Payoff for the Banker Read online

“She could have been,” Weigand said. “I don’t know that she was.”

  “You think she was?” Merle wanted to know.

  “I think she could have been,” Weigand said. “Naturally, I don’t know that she is going to have your father’s child, Mr. Merle. I don’t know that she’s going to have anybody’s child.”

  “Ask my doctor,” Laurel Burke said, shortly.

  “I imagine they will, Miss Burke,” Bill Weigand said. “I imagine they’ll do just that. I suppose you are thinking about a paternity suit? Against the estate?”

  “If they want it that way,” Laurel Burke said. “I don’t insist on it. I don’t mind it.”

  “In spite of the fact,” Bill reminded her, “that you lived in the Madison Avenue place as Murdock’s wife?”

  She could, Laurel Burke said, get around that all right.

  “Plenty of people knew that was a gag,” she said. “Plenty of people.”

  There was, Bill Weigand thought, a definite meaning in her emphasis on plenty. She might mean that some of them were in the group which heard her. It sounded as if she did mean that.

  Bill Weigand looked at the group—Jameson, Merle, Ann Merle, Potts, Sullivan and himself and Mullins—who had also come back from wherever he had been—and Stanley Goode. And, of course, Meggs, circulating again with drinks. Everybody took drinks; almost abstractedly, Bill Weigand took one himself.

  He waited for Ann or Josh Merle to deny—perhaps to deny heatedly—that their father was capable of living the kind of life Laurel Burke was saying he had lived; the kind of life which implied a surreptitious relationship with a girl such as Laurel, carried on under the cover of his secretary’s name; all of which implied, in essence, a series of mean assignations in a hide-out—a life lacking entirely in the dignity George Merle had otherwise seemed to prize. But neither Ann nor Joshua challenged the girl on those grounds. These, he concluded, were wise children.

  “What is going to be your story, Miss Burke?” Josh Merle asked. “Why should we pay off? I gather you want us to pay you off?”

  “I want you to support your father’s youngest child, Mr. Merle,” she said. “I hoped you would want to.”

  Merle told her to come off it. He said she wanted them to support her. Because of her nuisance value. She opened her eyes wide in apparent astonishment and said that she thought he was taking a very unkind attitude. She said he wasn’t at all like his father.

  “Your father was always terribly sweet to me,” she said.

  Merle said, “Hell!” with emphasis and looked at Weigand.

  “He used to take me to the most interesting places,” she said, as if Merle had not spoken. “To night clubs like—like the Zero Club.”

  Again there was an odd emphasis. It was on the name of the club, which Bill Weigand knew, it being a part of his business to know them all. The Zero Club was in a basement and it was so dimly lighted that the face of a companion floated dimly across a table. It was a place where the chances of running into people—save in the purely physical sense, which was always probable—were reassuringly slight. If you wanted to be reassured, as George Merle must have. But there seemed no clear reason why Laurel Burke had gone to the trouble of mentioning it.

  “Do any of you know the Zero Club?” she asked, “such an interesting place.”

  She looked around. Weigand could not see that her glance lingered on any of them.

  “Yes,” Mr. Potts said, unexpectedly. “A very odd place indeed, Miss Burke. Why?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I just wondered. You’d like it, I’m sure—all of you. Mr. Jameson—you’d like it. Mr. Merle.”

  The two men looked at her. Joshua Merle said he doubted it.

  “As a matter of fact,” Jameson said, “I don’t like it particularly. Any part of it.”

  “Really, Mr. Jameson?” she said. “Really? Do you like it, Miss Merle?”

  “I like to see the people I’m with,” Ann said. “I’m not afraid of people’s seeing me.”

  “Why, of course not, Miss Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Why should you be?”

  “What is your story?” Joshua Merle insisted. “If you’ve got a story.”

  “Why,” Laurel said, “just what you suppose, Mr. Merle. Your father met me and was attracted and—things just happened. He rented me that dear little apartment and—”

  “Under Murdock’s name,” Bill Weigand said. “So you could pose as Murdock’s wife?”

  “Your dear father was so careful, Mr. Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Of course he was such an important man.”

  “Did Murdock—find you for Mr. Merle?” Weigand asked.

  She looked at him.

  “I think that’s a terrible thing to say, Lieutenant,” she said. “So exactly what a policeman would think.”

  “It’s what I think,” Joshua Merle told her. “I knew Murdock. He—did things like that for Father.”

  He spoke bitterly. He was without illusions about his father. At some time, when he had found out things first, and the illusions first began to go, he had been bitterly hurt. Now the bitterness was dry and old.

  “My dear boy,” Laurel Burke said, with a kind of awful archness, “you make Mr. Murdock sound like—what is the word—a pimp. And your father—really, Mr. Merle, I can’t have you saying things like that about your dear father.”

  “You—” Merle began. Then he stopped. His voice grew quieter although his face did not change. “We’ll have to talk this over, Miss Burke. We’ll have to go into it.”

  “Of course,” Laurel Burke said. “That’s why I came. So we could all talk it over like friends.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Potts said gently, “Mr. Merle—Mr. George Merle—was over sixty, wasn’t he?”

  Laurel Burke looked at him. She said, “Why, Mr. Potts!”

  She stood up.

  “You know,” she said, “I’d really love to wash my hands.”

  They watched her go across the terrace, guided by Meggs, and through one of the French doors. And then they turned and looked at Bill Weigand and waited, the question evident but unphrased. Slowly, with regret, Bill Weigand nodded.

  “As I said,” he told them, “I am inclined to believe she was your father’s girl. The girl he kept. Whether she is going to have a child by him I haven’t any idea. Naturally. She may be. If she is, she’ll probably be able to collect, unless—”

  He paused and looked around at them.

  “Unless she killed your father, or was mixed up in it,” he said. “Because you may as well know—if you don’t know—Murdock didn’t kill him. And Murdock didn’t kill himself. He didn’t, so far as I know, kill anybody. But somebody killed him.”

  He looked for surprise and found none of it.

  “Of course,” Mr. Potts said, gently, “we guessed that, Lieutenant. Because otherwise, why would you be here?”

  Weigand looked at A. Wickersham Potts and smiled faintly.

  “I didn’t expect you to be surprised, Mr. Potts,” he said.

  “Do you think she killed him?” Joshua Merle said, and there was something like hope in his tone.

  Weigand shrugged slightly. There was a chance, he said. If, say, he suddenly told her he was finished and that she and the child—if any—could whistle for their support. Then she might have killed, either in rage or with consideration, after weighing one thing against another and deciding that Merle’s family was a better bet than Merle. But there was, at the moment, no evidence.

  “There are alternatives,” he said. “Several alternatives. Miss Burke and Murdock and whatever they had cooked up may have had nothing to do with it.”

  “You mean,” Mr. Potts said, “that there was an understanding between Murdock and Miss Burke—an understanding to defraud Mr. Merle? That he was—a victim?”

  Wickersham Potts was shrewd. He was very shrewd. But Weigand contented himself with the non-committal remark that such things happened. In, he pointed out, a variety of ways—variants on the “badger game.” M
urdock as the outraged husband, for example.

  Mr. Potts shook his head. He thought it would not have been that. Knowing George Merle, having met Mr. Murdock, he thought it had not been that. Not in those terms.

  “Mr. Merle and Mr. Murdock knew each other quite well,” he said. “Much too well for that, I should have thought. But if Mr. Murdock had—found Miss Burke for Mr. Merle and then had arranged with her to share the proceeds of—er—her pregnancy—that would be more likely. And the Mr. and Mrs. Murdock arrangement may not have been so—how shall I say it?—so completely a formality as we are asked to suppose. What do you think of that version, Lieutenant?”

  Weigand thought that Mr. Potts was very shrewd indeed, and very observant. It occurred to him that Mr. Potts might some day be too observant for his own good. But he merely said that Mr. Potts’s idea was, indeed, an idea.

  “It was interesting about the Zero Club,” Mr. Potts said. “Very interesting. I don’t care for the place, myself. But of course every man to his taste. Don’t you all agree?”

  Then Mr. Potts got up and went off, not as if he were going any place in particular. And after that, for a long time, Weigand was not sure where Mr. Potts was. He was not, for several hours, sure where anybody was.

  There had been a general tendency to break up when Mr. Potts departed; and Mullins, reappearing from the direction of the swimming pool, had looked inquiringly at Bill Weigand. Weigand shook his head. They were not leaving; they were waiting. Because it had occurred to Bill Weigand that it was not so necessary now for him to go to New York. It looked as if the part of New York he was interested in might be coming to Long Island.

  He detained Joshua Merle when Merle started to rise, with an “Oh, Mr. Merle. If you’ve got a moment?” Merle sat down. Weigand’s attitude did not encourage the others to remain. Captain Sullivan was already gone; now Stanley Goode and Ann went off together, stopping by the table which held only bottles and glasses again, going together into the shadows of the big living room. Jameson limped off after them, and Joshua Merle’s eyes followed him. Bill Weigand’s first question brought them back.

  “At one time, Mr. Merle,” Weigand said, “I gather you knew Mary Hunter—Mary Thorgson she was then—quite well. Is that correct?”

  Merle shook his head slightly as if to clear it.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” he said. “With anything?”

  It was, Weigand told him, merely something he wanted to know about; he wanted to know about it because he was investigating a murder—the murder of Mr. Merle’s father. Merle was under no obligation to answer, unless he wanted to help.

  “I don’t get it,” Merle said. “Mary doesn’t come into this. She—got out fast enough after she got what she wanted. But—yes, I knew her at one time. I thought we were going to get married. Does that surprise you?”

  “No,” Weigand told him. “What happened?”

  “My sainted father,” Merle said. “And a check. If you knew Mary and I were engaged, you must have known it from her. But I suppose she didn’t tell you all of it. I can see why she wouldn’t.”

  “She told me—she told some friends of mine—that your father intervened,” Weigand said.

  Intervened, Merle said, was good. Intervened was very good. Weigand waited. Merle said he still didn’t see what it had to do with anything, but what the hell?

  “I was in love with her,” he said. “She acted as if she were in love with me. But Father laughed at that—and he was right that time. He said ‘like father, like daughter’ and not to trust any Thorgson. You see, her father had tried to gyp the old man once. He didn’t get away with it—it was the other way around—but the old boy hated him. Or had contempt for him. And he said Mary was the same breed. I—I suppose I yelled at him. And he just smiled, in a way he had—not a nice way.”

  The way George Merle smiled meant that he would take care of things in his own fashion, whatever his son thought. He had, Joshua Merle said.

  “One afternoon,” Merle told Weigand, “the old boy sent for her—I was off changing and she was right here, sitting on this terrace. She went in to see him and when I came out she had gone—with a nice check. It was as easy as that. The old boy said if she wanted money she could get it easier than by marrying me—probably told her some nonsense about cutting me off in his will and stopping my allowance meanwhile. What he called an allowance—enough to keep me in cigarettes and tied to the house. He said he would pay her then and there. And he did. I was worth ten thousand dollars to Mary—ten thousand lousy smackers.”

  “Did she tell you this?” Weigand asked.

  “I didn’t see her again,” Joshua Merle said. “Not to talk to, anyway. The old boy told me. He was—he was smirking about it. I hated him.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “Did you go on hating him, Mr. Merle?”

  Merle looked at Bill Weigand and his eyes narrowed.

  “I didn’t like him much,” he said. “I never liked him much after that. But he was right and I suppose he did me a good turn. But I just didn’t like him.” He paused and looked at Weigand hard. “Do you think I’d kill my father because I didn’t like him, Weigand?” he wanted to know.

  Weigand shook his head, but did not answer directly. Instead, he asked another question.

  “Suppose,” he said, “your father lied to you about her. Suppose—I’m merely supposing—he told her some other story—that you had asked him to get rid of her for you. Something like that. And suppose that later, recently say, she found out the story he told you. What would you think of that, Merle?”

  Merle thought it was a lot of nonsense. He didn’t call it nonsense, but that was roughly what he meant. But after he had said that, he looked at Weigand with narrowed eyes. He wanted, after a moment, to know what Weigand meant by that.

  “Your father was killed in Mrs. Hunter’s apartment,” Weigand said. “Suppose—and this is merely supposition again—she really loved you and never got over it entirely. Suppose she suddenly came into her apartment and found your father there—suppose she arranged to get him there after she found out. Suppose she tried to get him to tell you the truth and he just laughed at her. And suppose all the hate she had been feeling since she found out floated up and—.”

  Merle looked at Weigand as if he were seeing horrors. He passed his hand over his forehead. It was quite a while before he spoke.

  “You’re making it up,” he said, and swore at Weigand savagely.

  Weigand sat quietly and looked at him.

  “But I said I was making it up,” he agreed. “I said I was supposing. It is a hypothesis entirely, Mr. Merle. Only—it is a possible hypothesis. Assuming your father lied.”

  “He didn’t lie. Not that time,” Merle said. He said it with determination, and with anger.

  “Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “He lied, I think, Mr. Merle. I really think he lied.”

  He waited and Merle merely stared at the ground.

  “You see, Merle,” Weigand said, “your father hated Mrs. Hunter’s father. He had cheated Mr. Thorgson out of quite a sum of money, I suspect. And often we hate those we wrong—it is a form of self-justification. Your father wasn’t going to let Thorgson have the satisfaction of seeing his daughter married to you.” Weigand paused. “Of course, to do your father credit,” he added, “he may not have thought the feeling between you and Mary was really serious.”

  Merle did not look up. He spoke to the ground. He said:

  “It was serious, all right.”

  After a considerable time, Merle spoke again.

  “Is that all you wanted?” he said.

  Weigand agreed it was all he wanted. But when Merle stood up and had taken one limping step, Bill Weigand spoke as if he had just remembered something.

  “By the way,” he said. “That man who called you at Charles and told you your father had been killed—would you know his voice if you heard it again? Had you ever heard it before?”

  “I don’t know,” Merle said. “
I don’t remember that I’d ever heard it before. It was muffled, sort of. I didn’t think about that—just about what the man said. I just heard what he said and started off without waiting for Jamie.”

  “Right,” Weigand said.

  Merle went off. For a man with a limp, he walked fast.

  Bill Weigand rather unexpectedly found himself alone. He was alone when Pam and Jerry North arrived, bringing Mary Hunter with them. Then it was a little after four o’clock.

  11

  WEDNESDAY, 4:10 P.M. TO 6:15 P.M.

  “Bill,” Pam North said, “We found the gun, so we came right out. Because it proves it isn’t the gun.”

  “Oh,” Bill Weigand said, “hello, Pam. Jerry. Mrs. Hunter.”

  “Mrs. Hunter’s gun,” Jerry North amplified. “It was in the bottom of a trunk in the storage warehouse. She remembered this morning where it ought to be. It never was in the apartment. Pam thought it was important.”

  Bill said it could be. He held out his hand. Mary Hunter took a .38 revolver out of her handbag and gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at it. It was a nice little gun. There were no cartridges in the cylinder. There was nothing to indicate that it had been used recently; nothing to prove it had not.

  “In a trunk in the warehouse,” Bill Weigand repeated.

  “Yes,” Mary Hunter said. “I remembered which trunk I had put it in after Rick went away. Mrs. North thought we ought to get it and bring it to you. We all three went and they watched me take it out of the trunk. Mrs. North thought they’d better, so they could—tell you what they saw.”

  Bill said that had been the way to do it. He said he would have the gun tested, as a matter of routine.

  “You don’t seem much interested, Bill,” Pam said.

  Bill looked at her and smiled. He wanted to know if she had really expected he would be much interested. He said he had no doubt that this gun had been at the bottom of a trunk in a warehouse when George Merle was shot. And that, with the gun found by Murdock’s body, they had enough guns. He wondered, but he did not say he wondered, why the Norths had brought Mary Hunter to Elmcroft. Because it was clear they had brought her.