The Norths Meet Murder (21 page)

“And Berex?” Weigand said. “How did he look?”

He hadn't, Mrs. Fuller said, looked anyway that she'd noticed. He just looked like Louis Berex.

“Rather tight,” she said. “And quick, as he always does. I mean nervously tight, not alcoholically.”

Weigand said that that brought up a point, as perhaps she had noticed. She looked inquiring.

“Well,” he said, “you told Mullins you were having your hair curled, or something. Anyway, that you were uptown until after six last evening. And it appears you weren't.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Fuller said, “that! Was it important?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “we thought so. Or we wouldn't have asked. And we're investigating a murder.”

“But the murder was Monday,” Mrs. Fuller said. “Anyway, it was silly. I said that because Ben was there, and it had to fit what I'd already told him. You see, I'd told him I'd surely be in by five-thirty yesterday, and I wasn't.”

“No,” Weigand said. “I gathered you weren't. You were down here in the neighborhood. Well?”

“Well,” Mrs. Fuller said, “it's simple, really. Saturday's Ben's birthday and I'm giving him a party; a party he doesn't know about. It's going to be at Charles, and I wanted a special table, with flowers and everything, and a special menu. So I stopped by to see Charles and talk about it, but I didn't want to tell Ben where I'd been, and it took longer than I thought it would. That was all. You can ask Charles.”

“Thanks,” Weigand said. “I probably will.”

Mrs. Fuller nodded approvingly. She said she would, certainly, if she were a policeman.

“And Monday?” Weigand said. “Just to fill in the record, were you really shopping Monday, as your husband said?”

Mrs. Fuller nodded, and said that was it.

“But I don't know who you can ask about that,” she said. “I was at a good many places, and I couldn't say what time I was at any of them.” She named four or five stores in any one of which she might have been. She thought that the charges might show, if they noted the time on charge purchases when they came through, a matter about which she didn't have the least idea.

“And,” she said, “also for the record, I didn't kill Stan. I can see you might think I might want to, but I didn't even want to. I liked him less than I used to, but I still liked him. I certainly didn't want him dead.”

“Right,” said Weigand. “I'll put it on the record.”

Nobody, apparently, wanted Brent dead; nobody was, so far as he could see, particularly regretful at his taking off. Mrs. Brent, to be sure, had acted as if she were, but he was beginning to believe—to be fairly certain—that shock, rather than grief, had affected her. And there were, he reminded himself, a number of ways in which a person could undergo a shock. Hitting a head with a mallet, and feeling the skull give, would probably be a rather shocking experience, particularly for one whose life had known nothing more violent than, say, the competition of a tennis match.

“Listen,” Mrs. Fuller said, “one reason I'm glad you've come is because I wanted to ask you something. Ben and I were going away for a couple of weeks after the dinner Saturday. Will it still be all right?”

Weigand shook his head and said he was sorry, but it wouldn't. Not as things stood.

“Not unless we break it,” he said. “I'm sorry, but you'll have to put it off.”

Mrs. Fuller said, “Oh,” in rather a hurt tone.

“It's like that, is it?” she said.

“Not necessarily,” Weigand said, getting up. “Call it a matter of routine. Say you might be needed to give evidence, or might remember something to tell us. But I'll have to ask you to stay in town for a while, anyway.”

Mrs. Fuller looked rebellious. She also, Weigand decided, looked very appetizing. But he shook his head, just the same, and said he was sorry, but he really meant it.

She wasn't, Weigand decided as he was politely shown out by the maid, really his type. He was, however, getting to see some attractive women in this case. He smiled as he thought of Mrs. Fuller and thought of Mrs. Brent, also, with pleasure. Then he thought of Mrs. North, and chuckled. They were all nice girls, in their various ways, he thought. He hoped nothing would have to happen to any of them. That would be too bad.

He hesitated which way to go; and decided to combine business and nutriment. At Charles they told him that, quite truly, Mrs. Benjamin Fuller had made arrangements for a special dinner, for eight, on Saturday evening, and that she had talked over the menu and wines the evening before. And at Charles they served him mignonettes of beef with Sauce Bernaise which were, he decided, precisely the kind of hamburgers he had been wanting to find all his life.

He had coffee afterward and then, because the mignonettes seemed to deserve it, a small cognac. After all, he was going to have a long evening at Headquarters.

16

T
HURSDAY

8
P.M.
TO
9:55
P.M.

Mullins had moved fast. Both he and the list were on hand when Weigand reached Headquarters. Mullins had already gone over the list of cases handled by Brent, and was able to assure the lieutenant that it didn't add up to anything. He mentioned, also, that he was getting pretty hungry, and how about it? Weigand waved him out, told him to hurry back, and picked up the list himself. It was not a long list; Brent's service in the District Attorney's office had, the detective noticed, lasted a little less than a year. Then he had seen a chance to go into a law firm, then Strahan, Mahoney and Butler, which became Strahan, Mahoney and Brent several years later.

The cases on Brent's list were all old cases now, buried at the District Attorney's office under the steady pouring of crime, great and small, which keeps the prosecutor's office of New York County an ever-filled reservoir, always slightly overflowing. Weigand ran down the names—varied offenders against the law, guilty or not convicted of various offenses. Forgeries were numerous, conversion of the securities of others frequent; shoplifters scattered here and there. Brent had prosecuted a band of young holdup men for first degree murder after a shoe-store robbery, and accepted second degree pleas from three of them. The fourth had been shot while resisting arrest. The surviving three insisted that they were unarmed, had embarked on robbery as a lark, and were more surprised than anyone else when their companion had shot the store clerk. There were manslaughter cases and a burglary or two—burglary wasn't, Weigand realized anew, what it had been in the old days—and the rather engaging case of a man who had bought two acres of Central Park from a persuasive stranger and been very surprised when he was unable to take possession. Brent had prepared extradition papers in a couple of cases.

The names of the offenders reflected the tangled population of the city. Cohens and Murphys rubbed shoulders on the docket; a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Kumiatchi were neighbors in offense against the law. Isaac Rotovitch and Hans Bremer had, against all Herr Hitler's precepts, entered into concord to rob a store and Mr. Sing Wu had, in a fit of Oriental petulance, slashed at a throat. Abraham Washington Jones, colored, had, on a jealous night in 1931, bashed his sweetheart, Amanda, over the head, inflicting contusions and letting himself in for a felonious assault charge, but Amanda, on recovering consciousness, insisted that she had fallen downstairs, and let him out of it. A lot of things happened in New York, but none of them, so far as Weigand, could see, was subject to connection with what had happened Monday afternoon at 95 Greenwich Place. It hadn't, he decided, been much of an idea, but worth just about the time it was getting.

He ran his eye down the list once more, and something ticked in his mind. One of the names rose up from the others and he stared at it. Kumiatchi—Kensuke Kumiatchi, manslaughter, conv., five to ten before Judge Greenberg in General Sessions. Weigand said “Hmm” to himself. It occurred to him that, if he had a servant named Kumiatchi, he would be inclined to call him Kumi and let it go at that. And it occurred to him that, if he were an Oriental named Kumi, or Kumiatchi, he might cherish some resentment at the assistant district attorney who got him sent to Sing Sing for—for, he noted, on reading the attached record, merely using a knife in a fight which began, and continued, on a purely personal basis.

He pondered over it, and figured times. Sent up on a five to ten years' sentence in 1931, getting time off for good behavior, one could be out and around quite easily in 1939. One would even have had time to get a satisfactory job as personal servant, and become a fixture at it. Nor was the period too long to harbor resentment, if one were going to harbor resentment. It would do with looking into.

Mullins returned, appropriately, from dinner. He kept his hat and coat on, and went forth again, to bring in Kumi, even if he were still washing the dinner dishes. Kumi would be looked into.

Weigand returned to other reports. The detectives searching for the girls who had written so affectionately to Stanley Brent were able to report no progress whatever, although they were industriously visiting night clubs on off chances and accumulating agreeable expense accounts. Detectives had attended Brent's funeral, held inconspicuously that morning, and reported no untoward incident. The financial district men had spent another day combing out the gossip about Fuller, Edwards and Berex, and had found nothing to contradict, and but little to strengthen, their previous reports. Specific information could, they concluded, be obtained only if office records were subpoenaed, which they judged was not yet on the cards. Weigand, rather regretfully, acquiesced in their judgment.

No claim had yet been made on Brent's insurance policy, and the company would agree not to rush the payment through when the claim was made, but would not consent to any long delay, unless definite evidence of irregularity was uncovered. If there was suspicion of irregularity, however, they would be glad to have their own operatives cooperate.

The Research Bureau had completed a minute examination of the recovered clothing and was able to assure Weigand, from a comparison of dust particles, that the one-time wearer had spent at least a short period in a room which had dust similar to that recovered from the fourth floor of 95 Greenwich Place. The Bureau would be glad to identify other places the wearer had been, if the Homicide Bureau would get them more dust for comparison. The Research Bureau suggested dust from the Brent apartment, for a starter. Weigand made a note of it; such information might be useful in court, if and when they got to court; and if and when the defense, the still very shadowy defense, chose to question the identification of the garments, for whatever strange reason of its own. Defense counsel were quite capable of raising such a question, only to annoy, because they knew it teased.

There were, the Research Bureau further reported, no fingerprints of any kind to be found anywhere on the suitcase, or the belongings which had accompanied the clothes. This the Research Bureau regarded as rather strange, and indicating that everything had been carefully wiped—with a linen cloth, apparently, since a thread of cloth was caught on one of the keys. The Research Bureau suggested the use of a handkerchief by a person or persons unknown. Well—

The Police Department of Danbury, Connecticut, in response to a request for assistance teletyped from Manhattan, reported—Weigand gave a low whistle, and said he
would
be damned. The Danbury police reported that they had been able to discover no exhibitors or others who had seen a woman answering the description given of Mrs. Stanley Brent at the Danbury Fair on Monday, the twenty-fourth instant. This did not surprise the Danbury police, because the fair had closed on Sunday, the twenty-third instant, and was in the process of being carted away on Monday. No members of the public had been allowed entrance. The Danbury police hoped this information would be of service.

Weigand leaned back in his chair and thought that one over. And he had thought he knew all the elements! Well, it only proved …

So the supple, light-haired Claire Brent was a liar, apparently, to boot. Her alibi was a clumsy fake, not worth the trouble she had gone to—not much, evidently—to invent it. She was a liar and probably a violator of her marriage vows and stood to pick up a hundred grand if something violent happened to Mr. Brent. And in the time missing from the sequence of her activities, she could, without too much hurrying, have driven in from near Carmel, New York, to 95 Greenwich Place, and struck Mr. Brent sharply on the back of the head with a mallet more conventionally used for crushing ice. She could have stripped him, stowed his clothing in a suitcase, checked the case in a lock-box at a nearby subway station and driven back to Carmel, none the worse except for a mild fatigue, probably hardly noticeable to a young woman in such evidently excellent physical condition.

“Hmmm,” said Weigand. “Well!”

He would have to see Mrs. Brent again. He could still go up this evening, if—But he remembered the imminent arrival of Kumi, no doubt even now clutching wildly at projections inside the police car which, with red lights blinking and siren wailing in the night, was coming down to Centre Street. Well, Mrs. Brent would keep until next day, and tell her story then. It would, Weigand decided, have to be a good story.

There was a thudding sound in the passage outside, presaging the arrival of Detective Mullins. But Kumi shot through the door, first, evidently propelled. Mullins, a new contentment on his face, followed.

“Here's your man,” Mullins said. There was also a new contentment in his voice.

Weigand nodded and went on looking at papers. Mullins sat Kumi down where the light was best. Kumi looked alarmed and resentful and started to speak. Mullins told him to wait until he was spoken to, huh?

“Your name is really Kumiatchi, isn't it?” Weigand said sharply, indifferently.