Payoff for the Banker Read online

  It would. Pam North pointed out, if they knew enough about character. If they knew who would think like that.

  “Besides Jerry, of course,” she said. “Jerry doesn’t count. He was with me.” She considered that. “Anyway,” she said, “when Murdock was killed.”

  Bill said they should try to keep it simple—keep it, anyway, simpler than that. Because, he said, they didn’t know enough about character—about the way people were, how they thought, what they would do.

  “Because,” he said, “it comes down to guesswork—to guessing what we would do if we were in the position some one else is in. We think he would do a certain thing, for a certain reason—meaning that we think we would do that thing for that reason in his place. But we’re not even sure, most of the time, what we would do. And our guesses about other people—even people we know very well—well, they aren’t good enough.”

  “I can guess what you will do,” Dorian told him. “At least, most of the time.”

  He looked at her, and smiled. He said he hoped she could; he said he thought she could. Most of the time. As, he said, Pam could guess what Jerry could do and Jerry could guess—. He stopped at that, overcome by doubt.

  “The funny thing,” Pam said, “is that he can. Even sometimes when I can’t. It’s disconcerting sometimes. Like eternal recurrence.”

  Everybody looked at her.

  “Probably,” Jerry said, “she means predestination. It makes her feel hemmed in, as if she had to do what I think she’s going to do.”

  Pam said she thought “recurrence” was better. Just going around and around, over and over again, and people catching you as you came by. She said she wasn’t sure it wasn’t that way, but she hoped not. Although sometimes Jerry frightened her.

  “But just as often,” she said, “he seems to be surprised, even by the simplest things. However, I don’t see where this gets us, because we’re talking about me instead of the murderer. It’s nice, of course, but it isn’t really very—very practical.”

  There was a slight pause. Pam broke it.

  “What we ought to decide,” she said, “is who have we got?”

  Bill Weigand held his left hand up in front of him, and seemed to be looking at his nails. Slowly he pulled down the thumb with the index finger of his right hand.

  “Mary Hunter,” he said. “To get Joshua and the money.” He pulled down the index finger of his left hand. “Joshua Merle,” he said. “To get Mary and the money. He rubbed his left thumb and index finger together. “Or both of them,” he said. “Like that.” He pulled down the finger next in line. He said, “Laurel Burke.”

  The others looked at him in surprise. Jerry, after a moment of thought, said he thought Laurel Burke was out. On a time basis, if nothing else. Weigand shook his head.

  “I stopped on the way to make some telephone calls,” he said. “It may have taken me—oh, ten minutes. And I didn’t drive fast, particularly. And when I left I took off the man who had been keeping an eye on her. If she left at once, got a cab and did drive fast, she might have been at Murdock’s room ten minutes before I got there—possibly twelve minutes. Five or seven minutes before you two got there. She kills him and gets out—the killing takes a couple of minutes, including setting the stage for suicide. It wasn’t an elaborate stage setting. She goes downstairs and sees you come in. When she’s sure you’re in Murdock’s room she calls and pretends that she thinks Murdock is still alive and that she wants to warn him.”

  “Why?” Pam said.

  “Why which,” Bill said. “Why murder? Why pretend?”

  “Both,” Pam said. “Or either.”

  As for the first, Bill Weigand said, Jerry’s theory fitted very nicely. Because Laurel Burke had made what might have been a deliberate effort to throw suspicion on Murdock. Possibly she was getting Weigand’s mind ready for confession by suicide. Why the pretense she thought Murdock still alive? Obviously because it looked good—made her appear innocent. As a matter of fact, she had identified herself, by name. Which one might think wouldn’t be necessary, since she and Murdock obviously knew each other very well indeed, and might be expected to know each other’s voices. One might think, indeed, that she would be able to tell Jerry North’s voice from Murdock’s as soon as Jerry answered the telephone.

  “Look,” Pam said, “maybe she did do it.”

  “Maybe,” Weigand agreed. He added that it would help to know why she had killed Merle, since they were assuming that whoever killed Murdock killed Merle—and had an original reason to kill Merle, rather than Murdock. He paused and smiled faintly.

  “Of course,” he said, “we could make it even more intricate, if we wanted to. Suppose the whole thing was set up to kill Murdock—to give Murdock a reason for suicide so that murder would be accepted as suicide. In that event, Merle isn’t a victim, exactly—really, Merle is a motive.”

  “That,” Pam said, “is worse than anything I ever thought up. Much worse. As a motive for murder—well—.”

  Bill Weigand smiled slightly and admitted he wasn’t betting on it. But he added that motives were, at the best, odd things—what was a motive for one person wasn’t a motive for another. What would hardly irritate one person would lead another to murder—and murder the hard way. Money was a simple motive—but the amount of money was unpredictable. Murder had happened for a few dollars; a gang of men had once spent weeks murdering a strangely resistant vagrant for five hundred dollars of insurance money. And a doctor had once been accused of trying to murder quite a large family so that his wife would inherit the family money—and not very much money. Men had killed other men who laughed at them, or who threatened to make them so ridiculous that others would laugh. It was difficult to think of any motive which would persuade some people to murder; an almost imperceptible flick to self-esteem or self-interest might turn other people into killers. That was academic—he was not prepared to argue, at least not for very long, that Merle had been killed to set the stage for the primary murder of Oscar Murdock.

  But they could, if they went to a little trouble, easily suppose a motive for Laurel Burke’s murder of the banker—as a primary murder. There might be any number of motives hidden in the relationships between Laurel, Merle and Murdock—hidden because they knew so far only as much of those relationships as Laurel and, to a lesser degree, Murdock himself, had let drop. Even what they knew or could guess at would supply a motive of sorts.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that she was shaking Merle down—with or without Murdock’s aid. Suppose Merle went there to see her and she went to meet him, expecting a payoff. But suppose he didn’t pay—suppose, instead, he threatened her. Suppose he threatened her with the police. Or, if Murdock wasn’t in it, suppose he threatened her with Murdock. She’s a fairly violent b—girl. Maybe she got mad and began pulling the trigger. Suppose she shot Murdock because he knew she was there—maybe he knew she was going there, maybe he happened to come in in time to catch her, or just happened to be passing and saw her leave.”

  Jerry was shaking his head.

  “The trouble with all this is,” he said, “that the Murdocks didn’t live there any more—either Murdock. Mary Hunter lived there. And Murdock knew it because he had rented her the apartment.”

  Bill nodded and said that was a catch. He said that was another thing about which they didn’t know enough. At the moment, it was evidently an argument that Murdock had not written the note which apparently took Merle to the apartment. It was also an argument against Laurel Burke’s being in the apartment, because she, presumably, also knew it had been rented. At least she knew she had moved out. They would know more about that when—and if—they found the typewriter on which the note had been typed. That would take time.

  “For one thing,” he pointed out—“for one nice initial complication—it could be practically any typewriter at the Madison Avenue Bank and Trust Company. Murdock would have had access there—he could have given access to Laurel. Joshua Merle could have used a typewri
ter there if he’d wanted.”

  Bill stopped and looked sad.

  “And so,” he said, “could probably hundreds of other people. So it will use up time. And there is no particular reason to think that the typewriter is in the bank at all.”

  He sighed. He looked at the fingers he still held up. He drew down another. And another. And another.

  “The antique man,” he said. “Because he was annoyed at Merle for not buying the chair. Because Merle knew he made artificial antiques and threatened to expose him.”

  “Did he?” Pam said.

  Bill nodded.

  “The elevator man,” he said. “Who rather oddly didn’t hear Mary Hunter scream—if she did scream. Weldon Jameson.”

  “Who—?” Dorian said a little helplessly. “People keep coming in.”

  Josh’s friend, Bill Weigand explained. A good-looking youngster a couple of years younger than Joshua Merle; apparently a devoted friend; apparently, like Merle, a washed-out flyer who had cracked up in an accident of some sort. What sort—and what the two young men had done in the Navy generally—was being looked up.

  “Why?” Pam wanted to know.

  Bill shrugged.

  “Do you,” he said, “want me to run up a motive? I could, I suppose. Arbitrarily—I haven’t evidence to indicate any motive. Maybe he wanted to give his friend a hand up—get him the money and the girl. Maybe old Merle had done something else he didn’t like—you see, we haven’t anything to go on.”

  “Or,” Pam said, “any place to go, I shouldn’t think. In that direction. How about Mary’s father—Mr.—what was his name, Jerry?”

  “Thorgson,” Jerry said. “Why?”

  “Because,” Pam said, “Merle had done him out of some money somehow. Which was why Merle hated him and wouldn’t let his daughter marry his son. Damn!” She stopped and they looked at her. “Relatives,” she said. “Not people relatives—pronoun relatives. Wouldn’t let Thorgson’s daughter marry his, Merle’s son. And so Thorgson murdered Merle.”

  “Except,” Jerry said mildly, “except for one thing, Pam, that sounds fine. The thing is—Thorgson’s dead. Isn’t he?”

  Pam said, “Oh.”

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “I could have liked him—as a murderer, I mean. Is there anybody else?”

  “Probably,” Bill said. “Hundreds, probably. Persons unknown—persons I’ll meet tomorrow on Long Island when I go to have a look around. Persons—”

  The telephone rang. Bill Weigand answered it. He listened, said, “Right” and, after another moment, “Thanks.” He hung up.

  “Well,” he said, “he didn’t use his thumb. The print on the trigger—what there was of it—was of his right index finger. He was shot with the same gun used to kill Merle. Ballistics is sure of that. And the doc agrees that his right wrist was stiff from an old fracture, not very well set. Stiff enough so that it would have been awkward—but not impossible—for him to hold the gun in position to put a bullet into his own forehead. It’ wasn’t a contact wound, incidentally—the gun was held off maybe a foot. Which makes it look pretty much the way we thought it looked.”

  For a few minutes nobody said anything. Then Pam said that, in a way, it was a pity, because it made things so much harder. Bill Weigand said she didn’t know how much harder, and when the others waited for him to go on he amplified.

  “Because,” he said, “it’s easier to be pretty sure we’re right than to prove we’re right. We’ve got an improbability. But we haven’t any more than that. Can you see what a defense attorney will do with it? Why do we insist that it was his client, not Murdock, who killed Merle? Why do we say Murdock didn’t kill himself when the going got tough? Because he had a stiff wrist. Oh, so he couldn’t have shot himself, is that it? It was physically impossible? Well, no. Oh, so you admit it wasn’t impossible? Then why do you decide he didn’t kill himself? Well, it would have been awkward. It would have been inconvenient. And then our defense lawyer throws up his hands and does double takes for the jury and what does the jury do?”

  “The jury,” Pam North said, “decides it was Murdock after all, because what is convenience when you’re going to kill yourself? Although, as a matter of fact, I’d think it was a lot. If I were going to do it, I’d want to do it just as conveniently as possible. I’d think that awkwardness just then would be—well, almost more important than awkwardness at any other time. Because it would be so—so trivial. So anti-climactic. But would a jury?”

  Nobody answered her and when, after a pause, she spoke again it was on quite a different subject.

  “What I wonder is,” she said, “who got the check? The check that Mr. Merle took to the apartment?”

  Maybe, Jerry suggested, he didn’t take it. Maybe that was why he got shot. Maybe the absence of the check annoyed someone. Or maybe the murderer got it and just tore it up. Pam shook her head at that. She said she had once and it had been dreadful, because it made the bank so mad. She said she had had an argument about whether she had given or sold something to someone and when the other person had insisted she had torn up the check.

  “And the bank was mad,” she said. “It was mad for years.”

  They all looked at her doubtfully. Finally Dorian said, mildly, that she didn’t see why the bank was mad.

  “Because,” Pam said, “it upset their bookkeeping.”

  Jerry ran a hand through his hair.

  “Listen, Pam,” he said. “It wouldn’t. It wouldn’t possibly. A check is just a piece of paper if you tear it up. It couldn’t make the bank mad.”

  “Well,” Pam said, “I don’t care what you say. It did make the bank mad. They had taken the money out of the account beforehand and so they had to wait because the check might come through and so nobody had the money—not the bank or the person who gave the check or me. It just wasn’t anywhere. I’ll admit I didn’t ever understand it, but that’s the way it was. The money just disappeared, somehow. And it was very bad for bookkeeping.”

  Jerry ran his hand through his hair again.

  “But—” he began. Then he stopped and a faraway look came into his eyes. He looked at Bill and Bill began to nod.

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “I almost hate to ask this, but—was it a certified check?”

  Pam said oh yes, it was certified all right. She said that that was one of the things the bank kept saying over and over. The bank kept saying over and over, “but it was a certified check. People don’t tear up certified checks.”

  “Which,” Pam added, “was nonsense. Because as I kept telling them over and over, I had.”

  9

  WEDNESDAY, 9:20 A.M. TO 1:15 P.M.

  The late editions of the morning newspapers had noticeably lost interest. The Times did, to be sure, begin the story on Page 1, but not as if it were really proud of it. It did run it for two columns, giving a good deal more detail—including speculative detail about Mary Hunter—than the tabloids, but the account had a slight air of weariness. The Times, without saying so, indicated that the case was finished with the suicide of Murdock. And at the end of the second column, the Times definitely dropped the subject. The Herald Tribune retained slightly more optimism, and fought against its own gloomy conviction that the case was solved, but it did not fight with confidence. The News moved the story to Page 2 and gave Page 3 back to the war and the iniquities of the administration. The Mirror hinted that there was more to all of it than met the eye, but its hints were unusually shadowy.

  It was all, Bill Weigand decided, as it should be. Always providing that eventually he got somewhere. He sighed and took up reports. For the most part they confirmed the already known—the fracture of Murdock’s wrist, the index fingerprint on the gun, the identity of the gun with the one used to kill Merle, the importance of Merle, who, in addition to being a banker, was in the Social Register, was affectionately mentioned in Dun and Bradstreet and was favorably known to the financial secretaries of half a dozen accredited charities. He was also, the Times
noted, a distinguished layman.

  “What I could do with,” Weigand told Mullins, “is somebody who didn’t like him. Somebody who thought he was a heel. I want the Nell he did wrong by. Nobody kills a saint.”

  Mullins looked puzzled.

  “Look, Loot,” he said, “that’s how they get to be saints. Lots of times. By being killed.”

  Bill looked at Mullins sharply, uneasily suspecting him of cynicism. Then he smiled. He said he didn’t mean real saints—church saints.

  “Oh,” Mullins said. “O.K., Loot.”

  Mullins tapped a cigarette out of Weigand’s package. He lighted it.

  “Like always,” he said, when the light was certain, “there’re rumors. About girls, mostly. Only not anything you can put a finger on. You say, maybe, that it looks like Mr. Merle was a pretty fine citizen, respectable and everything. And somebody says, ‘Yeah, that’s how it looks, doesn’t it?’ in a kinda funny way. Like they were thinking about girls, or maybe that he used to rob the poor box when he had the time. Or you say, ‘Did he have any girl friends?’ and people say they wouldn’t know about that as if they would know about it but ain’t saying.”

  “But,” Bill said, “nothing you can pin down?”

  Mullins shook his head. He said that was the size of it. Nothing you could pin down.

  “Only,” he said, “I’ve been getting the idea that a lot of people didn’t like him much. Even if he did own a bank.”

  Merle hadn’t, Bill Weigand pointed out, really owned the bank. Not all of it. He had merely run it. Mullins said that, as far as he could see, that was just as good. Either way, you made out all right. George Merle was an outstanding example of a guy who had made out all right.

  “He’s really got it,” Mullins said. “He’s going to make the inheritance tax collectors a fine corpse. State and Federal.”

  Bill Weigand said he supposed there wasn’t any doubt of that. Mullins said that he hadn’t, of course, counted it personally, but if it wasn’t there a lot of people were going to be mighty surprised. Including, Mullins said he wouldn’t wonder, the guy who bumped him off.