The Norths Meet Murder (5 page)

“How about these North guys?” he said. “They'd talk, all right.” He looked hopefully at Weigand. “They're screwy, anyhow,” Mullins urged.

Weigand shook his head, and Mullins' hopes visibly subsided. He sighed deeply, and looked at the menu again, seeking comfort. But Weigand shook his head once more.

“We've got to see the chief,” he said. “Dear old Arty. And how he'll love it.”

They rose, Mullins reluctantly.

“And don't tell Arty that one about the Norths,” Weigand warned. “The idea's screwier than they are. Right?”

Mullins said, “O.K.” without enthusiasm. The more he thought about the Norths, his face reported to the lieutenant, the more he thought it would be a fine idea to go over them a bit. They would be easy to round up, too. But maybe the Loot knew best.

They picked up their car and Mullins winked on its red emergency lights. Then, to the accompaniment of a stimulatingly alarming noise from the siren, they went down to Centre Street. Mullins went, on order, to the Homicide Bureau office and inquired with decision whether a lot of things were being done. They were, because the police department knows ways of starting from scratch; because a naked body, male, 165 pounds, five feet ten inches, brown hair and eyes, age about forty, has ways of speaking even after the tongue is stilled. Department experts, without direction from Mullins, were trying to make it speak.

The Medical Examiner's office was taking it apart with knives, and reserving portions for analysis, and sewing it up again. Fingerprint men had long since photographed and enlarged the prints of the dead fingers, and found that there were none in the department files to match them. Copies of the enlargements had been started by air mail to Washington and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and there more experts compared them with yet more files, and found nothing. To the Federal Bureau, too, went precise physical descriptions, backed by measurements, and those, reduced to punch marks in a key card, sent thousands of other cards whirling through a machine, and expelled a few of them—including cards which gave names and last addresses and other significant details of three men long since dead, two serving life sentences and another at that moment awaiting trial for bank robbery. This was not as helpful as it might have been.

And the body's teeth were examined. They turned out, to everyone's annoyance, to be remarkably healthy teeth, showing only a few small fillings and no really intricate dental construction. It was a setback; nevertheless, dental charts were prepared on what data there was, and sent circulating among dentists, on the off chance. The Bureau of Missing Persons came into it, checking the description of the body against those of men who had wandered, unreported, from their homes, and one or two promising leads were turned up. Detectives hurried with photographs to consult worried men and women who might prove to be relatives of what had been found in the bathtub of 95 Greenwich Place, and men and women looked at the photographs fearfully and sighed over them with relief. For that came to nothing, too.

While this went on, and Mullins waited, Lieutenant Weigand went to see Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley, in charge of the Homicide Squad, and of Lieutenant Weigand—in final charge, too, of the body which had turned up in the bathtub. Inspector O'Malley had once been rather like Mullins, only several times as bright. Like Mullins, he preferred blastings, and regarded amateur murder with distrust. Murders like the present, which were not only amateur but bizarre, irritated Inspector O'Malley. Thus, although not an unamiable man, as Deputy Chief Inspectors go, he growled at Weigand when the lieutenant entered, and wanted to know, profanely, where he had been. Weigand said he had stopped for a bite of dinner; he tried to make it sound as if he had scooped a sandwich off a counter and chewed as he ran after clues. The inspector looked at him coldly, and Weigand was gratified that he had avoided the fourth cocktail, but felt slightly uneasy about the third.

“Well,” said Inspector O'Malley, “what's going on there? It sounds screwy to me.”

Weigand told him what he knew—about the Norths finding the body, about the battered skull and the nudity, about the Western Union boy who probably was not a Western Union boy, and about the cat. He told about the cat with misgivings, because, among other prejudices, Inspector O'Malley did not like cats. He did not even like to have cats mentioned. He frowned disgustedly.

“A cat!” he said. “For God's sake!”

Lieutenant Weigand was sorry, and said so. Nevertheless, there it was. A cat had got into it and, when you looked at it carefully, to good purpose. It fixed the time, if you could believe it.

“A cat!” said Inspector O'Malley, with distilled disgust.

The inspector glared at Weigand, blaming him for the cat. Weigand waited suitably and went on.

“Well,” said the inspector, when Weigand had told him all he could think of that was pertinent, and omitted only the conversational waywardness of Mrs. North, which he doubted the inspector would appreciate—“well, it's your baby, Weigand. It's certainly a screwy one.”

Weigand nodded. There was no doubt of that.

“Let's have a report,” the inspector directed. “Let me know when you get an identification. Did you see the press?”

O'Malley preferred the press to cats, but by a narrow margin, and his tone revealed it. Weigand had seen the press, as a matter of fact; for a moment amid other moments. He had told the press there was a body and murder, and described the man. He said that that was all he knew, thinking it was enough for the press to know—from him, at any rate. The press could go to O'Malley, for more. The press would, it assured him, and he warned the inspector. The inspector thanked him for nothing; the press was on the doorstep, howling. Weigand thought of something, and suggested it, as a lieutenant suggests things to an inspector. He thought it would be better if the exact time of the killing were kept from the press. The inspector agreed.

“Even if we knew it,” he said. “A cat!”

Weigand left it to the inspector to tell the reporters that he, Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley, had the matter well in hand and expected an arrest soon. The inspector, Weigand knew, would “have the case in hand” and be “working on it unsparingly” until, in the end, he solved it. And if it were not solved, the inspector would take Weigand in hand. The lieutenant did not resent this; it was a course proper to inspectors.

Weigand went back to his office and looked at the reports, which were coming in. Prints not in the files; the body not that of Mr. Irwin Bokandosky, missing since September 26 from his home in the Bronx; not that of Alexander K. Churchill, absent only since the tenth day of October from his home in Queens—and also from his cage in the City National Bank. This last did not surprise the Police Department in the least; it had ideas already about Mr. Churchill. Mullins reported that it was a damned screwy case, and was deepeningly pessimistic.

Weigand studied the report sent along by the Assistant Medical Examiner, Dr. Sampson. It was technical, but clear enough, and Weigand translated it to himself. The man had been dead about twenty-four hours, but it might be as short a time as twenty or as long a time as twenty-eight. He had eaten several hours before he died. Death resulted from severe brain lacerations, and several blows had been struck. The blow which had partly disfigured the face, breaking the nose, had been delivered after the man was dead. Perhaps, Weigand thought, out of sheer rage. The weapon had had, apparently, a circular, flat face. (“Maybe a croquet-mallet,” Sampson had written along one edge of the report.) Weigand conveyed the gist of this to Mullins, who took it badly.

“Men with no clothes, croquet-mallets, cats and screwy people,” he said, indignantly. “And the guy ain't even got a record,” he added, piling on what was evidently the last straw. Weigand agreed this made things difficult, as did the battering of the face. The last was, intentionally or not, a shrewd move on the part of the murderer, since it made it highly improbable that the newspapers would publish photographs taken of the corpse, and thus blocked one quick channel of identification. Weigand sighed and reached for his hat.

“Let's go look at it,” he said. “Maybe we'll see something.”

Mullins heaved himself up, sadly, and Weigand led the way to their car. Mullins switched on the red lights, which made him more cheerful, and almost smiled as the siren cried their coming. A morgue attendant got the body out of its refrigerated drawer, where Dr. Sampson had left it. Weigand examined the hands, and pointed out the deep cigarette stains on the right hand.

“You get that from holding on when you drag,” Mullins assured him. “If you let go, you don't get them, see?”

Weigand said he saw, saying it abstractly as he examined the face. The wound told him nothing, but he looked thoughtfully at the bristle on the undamaged cheeks. The beard had grown since death, but it seemed to have grown irregularly—here and there the detective saw hairs much longer than those around them. And the short sideburns, instead of ending sharply, were irregular. The man had shaved hurriedly and badly when he shaved the last time and—then Weigand realized why, and rubbed his own cheek reflectively. He, too, had recently bought an electric shaver, and was having trouble learning to use it. Unaccountably, it missed hairs now and then, and it was hard to get a clean line at the sides. It left stray beard hairs standing belligerently among their clipped neighbors.

It might, Weigand realized, put them on to something. With his own razor there had come a guarantee blank, valid only when it had been filled in with the name and address of the purchaser and sent to the district office of the manufacturer. If, now, this man filled out such a blank and mailed it, his name and address would be on file with the company—along with, he added sadly to himself, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. If he had bought the same kind of razor Weigand had bought himself; if he had sent in the guarantee blank as, thinking of it, Weigand remembered he himself had not. “Do it tomorrow,” he thought, and pulled himself back to the matter at hand. Was it, he wondered, worth the trouble? He decided it was, and looked sympathetically at Mullins. Mullins caught the look, which he knew of old, and an expression of foreboding overspread his face.

“Now, Loot,” he began, “listen—”

Weigand told him, crisply, what he had to do—he and Perkins and Washburn. Mullins' expression lightened a little at the news he was not to be the only victim. They would get hold of the manager of the Clipper Shave Company and he—with Perkins and Washburn—would go over the records of guarantee slips returned. They would copy out all showing identified purchases within two weeks—“better make it three,” Weigand corrected himself—and tomorrow they would get enough men on it to make the rounds.

“Tonight?” said Mullins, drearily. “I gotta work all night?”

Weigand's sympathy was mild and his instructions unaltered. “Tomorrow you can get some sleep,” he promised. Mullins went unhappily to the telephone to break the news to Perkins and Washburn, and to try to persuade one of them to uncover an officer of the company. Mullins said “Yeah” and “That's what I told him” into the telephone, glanced around to see if Weigand had relented, learned he had not, and, eventually, went about his chore. And now, Weigand realized, he would do it diligently and exactly, missing nothing. Weigand looked at the body and had another idea, but decided it could go until morning. He could, he decided, do with some sleep himself, and went home to get it.

4

W
EDNESDAY

8
A.M.
TO
N
OON

He went to sleep in his small apartment uptown thinking that it might be rather fun to be married to somebody like—well, like Mrs. North. He awoke in the morning and groaned to find it day again, and constabulary duty to be done. He made himself coffee and toast and decided the world was screwy; he smoked his first cigarette and was mildly dizzy for a moment; he answered the telephone. Mullins, sleepily, reported a list of four hundred and thirty-two names, all over town, and said he was turning it in and going to get some sleep. Weigand called Headquarters, reported, and found that the squad could allow him three men to check the four hundred and thirty-two names, and felt that preliminary work, at least, could be done by telephone.

“Arty doesn't think so much of the idea, anyhow,” the office lieutenant informed him.

Weigand hadn't thought Arty would. Nor did he suppose Arty would think so much of the other idea, which was for a canvass of cigar-stores with pictures. The canvass might, Weigand thought, begin in the neighborhood of the murder, although there was no particular reason to think the murdered man lived there. Afterward it might broaden out. The Bureau decided, reluctantly, it could give five men to that and Weigand realized the murder was making a stir. He got his newspapers from in front of the apartment door, when he had finished with the telephone. The murder was making a stir, all right; it had, Weigand gathered, everything. There were pictures of the house, and of the bathroom—without body—and of the Norths. Mrs. North looked surprised and interested, Weigand noticed. There were no pictures of the body, except a few shots in one of the tabloids, taken at some distance and after the body had been covered. Nobody, the newspapers reported, knew the identity of the victim, nor the time of the murder. The Norths, he was pleased to notice, had evidently been cautious about what they said to the press.

Weigand went downtown to Headquarters and waited for reports. It was dull business, and he took a hand in telephoning to the purchasers of electric razors. Most of them were alive and well, or had been when they left home that morning. Two wives who answered gave small shrieks, and, apparently, fainted. About every fourth call gave no response and had to be put aside for further investigation, along with a smaller pile of reports which left matters in the air. It was slow work and probably, Weigand thought, futile. He was explaining to an alarmed Italian woman that her husband was, so far as he knew, in perfectly good health and importing the olive oil he had gone forth that morning to import, when a call came. He hung up on expostulations, and said “Yes?” into the other telephone.