Free The Dishonest Murderer by Frances Lockridge Page A

when you’d expect them to be? Somebody too worried? That sort of thing.”
    The Norths thought it over. Jerry shook his head first. He said he had spent most of his time with, or near, Admiral Satterbee. The admiral seemed to be worried chiefly about the protective storage of warships. “Shop talk,” Jerry said. “I don’t remember any talk of Kirkhill. I did gather he was expected and hadn’t arrived.”
    â€œShe was worried,” Pam said. “Mrs. Haven. About as you’d expect. I mean, I didn’t know then because I didn’t know why, but now it seems about what I’d have expected if I’d—heavens! Where am I?”
    â€œRight,” Bill said. “I didn’t suppose you’d have seen anything. I was passing by, did see the lights. It was a coincidence you had been at the party Kirkhill—missed.” He grinned. “I got more than I expected,” he said. “Unofficially.”
    There was a long pause.
    â€œWell,” Jerry said, “she is worried about someone else. Needlessly, probably. And you’re suggesting we look into it? Find out what we can? Tell you what we find out?”
    â€œIf you like,” Bill said. “Forget it if you like. Or—look the ground over and then make up your minds. If you feel you’d be in an untenable position, drop out.”
    â€œSubtle,” Pam said. “Very subtle. If we drop out, it’s because we’ve found something to make us suspicious of Mrs. Haven. Then, whatever you say, we have to tell you what it is.”
    Weigand merely smiled.
    â€œOr,” Jerry said, “we tell you now what she told us when she had no reason to think that what she said would go to the police.”
    Bill Weigand smiled again.
    â€œOf course,” he said, “you’d be helping the daughter of an author. An author you’ve bet money on. Who ought to have peace and quiet for those revisions you were talking about. Right?”
    Jerry North said “Damn!”
    â€œAnyway,” Bill Weigand said, “I’ll tell you what we know so far. It’s an odd setup; Mullins will say it’s screwy.” He smiled. “He’ll say, ‘Look, Loot, this is one for the Norths.’ Your public.” He paused again. Then he said here it was, so far as they’d got.
    The body was found a little after eleven o’clock that night, the last night of the year. A patrolman, working north on lower Broadway, below Canal, cold and bored on a deserted street, flashed his light in a doorway, as he had, expecting nothing, finding nothing, in fifty doorways. This one, the doorway of a cheap lunchroom which had been closed for hours, was different. A big man was sitting in the entry, his legs stretched out, his back to the door. He looked like a drunk; the patrolman said he smelled like a drunk. But he was dead. Snow had begun to drift over his outstretched legs.
    It looked like a routine thing. A man with no place in the world, except a flop house when his luck was in, a saloon on the Bowery when he had a dollar or two, had had a dollar or two that last night of the year. He had drunk it up; he had had enough to get too much of the stuff they sold across a dirty bar in a dirty room to hopeless men; to men who had not even the pathetic human hope that a new year would be a better year. He had used up his money, gone out of the bar—out of smelly warmth into biting cold, into a harsh wind—and walked in no direction. He had got sleepy, tried to get into the lunchroom, in his muddle not realizing it had closed, gone to sleep as he stood there and slumped down, and then had frozen. That was what it looked like, at first.
    The wagon was summoned, came for him. At the morgue, they might well have done nothing about him for hours had not a doctor, starting home after a late post mortem, stopped by the body and looked at it idly. The doctor had thought vaguely that the