The Norths Meet Murder (16 page)

Berex pushed open the door and waved Weigand and Detective Stein into an almost bare room. There was a desk, bare, too, and a steel filing cabinet and by the window there was a drawing-board. There were a couple of chairs, not inviting to repose. There was nobody in the office until the three went in, and Berex closed the door behind them. It was a bright day, but the room was dim and Berex switched on a shaded light hanging over the drawing-board. He sat down on the desk and motioned the detectives to chairs.

“So,” he said, “the police.”

“Right,” Weigand told him. “We want to ask you some questions. You've read about the Brent case?”

“Brent?” Berex said. “No, I don't think so. Somebody—your man, I suppose—said Lieutenant Weigand wanted to talk to me and I could set a place or come to Headquarters. He didn't say why.”

“And you just came?” Weigand said, not too believingly.

Berex looked at him and said: “Of course.

“I thought it might be something about my car,” he said. “I always think of the police and cars together, for some reason. But you say it's about a man named Brent?”

He was, Weigand decided, a singularly casual man; a singularly casual young man, he thought a moment later, realizing that Berex could hardly be over thirty.

“Stanley Brent,” Weigand said. “You ought to know him; he was your lawyer. He's been murdered.”

“Well,” said Berex, still quite casually. “Has he? Then I'll have to get a new lawyer, when I need a lawyer.”

He didn't seem much interested, or much surprised or, so far as Weigand could tell, much anything. He swung a leg as he perched on the desk and looked at Weigand, waiting for Weigand to go on.

“I gather he wasn't a friend of yours, particularly?” Weigand said.

Berex shook his head.

“No,” he said. “He was just my lawyer in a case. And now there isn't any case, or any lawyer.” He paused, and thought it over. “Claire's a friend of mine, of course,” he said. “Was it something about Claire you wanted to ask? She's a very fine girl, Claire.”

He was dispassionate about that, too. Weigand backed out, mentally, and decided to go back to the beginning. The beginning seemed to be Berex's occupation. Berex appeared rather more interested, and said he was an inventor.

“Well,” said Weigand. “What do you invent?”

Berex didn't seem to feel that Weigand would understand even if he were told. He looked very doubtful about Weigand, and asked whether he knew about the transmission of telephotos. “Pictures,” he explained. “You see them in the papers, sometimes. Very smudgy, usually.”

Weigand said he had seen them.

“Well,” Berex said, “that's what I am working on right now. Make them better, see?” He looked at Weigand still more doubtfully. “Electricity?” he said, as if he wondered whether Weigand had heard of it. “I've done some work in radio and television, too.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I see. And it was in connection with your invention that you hired Brent?”

Berex looked rather astonished, and shook his head. He said of course not.

“I have a patent lawyer,” he said. “Naturally. Brent isn't a patent lawyer. He was representing me in quite another matter.”

“Something to do with a man named Edwards, wasn't it?” Weigand said. “You were going to sue Edwards?”

Berex nodded and then shook his head. He didn't seem interested in learning where the detective got his information.

“It had to do with Edwards,” Berex said. “But I am not going to sue. It's all been fixed up.” He seemed to regard the matter as closed, and moved as if he were about to get down from the desk and go away. But Weigand shook his head and said there was a lot more. There was, it developed, but it took a lot of questions.

Befex, still vaguely puzzled that anybody should be interested, but not at all resentful, explained in a series of answers, with each of which the conversation seemed, as far as he was concerned, to die. It had to do, it turned out, with a trust fund. “An uncle,” Berex said. “He thought I wouldn't know what to do with it, so he left it in trust. He was quite right, too.” Edwards was the trustee; Berex seemed to feel vaguely that there had been another, who had died and not, as yet, been replaced. The amount of the trust was around two hundred thousand dollars.

For the past year or two, Berex went on, as Weigand dug it out, the income had mysteriously dwindled. Edwards had said that all incomes were dwindling, these days, but Berex had not been satisfied. He did not suppose, for a long time, that there was anything he could do about it, but then somebody told him he could ask Edwards for an accounting and find out where the money was and perhaps learn what was happening to the income. So he had written Edwards a couple of times asking for an accounting.

“He kept promising,” Berex said. “But I didn't get it. He just sort of slid around it, somehow, and gave me a long rigmarole. It was annoying.”

Berex finally, it appeared, got annoyed enough to do something about it, the something being the employment of Brent. Brent was to look around and see what went on. Then, if he couldn't get the accounting, he would take the matter into court and sue for it, petitioning to have Edwards removed as trustee.

“I was really very annoyed,” Berex said. “There were certain experiments which were costing money and I wanted to find out where I stood. I have a laboratory out in New Jersey to keep running. But it's all right now.”

Weigand wanted to know how that was.

“A week or so ago,” Berex said, “I got the accounting from Edwards and it's all shipshape. I showed it to a banker I know and he said it was a very good list. That, I took it, meant that the securities were all perfectly good securities, and that my income was all right. So I don't need Brent, after all.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “that's just as well.”

Berex nodded, with rather the air of one who discovers a happy coincidence.

“And that was all you had to do with Brent?” Weigand asked. “Or Edwards?”

Berex said it was—with Brent, anyway. Edwards had once or twice represented him as agent in the sale of an invention.

“A year or so ago,” Berex said, “before this trust fund business came up. I went abroad and left Edwards power of attorney to sell a device I'd patented—a radio device.”

“And did he sell it?” Weigand wanted to know, as long as they were on the subject.

He had, Berex said. Very satisfactorily, on a royalty basis.

“I make a very decent thing out of it,” Berex said. “And what has it to do with Brent's murder?”

Weigand said he couldn't think.

There was, however, the slip of paper from the vestibule of the Buano house. Weigand took it out, still in its envelope, and handed it to Berex.

“Have a look at that,” Weigand said. “And tell me about it. It's been photographed, so you can handle it.”

Berex drew the slip of paper out of the envelope and looked at it. He turned it in his fingers and shook his head.

“It looks as if it came out of a mailbox or something,” he said. “In one of the old houses. Mr. Edwards'?”

“You tell me,” Weigand said. “What do you know about it?”

Berex looked to be, in an incurious way, somewhat astonished.

“Me?” he said. “What would I know about it?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “I think you've seen it before. I think you cut it off the top of a letterhead of your own, and wrote Edwards' name on it and stuck it beside a bell at 95 Greenwich Place. And that was where Brent was killed.”

Berex did not seem at all alarmed. He smiled and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I never saw it before. Why should I do any of those things?” He paused, and looked at Weigand more sharply. “You're not, by any chance, thinking I killed Brent, are you?” he said.

“I think you prepared that slip of paper,” Weigand said. “I think it was cut off the top of one of your letterheads—a letterhead sheet like this.” He took out of his pocket Berex's letter to Edwards. He took the slip from Berex and laid it near the name at the top of the full sheet. He pointed to the little mark at the edge of the slip, and to the X in Berex's name.

“And I think you slipped up,” he said. “I think you signed it, without knowing it.”

“No,” Berex said. “I never saw it before. I see what you mean, and it's funny, but I never saw it before. I think you've slipped up, somewhere, yourself. I think if you try to prove I knew anything about Brent's murder you're working yourself into trouble.”

His voice was rather hard, now.

“I haven't,” Weigand said, “said anything about murder. I'm talking about a slip of paper.”

“The hell you are,” Berex said, but his voice was still unexcited. “I don't know how it works in, of course, but you think the murderer wrote the name of Edwards on this slip of paper and used it somehow in killing Brent. Maybe he did, for all I know. But I'm not the murderer; I never saw this slip before. So what do you do next?”

There were, Weigand told him, several things he might do. “Like taking you down to Headquarters,” he said. But that could wait a while.

“You'll be around,” Weigand said, without inquiry. “We'll know where to find you if we want you.”

Berex said he would be around, but that they wouldn't want him.

“Right,” Weigand said. “Let's hope you're right.” He started for the door. “But,” he said, “I wouldn't be so sure you won't need a lawyer. I wouldn't be sure at all if I were you.”

Berex sat on the desk, swinging a foot, and merely looked at him. His right hand, Weigand noticed, was stroking the handset telephone on the desk. The detectives went through the office door and closed it. Weigand stood outside the door for a moment, listening. He could hear the faint whirr of the dialing mechanism of a telephone inside the office. On impulse, he bent so that his ear was near the mailslot in the door.

After a moment, Berex's voice came to him, no longer level or bored.

“Claire,” he heard Berex say. “Claire—we've got to talk …”

Weigand straightened up a minute later, knowing that Louis Berex had invited “Claire” to lunch with him at some place called “Charles,” and gathering that the invitation had been accepted. It was interesting, Weigand decided, as he and Stein walked to the elevator.

Going down in the elevator, Weigand wheedled the slip of paper out of the envelope, still holding the envelope by the edges, and gave the envelope to Stein.

“And give me a ring as soon as they bring the prints up,” he directed the detective. “I'll be at Mr. Gerald North's.”

Weigand remembered the telephone number and Stein jotted it down. Stein went toward Centre Street in the squad car and Weigand walked south, turning down Fifth Avenue. Maybe, he thought, he was beginning to see a pattern in it.

12

T
HURSDAY

N
OON TO
1:30
P.M.

Both the Norths were home, and Mullins was in the midst of them. Any apprehension which Mr. North might have left from the last interview had, Weigand noticed, evaporated. The detective was rather surprised to find the male North, and looked at him inquiringly.

“I've stayed home to read a manuscript,” Mr. North explained.

There was, however, no sign of a manuscript. Mr. and Mrs. North had apparently been sitting in the living-room talking to Mullins. It was a very comfortable-looking party, Weigand decided. Mr. North said how about a drink? and Mullins' face went up. Mrs. North said not for her, so early, and Weigand felt the same. Mr. North and Mullins had ryes. Mrs. North looked admiringly at Mullins while he drank.

“And without a gun!” she said. “Or was it without a rod?”

It was past Weigand, but neither Mr. North nor Mullins seemed at sea, although Mullins looked slightly taken aback. He said it wasn't anything.

“But
four gangsters
,” Mrs. North said. “In a hallway! It sounds to me like a good deal.”

Mr. North nodded.

“It certainly sounds like a good deal,” he agreed.

Mullins looked at him quickly, but saw nothing to support any suspicion.

“Wasn't he brave?” Mrs. North said to Weigand. “Four of them, with machine-guns, and he went right in!”

Mullins looked at Weigand, hopefully.

“Very,” Lieutenant Weigand agreed. “We call him Mighty Mullins down at Centre Street. He's historic.”

Mullins said: “Now listen, Loot.”

“But it was such a lovely story,” Mrs. North said. “Full of action. I like them to be full of action, don't you?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “in real life it's different. Four gangsters, now—with machine-guns. It means a good deal of action, I should think. I never ran into anything like that, myself. I always sent Mullins.”

“Now, Loot, listen—” Mullins said, aggrieved.

Weigand grinned at him. The odd thing about it was that Mullins had, or thereabouts. There had been four of them, all right, and automatics, if no machine-guns. Mullins had had a gun, too, and had gone in shooting. But the fact remained that he had gone in, and, eventually, came out, rather nicked but with a couple of his men. A third of them wasn't going anywhere, any more, and the fourth had gone, very rapidly. Of course, it needed the breaks; but there had been four of them, all right.

Mrs. North watched Weigand's face, and nodded.

“I knew he had,” she said. “He
is
brave, I mean.”

Mullins said: “Listen, Mrs. North—”

“Well,” Weigand said, “nothing's been going on here, I gather. No alarms or excursions?”

Mr. North shook his head.

“It was Timothy?” Mrs. North said, sobered.

Weigand nodded, and said it was.