Death of an Angel (16 page)

Bill Weigand digested. Bradley Fitch's residuary estate—estimated by Mr. Patterson in the word “phew!”—went to “this pretty actress he was going to marry”—Naomi Shaw, born Mary Shaftlich. To her, also, went the apartment in which Fitch had died. “Barn of a place. Co-op, you know.” To her went various articles of jewelry which had been Fitch's mother's. To her, further, went the Southampton estate.

Mrs. Alicia Nelson—“cousin of his, you know”—received a bequest of $25,000. Several other, more distant, relatives received less. “Can't keep it all in my head, you know,” Mr. Patterson said, running a towel over the thick gray hair of the head in question. There were relatively small bequests to several servants—one Henry Jones—“or is it Smith?”—got ten thousand; Rose Hemmins got the same amount, and occupancy for life of a cottage on the Long Island estate. Peggy Latham—“nice girl; more his kind, really”—received Fitch's string of polo ponies.

The will had, since Detective Rider asked, been made quite recently—six weeks ago, two months ago. He'd have to have a look at the instrument itself. The instrument was locked up in his office safe, and if the detective would drop around? The will which was the latest—“the latest we know about, anyway,” Patterson said—had superseded a will in which Mrs. Nelson got half the residue, the remaining half being divided among four other relatives. In that previous will, also, there had been a specific bequest of twenty-five thousand to “this other girl of his. Another actress.” Rider suggested a name.

“That's right,” Mr. Patterson said. “Girl named Barnscott. Went around with her for a while. She gets nothing this time.”

Certain personal effects—“watch, that sort of thing”—went to a man named Strothers. “In this will, not the old one.”

That was about the size of it, as memory served. Mr. Patterson had returned to the court, this time for doubles; Detective Rider, who was in his early thirties, and a canasta player, had shaken his head admiringly, and sought out a telephone.

James Nelson, who was in his middle sixties, was a retired investment counsellor. “For retired, you can read broke, or damn near it,” a man named Foster told his companion over drinks at the Yale Club. His companion, a detective third grade (and also a member of the Yale Club) ordered another round and made encouraging sounds.

“Followed his own advice, is what it came to,” Foster said. “One of these guys who inherits something and doesn't know what to do with it. Know the type?” Detective Willings, whose father had undergone the same period of confusion, nodded.

Mr. Nelson had managed to lose his money when all about him were doing nicely, which argued a special sort of talent. Since then he and his wife had been living pretty much on her money. “Some relation to this guy Fitch who got—but you know about that, Freddy.”

Freddy Willings nodded. He knew about that.

“Lot younger than he is,” Foster said. “Or so I hear. They've got a place up around Rye somewhere. His father's place—probably one of these big barns you can't do anything with. Know the kind I mean?”

Detective Freddy Willings, who owned one, admitted knowing what Foster meant.

“Princeton man,” Foster said. “Not that that means anything. Lots of all right guys went to Princeton. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Freddy Willings said.

“Only thing is,” Foster said, “I hear that Nelson's been drinking a lot lately. Sits in a customers' room somewhere—not our shop—and goes out and has a quick one. Has a lot of quick ones. Doesn't keep his wits about him. Know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“What we need,” Foster said, “is another drink.”

In time, Freddy Willings went to Homicide East and used a typewriter.

Wesley Strothers had been around for some years. Started as a stage manager. “I'm damned if I know how stage managers do start,” an editor told a detective. Strothers had done some directing; he had got hold of a script he liked and become a producer. “Only trouble was, he picked a turkey.” He had kept at it. He had had other turkeys. He had had a moderate success; then another turkey which had, however, sold well to the movies.

“Money of his own?”

Not that the editor had ever heard of. Got production money from backers. “Like most everybody.”

“However, he ought to make plenty now. Since they're not going to close
Corner
. That one's a mine. Hell, it's a uranium mine.”

“It's going to keep running, then?”

“That's the word I hear. Damn shame if it doesn't, because it hasn't paid the nut yet, and like I said, it's a mine.”

The square man from Kansas City and Chicago, and from Pakistan, Robert Carr, had not, after all, been able to prove that he had been in Chicago when Bradley Fitch was killed. Sergeant Mullins had given him the opportunity, and afterward done what he could to check. A Robert Carr had, certainly, booked a seat on a late plane from LaGuardia on Friday night. He had checked in for the flight. It was, therefore, to be presumed he had made the flight. But it was not, therefore, proved he had made the flight. A Robert Carr had reserved a seat on a return plane, getting in late Saturday. Possibly they would, in time, if necessary, find someone who could testify that Carr had been on the plane. So far, they had not. “Which,” Mullins had said in his oral report, “we'll have to admit don't need to mean anything.”

Somewhat more interestingly, some hours on the telephone had not enabled Mullins to find anyone in Chicago who could say Carr had been there Saturday. But this, again, did not necessarily mean anything. Asked to be specific, Carr had said that, from the airport, he had gone to his apartment—a small apartment he leased more or less permanently, and sublet when he was in the field. He had made several calls from there, seeking companionship, but had completed none of them. “Nobody stays in Chicago over weekends; not if they can help it.”

Giving it up a little after noon Saturday, Carr had, he said, had a lonely drink or two, planning to go out afterward to a solitary lunch. About one o'clock he had turned on the radio and heard a brief report of Fitch's death. “Time fits,” Mullins said. “They got out a bulletin fast. And there's the difference in time.”

Carr had been sure, talking to Mullins, that the superintendent of the building had seen him when, after hearing the news, he had left and got a cab for the airport. The superintendent, reached—with no little difficulty—by telephone had said, “Sure,” and then, “Sure, I guess so,” and, finally, “If Mr. Carr says he saw me I must have seen him. Stands to reason, don't it? Course, I see lots of people lots of times.” And this was worth nothing.

And Mullins, talking to Robert Carr, had said, all innocence, “Where did you say you were Friday night, Mr. Carr? Before you caught this airplane for Chicago?”

“Why?” Carr asked.

“Just wondered,” Mullins said, the innocence persisting. “Told the captain you were tied up, and he assumed it was some business deal. Just like to get things straight.”

“What's the point?” Carr said, and Mullins, quite ingenuous, had said he had been told to ask. He had said, as man to man, that it was funny the things the captain wanted to know.

“Consider I'm laughing,” Carr said. He paused; seemed to think about it; looked for a long moment, with speculation, at Sergeant Mullins.

“Seems you people get around,” he said, then. “O.K. I had a drink with my former wife. Had dinner with her afterward. Had things I wanted to talk to her about.”

Mullins waited.

“No,” Carr had said then. “I look at you and I say, does he look like Dorothy Dix? and I say, nope, can't say he does.”

“All he would say,” Mullins had reported. “Can't say I got it.”

“He more or less told you,” Bill said. “Advice to the lovelorn, sergeant. You write in and say, ‘I am only sixteen and my boy friend says all the other girls let their boy friends kiss them good night at least but—'”

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said.

“In other words,” Bill said, “Carr was trying to talk her out of marrying Fitch. Or—so he implies.”

“You think that was it?”

“He may,” Bill said, “have been giving her a box of oxalic acid.”

Drumming his fingers now, Bill thought of that, and decided that it was one of the possibilities which could not be dismissed. Not perhaps as he had phrased it. But the girl's motive was obvious—it was almost obtrusive. Carr, if he thought to share the money she would inherit, shared her motive. There was no other motive stronger; none he could think of so strong. It would be convenient if that fact answered the question. It had never been his experience that things were necessarily so simple.

There were too many with motives. Naomi's (and Carr's by association) was the strongest. He tried to think of the weakest. Jasper Tootle, in retroactive jealousy, by way of killing Phyllis Barnscott's past? He smiled faintly at the thought. But it was no more ridiculous than situations which had led to murder. People killed, sometimes, for very little—not, say, for a large inheritance, but for a small one which loomed large. Like, he thought, ten thousand dollars in cash and the occupancy of—

The telephone rang.

9

Sunday, 8:35
P.M.
to 10:05
P.M.

It is difficult to lurk satisfactorily on Park Avenue; it is particularly difficult on a Sunday evening in June. Lurking is best done where there is cover; one lurks among; a solitary lurker is at a disadvantage. The Park Avenue sidewalks, never so occupied as those of Fifth, so nervously alive as those of Madison, take on an almost embarrassing tranquility on Sunday evenings in summer. Lurking to the best of her ability, Pamela North felt uncomfortably conspicuous.

There were, to be sure, some people about her. Most of them seemed to be walking dogs. With a dog, Pam thought, sauntering distractedly north to the nearest intersection (but snatching watchful peeps over her shoulder toward the entrance of the apartment house) it would be much simpler. A person with a dog lurks of necessity, making frequent halts in a generally aimless progression. The dog explains everything. A cat, even if Pam had happened to have one with her, would have been of no use whatever. There are advantages to dogs, she admitted, grudgingly, and turned and walked down Park again. Dozens of people, at least, were, she was certain, watching her from windows. There had never been a more public lurk.

She passed—and this was for the fourth time, or perhaps the fifth—the entrance to the elderly and dignified apartment house in which Bradley Fitch had died, and into which Samuel Wyatt recently had popped. It was no longer
very
recently, Pam thought, and looked at the watch on her wrist. It was a good quarter of an hour since Jerry had gone off to find a telephone. It was taking Jerry long enough.

The doorman of the apartment house looked at her, Pam decided, very intently. He must think she was out of her mind, or worse. Probably he thought she was casing the place; perhaps at any moment he would call the police and have her arrested for loitering. Loitering with intent. Or was that something you could do only in Britain? If only she had a dog. Even a small dog. Even a Peke. Temporarily, of course, because what the cats would do to a Peke hardly bore thinking about. What they would do to a Great Dane, for that matter.

Having passed the entrance, Pam was now constrained to resume looking over her shoulder from time to time to make sure Wyatt did not pop out again unobserved. This, Pam thought, is going to give me a crick in the neck. Wherever did Jerry
go?
Surely it shouldn't take him all this time to find a telephone here in the middle of the city of New York. Of course, there isn't much open on Park this time of a Sunday. Even on Madison—perhaps he's had to go clear down to Grand Central.

She reached the cross street below the apartment house. She stopped on the curb. She snapped her fingers—that was it. She snapped them again for good measure, becoming a person who had suddenly thought of something. A woman, say, who had just at that moment remembered she had left something turned on at home and had to hurry back to turn it off. Pam North walked briskly north, her heels clicking on the pavement, a look of intentness on her face. People probably would think she had absent-mindedly left the baby in the bath.

The up-and-down-town blocks in Manhattan are short blocks. It takes hardly any time to walk one. (Particularly when you are hurrying before the baby drowns.) Almost at once, Pam found herself at the next intersection. Now what? She hesitated at the curb, as if to let traffic pass. Unfortunately, there was no traffic. If she turned into the cross street, toward Madison, she would be out of sight of the apartment house. Wyatt might come out and go away, un-tailed. Of course, she could just stand there. Stand there and—say—look at her watch indignantly from time to time, so becoming a woman waiting with lapsing patience, to be met.

She did look at her watch. It had now been a good twenty minutes.
Good
twenty minutes indeed! One of the most annoying twenty minutes she could remember. Of course, there had been the time she had been locked in a closet somewhere in Westchester. And the time she had been in a glass case with a prehistoric man. But those times had not been, in the proper sense, annoying. Was it conceivable that Jerry had gone all the way back to the apartment to telephone? Was it even remotely—

She looked down the side street, toward Madison, and there was Jerry. He was hurrying; it was hardly too much to say he was loping. At least he knew he had taken an inexcusable time to telephone Bill Weigand. Leaving her holding the bag, conducting an uncompanioned lurk. He'd better have a good ex—

Abruptly, the air was filled with the wailing of sirens. A patrol car came through the side street, flashed past Jerry North—who checked his lope and stared at it—and at Park turned south. There was another patrol car coming down Park. And another coming
up
Park. And another—