The Norths Meet Murder (13 page)

“Listen,” said Fuller, “how about talking to you as another man? Suppose you're not a cop, for a while?”

Weigand shook his head, and said he was always a cop.

“Which doesn't,” he said, “mean I tell everything I hear, or want to make mistakes in my man. I'm after the man who bumped off Brent. I'm not after anybody else.” He paused. “Or anything else,” he said. He was weary of saying it. “My God,” he said, “what your wife does is her business, and yours. Only who killed Brent's my business.”

The blood flooded hotly under Fuller's skin. He had red hair, all right. He half started up, and then settled back a little.

“You've been hearing things,” he said. “They're lies.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I've been hearing things. I've been hearing that Brent and your wife were great friends. I've been hearing—”

“That they were perfectly swell friends,” Fuller said. “That I could go into divorce court on how good friends they were.”

“O.K.,” said Weigand, mildly. “Right. That's what I've been hearing. So what? I don't have to believe it. You could calm down, if you wanted to. You could tell me about it, and why you didn't like Brent, if it wasn't because he was running around with your wife. We wouldn't have to fight about it, unless you wanted to.”

Fuller lighted another cigarette and took a drag from it. Then he took another, and another. He watched the smoke and Weigand waited. Finally Fuller said, “All right.

“You may as well know the truth of it,” he said. “You've heard everything else, apparently, from our friends.” The word “friends” was harshly accented. “You've heard that the Brents and the Fullers used to be great friends?”

Weigand nodded.

“Well,” Fuller said, “I'll tell you about it.” He dragged at his cigarette and hesitated.

It took a good many cigarettes and many pauses for words before he finished his story.

The couples had met, as couples, about four years earlier, he said. Fuller had known Claire Brent, first; had known her before she was Claire Brent, while she was still Claire Askew. “She was a tennis player, you know,” Fuller said. So, Weigand learned, was Fuller. He and Claire Askew had met in the marquee at Forest Hills. Fuller paused to clear up a point. “I was no good,” he said. “Never was any good; any real good. The best I ever did was to get through the first round, against another bunny who was even worse. She was better, in her class, but no world beater. Quarter finals she got to, once. And lost to Jacobs in love sets.”

“Right,” Weigand said.

“We played together a few times in mixed doubles,” Fuller said. “Not tournament play; just for fun. She didn't have much but an overhead game. She could smash if they set them up for her.” He grinned. “Which they didn't, if they knew anything,” he added. “It made her mad, that.”

“Yes,” said Weigand. “And—?”

They had, Fuller explained, got friendly and for a while seen a good deal of each other. Then she met Brent and in a little while married him; Fuller himself married a few months later. There had been nothing more than a casual friendship between himself and Claire Askew, Fuller indicated; it had continued with Claire Brent, and, as such things happened, with her husband, Stanley. “The four of us got to going around together a good deal for a while,” Fuller said. “To theaters, and night clubs sometimes, and bridge. It made an agreeable foursome.”

Things had jogged on that way, Fuller said, for a couple of years, and then Brent began to pay special attention to Jane Fuller. “He began to edge in,” Fuller said. “Nobody else wanted it that way; Claire and I didn't feel that way. Nobody felt that way but Brent. At first, anyhow.”

“And then?” Weigand said.

“Then—all right,” Fuller said. “Suppose she did get flattered? And suppose she liked Brent? What about it?”

“Right,” Weigand said. “What about it?”

It became, after a time, inescapable that Brent was making a play for Jane Fuller. Nobody could ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening. So Fuller had had a showdown with Brent and broken up the foursome. Claire, who was angry and hurt, had agreed that was the only thing. Brent had laughed about it. “I damn near knocked his block off,” Fuller said. “But—well, it was a mess anyway you took it. It was a mess already.”

“And how did Mrs. Fuller take it?” Weigand asked.

Fuller thought a moment before he answered. To understand, he said, you would have to know Jane, and it was hard to explain her. “Damn it all,” Fuller said, “what do you want me to say? She's my girl, man!” Weigand nodded—and waited. Well, then, put it this way: Jane thought it was a storm in a teacup. “She thought I was making a lot out of nothing,” Fuller said. “She said people nowadays didn't need to take such things seriously; she thought she could bring him around without breaking up the group. She said you had to be kind to people, because people were restless and lonely, and that I could trust her.”

The point was, Fuller insisted, that he did “trust” her, when it came to that. And that he wouldn't, in any case, try to apply compulsion. It was up to her, but what he did was equally up to him, and he wasn't seeing any more of Brent. It was merely a way he felt, he had told her—it was nothing to argue. As far as he was concerned the Fuller-Brent combine was dissolved. He didn't demand anything of her except, in the end, loyalty. He was not going to say what loyalty, from her to him, would be; that was a thing for her to decide. He would prefer that she, too, stop seeing Brent; but he would not argue that it proved anything if she didn't.

“Only I was through with him,” Fuller said. “I didn't like him. I figured he was a bad actor, about women and, probably everything else. I thought he'd done wrong by his Claire—all that sort of thing. I thought he would make a mess of things for Jane, if she'd let him, and I didn't see how to stop her letting him. I couldn't pull the heavy husband, you see that. And it would have spoiled something, anyway, if I'd tried it. With Jane—it—well, it wasn't on our cards. D'you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “I think so. What did she do?”

Jane had, it seemed, seen Brent occasionally, quite openly. “At first because she wanted to,” Fuller thought. “Then because she had started and had no clear, sharp reason for stopping. Then—oh, God knows. Because of some strange, perverted kindness. That was after Claire—” He stopped, suddenly.

“Yes?” Weigand said.

Fuller wasn't going on with that, he said. It was enough to tell all that about themselves. Suppose they said, merely, that Claire got fed up with it, as she might well. Right?

“Right,” said Weigand. “I can't press you.”

Well, then, they would stick to the main issue. Brent discovered that Jane would, other things being equal, rather not be with him. “That it was—well, call it momentum” alone that was maintaining their relationship. But relationship wasn't the word, if it meant anything in particular to Weigand. “There wasn't anything of that in it,” Fuller said. “There was no question of it. Both Jane and I knew that.” He paused. “You'll think I was fooled about it,” he said. “The husband is the last person—all that sort of thing. But I wasn't fooled; I knew. Can you see that? If there had been anything of that I'd have known the first time I looked at her.”

Weigand nodded. It could be that way. And, all right, Fuller could have been fooled.

Then, Fuller said, Brent realized that he didn't mean anything to Jane, and wasn't going to, but at first he did nothing. Kept on inviting her to lunch, taking her to the theater now and then. Being very cordial when they met at parties. Then he—

“Look,” Fuller said. “This is all intangible. Anyway I say it, it sounds like nothing at all. As if I were jealous and imagining things. I don't know—”

“Well,” said Weigand, “have a shot at it. I'm a cop, of course, but have a shot at it.”

Fuller leaned back, smoking. Then he ground out his cigarette. All right, they could take it this way:

“We ran into each other rather often,” he said. “You can understand that—it was inevitable, unless we all changed our habits. And people don't. We would go places and the Brents would be there; or Brent would be there alone. And then—well, say that he began to be pointedly solicitous of Jane. That doesn't phrase it, but nearly. He'd get her little things and light her cigarettes, d'you see? He'd touch her shoulder with his hand as if—well, as if it was an accustomed gesture, or the beginning of an accustomed gesture. As if—”

He paused again, and said that there was, really, nothing you could put your finger on. But it was in everything he said to her and about her, and in everything he did when he was near her. It was in the way he treated Fuller.

“There is,” Fuller said, “something about the way men and women behave when they are together, even when they intend to be careful, that gives them away if they're lovers. It's in their voices and their hands, and their choice of words to each other, and if you know about people you can tell. Well, most of the people we meet know about people. And Brent is—was—clever, remember.” He paused again.

“Yes?” Weigand said.

“So everything he did made it seem to everyone who saw them that Jane was his mistress,” Fuller said. “That's blunt enough for you. It yelled itself at you—he was smug and attentive and—well, damn it all—satisfied. And the devilish thing about it was that it was all an act, and an act you couldn't put a finger on. It wasn't even anything you could object to; nothing Jane could object to, or I could. And he knew all the time what he was about; it was quite conscious and deliberate. Every now and then he would look at me and let me see that he knew I knew what he was up to, and that he knew there wasn't a thing I could do. Sweet, wasn't it?”

“Very,” Weigand said. “Very sweet. He must have been a swell guy.”

Fuller nodded.

“A perfectly swell guy,” he said. “All right, you can see what I meant when I said I had a motive for killing him. I didn't kill him, but I tried to knock his block off, once. You heard about that?”

Weigand nodded.

“And you heard my wife was his mistress?”

“Gossip,” Weigand said. “Some people think so, certainly. You can see how they might—on your own story.”

“Sure,” Fuller said. “That was the idea—the big Brent idea. All right, I've got a temper. You know that. So there you are.”

There, Weigand agreed inwardly, he was. It sounded perfectly all right as Fuller said it; Fuller sounded entirely straightforward and honest. It was clear that Brent had something coming to him. It was also clear that whatever Brent had had coming had come. It could all be entirely true, except for one sentence. “I didn't kill him.” That obviously didn't have to be true.

And if Fuller's story left Fuller in it, so did his account of his actions on Monday afternoon. He had left his office—he was an importer, running successfully the successful business left him by his father—at about 3 o'clock. He had gone out with a customer of his, and also an old acquaintance of his, for a drink or two before the customer went back to Chicago on the Century. They had had the drink or two and the customer had gone on to his hotel to pick up his bag. Fuller had walked part-way downtown to stretch his legs and taken a taxicab the rest of the way, getting home a little after four. The customer had, presumably, caught the Century. He was, at any rate, back in Chicago. What time had Fuller and the customer, a man named Raymond Crowley, parted?

Fuller couldn't put an hour and minute to it. It hadn't been long. Crowley had remembered, in the middle of the second drink, that he had promised his wife to give a message to a decorator for her, and leave some samples, and, being a dutiful husband, had dashed back to the hotel to get the samples out of his bag and drop them on his way to the station. It might have been three-thirty when they parted; it might have been three-twenty, or a quarter of four.

It wasn't, certainly, iron-clad. From the bar in Forty-second Street which Fuller and Crowley visited to 95 Greenwich Place might not be more than a quarter of an hour; a few minutes one way or another on the various times, none of which was exact, might make it possible for Fuller to get to the Buano house and give Brent what he had coming. There was, to be sure, the evidence that the engagement had been made in advance, and according to Fuller's story he was alone between three and four only by chance, and Crowley's memory. But that, evidently, was not conclusive; Fuller might have remembered an errand if Crowley hadn't. If you took everybody at his word, nobody had killed Brent; Brent was still alive. And Brent wasn't alive.

Weigand said yes, he saw. And was Mrs. Fuller in? Mrs. Fuller wasn't, but would be, if Weigand wanted to wait. He looked at his watch, found it was after seven, and decided another time would do. There were only a few questions. Where she was Monday afternoon. Things like that. Routine, really.

“Well,” said Fuller, “I can tell you where she was. She was shopping. She came home a few minutes after I got in and the taxi driver had to help carry her packages. There were more the next day, too, by truck. That's where she was.”

“Right,” said Weigand, thinking that it told him precisely nothing. He said that, in that case, he would get along. He might, later, think of some other questions. Fuller would be around? Fuller grinned, without enjoyment. He would be around, all right.

“We'll both be around,” he said. “Drop in any time.”

Fuller was an attractive sort of a person, Weigand thought, as he went out looking for dinner. Very attractive in his way. It was unfortunate that murderers were not always unattractive people one could enjoy arresting.

9

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EDNESDAY