The Norths Meet Murder (28 page)

Mr. North said, “Yes, sure,” and led the detectives into the living-room. There were fewer there, now, and they glanced quickly around. Mr. North's voice was puzzled when he spoke.

“She ought to be,” he said. “She was just a minute ago—when we all came down.” Then his voice became more doubtful. “Or was she?” he said. “Come to think of it—”

Weigand was looking quickly for another face—and not finding it, suddenly, hardly knowing why, he was worried. He spoke quickly and sharply, and Mullins, who knew the tone, looked at him with inquiry as quick and sharp. Mr. North swung on them.

“Yes?” he said. “What is it?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “Did you all go upstairs?” Mr. North nodded. “And all come down?” the detective asked.

“I thought so,” Mr. North said. “Some went out, though—I thought Pam—”

“Come on!” Weigand said. “We'll look. Come on!”

Turning, he stepped quickly toward the stairs, and North was quick after him. Mullins started to follow, checked himself and ran to a rear window of the apartment. He threw it open, jumped through and in a moment was running up the fire-escape. The men and women in the living-room swung, suddenly quiet, and stared after them. They heard the pounding steps of hurrying men on the stairs; a moment later the hollower pounding at a door.

The door was locked. Weigand flung his weight against it and it rattled but held. Together, he and Mr. North hurled themselves on it, and it threw them back. They hesitated a moment, and from inside there came the angry yowl of a frightened, furious cat, and the sound of scuffling movement. Frantically, the two men surged against the door. Weigand whirled angrily when he realized Mullins was missing; then whirled back as glass crashed inside.

“The fire-escape!” he said, grasping it. “Mullins—the window.”

The two men raced downstairs, through the window Mullins had left open, and up the fire-stairs outside to the window of the fourth-floor apartment. Weigand's flashlight beam bit into the darkness, as, on North's heels, he hurled himself into the room.

But there was no need to hurry, any longer. The beam picked out Mullins, enormously tall and burly, with his shadow enormous behind him. Even as they ran across the room toward him he stooped over one of two figures lying at his feet, and there was a flash of metal and a click. Then he stood up again, turned to face the flashlight.

“O.K., Loot,” he said. “Got him. Only—the lady—”

But Mr. North was already beside the other figure on the floor, and held its head in his hands and was saying, over and over, “Pam. Pam. Pam, kid!”

What had been black in front of Pam North's eyes began to eddy and whirl, and her hands went up to soothe a clutching burning at her throat. She fought to push hands away and the black swirled into gray, and then in the center of the gray, light broke through and she heard a voice saying: “Pam. Pam, kid!” She had to scream, she remembered—she had to scream. She had to scream and bring them and she had to tell them about the murderer.

The light space in the center grew, and she could see a face in it. It was not a face she knew, and below the face there was stiff whiteness, and a voice, which she didn't know, either, said:

“She'll do now, I think.”

Then the lightness grew still larger and she could see Jerry, kneeling at her feet, and knew it was he who was calling her name. She smiled and tried to speak, and he nodded and smiled. He was terribly white, she thought, and she wondered if he was going to be drunk, because he looked like a person who was going to be drunk. She wanted to tell him that he should lie down a while and then there was another face, and it was the face of that detective—that detective?—Lieutenant Weigand, of course.

“It was—” she said. It was terribly hard to speak, but Weigand was nodding. “I told you he left his name,” Mrs. North said. “From the first—”

The ambulance surgeon was shaking his head at her and telling her not to try to talk, but she could see Weigand nodding.

“Right,” Weigand said. “You said that all along. Sure you did.”

The ambulance surgeon was less gentle in restoring consciousness to Clinton Edwards, out from the effects of a blackjack laid with scientific precision behind his right ear. And when Edwards came to, he found that his wrists were cuffed together, and that Weigand was standing over him, looking down without expression. When Weigand saw Edwards' eyes open, he turned and nodded to Mullins.

“All right,” he said. “You can take him along and book him. Felonious assault.” He looked down at Edwards, who was trying to sit up. “Just for now, Mr. Edwards,” he said. “Don't get any wrong ideas. We'll have something else for you in the morning.” He stared down at Edwards. “We'll make it murder in the morning,” he said. “And glad to.”

22

W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
2

Mr. and Mrs. North finished their lunch in a little restaurant near the Criminal Courts Building, and finished their coffee and had more. Their waiter had begun to hover when finally Lieutenant Weigand came in the door and walked across to their table and looked down at them. He looked down and, after a moment, answered their unspoken inquiries with a nod.

“Yes,” he said. “They voted the indictment. Murder in the first degree.”

He sat down and ordered coffee.

“And that's that,” he said. “Except for the trial, at which you'll both have to testify. But heaven knows when that will be. I hear he's hiring Verndorf, and Verndorf's good.” He paused. “Verndorf will need to be,” he said, rather grimly.

“Well,” said Mr. North, a little uncertainly. “You don't think Verndorf can get him off?”

Weigand shook his head. He said he didn't think Clarence Darrow could get Clinton Edwards off, if Darrow were alive and willing to try. “As he wouldn't be,” Weigand added. He sat brooding over his coffee, relaxed. The Norths waited hopefully, and finally Mrs. North spoke.

“There are still a lot of things I don't understand,” she said. “Why he did, and how you knew. You did know, didn't you—before he went after me, that is?”

Weigand nodded.

“Only a little while before,” he said. Then he looked at Mrs. North with livening interest.

“What did you find out?” he asked. “I mean, what suddenly made you dangerous to him, so that he had to try to get you out of the way?”

“Lobster,” Mrs. North said. “When it didn't taste right.” She paused. “Or, really, when it did taste right,” she said. “That made me remember.”

Weigand felt he ought to be expert by now, but he had to shake his head. Mrs. North explained.

“It was when I tasted our own lobster at the party,” she said. “Tasting it made me think of Edwards' and then I realized for the first time that something had been troubling me all along about that. His wasn't right; it wasn't the same thing at all. Just lobster, warmed up with cream and butter, and probably a little chili-sauce, and all at once I realized it. But he had got the recipe from me specially and he had described to you how he made Spanish lobster by the recipe and how long it took. I realized he had told a lie about that, and so there must be something about it—funny business. But if there was funny business, then he was trying to hide something, so he had really done it.” She paused. “Of course,” she added, “I said that from the first, you know.”

Weigand smiled and nodded, and said he remembered.

“And when I found out,” Mrs. North said, “I was startled and frightened and, I suppose, showed it. And he saw me show it, and guessed what I had found out. Which was shrewd of him, wasn't it? Only I still don't get it.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “it was fairly simple, really. He just used frozen lobster, instead of natural lobster. The kind of lobster they sell now in little compressed, quick-frozen blocks, each block equal to a two-pound lobster. You know?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. North. “Of course! Of all the
stupid
things. My not guessing, I mean.”

Weigand admitted he hadn't guessed, either, until it was almost over; until, in fact, he had looked in a restaurant window on his way to the North party and seen lobsters lying on beds of ice.

“They looked cold,” he said. “Cold lobsters. Then I thought of frozen lobsters and then realized how it could be done. Edwards was always a likely one, it seemed to me, if we could break the alibi.”

“But how—?” Mr. North said, still at a loss. Weigand finished his coffee and ordered another cup. He had better, he said, tell them the whole business from the start. There was, first, the motive.

“We didn't get that, really, until after the arrest,” he admitted. “Then we knew Edwards had done it, and it was a question of filling in. So I went to Berex.” He took a sip of the new coffee. Berex, he explained, because Berex was the only established link between Edwards and his victim.

“Even without the trust fund, which we had had to abandon,” he went on, “Berex was somehow the link between Edwards and Brent. Berex himself didn't know how, and we had to dig. Then I remembered something which hadn't seemed to mean anything at the time—that Edwards had sold an invention for Berex. It didn't connect up, at first, even when I found out that it had been sold to Recording Industries, Inc. But the company's name was familiar, and I finally remembered that it was on the list of clients of Brent's firm. So we worked on that line. Then it came out.

“Berex remembered having told Brent of the invention sale, when they were discussing Edwards and the trust fund. Berex had said something about his satisfaction with Edwards' handling of that matter, and told Brent he was getting three thousand a year out of it. Thinking back, he remembered that Brent had looked a little surprised, and said something to the effect that he would have expected it to be more, considering the size of the firm. There Berex stopped. Then we got hold of Recording Industries—this was all day before yesterday, after we had arrested Edwards. It took only a few minutes, there, and we had it. They weren't paying Berex three thousand a year; they were paying him around fifty thousand. Or they thought they were. We subpoenaed Edwards' records and got the whole story. It was straight theft.”

Weigand swallowed more coffee and lighted another cigarette. The Norths nodded, encouragingly.

“Edwards,” Weigand went on, “was simply rooking Berex. He'd sold the invention, all right, and signed the royalty contract in Berex's name. He had Berex's power of attorney, you see, because Berex was out of the country. The contract provided for royalties running around fifty thousand a year. Then Edwards forged another contract, calling for royalties around three thousand, and that was the one he showed Berex. He kept the difference.” Weigand paused. “It was a neat difference,” he added. “Now we go back to Brent.

“Brent was surprised that Berex wasn't getting more, but he didn't say anything to Berex about it. Instead, he checked with the corporation, which was easy since his firm were its lawyers. It probably didn't take him as long as it took us to uncover the scheme. His first thought was to go direct to the District Attorney with it, and he called up that Monday and made an appointment. Then—we have to guess a bit here—he decided to give Edwards a chance to explain. Or—” He broke off, and looked at the Norths.

“That is the official version,” he said. “The one we're using. It's also possible Brent thought not better, but worse, of it after he had made the appointment with the D.A. Maybe he thought he might get in on it.”

“Blackmail?” Mr. North asked.

Weigand nodded, and said it could be.

“But we're not trying to prove it,” he said. “All we're going to prove, and we've already proved it at Edwards' office, is that Brent called Edwards on the telephone early Monday afternoon. There's no doubt that, then, he told Edwards enough to show that he had the goods on him. Then Edwards began to think fast. The first result of his thinking was to make an appointment with Brent. He may merely have wanted to have the meeting where nobody would be apt to stumble on it; more likely he decided, almost at once, that Brent would have to be killed. At any rate, he fixed your house—the Buano house—as the place of the meeting, remembering the vacant apartment and the ease of getting in. Then he must have kept on thinking fast; anyway, we can figure out what he did.

“First, he must have prepared the slip to go into the slot by the bell, getting it to size by guesswork, and being sure he made it, if anything, too large. He could always snip it down, after he got there. He cut it out of the top of a letter Berex had written him about the trust fund and was careful to leave part of the X on it. By then, anyway, he knew he was going to kill. He couldn't know that Berex's fingerprints were on it, but there was a good chance. He was careful to see that his own weren't. He printed his own name on it—”

“Why,” Mrs. North interrupted. “And why did he leave it?”

“Obviously he had to use his own name, since he was the one Brent was coming to meet,” Weigand said. “I'll get to the rest later.

“Then he went home, arranging to get there and receive the lobsters, which he knew pretty well wouldn't get there before the latest hour he'd fixed, three o'clock. He had arranged to have them come by that time merely so he would have time to prepare them, but now it fitted in. He was there when they came, took them into the kitchen, sent Kumi upstairs to clean, and threw the lobsters down the incinerator.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. North. “Of course!”

“Precisely,” Weigand said. “Then he took an old suitcase with him and went down the service stairs and over to the Buano house, which is only a couple of blocks. He had to chance being seen, but he was lucky. We still haven't found anybody who saw him, but we're still looking. The appointment was, probably, for three-thirty, and again he had to chance Brent's being on time. But if Brent wasn't on time, there was no real harm done. Edwards would only have to think up another plan. But Brent kept his appointment.