Death of a Tall Man (20 page)

“Those damn pilot lights,” the detective had said. “Half the time somebody decides to bump himself off with gas he forgets the pilot light. And the whole place blows up. They never learn.”

It was not entirely clear who never learned. As nearly as Pam could work it out, the detective seemed to mean that the people who committed suicide never learned. It seemed, Pam told Jerry, an odd thing to reproach them with.

The taxicab had got them to Charles by the time Pam finished her account. They decided that, in view of everything, they deserved cocktails, and they watched thirstily while Gus twirled gin, and a very little vermouth, with a great deal of ice. They beamed at Gus when he had finished and drank with thirst. Jerry, lifting the brim-filled glass, found that his hand was shaking a little.

“But why Oakes?” Jerry said then, putting the glass down on the bar. “What did he have against the doctor?”

Pam put her glass down, regarded it a moment and then turned her regard to Jerry.

“I suppose that's the simplest,” she said. “Suicide before the police got him.” She considered. “You'd think he'd have waited until they were—well, closer,” she said. “He was in an awful hurry, if that was it.”

“Panicked,” Jerry suggested, and returned to his glass. “Why? Why did he kill the doctor?”

“Why,” Pam said. “And how? Of course, he might have a motive like Mr. Weber's.” Jerry opened his eyes and waited. She told him about Mr. Weber. “Except,” she said, “it would be a rather remarkable coincidence. Two men in the same fix.” She considered again; she finished her glass. “Of course,” she said, “there's no denying there's another theory.”

Jerry emptied his glass, looked at it, looked at Gus and raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the empty glasses, and then looked at Pam again.

“Yes,” he said. “Naturally. Somebody knocked him out, turned on the gas and left him there. The same one as before. Because—well, I suppose because Oakes knew something, too.” He considered that. “Our man—or woman—must have been mighty careless about who was looking,” he said. Then, because Pam was looking beyond him and beginning to smile, he turned on his stool.

“Oh, hello, Bill,” Jerry said. “Imagine meeting you here.”

“Right,” Bill said. “It's a small world.” He looked beyond Jerry, and smiled. “You look very well, Pam—considering,” he said. “All right. Let's have it.”

Pam North let him have it. It took time; they left the bar, found a table, interrupted themselves to eat, sat with cigarettes and coffee afterward as the tempo of the restaurant slackened—as John went by from the bar to the waiters' dining room with a glass of beer in his hand, and came back from it with his hands empty; as Gus went by with his glass of beer.

“So,” Pam said, “we can boil it down. Dunnigan—nothing. Flint—I don't know. He's a sorehead. Perhaps he got an offhand, hurried examination. But he'd think so anyway. Weber—he apparently got a careful, unhurried examination and learned that he was going blind. And Dr. Gordon refused—or didn't offer—to connect his blindness with an accident where he worked, so that Weber doesn't get insurance. And Oakes blew up.”

Weigand nodded slowly and said, “Right.”

“Actually,” he said, “I don't know what you were after. Do you?”

She was, Pam told him, after something strange. Anything strange.

“Not, of course, as strange as being blown up with Mr. Oakes,” she added. “That was stranger than I'd expected.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Oakes. Oakes died of gas poisoning, not of the explosion. Not of the fire. And in a couple of months he would have died of cancer. Behind his right eye. So he had reason enough to turn on the gas.”

Pam said “oh,” and shivered.

“On the other hand,” Bill said, “it is quite possible that someone got in, knocked him out and turned on the gas for him. Taking the chance, obviously, that he wouldn't recover consciousness before the gas got him. A considerable chance.”

“Can't they tell?” Jerry wanted to know. Bill Weigand shook his head. He said it was doubtful, because of the damage done to the body by the explosion and, afterward, by the fire. He said they were trying to tell. He pressed a cigarette out in the ashtray and almost at once lighted another.

“The chances are he killed himself because he was sick,” he said. “Not because he was guilty of murder and afraid of being caught. The chances are that Weber—you got more than we did from him, Pam—is merely the quiet, beaten little man you thought he was. But it is true we can make out a motive. The chances are that Flint is merely a sorehead, and would have complained no matter what kind of treatment he got.” He paused. “The chances are that young Gordon killed his stepfather,” he said. “In a fit of—‘uncontrollable irritation,' call it: And has tried to cover up since.”

“But,” Pam said, “you aren't satisfied.”

Bill Weigand smiled at her and shook his head.

“Chiefly because I can't see him killing the girl,” he said. “And a guy I talked to can't. He's not very much taken with the idea that Gordon would have killed his stepfather. He's less taken with the idea he would have killed again. And he's supposed to know about that sort of thing. Combat-fatigue cases are easily irritated—sure. But he can't remember one who's been irritated enough to kill anybody. Particularly one as far along toward recovery as Gordon seems to be. But—give a motive and lack of control—well, maybe. He would hesitate to predict.”

“Sounds like a doctor,” Jerry said.

“Right,” Bill said. “He is a doctor.”

None of them said anything for a moment.

“I still wish it could be Mr. Smith,” Pam said. “I think he's—ideal.”

Bill smiled and shook his head. Then he said one word. “How?”

“All right,” Pam said, “erase him. How about Mrs. Gordon? How about this—friend of hers?”

“Westcott,” Bill said. “Lawrence Westcott.”

“How about both of them?” Jerry said. “In the tradition. Wife and lover do in husband.”

Bill Weigand nodded.

“That one Heimrich will buy,” he said. “He'd like to buy it. And—he's beginning to think he can pay for it. Westcott and the lady went around together a good deal. Quite a good deal. Neighbors noticed. She's a lot younger than Gordon was. Westcott's nearer her age. He has more time, and apparently likes to spend it with her. And—I think he had lunch with her yesterday and went along with her on, anyway, part of her shopping trip.”

“Look,” Pam said, “no woman's going to buy a new hat just before she and her lover kill her husband.”

Jerry shook his head at that. He didn't, he said, see why not. Women would, as far as he could see, buy hats any time.

“A pickup,” he said. “Like a pill. Benzedrine. Probably very stimulating to murder.”

“Jerry!” Pam said, with reproach.

Bill Weigand smiled at both of them.

“Possibly,” he said, “they figured that a little shopping expedition would look very innocent, just then. That we'd figure the way Pam does.”

Pamela North was not content and murmured slightly. Then she made a small motion, indicating tentative acceptance, with her shoulders.

“All right,” she said. “How, then?”

That, Bill told them, was no problem—at least at the moment. There was nothing to indicate that Westcott had not been free during the crucial time. Since he was, they thought, with Mrs. Gordon, he could not obviously have any alibi except one she would give him. Which they needn't buy. Since she would presumably have a key to the back door of the offices, he presumably could get it—with her knowledge or without it. He could go in, taking a chance on being seen—ready to call the whole thing off if he was seen. He could kill Dr. Gordon in the doctor's private office, go through the examining rooms or along the corridor—probably the former, since the rooms gave cover—and go out the back door again. Taking the chance of being seen when, now, it would matter a great deal. But taking no greater chance than many murderers took. He could then meet Mrs. Gordon at some place prearranged, tell her the job was finished, send her to the office to play the shocked and grieved wife; himself go home to North Salem. Or, if she were not in it, not see her after the killing and let her shock and grief be real. Always, either way, planning to marry her and, through her, Dr. Gordon's money.

“Was there a lot of money?” Pam said. “And does he need it?”

“Plenty,” Bill said. “Not particularly, as far as Heimrich's got. But that sort of checkup takes time. Just as it's taking time to find out about the trust fund—Dan Gordon's money. All we've got so far is that it's shrunk all right—just as Smith said. Smith's cooperating fully, incidentally. Shaking his head and looking shocked and saying ‘tut, tut' at appropriate intervals.”

“What I want to know,” Pam said, “is why I don't like Mr. Smith unless it's because he's the murderer?”

They both looked at her. Jerry ran his right hand through his hair.

“Pam!”
he said. He considered. “You don't like the way he wears his hair,” he suggested. “You don't like his voice. You think he's too fat.”

Pam shook her head. She said he wasn't fat. She said he wore his hair short and straight up, to which she didn't object. “Although,” she said, “it makes him look a little like a brush.” She guessed she just didn't like him.

“I never thought of his looking like a brush,” Bill said. “However—I guess you can't have him, Pam. Alibis are a nuisance.”

Bill smiled at her.

“By the way,” he said, “if you want to worry about something profitable, I'll give you something. Where did Dr. Gordon's glasses go? And why did they go there?”

“Go?” Pam repeated. “Didn't they just get broken—the way glasses do?”

Bill Weigand shook his head. Not, at any rate, in Dr. Gordon's office. Because, no matter how carefully the pieces had been picked up, there would have been traces. Tiny fragments, invisible to the eye—but recoverable when the floor was cleaned properly by the police, and the dust and lint examined under microscope. And no glass had been recovered.

They thought about that for a moment.

“You know,” Pam said, then. “I think somebody's going out of his way to make it hard for us.”

Bill and Jerry agreed that somebody was. They pushed the table back and stood up. Then Hugo came to them to tell them that Lieutenant Weigand was wanted on the telephone. Weigand went rapidly, and the Norths less rapidly, toward the front of the restaurant. Jerry paid the check and they waited. Bill was gone only briefly.

“Mullins,” he told them. “Checking on Westcott. He was with Mrs. Gordon—a girl in one of the shops identified his photograph. And—he didn't go back to his office yesterday afternoon. He left a little before one and didn't return. So—you can have him, Pam.”

They went out. They picked up a newspaper at the corner of Tenth Street. The murder was below the first page fold. Near it, also below the fold, was the story of Robert Oakes's suicide. There was nothing in it about Pam North; there was reference to an as-yet-unidentified woman who had been taken to Bellevue, suffering from superficial injuries and shock. And there was a picture of Oakes and a description in some detail—a description dropped in for color. He had been very tall—well over six feet—and disproportionately thin. Everybody in the neighborhood knew him by sight. “As Chesterton once said of himself,” the rewrite man had tossed in, “if they didn't know, they asked.”

“Did he?” Pam said to this. “Why?”

“He was noticeable, too,” Jerry said. “For other reasons. He may have said something like that. Look, it's raining.”

Because it was raining, Bill Weigand took the Norths home in the police car. They, Jerry told him with determination, were going to stay at home. The office could struggle on without him. He was not certain that Pam could.

Bill grinned and waved at them and drove off. He decided to look in on the accountants who were checking on the Gordon trust.

The accountants were deep in it. They were checking figures; they were comparing lists with stock certificates and bonds from safe deposit boxes which Nickerson Smith, cooperative to the last detail, had opened for them. And the overall picture was clear—much of the money which the first Mrs. Gordon had left to her son, invested in securities as stable as human ingenuity could provide, had been reinvested in other securities—stocks, chiefly—which had lacked stability. The depression had emphasized that lack.

“Good intentions. Bad judgment,” one of the accountants told Weigand. “As far as we've gone. Of course, we have to guess at the intentions. They don't have to have been good. If somebody wanted to, he could have made a nice thing out of substituting here and there—buying outright on the market—lower grade stuff. Selling the good stuff and keeping the change.”

“Which could have got somebody in the clink,” Weigand pointed out.

The accountant shrugged. If you could prove it, it would. Things like that were hard to prove. They might later, or might not, find something more concrete. They went back to it.

Bill Weigand left the accounts and went to Nickerson Smith's inner office. Smith was dictating to a young woman with red hair. Wiegand started to apologize, but Smith would have none of it. He stood up, and the red-haired girl stood up with him. He had a desk lighter flaring as Bill reached for a cigarette from an offered case. The case was discreet leather; the lighter a silvered mechanism set in a curve of dark green stone. The chair to which Smith gestured Weigand was deep and comfortable. Smith was very substantial, very affable. And it was true that his hair did make him look a little like a brush, as Pam had said. Weigand had not remembered that Smith was so brushlike.