The Norths Meet Murder (17 page)

“Why?” said Mr. North. “Was it the slip?”

It brought up a point, Weigand said, about which he had been wondering. Assuming that the mail-carrier had been killed, as they would have trouble proving, and assuming it hooked up with the Brent case—

“But it does,” Mrs. North said. “You
know
it does.”

Weigand nodded and said that he thought it did, certainly.

“But it's a little hard to see how it can hang on his finding the slip,” he said. “Because I think we were supposed to find the slip, if we found the body.”

Mrs. North looked puzzled and Mr. North nodded.

“How—” said Mrs. North, and then stopped. “Or he would just have thrown it away,” she said. “Not put it in the box. Of course, how silly of me!”

Both Mr. North and Lieutenant Weigand looked at her approvingly. Mullins looked at his glass.

“Precisely,” Mr. North said. “I've been wondering about that.”

“But why?” Mrs. North said. “It points to him.”

Weigand and Mr. North shook their heads and so, still looking at his glass, did Mullins. Mr. North said, “Have another?” abstractedly, and Mullins nodded.

“If we were supposed to find it, it doesn't point to him,” Mr. North said. “But it points to somebody else. Only why point at all?”

He and Weigand looked at each other, and shook their heads.

“Especially,” Weigand said, “as we weren't supposed to find the body—not right away, anyhow. We weren't supposed to find it until—that is—” He seemed doubtful, and looked at Mrs. North.

“That's all right,” she said. “They do. Even women have heard about that. ‘Dust to dust,' only not immediately.”

“Two closed doors and the ventilator in the bathroom,” Weigand said. “And the apartment at the top of the house. It might have been a long time, particularly with the people on the floor above you not at home. It was sheer chance that it was found so soon.”

“If I hadn't been going to give a party—” Mrs. North said.

Weigand said, “Right,” and pointed out something else. The murderer had, apparently, made allowance for such a chance. That was where the slip of paper came in.

“The chances are,” he said, “that, if the murder hadn't made us look around, we would never have found the slip—you wouldn't have found it, Mrs. North. Or, if somebody had come across it, the chances are it would have meant nothing. But if we did find the body, the murderer must have realized that we would probably find the slip; if we found the body he
wanted
us to find the slip.”

“Why?” said Mrs. North.

“That,” Mr. North said, “is where we came in.”

Weigand nodded. They looked at one another and nobody had any suggestions.

“It was something on the slip,” Mr. North said. “That's obvious.”

Weigand nodded.

“And what is on it is pretty obvious,” he said, and stopped. The Norths waited.

“Well,” he said, “this is damned irregular, but here it is.”

He told them of the evidence connecting the mark on the back of the slip with Berex. He told them about the fingerprints; he brought the slip out and showed them the prints. They both looked at them.

“But—” Mr. North said. Then, with almost absurd timeliness, the telephone rang. It was Detective Stein for Lieutenant Weigand. Weigand said, “Yes” and “Um” and “I thought so.” Then he said, “Thanks,” cradled the telephone and sat thinking. The Norths looked at him with hopeful interest.

“Well,” he said, “I may as well tell you. Those are Berex's prints. I had him handle an envelope and the detective who just telephoned took it down to Identification. The prints match those on the slip, all right.”

“But—” said Mr. North. He was worried about something, and took the slip up to examine it again. What he saw confirmed his suspicion.

“They're in the wrong place,” he said. “They ought to be the other way round.”

“Let me see,” Mrs. North commanded. She saw and said: “Oh, yes.” Then both of them looked at Weigand.

“The prints are upside-down,” Mrs. North said, “aren't they?”

Weigand nodded and said it looked that way to him.

“I wanted to see whether I was right,” he said. “We'll go down and try.”

They went down to the vestibule, but a glance was enough to show them that the prints were in the wrong place. The slotted container which held the slip opened at the top. The thumb and forefinger which had held the slip, and left identifying marks upon it, had held it from the bottom; they had, moreover, held it in such a way that, with any likely position of the hand, the name on the face of the slip would have been innermost, assuming that it could have been got in at all. Whenever Berex had left his prints on the slip, it was not when he had put the slip in the slot opposite the fourth-floor bell.

Furthermore, if the slip had ever been in the slot at all, it had been put in by somebody who had left no prints while doing it, because there were no other prints on the slip.

“Damn,” said Weigand.

“Gloves?” said Mrs. North.

Mr. North shook his head. It would, he pointed out, be hard to handle the tiny slip of paper, inserting it in the narrow slot, while wearing gloves; it would, he thought, be impossible to do it with any speed. It must have been held in something.

“Like pincers,” Mrs. North said. “Manicure pincers.”

Weigand said, “Huh?” and what were manicure pincers? Mrs. North looked a little flustered. She said they were things women used. She was evidently willing to let it go at that.

“If they have a hair on the chin,” Mr. North said. “To pull it out. Manicure tweezers, she means.”

“Well,” said Weigand. Then he added that the slip had apparently been cut out with manicure scissors.

“Then it's a woman,” Mrs. North said. “It's a
Mrs
. Edwards. Or married man, of course.”

They went back upstairs, thinking it over. Mrs. North went back to the beginning. She said it didn't explain about poor Timothy.

“And that,” she said, “was terrible. I knew Timothy, and it was wrong to kill him. When it was only Brent it was just a story, but now it means something. People can't kill people like Timothy.”

She was firm about it. Then Mr. North could see an idea growing, and reflecting in her eyes. She said she bet she knew what it was.

“It wasn't the slip at all,” she said. “It was when he was delivering!”

“Huh?” said Weigand. “I mean—what?”

“When he was delivering,” she said. “The last time. He saw her.”

“Her?” Weigand said.

“Mrs. Edwards,” Mrs. North said. “When she was coming out. Or Mr. Edwards, if he was married. X, I mean—The murderer.”

Mr. North nodded, quickly.

“It could be, you know,” he said, to Weigand. “The time would have been about right—sometime between three-thirty and four is the last delivery. He might have seen somebody coming out with a suitcase and got to thinking about it. Brent's clothes would have been in a suitcase, wouldn't they? And maybe there was blood or something.”

It might, Weigand thought as he nodded slowly, very well be. Assuming Timothy Barnes to have been delivering his mail at the Buano house at the right time, somebody might have brushed past him, carrying a suitcase, anxious to get away from there. Barnes and the person with the suitcase, who just then rather desperately wanted not to be seen, would have noticed each other. And, later, Barnes might have been able to describe the man or the woman. Or the murderer might have feared he could, and taken no chances. It would, probably, have been easy to find out what time the carrier left the branch post-office; easy to follow him to the subway station. There would be no risk in following him to the downtown platform; hardly any in working through the crowd to stand behind him; to give a quick push and then to seem to be attempting to save a life instead of destroy one. A man and a woman had reached for the falling man in gray-blue, Weigand remembered. It was an ugly way to do it, but efficient. Their murderer looked like being efficient, and not minding ugliness.

He would, he realized, have to recheck those who had so far come into the case as possible suspects, determining where they were at the time Barnes had plunged from the platform. It had happened, he realized now, suddenly, while he was having another martini in Goody's Bar. The crowd around the station exits in Sixth Avenue had, after all, been part of his case. And then where were all these people?

The Norths, anyway, had been at home. That much he remembered from the report of their guardian detective. Edwards and Mrs. Brent?

“Damn it all,” Weigand said, remembering that he had directed that they be kept under observation so late that the observation could not possibly have been begun until half an hour or so after Barnes had been killed. There was no report that Mrs. Brent had left her apartment house, but the uniformed men assigned to hold the reporters and the curious in check would not necessarily have noticed if she had gone out; might not even have known her. And she could have gone out through a service exit, if need be. The situation was no clearer as it concerned Edwards. Benjamin Fuller would have had time to kill Barnes and reach his home before Weigand got there; it had, judging by the already arrived ambulances, been at least ten minutes, probably a quarter of an hour, after the Barnes killing that the detective had left the bar and noticed the excitement down the street. Where Berex was at that time he hadn't, naturally, the faintest idea, because at that time Berex was only an element postulated by the evidence, and not yet visible.

“We were home,” Mrs. North said. “At home with bacardis.”

“I know you were,” Weigand said. “That is—”

Mrs. North looked at him with widening eyes.

“Darling!” she said, to Mr. North. “We are being tailed! We're
really
suspects.”

Mr. North nodded, without elation. It was, he thought, really very foolish for a grown man to go out walking in Central Park in the middle of the afternoon.

Mr. North joined Mullins in a short one and Pete, the cat, walked in from the bedroom. Pete sat down in the center of the group and started to wash his chest earnestly. Then he stopped washing, with the abruptness of a cat, and looked around at the humans inquiringly. He looked at Mr. North and at Mullins and made a small sound, neither quite a mew nor quite a purr. Then he walked over to the coffee-table and put his forepaws on it, so he could examine its top. His nose quivered with the intensity of his examination and then he looked around at Mrs. North and said, rather indignantly, “Miaow.”

“No little fishes, Pete,” Mrs. North said.

“He thinks there ought to be little fishes because we're drinking,” Mrs. North explained to Weigand. “We have canapes with cocktails and sometimes there is fish on them. So whenever he sees us drinking he looks for fish.”

Pete got down, looked around reproachfully and went to sit with his back to everyone. He swished his tail at them.

“Nice Pete,” Mrs. North said. He swished his tail more vigorously, but did not turn. “And to think he knows who did it and can't tell us.” They all thought about it for a moment. Then Weigand sighed. It was too bad Pete couldn't, but he couldn't.

“Fish reminds me,” Weigand said. “That lobster recipe. Perhaps I'd better have it, after all, if you don't mind.”

Mrs. North didn't, and got it. It was typed on a sheet of paper, and Weigand read it over. It seemed very complicated.

“You use as many lobsters as you want, of course,” Mrs. North said. “And step it all up accordingly.”

Weigand nodded.

“How many, say, for—oh, twenty people.”

Mrs. North thought a minute, and said she thought ten, anyway.

“Only,” she said, “not, of course, if he was serving other things, too. Just if it was only lobster. With other things, maybe six.”

Weigand studied the recipe. It looked, certainly, as if it would take a long time. Starting with even six lobsters, cracking them and taking out the meat; boiling the shells down, straining, adding other ingredients, boiling again—it was complicated enough.

“An hour, anyway,” Mrs. North said. “Probably longer, unless you were very good with lobsters.”

Weigand nodded, and said it looked very likely. It was, he thought, an odd thing for an alibi to hang on, but the alibi apparently hung, pending further checkup. It was, however, time for a further checkup, because if there was anything phoney about it, it would be very helpful. Just one phoney alibi, he thought, would fix him up fine; it was aggravating, in a way, that so few of the possibilities had any alibis at all.

“Well—” he said, tentatively. He had, he decided, better start on and start others on. He looked at Mullins speculatively. Mullins could check alibis for the time of Timothy Barnes' death, and also see what Berex had to say about Monday afternoon. He told Mullins as much, and Mullins said, “O.K., Loot.” His eyes brightened a little.

“Except Edwards,” Weigand said. “I'll be dropping in on Edwards myself.”

Mullins rose to get on with it, and Weigand also got up. So did the Norths. Mr. North said they might, as well go and have some lunch. Mrs. North said where and Mr. North said, oh, he didn't know, what did she think?

“Charles,” Mrs. North said. “And the lieutenant with us. And Mr. Mullins, of course. Mighty Mullins.”

Mullins looked reproachfully at her and said he'd have to be getting along, like the Loot said. Weigand started to shake his head, and then something pricked his mind. “Charles.” He hesitated a moment, weighing it, and said it would be fine, if this Charles place wasn't too far. It wasn't, they assured him; only around the corner. They all went down together. Mullins stemmed off toward Grove Street and Fuller; the Norths and Weigand went up Sixth Avenue to a large, bright restaurant with a circular bar. Mrs. North led the way to the bar and the men followed her. They had a round of martinis, and peanuts, and found a table. Mrs. North decided, after internal debate, on frogs legs
au beurre noir
. Mr. North and Weigand had omelets. Mrs. North said it was a fine restaurant, and that it was a shame to waste it on omelets.