Death of a Tall Man (35 page)

“I—” she said and found she could not go on. She looked at Pam, her eyes intent, her eyes seeking help.

“Why frightened?” Bill Weigand said, and her eyes went back to him. “Not for yourself. Or is it for yourself?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No.”

Bill Weigand looked at her for a long moment. Then, she thought, he made up his mind about something, because his manner changed. The intensity, the pressure, went out of his manner; he shrugged slightly and seemed to dismiss something. She tried to guess what had caused the change; tried to understand how his mind was working because, she thought, it might become important to know how his mind worked. But there was too much turmoil in her own mind.

“Then don't be frightened,” he said, and his tone was casual. “Go home. Try to get some rest. Leave it to us.” He smiled, and the smile changed his thin face. There seemed, she thought, to be sympathy in his smile. “It's hard,” he said. “I know that, Mrs. Haven. We'll let it go until—until later. Right?”

She stood up; she forced quiet into her manner.

“It was really true,” she said. “I did come because—because I had to talk to someone. Someone who didn't know Bruce, someone outside. I know I only met the Norths tonight. I—I just tried to make it understandable. I felt I could talk to—to Mrs. North.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. He stood up also. His voice seemed to accept what she said. “Mrs. North affects people that way,” he added. “Sometimes,” he said, and suddenly turned toward Pam North, his expression amused. His smile faded. His tone became more official. “There's a car down stairs, Mrs. Haven,” he said. “I'll have you driven home. Get some sleep. I'll have to see you tomorrow—you, your father, the senator's daughter.”

Weigand picked up his overcoat, shrugged into it. He waited.

“Thank you,” Freddie Haven said to the Norths. “Thank you for letting me—barge in. I—I don't know why I did.”

“It's all right,” Pam said. She hesitated. “Try not to worry.” She paused again. “We're both terribly sorry,” she said.

Freddie Haven tried to smile, and made little of it. She went through the door Weigand held open for her, stood with him, without speaking, while he brought up the elevator, stood with him in it while the car took them down. Just before it stopped, Weigand spoke.

“Eventually,” he said, “you will have to tell me what you think you know. You realize that, Mrs. Haven.” He looked at her, and she made herself meet his eyes. “We have to know,” he said. He said nothing more, took her out of the apartment house to a car parked in front of it. He spoke to the man behind the wheel.

“Take Mrs. Haven home, Blake,” he said. “Then come back.”

“Right,” Blake said. Weigand opened the rear door and Freddie Haven got into the car. “Good night,” Bill Weigand said. He watched the car start up, for a moment regarded it. Then he went back into the apartment house. His thin face was thoughtful.

He knocked briefly on the door of the Norths' apartment and then pushed it open. Pam and Jerry were much as he had left them. “Well,” Pam said, “the coffee's hot, now.”

Bill Weigand took off his coat and, abstractedly, said, “Good.” He took a cup of coffee, poured a little cognac into it. He sipped and said, “Good,” again, in a different tone, and then sat down.

“You're not in a spot,” he said, then. “I'm not going to ask you anything.”

The Norths looked at him.

“Yeah?” Jerry said.

“Officially,” Bill Weigand said, “I didn't stop in. Why should I? Officially, I have no idea that Mrs. Haven came here to—get you to help her? Get your advice?” He shook his head when Pam started to speak. “Advise her. Help her.” He looked at them; tired as he appeared to be, he also appeared to be amused.

“Bill!” Pam said. “You—Bill!”

He merely smiled at her.

“Not on a spot!” Pam said. “What would you call a spot? Run with the hare, hunt with the hounds!”

“Is she the hare?” Bill wanted to know.

“And,” Pam said, with some bitterness, “I made you fresh coffee! No, I don't think she is.”

“Then there's no harm done,” Bill told her. “If she's not the—hare—she's not being hunted. What you find out may help. It won't hurt.”

“It is a spot,” Jerry North said. He was sober. “We didn't ask for confidences but—we got them.” He looked at Bill. “Well?” he said.

Bill said he appreciated that. His tone, now, was serious. He realized he could get them to tell; that he would only have to ask. He also realized that they would not be happy, telling. That, he told them, was part of it.

“Also,” he said, “you're in it again. Both of you. Officially, you're not, of course. But—officially I'm not here, not here to tell you that, or anything. If you can help her, help her. If, along the way, you find the man who killed Kirkhill, you'll let me know.” He paused. “Where's the spot?” he said.

“The whole thing's a spot,” Pam North told him. “You're throwing us into it; tying us up and throwing us in. Aren't you?” She looked at him. “Suppose I squeal to O'Malley? Tell the great man you invited us in? Threw us in?”

Bill Weigand laughed. Then he became serious.

“Forget it all if you'd rather,” he said. “If—if you really think Mrs. Haven's involved, skip it. Forget she was here; forget I was here.”

“You think she could have been?” Jerry asked.

Weigand shook his head.

“Directly, no,” he said, “At least, I don't think so. At a guess, a man killed Kirkhill. I don't even know Mrs. Haven or any of the rest—I mean Kirkhill's daughter, his secretary, the people he would have met at the party tonight—had anything to do with it. I'd be inclined to think they didn't, on the whole. Actually, I stopped by to see whether you'd noticed anything at the party that might help. Any—strain? Uneasiness? Somebody not worried at Kirkhill's failure to show when you'd expect them to be? Somebody too worried? That sort of thing.”

The Norths thought it over. Jerry shook his head first. He said he had spent most of his time with, or near, Admiral Satterbee. The admiral seemed to be worried chiefly about the protective storage of warships. “Shop talk,” Jerry said. “I don't remember any talk of Kirkhill. I did gather he was expected and hadn't arrived.”

“She was worried,” Pam said. “Mrs. Haven. About as you'd expect. I mean, I didn't know then because I didn't know why, but now it seems about what I'd have expected if I'd—heavens! Where am I?”

“Right,” Bill said. “I didn't suppose you'd have seen anything. I was passing by, did see the lights. It was a coincidence you had been at the party Kirkhill—missed.” He grinned. “I got more than I expected,” he said. “Unofficially.”

There was a long pause.

“Well,” Jerry said, “she is worried about someone else. Needlessly, probably. And you're suggesting we look into it? Find out what we can? Tell you what we find out?”

“If you like,” Bill said. “Forget it if you like. Or—look the ground over and then make up your minds. If you feel you'd be in an untenable position, drop out.”

“Subtle,” Pam said. “Very subtle. If we drop out, it's because we've found something to make us suspicious of Mrs. Haven. Then, whatever you say, we have to tell you what it is.”

Weigand merely smiled.

“Or,” Jerry said, “we tell you now what she told us when she had no reason to think that what she said would go to the police.”

Bill Weigand smiled again.

“Of course,” he said, “you'd be helping the daughter of an author. An author you've bet money on. Who ought to have peace and quiet for those revisions you were talking about. Right?”

Jerry North said “Damn!”

“Anyway,” Bill Weigand said, “I'll tell you what we know so far. It's an odd setup; Mullins will say it's screwy.” He smiled. “He'll say, ‘Look, Loot, this is one for the Norths.' Your public.” He paused again. Then he said here it was, so far as they'd got.

The body was found a little after eleven o'clock that night, the last night of the year. A patrolman, working north on lower Broadway, below Canal, cold and bored on a deserted street, flashed his light in a doorway, as he had, expecting nothing, finding nothing, in fifty doorways. This one, the doorway of a cheap lunchroom which had been closed for hours, was different. A big man was sitting in the entry, his legs stretched out, his back to the door. He looked like a drunk; the patrolman said he smelled like a drunk. But he was dead. Snow had begun to drift over his outstretched legs.

It looked like a routine thing. A man with no place in the world, except a flop house when his luck was in, a saloon on the Bowery when he had a dollar or two, had had a dollar or two that last night of the year. He had drunk it up; he had had enough to get too much of the stuff they sold across a dirty bar in a dirty room to hopeless men; to men who had not even the pathetic human hope that a new year would be a better year. He had used up his money, gone out of the bar—out of smelly warmth into biting cold, into a harsh wind—and walked in no direction. He had got sleepy, tried to get into the lunchroom, in his muddle not realizing it had closed, gone to sleep as he stood there and slumped down, and then had frozen. That was what it looked like, at first.

The wagon was summoned, came for him. At the morgue, they might well have done nothing about him for hours had not a doctor, starting home after a late post mortem, stopped by the body and looked at it idly. The doctor had thought vaguely that the man had been eating well, for a bum from the Bowery. Then the doctor had noticed the man's hands, looked at them more closely and let out his puzzlement in a statement that he would be damned.

“He'd had a manicure,” Weigand said. “Probably yesterday.”

It was enough to start things moving. Once they began to look, almost nothing fitted the obvious picture. Even the clothes, which at first seemed part of the picture, did not really fit in.

The overcoat was worn, but had been recently cleaned. It did not fit the man; he had picked it up, presumably, in a second-hand clothing store. He had, at a guess, worn it only a day or so, if even for a day or so.

The suit under the overcoat was even more at variance with the picture. It was a very cheap suit, it fitted very badly. But it appeared to be almost new. But, although almost new, it was noticeably, almost flagrantly, unpressed. It almost seemed, the medical examiner's laboratory reported, that someone had deliberately stretched the shoddy material out of shape, pulling it, crumpling it, possibly using an iron on it to remove the original creases. Both cuffs of the trousers were frayed, although most of the suit showed no signs of wear. Somebody could have frayed the material with a file, even scraped at it with a knife. “Phoney,” a lab man said, briefly, unofficially.

The shoes were worn and scuffed—and were too large for the feet. But the socks were silk, and new. The underwear was of medium weight wool and had cost money. It had been washed several times, but there were no laundry marks. The shirt had been worn a long time, washed often and it, too, had no laundry marks. But it fitted perfectly, as if it had been made for the wearer.

The body was that of a large man, weighing a little over two hundred pounds; the man had been an inch over six feet tall; he had eaten well, taken care of himself, once might have been an athlete. When he slumped down in the doorway of the cheap restaurant and began to die, he had been in his middle forties.

It was strange; it required looking into. Appearances apparently had been created which were at variance with facts. So the police machine started; a report of suspicious death went to the Homicide Squad; fingerprints, measurements and description went to the Missing Persons Bureau. A coded description of the fingerprints went on the wires to various cities, including Washington. A check of the prints was made in the department's own records.

An autopsy was begun at once. There were no injuries discernible. The man had been drinking before he died; he had eaten some hours before. And he had died, not of exposure, but of an overdose of chloral hydrate.

“Knockout drops,” Weigand said. “Very tricky stuff. They use it sometimes to put a man out while they rob him. It's too uncertain to be used often in homicides; I don't know that I remember a case. But—if a man has a weak heart, even a normal dose may kill him.”

“That happened this time?” Jerry said.

Bill Weigand nodded. He said the doctors thought so. The heart was impaired. Not seriously; with normal care, the man need not have died of the impairment. He would merely have had to be careful.

“Of course,” Bill said, “on a night like this, there was a good chance he'd die anyway. If you could get him out of doors, follow him, maybe, to see that he didn't find shelter—he'd have been dazed and sleepy within a short time; probably out within half an hour—the cold would finish your job for you.”

A preliminary report of the post mortem was ready by a little after one o'clock that morning. “Three and a half hours ago,” Jerry said, rather morosely, looking at his watch. Bill said he knew; said that he wouldn't be long. At almost the same time, identification had come through from Washington.

The man about whom PD, NY was enquiring had been a lieutenant colonel in the Army during the war. His name was Bruce Kirkhill. And—he was presently the junior senator from a western State. They woke Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley up, then; they notified the commissioner.

“And,” Bill said, “they got me. They showed up at the Plaza just after we'd all left; they caught me at home. Got me down to the morgue to talk to Mrs. Haven and her father. They'd already sent Blake up to the Satterbee apartment.”

The Washington police had cooperated efficiently, which accounted for Blake's early appearance at the apartment. They had found Kirkhill's secretary—“his typing secretary,” Weigand said. “A girl. His official secretary, if that's what you'd call him—is a man named Phipps.” The “typing secretary” had been able to tell the Washington police that the senator had gone to New York, that he was planning to attend a New Year's Eve party there at the home of his prospective father-in-law, Admiral Satterbee; that his nearest relative, his daughter, would be at the same party. So, in Weigand's absence, Sergeant Blake had been sent to the Satterbee apartment to get someone to make the identification.