Murder Comes First (17 page)

After another considerable time, however, a steam locomotive backed slowly down the track toward the train. Miss Lucinda watched, fascinated and a little frightened, with the feeling that something surely had gone wrong. The locomotive came on, ever more slowly, as if disgruntled by its approaching task, and just before it hit almost stopped. Miss Lucinda closed her eyes, and there was a jolt. There was then another longish pause, and men walked up and down beside the train. Then, with an even more pronounced jolt, the train started off. It did not go rapidly, now, or with assurance. It went on only for about five minutes and then stopped again.

Toilsomely, then, it progressed toward Pawling, its laborious progress so distracting that not even the
Atlantic
could fully engross Miss Lucinda. Something of the train's obvious disinclination to reach its destination found an echo in Miss Lucinda's mind. Perhaps, she thought, she had been too precipitate, after all.

She also began to think that perhaps she had been wrong. She began, indeed, very much to hope she had been wrong. If it had not been an action so—so fluttery—so much in the character she knew Thelma ascribed to her, Miss Lucinda might have got off the train at Mount Kisco. But she did not.

“If you can convince us there's a tie-in, we'll coöperate,” the man on the other side of the desk told Bill Weigand. “We always do. You know that. The trouble is, you're merely playing a hunch.”

“Right,” Bill told him.

“And when you come down to it,” the other man said, “it's an unofficial hunch. Your inspector's satisfied. The county district attorney's satisfied.”

“It won't hold,” Bill told him.

The man across the desk shrugged, indicating that whether it would hold was a matter on which he had no opinion, and one outside his range of interest.

“It's at a delicate point,” the man behind the desk said then. “It's no reflection on you—certainly not on you. No reflection on any of your people. But we don't want a mob scene.”

“I don't,” Bill told him, “see precisely how you're going to avoid it, in the end. After the inspector gets through following his red herring. He will, you know.”

Again the man shrugged. He said maybe it would all be wound up by then.

“Try this one,” Bill said. “Your man's been in and out of the city a good deal recently? In line of duty?”

The man hesitated. Then he said they all got around a good deal on a job like this.

“Right,” Bill said. “About your first tip-off. Was it from one of your regular sources?”

The man behind the desk hesitated even longer over that. Then he said, “No comment.”

“Or closer home?” Bill said, as if finishing what he had only begun to say.

“Nope,” the man said. “Sorry, Weigand. No comment.”

Bill waited.

“It's no good,” the man told him. “If it were just this one thing, maybe. But there are all sorts of tie-ins in things like this—here, there, everywhere. Damn it, I haven't authority to take a chance on the whole operation, even if I wanted to. You can see that.”

“Right,” Bill said. He stood up.

“It's a damn nuisance all around,” the other man said, standing up too.

Murder usually was, Bill told him. They shook hands. Bill started toward the door; seemed to think of something more.

“Heard from the one who tipped you off recently?” Bill asked.

“Not for—” the other man began, smiled slightly, and finished, “No comment.” But then he added, “No reason why we should, you know.”

“Right,” Bill said. “No reason at all. As a matter of fact, I didn't think you had.”

Bill went, then, leaving the other man to look for a moment doubtfully at his closed office door. Then he picked up a telephone and told the answerer to send Saul in.

Bill Weigand retrieved his Buick, parked in a side street off Foley Square, and drove up Lafayette Street. It was still only a hunch; there was nothing much to go on. Nor was there, he thought, at the moment any place to go, except home. He went home.

He expected to find Dorian, and did not. He found a note saying she was out with Pam.

He reached toward the telephone, but it rang under his hand. He listened.

“I thought it would,” he said, after listening for more than a minute. He listened again, smiling faintly. “Right,” he said. “I'm on my way, Inspector.”

He replaced the receiver and wrote a note for Dorian. He wrote, “It blew up in Arty's face. You and Pam keep out of trouble.”

He went down in the elevator and was surprised to hear himself whistling. He drove downtown to his office in the West Twentieth Street station.

8

Tuesday, 2:45
P.M.
to 4:15
P.M.

“Not
again
,” Pam North said. “This is getting to be ridiculous.”

All the same, Dorian said, there was a man. There had been for several blocks. If he was not following them, it was a very interesting coincidence. He was a tall man, sauntering on a pleasant afternoon. But wherever they went, he sauntered after.

“After all,” Pam said, “we're walking down Madison Avenue. Lots of people do. Of course, we can always stop at a window.” She turned toward one, and said, “I'm getting sort of tired or looking in windows. Particularly such—”

She had taken the opportunity to glance back up Madison.

“For heaven's sake,” she said. “Look hard, Dorian. It's Mr. Sandford. He's—”

But then, smiling with evident pleasure, Mr. Sandford turned toward them.

“Thought I saw someone familiar,” he said. “Said to myself, ‘Mrs. North.' Been trying to catch up.”

Pamela North said, “Oh.” She said that this was Miss Hunt. Everyone was delighted.

But then Barton Sandford's pleasure at the meeting seemed to drain away, and he became serious; worried. He said he understood the police still suspected one of Mrs. North's aunts. He made sounds which deprecated this situation.

“We're trying to do something,” Pam told him. “But we're not getting anywhere. We thought you were following us.”

“Following you?” he repeated. “For God's sake why?” He smiled. “In addition to the obvious reasons, of course,” he said.

“Because you're FBI,” Pam wanted to say, but thought that she should not, since it would of course embarrass him. She said she didn't know why.

“Except we were trying to follow Paul Logan,” she said, “and made a mess of it. I suppose it put the idea in our heads.”

Sandford looked at them and shook his own head.

“Because,” Pam said, “we thought he knew something about your wife's typewriter.”

She explained, in part. She did not mention the suspicion Paul Logan had indicated feeling of Sally Sandford; she did ask whether Sandford was sure his wife was not at the country cottage. He had looked, she understood, and to this he nodded. But could Sally have, in any way, seen him coming—or known he was coming—and hidden until he left? He started to shake his head but then hesitated. What Pam suggested was, of course, possible.

“You suspect her too?” he said, and it was Pam's turn to hesitate. She was about to say again that, still, she suspected everybody, and realized suddenly that that was not true. She suspected two more than the rest—Lynn Hickey, Sally Sandford. “You do,” Barton Sandford told her, when she still did not speak. He looked at her with eyes a little narrowed as if, so, he could see more readily into her mind. He said, “I'd hoped—” and broke it off. He pointed out, then, that they couldn't talk there. He suggested he buy them a drink in a place where talk would be possible.

They found a place, uncrowded in this interlude between late lunch and early cocktails. Dorian and Pam sat on a banquette, with Sandford on a chair opposite them. After the drinks came he said, “Why Sally? Not only you. Everybody. Not coming out and saying so. The district attorney, this inspector whatever his name is. Everybody.”

“Not those two,” Pam told him. “They think my aunt.”

Sandford said that, two hours ago, they hadn't acted like it. They had called him for questioning and most of the questioning had been about his wife. Was she—were they—in urgent need of the money Sally would inherit? What had been her attitude toward her aunt? And, as Mrs. North had just asked, was he certain she had not merely stayed in the country cottage, a scant two hours' drive from New York? Didn't he—this a question many times repeated—actually know where she was? Wasn't he lying to protect her? (This last more indirectly phrased.) And that he had been aware of the further implications, although now he did not directly phrase them, was apparent from his attitude and his choice of words—had he and his wife not conspired to kill, for fifty thousand dollars? But the district attorney's assistant had been polite, and had questioned politely. There had been no open suggestion that Sandford was himself under suspicion.

“Did they ask about your discovery,” Dorian asked him. “Invention, formula, whatever it was?”

He looked from one to the other of them and reddened slowly. He said, “Oh, you've found that out. Logan, I suppose?”

They did not deny it.

He had not told at the district attorney's office about that. He supposed they would find it out and make a lot of it. There wasn't, he said, a lot to it. There was a formula, yes. It was too complicated to go into, and too technical. He thought it would have a certain usefulness in a certain field; he would like a laboratory in which to manufacture.

“Sally built it up in her own mind,” he said. “She—” Then he stopped abruptly, apparently disconcerted by what he had said. “She wouldn't have done anything,” he said, after a moment. “I—I know she wouldn't have.” But he did not sound assured.

“All the same,” Pam pointed out, “you didn't tell the district attorney's people about it.”

He hesitated more lengthily this time. Then he shook his head slowly, and by his attitude admitted an implication Pam North had left in her words.

“Sally—Sally's a funny girl,” he said, finally. “To hear her talk you'd think—oh, a hell of a lot of things. That she could be ruthless for what she thought was important, was right. You remember when the fascists were teaching children to spy on their parents? Well—Sally didn't defend it. But because she thought the fascists were wrong, not because the thing in itself would be wrong. She'd let people think that, if the fascists had been right, then betrayal of anybody for them would have been right. Of course, she didn't really mean that. I know she didn't.”

And again the reiteration of certainty lessened conviction.

It was true, he said—and now he talked without prompting, as if doubts and fears had long been bottled up and now poured out—it was true that she had been urgent that he try again to borrow from Grace Logan enough to get his laboratory equipped and started; it was true that the fifty thousand dollars she would inherit would have given them the start. It was true that much of the last night they had spent together she had argued this, and that his refusal again to apply to her aunt had seemed—

He didn't, Pam thought, seem to realize he was talking to people he hardly knew. He was, she decided, talking to himself; arguing with himself against a possibility which had perhaps tormented him since Grace Logan died and now, during his questioning at the district attorney's office, had been forced to the front of his mind.

“You'd have thought everything hung on this formula of mine,” he said. “The whole damn future of everything. Believe me, it doesn't. I kept telling her that.”

But she hadn't accepted that, had taken his disclaimers, it appeared, as merely further evidences of his lack of decisiveness of character. He had supposed, when the next day she would not return to town with him, that it was because she had, in view of her new—or newly confirmed—belief in his inadequacy, to, as she said, “think out” their future. He still thought that; he still thought she had gone off, as all the evidence showed she had, in the car to drive and, presumably, think.

“I'm damned sure of it,” he said, but again the tone did not match the words.

“Wherever she is, the typewriter is too,” Pam pointed out. “Since we know it's the right typewriter. If she's at the cottage, the typewriter is. Did you look for it when you looked for her?”

He hadn't, specifically. He thought he would have seen it, and realized its importance, if it had been openly in sight. But it might have been anywhere—in a closet, under a table—and he would not have noticed. In a word, no—he hadn't looked for the typewriter; he didn't know it wasn't there.

The return to a matter so specific as the typewriter apparently aroused Barton Sandford to his own loquacity. He said he had been talking too damn much; he apologized. He said he was keyed up. He suggested further drinks.

“I've got to go to the aunts,” Pam North said and added, to her own surprise, “I'm a sluggard.” She must, she decided, adopt a broader “a,” even in her own mind.

Barton Sandford paid for their drinks. It was exasperating, Pamela North thought, that when men want to pay, waiters appear with bills. Sandford said he didn't think Pam needed to worry about her aunts. He thought, he had gathered distinctly, that they now were out of it.

He walked with them down Madison for a few more blocks, then went off east, apologizing once more for, he said, “having talked their ears off.” They went on to the Welby, and up to Aunt Thelma's room, which had Aunts Thelma and Pennina in it and, surprisingly, Sergeant Aloysius Mullins.

“—blew up in their faces,” Mullins was saying, and stopped abruptly as Pam and Dorian came in. “Don't say I said it,” he added, rather hurriedly. “Hello Mrs. North. Mrs. Weigand. Where's the Loot?”

Dorian said she did not know, and wished she did.