Murder in a Hurry (13 page)

“Some time or other,” Pam said. “And now's better. Before it sets.” She paused. “Things get more mixed up when they set,” she said.

Liza was not convinced; she realized she had no choice. She raised slim shoulders under the sheer-wool dress, took a cup of coffee Pam offered her. She had drunk half of it before the door buzzer sounded. Brian Halder, very tall, his face set, tightness around his dark eyes, came in first. The thin detective with the sensitive face, Sergeant Stein, was behind him. Brian Halder looked around the room, found Liza. For a moment his face lightened.

“You're all right?” he said.

She nodded.

Then Brian Halder turned to Lieutenant Weigand and, making a point of it, waited.

“Sit down, Mr. Halder,” Weigand said. “Perhaps Mrs. North will give you some coffee.”

“Of course,” Pam said, but Brian Halder said, “No,” in a flat voice.

Bill Weigand said, “Sit down anyway.”

Brian Halder found a chair, sat facing the detective.

“First,” Weigand said, “did you hit Miss O'Brien last night? Knock her out?”

“Does she say I did?” He did not look at Liza, looked only at Weigand.

“She is—was—afraid you did. Did you?”

“For what good it is,” Brian Halder said, and there was bitterness in his tone. “No, I didn't. I told her what happened. I—if she wants to think something else, I can't stop her.” He still did not look at the girl he was talking about.

“Right,” Weigand said. “Tell me, Mr. Halder.”

Brian Halder spoke slowly, carefully; the harshness was still in his voice, Liza thought. There was almost truculence in his voice.

“I went to the shop to feed the animals, Dad's animals,” Brian Halder said. “As Liza says she did. I had a key. I went in and looked at them. The boxer was worse. A great deal worse, I thought.”

He paused.

“The boxer,” Weigand said, no comment in his voice. “The sick dog. What is her name, incidentally?”

“Clytemnestra,” Brian Halder said.

“Oh, dear!” Pam North said. “Another!”

Halder waited. “Go on,” Weigand said.

Brian Halder had called the veterinarian who had been treating the boxer, waking the veterinarian up, telling him the dog seemed much worse. “The dog,” he called Clytemnestra, very carefully, each time he spoke of her. He had described the symptoms; said she seemed almost in collapse. The veterinarian had said that, if Brian could arrange to bring the dog to the hospital, he would do what he could. It was, flatly, too late to make a call. Halder had, he said, wrapped the dog in a blanket and, failing to find a taxicab, had carried her half a dozen blocks to the animal hospital.

“How is she now?” Pam asked.

Halder looked at Pam, apparently in surprise. Then he said that the vet thought she would, with luck, make out. It still depended on her reaction to penicillin. To Pam, about this, he spoke like himself, Liza realized.

“When you left, you locked the door?” Bill Weigand asked.

So far as Halder knew, he had. At least, he had pulled the door to behind him, and it was a snap lock. He did not think that with the dog in his arms, he had bothered to try the knob. He was uncertain.

“Go on,” Weigand said.

Halder had been gone, he thought, about forty-five minutes. He had returned, intending to feed the animals.

“The door was partly open,” he said. “The light in the shop was out. But there was a light in the rear room, and the door between the rooms was open. Liza was lying just beyond the light, just on the near side of the light. You know? She was—she was a kind of shadow.”

Now he looked at Liza: held her eyes for a moment.

“A little shadow,” he said; and his voice was suddenly deeper, soft.
Oh Brian
, she thought,
Brian dear!
But she did not say anything in words, and what she thought she was saying with her eyes she could not have been, because he did not seem to understand; he merely turned back to Weigand.

“I didn't think it was Liza,” Brian Halder said. “I thought—I didn't know who it was.” (But he started to say something different, Liza thought.) He had run into the room, discovered who it was, discovered, after a moment, that she was alive. She had been lying face down, her head turned to one side. He had put her on her back, found a pillow to put under her head. In placing it there, he discovered she had been struck. Before that, he had thought she had merely fainted. He had been about to call for help when he saw that she was regaining consciousness. Then, very quickly, she had seemed to get all right. Brian Halder looked at her, then. “I thought you were,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn't have let you go. Whatever you said.”

“I was all right,” she said.

“You were—” Pam North began, her voice indignant. But Liza caught Pam's eye, and shook her head slightly. Pam North shrugged.

“And,” Bill Weigand said, “thinking she was all right, although you knew she had been knocked out, you let her walk out of the shop by herself? Made no effort to stop her? To overtake her?”

“I was—” Halder began, but Bill Weigand shook his head.

“You don't want me to believe that,” Weigand said. “I wouldn't, anyway.”

Now Brian Halder hesitated, his eyes losing focus as he thought, considered. Then he looked at Weigand again and said, “All right.

“I started to follow her,” he said. “Bring her back. Something came up. But—I can't prove it.”

He was told to go on.

“I heard—thought I heard—someone, something, moving in the little area-way next the shop,” he said. “Between it and the building next door. A narrow passage between.”

Weigand said, “I saw it.”

Halder had, he said, started to go into the area-way to investigate; had taken one or two steps into the darkness and then—well, then stopped. That was the way he told it. He did not see any movement, or hear any sound and—Brian Halder hesitated.

“Actually,” he said, “I suppose I wanted to decide there wasn't anyone. Going in got to seeming—well, like not such a hot idea. There was quite a bit of light behind me and—” He paused, seemed embarrassed. “I just decided to give it a miss,” he said.

Weigand nodded, agreed. Only a fool, he told Brian Halder, walked into a narrow passage with the light behind him and possible animosity ahead. Stein looked at Weigand quickly, looked away again. The lieutenant, on that reckoning, had been several times a fool, and when the danger was not so problematical as this time it had been. Stein had done as much himself, and been three months in a hospital as a result. Of course, that sort of thing was their job, as it wasn't Halder's. Still—

“Mr. Halder,” Pam North said. “Are you sure it wasn't because you didn't
want
to find out who this other person was? Didn't
want
to know? Or—were afraid you did know?”

Brian Halder flushed. It's so hard for very young people, Pam thought. So little control over the capillaries. But Halder, if he knew his face had reddened, ignored it.

“It was the way I said,” he told Pam.

Bill Weigand frowned, momentarily. But when he spoke, his voice betrayed no annoyance.

“When you saw this shadow,” he said. “The shadow which turned out to be Miss O'Brien. Didn't you think it was somebody else?”

“I told you,” Halder said. “No.”

“No guess?”

“No.”

“Merely somebody small?”

Not even that, at first, Halder said. Merely somebody, something, lying on the floor. He had not thought of its being Liza, of its being anyone.

Brian Halder realized, he agreed in answer to further questions, that whoever had entered the shop between the time he left with the sick dog and the time Liza arrived and found the door unlocked, must have had a key if, as he thought, Brian had left the door locked behind him. “But now I'm not sure I did,” he said. So far as Brian knew, there were only three keys; one which hung, out of sight, on a nail inside the shop door; one J. K. Halder had carried in his pocket; and the one he had given Sneddiger. It was his father's that Brian himself had used; he had asked for it and got it from one of Weigand's men.

“Mullins gave it to him,” Stein said. “Figured somebody had to be able to get to the animals.”

Weigand nodded.

“But,” he said, “why not the second key? The one on the nail? Why didn't you take that?”

Halder hesitated momentarily. Then he said it had not been there when he looked; it was after he had been unable to find it that he had asked Mullins for the other key.

“You're certain there were only two?” Weigand asked. Not “certain” Brian Halder said, and now his voice, to Liza, sounded careful, considering. He only knew of two.

“For example,” Weigand said, then. “Your mother didn't have a key?”

“She did not.” Of that Brian was suddenly, emphatically, certain. Weigand did not comment on the certainty, on the emphasis. He went back to events of the night before; was told that, after Halder decided not to go into the dark passage, he had started after Liza, walked to the far end of West Kepp Street, realized he had lost her and returned to the shop. He had gone in again, looked around, found Liza's purse—“by the way, here it is,” he said, and took it out of his pocket and held it out to her—and found nothing else. He had locked up, making sure this time, and gone to his rooms. Later he had tried, several times, to reach Liza on the telephone at her apartment.

“You weren't worried when she didn't answer?”

He had been, certainly. But he had decided she was there and, thinking the calls were from him, deliberately not answered. He looked at Liza: she shook her head.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, and suddenly seemed to have all he wanted. He asked for the key to the shop, said he would see that the animals were fed, stood up and held out his hand. Brian gave him the key after a moment's hesitation. Bill nodded to Stein, who stood up.

“Well?” Brian Halder said.

Weigand appeared to be surprised.

“That's all,” he said. “Thanks for coming down. And—leave it to us, won't you?”

Halder flushed again. He looked once at Liza and she thought he was trying to tell her something. But she could not understand what it was and merely looked back at him, knowing there was only a question in her eyes.

Then Brian Halder said, “Well,” again, but this time inconclusively and turned toward the door. He stopped there; turned, spoke slowly, hesitantly.

“Can I—can I telephone you, Liza?” he asked. And this time his voice was Brian's again, but a younger Brian's than she had ever heard.

“Of course,” she said. “I'll—I'll be home this afternoon.” She looked at Weigand, who nodded. “This afternoon,” she said.

Then Brian Halder went, and Stein went with him. Bill Weigand finished cold coffee. Liza and Pam North waited.

“I'm fairly sure he didn't hit you,” Bill said, finally, to Liza, speaking slowly. “I think he knows, or is afraid he knows, who did. I think that was the reason he didn't go into the passage, not the reason he gave. I think he stayed behind to keep you from being followed and perhaps attacked again. In other words—I think he put on a better show, or at least a different show, than he says. But—”

“But you don't know,” Liza said. “I—I have to know.”

Bill did not reply to that, except with a nod of his head. He looked thoughtfully at his empty coffee cup.

“Who did he think it was?” Pam said. “The shadow on the floor? Who—which—turned out to be Liza?”

“Oh that,” Bill said. “Why—I think he was afraid it was
his mother. At first.”

There was a considerable pause, while both of them looked at him.

“That she was hurt?” Pam said, finally.

“That it was she lying there,” Bill said, after a pause. “I don't know what else he may have thought.”

Then the telephone rang. Pam answered it, handed it to Bill Weigand, who identified himself and listened. Then he said, “Spell it, will you?” and motioned for a pencil and for paper. Used to the mute appeal, thinking that even detectives were like other men in such matters, Pam North provided. “Faberworth,” Bill repeated and wrote the name down; wrote an address down. “Call him back,” Bill said. “Tell him I'll be there within half an hour.” He replaced the telephone and got up. He seemed pleased and interested.

“Halder's lawyer called in,” he said, answering the question Pam did not speak. “Says he has something which he thinks may interest us.”

Isaac Faberworth was, it was very evident, a lawyer in a big way, with his name first on a long list of names discreetly lettered on a glass panel. He was a compact man behind a large, clean desk; his face told little about his age, and much about his intelligence. He stood up when Weigand went in, was polite in a soft voice, desired to see Weigand's badge; saw it and nodded over it. He said he had heard of Weigand. “You considered law, once,” he told Weigand. “Columbia Law School.”

“Right,” Bill told him, sitting in the chair at the end of the desk; the very comfortable, disarming chair. “It was a long time ago.”

“A friend of mine there remembers you, nevertheless,” Isaac Faberworth said. He gave a name, and Bill Weigand said he was flattered. “Thought it a pity,” Faberworth said. “However—” He left it there. He opened the center drawer of the big desk and took from it, with no hesitancy at all, the one paper it seemed to contain. It was a sheet of familiar color, familiar size.

“Arrived yesterday morning,” Faberworth said, and handed it politely to Bill Weigand.

“Will call your office noon regard will change, J. K. Halder,” the telegram read. Bill Weigand read it twice and looked at Faberworth, who was looking at him.

“That's all,” Faberworth said. “Characteristic. Doesn't ask if I'll be in; doesn't ask if I'll be free. Gives no more than the minimal information he thinks necessary, so I'll have the will available. Very characteristic.” Faberworth shook his head briefly, modifying his ill speech of the dead. “And, of course, very annoying when he failed to show up,” he said. “My secretary tried a couple of times to reach him at the shop. Then, since I was tied up all afternoon anyway, I told her to let it go. I didn't learn what had happened until this morning—in the papers. Then I called you people, of course.”