The Norths Meet Murder (31 page)

“They'll come to you as time goes on,” North promised. “You'll be seeing them all after dinner, at the Fullers'. Party.”

“Right,” said Weigand.

Mr. North submerged himself in thought.

“Did you,” he said suddenly, “ever see anything flukier than that shot of mine?”

Weigand said he hadn't, that he could remember.

2

S
ATURDAY
4
P.M.
TO
6:30
P.M.

The people began to come straight a little as they sat in the cabin, before a tiny fire built, Mrs. North said, for cheerfulness. (But as the sun sank one began to remember that it was September; that they were sixty miles northeast of New York and five hundred feet higher.) Bram Van Horst came straight, for example. He owned Lone Lake and all the cabins. He had been an aviator once, and an army officer in the first world war and for a while he had been rather successful as an illustrator. Then he had bought a hundred and fifty acres and built a dam—“he's Dutch, you know,” Mrs. North explained—and put up cabins around the edge of the lake when it filled. He called it Lone Lake—“I guess because he was lonely then,” Mrs. North said—and rented the cabins to people he knew, or friends of people he knew.

Weigand sat, glass in hand, on a couch beside Dorian Hunt. The people were new to her, too. She hadn't, she said, been up before, although Helen had often asked her. Helen lived in what had been the farmhouse, when Lone Lake was a farm, commuting to New York in spite of unfriendly train schedules. Helen's mother stayed at the lake all summer, and took care of Helen and Helen's guests.

“She's a jolly soul,” Dorian Hunt told Weigand, as this information weaved in and out of the conversation, broke off at some remark from Ben Fuller, started again when the talk hesitated and almost stilled. Weigand thought of the description the next day, when he met Mrs. Wilson, who then had no cause for jollity.

Dorian was a fashion artist and Arthur Kennedy, who was also a guest of the Wilsons', was a friend of hers and of Helen's.

“Misplaced at the moment, apparently,” she added.

Weigand exchanged information, giving her the Fullers, Ben and Jane. They lived in the Village, in a house all their own, and Fuller was an importer like his father before him.

“I don't know them at all well, as a matter of fact,” Weigand added. “I met them both once, in connection with a matter—well, a matter of business. Likable.”

Dorian nodded, and looked off inquiringly at Helen Wilson, who was standing up, with a small package under her arm. Helen was a tall, solid girl with light hair and wholesome coloring. She told Dorian to stay right where she was.

“I've got to go to Ireland's,” she said, “and then around to Jean's to leave her a tennis shirt I bought for her and forgot, and then I'll be back. Keep my drink warm for me.” She looked around. “I'll put it up here,” she said, and put it on the mantel. Then she went off along the path which paralleled the road toward Ireland's store. Everybody who had looked up and smiled returned to their drinks. Nobody could do more than guess afterward what time she left or returned, but she was gone, Weigand thought, not quite half an hour.

She came back, at any rate, took her drink, looked around at the others suspiciously, and said she had left more than that. “Lots more,” she said. Everybody laughed and Mr. North made her a fresh one. He had only finished it, and one or two refills, including Weigand's, when somebody outside said: “Hello?”

The Norths said “Yo!” and Hardie Saunders came in, tall and blond and with a sunburn which seemed to glow in the room. He had a rum collins, and cupped his big hands around the tall glass gratefully. Then he looked at the little fire and snorted.

“My God,” he said. “A fire!” He looked hot, and made much of it, mopping his forehead. “I thought fires were weeks off.”

“Not in this house,” Mrs. North said firmly. “Don't give Jerry ideas. He
never
gets cold and I have to build them and get kerosene all over me. Smelly.”

“Kerosene?” Weigand said, looking at the logs blazing.

“To start,” North said. “We all do up here. Old Marvin doesn't sell kindling, so we just slosh kerosene on and—pouff!”

“That's why we don't allow Boy Scouts,” said Mrs. North. “They'd writhe so, the poor things.”

The talk was now desultory, now heated as it turned to the world war that was beginning, shied away from it, edged relentlessly back. There were more drinks and Helen Wilson joined Dorian and Weigand on the couch. She seemed thoughtful, but listened smilingly when North and Saunders post-mortemed the mixed doubles final. Mr. North insisted gravely that he had all along intended the slice on his return of service.

“It was just as we planned it,” he insisted. Saunders said, “Yah!” in burlesqued disgust. “Why, Jean and I—” he said. He left it at that and moved across the room away from the fire. He was out of earshot when Helen turned to Weigand.

“You can't imagine how odd that sounds,” she said suddenly. “‘Jean and I' from Hardie Saunders. As odd as that they should have been playing together—” She stopped and made a gesture of annoyance. “Although why they shouldn't,” she said. “That I of all people should be starting gossip.” She looked at Weigand and smiled. “Forget it,” she said. “It was just that they used to be better friends than they are now and we were surprised when Jerry and Ben put them together, even if they do make a good team. But it worked out fine, didn't it? You saw them play together and particularly at first—but you didn't see them at first, did you?”

Weigand said he hadn't.

“They were playing so beautifully together,” Helen said. “It was fun to watch them, even when they were losing the first set. And in the second—!”

There seemed to be nothing much to say.

“You know them well?” he asked.

Helen said she did. She and Jean Corbin worked in the same advertising agency, Bell, Halpern & Bell. And Saunders had been an account executive there until about a year before, when he had left to start his own agency, taking the account with him.

“Quench,” Helen said. “Awful stuff. You drink it. Anyway, lots of people drink it.”

“And what did Bell, Halpern & Bell think of that?” Weigand said.

They hadn't, naturally, been much pleased, but it was all in the game. Jean Corbin, who had been Saunders' assistant, became an account executive a month or two later, so it was all right with her. And Bell, Halpern & Bell weathered nicely.

“And all this,” Helen said, “must bore you terribly. How did I get started?”

It wasn't clear to Weigand, who was watching Dorian Hunt's small, animated face as she talked to Ben Fuller, sitting in a chair pulled up in front of her.

“Is she—Miss Hunt—also with Bell and whatnot?” he said. Helen shook her head.

“Fashion artist,” she said. “Free lance. And good; funny thin girls all her own.”

People were, Weigand decided, coming to him as North had promised. For no good reason he checked them in his mind, recapitulating. Jane and Ben Fuller, whom he knew; Hardie Saunders, large and blond and sunburned, and proprietor of an advertising agency which advanced the claims of “Quench.” Helen Wilson, hearty and wholesome and something—a copywriter, he would guess—with Bell, Halpern & Bell. Jean Corbin, account executive with the same, and slight, dark, with a face of clear pallor and features carved impeccably by an artist. Bram Van Horst, who had flown airplanes and commanded men and done illustrations, and now was the squire of Lone Lake, and was Dutch and built dams. And the Norths, whom he had met under such unprepossessing circumstances, and got to know under such stress and whom he had come to know much better during the year—the year less a month or so—since he had encountered them, and been puzzled by them. A year since Mrs. North, going upstairs to an empty apartment above hers in Greenwich Place, had found the bathroom so unexpectedly and horribly occupied.
*

Then two things happened in quick succession. Fuller and Dorian Hunt were suddenly both looking at Weigand, Fuller grinning with the expression of light-hearted malice Weigand remembered from previous encounters. Dorian Hunt's expression was different—withdrawn, considering.

“I've been telling her about you, copper,” Fuller said. “She was asking.”

“Oh,” said Weigand, flatly because Dorian Hunt's face made him feel flat. “Right.”

Then there was a peculiar cat sound at the door and Pete shouldered open the screen. He was staggering under the weight of a quarter-grown rabbit, clamped in his jaws. Over the rabbit, Pete's eyes shone with pride. All the women gave small squeals of horror, but Dorian Hunt moved.

She was across the room in an instant and had the surprised cat by the neck. With a kind of desperateness in her movements, she wrested the rabbit from Pete, who yowled in disapproval but was too polite to scratch. The rabbit was wide-eyed with terror, but still alive.

“You—!” Dorian Hunt stormed at Pete. “You—hunter!”

Pete, not used to humans who were other than friendly, backed away, one yellow eye wistfully on the rabbit which Dorian held to her, while little drops of blood dripped unnoticed on her bare arm. Then Dorian looked abashed and apologetic, and spoke more gently to Pete. She told Pete that it was his way, and that he was a cat and knew no better.

“If only they wouldn't hunt!” she said, turning to the others. “They're so gracious and beautiful, but they hunt.” She stroked the rabbit. “It's trembling,” she said. “It's dreadful to be hunted.”

Nobody said anything, because there seemed to be nothing to say. Then Mrs. North, deftly, broke the moment and turned it against Pete. She told Pete he was a bad cat, a dreadful cat, and pushed him out the door. He went, looking back at the rabbit. Mr. North took the rabbit from Dorian and said he would see it safe and was gone a little while and came back without rabbit and with reassurance. They brought Pete in, then, and shut the door so he would forget and he went to rub against Dorian's bare legs, forgivingly. After a moment, she stroked him and repeated, to him and the company at large, that of course he didn't know any better.

But she did not, from then until the time she and Helen, and the Fullers and Saunders with them, left the Norths' cabin, look directly at Lieutenant William Weigand, acting captain in the Homicide Bureau of the New York Police Department. It was pretty clear, Weigand thought—and was depressed unexpectedly by the thought—that she didn't like detectives. She felt more strongly about them, he suspected, than a charming young woman in her middle twenties ought to have any reason to feel.

*
The circumstances of Mrs. North's discovery are described in “The Norths Meet Murder.”

3

S
ATURDAY
6:30
P.M.
TO
S
UNDAY
, 1:25
A.M.

Lieutenant Weigand believed that a detective needed luck, and that a lucky detective was given hunches. He thought, afterward, that a particularly lucky detective would have had a hunch during the Fullers' party; would have felt in the air something of what was coming, as the thunder of a summer storm announces what is to come, making ashtrays tremble metallically and sending vibrations tingling through glass. But Weigand was not that lucky, and no hunch troubled him all the evening. And since no hunch told him that he should, he paid no more than any man's attention to what went on.

It was a casual party. The Norths led him to it along a path through the sumach, reddening for autumn, a little after nine, and already it was dark. They had had another drink after the rest left, and a steak and an hour or so of sitting while the setting sun did things to clouds which made Mrs. North say “Oh,” and then while it grew dark, with the air of having all the time in the world to grow dark. They talked lazily, and the Norths gossiped a little. What Helen Wilson had meant about Jean Corbin and Hardie Saunders was that they had once been, everybody believed, in love, but that it had broken off after Saunders left the advertising agency.

“Jean gets around,” Mrs. North said, with tolerance. “Now it's Johnny Blair, from 'way down south in Dixie. Which made Thelma very annoyed.”

Weigand tried to remember.

“Thelma?” he said. “Which one was Thelma?”

“Pale,” Mrs. North said. “No-colored, stringy hair. She was at the court. Sort of forgettable face and always looks unhappy, sort of.”

“Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “What annoyed her?”

“She thought she was going to be Cinderella again,” Mrs. North said. “You'd be sorry if she'd let you like her. But there wasn't any prince.”

Weigand looked at Mr. North, who shook his head and said he'd tell it, since it had been brought up.

“Thelma shared a cabin with Jean last year,” he said. “And the year before. They used to be great friends, although I always thought Jean had Thelma around—well, for whatever reason it is that attractive women sometimes like to have unattractive ones around.” He held up a restraining hand toward Mrs. North, who seemed inclined to yip. “I said
sometimes
,” he said. “Not you, wiggles.”

“And don't call me ‘
wiggles
'!” Mrs. North said.

Mr. North captured the hand which was beating his arm, and continued.

“Then, toward the end of last season, Blair turned up and was over at the Jean-Thelma cabin a good deal. He lives with Saunders, and Saunders introduced him. And Thelma seems to have been a little confused for a while as to his purposes. Then Jean and Blair, between them, unconfused her. And Jean and Thelma stopped sharing a cabin. Clear?”

“Well—” said Weigand, speculatively. “She's still here, though. Thelma, I mean.”