Death of an Angel (18 page)

It was true, Wyatt said—and now he began to talk rapidly, a little jerkily—that he had had dinner at the Commodore Bar. It was true that, after dinner, although he had been too nervous to eat much—

“Why?” Bill asked him.

“My God, man,” Wyatt said. “Who wouldn't be? You think I don't know how it looks to you people?”

“Go ahead,” Bill said.

After dinner, Wyatt had walked up Park Avenue. Worrying. “Kept writing a scene about being in the death cell. One I told the Norths about.” He had been about half a block from the apartment house when he had seen “this fellow” go into it.

“Who?”

“O.K. Wes. Wes Strothers.”

Strothers had gone in as if he were in a hurry. Wyatt had thought it was “funny.”

“Why?”

“His friend Fitch is dead. Who would he be hurrying to see?” Wyatt snapped his fingers. “Hell,” he said. “I don't know why I thought it was funny. Except—I was looking for something funny. See what I mean?”

“Go on,” Bill said.

“That's what I didn't do,” Wyatt said. “I waited. Walked up and down and—”

“No wonder the doorman was puzzled,” Pam said. “All evening, people lurking.” They looked at her. “It doesn't matter,” Pam said. “I was just thinking.”

Wyatt snapped his fingers and shrugged at the same time, dissociating himself. He had patrolled the block for, he thought, about fifteen minutes. He had been at the upper end of the block when Strothers came out again. Strothers seemed still to be in a hurry. He had stood at the curb and waved at cabs. “Including some anybody could see were taken.” He had also looked, several times, up and down the avenue. Wyatt, stepping close to a building—looking around the corner of a building, actually—had watched the tall, slightly stooped, producer of his play.

“Why?”

“I don't know. The way he acted. Fidgety.”

A cab had stopped for Strothers after a few minutes. On an impulse, Wyatt had waved down a cab for himself, being lucky. He had had the cab follow Strothers.

This time, Bill did not ask why.

Wyatt had followed the producer to the Algonquin, and followed him into it—or part way into it. He had seen him meet Naomi Shaw and, with her, start toward the entrance of the Oak Room.

“Then I decided to come back here,” Wyatt said. “Try to find out what he'd been up to.”

“Why did you think he'd been up to anything?”

Wyatt looked hard at Weigand.

“Somebody has,” he said. “You think I have. You're willing to settle for me. Think I don't know?”

“So,” Bill said, “you're merely trying to be helpful.”

“To save my own skin. You want me to go on? Or am I just wasting your time?”

“Go on.”

Wyatt had walked back to the apartment house. “With these friends of mine following me.” He had gone up to the apartment, and rung the bell several times and, after it remained unanswered, gone to find the superintendent.

“Don't ask me why, except that I thought something had happened. He'd got in.”

He didn't know that, Bill pointed out. He did not know Strothers had gone there to see Mrs. Hemmins. He did not know that, if he had gone to see her, he had found her in the apartment.

“A quarter of an hour he was inside,” Wyatt said. “It wouldn't take five minutes to find out she didn't answer. It didn't take me five minutes to find out she didn't answer. And—the superintendent hadn't let anybody else in. He told me that when I asked him.”

Wyatt had found the superintendent. Together they had found the body of Rose Hemmins—and the body of Toby, her cat. The superintendent had reported what they had found. “And that,” Wyatt said, “is all I know about it.” He looked at Bill Weigand with resolution; with an expression affirming innocence. Unfortunately, the expression was disrupted by another sneeze. The poor man, Pam North thought. Just when he was registering.

Sam Wyatt stood, then. He held his hands out, side by side, the fists clenched. “All right,” he said, “put them on.”

Bill let him stand so for a moment. Then Bill said, “No, Mr. Wyatt. The tumbril isn't ready yet. I'll let you know when it is.”

Wyatt looked at the acting captain of Homicide East.

“You know,” Wyatt said, “I don't think I like you.” He snapped his fingers. “I'm damned sure I don't,” he said. But then he sneezed again. “Oh
hell
” Sam Wyatt said. “Let me get out from where there're cats.”

“Wherever you like,” Bill Weigand told him. “For now.”

Wyatt was surprised. He showed it. It occurred to Pamela North that he was, indeed, almost disappointed. You write a scene, she thought, and it doesn't play the way you thought it would. You sneeze, and nobody puts handcuffs on at cue and—I wonder, Pam thought, if he's writing the whole thing? Or—if he wants us to think he is? Writers are such funny people. If, of course, they're all like poor Sammy. Imagining everything out in advance.

As Wyatt went, a thin—a curiously rejected—figure, in search of purer air, Sergeant Mullins lifted enquiring eyebrows. “Right,” Bill said, and Mullins went to see to it.

“Well,” Jerry North said, flatly. “You think he's the one?”

“I'm not,” Bill said, “as sure as he seems to think I am. He tells a circumstantial story. Lots of nice detail. But—” He did not finish, although he was given time.

“Sometimes,” Jerry said, “a writer becomes a figment of his own imagination. Sometimes you can see them at it.”

“Only,” Pam said, “you can't always tell which is which. And sometimes there are—oh, figments within figments.” She paused. “If I know what I mean,” she added. “Anyway, I think it's very strange about the poor cat.”

“I—” Bill began and then said, to a blond young man who had come in from the elevator foyer and stood just inside the door, “Yes, Freddy. You want to see me?”

Detective Frederick Willings—who sometimes thought people would still be calling him Freddy when he was ninety—said, “If you've got a moment, captain,” and came over. He looked, with a policeman's doubt of civilians, at the Norths. He was told to go ahead. He went ahead.

Pursuant to instructions, he had been talking to the superintendent of the building, to the doorman, to the operator on duty in the elevator which served the Fitch apartment. The doorman had said that there had been a woman hanging around suspiciously just before the police arrived. “We'll check on that,” Bill Weigand told him gravely, pointedly not looking at Pam North.

The superintendent of the building, who had a flat on the ground floor, was shocked by the whole business—personally shocked by what he had seen; shocked in behalf of the owners of the building by this second blow to the building's dignity. He had had a drink or two to steady himself. He found it difficult to tell what things were coming to.

He had not let anyone into the apartment before he let Mr. Wyatt in. Mr. Wyatt had seemed excited and upset when he had come asking to be let in. He had kept snapping his fingers, which proved he was excited and upset. He had been sure something must have happened to Mrs. Hemmins. “Turned out he was right, didn't it?” the superintendent said, and Freddy Willings had agreed that it had. Who else might have visited the apartment previously, if anybody had, the superintendent wouldn't know. Maybe Roy, on the elevator, would. Except maybe he had been eating and put the car on automatic. He was supposed to eat about eight, and not take more than half an hour at it.

Roy, who was elderly, had been eating from about eight until around eight-thirty. He had had no relief, and had left the elevator at the first floor, set for automatic operation. “Most of our people go away weekends,” Roy said. “Like you'd expect.” There was no way of knowing whether the elevator had been used in his absence. It had been at the first floor when he returned to it.

During the earlier part of the evening? Before he went to eat? And, after he returned?

Just after he returned—this skinny man, up
and
down, ringing like he was in an awful hurry when he wanted to be brought down; asking where he could find the super; finding the super and going up with him. After that—“You people. Cops. Never saw so many cops.”

Before?

Before eight—about ten minutes before eight—a couple. The woman “skinny,” maybe forty, maybe fifty. The man considerably older, wearing the kind of straw hat you didn't see so often any more. The man had been drinking, but he didn't show it too much. “Smelled like it, though.” The couple had got off on the eighth floor and had crossed the foyer to the door of the Fitch apartment. Whether they had got in, he didn't know. He assumed they had, since they had not rung to be brought down before he went to eat. For all he knew, they were still “up there.”

His report finished, Freddy Willings, neatly dressed but with a police shield pinned to his coat, as is required of detectives at the scene of a crime, waited.

“The man with the straw hat,” Pam North said. “The
bleached
straw hat.”

“Apparently,” Bill said.

“But,” Pam said, “Mrs. Hemmins was shot, wasn't she? And Toby, too? Don't people always use the same methods?”

“No,” Bill said. “Freddy, I want you to go to the Barclay. See a Mr. and Mrs. James Nelson.”

“Yes sir,” Freddy Willings said.

“Ask them,” Bill told him, “if they killed Mrs. Hemmins and her cat.”

“Right,” Willings said. He turned, almost military in his precision, and started for the door. Bill looked at him with a little doubt.

“Freddy,” Bill said, and Detective Willings stopped. “Not in precisely those words, perhaps.”

“No sir,” Freddy Willings said.

“A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive,” Bill said. “I quote from the Manual of Procedure, Freddy. Find out what the hell the Nelsons were doing here.”

“Yes sir,” Freddy said, and went to do it. Bill Weigand watched him go, smiling faintly. He turned to Pam North. He said, “You're a housewife, aren't you?”

“What on earth?” Pam said. “Yes. I suppose so. If you like pigeonholes.”

“Wait a minute,” Bill said, and went and returned. He carried wadded cloth. There were spots of blood on it. He shook it out and it dangled, wrinkled badly, from his hand. It was, now, evidently a tea-towel, banded in red at top and bottom. He asked Pam what she made of it.

“Well,” Pam said, “it's a tea-towel.” She swallowed. She said she supposed that that was blood on it.

“Oh, yes,” Bill said, dismissing the blood. “A wrinkled tea-towel.”

They waited.

“Mrs. Hemmins had dressed herself in a black dress,” Bill said. “Black silk dress—or rayon or nylon or something of the kind. Dressed herself up, I'd think. Because she knew somebody was coming. And—she had this tea-towel wadded up in her hand. And, she wasn't wearing an apron.” He stopped and waited for Pam North, who looked at the cloth and after a bit said, “Well?” Then she held out her hand and took the towel.

“It's dry,” she said. She held it up. “It was damp and somebody wadded it up damp and it dried that way. Anybody can see that by looking at it.”

“Not a freshly laundered towel she'd picked up and wadded in her hand?”

“That would
look
different,” Pam said. “This one was used and then, instead of being shaken out and hung on a rack or something, it was just—well, wadded up.” She looked at it more carefully, and shook her head. She held it out to Bill Weigand. She said, “Is there something special about it? Outside of careless housekeeping?”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “She wasn't dressed for washing dishes. And, as you say, the towel's dry now. If it had just been used, you'd expect it to be damp.”

“It means something?”

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Bill Weigand said. “I'm just inquisitive, as I reminded Freddy Willings to be.”

10

Sunday, 10:20
P.M.
to Monday, 1:05
A.M.

Naomi Shaw had a house of her own. Samuel Wyatt had a small, but comfortable, suite in an apartment hotel. Phyllis Barnscott lived at the Algonquin; the James Nelsons—now presumably explaining themselves to Detective Freddy Willings, who it was to be hoped talked Mrs. Nelson's language—had a house in Rye.

But Mr. Wesley Strothers, who employed Miss Shaw and Miss Barnscott, who paid royalties to Sam Wyatt, lived in the westward reaches of Bank Street. Bank Street is a street in the Village; it is one of those streets which are hard for cab drivers to discover; it is not an impressive street. The house in which Wesley Strothers lived was not an impressive house. Acting Captain Weigand went up a short flight of sandstone steps, which were flaking off, and opened a heavy door and went into a small vestibule, which was almost completely dark. Weigand struck a match and examined push-buttons. Strothers lived on the third floor. Weigand pressed the button several times, and was unanswered. He went out to the sidewalk and looked up at the windows of the third floor. They were unlighted. Weigand went back to his car and sat in it. The radio talked to itself, speaking, harshly, of trials and tribulations, and of the need of patrol cars to cope therewith.

He sat in the car for almost half an hour, and smoked several cigarettes and—toward the end a little sleepily—sought among the facts he had for the hunch he needed. The hunch remained elusive. Presumably, this meant that he still lacked facts. It was to be hoped that that was what it meant. He named names to himself—Naomi Shaw; her former husband, Robert Carr; Alicia and James Nelson; Phyllis Barnscott; Peggy Latham, who had (perhaps) sought love and had come up with polo ponies. But perhaps they were an adequate substitute; Miss Latham was only a name, brought to his attention. Miss Latham had a brother. Bill had to search memory for his name. Arnold Latham, Jr. So far, a character created by Naomi Shaw. And Samuel Wyatt—to some extent, as Jerry had suggested, a character created by Samuel Wyatt.