The Norths Meet Murder (32 page)

“She's just up for the party tonight,” North said. “She's staying overnight at the Wilsons', or somewhere. Jane Fuller thought it would be nice to invite her.”

“But you're not telling him about James Harlan Abel,” Mrs. North objected. “Our only professor. And Jean after him.”

“Look,” North said, “I don't see how we got into this. Does Bill
have
to know about all these people?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. North. “It's fascinating. Like a comedy or something.”

“Well,” North said, and hesitated. “We think that now Jean is getting a little fed up with Johnny Blair and would like to go over to Abel. Abel's tall, stooped, and young-looking in an old way—you met him. He's at Columbia. English. He's new this year, and Jean apparently likes him. Or just likes his being new. Anyway, the sewing circle is mighty suspicious about it, and is very sorry for Mrs. Abel, who is old-looking in a young sort of way. She's the one with faintly red hair. Very thin and nervous. She rides herd on James Harlan, rather, and our Jeanie had better look out.”

Mr. North paused a moment.

“And now,” he said, “shall we tell you how Van Horst beats his wife?”

“Jerry!” said Mrs. North, indignantly. “You're making fun!”

Mr. North was very grave.

“We think you should know all,” he assured Weigand. “This is a very desperate place, full of currents. We're just waiting until Van Horst gets married.”

Mrs. North got her hand loose and resumed pounding her husband's arm, with an indignation which was not supposed to convince.

That had all been just before they went along the path through the sumach to the party at the Fullers'. The Fuller cabin was very like the Norths', only rather larger, as it shortly needed to be. It was a casual but crowded party; Weigand met all the people he had met before or heard talked about, and a good many others and after a few drinks he found a place to sit in a corner and the party became a pleasant blur. He hoped Dorian Hunt would sit by him when there was a place vacant, but she didn't. A few times he danced with Pam North and Jane Fuller, when there was dancing, and Saunders sat beside him for a few minutes, looking damply hot and jovial, and Helen Wilson said that she didn't want to dance, but that a drink and a place to sit would save her life. So for a time after he had got her a fresh drink she sat beside Weigand, companionably but without saying much.

People went in and out of the cabin on excursions and for purposes of their own. Weigand went out once and found that white mist was rising from the lake and that an almost full moon had come up and was shining on it and as he turned back into the house he met Hardie Saunders coming out, mopping his forehead and talking about air. Helen Wilson was gone from her place on the sofa when he got back, but after a little he saw her dancing. Both the Norths were gone, then, and so was Jean Corbin, who had been talking quickly, containedly, to a thin, oldish-young man who must be James Harlan Abel. But Mrs. Abel seemed nowhere in sight to ride herd. Then the Norths came back, apparently having been somewhere in a car, the lights of which swept the lawn outside the cabin and went out just before they came in. Van Horst was with them and with Van Horst was a guitar, and then he sang Scottish and Irish songs, and one or two songs of surprising bawdiness.

It was then and afterward that a hunch would have been helpful, but Weigand had no hunch. So he paid only the attention that a man comfortably looking on at a party, a reasonable part of the time through the bottom of a glass, might be expected to pay. He had, when he tried to work things out afterward, a belief that most of the people he knew at the party had been grouped around, on chairs and sofas and the floor, when Van Horst was singing. But he had no definite guess to make as to what time that was. And as, afterward, the party scattered from the nucleus of the music, and took on a more rapid tempo, he made no effort to follow the movements of the various Lone Lakers. Dorian Hunt was, he was pretty sure, out of the cabin only once or twice, and then briefly, and he was surprised, when it came time to remember what he could, how sharply he remembered her—now dancing with the grace he had expected; now standing and talking, and managing to carry that rather singular, balanced grace even into relative immobility. Her smile recognized him once or twice, but when he tried to get her to dance she had already moved into the arms of someone else.

It was, he knew, very near the end of the party when Jean Corbin ended a dance near where he was sitting, and sat down beside him and said:

“They say you are a detective.”

Weigand nodded.

“I'm trying,” he said, “to be on vacation, though.” He patted his pockets. “No handcuffs,” he added. “No gun.” The gun was back at the Norths', locked in a bag, and he had no handcuffs. There was a badge in his pocket, however.

“It must be interesting,” Jean Corbin said. “Thinking ahead of people. Outwitting them. Letting them think they are too clever and then—snap!”

Weigand smiled and said it seldom worked out that way. Usually, he said, it was a question of getting hold of somebody who knew something, and getting him to tell what he knew. A stool-pigeon; a man who might be expected to grow talkative if he had to go too long without narcotics; a man who stayed unmolested on sufferance, and the promise of a willing tongue. Those things, and what one came to know of certain patterns of criminal behavior.

“I don't mean professional criminals,” the slim, dark girl with the sharply cut face assured him. “I mean—oh, murderers who haven't police records or anything, and kill—what shall I say?—privately, for private ends.”

Weigand nodded, and said he assumed she did. Most people thought of crime like that, he said. But most crime was professional and its detection took a memory for faces and for facts, and a knowledge of who, among all the talkers the department knew of, might be the man to talk to the point. That and organization, and having plenty of men to cover the ground.

“It's seldom the detective's wits against those of the gentlemanly murderer,” he said. “Too bad, isn't it?”

“But sometimes—?” she insisted.

Weigand said of course, sometimes. And that then it was usually a lot of work, with no assurance of success.

“Murder is seldom ingenious, outside books,” he said. “And when it is, it is often successfully hidden.” He grinned at her. “Only don't try it,” he added. “Sometimes we
do
catch on, and you might be unlucky.”

She shook her head and said she wouldn't.

“Not even Hardie, the lummox,” she said. “Although when he let that one get by this afternoon I could have—”

Saunders' ears apparently caught their owner's name, to which ears are always so marvelously attuned. At any rate, he came over and stood in front, and beamed down.

“What's this I hear?” he demanded. “What's this?”

“I was telling him I thought I was going to have to kill you because of this afternoon,” Jean explained. “But he talked me out of it. You owe him your life.”

“Good,” Saunders said. “Thanks, old man. Keep an eye on her, will you? They say you're a cop.”

He seemed pleasantly drunk and amiable.

Jean looked at the watch on her wrist, and said suddenly that she thought she would go. It was after one, she said, impossible as it sounded. The party seemed unabated but, as Weigand looked it over, it was appreciably thinned out. Dorian had gone, for one, and apparently Helen Wilson with her; the discontented face of Thelma Smith also had vanished. The Abels, together now, and the Norths, also together, were talking and Mrs. North caught Weigand's eye and her eyebrows indicated Jean and went up. Both Fullers were mixing drinks and somebody was urging Van Horst to play again. Jean got up and drew a light coat around her.

“Is your cabin near?” Weigand asked. “Should I walk along with you?”

She smiled and said it would be nice, if he wanted to. They walked through a mist that was creeping higher from the lake and now dulled Weigand's flashlight as they went along a path which seemed to circle the lake. The path dipped toward the lake, and another joined it from the right and the sumach was still growing closely. Then Jean turned up, away from the water, and the moonlight outlined another cabin, rather smaller than the others. They stepped in and Jean said to wait a moment while she got a light. A match flared and she lighted lamps. Then she said “brrr!

“It's cold in here,” she said. “The fire's—well, that's odd. It isn't quite out, is it? It's smoldered along since this morning, evidently.”

Bill Weigand crossed to the fireplace.

“It needs stirring,” he said, and stirred it resolutely. A flame shot up.

“It needs more wood,” Weigand said. “If you'll tell me where—?”

“In the still-room,” she said. “Through that door.”

The Corbin cabin differed from the others Weigand had seen. It was considerably smaller, in its central mass. But a one-room wing had been built beyond the kitchen; built solidly, with a concrete floor. There was wood piled in it, and a few garden tools and a two-gallon can for kerosene. Weigand picked up an armful of wood, went back, built up the fire and said:

“Still-room?”

Jean was sitting on a bench in front of the fire, huddling toward it. She held out her hands to the flame as she explained.

“It
was
a still-room,” she said. “Really a still-room. That was before I took the cabin. The man who had had it was a broker before 1929, and then he turned bootlegger in a small way, and Van Horst let him build a room. He made it solider than the rest of the cabin, I guess to keep the fumes in, or something. So I store things in it—wood and kerosene and just general rubbish.”

Her voice sounded tired, Weigand decided. And, anyway, the Norths would wonder about him. She thanked him for building up the fire, and for being company, but did not urge that he stay. The mist had grown thicker when Weigand stepped out into it, and took a path which he thought was the one they had come by. And almost instantly he was lost, because this path branched and dwindled and seemed to cross another, and ended at a long, rough dock extending into the lake. A boat floated at the end of the dock.

The mist which baffled the flashlight, and the crossing paths and the close-growing sumach, proved unexpectedly difficult. Weigand tried one path, but it ended in a dark cabin which was not the Corbin cabin. Another ended in an outhouse. A third seemed to abandon life entirely in the thick of the undergrowth. Weigand said, “Damn!” when he came to that. He began to feel that he had been pushing his way through the mist for a long time. Then for the first time in hours, he turned his flashlight beam on his wristwatch. It showed 1:20. He must, he thought, already have been gone from the Corbin cabin almost a quarter of an hour, and he had evidently got no place. He stopped and listened.

“Oh, oh, my honey, have a—on me!” he heard. That was the party. He could fill in the pause, because he had heard it filled in before. Everybody was singing, and when they came to the pause they all sniffed resolutely. “Morphine Bill and Cocaine Sue” was being shouted happily to his right. He turned toward it, and found the faintest of the paths. He started along it and then, drawing in his breath quickly, he stopped.

There was something dark and inert lying across the path in front of him, and when his light found it, it was the body of a woman. She lay face down, sprawled shapelessly, and around her head dark wetness caught the light from his torch. Weigand had seen enough death to know he was seeing it again. He bent quickly to throw the light on the face, and to see it he had to lift the head a little. He was flooded, as he did so, with the certainty that he already knew what he would see. And then he let his breath out so that the tiny rush of it was almost a whistle.

Because what he saw was not what he had, in that moment, known he would see. What he saw was the face of Helen Wilson.

Helen Wilson was dead. In the left side of her throat was a ragged gash. But blood was not flowing from it any longer.

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About the Authors

Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the
New Yorker
turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances's death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1940 by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3107-3

This 2016 edition published by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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