Murder Is Suggested Read online

  Murder Is Suggested

  A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery

  Frances and Richard Lockridge

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  In Memory of the Cat Named

  Martini

  1945–1959

  1

  Standing at the third-floor window, William Weigand could look north and west and see the Hudson River. He could not, to be sure, see a great deal of it—a narrow slice of river had been Professor Jameson Elwell’s share. Such views are rationed in Manhattan, and rationed grudgingly. But there was moonlight on what Weigand could see of the Hudson; a tug, coaxing a string of barges upstream, moved in whiteness against black shadows etched on shining water. Weigand closed his eyes, which were tired, and opened them again to see the river fresh. A moment of tranquillity—

  Someone knocked at the door of the room which had, evidently, been Professor Elwell’s office and Weigand turned from the window and nodded to Sergeant Mullins, who opened the door. “Mr. Carl Hunter,” a policeman who remained invisible told Mullins, and a tall young man in a narrow gray suit—a man in a button-down shirt; a man with close-trimmed hair—came into the room. He stopped just inside the door, which closed behind him and said, “You wanted to see me?” and then, without waiting for an answer, walked across the room to a wide desk.

  There was a small, silver clock on the desk. The young man in the gray suit picked the clock up and looked at it. He turned it over in his hands and wound it, and looked at it again. Then he took two long steps away from the desk and threw the clock into the black mouth of a fireplace. It broke noisily. The young man looked at the remains of the clock for a moment, brushed his hands together briskly and turned back to face Captain William Weigand, of Homicide, Manhattan West, and Sergeant Aloysius Mullins.

  The young man had a square face and intelligent-looking gray eyes.

  He said, “You wanted—?” and then, it was evident, was stopped by what he saw in the faces he looked at. This was understandable; Mullins’s mouth was somewhat open. Mullins’s blue eyes were filled with consternation.

  “Oh,” Mr. Carl Hunter said, in the tone of one who has just got the point. “I suppose you want—” With that, before he paused again, he seemed a little irritated. “It kept on losing time,” he said. “What’s the use of a clock that keeps on losing time?”

  Mullins said, “Lookit, mister,” in a harsh voice. “What you think you’re—”

  “All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, and Mullins—who is a large man with the appearance of a policeman—said, with reluctance, “O.K., Loot. Only—”

  “Do you always break clocks that run slow, Mr. Hunter?” Weigand asked the young man, who looked puzzled for a moment and then shook his head, but shook it uncertainly. The question seemed to have made him uneasy.

  “I guess not,” he said. “Silly thing to do, wasn’t it? Be interesting to trace the psychological motivation if—” He let that trail off. “They tell me,” he said, “that a pretty bad thing’s happened. That Professor Elwell—”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell’s dead, Mr. Hunter. Been dead since a little after three this afternoon.”

  “The man who came around,” Hunter said. “Said you wanted to see me—what he said was, ‘The captain would like to ask you a couple of things’—he said ‘about an accident.’ But from the look of things—”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell was murdered, Mr. Hunter. It must have been quite soon after you left this afternoon.”

  “He was fine when I left,” Hunter said, quickly. And that was what Weigand had supposed he would say, since it could hardly be expected that, under the circumstances, he would say anything else.

  “Right,” Weigand said again. “I wonder if you—”

  He paused. Mullins had crossed to the fireplace. He looked down at the clock momentarily and then squatted and picked the clock up. He looked at it and then looked at the watch on his thick wrist. He stood up, then.

  “Funny thing, Loot-I-mean-captain,” Mullins said. “Clock says nine-thirteen. And you know what time it is? Nine-seventeen. So when this character threw it there and it stopped—see what I mean?” He looked at Weigand; then, with a different expression, at the young man in the narrow gray suit. “So what about it, mister?” Mullins said.

  “When I looked at it—” Carl Hunter said, but then he seemed momentarily bewildered. “I was sure it was slow,” he said. Now uneasiness was in his voice.

  It was, Weigand thought, the uneasiness of a puzzled man. Or, of course, of a man who wished to appear puzzled. The investigation could not, Bill Weigand thought, be said to be beginning in a very orderly fashion. It was almost as if—He smiled faintly to himself, although he did not feel particularly like smiling, and had not for several hours. The affair was starting in a “screwy” fashion. But Mr. and Mrs. North were not in it. At least—

  He had got into it himself rather later than he would have liked. He had got back to his office in West Twentieth Street at a few minutes after five, intending only a quick look around before calling it a day, and feeling altogether ready to call it a day. He was tired, then, and his throat was dry and his eyes smarted. He had smoked too many cigarettes in courtroom corridors, and been too bored. Home and a cool drink—it was warm for October—and the tranquillity which, at such parched moments, was to be found also in the quiet of greenish eyes and the clarity of—

  He was standing at his desk, calling it a day (and good riddance) when the telephone rang. It was not any telephone, ringing for any policeman. Send not to ask, Weigand thought gloomily, and picked the instrument up and said, “Weigand.”

  “His nibs,” the telephone said.

  “Put him on,” Weigand said and, instinctively, held the receiver at a little distance from his ear.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley shouted. Weigand removed the receiver further from his ear. The inspector could put a really nasty emphasis on the word “you.” Also, the inspector knew perfectly well where Weigand had been. Such matters are not unrecorded.

  “General Sessions,” Weigand said. “Summoned as a rebuttal witness in the case of People of the State of New York versus ‘Puggy’ Wormser. To testify that, no, we didn’t beat him with rubber hose.”

  “Didn’t we?” O’Malley asked, momentarily diverted.

  “No.”

  “Kid gloves,” O’Malley said. “That’s what’s the trouble nowadays. G.d. kid gloves.”

  It was a subject by which Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley could easily be diverted. O’Malley was a graduate of the school of hard knocks, which he believed it more blessed to give than to receive. Left to himself he would expatiate indefinitely on the theme.

  “You wanted me?” Weigand said, not leaving O’Malley to himself.

  To this, Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley said, “Huh?” in honest, but momentary, bewilderment. He made up for it. He said, “What did you think I called for, captain?” Weigand withdrew the receiver another half inch from his ear. He said, mildly, that he had just got in. There was no point in saying that he had, also, been just about to go off. It was already evident that he wasn’t.

  “Some g.d. professor’s got himself killed,” O’Malley said. (He said “g.d.,” circumventing the Holy Name Society.) “Seems like he’s got a name.” O’Malley disliked murder victims who had names. Names stirred up newspapers. “Sent it through hours ago.”

  “I was—” Weigand began.

  “I know where you were,” O’Malley said. “You think I can’t hear, Bill? What the hell’s the matter with that outfit of yours?”

  “Nothing,” Weigand said. “If it came through, so
mebody’s on it. Lieutenant Graham—no, he’s on the Birdy kill. Mullins, probably.”

  “Find out,” O’Malley said. “Get on it. You young squirts.”

  “Right,” Weigand said.

  “Keep in touch,” O’Malley said. “I’ll be home. Or maybe at Paddy’s Grill. That is, if there’s something you can’t handle. Otherwise—”

  “Right,” Weigand said.

  He hung up, complete with instructions—and, in spite of weariness, of acute realization that policemen may not plan on tranquil evenings, somewhat amused. There was only one O’Malley, and he to be disturbed only if the heavens fell. And a good cop, all the same, and an appreciative one. (Hence Weigand’s captaincy, fairly early on, although Bill Weigand could not convincingly argue, even to himself, that he was too young a squirt.) Weigand used the telephone again.

  Mullins was on it, along with the precinct men and, in the normal course, a detective assigned to the district attorney’s Homicide Bureau. Along, also, with lab men, with photographers, with, in a word, everybody.

  “It” had begun at precisely eleven minutes after three o’clock on that afternoon of Wednesday, October twenty-second.

  It had begun with a sound in the ears of a young woman who had said, with professional cheer, “Operator?”

  The voice had been that of a man—a man who spoke with obvious and great effort, as if each articulated sound took more strength than the man had left.

  “This is emerg—” the man said, and the voice faded.

  “I don’t—” the operator began, and the other words came—came faint, came in gasps, so that they were just understandable. “Doctor,” the man said. “Been shot. Ambu—”

  But there the words stopped.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator said, automatically. And then said, “Hello? Hello!” And there was no answer at all.

  The line remained open, which helped. An open line from a dial telephone may be tracked down, given time enough. It was tracked down. The call had come from the number listed to Jameson Elwell, who lived on the upper west side of Manhattan, on one of the streets which slope sharply down from West End Avenue toward Riverside Drive.

  But the tracing of calls from dial telephones does take time, and the uniformed men of the first squad car found Jameson Elwell dead. He had bled to death from a gunshot wound, in what was clearly his office on the third and top floor of a narrow house. There had indeed been nobody else in the house when the police arrived. It had been necessary to force the door of the house—the heavy door with polished brass knob, two steps below sidewalk level. That had taken time, also, and it had taken more time to find Jameson Elwell, since they had, quite naturally, worked upward through the house.

  He was slumped over his desk, his hand still on the telephone, but the hand limp now. The desk blotter was soaked with his blood, and blood had trickled to the floor around the desk. But it would not, the assistant medical examiner said, when he had looked and touched, have made any real difference if they had got there more quickly. With a bullet so near the heart, the remarkable thing was that Jameson Elwell had been able to dial the operator, to say as much as he had said—almost to complete the word “ambulance.”

  Jameson Elwell—more fully, a quick check revealed, Jameson Elwell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Dyckman University. Author of—author of a row of books, three shelf-feet of books. (Suggestibility in Children; Technics of Suggestion. Etcetera and etcetera.)

  More fully still—a rather heavy man of a little under normal height; a white-haired man with clipped white mustache; a blue-eyed man. Before so much blood had drained out of him, probably a ruddy man. A man in his middle sixties. (He would, it turned out, have been sixty-five on December twenty-third, if he had lived so long.) A man shot once, from no considerable distance—probably from across the desk only—with what appeared to have been (and was subsequently proved to have been) a .32 calibre revolver. Once had been quite enough. No revolver was in the room. There was nothing on the desk except the blood-soaked blotter, two pens in a holder, a small silver clock faced so that, had his eyes not been dimmed by death, Professor Elwell might have noted exactly when he died.

  It had been five-thirty, or thereabouts, when Bill Weigand dialed a familiar number and heard a familiar voice and said, “Dorian. I—”

  He did not need to finish. He could see her. She had answered quickly; would have moved quickly across the room—the room with windows looking out over the East River—moved with the grace of a dancer, almost of a cat. She would be standing now, with the tips of fingers just touching the telephone table, with the telephone held to her ear with the other hand. She would be standing with uncalculated grace, as she moved with grace.

  “Oh,” Dorian Weigand said into the telephone. The syllable was flat, deflated. “Not again.”

  But it was again.

  “You would marry a policeman,” Bill Weigand said. “After all due warning.”

  “Wouldn’t I just,” Dorian said. “I suppose you’ve no idea? But have you ever?”

  “No,” Bill said. “People will get themselves killed.”

  “Pam and Jerry are—” Dorian said.

  “I know,” Bill said. “Drink a round for me. And, darling—”

  Bill Weigand felt somewhat better when he replaced the telephone in its cradle—somewhat, but not much. Even a voice, diminished by electric impulses, a little scratched by them, was something. Not sight, not touch—just a little something. Bill Weigand drove his car north from Twentieth Street, up the elevated highway, and off it at Seventy-second and, first, to the precinct station house, where he caught up with things—where he looked at photographs and sketches; where he learned that there were fingerprints (not, so far, on record) on the surface of the desk opposite the dead man; that dust from the room was at the lab; that Professor Elwell had been alone in the house when he died because he had given his houseman, one Delbert Higgins—“Delbert?” Yes, Delbert—the afternoon off. And—that, before he left, Higgins had admitted a man named Carl Hunter who was, Higgins thought, one of the professor’s students and was, whatever else, a man who frequently visited the professor, almost always in his office.

  Mr. Hunter had arrived at about two o’clock. Higgins had let him in, had heard him say that the professor expected him, had watched him go up the stairs. Higgins had then, himself, gone elsewhere. He had gone to a movie. He had returned to the house and found the police there.

  Where Higgins had gone did not, for the moment at least, seem of importance. Mr. Hunter might be; Mr. Hunter had been found (from university records) to live in a one-room apartment off upper Broadway and to be, at present, not in it. He was being waited for.

  Nobody had been found who had heard the firing of the bullet which killed Jameson Elwell. Nobody had, as yet, been found who remembered seeing a man—presumably young, if a student—leaving the Elwell house either before or after three o’clock.

  The house was Elwell’s own. Preliminary enquiries suggested that Elwell had not needed to live on a professor’s salary. By the time Weigand reached the precinct house, it was also known that Professor Elwell was a widower of some years’ standing; that he had a brother living in Westport, Connecticut—notified; on his way in—a niece and two nephews, one of the latter attending Dyckman and the other in the army; the niece married and living in Scranton, Pennsylvania; that he had had a daughter who, six months before, had been killed in an automobile accident on the Merritt Parkway.

  Weigand’s hands were, in short, piled high with facts, for some of which he might sometime have use. There was no urgent need to visit the house in which Professor Elwell had died; to look at the dried blood which had drained out of him. Experts had been there, experts would be there again. There were many papers to go through and—

  “By the way,” Weigand said, “what’s this?”

  This was a door indicated in a sketch plan of the professor’s office.

  “Door to a closet,” the precinct detect
ive captain told him. “Record files on both sides; file cards. God knows what all. Putting a couple of men on it tomorrow unless you—”

  “Thanks,” Weigand said. “You go right ahead, Barney.”

  There was no urgent need to visit the house. What was to be found there had been found, or would be.

  “Come on, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said.

  They went to dinner, first, and did not especially hurry over it. If occasion to hurry arose, which was not likely yet, they would be notified. They were not notified. They drove to the Elwell house. A uniformed policeman stood near the door and, as they approached, approached them—and then saw the badge Weigand held out to him and said, “Evening, sir.”

  “Visitors?” Weigand asked, and the patrolman shook his head.

  “The man who works here came back,” he said. “Little geezer named Higgins. Seems to be taking it hard.”

  Weigand rang and there was a pause—rather a long pause—and the door opened. Higgins was, as promised, a little geezer—a small man with not much gray hair, with sloping shoulders under a blue suit jacket, with a black string tie. His eyes were red.

  “’Iggins, sir,” Delbert—the name no longer seemed so odd—Higgins said. “You’ve found out who killed him? Was it that Mr. Hunter?”

  They didn’t know yet, they said they didn’t know yet.

  “I should have been here,” Delbert Higgins said, and his voice quavered. They were in the hallway by then, at the foot of stairs. “I’ll never forgive myself, sir. Never as long as I live.”

  “Not your fault,” Weigand said.

  “It’s easy to say that, sir,” Higgins said. “All these years and when he needed me—” He shrugged sloping shoulders. “I’ll carry it with me, sir,” he said. “I suppose you want to go up there?”

  They did.

  “If you need me,” Higgins said. “There’s a bell to push. On the desk. He would ring and I’d—” He shook his head; said it just didn’t seem possible, and his voice choked on the words.