Lockridge Frances & Richard - The Norths Meet Murder Read online

  THE NORTHS

  MEET MURDER

  FRANCES AND RICHARD

  LOCKRIDGE, 1940

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25: 4:45 P.M. TO 5:15 P.M.

  MR. NORTH came home rather early that Tuesday afternoon, and as soon as he came in Mrs. North realized he was in a mood. He was, for one thing, annoyed about the weather, because it was behaving so irregularly. He said that he was annoyed with the weather and that, as far as he was concerned, he wished it would make up its mind, because if it made up its mind to be summer all year round one could at least dress for it.

  “As it is-” he said, going off into his own room angrily, and beginning to thump shoes.

  “What?” said Mrs. North, from the living-room. She could hear that Mr. North was still talking, but not what he was talking about. In a moment, however, he came back in shirtsleeves and slippers.

  “-in sixty-eight years,” Mr. North said, coming back.

  “What?” said Mrs. North. “What’s in sixty-eight years?”

  Mr. North looked at her and inquired, rather peevishly, if she hadn’t been listening to a word he said. Mrs. North said that, if he was going to wander off whenever he started to say something-

  “The weather,” Mr. North said. “The warmest October in sixty-eight years. In the paper.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. North. She thought a minute.

  “Why sixty-eight years?” she said. “It’s always sixty-eight years, for some reason, and I’ve never understood why.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. North, “that-well, the Weather Bureau’s sixty-eight years old.”

  Mrs. North said, “Oh,” and then said it was warm, wasn’t it, and that she had a fine idea.

  “So,” said Mr. North, “have I. A very fine idea. Cocktails, or maybe Tom Collinses. And your making them.”

  “No,” Mrs. North said, “I mean a really fine idea. I’ve had it since yesterday.”

  “Look,” said Mr. North, “cocktails are enough fine idea for me. Just cocktails, or maybe Tom Collinses.”

  Mrs. North nodded and said that she thought that would be all right, too, but hers was a real idea. “And, anyway, you’re getting so you want drinks every afternoon,” she said. “I don’t think that can be very good for you, do you?”

  “Listen-” said Mr. North. Then he rose, coldly, and went to the kitchen. After a while he came back with two Tom Collinses. They sipped and said, “Ah!” and Mr. North, mollified, inquired whether it needed more sugar. Mrs. North said it was perfect the way it was, and watched while the drink slowly dissolved Mr. North’s mood. He admitted it was dissolved by smiling at her and saying that the thing was, one got all set for cool weather, and then warm weather left its mark. “Leaves you drained,” Mr. North said, leaving his glass in the same condition. Mrs. North nodded, and decided to go back to her fine idea.

  “What would you think about a party?” Mrs. North said. Mr. North made small, discouraging sounds, so she continued rapidly. “Not an expensive party,” she said. “Just a party upstairs. I thought of it yesterday and it’s perfectly all right with Mrs. Buano, and we can dance. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Upstairs?” said Mr. North, following at a little distance.

  Mrs. North nodded.

  “On the top floor,” she said. “Where it’s been vacant so long, poor Mrs. Buano, and we could fix it up and have the electricity turned on and take the radio up and-“

  “Listen,” said Mr. North, “I don’t think I’m getting this. Why a party? Why upstairs?”

  The party, Mrs. North said, because it had been a long time since they had had a party and she thought it was about time, and upstairs because there was so much room and she had just thought of it. “That’s the fine idea,” she said. “People can just leave their things down here.” Mr. North pulled himself together and made more drinks, and afterward he went at the matter seriously, although he did not then, or later, clearly determine whether they were to have the party because Mrs. North had remembered the top floor apartment was vacant, or whether they were using the top floor apartment because they had to have a party. He tried to clear this point up for some time, too, because such points are among those Mr. North likes to have clear.

  The top floor apartment was, in itself, clear enough, and Mr. North admitted to himself, and after a time to Mrs. North, that it would be a good place to have a party, other things being equal and if they were really going to have a party. And he agreed that Mrs. Buano, who owned the house, would probably be glad to let them use the apartment, which she advertised as a studio, since it was at the moment of very little use to her. It was a fine apartment, too, and neither of the Norths had ever understood why it was so difficult for Mrs. Buano to rent - why it was difficult to rent even before it was used for purposes which, for a very considerable time, made any thought of renting it out of the question.

  The apartment occupied the whole of the additional story Mrs. Buano had had built on the house in a halcyon day when it seemed to most of the owners of old houses in the neighborhood of Washington Square that there would never be living space enough for those who wanted to rent it. Below the added story, the house was standard - the three-story and semi-basement brick house which was, for a great many years, the mean of New York domestic architecture. In such houses, almost all New Yorkers of sufficient duration and normally migratory habit have lived at one time or another.

  Those houses were built, seldom less than fifty years ago, as dwellings for one family, but that did not last, as nothing in New York lasts. The families dwindled or moved or lost their money; the houses were remodeled into apartments and those were, around the square, occupied for some years by people convinced that everything south of Fourteenth Street was quaint. Those people dwindled, too, and after them came occupants not too unlike, except, of course, for timely change of mores, those who had lived in such houses first - save for change of habit, that is, and evident shrinkage, which permitted them to be content with a fraction of the space necessary to the fuller, and possibly in many respects, more arduous, life of their ancestors. Basements which had housed kitchens housed young couples engaged in advertising; parlor floors were occupied by the more solvent journalists or stock brokers, and the floors above were occupied by others of divers occupations and, in almost all instances, young or youngish or, at any rate, not old. In general, those living on the second floors did not know those living on the third floors; it was equally probable that they knew people who knew the people who lived on the third floors, so that always, leading a normally social life in that stratum, you were being introduced to people who knew people you also knew. As Mrs. North said, people overlapped.

  The Buano house stood shoulder to shoulder with almost identical brick-front houses in Greenwich Place, from any part of which, since it is only a block long, one may hear the children playing in Washington Square, where children play at the tops of their voices. Mrs. Buano’s predecessor had made it over; Mrs. Buano had given it an added head. And Mrs. Buano reserved the basement and first floor to herself.

  The house was some thirty feet wide and perhaps seventy deep. The front had not been remodeled, so, facing it, one faced a broad flight of brown steps, leading up from the sidewalk to double front doors. At the right of the steps there was an iron railing, broken by a gate, and, going through the gate and down a few stairs to the left, one came to Mrs. Buano’s basement front door, under the main stairs. Although Mrs. Buano had two doors opening off the common hall on the first floor, she and her guests commonly used the basement entrance as the more convenient, and in conformity with the unfailing human incl
ination to go downstairs rather than up them whenever possible.

  Going up the brownstone stairs, you came to double doors, unlocked. Opening them you were in a square vestibule and facing an inner set of double doors, which were locked. If you lived there, you had a key to these inside doors and continued on your way. But if you were visiting someone who lived there, proceedings were slightly more difficult. Then you turned to the left wall of the vestibule and looked for your host’s doorbell.

  The left wall of the vestibule had set into it the four mailboxes of the tenants - Mrs. Buano, the Norths, the Nelsons of the third floor, and the fourth-floor box, at the moment unnamed. Each box was identified by a name card slipped into a slot, and the Nelsons’ box was further identified by being full of the Nelsons’ mail, which the Nelsons had not had forwarded when they went on vacation to California. Above the boxes was an open grating.

  To the right of the mail boxes were four bells, each similarly identified with the name of one of the tenants. The Norths’ identification card was cut from a calling card; the Nelsons’ was typed; Mrs. Buano’s was hand-printed in ink and the bell connecting with the fourth floor was, generally, unidentified. If you were calling, you pressed the suitable button and a bell rang angrily in the apartment of your host, usually making him jump convulsively. Then, in theory, he went to a wall telephone in his apartment and asked who you were, his voice emerging from a grating in the vestibule. You yelled back into the grating and told him. But these amenities were commonly dispensed with, because the system was usually obscurely broken down. Newcomers to the house yelled valiantly into their telephones for a couple of months, and their guests yelled valiantly back, but communication was seldom effectively established. Experienced tenants, like the Norths, who had been there six years, merely pressed a little button set into their wall telephone.

  Pressure on this little button actuated a mechanism in the lock of the downstairs door, and set up a furious clicking there. Inexperienced callers stared at the inner vestibule doors doubtfully when this clicking began and then, catching on, threw their weight against them. If everything had gone properly, one of the doors then opened, letting them into the inner hall, with heavily carpeted stairs leading up. The hall, in spite of a skylight at the top of the house, was usually dark; now and then, when a bulb burned out, it was almost entirely dark. Like everything else in the Buano house, it was also very clean; in the winter it was usually too warm, but in the summer - because of the thick walls of the house and old-fashioned ideas of spaciousness - it was surprisingly cool. To reach the Norths, you went up one flight.

  The Norths lived on the second floor - once the parlor floor - in two big rooms and two little rooms. The big rooms, one facing the street and the other the rear garden, had fireplaces and high ceilings and deeply recessed windows and were, respectively, bedroom and living-room. There was a hall and bath between them.

  Mr. North’s study was hall-bedroom size, and at the front; and in the rear was its twin, the kitchen. Martha, the maid, almost filled the kitchen, but did not seem discomfited, nor, the Norths noted thankfully, handicapped.

  The floor above the Norths was similarly laid out, although with lower ceilings, and was almost always rented. The plans for the top floor, however, had eliminated the study, and the living-room stretched the width of the house in front, with a sweep of windows admitting north light riotously. That was why Mrs. Buano called it the studio, and there had been painters in it. Recently, however, it had proved that everyone who wanted a studio wanted it for a piano and pupils, and on that Mrs. Buano, who had firm ideas, set a firm foot. Better, she said, vacancy than pianos, and pupils always on the stairs.

  “Tracking,” Mrs. Buano said.

  Thus it was vacant, as per announcement on a swinging board on the front of the house, and available for the party.

  “And,” said Mrs. North, finishing her second Tom Collins, “I’ve got it all worked out. Come on.”

  “Come on?” said Mr. North. “Where?”

  “We’ll go look at it,” Mrs. North said. “I know where we want the radio and you tell me what you think about yellow paper.”

  “Listen,” said Mr. North, “why yellow paper, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Hallowe’en,” said Mrs. North, “or, anyway, thereabouts. For decoration. Come on.”

  Mr. North sighed, but the Tom Collinses had mellowed him and he went on. They went up the two flights and came to the door of the top-floor apartment, which was closed.

  “All locked up,” said Mr. North, quickly. “We can look tomorrow.” He turned, ready to start down again, but Mrs. North said, a little impatiently, that it wasn’t locked, and proved her point by pushing it open. “I was up yesterday and it wasn’t locked,” she said. “Mrs. Buano leaves it unlocked so people can look at it without her going upstairs. Come on.”

  Mr. North, who wanted to go and mix another Collins, sighed and followed her in. It was, he saw at once, dusty and forsaken-looking. And, although a faint breeze came through a partly opened window at the rear, it was extremely hot. Mr. North looked around quickly and said all right.

  “All right for the party,” he said. “Fine for the party. Let’s go.”

  Mrs. North put a restraining hand on his arm, and Mr. North stopped.

  “Here,” she said, looking around the smaller rear room, “we’ll have the bar.”

  “Bar?” said Mr. North.

  Mrs. North led him through the hallway to the big studio room.

  “And dancing here,” she said, “with the radio over there.” She pointed. “And you’ll have to get the electricity turned on, and see Mrs. Buano about the water.”

  “Water?” said Mr. North.

  “It’s turned off, too,” Mrs. North said. “Everything’s turned off, and we’ll have to get somebody to clean, unless - “

  “No,” Mr. North said, “I certainly won’t. We’ll get somebody to clean.”

  There would, Mrs. North pointed out, be a lot of cleaning to do in the studio room, and in the rear room. The kitchen, since they could cook anything they wanted cooked in their own apartment, didn’t matter so much. And there was, of course, the bathroom. That would have to be cleaned, of course, because people -

  “Yes,” said Mr. North, quickly, “I see that.”

  Mrs. North’s heels clicked on the bare floor as she went to examine the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed, and she opened it quickly. The bathroom, without a window, was black vacancy, with only faint light filtering in from the hall.

  “A match,” Mrs. North said; “we’ll just look.”

  Mr. North, behind her, flicked on his lighter and held its wavering flame above her shoulder. Both peered into the bathroom. And then Mrs. North’s breath came in, with a kind of shudder, and Mr. North shook out the light and, seizing her shoulders, drew her back against him, holding her firmly.

  “All right,” said Mr. North, quickly, and keeping the shake out of his own voice. “All right, Pamela.” The voice came through to Mrs. North, and she managed not to scream, and in a moment he had pulled her back from the door, and was saying, over and over:

  “All right, kid. All right.”

  She was quiet after a moment, and nodded, although she still did not dare to try to speak. Mr. North held his hands for a moment firmly on her shoulders, and then flicked on his lighter again and went back, because he had to, to look at what they had seen. It was not a pleasant thing to look at.

  Whoever had hit the man who was lying in the tub had hit him much harder than was necessary, even admitting a murderer’s necessities. The head lay against the sloping end of the tub with a peculiar, horrible flatness, and that, quite clearly, was because blows had crushed in the back of the head. The face, too, was battered and discolored, but there did not seem to be any other mark on the body. Mr. North could see that, because the body was entirely naked - naked and white in the uncertain light of the little flame. After Mr. North had looked at it a moment it seemed to him to begin
to float, and then Mr. North turned and went out of the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Mrs. North was standing where he had left her and she looked at him once. Then she was clinging to him, shaking, and saying something he could not understand about the party. He thought she did not understand what she was saying, either, because she seemed to feel that there was something horrible in their having planned to give a party.

  II

  TUESDAY 5:15 P.M. TO 7 P.M.

  MRS. NORTH was still trembling a little when they reached their own apartment, but she was sure that she was perfectly all right. “Only it was awful,” she said, “just when we were talking about a party.” She had, she said, always wondered how people felt when they discovered a murder, and then she looked a little puzzled, and said that even now she didn’t know, really.

  “Things happen too quickly to have feelings about them, don’t they?” she said. “I mean, by that time things are over, and you begin to have feelings about the kind of feelings you had. And it isn’t as if we knew him, of course.”

  She was, Mr. North saw, coming out of it quickly - much more quickly, as a matter of fact, than he was, and he thought that it must have something to do with speed of perception. He, for example, was only now really shaky and glad to sit down. He sat down and reached for the telephone. “Police?” Mrs. North said, and Mr. North nodded.

  “You know,” he said, “I never called the police. I never really thought I would.” Mrs. North nodded.

  But, an indefatigable reader of directions, Mr. North remembered how to call the police, and dialed the operator. She was cool and impersonal and a long way off, where nothing had happened.

  “I want the police,” Mr. North said. Then he remembered the phrase. “I want a policeman,” he said.

  “What?” said the operator, as if it had come to her very suddenly. Perhaps, Mr. North thought, she has never called the police, either. Mr. North told her again and gave his name and address. “It seems to be murder,” he added, because he wanted to tell somebody about so strange and awful a thing.