The Norths Meet Murder (8 page)

“He'd be frolicsome, too, if he weren't a policeman,” Mrs. North thought, of Weigand. “People with blue eyes and chins like his are, usually. Stubby chins.”

“What?” called Mr. North from the other room, making Mrs. North realize that she must have been speaking aloud.

“Stubby chins,” Mrs. North called back. “Friendly, sort of.”

There was a considerable pause, and then Mr. North said, “Oh,” vaguely.

“Don't you think so?” Mrs. North called, still looking out the window.

“No,” said Mr. North. “Anyway, I wouldn't call his that. It's got a point.”

Mrs. North continued to look out the window, watching a man across the street, who was burrowing into the waste in a trash-can, and every now and then finding something and dropping it into a burlap bag he carried.

“Listen,” said Mrs. North. “We're being watched. He's put a tail on us.”

“What things you must read!” Mr. North said, coming in to look. He looked.

“It's just a rag-picker,” he said. Mrs. North looked disappointed, and said she thought sure it was a tail.

“After all,” she said. “We found it. I think it would be very irregular if we weren't tailed. As if we weren't important.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. North, but he looked at the rag-picker more closely. The rag-picker still looked like a rag-picker. “Nonsense,” said Mr. North, more firmly. “You've been reading things. It was Weigand you meant about the chin?”

Mrs. North nodded, and said he didn't look much like a detective to her. He was too—Mrs. North stopped.

“Well,” Mrs. North said, “he talks just like anybody and he took off his hat and he smokes cigarettes, so he's not like a man from Headquarters. But did he talk about jade?”

“Jade?” said Mr. North. “I don't get it.”

“No,” said Mrs. North, “he didn't. So he's not like an amateur. He's just like anybody else—brown hair and blue eyes and a little tall, but not very, and just thin like anybody else. And he dresses like anybody else.”

Mrs. North's tone was, Mr. North thought, vaguely accusing, as if she didn't like the detective he had provided for her.

“Well,” Mr. North said, “he's a lieutenant. So he must be all right.”

Mrs. North nodded, and said there might be something in that.

“He's nice,” Mrs. North said. “As a person, he's nice. But he seems very irregular to me. Not like Mullins.”

No, Mr. North agreed, he wasn't at all like Mullins. Mullins represented type casting.

Weigand and Mullins turned the corner and went on toward Fifth Avenue and Mrs. Brent. They came to a drugstore and Weigand turned in and found a telephone booth. He telephoned Headquarters and had a man assigned to keep an eye on the Buano house and its occupants, which could be done from a café in the semi-basement across the street. Half an hour later, Second Grade Detective Cohen found the café and was pleased to discover that he could sit at the bar while keeping the Buano house under his eye. It was only a slight flaw, he decided, that he would have to stick to beer; after all, there were peanuts to go with it, and peanuts were fine. Looking back on it afterward, Detective Cohen decided that it was one of the pleasantest cases he had ever worked on.

Weigand and Mullins left the drugstore and went on to No. 34 Fifth Avenue. A crowd stood outside it and stared aloft, and a couple of uniformed men told it to move along and open up, and pushed it aside when it threatened to block the sidewalk. Inside the lobby two more uniformed men peered through an increasing haze of cigarette smoke at half a dozen reporters; and the doorman, who had retreated from the outside crowd, expressed dignified disapproval, as well as some furtive enjoyment, of the whole matter. The reporters got up when Weigand entered, and sat down again when he shook his head at them. He went up.

The face of the Brent maid reflected suitable gravity and her voice was hushed. She would see if Mrs. Brent could see Lieutenant Weigand; Mrs. Brent was feeling very indisposed, but the maid would see. “She's grieving,” the maid imparted, in a suddenly lowered tone. Then she left and, after a moment, returned. The detectives followed her across the foyer and into the living-room, done in soft grays and reds. Mrs. Brent rose from a chair near the window and said, “Lieutenant Weigand.” Her voice was low-pitched and steady, but there was still shallowness in her eyes. She was very pale, under tan. She moved forward and Weigand noticed that she moved with that balance which becomes instinctive to a dancer, or an athlete.

She was a little above the usual height of women, and muscularly slender. Standing quietly, and waiting for Weigand to speak, she lifted a cigarette to her lips, and as her arm rose Weigand could see the supple stir of muscles under the pale brown skin of her forearm. Weigand could feel Mullins beside him thinking “She's a good-looker, all right.”

She was, Weigand agreed, mentally. Her features were regular and disciplined; her jaw compact and liable, he suspected, to become prominent as she grew older. Youth softened it now, but it was the jaw of a lady who knew her mind. Her hair was blond and—Weigand's experienced eyes hesitated imperceptibly—yes, naturally so. Her gaze at him was steady, unrevealing and unperturbed.

He apologized. She would understand that there were certain questions they must ask; certain things they must find out. He would like to give her more time; knew the shock she had experienced. But in such cases it was hazardous to waste time; every hour made their task more difficult, as she would realize.

She said, “Yes, Lieutenant, of course,” in her low, steady voice, and motioned toward chairs. She sat again herself, in a fluid, balanced movement which Weigand envied. That sense of balance you had to be born with; could never fully acquire if you were not. He had seldom seen it more completely embodied than in Mrs. Brent; never, he decided, in a woman. Watching her move, he wondered why she had not really attained top flight as a tennis player, and decided that it must have been because she had not wanted to, or had lacked something of the peculiar spirit necessary. Or perhaps, and that was always possible, she lacked that supernormal coordination of vision necessary for greatness as an athlete. Certainly what she had not lacked, he realized as she waited composedly for him to continue, was poise.

There were routine questions, about herself and her husband—questions for the record. She was thirty-two; they had been married a little over seven years. Before her marriage she had been Claire Askew; had been born upstate at Binghamton and been educated in private schools. Her husband had been five years older, a native New Yorker, educated at Yale. He had been a member of the law firm for about five years. Before that he had been, for a short time, an assistant in the District Attorney's office. Latterly, she thought, his practice had been almost entirely a civil one. The firm represented several corporations.

She had last seen her husband on Saturday, when she went to the country to close up their house there. Her level voice checked a moment, and went on. She looked straight at Weigand, waiting for each new question, with her hands quiet in her lap.

“The country house?”

“It is a little way out of Carmel,” she said. “It is a week-end place, really, although we often spend a month there in the summer—longer if Stan can get—” She stopped suddenly. “It is hard to realize,” she said. “That was what we used to do.”

“I'm sorry about this,” Weigand said. “You understand it isn't what I'd choose to do?”

She nodded. She quite understood; she was sorry if she was making it more difficult. She was keeping him at arm's-length, Weigand realized. Perhaps she was, in a way, keeping herself, also, at arm's-length.

“It's about two hours from town by car,” she said. “Sometimes a little less. I was there from about Saturday noon until this morning. I drove in.”

“Yes,” said Weigand. “Thank you.”

He waited a moment while Mullins finished a page of notes and flipped to a new page.

“Now,” he said, “there are a few more things. Do you know, or did your husband, anybody named Edwards? A man or, perhaps, a woman?”

Mrs. Brent's eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly in inquiry, but the question appeared to be no more than faintly puzzling. Her eyes deepened as she thought. There was, she said, a laundryman named Edwards, or perhaps Edmonds. And there was an old school friend of hers who had married a man named Edwards. They lived in Chicago. She couldn't answer for her husband, of course—he might know many others. She had met a Dr. Edwards a month or so ago at a party and he had played the piano delightfully for an hour or more, but she had never met him again. Yes, her husband had been at the party.

“Do you know a Mr. Clinton Edwards?” Weigand asked.

Mrs. Brent nodded, and said, “Just.

“Stan had some business relations with him, I believe,” she said. “A year or so ago, and we both got to know him slightly—never well. We went to his parties once or twice, and he came here, I think, once. But all of this was some time ago; I haven't seen, or thought of, him for months.”

And her husband? Had he seen Clinton Edwards recently? Mrs. Brent couldn't, of course, say definitely. But not so far as she knew. Weigand said, “Right,” and that he would pass on. Did she know whether her husband had enemies? Had he ever mentioned them?

“I don't think people nowadays have ‘enemies,' in that sense,” she said. “Do you? I suppose some people didn't like him. There were people we used to see, and don't see now”—she corrected herself, and her voice went dead on the correction—“hadn't seen recently,” she said. “Some of them didn't like him, any more; or didn't like me. Some of them we didn't like. But I don't think people like us really have enemies.”

Weigand more or less agreed with the theory, but the facts seemed against it. He nodded.

“No quarrels?” he said. Mrs. Brent thought.

“He and Ben Fuller swore at each other, once,” she said. “They were both a little tight, and nobody knew what was wrong. I don't think it was very much, really. I don't know of anything else.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “It doesn't sound like anything.” But he jotted down the name of Benjamin Fuller, just on the chance. He collected, also, the names of relatives. He inquired about insurance, and again Mrs. Brent's eyebrows raised themselves slightly. It was routine, he pointed out. “We like to get the picture,” he said. She thought her husband had carried rather a good deal of insurance, but she was not sure. Weigand could doubtless find out. He agreed. And if Mr. Brent had had a desk in the apartment, might he look through it? And among the papers in the safe, if there was a safe? Mrs. Brent, whose eyes were growing shallow again, and who seemed to be looking beyond him, agreed with a nod. The maid would show him the desk and the wall safe. But she did not know the combination of the safe.

The desk showed two things. In one pigeonhole a note of two lines, reading:

“Both my wife and I have had enough of this. I'd advise you to quit your little pranks.”

It was signed “B. F.”

The desk also yielded, very conveniently, a list of numbers which might be the combination of the wall safe—might be, and, as it turned out, was. The safe disclosed a few bonds, and stock certificates, none of great value; insurance policies on a car and on household effects, and a life insurance policy. The last was for $50,000, with a double indemnity clause which might, Weigand thought, be applicable in event of death by murder. He jotted down particulars, and put the policy back.

“A hundred thousand,” he said to himself. From where he sat it was a lot of money. The policy named Claire Brent as beneficiary. Weigand said, “Um,” and listened while Mullins told him what he had learned from the maid, Mary, and the doorman.

Mary had gone with Mrs. Brent to the country, to help close the house. The cook had been given Saturday, Sunday and Monday off, Mr. Brent saying he would prefer to eat out rather than in the apartment alone. Mary and Mrs. Brent had been busy both Saturday afternoon and Sunday; by Monday noon they were done. But it was a lovely day, so Mrs. Brent had decided not to go in until the next morning. She, Mary, had “jes sat around in the sun,” but Mrs. Brent had driven off on Monday.

“She took the things she paints with and jes drove off,” Mary explained. “She came back before it got dark.”

Pressed, she had thought Mrs. Brent might have left between one and two o'clock, and got back at six-thirty. She had said she was going to the Danbury Fair.

“Huh?” Mullins had said at this point.

“The Danbury Fair,” the maid had repeated. “At Danbury. She goes right often.”

It took Weigand back to Mrs. Brent. He was sorry, but there was one other point—pure routine. Monday afternoon? Did she remember? She had driven off—?

“Oh,” said Mrs. Brent. “You want to know—?” Her voice had a new note of strain, but it was still unshaken. “Yes, I drove over to the fair at Danbury. I paint sometimes, you know, and I usually try each fall to do something at the fair. There is a way the light comes in through the main exhibit tent and falls on things—cans and prize vegetables and cakes. I've always wanted to get it on canvas. I spent most of the afternoon there Monday.”

“Did you get it?” Weigand wanted to know.

“No,” she said. “I was further off than ever. That evening I scraped the canvas.”

She had seen no one she knew at the fair.

Weigand thanked her. It was, he reflected, perfectly reasonable; perfectly likely. It was also completely unprovable, so far as he could see. She might have driven into New York in plenty of time, and back afterward in plenty of time. She seemed shocked by her husband's death, but she might be shocked even if—People who killed were shocked, sometimes, at themselves when they thought about it afterward. And terror, too, might shock. Mrs. Brent did not seem terrified, but—And there was the hundred thousand in insurance.