Free Death Takes a Bow by Frances Lockridge

drawn him aside; now, nodding, he took advantage of the pause.
    â€œWe may as well sit down somewhere,” he suggested. “In that little room over there, perhaps.” He pointed toward the door to the speakers’ room.
    â€œWhy not?” Burden said. “Although you’ve got what I know. However—anything to help.”
    He preceded Weigand to the speakers’ room, stood while Weigand switched on a desk lamp, then sat down and offered cigarettes. Weigand took one. For a moment, neither said anything.
    â€œIt’s a damn shame,” Burden said suddenly. “A Goddamn shame.”
    â€œMurder is,” Weigand agreed. “Or, if this isn’t murder, why death is. Tell me more about Sproul when you knew him.”
    Burden disavowed information of importance, but talked willingly. As he talked, Weigand, sorting and accepting, making allowances here for the kind of man who was talking, trying to discount prejudices without discounting facts, began to draw in his own mind an outline of Sproul alive. It was a first step, something to go on.
    Sproul was, it appeared, around forty-five when death caught up with him. He had come from somewhere in the West, showing up in the Village a year or so after the other war. Burden, who had also showed up in the Village, thought he had met him then, but found the memory vague. At least, he had known people who knew Sproul, who was then only Vic Sproul. Then, a year or so later, he had disappeared from the Village and was supposed to have gone back home.
    â€œPeople came and went in those days, you know,” Burden said. “I did myself. It wasn’t the old, old Village even then, you understand, but it was more than it is now. Or less, depending on how you look at it. You got the feeling that you knew ‘everybody,’ in which you didn’t count the people you didn’t know. I mean the people who just lived there and went about their ordinary business. The people you knew—the people Sproul and I knew—were the people who sometimes called themselves ‘Villagers’ and who usually called other people ‘Up-towners.’ They were also sort of interested in writing or painting or making linoleum blocks or something. They came and went—beat it back home and earned some money or got some given them; came back and stayed a while. You remember?”
    â€œI was an up-towner,” Weigand said. “But I got the picture. And Sproul came and went?”
    Sproul had. Several times, Burden thought. He was sure that he had known Sproul in, he thought, 1924—known him as an individual, not only as a name which was known, vaguely or sharply, to most of the rather amorphous group. Sproul had been writing then and seemed to be in funds. This puzzled everybody, because Sproul was a great one for the misunderstood writer and the crass public.
    â€œWe didn’t know it then,” Burden said, “but what he had was his tongue in his cheek. Even then. Because he was making a pretty fair living writing for the pulps and the rest was—well, so much hog-wash. He just thought it was funny to pull our earnest young legs.” Burden smiled at a memory. “As probably it was,” he said. “As probably it was. We grow up. But Sproul grew up earlier than most of us.”
    â€œHe must have been around—what?” Weigand interrupted.
    â€œThat’s right,” Burden said. “He wasn’t so terribly young, was he. Thirty, probably, this way or that. I was about twenty-five.” He was reflective again. “But I must have been a lot younger,” he said. “Or not so bright. I was pretty serious about it. No tongue in cheek. However—we all grew up.” For a moment it seemed to Weigand that Y. Charles Burden was not altogether satisfied with his own growing up. The moment passed.
    Burden had, it developed, been discussing Sproul’s early practicality only a week or