The Norths Meet Murder (14 page)

7:15
P.M.
TO
11
P.M.

Weigand found dinner, walked across town to the B.M.T., and rode down to Headquarters. Mullins, comfortable with his feet on a desk, was waiting. He took his feet off the desk and said that the more he saw of the case the screwier it got. Yes, he had sent the slip to the Research Bureau in Brooklyn and they had promised a full report by morning. Also he had seen Edwards, the laundryman. William Edwards.

“He says no,” Mullins said.

“No what?” Weigand wanted to know.

“No, he didn't commit the murder,” Mullins explained, as if it should have been easy. Mullins was patient about it. “He knew Brent and he didn't like him much, but he didn't kill him. ‘Over a shirt I should kill people?' he said.”

“This is Edwards?” Weigand wanted to know. “Bill Edwards. Over-a-shirt-he-should-kill-people Edwards?”

Mullins nodded.

“It's just a name,” he said. “It goes with the laundry. Every time a new man takes over the laundry he's William Edwards. He might have been a Chinaman.”

“But he wasn't,” Weigand said. “What about the shirt?”

Brent had, it developed, accused Edwards of destroying a new and custom made shirt of great value. Edwards had insisted that (a) he had not destroyed it, (b) it was not new, anyhow, and (c) anybody should, pay fifteen dollars for a shirt, and did Brent think he was a greenhorn? So relations had been strained. But Edwards was up in the Bronx seeing his mother on Monday afternoon and he could prove it by “mama.”

“He could probably, too,” Mullins thought. “But he didn't like Brent. Nobody liked this guy Brent, much, did they?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “lots of people didn't, apparently. But maybe some did—maybe his wife did.”

“Maybe,” Mullins said. “And maybe it was an act. Maybe she thought somebody had a swell idea. Maybe she had the swell idea herself. What does the Doc say? Could a woman have bashed him?”

Weigand had been over that, and it was, the doctor thought, possible. It would, naturally, depend on the weight of the weapon and, at least as much, on the strength of the woman. A weapon with a handle, weighted and balanced—with such a weapon almost any reasonably strong woman could have done it, particularly counting in the thinness of Brent's skull.

“The North dame?” Mullins wanted to know. Weigand nodded his head, but doubtfully.

“Physically—yes, with the proper weapon. But I don't think she did. I don't think she goes around bashing people.” He waited for Mullins, who thought it over. Mullins might be interesting on the point. Mullins shook his head.

“Neither do I, somehow,” he said. “She's too screwy and, oh—what the hell? It's not in the picture, Loot.”

Two hunches didn't make a fact, Weigand thought. On the other hand, two hunches might be better than one.

“How about the Brent dame?” Mullins wanted to know. “She looked sort of hefty, somehow.”

There wasn't, Weigand thought, much doubt that the Brent dame could have killed her husband as he was killed, if she had wanted to. She was, well, “lithe” was the word. Then he remembered something Fuller had said.

“She had a good overhead smash,” he said. Mullins looked puzzled and then said that somebody, sure enough, had had a good overhead smash. Weigand explained.

“In tennis,” he said. “She was pretty good a few years ago. She was particularly good at hitting the ball when it was in the air, over the head. She reached up and came down on it. Anyway, that's what Fuller says.”

“Oh,” said Mullins, “tennis. A tennis ball ain't a man's head.”

“Get under a good overhead smash some time,” Weigand said. “Even with a racquet, and not anything heavy—like a mallet. You'd see things. Or maybe you wouldn't see anything.”

Mullins didn't think much of the idea, it was clear; he thought tennis was something you played in white pants. But he let it go, in favor of something else.

“Parkes called up,” he said. “Remember Parkes—Sergeant Parkes, assigned to the D.A.'s office?”

Weigand nodded.

“He said he thought we ought to know,” Mullins said. “He thought we ought to know Brent had an appointment with one of the assistants for Tuesday. With an assistant named Cummings. They don't know what about and they sort of wondered why he didn't show up. Then one of them sort of thought to look in the paper and there, sure enough, it was. Even those boys could dope out why he didn't show up after they saw the papers.”

Weigand was interested; very much interested.

“They didn't know what he wanted?” he said.

Mullins said that was it. He called up and said he wanted to give some information and they put him onto Cummings. He said he wanted to come around and see Cummings personally and made an appointment for Tuesday—the next day.

“It was Monday when he called, then?” Weigand said. “What time Monday?”

“Monday afternoon about one o'clock,” Mullins said. “They made a note of it. Bright guys up there. About an hour ago they got to thinking we might be interested.”

The District Attorney's office, it developed, was leaving the matter entirely to the Department, although in promising cases it often assigned detectives from the staff detailed to aid its investigations. Just now, however, its staff was busy on rackets.

“Parkes says they've got some hot stuff,” Mullins reported, interestedly. “He says they're going to blow things open.”

“Well,” Weigand said. “That will be swell. What things?”

Parkes hadn't said. Just things.

“What about the other end?” Weigand said. “Brent's office? Did the boys turn up anything?”

Mullins hadn't heard and Weigand sent him to find out if Sergeant Auerbach, in charge of investigations at the law offices, had reported in. Auerbach had, and came along. He had been, he said, writing up his report to send along to the Inspector, but he could give Weigand the gist of it. They had interviewed everybody at the office and nobody knew any thing of importance. “You'll get it all,” Auerbach said. “But I don't think there's anything in it.” They had checked Brent's bank account and income. His balance was not large, but large enough and his income was substantial and steady, running, apparently, around fifteen or twenty thousand a year. There was nothing irregular about it; no large unexplained deposits, no unaccountable withdrawals.

“They spent about all he made,” Auerbach said. “But there was always more coming along.”

The Brents had had a joint account, and Brent had had another in his own name. The bills from various charge accounts went to his office and were paid from there, apparently after reasonable lapses of time. At the time of his death he owed rather over a thousand, which was, Auerbach said, probably about average for his income.

“It doesn't show us anything that I can see,” Auerbach said. “The details are all in the reports.”

They had got a list of the firm's clients, on pledge that the information would go no further, and the cases especially assigned to Brent were checked.

The law firm had, Weigand discovered, a good many imposing clients, many of them corporations. Consolidated Foods was on the list, and the Framingham Steel Corporation and something called, rather oddly, Recording Industries, Inc., along with many others. These apparently were permanent clients, and a few of them were checked. There were also a number of individual clients assigned to Brent, and Weigand ran through them without finding any familiar names until he came to “Berex, Louis.” He pointed to the name.

“Any correspondence from this man?” he wanted to know.

Auerbach thought there was; he went back to his desk to look and returned with two letters, which he tossed to Weigand. Both bore Berex's name printed at the top. One merely confirmed an appointment at Brent's office for a Friday in late September. The other, written a fortnight earlier, asked for information.

“Will you let me know,” Berex had written, “what progress you are making in the Edwards matter? And what attitude he and his lawyers are showing? I appreciate that these things cannot be made to move rapidly, and that you are doing all that can be done. But you will appreciate, also, my anxiety to get the matter settled.”

Clipped on was a carbon of Brent's answer, which said, in effect, that he hoped to have progress to report within a week or two, and that he did appreciate Berex's desire for a favorable conclusion of the matter. Both letters were direct and formal; neither showed that the relation between the two men was more than that of client and counsel. Weigand read them quickly and continued to stare at them. After a while he said, “Um,” thoughtfully.

“Anything else?” he wanted to know.

“There were several notes from dames,” Auerbach said. “Nice, friendly notes. I've got the boys checking them. Brent seems to have gotten around quite a bit.”

“Anything from a Mrs. Fuller?” Weigand asked. “A Jane Fuller?”

They hadn't, Auerbach said, found anything. There was a note from Myrtle—“My God,” Weigand said—and one signed “Honey” and another signed merely “Love, K.” But the most recent of these, it developed, had been written almost three years earlier.

“What,” Weigand said, “do you suppose they keep them for?”

Auerbach hadn't, he said, any idea. Mullins said that maybe they just liked to remember.

“Well,” Weigand said, “they'll be fun for the boys to check. Let me know what they find, will you?”

“Sure,” Auerbach promised. “It will be about Christmas, but I'll let you know. If you still want to know.”

“Right,” Weigand said. Then he said, “Thanks,” and Auerbach went back to his report. Now, Weigand wondered, where were they? He looked at his watch and discovered, rather to his surprise, that it was almost eleven. He was tired and his head ached and Inspector O'Malley had gone home a long' time before. Weigand checked, mentally. Brent's clothes were being looked for, diligently but without much hope. The Salvation Army had been checked, but had no record of receiving a man's complete outfit. The Post Office Department had been notified of the chance that the clothes worn by Brent might be jogging somewhere in the mails, bound for heaven knew what imaginary addressee.

A couple of men were checking the parcel rooms at the Pennsylvania and Grand Central Stations, and the railroad ferries. As fast as unredeemed bundles were removed from the lock boxes on the subway stations, from which they are taken after a stipulated twenty-four hours has elapsed, they were checked. But the clothes might just as well never turn up. If anybody wanted to go to the trouble, and sacrifice, say, a flatiron, there were always convenient rivers.

The slip Mrs. North found in the fourth-floor mailbox was being examined by modern science in Brooklyn. An eye was being kept on possible suspects. Weigand couldn't see O'Malley until tomorrow, unless something broke. Berex was the next man to see, but that could wait until tomorrow; would have to wait until tomorrow, when the mailbox slip had been fingerprinted and otherwise examined. Hmmm—

Weigand decided that there was nothing which prevented him from going home and sleeping a while. It was an agreeable thought. Mullins could drive him up in a Department car. He told Mullins as much, and Mullins said, “O.K., Loot.”

It was turning cooler out, Weigand noticed, as they drove uptown. Weigand was stern about the red lights and the siren, this time; there was nothing to identify the car as belonging to the police except, of course, Mullins behind the wheel. Weigand was half asleep when they reached his apartment house in the West Fifties, three-quarters when he fell into bed.

10

T
HURSDAY

8
A.M.
TO
10:45
A.M.

Weigand had gone to bed Wednesday evening with a feeling of tired satisfaction; he awoke Thursday in a mood of angry impatience which nature abetted by providing him with a mild hangover. He got up filled with smoldering indignation, directed chiefly against himself and for slightly intangible reasons; he bathed and shaved irritably, and the whirring of the razor tightened his nerves. He was at Headquarters a little after eight, and angrily in quest of Mullins. Before nine he was smouldering on the telephone to Brooklyn, inquiring bitterly for a report on the slip of paper he had sent over the evening before. Mullins, when he came, was snapped into motion, telephoning Louis Berex to make an appointment for eleven; checking on the progress of the search for Brent's clothing; arranging another interview to follow immediately with Edwards; finding out from the watchers' reports what Mrs. Brent, Fuller and the Norths had been doing the evening and night before.

None of them had, it developed, been doing anything out of the way. The Norths and their guests had gone to a motion picture theater around the corner and seen a mystery film, which Detective Cohen, rousted from his comfort at the bar across the street, had also seen and enjoyed. He was willing to tell Mullins the plot, but Mullins, feeling hostile eyes on the back of his head, demurred. Edwards had gone to a formal dinner in one of the East Seventies and his accompanying detective had had a dull time on the sidewalk.

Fuller had stayed at home with, it was presumed, Mrs. Fuller, who had arrived shortly after Weigand left. A man identified as Berex by the doorman of the apartment house near the East River, where Berex lived, had come home about ten and, apparently, stayed home, although, since there were several possible exits to the house, nobody could be quite sure, and if Headquarters really wanted him watched, two men would be necessary, at least. Mullins relayed this information to Weigand, who was frosty. This morning, Mullins decided, the Loot suspected everybody.

There was, Mullins knew by experience, a time in every case when the Loot began to suspect everybody. It came when things got too screwy even for the Loot, who could take things a lot screwier than Mullins could. Mullins suffered through this period, but he understood it. In his idle moments—never as numerous as Mullins would have liked—he experimented with crossword puzzles, and they were always too much for him at a certain point. Then, he had long since decided, the way he felt must be about the way the Loot felt now. He looked at Weigand warily, but with understanding.