A Key to Death Read online

  “The office triangle,” she said, and then, for the first time, she laughed briefly, without mirth.

  The laughter accepted a cliché of situation; one, the laughter said, which might have been Phoebe James’s own. There was wryness in the quick laughter. She’s self-conscious about what she writes, Pam North thought. I must ask Jerry.

  “You see why we—Nan and I—feel we can’t trust the police,” Mrs. James said. “Why—” She paused. “I’ll find the one who killed Forbes,” she said, and for that moment her voice was no longer soft. “Oh, I’ll find him.”

  “No,” Reginald Webb said, “I don’t know why Forbes wanted an appointment with the district attorney, captain. It’s not unusual for circumstances to come up which lead an attorney to want a conference.”

  “This isn’t a firm which handles criminal cases to any extent,” Bill said. “I gather that’s true?”

  “Except this Halpern matter. That was pretty much Forbes’s own operation. I’d guess it concerned that, yes. But I’d only be guessing. Forbes might have wanted to find out—” He stopped. He shook his head.

  They sat in his office, which was smaller than those which had been occupied by the two senior partners. He sat erect behind a wide desk, and he sat tall. He spoke crisply, and with emphasis. Already, he had assured Weigand that he knew nothing which might help to the solution of Forbes Ingraham’s murder. Of that, his professed ignorance was no greater, and no less, than that of any of the others in the office—of long-faced Mary Burton, or of Dorothy Lynch or Phyllis Moore; of Francis Cuyler, who pushed at black hair, or the precise Saul Karn, who made his points—seemed to chop his points—with small, quick movements of his rimless glasses.

  Long before, the office would normally have been closed for the day. Mary Burton would have been on a ferryboat plodding through the bay toward Staten Island; the other women on subways, or leaving them and walking through evening streets; Webb himself, Bill Weigand guessed, would have crossed Forty-fourth Street to the Harvard Club. But the lights still burned in the offices, and the staff stayed.

  Webb had been left to the last in this final round of the day’s questioning. The first round had established facts, as stated. Those subsequent sought to relate facts. And from each, beyond statements of fact, came more—came the less tangible things; came relationships and matters for speculation. (There was considerable violence in Francis Cuyler, particularly at any mention of the blond Miss Moore; Mrs. Burton still dabbed at red eyes; for Saul Karn, from all he showed, the death of Forbes Ingraham might have been a misplaced comma in a brief, rendering its legality doubtful. He appeared to take the matter under consideration.)

  Nor, now, did Reginald Webb reveal what emotions he might feel. He had seemed shocked at first; expressed, at first, that disbelief which is so often the first reaction to violence. He had made it clear that he had thought of Forbes Ingraham as a friend. But on what, under those circumstances, he presumably felt, he had closed a door, which fitted perfectly.

  “You want to know what happened, how it happened,” he had told Bill Weigand. “Not how I feel about it. You want evidence.”

  That was true enough, if by no means all the truth. Bill had accepted it.

  His guesses about the reasons for Ingraham’s wish to see District Attorney Sumner would not, he pointed out, be evidence. Ingraham might have had any of a dozen purposes. That Halpern was involved was, obviously, the most probable of alternatives.

  “When a defense attorney wants to talk to the district attorney,” Webb said now, “one thinks first of some sort of compromise. Plea to a lesser charge. But—”

  Bill Weigand waited.

  “I’d be surprised, in this case,” Webb said. “Doesn’t sound like Forbes. He was—well, he was all het up about it. You wouldn’t think he would be—been around a good while, pretty calm about things, for the most part. About some things he wasn’t, and this Halpern business seemed to be one of them. It’s not a case I’d expect him to compromise. Still—I don’t know what came up. Maybe the case fell apart when he began to look at it.”

  “Would anybody else know about that?”

  Webb doubted it. If letters had been written, instruments prepared, one of the girls would know. Dorothy Lynch, probably; perhaps Mrs. Burton. Ingraham might even have told Mrs. Burton if there had been—well, a hitch.

  “She says not,” Bill told him.

  It wouldn’t be much help in any case, Webb said. He said, “Poor old Mary.” Again, Bill Weigand waited.

  “She’s been around for I don’t know how long,” Webb said. “Before I joined the firm. Forbes was her particular chick. She used to be his secretary. Then—well, we all get older. She does seem to have got older more than most, somehow. Gets things muddled up a good deal and—” He stopped. Then he said that the captain might as well know.

  “We hadn’t broken it to her yet,” he said. “Unless Forbes did in the last day or so. We’d decided we’d have to retire her. Full salary, Forbes insisted on that. She’s got a little house on Staten Island, and a little garden—and all that sort of thing. But—well, I’d have hated to be the one to tell her. Have to now, as things stand, but now—well, it probably won’t be so bad. There’ll be a lot of changes. She’ll recognize that. And, with Forbes gone, she probably won’t care too much. But, to tell her she was too old for it—made too many mistakes—that wouldn’t have been pleasant. Forbes dreaded it. But what could we do?”

  Bill Weigand nodded his head to that. He said that what Webb had just said brought up another point. Probably not germane. But still—

  “We have to poke around,” Bill Weigand said. “Find out all people are willing to tell us. What happens to the firm now, Mr. Webb?”

  “Not much left of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb, is there?” Reginald Webb said. “The last survivor. I don’t mind telling you. I haven’t decided. I may try to get somebody else to come in. I may, when I get things untangled here, go in with somebody else. For the time being, we’ll go on pretty much as before—except for Mary. Possibly Cuyler.”

  “Cuyler?”

  “Frank’s a good lawyer. He’s a nice boy. But this isn’t the kind of practice for him. You’ve seen him—dramatic sort of man. Ideal trial lawyer. Push that hair of his back in front of a jury, turn on that intensity—phew! When we get into court at all, and we do our damnedest not to, it’s usually before a judge who doesn’t give a rap about intensity. Or hair, for that matter. Just wants precedents.”

  “Had this come up before?”

  “Well—Forbes and I had talked about it.”

  “With Cuyler?”

  “I hadn’t. After all, Forbes was senior. That would have been his problem.”

  “And Karn?”

  “Old Sol?” He smiled. “We mostly call him that. Not to his face, but he probably knows it. Probably amuses him, as much as he gets amused. As long as I stay in this kind of practice, I’ll try to persuade Saul Karn to stick around. Knows more about copyright law than any man I know. More than I do. More than Forbes did, which says a lot. He and Sam Schaeffer—between them, they knew the works.” He paused. “You’re looking for motives in all this, of course?”

  “For what I can find,” Bill told him. “You realize that, counsellor.”

  “Poor old Mary, because she was going to be retired? Cuyler, because Forbes might have told him he’d be happier with another connection? Not very—persuasive, are they?”

  “We have to take what we can get,” Bill told him. “There’s no scale for the weight of motives. Probably you know that. Something one person wouldn’t notice might make someone else kill. We get murders for a five-dollar bill. Because a woman won’t go back to a husband she doesn’t like. One man says, ‘All right, the hell with it.’ Another man—” He ended with a shrug.

  “Very well,” Webb said. “I’ll give you another—without prejudice, a better. Since you’ll find out, anyway. I stand to gain a hundred thousand dollars from Forbes’s death.”
/>   Bill Weigand raised eyebrows. Webb seemed pleased by the reaction. He nodded his head several times. He explained.

  Each of the partners in the firm had carried insurance in favor of the others. The premiums had been paid by the firm, as such, but in effect each insured the others. In each case, the policy was for a hundred thousand dollars. In each case, the two surviving partners were beneficiaries, share and share alike. If only one survived, the money went to him.

  “It’s not uncommon, in any partnership,” Webb said. “Some of our clients were, in effect, personal. Schaeffer had some; Ingraham brought some in. So did I. When Sam died, some of his people went elsewhere. Some of Forbes’s will—say these friends of yours, the Norths. I barely knew North; we were attorneys for his publishing house because he knew Forbes and trusted him. Will he stay on? I don’t know. So—”

  So the insurance was to indemnify the surviving partners for the losses likely to be sustained. When Schaeffer had died, the insurance had been paid equally to Forbes Ingraham and to Webb. Ingraham’s insurance would go to Webb.

  “And Mrs. Schaeffer?”

  “Not involved,” Webb said. “This was strictly a matter of the partnership. Sam carried his own insurance and I suppose that went to Nan. I know it did, as a matter of fact. Sam was pretty well fixed anyway. So—Sam dies, and I get fifty thousand. Forbes dies, and I get another hundred. Of course, Sam wasn’t murdered. Had an accident. But Forbes—”

  “By the way,” Bill Weigand said, “I gather there wasn’t a double indemnity provision in Mr. Schaeffer’s policy? Since you speak of getting fifty thousand.”

  “No,” Webb said. “Turns out to have been an oversight, doesn’t it? But—no. Not in this one.” He waited a moment. “You wanted motives,” he said. “You want a denial?”

  “All right,” Bill said. “Go ahead, Mr. Webb.”

  “I didn’t kill Forbes.”

  “Theories?”

  “You’ve thought of Halpern? And, if Forbes was right, the racketeers who were after Halpern? Might have decided to get Forbes. As they apparently tried to get Halpern himself.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “I’ve thought of them, counsellor.”

  “Coming in through Sam’s office and—”

  Someone knocked on the office door. Bill Weigand said, “Come in, sergeant.” Sergeant Mullins came in.

  Mullins said, “This. In his desk.”

  He held “this” out. It was a key to a Yale lock. It was like any other key, except that it was made of gold.

  Bill Weigand looked at it. He put it down on Reginald Webb’s desk. It glowed there in the light from the desk lamp.

  “Thought you’d want to see it, captain,” Mullins said. “Who’d want a gold key?”

  Weigand looked at Webb, and Webb nodded his head.

  “Sam’s,” he said. “Sam’s golden key. In whose desk, sergeant?”

  Mullins looked at Bill Weigand, who nodded.

  “Ingraham’s,” Mullins said. “Top center.”

  That, Webb told them, was rather odd. They waited.

  “It’s Sam Schaeffer’s key to his office,” Webb said. “What was his office—the key to the door from the outside corridor. I don’t know why Forbes had it. I thought Mary put them somewhere after Sam died. All the office keys, I mean.”

  Schaeffer had had various keys to office locks—to the front door and to the door out of his office; to filing cases and other cabinets which were kept locked. A few of these were Schaeffer’s only, opening personal files. The rest were duplicates of keys carried also by the other partners. They also had, for example, keys to the door which opened from Schaeffer’s office to the public corridor. After his personal files had been cleared, and his personal possessions given to his wife, the office keys had been returned to the office, and given Mary Burton for safekeeping.

  “Why this one turns up in Forbes’s desk, I don’t know,” Webb said. “You’ll want to talk to Mary?”

  Weigand agreed they would want to talk to Mary. Webb used one of the telephones on his desk.

  “Why gold?” Bill Weigand asked him, and at that Webb smiled. He said it had been Nan Schaeffer’s idea—a joke, and in a way not a joke.

  “Sam was a great man for losing things,” he said. “Misplacing them, rather. His ring of keys, his glasses, his wallet sometimes. He’d get down here without his keys and have to send the boy up before he could get his personal files open. So—Nan had one of the keys copied, and done in gold—gold filled, anyway. She said even Sam wouldn’t leave a gold key lying around, and if he had it, he’d have them all.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Matter of fact, I guess it did. Anyway, he wasn’t always having to send Eddie over to the apartment. Not that the key’s valuable in itself, particularly. But it apparently made him conscious of his keys. Kept on forgetting his glasses, but he kept extra pairs here. And—come in, Mary.”

  Mary Burton came in. She looked very tired; there was the vagueness of the weary in her movements. Bill said he was sorry they had had to keep her so late; she said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Anything—”

  “This key of Mr. Schaeffer’s,” Bill said, and held it toward her. “It’s turned up in Mr. Ingraham’s desk. Probably doesn’t mean anything but still—”

  “I don’t know how it got there,” she said. She reached out for it. “When Mrs. Schaeffer gave them to me—all Mr. Schaeffer’s keys, after he died—I put them in a file. One of the locked files, Mr. Webb. Under O, of course.”

  “O?”

  “For office. They haven’t been taken out since. At least—” She looked at the key. “I suppose Mr. Ingraham must have wanted it for something, although he had his own. I’ll put it back with the others.”

  But Bill Weigand put out his hand for the little golden key, said he’d hold on to it for the time being. Mrs. Burton looked at Webb with doubt. “Of course, captain,” Webb said. “Whatever you want.” Bill took the key.

  “This was with the other keys? When you put them in the file?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “They were all on the chain. I put them in an envelope marked ‘Mr. Schaeffer’s office keys.’ The chain, just as Mrs. Schaeffer gave it to me. Mr. Ingraham must have wanted it for something and—”

  “Right,” Bill said. He asked Webb for an envelope, got it, put the key in it and the envelope in a pocket. Then he stood up. It was a little after seven. He had, he told Reginald Webb, nothing more to ask them for the time being. He was sorry to have kept them so long. He said, “Come on, sergeant,” and Mullins went on. They walked down Forty-fourth Street. Opposite the Algonquin, Bill suggested they might as well eat. They went in. At a table in the Oak Room they ordered drinks.

  “You figure Ingraham loaned this key to somebody?” Mullins asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “So this somebody could come in and kill him without bothering anybody?”

  “I doubt,” Bill said gravely, “that that was in Ingraham’s mind, Mullins. It may have worked out that way.”

  “Somebody he wanted to see without other people knowing,” Mullins said, and sipped his old fashioned. “Don’t put much sugar in ’em,” he remarked. “A dame, most likely.”

  “Or,” Bill said, “a client who didn’t want to be seen.”

  “Why not just let them in?” Mullins asked. “I mean, this giving a key to somebody so’s he can come in any time.”

  “I don’t know, Mullins,” Bill said. “Perhaps, as you say, it was a dame. Any particular dame in mind?”

  “You notice that blond girl?” Mullins said. “Moore. Phyllis Moore? She was knocked by it—by Ingraham’s being killed. For a girl who just worked there, she took it pretty hard. Could be, she worked overtime.”

  It could be, Bill agreed.

  “He calls it off,” Mullins said, and spiked out the cherry from his glass. “She takes it hard and shoots him. Then the key’s no good any more, so she puts it in the desk and—” He stopped.

  “
Yes,” Bill said. “There’s a catch there, isn’t there. You said the middle drawer? When he fell across the desk, his body pushed the drawer closed, if it was open. Held it closed, whether it was open before or not. So—the key was there before he was killed.”

  “O.K.,” Mullins said. “She gave it back. He put it in the drawer. Then she shot him.”

  “It’s not as good that way, is it?”

  “Well,” Mullins said, “pretty near. Of course—look who’s here, Loot—I mean captain.”

  Pam and Jerry North were following Raul into the Oak Room. Pam waved. When they were nearer, she told Bill that they had been looking all over for him. Jerry looked at her. “Well,” she said, “we were going to, right after dinner.”

  V

  Tuesday, 7:15 P.M. to 8:50 P.M.

  The police cannot be everywhere, and do not try to be. It was obvious that any of the seven men and women, counting a boy as a man, who worked in the law offices of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb might be the murderer of Ingraham. It was further obvious that if one of them was, any other who guessed at his identity might be in danger. In a city with enough policemen in it (but such a city does not exist anywhere) each of the seven might have been assigned to a pair of detectives—although three would really have been better—and so observed and, if need arose, protected. This would have required fourteen detectives, or twenty-one, and these were not available for so nebulous an enterprise.

  So there was no official observation of Phyllis Moore, as, on the sidewalk in front of the office building in Forty-fourth Street, she said good night to Mary Burton and Dorothy Lynch and began to walk east in Forty-fourth toward the Grand Central. She was slim and moved quickly; a cloth coat was wrapped tight about her and the wind hurried her along the sidewalk. When a tall man behind her, bare-headed in the cold air, said, “Wait a minute,” she did not slow her pace or look around. “What’s the sense of this?” the man said, and overtook her without effort, and walked beside her.