Killing the Goose (18 page)

So still Elliot was the man to start with—his was the name to write at the top of the list. Elliot, Martinelli—thereafter your list began to run out. Add Cleo Harper, in consideration of oddities noted by Mrs. North, who had an eye—as well as a tongue—for oddities. By the same frail token, add Mrs. Florence Pennock, who was also odd. Add Dan Beck, because it would be convenient—and because he had put in an appearance, even if the nature of the appearance seemed to vouch for its innocence. Put Beck in, in other words, because the commissioner evidently liked the idea, hoping against hope; because the commissioner was a policeman and hated, almost by instinct, mobs and the leaders of mobs—hated and feared them.

It wasn't, Weigand thought, much of a list. He crumpled it into the waste-basket, which seemed, this time, to be getting more than its share of useless notation.

Weigand looked at what else the boys had brought in. They had brought in two women and a man who had been at Ann Lawrence's house before she was killed and none of their names meant anything and none of their stories meant anything. They had, in two cases, eaten dinner at Ann's and stayed the evening; the man had come later and stayed the evening. They had been friends of Ann and were shocked at her death; they had noticed nothing unusual during the evening. They were supernumeraries—or quicker-witted than the detectives who had questioned them.

Weigand leaned back in his chair and thought of Ann Lawrence's last party. He thought of the small house on the park, and of the kind of easy elegance which its size and the money spent on it had given it. He thought of cars stopping in front of it and people getting out—young people, for the most part. Probably attractive people. He thought of the door opening and light coming out through it and people moving into the light from the dimmed-out street. He thought of Ann Lawrence, who was young and attractive and had everything before her and friends with her and a dress she liked and a feeling of being rested and a little excited. He thought of her waiting that final fifteen minutes between the time she was ready for the first of her guests and the time the doorbell first rang and perhaps using it to straighten a flower or to move some small object on a table. (Dorian did that, and even when it was not a special party she was a little happy and excited, and she would go out into the kitchen to see if the canapés were attractive and attractively arranged.)

Bill Weigand thought of Ann's waiting for the party to begin, and of what the party must have been like in the living room which occupied so much of the ground floor of the little house, and was so comfortable and quietly bright. He thought of Mrs. Pennock—or, more probably—a maid brought in for the occasion, passing canapés and cocktails, and of people in little groups of twos and threes, talking about other people with no more than a reasonable amount of malice, and Ann talking with them and moving from one small group to another. He thought of this, and of the rest of it—of the dinner and the further drinks after dinner, and of the party breaking up with Elliot remaining later than the others, and he could not see that the party would be likely to have had anything to do with the murder. He wished he knew what did.

And then Pam North and Mullins came in, and Pam was full of something she believed did have to do with it. Bill listened to her account of Pierson, and to Mullins's steadying contributions, and it was interesting. It was a new name for the list—perhaps it was a name to top the list. Weigand got another sheet of paper and wrote it there—

Alfred Pierson.

It looked fine and tangible and maybe, Weigand thought, this was it. When he had all the story he lifted the telephone and called the district attorney's office. The district attorney's office saw it the way he did and within an hour, and with the permission—the ostensibly cordial permission—of the executive secretary of Estates Incorporated, auditors were adding and subtracting and checking the accuracy of the figures which represented, as a result of one of society's more convenient conventions, a largely mythical substance which had enabled Miss Ann Lawrence to live in very tangible comfort in her little house. It became almost immediately apparent that Miss Lawrence's substance was uncommonly mythical even for a convenient social myth. If Miss Lawrence had not been killed, she would very shortly have had to make a living.

XI.
Wednesday, 2:33 P.M. to 10:40 P.M.

Detective Hanson, sitting on a bench just inside Gramercy Park, and commanding an excellent view of the little house of Ann Lawrence, deceased, and at the same time looking merely like a somewhat eccentric man of leisure who chose to sit in a park on a chilly March day, saw movement and looked at his watch. His watch said 2:29, from which Detective Hanson knew it was 2:33. The movement, in the areaway beside the Lawrence house, established itself as Mrs. Florence Pennock, outward bound.

Detective Hanson, who had been feeling the chill, was pleased. At least he would get to walk a bit. He sauntered to the gate, keeping an artfully casual eye on Mrs. Pennock, and emerged on the sidewalk. He looked up and down it, like a man undecided as to his future course, and turned after Mrs. Pennock, who was going east. He stayed on the Park side of the street, since she was on the other side. At the intersection, she turned north and Hanson quickened his pace. He crossed diagonally and came in behind her—about half a block behind. At the next intersection, she turned east again.

It was not, as Hanson had felt from the first, much of an assignment. Presumably, if “they”—“they” being the Homicide people, to whom Hanson was on loan from the precinct—wanted to know where Mrs. Pennock went and what she did, somebody had to follow her around. What Hanson did not see was why he should be the one. Hanson had a theory of his own about the whole business, and Mrs. Pennock was not involved in it. Hanson thought Miss Lawrence had been murdered by a bloke who was after her jewels. He was pretty sure she would have had jewels, because people who lived by themselves in complete—even if tiny—houses always had jewels. So far as Hanson's experience went, this was a minor law of nature.

All right then, Hanson thought, crossing the street after Mrs. Pennock, some guy had got in and tried to get the jewels. He had come in during the party, when it was always easy to get into a house. Probably he had gone around to the back and got in through the kitchen, waiting outside until Mrs. Pennock and whoever was helping her was upstairs serving. Then this guy, after the jewels, had gone on upstairs at a convenient opportunity—Hanson was not quite sure how the convenient opportunity had been managed, since the stairs from the kitchen ended in the living room, in which everyone still was—but he figured there must have been some way—and started looking in the upstairs sitting room. And Miss Lawrence had surprised him there and started to scream and the guy had hit her, probably just to shut her up. When he saw how much more he had done than merely shut her up, he had run like hell.

That, Hanson decided, watching Mrs. Pennock cross the street diagonally, was almost certainly what had happened. The Homicide boys liked to make them fancy and kept digging around for motives and things. But so far as Hanson could see, jewels were plenty of motive and all you had to do was to figure it out from that. He'd be willing to bet, he told himself, that the boys from Homicide had never thought of anything so simple. Probably they hadn't even bothered to find out if the Lawrence babe had had jewels, or if they were still in the house.

Mrs. Pennock turned another corner and in due course, Hanson turned it after her. He was just in time to see her go into a drug store half way up the block. Hanson followed her in without hesitation, confident that she had never seen him before. Without seeming to look around the store, he moved to the soda fountain and ordered a coke. Then, holding it, he half turned from the counter and looked around the store, abstractedly. It was a busy store and people kept coming in and going out and it was hard to locate one person. But unless it had another exit, which Hanson thought it hadn't, Mrs. Pennock was still in it. It merely required system.

Hanson looked down one side of the busy store and up the other, checking off the people who were not Mrs. Pennock. The rather short man buying aspirin was not Mrs. Pennock, nor was the rather dark man waiting for—apparently—a tube of shaving cream. The tall, thin girl who was evidently with the much broader, much shorter girl, and seemed to be helping her decide on a shade of face powder was not Mrs. Pennock, nor was the swarthy young man who was looking at a tray of fountain pens, although he was not, at a casual glance, the sort of young man who would have much use for a fountain pen. There was a gentle old couple sitting together at the end of the soda fountain, finishing coffee, and neither of them was Mrs. Pennock, although the woman was about the right age. They left the counter as Hanson looked past them and went toward the rear of the store, toward the section which said “Prescriptions.”

Following them with his eyes, and looking beyond them, Hanson saw Mrs. Pennock. She had joined a little group waiting outside a short line of telephone booths. Hanson finished off his coke and sauntered down. There was quite a little crowd around the telephone booths, and through the glass he could see the fortunate ones who had worked their way into them. All the people in the booths—three women and a man—were relaxed and unhurried. Two of the women were talking vivaciously into the transmitters; the other woman was dialing slowly from a number written down on a slip of paper—and apparently making a mistake and hanging up and starting over—and the man was leaning back against the wall of the booth with the receiver in his hand and listening with no apparent interest to someone else who was doing all the talking. Now and then the man would nod, apparently without saying anything, which struck Hanson as an odd gesture under the circumstances.

Detective Hanson joined the outer fringes of the little group and looked like a man mildly interested in calling somebody on the telephone if the occasion offered. Watching him—as more than one person was—you would have thought that his interest in telephoning was very mild indeed, since he managed to keep consistently on the fringes of the group as new people joined it; as the vivacious women finished talking and were replaced by, respectively, a very business-like man and an elderly woman in black, who, on entering, put down an enormous handbag on a very small ledge, held it there precariously by pushing against it, and began an anxious, but still unhurried, search through it. After a nickel, apparently. Hanson kept an eye on Mrs. Pennock, who was now second in line from one of the booths, and pursued his thoughts.

He could argue later—and did argue later—that he had not been careless in his observation, although clearly he had missed something which was worth observing. He could, and did, give reasonably complete descriptions of several of the people who had, at one time and another, been waiting to get into the telephones while he and Mrs. Pennock also were waiting, and after she had got in. But he could not, he had to admit, tell with any assurance which of them were there early, and had left before Mrs. Pennock went into the booth, and which had been around the booth while she was inside it and who had come after when people were waiting, with growing impatience, for Mrs. Pennock to finish a rather protracted conversation.

He knew that there had been several men and women in the group—rather more, he thought—than at any other time, when Mrs. Pennock's turn came and she went into the booth, neatly filling it. He had watched her idly as she dialed and he had, properly, moved closer to the booth on the chance she might leave the door partly open and so be subject to eavesdropping. He had had little confidence in this maneuver, and little confidence had been justified. She had closed the door firmly. He had thought of getting near enough to the booth to press his ear against it, and had concluded—rightly, it was admitted even by those who, by that time, were not at all pleased with him—that clamping his ear against the wall of a telephone booth would make him rather more conspicuous than a good detective ought to be. And he had not, in any case, assumed that what Mrs. Pennock would be saying would have anything to do with the case, because he did not figure
she
had anything to do with the case. Detective Hanson thought it was a matter of jewels.

(Even much later, walking his beat in deepest Staten Island, former Detective, then Patrolman, Hanson was convinced that he had been constructively right. It hadn't been jewels, unless the Homicide boys were wrong about the whole thing—as they still might be, when you thought about it. But it might just as well have been jewels; the theory that it was jewels was still the theory at which any sensible cop would have arrived at the time. Given the whole thing to do over again, Patrolman Hanson decided, he would still have thought it was jewels. Hanson's conscience was clear. If you had to be in deepest Staten Island, it was some consolation to have a clear conscience. Not much, maybe, but some.)

Hanson was not, admittedly, able to reconstruct the situation afterward from what he had seen at the time. It was easy enough to reconstruct it from what happened; there was only one way it could have happened. But Hanson did not see it happen; he did not know any of the people involved and so could not say whether any of them was in the group around the booth. He had merely stood by, making sure that he knew where Mrs. Pennock was, and hardly bothering to think that she was taking a good while. He knew that during almost all the time she was in the booth there had been a little group in front of it, pressing closer to let somebody by who wanted to go to a further booth—she was in the second of the five—and billowing out again when the person had passed. He could not, certainly, say who was in the group and when they showed him pictures of people who might have been, he identified several of them as possibilities, but no more than that. The only thing Detective Hanson was really sure about was what happened at the end.