Hanged for a Sheep (13 page)

“And the fizz,” Mullins said, suddenly. “Whatever she took would have had to fizz.”

“Do they?” Weigand asked, interested. “How do you know, Mullins?”

“Took some once,” Mullins said. “Met a guy who said they were fine for—well, for the next day, you know. So I tried them.”

“And were they fine for the next day?” Pam wanted to know. Mullins shook his head, sadly.

“I couldn't see no difference,” he said. “I felt lousy, just the same. But they fizz all right.”

Then it was practically certain that what Aunt Flora took as medicine that morning was either the customary salts or something almost identical. Which brought up another odd point.

“Because,” Weigand said, “the next day—the day after she was so sick, and while she still thought it was merely a digestive upset—she had Sand go out again for Wilson's Citrate Salts. This time he got them and, on her instructions, opened the package and put the bottle in the usual place in the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. And the place was empty, waiting for the bottle which was always kept just there, between the mineral oil and the pepsin tablets, on the shelf under the bicarbonate and the milk of magnesia. So Sand says, in detail. It was a blue glass bottle, he said, the small size. Probably a four-ounce bottle. She always got the small size because she thought it spoiled if it was kept.”

“But then,” Pam said, “what did she take?”

“Right,” Weigand said. “What did she take? And what happened to the bottle she took it out of—the special bottle, out of which she seems to have taken only one dose?”

Pam looked at him a moment and then said, “Oh!

“So that was where she got it,” Pam said. “The arsenic was in the medicine. And that's why nobody got sick when they nibbled off her tray. She was the only one who took the medicine.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “She was the only one who took the medicine. And the only one who got poisoned. And the bottle which contained the medicine appeared mysteriously and disappeared mysteriously. So when we find out who brought it, and who gave it to her—if she didn't give it to herself, maybe we'll know something.”

“Probably,” Pam said, “she had somebody mix it for her. She would—the maid or one of the family. A lot of them were in that morning, she says. Only the person who mixed the medicine—I mean the person who served it to her, in water—needn't have known it was poisoned. Need she?”

“She?” Weigand repeated.

“Well,” Pam said, “I should think she'd have asked the maid. Or one of the girls. Why don't you ask her?”

“I did,” Weigand said. “Obviously, Pam. She doesn't remember. It might have been one of the girls, or the maid, or Ben. Or even Harry Perkins. When you pin her down, she isn't sure of the order in which different people came to her room. She's inclined to think now that Perkins came in first, even before the maid. She says he always gets up early.”

“Well,” Pam said, “that's something to work on, isn't it? What else?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “I asked everybody, of course—everybody who was in the room that morning, except Perkins, whom we can't find. And nobody gave her the medicine. But she's sure she didn't get up and prepare it herself—says she never gets up until she's had some coffee, and never has coffee until she's had citrate salts.”

“But then—then it has to be Harry,” Pam said. “Unless—”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Unless one of the others is lying. Which is certainly a possibility.”

They thought it over, drinking coffee. Pam started the conversation again.

“Hunch?” she said. “Have you got one?”

Weigand shook his head. He had no hunch, only a few inadequate facts and guesses. Aunt Flora was poisoned by arsenic—“there's no doubt about that,” he interjected. “I've seen the report”—and the arsenic presumably was administered in medicine. Two weeks later, Stephen Anthony was shot, possibly as he stood in front of a seated murderer, the bullet entering his throat and blowing out the back of his head. The bullet had been found in the wall, high up, badly bartered. It might or might not still be useful to the men in ballistics. There was an abundance of suspects.

Anyone in the house, and anyone with a key to the house—and almost everybody in the family apparently had keys—might have shot Anthony. Almost anybody might have substituted the poisoned bottle of medicine for the harmless bottle.

“Not,” Pam objected, “unless they had sneaked in that night. Because there wasn't any bottle the day before.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “But anybody who was in the room would have brought the bottle with him, anybody with a key could have got in during the night and left the bottle. Your aunt says she hardly ever gets a wink of sleep, but that doesn't have to be true. She—”

“She always says that,” Pam said. “She sleeps like—well, I don't know like what. She stayed with us in the country a few days last summer and she slept beautifully. You could hear her all over the house. I think anybody could have gone in in a full suit of armour, clanking, and never waked her.”

Weigand nodded. He said he had suspected as much. “She's built like it,” he said. So anybody could have committed either crime, assuming he had a key and was lying about his actions. As, under the circumstances, he would be.

“The major could have come home earlier than he says and shot Anthony,” Weigand pointed out. “Because Anthony was blackmailing him about Clem, or because he wanted to eliminate an heir to his mother's money. Or for some other reason we don't know about. Ben Craig says he was in his room and heard nothing. But perhaps he was out of his room and heard and did a lot. Perhaps he had some grudge against Anthony we don't know about. Perhaps there was the same money motive the major might have had. The other brother—the major's brother, Wesley—might have come in the night, used his key, shot Anthony and gone home. I don't know what he says about it, but I'll see him this afternoon. Young McClelland doesn't have to have gone straight out after he looked for the major and found him missing. He could have stayed long enough to kill Anthony. Clem Buddie could have come back early enough—we're trying to check times at the Grand Central, and particularly at the oyster bar, but we've got to chase the night men. And she may have been there as late as she says, and nobody may remember her. Probably nobody will, which will prove nothing.

“And,” he went on, “your aunt may have poisoned herself for some purpose—according to the physician she had a very small amount of arsenic, enough to make her ill but not enough to kill her under any predictable circumstances. She may have thought it would lead suspicion away from her if she decided to kill Anthony. Maybe she did kill him. Maybe she wanted to be a widow again.”

“Don't be foolish,” Pam told him. “She never cared that much, one way or another. Except with the first.”

Weigand didn't, he said, mean that as a real motive. But perhaps there was a real motive. Perhaps Judy Buddie had a motive, too. Perhaps it was a motive of her own; perhaps she was acting to protect her younger sister.

“Toward whom,” he added, “she is obviously very protective, although she tries to hide it from Clem.”

“Yes,” Pam said. “I think so.”

And there was always Harry Perkins.

“Why?” Pam said.

“Well,” Weigand said, “maybe he wanted to get Anthony out of the way so he could marry your aunt himself. Maybe he's been wanting to marry her for years.” He said it smiling, but slowly sobered.

“And that,” he said, with more interest in his voice, “isn't necessarily as absurd as I thought it was when I said it. Maybe Harry's been in love with your aunt for years—from the time she was first married to his friend Buddie. Maybe he thought after Buddie's death that he would get her, and was disappointed and hung around. And maybe his hopes went up after the divorce of her second husband, and went down again when she married Craig. And still he stuck around, hoping—hoping and getting older and more bitter. Perhaps he thought that when they were both old she would change and he finally would win—get for a few dusty years the woman he had wanted all his life. And then Anthony came along—came along young and confident and hateful. And perhaps that was the last straw, so he decided to kill them both. But perhaps he couldn't force himself really to kill the woman he'd loved all his life, and subconsciously miscalculated her dose, giving her only enough to make her ill. But he had no such compunctions about Anthony.”

Weigand broke off.

“It makes quite a story,” he said. “Don't you think so, Pam? Worked out, I mean—with the psychological detail put in? Something Dreiser might have done, in his day.”

Pam nodded.

“Perhaps,” she said, “almost too much like something by Dreiser. Or don't you think so?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “‘An American Tragedy' was real, you know. It happened. This might have happened. It will be something to talk to Perkins about—when we catch him.”

“As a matter of fact,” Pam said, after a moment. “It is the best motive you've got yet, really. Only I don't think Harry did it, somehow. He's always been so—meek.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Which is precisely the way he would seem if the story were true, isn't it? Part of the character.”

Pam had to agree with that. They had finished coffee and cigarettes. Weigand looked at his watch.

“So there we are,” he said. “Nowhere much as yet. One poisoned, one dead, one missing; suspects to the right of us, suspects to the left of us. Everybody with opportunity; almost everybody with motive. A pistol missing; a bottle missing; a hunch missing. So Mullins and I go whistling back to work. Coming back, Pam?”

Pam thought swiftly. She didn't much want to go back. It was really snowing now and it was a beautiful snow. Pam said she thought she would do a little shopping, now she was out. And watch the snow for a while. If anybody asked, she'd be back about cocktail time. If, with things as they were, anybody was going to serve cocktails. And if Jerry called again, would Weigand have somebody take a message?

“Except,” she said, “that he's probably in a plane and he can't call from that, very well. If they're flying in this …”

The weather, Weigand reassured her, might be local—a purely coastal storm. It was hard to tell, now that there were no weather reports. It made them both think, suddenly, about the war.

“Jerry's still trying to get in,” Pam said, as they stood for a moment at the door of the restaurant, and waited for Mullins to retrieve his hat and coat. “He doesn't get anywhere, though. Apparently he can't see well enough for
anything
. Anything more about you, Bill?”

Bill Weigand shook his head. Apparently, he said, he would continue to devote his time to murder at retail. He looked down at her.

“Of course,” he said, “other things come up now and then. We—cooperate, as they call it. It's something.”

Probably, Pam assured him, it was a great deal. And it was what he was trained for. He flagged a cab for her, and she went off in it through the snow. Mullins and Weigand scuffed back, kicking the white powder on the sidewalks, to the dark Buddie house, slunk back between the apartment buildings.

It was a little after four when Pam North's taxi turned off Fifth Avenue, skidding a little, and sloshed down the block to the dark Buddie house. It was snowing hard, now, but it was warmer. In the streets, warmed by subterranean passages and pounded by tires, the snow was a dirty slush and already a grayish-brown. But on the sidewalks it was whiter and more like snow. The air was thick with it; it swirled down over the roofs of buildings and spiraled through the channels the streets made. Gusts caught it and threw it back; here and there it almost reached the ground and was tossed back into the air and fell again. There was a strong wind which seemed to be coming from all directions, so that you could never satisfactorily brace yourself against it. Snow found temporary lodgment on roofs and piled up there, and then was torn from its refuge by the wind and sent streaming out in banners. Janitors shoveled it from sidewalks into the streets, and some of them yelled back and forth at one another, enjoying the phenomenon like children. Others, red-faced and with mufflers wrapped under their chins, worked doggedly, in a kind of anger. Cars starting up skidded in the slushy snow and went off like crabs, straightening out only to skid disconsolately once more when they had to stop again. In Fifth Avenue cars which had skidded together and locked bumpers were stalled helplessly, and little knots of drivers and bystanders stood around and for each one man stood on the bumpers and bobbed up and down. But except for the angry shovelers and some of the traffic patrolmen, the snow seemed to make people jovial and when they bumped together, caught in wind eddies and half blinded, they laughed and bumped away again, their faces red and pleased. It was quite a snow.

But Pam was not enjoying it. She had shopped a little and then stopped at a news-reel theater, because obscurely she did not want to go back to Aunt Flora's. But one of the pictures showed what remained of an airplane which had crashed into a mountain in a snowstorm and suddenly Pam thought of Jerry and was frightened.

“Only,” she kept telling herself, as she waved frantically at taxicabs before one stopped, “only they won't let them fly in this. They never let them fly in this.”

Fear rode home with her, and as they skidded off Fifth Avenue into the right street, it grew larger, because in a moment she would know whether there was any word and the seconds which kept her from knowing were unendurable. She stared ahead at the house, willing it nearer, and that was how she saw the man going in.

He was vague and shadowy in the snow, even from a little distance, and oddly helpless. He was rather tall, and very thin, and the wind whipped his overcoat about him. He moved slowly, carefully, pulling himself up along the rail as he climbed the steps to the front door. Once he faltered, but then he went on into the house while the sloshing taxicab was still some doors away, and suddenly Pam knew who he was. Harry Perkins had come back, groping his way through the snow. She was excited for a moment, thinking how soon, now, they might know whatever it was he could tell them. And then she saw Jerry in an airplane groping through the smother toward the side of a mountain—a very high, vicious mountain—and forgot Harry Perkins.