Payoff for the Banker (4 page)

Jerry North and Bill looked at each other. Pam had, not for the first time, extended asylum to the frightened. Pam had become an advocate.

And now, Jerry thought—and suspected that Bill thought too—there would be that further complication; a psychological complication which would affect him a good deal, and Bill not a little. With a gesture, because a girl was trembling, Pam North had decided that the girl was innocent. And now they would be plagued by an uncertainty whether Pam was working on intuition, and hence could be wrong—as she had been several times in the past—or was working on something which was, in an obscure and glinting fashion, logic. In the latter case she might not be entirely right but she was unlikely to be entirely wrong. And in any case she was to be reckoned with.

“And probably,” Jerry said aloud, “get herself into trouble again.”

“Probably,” Bill agreed, evidently with no difficulty at all in understanding what Jerry was talking about.

“Or,” Pam said, “keep you two out of it. Which also happens.”

Mary Hunter looked from one to another of them and she was puzzled. Pam smiled at her.

“They're talking about me,” she said. “It's a way they have. Why don't we all go to dinner or something?”

“I couldn't,” Mary said.

“Well,” Pam said, “you've got to go somewhere, and it's time for dinner. Or almost. It's almost seven. And Jerry and I didn't find a body and while we're both very sorry, there it is. Isn't it, Jerry?”

As far as he was concerned, Jerry admitted, there it was. Although, he added to himself, you couldn't deny that they might be about to dine with a murderer. Which, also, had happened before.

Mary Hunter looked from one to the other again, and stood up. She stood up to an inch or two over five feet and even Pam was taller.

“All right,” Mary said.

She looked at Weigand, who nodded.

“Right,” he said. His eyes met those of Jerry and he nodded again, almost imperceptibly. “Where?”

“Oh,” Pam said, “I think Charles, don't you, Jerry. Or somewhere.”

“Make it Charles,” Bill Weigand suggested. It was something more than a suggestion.

“Charles it is,” Jerry agreed.

Charles it was. Gus made martinis from a bottle on a shelf behind him and they tasted like the old martinis of another year. Gus's dignified cordiality was encouraging, relaxing. Mary Hunter, sitting between the Norths, sipped her drink slowly and was still unfinished and shaking her head when Jerry ordered a second round. But she had quit trembling in the cab which brought them from Madison Avenue to lower Sixth and she was not trembling now.

She was not trembling until a telephone had rung, somewhere, mutedly, and Hugo had gone to answer it, and gone out into the restaurant, and after a minute or two come back with a tall, dark young man who limped slightly.

Mary looked up, turning toward Pam to answer something Pam had said, and she stiffened and her left hand, moving convulsively, brushed her cocktail glass. Jerry, beyond her, caught it as it tottered and his eyes followed hers. The tall young man did not see them, and he was nobody Jerry had ever seen.

Mary turned as the young man limped past, keeping him in view, but not speaking. Her eyes were large and—Jerry thought—frightened. The young man went into a telephone booth and still she looked at him. He had closed the door behind him before she spoke, and then her voice was so soft and tremulous that the Norths could hardly hear her.

“Josh,” she said. “Oh, Josh.”

The young man came out of the booth and his face was changed and his eyes were far away. It had not been good news.

Without a hat, without looking at anybody, the limping young man went out of the restaurant.

Mary then came back and the Norths were waiting. She looked at Pam, and her eyes were very wide and frightened, and she was trembling again.

“Josh,” she said. “His—his son. Joshua Merle.”

The girl was not, Pam knew—the girl's voice utterly revealed—talking about someone she knew only casually. As, it occurred to Pam, she had seemed to be when, earlier, she had mentioned that George Merle had a son named Joshua, whom a long time ago Mary Hunter—before she was Mary Hunter—had known and who had taught her to call his father “the old boy.”

*
The Norths found a body in a bathtub in
The Nortlis Meet Murder
. It was their introduction to murder, and to Lieut. William Weigand.

3

T
UESDAY
, 6:55
P.M.
TO
8:05
P.M.

On the east side of Madison Avenue, between Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth, police cars seemed to be piled like jackstraws. That drew the crowd. The crowd stood and stared at the cars and waited. On the sidewalk in front of the old building, with a window bowing out in front, marked discreetly J
AMES
S
ELDEN
, A
NTIQUES
, containing, as discreetly, a chair and a mirror, policemen in uniform told people to move on. People moved sluggishly and stopped again and stared at Mr. Selden's sign. They stared up at the windows of apartments above the shop.

“Nothing to see,” the patrolmen said. “Nothing's going to happen, bud—lady. Move along, now. Keep moving now.”

Across the street photographers had found vantage point in a shop window on the second floor. They took pictures of the house. Other photographers, immune to orders to move on but gaining little by immunity, smoked cigarettes on the stairs which led up to the building entrance, spanning an areaway with barred, low windows. They flicked the butts away and lighted fresh cigarettes and kept the gear of their trade close where they could nudge it with their feet.

The ones without camera cases and with cards in their hatbands were reporters. There were only a couple of them, standing by. This wasn't it; the precinct house was it, or headquarters of the Homicide Squad. Depending. One of the reporters was very young and wore very thick glasses and leaned against the stair railing and stared at nothing. He didn't want to be there; he didn't want to be working for AP local. He wanted to be in an airplane. The other reporter was in his sixties and red-faced and stocky. He wanted to be in a bar, and was going to arrange it. The
Daily News
thought of the damnedest things for him to do. You didn't see anybody from the
Times
hanging around, or from the
Trib
. What the hell—did the city editor think somebody was going to murder old Merle all over again for the exclusive benefit of the
Daily News?
Or that Weigand was suddenly going to walk out with the guy who did it in handcuffs? Anybody who'd been around town more than a week knew that nothing was going to break here. And that they weren't going to let him or anybody else in to poke around the apartment. Did the desk think he was a bloody sleuth?

Two patrolmen guarded the entrance, one at the door and one at the elevator. James Selden, a sparse gray man seemingly overlaid with a coating of dust, looked out of his door and, by peering diagonally through the glass, could see the patrolman at the outer door. It was just as well that Mrs. Belknap had decided not to come and examine the authentic table he had found for her. The policeman would have startled Mrs. Belknap, if anything could. Privately, Mr. Selden thought nothing could. But the whole business would have annoyed her, and probably she would have decided that J
AMES
S
ELDEN
, A
NTIQUES
, was shady and mixed up in things. Mrs. Belknap would not like to trade with people who got mixed up in things.

Mr. Selden wished, mildly, that he had taken a more ordinary show room—a modern shop, with a front door which was privately his front door and not shared by apartment tenants, who, it now appeared, would fall into the habit of getting themselves murdered. There was, unquestionably, something old-world about the setup he had, with the bow window on the semi-second floor and the general air of almost British reticence. People like Mrs. Belknap were—he hoped—persuaded to think that bargains lurked unobtrusively in seclusion. Which showed what Mrs. Belknap knew.

Mr. Selden went to the other side of the door and looked diagonally in the opposite direction. There was a patrolman at the elevator, doing nothing. Mr. Selden sighed. He pulled a green shade down over the glass of the door. The shade had the word C
LOSED
printed on it. Mr. Selden withdrew to his apartment in the rear, furnished comfortably with non-antiques. He lighted a lamp which had been made three years before out of all new materials and moved the box of cigarettes nearer. He picked up a lending library copy of
Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale
and began to read it, chuckling occasionally. It wasn't going to be good for business, but it was quite a book.

In the yard behind the building, men in plain clothes—and with weathered faces—went over the ground inch by inch. They investigated the contents of ash cans and poked into dark corners, now and then surprising a rat. They seeped into the basement under the building and looked in darker corners with the aid of flashlights and found crated furniture and Mr. Selden's workshop. Some of the things in the workshop would have surprised them if they had been in the antique business, but they had interest only in things of the very recent past.

They did not find the gun they were looking for, which was as good as if they had found it, in one way. Detection lies as much in discovering what did not happen as in discovering what did. They were not annoyed by the fruitlessness of their search; they were entirely dispassionate. They were finding out what was in the court behind the house, under the windows of the apartment Mary Hunter had rented from Oscar Murdock, and what wasn't in the court. It was all the same either way.

Mullins and Detective Stein attended to the apartment itself, while Weigand went over the things which had been taken from the pockets of the recent Mr. Merle. Mullins and Stein went over things thoroughly, opening Mary Hunter's luggage with Mary Hunter's keys; picking up her lingerie from the drawers of the bureau and from her trunk, and putting it back. They went through the clothes hanging in the small closet; they examined the papers and the checkbook in her brief case. Mullins whistled when he looked at the checkbook and showed it to Stein, who said, “Yeah.”

“Hey, Loot,” Mullins said, “look at this.”

Weigand looked at it, turning from the envelope he held in his hand. It was a very pretty cash balance; very pretty indeed.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Weigand said. “That's very nice. She said she had some money, you know.”

“O. K., Loot,” Mullins said. “She could have said it again.”

He laid the checkbook with some other things—letters, bills, memoranda without immediately apparent meaning—which would bear further examination.

Weigand read over again the brief letter he had taken from the envelope. The envelope bore that Monday's postmark and had been addressed to George Merle at the bank. The letter had been typed on a sheet of white bond paper.

“Mullins,” Bill Weigand said, and held the letter out. Mullins crossed the room and bent over it, not touching what Bill Weigand touched so gingerly. He read it and said, “Hey!” It read:

Dear Mr. Merle: Everything is fixed up, finally. L. will show up there about five tomorrow and a check will be O.K. But no shaving of the amount, L. says. Sorry. But apparently it is the best we can do.

O.M.

The signature, as well as the body of the note, was typed. Mullins read it again.

“Murdock?” he said.

“Well,” Bill said, “it fits. Oscar Murdock for O. M. and here for ‘there' as the place Merle was, apparently, to meet L. Whoever L. is.”

“But—,” Mullins said. Bill Weigand nodded.

“But Oscar doesn't live here any more,” he agreed. “Or had he forgotten?”

“Or,” Mullins said, “maybe he hadn't forgot. Maybe he wanted the Hunter girl to walk in on it. Or—or maybe the Hunter girl is L. A nickname or something.”

“I knew a girl once that everybody called ‘Lovely',” Detective Stein said, leaning around Mullins to read the letter.

“My God,” Bill said.

“I don't know,” Stein told him. “After a while you got used to it and it didn't sound funny any more. Come to think of it, I also knew a girl everybody called ‘Sweetheart'.”

“You don't live right,” Mullins told him.

“Murdock knew Mrs. Hunter was working,” Weigand said, more or less to himself. “She stood to get home some time after five. ‘About five' doesn't fit it too badly. She'd have been earlier if she hadn't stopped to shop. And the nickname wouldn't have to be ‘Lovely.' Maybe she has a middle name and people call her by it—some people. Old friends or what not.”

“As a matter of fact,” Stein said, with interest. “She has got a middle name. And it does begin with L. Louise. It's that way on some of her papers and things. ‘Mary Louise Hunter.'”

“And,” Mullins said, “she's got a nice bank account.”

Bill Weigand looked at him and waited.

“I mean,” Mullins said, “maybe that's the way she got it. Maybe people give her checks.”

Weigand nodded slowly and started to put the letter back in its envelope. Then he took it out, laid it flat and drew a faint pencil mark circling the place his thumb had been. He flipped the letter over with the point of the pencil and made another faint mark on the opposite side.

“Except in those two places, I don't think I touched it,” he said. He raised his voice. “Connors!”

Connors came in from the bathroom, where he had been spraying dust on the plumbing fixtures and blowing it off. Weigand gestured toward the paper. Connors blew dust on it and blew it off. He pointed to a whorling outline which appeared on the edge, near the pencil mark.