” He regarded the ceiling momentarily. “Starting with Mrs. Gordon,” he said. “And her boy friend. If he is.”

“The neighbors might know,” Pam North suggested.

Heimrich regarded her.

“Why, Mrs. North,” he said. “You wouldn't want us to listen to gossip, would you?” He was heavily jocose; it was a joke.

“Personally,” Pam North said, “I like gossip. As long as it isn't trivial.”

The Norths were home, Bill Weigand thought—with that just perceptible twinge of uncertainty which was so often a concomitant to making up one's mind about Pam and Jerry North. Dorian was home, he knew, having just talked to her. He pushed that thought away; he pushed away the thought that it would be better to be with her. He whistled a bar or two of Sullivan's music and thought of Gilbert's lyrics. For a couple of laymen—He looked at his watch, and learned what he could have guessed. It was getting on toward three o'clock-three o'clock in the morning. Another song came back into his mind, which was an indication that his mind was tired. And it was less applicable; they hadn't danced the whole night through. They had driven through the night, guided by a radio car which was trailing another car, they had found a sick man and a dead woman; a man in tweeds and a wife unprostrated by grief, and a little girl asleep with bright hair strewing her pillow. And they had wallowed back through fog. Weigand's eyes were as tired as his mind. He ran a hand over them and held them closed a moment. Then he opened them and looked at his desk, and at the reports piled in front of him.

The report on Nickerson Smith was on top, and it told him nothing he had not already heard. From one fifteen certainly, from one ten probably, until he had taken the call from Nurse Spencer, he had been at his desk. That much of his story was true, and that was what was significant. So far as they had got, which was not far, the rest of his story was true, at least in its factual elements. He had been named co-executor with Andrew Gordon of the estate left by his sister, and Gordon's wife. The will did provide that the principal go to Dan Gordon on his twenty-fifth birthday. The rest of it was more obscure and would require further enquiry—laborious, careful enquiry by accountants. Presumably this enquiry would show that the estate had wasted badly; if Nickerson Smith had a motive for lying about that the motive was surpassingly obscure. The enquiry might show that Gordon had lost the money; whether by financial incompetence, bad luck or chicanery there might be a way of telling. It might show that the fault—if there had been fault—was Smith's. His motive for lying at that point need not be obscure.

Weigand conjured a picture of Smith into his mind. A solid, substantial man with a square face and a habit of looking at people he spoke to with an unwavering gaze. He had bristling gray hair—or did he have? The picture was not clear. Weigand passed the detail and sought the general effect. The general effect was a substantial businessman in his middle fifties, with no noticeable peculiarities. There was an additional factor to be considered—Mrs. Gerald North openly preferred him as the murderer. Weigand was impartial as he considered this; he weighed Pam's insight—if insight was what you called it, and Bill Weigand had given up being sure—against the facts. Pam had been right in the past. She had also been wrong. Her average was good. But the facts were against her.

Nickerson Smith was tempting, because you could give him a motive. But he was, so far as Weigand could see, unobtainable. Weigand dismissed the mental image of Nickerson Smith, put the report on him in the file basket and regarded the report on Mrs. Andrew Gordon. It was, he decided as he read it, rather interesting.

A waiter captain at Longchamps had been found who believed, without certainty, that he remembered Mrs. Gordon lunching there, coming in at some time around one. The picture they had showed him had helped. If the woman he was thinking of was Mrs. Gordon, it was true that she had seemed, at first, to be waiting for somebody. But, still if he was thinking of the right woman, she had not, as she said, waited fruitlessly. About ten minutes after she arrived—this was always if the woman the waiter captain was thinking of, was the woman they wanted him to think of—she had been joined by a man. The waiter captain did not go beyond that. There was a man and that was the end of it. It could be presumed that the waiter would have noticed if he had been an Indian with feathers, or an Indian with a turban. Failing these peculiarities, he was merely a gentleman who had joined a lady for lunch.

But, even so vaguely established, it was interesting. Presuming the waiter captain was remembering Mrs. Gordon, and Weigand thought he was, she had had a companion at the luncheon she had pictured as solitary. Her husband, after all? Or the tweed-covered Westcott? Or someone else? If it had been Dr. Gordon, it would be very interesting indeed.

From the restaurant she had, as she had said, gone to a Madison Avenue shop. There was no question about it this time; she was known there—and she had bought dresses for a little girl and had them mailed to an address in North Salem. But—and again this evidence was more assured—she had not been alone. There had been a man with her. He had merely stood and waited, not taking part in her decisions among the dresses offered. But he had certainly been there. And, as certainly, he remained vague. Again he was merely a man. Apparently, he had been unassertive, whatever—and whoever—he might have been. Dr. Gordon? But would he not have been interested in helping to pick out clothes for his little girl? Westcott? Or, again, somebody new?

And, after the shop which sold the dresses, Mrs. Gordon had gone to another shop which had sold her a hat. There was no doubt of the identification here. And, this time, she had mailed back to North Salem the hat she had been wearing and put on the new hat. But—this time there had been no man. They were sure of that at the shop. If there had been a man, it appeared, they would have noticed him.

The rest of the report made the already known, official. Bill. Weigand tossed the report into the file basket. There would be some new questions to ask Mrs. Gordon, when next she was asked questions.

Dan Gordon came next. The reports added little, as far as his actions went, to what they already knew—and did not either contradict or confirm what they had been told. Young Gordon had spent Sunday night at the Harvard Club and had left early. The elevator starter in the office building had said “oh yes, sure” when shown Gordon's picture, and had remembered seeing him come in some time between nine and ten—and remembered that he came down again a little later.

The same starter had remembered him coming into the lobby again, he thought a little before one, with a very pretty girl and thought they had stopped for a few moments to talk, letting one elevator go up without them. But this memory was vague; the starter supposed they had gone up together but, pressed, he admitted that this was only a supposition. “May just figure that people who come into the lobby always do go up,” the precinct detective who had made the investigation noted. At any rate, it appeared that Dan Gordon had not loitered, obviously, in the lobby waiting for his father to come down. But the lobby was busy, with offices emptying and refilling at the lunch hour. He might easily have hung around, unnoticed. Queried as to whether he had seen Dr. Gordon come down, the elevator starter threw up his hands. If it had been a little after one, then he had come with a swarm. There were outgoing swarms at a few minutes after twelve, minor swarms half an hour later, returning and departing swarms just before and just after one. That Dan Gordon was noticed at all was because his arrival, with the pretty girl, was during a comparatively slack period in lobby traffic. Which checked, Bill Weigand reflected. And the rest—proved nothing.

The Army in Washington, reacting to an urgent plea, confirmed and amplified what had been partially a guess. Dan Gordon had served as an infantryman in the ETO for two years, and had been around. He had been around where it was thick and he had been good—good enough to be commissioned in the field just before the German collapse. And there had been nothing wrong with him; he had been wounded once and had recovered and been sent back, and thereafter there had been nothing wrong with him. Then, in midsummer, when they were merely sweating it out, he had, unexpectedly, cracked up.

This was unusual, but not unprecedented. Almost nothing was unprecedented among the things which could happen to combat soldiers in a war like that. Gordon had been hospitalized and, in the course of time, returned to the States. Combat fatigue, but the prognosis had always been good. He had responded normally; late in the previous autumn he had been released from the hospital and, at his own request, from the Army. It was to be expected, the Army psychiatrists indicated, that he would continue to improve and that, within a year, he would be entirely normal. No treatment was indicated; time and peace could be expected to take care of things.

Bill Weigand made a note, tossed the report on Dan Gordon into the file basket and looked at his watch. After three, now. He ran a hand again across his tired eyes. He sat for a moment looking at nothing, tapping the top of his desk. He went back to it.

There was a brief report on Deborah Brooks—a report consonant with the brevity of her life. It seemed to tell them nothing the girl had not told them; it told them less—“said to be engaged D. Gordon” was an almost absurd summary of what her eyes said—what her whole face said—when she looked at “D. Gordon”; of what her foolish, impulsive actions had told them that afternoon and night. The report on Grace Spencer was longer, but it, too, told less than they knew. There was no hint in it of what the girl—whose body was now lying somewhere under glaring lights; was now no longer sentient, but merely a fact in an investigation—had revealed when she dropped her head on her arms after she had answered their questions and sobbed with a kind of hopelessness.

There was nothing on Lawrence Westcott, the attentive neighbor. Nothing had been known of Westcott when the Police Department—which meant unhurried, ingenious men in ordinary clothes, turning things over methodically—had started that community effort which would not end until, somewhere, at some time, a jury said: “We find the defendant guilty—” of whatever they found the defendant guilty of. In this instance, Weigand supposed, murder in the first degree would have to be the answer. Because of the nurse.

That would hang somebody—or send electricity through somebody. Not even Dan Gordon would beat a conviction on that. (The chair was another matter; in the end he would almost as certainly not go to the chair.) You could imagine circumstances which would make the first killing merely manslaughter. In connection with Dan Gordon, you could imagine those circumstances with little difficulty. But it would take stretching—very expert stretching, by a very expert defense—to make uncontrollable irritation, or whatever psychiatry chose to call it, cover the killing of Grace Spencer.

He was thinking a good deal of Dan Gordon, Weigand realized. It fitted very well; it was the way to play it. Which would, Bill Weigand realized, not suit Mrs. Gerald North. Bill smiled involuntarily when he thought of Mrs. Gerald North. It was too bad they weren't going to be able to work things out for her; work them out so Debbie Brooks and Dan Gordon had a chance to live happily ever after. But the chances were they weren't.

If there is much more of this, Weigand thought, blinking his eyes, it would have to go over until morning. He looked at his watch again. Morning was now; it would have to go over until he had slept a little. But there shouldn't be much more of it.

There were five reports clipped together. Those would be the reports on the afternoon compensation cases. There should be six. A note explained that. Two efforts had been made to talk to Robert Oakes, who lived on the East Side, not far from Stuyvesant Square. Oakes had not been at home. Another attempt would be made later.

The men who had been at home were Henry Flint, Fritz Weber, John Dunnigan, George Cooper and Jose Garcia. All agreed that they had been at the office the day before; all had employments and all argued that their work had led to eye ailments for which the insurance company should pay; all had been examined by Dr. Gordon for the first—and, as it turned out, the last—time that day. And even detectives, always suspicious in accordance with regulations, had found nothing about any of the five to connect them, in other than the most casual fashion, with Dr. Andrew Gordon. To them he had been a name and an address, and a time of day, handed them on a slip of paper; he had been an abstraction of science, wearing a white coat. On what he noted down on cards depended their immediate futures—perhaps more. But he, himself, was impersonal. Only what he wrote mattered.