The Norths Meet Murder (18 page)

“We always come here when we're not at home,” Mrs. North said.

“Well,” Mr. North said, “when we're eating, that is.”

Weigand said nothing, because he had just caught sight of Berex at a side table. Berex and Claire Brent had their heads together and were talking engrossedly. There was, Weigand thought, an air of very good friendship about them.

“There's Berex,” he told the Norths, nodding his head in the right direction. “Berex and the Widow Brent.” The Norths looked at them and Mrs. North said, “Well!” The men looked at her.

“So
that's
who they are,” she said.

“Who
who
are?” Mr. North said. “I mean, he says there's Berex and Mrs. Brent but you sound like they were somebody else, too.”

Mrs. North looked at her husband a little impatiently. She said that he knew, or didn't he ever see
anybody?
He shook his head.

“Why,” Mrs. North said, “we've seen them here often, and I wondered who she was because of her hats. Very
nice
hats.”

“Well—” said Weigand. It was interesting, he thought. Then the omelet came, and Mrs. North's frogs legs. The lieutenant glanced at Berex and Mrs. Brent now and then and wished he knew what they were saying.

13

T
HURSDAY

1:30
P.M.
TO
4:15
P.M.

Weigand left the Norths outside the restaurant; left them discussing, amiably, whether they would go uptown and look at a new dress Mrs. North thought was becoming, but wasn't sure about, or whether they should go home so that Mr. North could really read the manuscript. Weigand walked along and in a moment the Norths passed him in a taxicab, going uptown. Mrs. North waved at him from the window of the cab and he realized, with a qualm, that everybody had forgotten about protecting them, or even seeing where they went. It wasn't, he decided, important, and walked on to see Mr. Edwards.

But Mr. Edwards was not at home, Kumi, the Japanese, assured him, holding the door inhospitably a foot open. He was at his office. Kumi was unloquacious about it and started to close the door, and Weigand, for the first time in a long while, had to put his foot in a door. He said that Kumi would do, for the moment, and pushed his way in. Kumi backed away, bowing defensively, and saying: “I know nothings, pliss.”

“All right, Mr. Moto,” Weigand said. “We'll just talk it over, anyway.”

“Kumi,” Kumi said. “I know nothings, pliss.”

It was hard to get him started. When Weigand said, “Suppose you tell me about Monday,” Kumi shook his black head. He remembered, pliss, nothings whatever about Monday. “Monday?” Kumi seemed to doubt that there had ever been a Monday.

“Mr. Edwards had a dinner party,” Weigand said. “Lots of people. You remember—Monday.”

“Oh,
Monday?
” Kumi said, with the air of one who sees through cryptic mysteries to the heart of truth. Weigand nodded.

“Tell me what happened,” he directed.

“I don't remember, pliss,” Kumi said, helpfully. “I just work. Clean up. Put away. Serve the guests.”

It came slowly. On Monday morning, knowing that his employer would be still in the country, Kumi had arrived rather later than usual; perhaps about ten o'clock. He had decided to defrost the refrigerator and turned off the power so that the heavy hoarfrost on the freezing unit would thaw. “Then it freeze faster later,” Kumi explained. He had taken advantage of the opportunity to clear out the icebox. Edwards had left a list of things for him to order from the market and he had ordered them by telephone.

“Lobsters?” Weigand inquired.

Kumi remembered the lobsters, because he was to tell the market they must be delivered as soon as possible and, in any case, not later than three o'clock; the other things could come later, on the regular delivery around four. Kumi had so instructed the market, which promised—and, as it developed, performed. Then Kumi had—Weigand told him to wait a minute.

“When you cleaned out the icebox,” he said, “what was in it then?”

Kumi looked bewildered for a moment, then painfully thought. “Eggs,” he said. “Butter, maybe. Milk.” He struggled, “Beer!” he reported, triumphantly. “Maybe cheese—not much anything.”

“No lobster?” Weigand said.

Kumi looked astonished.

“I just tell,” he said. “Lobster not come until later—maybe three o'clock, I think. No lobster then.”

Weigand said, “Right.”

So then Kumi had cleaned the lower floor. Mr. Edwards had come home, changed and gone out. Kumi had turned on the refrigerator again. Then Mr. Edwards had come home again, early in the afternoon. Then the lobster had come.

“Yes?” said Weigand.

Kumi had been upstairs, cleaning, when the bell rang and he had gone down to let in the boy from the market. That was shortly after his employer came home. Kumi had led the boy in through the service door, near the kitchen, and Mr. Edwards had looked out to see what it was, looked at his watch and told the delivery boy he was ten minutes late. He had not been cross about it, however, but said it was near enough. Then Mr. Edwards took the lobsters, six of them, already boiled, into the kitchen and Kumi went back to clean the second floor. It had taken him about an hour and a half.

“So you didn't see Mr. Edwards between a little after three and about four-thirty?” Weigand said. Kumi looked surprised.

“He was in kitchen,” he said. “I never go in kitchen when he there. Mr. Edwards not like I go in kitchen when he working there.”

So—Then he came back down and opened the kitchen door and looked in to see whether his employer had finished. He was just finishing. Then the other things came from the market and Kumi let them in. It was about four-thirty, then. How had he known the time? When the boy from the market came on the second trip, Mr. Edwards had thought the kitchen clock was wrong, and had asked Kumi to “ask the telephone.”

“Ask the telephone?” Weigand repeated.

“One two, one two,” Kumi explained. That was the number of the telephone company's time service. He had called only a minute or two after he came down, and the time was thirty-two minutes and forty seconds after four o'clock, Eastern Standard Time.

“And was the clock wrong?” Weigand wanted to know.

The clock was wrong, it turned out; it was about five minutes fast. He had set it. Mr. Edwards had told him the lobster was all ready and showed him the big pot of Spanish lobster on the back of the stove, ready to be put in a chafing-dish and heated when the guests came. It was still warm from its preparation, then, but Mr. Edwards said it would, of course, have to be reheated. It smelled very good, Kumi reported, and, when Mr. Edwards had taken off his apron and gone to the front of the house to arrange the flowers, Kumi tasted it. It was very good.

There were, the servant said, when Weigand questioned him, no shells left around and everything was tidy. Weigand jumped at that. No debris in the garbage pail? Kumi looked a little shocked at the suggestion.

“We have incinerator,” he said, a little loftily. “All in and down to burn.”

There was, Weigand gathered, nothing unusual about Edwards' having disposed of the shells himself; there would have been, he realized, a good many, taking up a good deal of room in a small kitchen, where Kumi still had considerable other, less special, food to prepare. It was only a step from the kitchen to the service hall and the incinerator opening. There was, so far as he could see, nothing irregular about any of it. While Brent was being killed, Edwards had been at housewifely pursuits, preparing dinner for company. He could see no way around it and the only way through it was through Kumi, who would be a stumbling-block. Only through Kumi, and, he realized, the boy who had actually delivered lobsters at 3:10 or thereabouts and, apparently, seen Edwards. If it ever came to a showdown, Weigand decided, the two stories, together with Edwards' own, would go a long way; would go further than he could, at the moment, go in rebuttal.

Nor, Weigand realized, did he disbelieve the story himself. The Edwards angle was, he was about ready to believe, a side angle, not germane. No motive; fair alibi. Probably he was wasting time. The information, duly extracted from Kumi, that Mr. Edwards had been at a cocktail party with friends the afternoon before, during a period which apparently included the time of Barnes' murder, neither confirmed nor lessened the detective's belief. Cocktail parties with guests coming and going and in constant motion, did not, to be sure, provide much in the way of alibis. But if Edwards had gone to the trouble of preparing an alibi for the first murder, he may be expected to do as much for the second. The inference was in his favor.

It was hardly, Weigand thought, worth looking over the apartment, especially since he did not know what he was looking for, but he did look. It was all very neat, now, and comfortably furnished; the kitchen, which interested him particularly, was small but convenient, with shining aluminum pans hanging along above the stove, flanked at one end by a coffee-grinder, fixed to the wall, and at the other by a chromium device which was, Kumi told him, for crushing ice. In addition to the large refrigerator there was, next to it, a small one intended, he realized, solely for freezing ice cubes. Weigand, thinking how ice cubes ran out under normal circumstances, looked at it with cupidity and thought, again, that Edwards, for a bachelor, did himself very well. Then he told Kumi that he would see Mr. Edwards at his office and went along.

Out on the sidewalk, it hardly seemed worth while to make a trip down to the financial district to talk to Edwards, and he hesitated whether to go there, or to return to Headquarters and wait for returns from Mullins and the rest. He thought that, if he went to Headquarters, Inspector O'Malley would be after him for his report, and decided that, perhaps, he had better see Edwards after all. He went down on the subway to Wall Street and found Edwards' office.

The offices of Clinton Edwards & Company, Investments, on the second floor of a corner building, were fairly numerous, and sedately busy. Edwards' own office, when Lieutenant Weigand was permitted to enter it, was the corner office, large and light and comfortable. Mr. Edwards was large and comfortable himself, if not light, and half rose from behind an expansive desk as he verbally assisted the detective to a chair. It was, he reported deeply, a pleasure to see Inspector Weigand again, and it would be another if he might, should he say, be of service in any particular.

“Lieutenant,” Weigand said. “Not inspector. Just lieutenant. I've been talking to your man, Kumi.”

“Ah?” said Edwards.

Weigand confirmed Mr. Edwards' impression. He had been talking to Kumi. And now he wondered whether Mr. Edwards himself would, as a formality merely, give a more detailed story of the preparation of the lobster on the Monday afternoon of Brent's death.

“Ah,” said Edwards, “it is very sad, don't you find? On thinking it over, it seems to me very sad that Brent should die so.” There was nothing in his voice to suggest that it was keeping him awake nights. And the lobsters? It was, did not Lieutenant Weigand think, strangely ironic that the death of a man, and a man so young and vigorous, should come to be concerned, even remotely, with the preparation of lobsters. Did not Lieutenant Weigand find that oddly, disturbingly, ironic?

“Right,” said Weigand. “And about the lobsters—”

Well, the lobsters had been delivered a little, Edwards believed, after three o'clock and Kumi took them from the delivery boy. Then Kumi had gone back upstairs to carry on the cleaning, and—The rest of the story agreed with that of the Japanese, and Weigand said as much. Edwards smiled.

“It should,” he said, “since we are discussing the same events. I am, although you will think it odd, no doubt, a little surprised it does. Kumi is so very forgetful, so often gets things tangled. I am a little surprised, indeed, that he remembered anything precisely. I am really
quite
surprised. He often forgets things which are, shall we say, much more immediate; he has even, on occasion, forgotten to serve half my dinner after he had cooked it.” He paused and smiled reminiscently. “But in other respects he is a most satisfactory servant for one of my simple needs,” he added. “And a very courteous little man.”

Edwards seemed to be in a mood to run on about Kumi, Weigand noticed. The detective guided him back to the lobsters.

“Ah, yes,” Edwards said. “It is the tangible things which are important, is it not?” He would tell about the lobsters, as he remembered it. Naturally, since he had no idea the lobsters would prove to be, in the end, so ironically entangled with the death of a man—But he must confine himself to the tangible things, must he not?

The lobsters had come a little after three, Kumi had received them and given them to Edwards and Edwards had taken them into the kitchen. Then he had cracked the shells and removed the meat. How long had it taken? It had, certainly, taken some time. Half an hour, should he say? Perhaps longer. It must, he thought, have been nearly four when he finished. Say ten minutes of four. Then he had broken the shells and put them on to boil and meanwhile diced the lobster meat and added the other ingredients. Then he had removed the shells from the broth and added it to the meat, added more ingredients and finished a little after four. Then he had looked at the clock to see how the time was going and seen it was almost twenty of five.

It had occurred to him that it would be well, should he say, to have the clock accurate and, when Kumi came in a moment later, he had had the Japanese telephone for the exact time. It had been about four-thirty, in reality, and Kumi had set the clock. Then Edwards had left the kitchen to his servant, who could be trusted to prepare the other dishes for the buffet supper, and had gone into the living-room to see about the flowers. And then—