The Norths Meet Murder (9 page)

“Well—” he said to himself, walking slowly back to the living-room, where Mullins stared out of a window and down at the crowd below. There was one—Claire Brent. Motive, money. Opportunity, possible. Alibi, none. There was Mrs. North, who was hiding something about her acquaintance with Brent, or her knowledge concerning him. There was a Benjamin Fuller, not further identified, who had quarreled with Brent. There was some one named Edwards, whom Brent obviously had known. And there was Clinton Edwards, broker and party giver, who might be the man. There was, of course, Mr. North, but he was a suspect only if men who found bodies were necessarily suspects. The odd thing about that was that men who found bodies were, quite often, the men who had quenched the life in the bodies they found. He could name half a dozen such, from experience and history.

“Well?” he said to Mullins.

Mullins had interviewed the doorman and elevator man on duty Monday. The doorman remembered it had been a fine, warm day. The elevator man remembered that Mr. Brent had come home about one o'clock that afternoon and gone out again several hours later. He remembered it because it was unusual for Mr. Brent to come home in the daytime. Weigand said, “Um?” and Mullins shook his head. Mr. Brent was by himself; nobody came to see him while he was in the apartment. If he had telephoned, he had used his private telephone and not gone through the house switchboard; he had the choice. He had gone in, stayed a while—until three, maybe—and come out and gone off to be killed. While inside he had, the elevator man thought, changed his clothes. He was wearing a brown suit when he went out, unless the elevator man was wrong. “I could be wrong, all right,” the elevator man assured Weigand, when the detective checked as they went out.

“If you ask me, we ain't getting anywhere,” Mullins announced gloomily as they walked toward the corner. “Give me a case where you can round people up, O.K. But these fancy cases—” Mullins' voice withdrew into a cave and rumbled.

“Here,” it said, coming out again, “here we got how many men on it, Loot?”

Counting the precinct men, the men trying to trace the clothes of the murdered man, the auditors and others at the law offices, the sergeant and two detectives questioning the staff there, perhaps twenty, Weigand thought. When it came to alibis, if it came to alibis, twice as many.

“And precinct and squad men doubling up, probably,” Mullins remarked. “Falling over each other. And where do we get? We know who got killed!” Mullins was disgusted. “Twenty-four hours, pretty near, and we know who got killed,” he said. “Guys who don't have prints!” Mullins was still, Weigand realized, annoyed at the victim for not being on file. They had, Weigand pointed out, done rather well, as a matter of fact. They had been lucky. Identification might just as well have taken weeks. Mullins was not pacified.

“These fancy cases,” he said. “People you can't round up. People who talk screwy, so you can't understand them. People who paint vegetables!” Mrs. Brent's activity on the afternoon of the murder, providing it had in truth been her activity, had done nothing to assuage Detective Mullins, Weigand realized. “Now who tells us funny stories?”

“Edwards,” Weigand told him. “Clinton Edwards. Did you get his address?”

Mullins had got the address, and it was little more than around the corner—another remodeled house, this time, or, rather, a series of remodeled houses thrown together. Edwards had a duplex apartment on the third and fourth floors of one of them, and was served by an automatic elevator. He was also provided with service stairs, in case he wanted them. Looking at him, after they had gone up, been admitted by a serious-faced Japanese and shown into a long living-room, Weigand decided that Edwards would have little personal use for stairs.

Edwards stood up and looked very affable when Weigand and Mullins were shown in. He had just risen from a deep chair near a window, and he had a copy of an afternoon newspaper in his hand. Half across the room, Weigand could see the headlines about the Brent murder. Edwards was a large man, tall and wide and thick, and somehow rather billowy. He had a high forehead from which the hair was retreating and an irregularly shaped nose, and his voice was a soft, cushioned bass.

“Yes, gentlemen?” he said, in the soft, cushioned bass voice. “Inspector Weigand?”

“Lieutenant,” Weigand corrected. Edwards spoke, somehow, like a man who, knowing city magistrates by the dozen, is still affable to traffic policemen. The city magistrates would also be treated affably, Weigand thought, so that they would never guess that Edwards guessed there was a difference in social level—or would think they were not supposed to guess that Edwards perceived any such distinction. “Very complicated,” Weigand told himself.

Edwards' room, on the other hand, was uncomplicated. It was thirty feet long by perhaps twenty wide, and the ceiling was his height again above Edwards' head. But the chairs were low and the fireplace was broad; there were a great many chairs, Weigand noticed, but the room did not seem as if it held a great many chairs. There were tables near the chairs, with ash-trays and room for drinks and, all in all, the room looked as if it were ready for a party. There were flowers on the mantel and more flowers sprawling from a low vase on a table by the windows. All, Weigand thought, very nice.

“Won't you sit down, gentlemen?” Edwards said. “And tell me what I can do for you?”

He spoke the words of each sentence with full, measured precision. Weigand and Mullins sat, sinking deeply into chairs.

“Perhaps a drink?” Edwards said. He was, clearly, being very affable. Mullins looked expectant.

“No. Sorry,” Weigand said. “We're both on duty, you see. Regulations—”

Mullins looked at Weigand in grieved astonishment, but Edwards nodded with a nod that was almost a bow, and said he quite understood.

“Then—?” said Clinton Edwards, with an inflection that rose smoothly and with the utmost cultivation.

“We're investigating the Brent Murder,” Weigand said. It sounded very crude.

“And you have learned that I knew Stanley Brent, no doubt?” Edwards said.

That, Weigand thought, was getting it before you asked. He found himself wishing he were not so deeply sunk in so comfortable a chair. It invested the proceedings with undesirable lassitude.

“Yes,” Weigand said. “That, among other things. You knew him—?”

“Yes,” Edwards said. “Certainly I knew him. Professionally and socially, although never intimately.” He paused. “No,” he said, “never intimately.”

“Huh?” said Mullins, suddenly. Weigand glared at him, and he subsided to note-taking.

Edwards would, it appeared, be delighted to give any helpful information, although he hardly saw how details of his acquaintance with Brent would prove helpful. He had known Brent and, to be sure, Mrs. Brent, for several years, first when Brent made with him “certain small investments.”

“I am a man of business, as you probably know,” Edwards said. “Merely a man of business.”

Later, through this business relationship, he had got to know the Brents socially, and they had come several times to “my little parties.”

“I often give little parties,” Edwards said. “Many people come to my little parties. I should, indeed, be delighted, Lieutenant, if you—”

“Quite,” said Weigand. “Very good of you. And the Brents came often? You got to know them rather well?”

Edwards' heavy shoulders lifted just perceptibly, gesturing disclaimer. Who, Edwards inquired, could say? “Our nearest friends,” Edwards said, and left it open.

“Certainly,” he said, “I did not know Brent well enough to imagine why he might be murdered. It was hardly a friendship. He was an acquaintance. We spoke when we met, he came to my little parties, I once went to his. It was all casual. You and I, Lieutenant, know so many on that basis, don't you find?”

“Right,” said Weigand. “Did you know anybody who disliked him; did you know of any enemies he might have?”

Again the question seemed rather crude and direct. Edwards, however, hardly smiled at its crudity.

“The inevitable question, is it not?” he said. “Any enemies. I should not say that I knew any enemies, although no doubt some people liked Mr. Brent better than others did. I don't suppose, for example—but I must not gossip, of course.”

Weigand waited, and let Edwards see he waited.

“But no,” Edwards said, sweetly and reasonably rumbling from his deep chair. “It would not do to gossip. You will agree, Lieutenant? And I know nothing, really. But nothing.”

Weigand still waited. Mullins waited with his pencil poised.

“Ah,” said Edwards, “you will have my thoughts out of me, I see. But it is only gossip, and certainly no motive for murder.” He paused, and Weigand continued to wait. “You know of Mr. Benjamin Fuller, perhaps?” he inquired. Weigand nodded. “I see you do. Then there is nothing I could tell you, and it is, of course, of no importance. You agree?”

“No,” Weigand said. “I don't agree, or, at any rate, I should like to know. Did Fuller dislike Brent? Did he, in any way, have it in for him?”

One of Edwards' large, soft hands brushed aside the vulgarity of the phrasing. Not, he said, “in for him.” Certainly not. There was, to be sure, friction—but definitely, one might say, friction.

“But that,” Edwards said, and the large, soft voice was edged with melancholy, “is so very often found, don't you agree? So much friction, in such cases.”

“Listen,” said Weigand. “Assume I know nothing of anything between Brent and Fuller. Right? Just tell me.”

There was, Edwards said, so little to tell, and that so—how should one phrase it?—conventional.

“Brent and Mrs. Fuller,” he said. “They—you understand? But I am sure that Fuller, at bottom, took a most civilized view. He was, shall we say, irritated? But he is, naturally, quite modern in such matters. We are all so modern, don't you find? I sometimes think—”

Weigand found he was not listening to what Mr. Edwards sometimes thought, as Edwards purred comfortably through the relationship of morality to modernity. The relationship seemed to be, in any event, vague. Weigand was thinking that Fuller had popped up again, accompanied this time by a wife. Jealousy and, er—well, call it outraged love. That took in both Fullers, one way or another. They seemed to pop up, certainly.

“You know this?” he asked. “I mean, it is generally understood that Brent and Mrs. Fuller are—of were—lovers? Is that the general understanding among their friends?”

Edwards' shoulders deprecated such forthright, encompassing statements.

“Among their friends?” he repeated. How could one postulate a general understanding, outside one's ken? “Lovers?” It was, the lieutenant would understand, a matter of speculation on Edwards' part. “They had not gone away together, certainly. There was, shall I say, nothing direct.” But, personally, Edwards had implied there was little room for doubt. One knew, in such cases, Mr. Edwards suggested. There was—how should one say?—an atmosphere. But one could not, of course, be certain—in the very nature of such things. Edwards' affability was bland and worldly.

There was a pause for mental digestion. Then Weigand resumed.

“What really brought us to you, Mr. Edwards,” he said, “was another matter—a rather curious matter.” He paused, and Edwards looked expectant.

“The murderer seems to have used your name,” Weigand said. He had the satisfaction of seeing Edwards start perceptibly.

“That will jar him,” Weigand thought with interest. He explained about the slip bearing Edwards' name. He regretted, disingenuously, that the slip was now being examined by experts, else he would have liked Mr. Edwards to see it. But it was, certainly, the name “Edwards.” Hand printed, in ink; blue ink.

Edwards seemed at a loss for a moment, and shook his head. It was a grave, unpleasant business, the shaking head implied. Then it spoke.

“One can hardly imagine,” Mr. Edwards said. “For any one to throw suspicion on me, deliberately, as it seems, is—” Words failed him; words were found again. “I am such a harmless person, so friendly with everyone. I think I may say that I feel friendlily toward everyone. It is very—” he paused for a word and found one that was a little, it seemed to Weigand, inadequate, “—disheartening.” Edwards thought about it. Then he brightened slightly.

“But it is, of course, such a very common name,” he said. “It does not seem to me that the connection is—?”

“Right,” said Weigand. “We thought of that, of course. It may very well be merely a coincidence. You were friendly with Brent and—”

Edwards raised a hand to stop him. In all honesty, Edwards said, he could not let it stand at that. Lately, he was sorry to say, there had been a certain coolness. Representing a client, Brent had been, should he say, in opposition? Edwards was, should he say, regretful?

“He was representing a man named Louis Berex,” Edwards said. “A man toward whom I feel, shall I say, like an older brother—yes, like an older brother. An inventor and a very excitable young man; the son and nephew of two men I knew well and valued very highly. Louis himself is, shall I say, innocent of business knowledge and I felt that he had, although it seems a harsh way of putting it, fallen into Brent's hands.”

How, Weigand wanted to know, was that? Edwards hesitated; made deprecating sounds. How it bore—?

Weigand admitted that, probably, it did not bear at all, except in so far as everything they could discover—matters of psychology as well as of speech and action—might bear to complete their picture. Edwards, looking a little troubled, nodded.

“I am,” he said, “Louis Berex's man of business; I am many people's man of business. In Berex's case I manage a trust fund set up for him by his uncle some years ago. Now and then I act as his agent, because he is really quite incapable of acting wisely for himself in such matters.” Edwards paused. “I would not have you misunderstand,” he said. “Louis is, in his own way, brilliant and quite practical. One of his minor inventions, indeed, brings him a very decent sum annually, as I happen to know. But in matters solely of finance he is, as his uncle realized, totally without experience. So I administer and advise, in his behalf.”