The Dishonest Murderer (11 page)

“There are certain things I'm supposed to find out,” Weigand said. He was patient, unperturbed. “Meaningless things, most of them. But we're supposed to cover all the ground.”

Grainger hesitated, then shrugged. He had gone out the previous afternoon for a late, long lunch with some of the men at the office. He had got to his apartment after four. He had taken a nap. At about six, he had telephoned Celia and suggested dinner, been told she had been out all afternoon and now wanted to rest for the party. He had loafed around the apartment for a time, gone out to dinner, returned and changed. “I picked Miss Kirkhill up at the Chatham and came here,” he said. “We planned that when I called her.”

He looked at Weigand.

“And,” he said, “I was alone, didn't see anybody, pr-probably wasn't seen by anybody, except a waitress who wouldn't remember.”

His tone was a little combative, but Weigand did not appear to notice it. He merely said, “Right.” He said, generally, to all of them, “Thank you.” He recapitulated.

“None of you, then, has any idea why Senator Kirkhill was dressed as he was, was where he was,” he said. “None of you knew he had a weak heart. None of you saw him in New York yesterday afternoon or evening.” He looked at Freddie and nodded. “Barring the chance you saw him, Mrs. Haven,” he said. “None of you saw him to speak to, to get anything which will help now.”

He looked around. They looked at him and nobody said anything.

“Then—” Weigand began, and interrupted himself. It was as if, belatedly, he had thought of something of little importance. “By the way,” he said, “does any of you know a man named Smiley. Arthur Smiley?” He looked around again, and got no answer. He did not appear to be surprised. “A private detective,” Weigand said. “An investigator. He has a partner, a man named Briggs. Harry Briggs?” He seemed to feel that this might prompt a memory. He waited again. He seemed very patient, Freddie thought, very—

Harry,
she thought, then. The man who was here said something about “Harry.” He had said to her father, in his buttery voice, something like amusement in his buttery voice, that Harry wasn't he—“Harry ain't me.” That was what he had said. Then the man who had come to see her father was the man called “Smiley.” A private detective, an investigator—a soft, buttery man, with a kind of oily assurance in his voice, a kind of gloating; with a kind of assurance, too, in his manner; a kind of confidence that he could enter an apartment,
this
apartment, when he chose, say what he chose. The turmoil in her mind would show in her face. She tried to pull a shade, an expressionless shade, over her face. But instead she found that she was looking at her father, that her eyes were demanding something of her father, some explanation.

“Mrs. Haven?” Weigand said. “You don't know Smiley?”

There was only one thing to say. She made herself say it. “No,” she said.

Weigand looked at her for a second, and then looked away.

“Right,” he said. “Probably not important. Somebody thought he'd seen him around in—in the neighborhood.” He smiled; he appeared to extend a confidence.

“A very able man, Mr. Smiley,” he said. “In his way, that is. In—getting his way. Very odd team, Smiley and Briggs. Briggs might be a lawyer, you see. Very respectable, inspires confidence. None of you has met this Briggs?”

He looked at all of them; he looked at Admiral Satterbee.

“No,” Weigand said. “Why should you?”

He turned away, then; he talked to the big man who looked like a policeman in civilian clothes. He turned back and said he thought that was all, for the moment.

“Except,” he said, “I'd like to have you talk to Sergeant Mullins, here. Just to fill things in. How long you knew the senator—that sort of thing.” He looked at Celia Kirkhill, then. “Not you, of course, Miss Kirkhill,” he said, and his voice sounded gentle. “Nor you, Mrs. Haven, naturally. We'll get what we need from Mr. Phipps and Mrs. Burnley, probably.” He looked at Admiral Satterbee. “And perhaps the admiral can help,” he added, his voice without inflection.

V

Saturday, Noon to 3:20 P.M.

“Jerry,” Pam North said, her voice very wide awake. “The cats want in.”

Jerry North said something rather like “Whah?”

“The cats,” Pam said. “They—”

Gerald North tried to climb into his pillow. He wrapped it around his head. He said, in a smudged voice, “Tell them—” and did not finish, because he was almost going back to sleep.

“And,” Pam said, “besides the cats, there's the admiral.” She paused, her voice from the other bed still clear and wide awake. “Your admiral,” she said.

It was preposterous that the admiral was outside their bedroom door, trying to get in. That, at least, was clear. Jerry told Pam it was clear. He said, “You're crazy. No admiral. Nobody there but those—” He began to drift off again.

Sherry, the blue-point, had the most penetrating voice. It was pitched higher than the other voices; it was very plaintive. Gin, the younger seal-point, spoke briefly, more harshly; it was almost as if she barked. There was a pause. Martini, her voice soft but still guttural, spoke in command. It was just as Jerry thought. Pam's idea was preposterous.

“Just the cats,” he said. “The admiral would
say
something.” He tried to withdraw into the pillow and, at the same time, under a blanket. Then he realized, with a kind of cold dread, that he was awake. He groaned, turned over and opened one eye toward his wife in the other bed. Pam was propped up against pillows; she was entirely wide awake.

“What are you talking about?” Jerry said. “At this hour?”

“Noon,” Pam said. “Don't you remember about the admiral? Your admiral? And the senator? Anyway, it was you who didn't want to lock them up in the kitchen, because it would be too cold.”

“Yowowow?” Sherry enquired, hearing their voices. “Yah!” Gin said. Martini scratched the door.

“But go back to sleep, Jerry,” Pam said. “I didn't mean to wake you up.”

Jerry opened the other eye. The experience was trying; a great deal of unwelcome light came in.

“Fine,” he said. “Wonderful. I go right back to sleep.”

Pam looked at him. She said she was sorry. She did not, Jerry decided, look sorry. Looking at her made him feel much better. Anyway, the worst of it was over. He was awake, now. He had both eyes open. Suddenly he grinned at Pam North.

“I thought you said an admiral was outside the door,” he said. “With the cats.” Then he remembered. He said, “Oh!”

“For practical purposes,” Pam told him, “it's the same thing. I'll feed the cats if you'll turn off the air.” She smiled at him. “And you,” she added.

Jerry writhed out of bed, shivered, and plunged across the room. He snapped off the ventilator which was pumping cold, damp air into the room. He lifted a Venetian blind and looked out and shivered. It was still snowing. He turned on a radiator. He said, “Brrr.”

“Well,” Pam said, reasonably, “if you wore pyjamas. In the winter, anyway.”

Jerry said “Huh!” crossed the room hurriedly and got back into his bed. “Your turn,” he said.

Pam North got up as if it were a pleasure. Jerry regarded her with interest.

“Actually,” he said, “the difference is technical. I mean, if that—er, garment—is supposed to provide warmth. I mean—”

“I know what you mean, darling,” Pam said. “Don't you like it?”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “As far as that goes—”

Pam found a negligee on a chair. With quick, assured movements she became hopelessly entangled in it. She extricated herself, less quickly, looked at the negligee with irritation, said, “Oh!” and turned the sleeves right side out. This time she went into it cautiously, with evident doubt, and was pleased and a little triumphant when she had it on. She looked at herself in a long mirror and told Jerry that he had good taste. Then she let the cats in. They arched and curved around her; Gin discovered Jerry in bed and went over to lick his face, purring loudly; Martini sharpened her claws briefly on an edge of the blanket, jumped up and said “good morning” with a short emphatic sound which took getting used to.

The cats followed Pam out of the bedroom and followed her back in again. “The papers,” Pam said, and presented the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune.
“Scrambled all right?”

“Fine,” Jerry said.

Pam went out again, accompanied by the cats.

Both newspapers were, as Bill Weigand had predicted, happy over the murder. The
Herald Tribune
gave it the right hand column of Page One; the
Times,
more austere, confined it to the left hand column, across the journalistic railroad tracks. But the
Times
gave it more space.

For a column or so, the
Times,
which Jerry dutifully read first, told him little he did not know about Senator Bruce Kirkhill's death. (“Under suspicious circumstances,” the
Times
said in its long opening sentence. The understatement, Jerry felt, did the
Times
immense credit.) The
Times
gave the facts; then it began to puzzle over them. The police, the
Times
reported, with a suggestion of disapproval, could not explain why the senator “known for his immaculate dress” had put on such old clothes to be killed in, had found such an inferior doorway to die in. Various explanations had been offered, the
Times
said, not saying by whom. (By various members of the
Times
's city staff, Jerry suspected.) For one thing, the
Times
told its readers, Senator Kirkhill had long been known for his activity in favor of public housing and slum clearance. It was possible that he had, for reasons of his own, been making a personal investigation of slum conditions and had dressed as he had so as to be able to move in lower East Side areas without attracting undue attention. Presumably, he had been killed, unintentionally, by someone whose purpose was theft. The
Times
seemed, with puzzled reservations, to prefer this theory, but did not limit itself to it.

“Although a liberal,” the
Times
said, “Senator Kirkhill was an outspoken opponent of communism and the possibility that communist sympathizers may have been involved is being considered by the police.” (The copy desk, Jerry thought, should have cut the “although” with which the sentence began.)

Under a separate headline, the
Times
ran a column and a half of obituary, and Jerry skimmed through it rapidly before he turned to the
Herald Tribune.

Kirkhill had been wealthy, inheriting a considerable fortune from his father, who had made it in oil; Kirkhill had spent his early maturity making money, also in oil; he seemed to have been precocious at it; he had apparently betrayed no interests less conventional. He had married in 1927, when he was twenty-three, had fathered a son who had died in infancy and a daughter, Celia, who was born in 1930. His wife had died in 1939.

Early in 1942, Kirkhill had sought, and obtained, a commission in the Army, going in as a captain—and, apparently, as a specialist in oil. He had spent most of his time in Washington, but he had traveled widely, and hazardously, on missions. (Presumably, although the
Times
did not specify, connected with oil.) He had been in a transport plane which crashed on a Pacific island; he had survived—apparently by tenacity and physical stamina—where a number of other men had died.

He had left the Army, a lieutenant colonel, in the fall of 1945 and, reading between the factual lines, one could guess he came out a different man, with different interests. He did not return to business, to the making of money. He went into politics, and not to defend the concepts normally dear to the interests of a man of wealth. His advocacy of public housing was an example of this variance from the norm. His even more determined support of a vast middle-western flood control and power project was another. “He became, in his few years of public life, widely known as a progressive of the type once so common in the American west,” the
Times
biographer remarked, with the air of one writing history. “But he was one of the first to recognize, and to combat, the rising menace of communism.” (This time, Jerry took the conjunction in his stride.)

Kirkhill had been appointed to the Senate by the governor of his State to fill out the unexpired term of an elderly and docile gentleman who had succumbed to the pressures of government and the advance of years. Kirkhill had been prominent for a freshman senator; the spring before he had received his party's nomination for the Senate, and, two months before his death, he had been elected. He was survived by a daughter, Celia, and a brother, George.

Already, the
Times
had found many persons of importance, chiefly in politics, to lament this untimely taking off in carefully chosen words. Members of the senator's own party were eloquent, no doubt sincere; members of the opposition party, appropriately more restrained, nevertheless had words of praise. Men associated with him in his business career lamented his passing; even his enemies, now that he could no longer trouble them, were sorrowed by his death. (“He was a determined fighter for what he believed in and a splendid American. Although we many times disagreed, I feel that the whole country is the loser by his death.”—Julian Grainger, director of the Utilities Institute.)

The
Herald Tribune,
in a somewhat more sprightly fashion, provided most of the same facts. It, also, said there were many theories to explain the central and most mysterious circumstances of the senator's death—why he was where he was, dressed as he was. Amnesia was always possible, the
Herald Tribune
pointed out. A side story from Washington reported that Senator Kirkhill had, in recent weeks, been under unusual pressure and that he had visited a Washington hospital for a checkup, leaving the reader to find what he liked between the lines. The senator's notorious antipathy to communism was noted, as was also the indignation which his advocacy of the Valley Authority had aroused among “many prominent business men.” The
Herald Tribune,
Jerry North noticed, had missed the one about slum clearance.