Hanged for a Sheep (21 page)

“I still don't see why we can't go ahead with them,” Mullins said. He still sounded aggrieved. “Suppose there ain't any other prints. What's the matter with the prints we got? Why not pinch Craig and let his lawyer explain it?” He looked at Weigand hopefully. “We ain't working for the defense, Loot,” he insisted. “Maybe they wouldn't wonder about other prints.”

Weigand merely looked at him.

“Nope,” Mullins said. “I guess you're right, Loot. Probably it wouldn't work. But it does show he gave her the salts, don't it?”

Weigand shrugged. That was, certainly, the inference to be drawn. And he had—or
had
he denied it? Mullins went back into his notes. He plodded, his lips moving. Then his face brightened.

“Yeh,” he said, “he says she was drinking the stuff when he came in. And that the bottle was on the table, and it was a new bottle. But—wait a minute.
He didn't say it was a different bottle!”

Weigand nodded. That, he said, was the way he remembered it. It was a point.

“But there's a chance that he wouldn't have noticed,” he pointed out. “A good chance—he expected to see the usual bottle, and saw what he expected to see. As anybody might have.”

Mullins looked doubtful.

“Yes,” Weigand told him. “As anybody might have. We get into the habit of giving significance to such things, Sergeant; we get to seeing things too clearly and to expecting other people to see clearly too, and make logical deductions, at the time. But at the time—at any time—most people don't see clearly and make logical deductions. We don't, except when we're on a case. For example—could you identify any stranger you saw coming down this morning? Say the first man you met coming out of the house?”

“It was a woman,” Mullins said. “At any rate—I think. No, I guess it was—oh, the hell with it. O.K., Loot.”

Weigand nodded. That was the way it was. Looking back, you often wished, as a detective, that witnesses had had their wits about them. But it was a lot to ask. So possibly—even probably—Ben Craig would not have noticed that it was the wrong bottle. At least, it would be difficult to prove anything by the point. As to whether he had prepared the dose, and was now lying about it—well, that was confusing too.

“In the first place,” Weigand pointed out, “she says she doesn't know. Which isn't reasonable, because when she began to suspect she had been poisoned, she would remember all she could about the circumstances, and probably remember who gave her the salts, even though she didn't know the salts had the poison in them. So, probably, she is shielding somebody.”

“Somebody who tried to poison her?” Mullins asked. He seemed doubtful.

“Perhaps she had her own reasons,” he said. “Now that we know where the poison came from, we'll have to try to get it out of her. Maybe she thought the person who gave her the poison was innocent—didn't know the poison was in the salts.”

Weigand paused and drummed on the table and Mullins waited.

“And,” Weigand pointed out after a moment, “she may have been right. If you were going to poison somebody would you put poison in medicine and then give the person you wanted to poison the medicine with your own hands? Or would you arrange to have somebody else give the poison?”

“Somebody else,” Mullins agreed. “So Craig didn't do it, because that makes it too easy?”

Weigand smiled a little. There was something in that, he said. Supposing Craig had openly given the poison, openly leaving fingerprints on it, it was a better than fifty-fifty chance somebody else had put the arsenic in the salts. Mullins nodded and Weigand watched him nod.

“Then,” Weigand said, “why did he lie about it, if he was so innocent as all that?”

Mullins thought it over. “Hell,” Mullins said. “Maybe he
did
do it.”

“Then why—?” Weigand began.

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. His voice had a note of entreaty. “Let's take up something else, huh? You've got me going around.”

Weigand thought a moment longer and then shrugged.

“Right,” he said. “We'll let it go for the moment. But it's going to stay right there, Sergeant. We're going to have to think up some way Craig can be innocent and not innocent at the same time.”

His fingers stopped drumming for a moment and he looked through Mullins.

“Or,” he said, “maybe we don't. Maybe we don't after all, Mullins.”

Mullins waited, but Weigand did not amplify. Instead, the lieutenant picked up the first of a sheaf of reports lying on his desk. It concerned the manner of Anthony's death, and added little to what they knew. It was formal, for the records. A .38 calibre bullet, fired from an automatic, had ended Anthony's life. (So the bullet had not come from the major's gun.) The bullet had entered the neck and ranged up and back, coming out the back of the skull—and taking part of the skull with it. Death had supervened without an interval worth mentioning. Anthony had been in his late thirties or early forties and well nourished. He had been facing his murderer, who was below him, at the time of the shot, which had been fired at a distance greater than two feet, since there had been no powder marks around the wound. The distance, as indicated by the nature of the entrance wound, had probably been between four and five feet.

Weigand tossed the report into the proper basket, for proper filing. He took up another, which dealt with the body of Harry Perkins. It reported that Perkins had been hanged, with enough drop to break his neck; that he weighed 103 pounds and was undernourished; that there was a contusion on his jaw indicating that he might have been knocked unconscious before he was hanged. This report followed its predecessor into the basket.

There was a report from detectives who had searched Anthony's apartment after his body was found, and removed from it almost everything portable. The things removed were now in the possession of the property custodian, and were itemized. Weigand ran down the list. Anthony had had a good many clothes and a good deal of liquor in his apartment. He had also had marijuana cigarettes. Weigand said “well.” He had had checkbooks and unpaid bills and receipts and very little correspondence. And he had had, with a rubber band around them, several letters which started, in most cases, “Darling” and ended, in all cases, “Clem.” He showed Mullins this entry.

“Sometime,” said Weigand bitterly, “we'll get a precinct man with a mind. Maybe. Get the letters, Mullins.”

Mullins went. Weigand read on through the papers while he waited. Detective Stein, in charge at the Buddie house the night before, reported that all concerned had kept to their rooms and that there had been no disturbance. The girls, Clem and Judy, had doubled up in the former's room, and Bruce McClelland had been moved into Judy's. And as far as Detective Stein could report, everybody had slept well. If a guilty conscience had induced wakefulness, that fact did not come within the purview of the Police Department.

There had been a checkup, also, on Stephen Anthony's past, which had, from time to time, come within the Police Department's purview. There was an arrest some years previous, for example, on the complaint of a wealthy woman—also, as Mrs. Buddie had been, appreciably older than Anthony. She had alleged that he had sold for his own benefit securities entrusted to him for purposes which remained a little vague. Then, without explanation, she had withdrawn her allegations, leaving the case, and the police, at loose ends. And another time he had been picked up on suspicion that he knew more than an innocent man should about the recovery of some jewels which had been stolen—or had they ever actually been stolen?—and had been returned mysteriously, with money changing hands. They had got as far as magistrate's court with that one, and the magistrate had, lugubriously, dismissed the charge. And Anthony had been born of Greek parents, whose name was not Anthony; he had appeared in New York some fifteen years previously, being then in his early twenties, and he was suspected of doing odd jobs for Ross Brack. After Mrs. Buddie had dismissed him he had several times, after a few drinks, complained to associates and made vague promises of getting his own back. His associates, who did not regard Mr. Anthony as dangerous, had been unimpressed. He had hinted of a new angle which was to bring him unprecedented affluence, but for fifteen years he had been dropping equally murky hints and remaining, on the whole, no more affluent than the next hanger-on of rackets.

There was, Weigand thought, tossing aside the papers which dealt with Mr. Anthony, formerly Anaragagnos, nothing conclusive in that. There was not, on the whole, even anything suggestive. He drummed the table.

The trouble was not, he reflected, that he lacked a hunch. He had a very good hunch. And usually good hunches could be proved or disproved, and there you were. You matured an hypothesis, on the basis of observed details—of events, fabrications, personalities. If too much showed against the first hypothesis, you matured a second, and perhaps after it a third. But if you knew your job, the first hypothesis was usually correct in essentials. You knew who had acted and what he had done and you could guess why. The rest could be filled in.

But here the method seemed to be breaking down. He thought he knew who, but the hunch was almost wholly speculative. If necessary, he could postulate a “why,” although he was not certain it would be the right “why.” What he did not know was, peculiarly, what. He knew somebody had killed Stephen Anthony, because Stephen Anthony was dead. He knew somebody, and presumably the same person—although that, again, was “hunch”—had hanged Harry Perkins. But these things were subsidiary. What he did not know was whether somebody had tried to kill Pam North's Aunt Flora. That was where the peculiarity lay.

Somebody had gone to the trouble of getting white arsenic—presumably picking a pharmacy which was not too scrupulous, putting up a good story (a desire to sprinkle the poison as an insecticide on some favorite plant, perhaps? Or a desire to use it in disposing of some loved, but ailing pet?) and had further gone to the considerable trouble of mixing the poison with the fruit salts. But it appeared that he had not done it to kill, because it would be easy to discover the lethal dose and not too hard to insure that the amount of the salts recommended would include ample arsenic.

“He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases,” Weigand quoted to himself. Which was silly, because who would tease with arsenic? He considered possibilities.

It was a possibility, for example, that the purpose
had
been merely to annoy, in a somewhat extreme sense; that it had been an unpleasant practical joke, played by somebody with an unpleasant mind and an active grudge. Somebody might merely have wanted, for reasons which did not appear, to make Aunt Flora extremely uncomfortable. This argued the presence, somewhere in the circle, of a malicious monster. Weigand shook his head, not believing in monsters and having noticed no psychopathic tendencies among those around Aunt Flora. Nor was it easy to imagine a chain of circumstances which would lead from such a malicious joke to a double murder; if somebody had been “teasing” Aunt Flora with arsenic, then the subsequent murders were unconnected. You came back then to coincidence, which got you nowhere. Or nowhere you wanted to get.

If not to kill and not to tease, then why arsenic in Aunt Flora's medicine? A mistake? It seemed improbable; it was difficult to imagine so prodigious a mistake. Nobody had mistaken Aunt Flora for a plant, and sprinkled her with arsenic. Nobody had mistaken her medicine for weed killer, and reinforced it. Nobody had supposed that a person not Aunt Flora would be more likely than she to take fruit salts from a bottle carefully, as it appeared, insinuated among her medicines. Reluctantly, Weigand returned to his first conviction—for some reason, some person had given Aunt Flora enough arsenic to make her ill and not enough to kill her, and so had achieved precisely what he intended. Which did not make sense. Or—

Weigand stopped drumming on the desk for a second and then began again, at a faster tempo.

Or perhaps somebody had intended the incapacitating, but not lethal, dose as a warning of worse to come. It might have been somebody's way of telling Aunt Flora to watch her step, to abandon a course she was following which was injurious to the poisoner. That would make sense. But it would not fit in with the murders—unless. Unless Anthony, also, had got in the way and had not been warned, but had merely been stopped. It indicated a new forthrightness on the part of the murderer, and a drastic change of method. But that might be explained by the relationship between the murderer and his victims. He might have been fond of Aunt Flora and wanted to give her a chance to mend her ways; he might have disliked Anthony for other reasons, and seen no cause to temporize. He might have killed Harry Perkins because Perkins knew his identity, having discovered it either during the attempt to poison Aunt Flora or during the murder of Anthony. Presumably, since he had come up with the arsenic bottle, Perkins's information pertained to the poison attempt.

This tied things together, but the pattern did not fit the hunch. Weigand shook his head, dissatisfied. Then he had a new, and rather startling notion. It occurred to him that he was getting things too complicated, because there was a much simpler pattern.

Suppose Stephen Anthony, possibly thinking he had an inheritance coming and wanting to hasten it, had decided to dispose of Aunt Flora. (This fitted with Anthony's vague hints about affluence to come.) Suppose he had given her the arsenic, and had either miscalculated the dose—which was not out of his character—or had planned on one of those slow, methodical poisonings so popular, if criminal history was to be credited, among the British. And suppose Aunt Flora had realized what was going on and put a stop to it, partly out of pure annoyance with a man who was trying to kill her; partly to see that he didn't, in the future, succeed. That was in character, too. Aunt Flora might be expected to be drastic, if she moved. She might be expected to use a gun. And she would, as a former ranch-woman, know how to tie a bowline.