Payoff for the Banker (2 page)

“It certainly—” Jerry said.

“On the telephone, silly,” Pam said.

“—better be,” Jerry finished. “Under the circumstances.” He looked at her with deliberate care. “Very pretty circumstances,” he added and went on toward his study.

“Mrs. North?” the voice said. “Pamela North?”

Pamela was brought back from her thoughts, which were that Jerry was very sweet, really.

“Yes,” she said. “This is Pamela North. Who is this?”

“Mary Hunter,” the voice said. Now that Mrs. North could give it her attention, there was no doubt that the voice was high and strained. “You've got to help me.”

“All right,” Pam said. “I'll help you. Mary what?”

“Hunter,” the voice said. “Mrs. Richard Hunter. You've got to remember. At Billy Clarkson's a week ago Sunday.”

“Oh,” Pam said. “Of course. Mary Hunter. Of course I remember you.”

She did remember her, vaguely. A slender, quick girl with short light hair, whose husband had been a Navy flyer and had been killed. A girl who just seemed to be coming out of it.

“Yes, Mary,” Pam repeated. “Of course—and I'd love to—to help you. If I can.”

“He's dead,” the voice of Mary Hunter said. “I know he's dead—there's—there's blood all over. Just lying there. When I came home.”

“I don't—” Pam began.

“I found him,” the voice said. And now it sounded as if it would break at any moment. “And I don't know what to do. And you and Mr. North know the police and—”

“Yes,” Pam said. “You mean you found a body? The body of somebody who has been killed? In your apartment?”

“Yes,” Mary Hunter said. “Yes. Oh, God—yes!”

“Do you know—it?” Mrs. North said.

There was a little pause, and Pamela could hear the girl breathing—quickly, desperately.

“It's—it's the old boy,” she said. “Josh's father. So you've got to help me. I'm—I'm afraid.”

“Have you called the police?” Pam said.

The girl hadn't.

“Just you,” she said. “I've—I've got to have help. In murder.”

Pam made up her mind.

“All right,” she said. “We'll come. But you must call the police. Ask for Bill Weigand—Lieutenant Weigand—and say I told you to. And we'll come. Where?”

The girl on the telephone gave the address.

“The police,” Pam repeated. “Right away. Before anything else, remember.”

“All right,” the girl said. “Lieutenant Weigand.”

The voice sounded not quite so shrill and breakable. “We'll come,” Pam promised again, and hung up the telephone. She stood for a moment, looking at it. Then she turned quickly and hurried down the hall to Jerry's room. He was looking through his brief case for something. He looked up.

“Well,” he said. “Welcome.”

“Jerry,” she said. “We've been called in. Just as if we were detectives. Mary Hunter's found a body. Come on.”

“Wait,” Jerry said. “I mean—wait. We've been—what?”

“She wants us to help,” Pam said. “And she's calling Bill and we've got to hurry. Come on. Come
on!”

Jerry looked at her and slowly he grinned.

“Look, dear,” he said. “Before we rush into anything—or out anywhere—don't you think—”

“Jerry,” she said. “I promised. Right away.”

“Don't you think,” Jerry repeated, “that you'd better put some clothes on? Particularly if the police are going to be there?”

Pam looked at herself and was honestly amazed at what she saw.

“Oh!”
she said.
“Jerry!”

2

T
UESDAY
, 6:10
P.M.
TO
7:20
P.M.

The police photographers took their last shots and were reluctant, like all photographers, to admit that they had had enough. They stowed cameras and withdrew to stand by. The Assistant Medical Examiner was a thin, studious man in his forties and he knelt beside the body, took its temperature and examined it. Three slugs had gone into the chest, and any one of them would have been enough. There were no powder burns. The Assistant Medical Examiner said that whenever they were done with it, he was done with it—in its present place and position. For the record, he said, it was dead. Recently dead. Within an hour or so. That was as close as they need expect him to come, now or later, although he would look it over at the morgue.

The detective captain from the precinct said, “Thanks.” He nodded to two detectives with weathered, out-of-doors faces, and they knelt by the body. They rolled dead fingers on an ink pad and on strips of paper, and made notations. They finished with ten fingers, and a man in a white coat from the morgue put a tag on the body. He and another man stood up and looked waitingly at the detective captain from the precinct. The captain knelt by the body and turned out the pockets. He gave the man from the morgue a scrawled receipt. The man from the morgue and his assistant put the body in a long basket and carried it out.

“They walk in and we carry 'em out,” the man from the morgue observed to his assistant as they went down the narrow hall to the door. “Yeah,” said the assistant, without emotion. He indicated he had heard it before, a touch of philosophy appropriate to the circumstances.

Bill Weigand, getting off the elevator, had to flatten himself against the wall to let the basket pass. They were hurrying it up, he decided, not pleased. When the basket passed he went into the apartment and raised eyebrows slightly at Sergeant Mullins, who raised shoulders slightly at the man from Homicide. His shoulders said that the precinct was in charge and where the hell had Lieutenant Weigand been? Weigand looked at the precinct captain and said, “Hiya, Jim,” in a tone which expressed no interest whatever in Jim's health.

“Hi,” Jim said. “You want it now?”

“Any time,” Weigand told him. “Any time. Assuming somebody plugged him. You moved it right along, didn't you?”

“Well,” the precinct captain said, “you wanted to look at it? Particularly? We made some mighty pretty pictures.”

It would be all right with him, Bill Weigand thought, if nobody got killed in Capt. James Florini's precinct—with, possibly, the exception of Capt. James Florini. However—

“Can't leave them lying around all night,” Captain Florini pointed out.

“Right,” Weigand said. “I was tied up.”

He hadn't been. It was hard to imagine any way he could have got there quicker, not being at precinct headquarters around the corner. But there was no sense in debating it. He turned away from Captain Florini, just not pointedly, to Sergeant Mullins.

“Well, Sergeant?” he said.

“Well,” Sergeant Mullins said, “we just got here ourselves, Loot. Me and Stein and the other boys. The captain here had it pretty well taped out.” He looked at the captain blandly. “Expeditious,” he pointed out. “Like the man says.”

“Right,” Weigand agreed.

“Very high-class corpse,” Mullins told him. “Only full of holes. Somebody did very nice shooting, Loot. From in front.”

“Here,” Captain Florini said. He pointed to objects laid out on a table. “Out of the pockets. You want to give me a receipt, Lieutenant?”

Weigand gave him a receipt. Captain Florini put it in his pocket.

“In your lap, Weigand,” he said. “We'll send the stuff through. You can have it.”

The tone was mildly pleased. Bill Weigand looked at him and waited.

“Merle,” Captain Florini said. “George Merle. As the sergeant says, very high class. They picked it up in the press room and AP local's flashed it. You'll have company, Lieutenant. Also, he was a friend of the commissioner's. And of the mayor's. And probably of the governor's and for all I know of Mr. Big.”

He looked at Weigand and smiled.

“So there it is,” he said. “On a platter. Nothing in it for us precinct boys.”

Weigand's face showed nothing. But his “Right” could be taken any way you chose. He crossed the little room to the table and looked down at the objects on it without touching them. Keys, a little pile of change, a notebook, a billfold which was comfortably swollen, a card case, a cigarette case, a silver lighter, two envelopes which had been slit open, a gold pocket watch, a case for glasses, a folding handkerchief, a fountain pen, two match folders, a folding checkbook in a case, a small pile of pieces of paper of anomalous purpose. He pulled a chair over and sat down.

“They haven't been printed,” Florini told him.

“Right,” Weigand said.

He handled them gingerly, touching only edges and protuberances. The billfold first. Its bulge was attributable to tens and twenties, which Weigand did not count. There was a secondary bulge of identification cards and papers. There was an operator's permit made out to George Merle of Elmcroft, Long Island; there was George Merle's owner's license for a Cadillac, 1942, convertible sedan. There was a sixty-trip commuter's ticket to Elmcroft, if Mr. Merle's gas ran out, but there was a folder of C gas coupons, so it probably wouldn't. There were a number of cards which testified to Mr. Merle's membership in a number of institutions. It looked as if the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle. The card case held engraved cards in two compartments, social and business. Unquestionably, the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle—of George Merle, President, Madison Avenue Bank and Trust Company. Everything beautifully in hand, beautifully in order. Except for the three holes in Mr. Merle.

It was enough to go on with. He turned from the desk, and Captain Florini and the precinct men had gone. Weigand looked at Mullins and smiled slightly.

“Phooey,” Mullins said. “And double phooey.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Coöperation, Mullins.”

He looked at the girl for the first time, although he had seen her from the first. She was sitting in a corner of a little sofa and she made herself small. She looked at him and her eyes were wide and shocked.

“Now,” Weigand said to her. “You found him? You're”—he looked at a slip of paper from his pocket—“Mrs. Richard Hunter? This is your apartment?”

The girl opened her mouth to speak and her voice caught. She swallowed and said, “Yes.”

She was a pretty girl—slender, with blond hair cut boyishly but twisting slightly in a wave; her eyes were blue and she wore a dress of a paler blue. Just now she was pale; just now her eyes were wide and shocked. Her slender hands held tightly to one another and moved in a clenched embrace. Weigand noted but did not comment. A pretty, frightened girl. With a dead man in her apartment.

“You live here alone?” he said. It was hardly a question.

“Yes,” the girl said. “Did you get my message?”

“That Pam North told you to call me—me, personally? Yes. You know Pam?”

“No,” the girl said. “Not really. I met her and her husband at a party. I talked to her some. But they told, me about her—about her experience with—this sort of thing. About her knowing the police.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “You live here alone, Mrs. Hunter. Your husband is—away?”

You could guess her husband was away. Husbands of girls her age were mostly away.

“He's—dead,” she said. “Rick was killed in the Pacific. It was in the papers, about him. He—.”

Bill Weigand said he remembered. He did remember. It had been memorable.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't know, of course. So you do live here alone?”

Mary Hunter told him about that. As of yesterday—technically, if you preferred, as of Saturday. She had slept in the apartment the night before but only today was really moving in.

“They aren't my things,” she said, looking around. “Nothing here is mine.” She paused. “Nothing,” she said. “I don't know about any of it.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “You walked in and he was lying here. You'd never seen him before?”

She hesitated. After the hesitation she did not need to say she had seen him before.

“A long time ago,” she said, “I knew his son. Years ago, before I met Rick.”

“And you knew Mr. Merle, too?” Weigand said. It was a statement.

The girl nodded.

“He was Josh's father,” she said. “I went there weekends a few times. That was the only way I knew him.”

Weigand looked at her, waiting.

“The
only
way,” she said. “I know how it looks and—.”

“It's just a coincidence?” Weigand said.

“It's got to be,” the girl said. “I haven't seen him in—oh, for a long time. Except—.”

She stopped and Weigand waited.

“Not for a long time,” she said. “Two years, anyway. I think Rick and I ran into him once at a restaurant somewhere. That's all.”

It was all for now, anyway, Weigand decided. He asked her to tell him about finding the body.

She had, she said, come home with some things and walked into the hall and there he was. You could see him from the hall. He had fallen in full view from the hall—on a straight line. And she had dropped the package.

“And screamed?” Weigand said.

“Yes,” the girl said. “I must have. But I don't remember.”

“And recognized him?” Weigand said.

The girl nodded, without speaking. She had a fine head, Weigand noticed.

“And then,” Bill Weigand said, “you called Mrs. North. Why?”

“Because—I told you,” the girl said. “I had met her and they said she—”

“No,” Bill said. “I mean why did you call her? Instead of the police. How did you happen to think of calling her first? When you'd met her only casually, and knew only casually that she knew me. She's not a policewoman, you know. And her husband isn't a detective. They're just friends of mine.”