The Judge Is Reversed (22 page)

The insurance investigators had worked hard on this; worked hard to find some way in which Madeline Somers gained by the other's death. They had come up with a wall a good deal thicker, more impervious, than that through which the two youngish women had been heard laughing.

The loose strip had been reported—reported two days before the accident; reported by Madeline Somers, who had said that the management had better do something before somebody fell down the stairs and broke his neck. Used those words, prophetically. The words anybody might use, making need of a repair seem urgent. Nothing to go on there. The management had checked, found conditions as described. A man was to have come the next morning to replace the faulty stripping. (And had. Which did Louise Rush no good.)

Madeline had told her simple story, and told it straightforwardly. So far as the captain Weigand had talked to—he had been a lieutenant then—could tell, and he had interviewed Madeline Somers, who seemed greatly shocked by what had happened. She and Louise had known each other only briefly, but Louise had been a lovely person. It was a terrible thing to have happened.

“Convinced me,” the Los Angeles captain said. “Convinced the insurance guys, who wanted something different.”

Miss Somers had stayed on at the apartment for only a few days. Then she had moved away—first, briefly, to a residence hotel; afterward to New York. When she was established in New York, she had sent back a forwarding address. There had, however, been little mail to forward. “Sort of a loney,” the Los Angeles captain had guessed.

Bill Weigand considered. That part of it came together—Alex Somers, “Cousin Alex,” had died about two years before. Six months would have been quite long enough for John Blanchard, as administrator, to discover that Madeline Somers was the heir—or one of the heirs—to notify her, to—The two women had seemed especially gay during the couple of days just before Louise Rush died. Because Madeline Somers had learned she was to inherit money? And offered to let Louise help spend some of it when it arrived? Enough, certainly, to make them cheerful—notably cheerful.

It worked out well enough. Miss Somers, her friend dead, had come to New York to be—call it nearer the source of supply. Had opened her cat shop to pass the time of waiting. Conceivably, got an advance against the inheritance? That should not have been impossible. Or, had enough money of her own to open the shop? Quite possible, also.

It worked out well enough. The trouble was that it did not really work out
to
anything. A sad happening in Madeline Somers's past. No evident connection with the—

For the love of God, Bill Weigand thought. Call yourself a detective!

He reached for the telephone. He made three calls. The first was to the North apartment. He was answered, this time—answered by Martha. Mrs. North was not at home. She had left a note—she always left notes when she left before Martha arrived. (Otherwise Martha might be worried or, at any rate, puzzled.) This note read: “Gone to look at a new cat.” Martha read it to Bill Weigand, and was thanked. She said, “Mrs. North's all right, captain?” and Bill said, “Sure,” and hung up to call again. This time he called the office of North Books, Inc. Mr. North had taken an author out to lunch. Where he had not said; when he would be back he had not said. It could be pretty late, Miss Abigail Clark told Weigand, speaking from experience. Sometimes these lunches with authors—The third call was to precinct, asking cooperation.

17

Captain William Weigand parked his Buick—which looked like any Buick of its year and model, if one did not notice the rather long radio antenna—at a meter space on Madison Avenue. Law-abiding, he put a coin in the meter and turned the knob. He walked, a man in no evident hurry, half a block and a man in slacks and odd jacket, walking toward him, also in no apparent hurry, said, “Happen to have a match on you?” Bill gave him matches. “O.K.,” the man said, “only looks like nobody's home.” He sauntered on. After half a dozen strides he apparently decided he was going in the wrong direction, and turned, and sauntered back.

Bill went down two steps from the sidewalk level and looked at a door—at a lowered shade with one word on it. The word was “Closed.” The man in slacks and jacket stopped at the top of the two steps and Bill turned. “Thanks for the matches,” the man said, and held out the folder, which Bill took. “Covered in the rear,” the man said. “Station wagon backed up to the loading dock.” Bill said, “Right. Thanks,” and the man walked on, in no hurry—and not far.

Bill reached a finger toward a bell-push beside the door, and stayed the finger. Pamela North had gone to look at a new cat. A harmless enough activity, surely. But—Pamela North, engaged in reasonably harmless activities, now and then gets herself into spots of trouble. So far, she had got herself out of them. But still—

There is a small instrument, recently perfected, which greatly simplifies an ancient procedure. It is, authority hopes, limited to the uses of policemen and locksmiths. It is by no means in general issue even to policemen. Weigand had never used his before, except to try it out after a demonstration. This was, he decided, a good—if highly illegal—time to begin.

It was not, of course, as quick as a key would have been. Nobody had contended that it would be. But it was really hardly any trouble at all to use. Having used it, Bill opened the door quietly, and quietly moved inside.

He moved into an empty room—a room like a living room, but with a pedestal in the center of the room. Nothing on the pedestal. Bill stood still and listened, and heard nothing. Bill parted curtains and went into another room, this one with cages on either side—and a few cats in cages. The cats looked at him. A Siamese cat spoke in welcome, and Bill froze.

Nothing happened. It began to appear that there was, indeed, nobody home—that the bird had flown. (If the bird sought, which was still by no means certain.) On the other hand, Siamese cats talk a good deal, some of them to themselves. People who know them get used to this, may pay no attention. Bill stood and listened. He heard nothing and moved on across the room—moved with what he trusted was an appropriately catlike tread. He reached a door and stood close to it.

He heard something then—heard from beyond the door a shuffling sound and then, faintly, a human “uh!”, soft, as if a reaction to physical effort. Bill turned the knob of the door, loosened the catch as silently as he could, and pulled the door open as quickly as he could.

A sturdy woman in a beige-colored silk suit had, for an instant, her back to him—for that instant she was still shoving at a very large, evidently quite heavy, cardboard carton. A carton as big as a wardrobe trunk. A carton lashed around with heavy brown cord. She was pushing it toward the rear of a long room.

The tableau ended in the instant Bill saw it—ended with the sound of the opening door. The sturdy woman whirled. Her face was pink—pink, Bill supposed, from the effort of her shoving.

“How did you—” the woman said, loudly. “We're cl—” She did not finish. Mind had caught up with speech.

She moved away from the big carton. She was not touching it. And the carton, untouched, swayed uncertainly, bumpily, from side to side.

For an instant she looked at the moving carton. Not at Bill Weigand.

“Police,” Bill said, and started toward her, and she ran—ran heavily, ran down the long room toward a door at the end of it.

“Miss Rush!” Bill said, and did not raise his voice. “It's no good. You'd better—”

She did not stop. She ran on; she tugged open a door at the end of the room.

And then she stopped.

“Going some place?” the broad-shouldered man she faced said. “Don't want her to, do we, captain?”

Bill said, “No,” and said it over his shoulder. He was looking for a knife. He found it on a counter, under a spindle of heavy brown cord—three-eighths of an inch in diameter, three ply.

“Doesn't want you to go any place,” the broad-shouldered man said to the sturdy woman, from whose face pinkness now had faded. He moved toward her. She backed into the room.

Bill slashed at the brown cord around the big carton. Holes had been cut in the top of the carton—air holes. The last lashing fell away and Bill tore at the top flaps of the carton, which opened to his tugging.

Pamela North, doubled into a kind of knot, glared up at him. He had never seen such angry eyes, Bill thought, and reached for her.

A stocking ran through her mouth, was knotted behind her head. Bill, careful now, cut that first.

“Awful woman,” Pam North said. “Going to take me to an accident. It hurts.”

What hurt—what would have hurt anyone—was the bite of cord—the brown, the ropelike, cord—with which she was bound; with which she was bound into a knot; a shape to fit the capacity of the carton. Bill's knife slashed.

“I tried to make it bump,” Pam North said, sitting on the floor, rubbing her ankles. (The bonds had started there, been drawn tightest there—had started with the line passed through the fixed loop of a bowline to make a running loop.) “Did it bump?”

“Yes, Pam,” Bill Weigand said. “It bumped.”

“She—?” Pam said.

“Behind you.”

Pam whirled, as if on a turntable.

“All I came for was to look at a cat,” Pam North said. “That was
all
—Miss. Somers.”

Pam is customarily soft of voice. She made the woman's name an epithet.

“No, Pam,” Bill said above her. “Not Miss Somers. Dead a long time, Miss Somers is. Fell downstairs and broke her neck, didn't she, Miss Rush? Miss Louise Rush.”

The sturdy woman, whose arms were now gripped firmly from behind, did not say anything at all.

Pam twisted to look up at Bill Weigand.

“Rush?” she said. Bill nodded his head. “Rush?” Pam said again, disbelief—incomprehension—still in her voice.

“Uh-huh,” Bill said. “That's the name they'll try her under.”

“Are you sure you're all right?” Jerry asked, with anxiety which had diminished only a little. “Yes, dear,” Pam said, for what she thought must be the twentieth time. “I keep telling you—”

Jerry crossed the room and knelt by her chair so that he could put his arms around her.

“Perfectly all right,” Pam said, when her lips were again available. “The post had carpet on it, you know.”

Jerry tilted back and sat on his heels.

“Some day,” he said, and spoke darkly. “Some day, you're going to get yourself killed.”

She said,
“Jerry!”
to that. She said, “All I went to do was to look at a cat. We agreed on that. Didn't we?”

“Well—”

“And it's not my fault if she—this Miss Rush, only I still keep thinking Somers—if she thought I was—” Pam paused. “Detecting,” she said. “Actually, I was as innocent as—as Winkle.” She paused, obviously in thought. “I think no about her,” Pam said. “She's a doll and everything, but I'd always think of cartons.” She paused again. “The insides of cartons,” she said, amplifying. “I'd never thought about them before. Dark. And very stuffy, after the first few minutes.”

She had been, at a guess, in the carton for at least half an hour—perhaps longer. In it while it was tilted back and forth as the sturdy woman they would have to begin to think of as Louise Rush had tied heavy brown cord around it; in it, then, for some time longer, while nothing happened. “While she went to get the station wagon,” Pam said, going over it again. “To take me to an accident.”

She had only been knocked out for a few seconds—actually not “out,” in the precise sense, for any time at all. “It was always sort of blurry,” Pam said. That was after the sturdy woman had hit her, from behind, with the square club of the scratching post—the padded club. When the blur ended, she was already partly tied up, and gagged with the stocking.

“My
own
stocking!” Pam said, with remembered, with renewed, indignation.

“Yes, Pam,” Jerry said, and stood up. “Very dirty billiards, to use your own stocking.” He went back to his own chair, his own martini. Pam sipped hers.

“All the time she talked,” Pam said. “Called me all sorts of names—snoop and I don't know what all. And all I'd gone for was to look at the cat. If she hadn't been so wrong—thinking I was a detective when I wasn't—she might—would she have got away with it?”

Jerry didn't know. He assumed not, since Bill had already, obviously, been on to it. Probably, the misconception in Miss Somers's—no, Miss Rush's—mind only hurried things along. Bill would tell them more when he arrived. Which ought to be any—

She had not only called Pam names. She had, although not in precise terms—“just you wait and see, you little snoop”—described Pam's future, which was to have been brief. She had said this as she tilted the big carton on its side and rolled Pam into it, and set it upright again.

Pam was to be taken off to have an accident. She could not, obviously, have it there, in the shop. And she could not die until she had it. “They've got ways of telling,” the sturdy woman had told Pam, needlessly. Pam was not sure that Louise Rush had worked out her own plans in any detail; suspected she was making them up as she went along. At any rate, when she was putting down the top flaps of the carton—after saying, “All tucked in, dearie?” in a very unpleasant voice—she had said, “Got it! Let him and that girl of his explain it.”

“I thought—” Pam said, and paused. “Actually,” she said, “I don't know I did, then. I was too scared. Don't think I wasn't scared.”

“I don't,” Jerry said. “Latham and his daughter? Have your accident near where they live?”

“I think so,” Pam said. “Maybe she's talked. Told Bill. Maybe—”

The doorbell rang. It would be Bill Weigand; it was Bill Weigand. He still looked tired, but now in a different way—now he looked tired but satisfied. He would very much like a drink; seated with it, he proved his statement. It was after he had taken a longish swallow and put the glass down on the table beside him that Jerry said, “Well? Has she?”