Murder Comes First Read online

  “—blew up in their faces,” Mullins was saying, and stopped abruptly as Pam and Dorian came in. “Don’t say I said it,” he added, rather hurriedly. “Hello Mrs. North. Mrs. Weigand. Where’s the Loot?”

  Dorian said she did not know, and wished she did.

  “The Loot had it right,” Mullins said. “Somebody planted the stuff. Anyway, the D.A.’s afraid they did.”

  “Pam,” Aunt Thelma said, “the most ridiculous thing has happened. Sometimes I can’t believe she’s my own sister.”

  Pam looked at Aunt Pennina.

  “Lucinda,” Aunt Thelma said. “She’s—”

  “Please, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. “Everything’s getting so confused. What blew up, Sergeant?” Aunt Thelma looked at Pamela with severity. “Please, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. Mullins waited for things to subside. “Please, Sergeant Mullins,” Pam said.

  It was very simple. There were no fingerprints on the bottle one of the detectives working out of the District Attorney’s office had found in Miss Thelma Whitsett’s suitcase—none, at any rate, but his.

  “The poor Joe,” Mullins said, “should of used something.”

  And that, quite simply, made it blow up. There was, obviously, no reason why Miss Whitsett herself should have removed all fingerprints from a poison bottle and then have secreted it in her own suitcase—at least none anyone could think of, or would want to take to court. There was every reason why anyone who had put the bottle where it was found to incriminate Miss Whitsett would have been careful not to leave his own prints on it.

  “He’d have to wipe it,” Mullins pointed out. “Trust to luck Miss Whitsett would touch it and leave prints. Or that nobody would be bright enough to notice. Or maybe he just didn’t think about it at all.” Mullins paused. “You’d be surprised the guys who don’t,” he added, out of long, if perhaps somewhat confusing, experience.

  “The inspector tried to argue maybe Miss Whitsett did it that way to make it harder,” Mullins told them. “But this Thompkins wouldn’t buy it and after he thought it over, Arty—I mean the inspector, Mrs. Weigand—wouldn’t buy it himself. I gotta hand him that. Also, everybody they talked to in Cleveland pretty near died laughing.” Mullins’s own enjoyment, although properly muted, was nevertheless apparent. “So that lets you out of it, Mrs. North,” he said.

  It did, Pam thought. She no longer had an aunt to protect.

  “You don’t need to look so pleased, Sergeant,” Pam told him. “You—”

  “Pamela!” Aunt Thelma said, in that certain tone. “Will you stop this nonsense and listen to me? Lucinda’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Pam North repeated. “Gone where?”

  “To the library,” Aunt Pennina said. “I keep telling Thelma—”

  “Pennina!” Aunt Thelma said. “Show her the note. I was just about to tell this man.” She indicated Mullins. An expression of foreboding crossed Mullins’s broad face. It was going to be screwy again.

  It was, certainly. They looked at the note Aunt Lucinda had left, confident that with it she made everything entirely clear. They read: “Gone to the library to find the place. Cripland not Gribland.”

  “Obviously,” Aunt Pennina said, “she’s lost her place in some book or other and—” But then Aunt Pennina stopped and looked puzzled. “It really isn’t very clear,” she said.

  Aunt Thelma should say not; she did.

  “Gone to a place called Cripland or Gribland,” she said. “What-on earth?”

  “Or where on earth,” Pamela said. “I never heard of it. Did you, Dorian?”

  Dorian had not. Mullins had not. Mullins got the policewoman, who was just preparing to leave. He learned that Miss Lucinda Whitsett had gone out during the morning, ostensibly to get stamps, but wearing a hat. “A pink hat,” the policewoman said, and there was a kind of awe in her voice. “I had no instructions to detain her, Sergeant,” she pointed out. “Merely to caution her.”

  It was then after three o’clock in the afternoon. Even without the note, it would have been apparent that Miss Lucinda had gone farther than the lobby, was in search of more than stamps. She had gone to a place named Cripland, not Gribland, which apparently could be found at the public library.

  “Missing Persons,” Sergeant Mullins said, and went for the telephone.

  “Come on, Dorian,” Pamela North said. “The library to start.” She looked at the aunts. “You stay here,” she told them. “Both of you. Right here.”

  “Pamela!” Aunt Thelma said, but the certain tone was wasted on a closing door.

  The hills had grown taller as the little train chugged north. The trees were gold and red and green gold; the world burned gently, in beauty. The train had crept from Mount Kisco to Bedford Hills, shuddered and made Katonah. It had achieved Golden’s Bridge and seemed intent on resting on its laurels, but then gone grumbling on to Purdys and to Croton Falls. Then it had gone around curves, up-grade, and a few miles ahead a white church steeple had appeared among the soft-burning trees. “Brewster next,” a trainman said, hoarsely. “Brewster.” The train puffed uphill beside a lake, hooted its triumph and slowly subsided at the Brewster station. It had still some miles to go before achieving Pawling, but Miss Lucinda had not. She went down steep steps onto a sunny platform, a slight woman in the middle sixties, holding firmly to a purse and a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, wearing a quite remarkable pink hat. Several people said, “Taxi, lady?” and from them she chose a jovial man who said “where-a you wanna go-a, please?” or something which sounded rather like it.

  Miss Lucinda no longer had her memorandum, but she did not need it. Mr. Brisco, the taximan, knew the place. He said, however, “They’re not home.”

  “They asked me to have a look at the place,” Miss Lucinda said, firmly, and got into a very large car. There were two other passengers going in what Mr. Brisco chose to regard as Miss Lucinda’s direction, but it took time to catch them. It was almost three o’clock when they left the station. But, started, Mr. Brisco drove very rapidly, keeping one hand on the wheel and waving to passing friends with the other. Even with one hand, Miss Lucinda decided after a few moments, he was very expert. It was not nervousness about his driving that made her wish he would go a little more slowly. She hoped she had been entirely clear in the note she had left for her sisters.

  “—and a pink hat,” Pam North said. “A very pink hat.”

  “Oh, of course,” the young woman at the library information desk said. “I remember perfectly.”

  “Thank God for millinery,” Dorian Weigand said. “Pam, I’ve got to see that hat.”

  “It’s—” Pam began, starting to gesture a description. “It’s no use, Dor.” She turned back to the information girl, said, “It is the hat of my aunt. What did it—I mean, what did she—want?”

  She had wanted to look at out-of-town telephone directories; specifically, at those which covered the area within a hundred miles or so of the city. Dorian and Pam, a good many hours later, followed Miss Lucinda’s trail, knowing that the pink hat bobbed far ahead of them.

  It was to be assumed that Miss Lucinda’s interest in out-of-town telephone numbers was related to the death of Grace Logan; if it were not, if she were merely seeking to locate some suburban friend (named Cripland or Gribland?) the project was hopeless. Pam and Dorian had the obvious to go on, and went on it, wasting only a little time under the impression that Patterson, New York, was to be found in Westchester County; only a little more in finding that the Logan and Sandford country cottages, although presumably situated near Patterson, had Brewster telephone numbers. It was absurdly easy, then, since Miss Lucinda had made a pencil checkmark to identify the telephone listed under the name of Barton Sandford on Oak Hill Road. It was even easier, and more certain, when, on putting the book back in its stall, Pam dislodged from it Miss Lucinda’s memorandum, made because Miss Lucinda always remembered anything once she had written it down.

  But then it was a leap in the dark. It was hard to believe that lit
tle Miss Lucinda, alone, had gone adventuring into the country to find—to find what? Cripland? Gribland? But, with the time which had elapsed, it was inevitable to believe that she had gone somewhere.

  It was Dorian, in the end, who was most sure. She could look at the aunts, not knowing them, with detachment. She could point out that, were Thelma Whitsett her sister, holding so tight a rein, she would herself go anywhere, on any adventure. But she could not guess why she had, as it appeared she had, taken off for the Sandford cabin.

  “Not that there isn’t reason to go there,” she said. “To find out whether Mrs. Sandford is really there, or whether her typewriter is there. But how did your aunt get the idea? What does she know about it?”

  The questions were unanswerable. So was the matter of Cripland or Gribland.

  “All I’m sure of,” Pam said, “is that it comes out of something she’s read. You see, she is convinced that life repeats literature, just as she’s sure everybody has a listed telephone number.”

  Perhaps, Dorian suggested, everybody did in Cleveland.

  But Dorian stopped, then, because Pam was not listening. She was staring at the rank of telephone books, and her eyes were wide.

  “Dor!” Pam said. “We were all wrong. Terribly wrong. We’ve got to go!”

  She turned to go, and Dorian turned with her.

  “Go where?” she asked.

  “To Patterson or wherever it is,” Pam said. “We’ve got to get there first. It’s all upside down.”

  Mr. Brisco’s concept of similarity in destination, as concerning passengers in his taxicab, had proved rather remarkably flexible. Knowing the area not at all, Miss Lucinda had at first no more than wondered vaguely about this. Perhaps, she had thought, it only seemed as if, after going five miles or so in one direction to deposit a man known as Jim—“be-a-seea-you-Jim”—Mr. Brisco had turned the car around in a narrow road and more or less driven the five miles back again. It had seemed to her, then, that it was stretching a point to think that Jim’s destination had been on the way—“onaway”—to hers. It had merely, she began to suspect, been in the same part of the country. She was not even sure about the county.

  The second passenger was a young woman named Mizza Snyduh (which seemed improbable) and her destination was at least ten miles in what seemed to Miss Lucinda (but of course she didn’t know the country) to be almost the opposite direction. This, then, was the way to Oak Hill Road; Jim had been merely a side issue. But do I, Miss Lucinda wondered, have to pay for all of this very considerable distance we are traveling? Mr. Brisco’s taxicab did not have a meter; it was merely a car like any other car, although with a sign saying “Taxi” against the windshield, so there was no way of telling and she had not, before they started, thought to have any discussion of the fare. One didn’t, in taxicabs; the meter told one. At least, it had been so in Cleveland. Miss Lucinda, riding rapidly if bewilderingly through a green and gold countryside, began to wonder if she had brought along enough money.

  If she had—and if she had not, surely Mr. Brisco would understand, and probably take a check—there was, she began to feel, nothing immediate to worry about. Mr. Brisco was easy to trust, if not always to understand—he talked contentedly in his front seat, presumably to Mizza Snyduh, who did not, to be sure, answer, but perhaps to Miss Lucinda herself. The wind which swept into the open window on the driver’s side presumably blew Mr. Brisco’s words to pieces before they reached the rear seat. Certainly they arrived there in pieces. The countryside was beautiful and—this secretly felt, but best of all to feel—they were not reaching her destination with undue celerity. She was having time to think things out. This was one way of putting it. She was postponing an hour which might, which almost surely would, be evil. That was another way of putting it.

  I have put my hand to the plow, Miss Lucinda told herself, bobbing up and down as the big car hit uneven road, the pink hat a tossing banner. Darned be he who first cries hold enough. And of course when they get my note, someone will come to help; there will be someone to do the really difficult part. Miss Lucinda’s mind winced away from the difficulty she expected. I wasn’t foolish to come on alone, she told herself. Anyway, anyway—I can’t always just sit and let Thelma—It is later than I think, Miss Lucinda thought. There is so little time. Dear Mr. Marquand; such a wonderful writer. It is my little fling.

  The car turned off the main road into a much less considerable road, and from it into an even less considerable one—a dirt road, or almost. Surely, Miss Lucinda thought, this isn’t Oak Hill Road. Surely Mr. Sandford doesn’t—

  “I bringa quick lika say,” Mr. Brisco said, in triumph, and Miss Lucinda moved to get out. “Nota yet,” he told her. “Thisa Mizza Snyduh. Youa next.”

  Miss Lucinda said, “Oh,” and sat back. Mizza Snyduh got out and said, unexpectedly, “Goodbye now,” having previously said nothing whatever. She paid Mr. Brisco and Miss Lucinda wondered how much, but felt it would be rude to try to see. Mr. Brisco backed the big car off the road, pulled it back on again, and started back the way they had come. “Notta far now lady,” he said. “Pretty day.”

  They returned to the main road, turned back on it—Miss Lucinda was almost certain—the way they had come, and progressed gayly for several miles, Mr. Brisco happily waving at friends in passing cars. Then, without interrupting the salutation of the moment, or particularly slackening pace, he turned right abruptly into another secondary road, said, “Oaka Hill,” and began resolutely to sound his horn. The reason was evident; most of the turns were blind and the road was narrow. Oh dear, Miss Lucinda thought. Oh dear me!

  They went up a hill for what seemed another several miles, turned off it into a patch of what was almost lawn, and stopped. Beyond the lawn there was a pleasant, small but sprawling house.

  “Bringa quick,” Mr. Brisco said, in pride of crafts-manship.

  “This is it?” Miss Lucinda said.

  “Thisa it,” Mr. Brisco assured her. “You wanna wait?”

  “Wait?” Miss Lucinda said. “Oh, no, I don’t think you need wait. I’ll—I’ll telephone you when I want to leave.”

  Mr. Brisco looked back at her with apparent doubt. He looked with interest at her hat, which seemed to distract him, or perhaps to reassure him.

  “Youadoc,” he said. “Maybe she cutta off no?”

  “No indeed,” Miss Lucinda said politely. “How much is it, please?”

  “Twoa doll,” Mr. Brisco said. She paid him; she tipped him a quarter. She got out of the cab. It was not until the cab had backed, cut, backed once more and departed that it occurred to Miss Lucinda that Mr. Brisco might have meant to suggest that the telephone had been disconnected which would, certainly, make it difficult for her to telephone to be picked up. She had heard, she now remembered, that people sometimes had disconnected the utilities in country places which were closed up for the winter.

  There was little now to suggest winter. The air here, fresher than it had been in the city, still was balmy and the breeze was gentle. It was true, of course, that the sun was already very low in the west; looking at her watch, Miss Lucinda was surprised to learn that it was only about four o’clock. She recalled to herself that the days were drawing in; that in another two hours or so it would be almost dark. She would want to start home before dark. Now—where should she begin? Inside, or out? She decided that inside would be most probable, if she was right at all. And oh, I hope I’m not, Miss Lucinda thought. But somebody has to make sure.

  Getting inside a locked-up country cottage would have seemed, had she thought of it at all before this moment, a bridge to be crossed when she came to it, but now she had come to it unexpectedly and without plans. She went to the front door, as the most probable—and certainly most proper—place to start and, since it was not her house, she knocked. There was no response; she waited and knocked again, gently, since she was a gentle woman, but still with some decision—although not, as she thought to herself, loudly enough to wake the dead. Only aft
er waiting again, did she try the door. It was, of course, locked. She had thought it would be.

  She then, the pink hat bobbing, circled the house, trying first one window and then another. All the windows on the first side she tried were locked, and then she began to try those on the rear. They seemed to be locked too, and shades were drawn over them. All at once, Miss Lucinda began to feel forlorn. She had really been very foolish, now that she thought of it; no amount of understandable desire to help dear Thelma, or to escape momentarily from dear Thelma—and both things had, she realized, entered into it, together with whatever it was in her which had made her buy the pink hat—could exonerate her of having been foolish. Foolish, it now appeared, to no purpose. The back door was locked, as the front had been.

  An electric meter was on the outside wall near the door and a little wheel was turning in it, as little wheels turn in electric meters. It was odd to be consoled by a little wheel, but Miss Lucinda momentarily was. Somehow, it seemed to bring the world closer. Miss Lucinda went on around the next corner and—the little wheel had been a token after all—found a window several inches open from the bottom. She tugged at it, and it opened fully.

  Miss Lucinda looked around to be sure she was unobserved, because it would obviously be impossible to keep her skirt in its proper place while climbing in a window and, seeing no one who might observe her, did climb in the window. The pink hat was knocked a little crooked in the process, but not really damaged, and when she was standing—in a bedroom, as it turned out—Miss Lucinda straightened the hat. Then she began her search.

  It was about the time Miss Lucinda, having broken and entered, straightened her pink hat and looked around a dim, apparently empty, bedroom that Pamela North took her car up the Twenty-third street ramp onto the West Side Highway and said, “Thank heaven!” Dorian Weigand, sitting a little shaken beside her, agreed in stronger terms.

  “I know,” Pam said, working into traffic on the elevated highway and picking up speed. “I hate trucks. Great, hulking things. Like the time Teeney was treed.”