Free Payoff for the Banker by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Lieutenant?”
    It hadn’t been. But there was no point in insisting on discreet intentions. Weigand listened, dutifully, while the thunder rolled. After some time he was permitted to hang up, on the understanding that he had to solve the murder of George Merle within minutes—fifteen at the outside—get Mary Hunter away from Mr. and Mrs. North and Mr. and Mrs. North out of the case, and send Sergeant Mullins immediately downtown with a report of progress for the press. Weigand looked at the telephone for a moment after he replaced it and sighed. In some ways, he thought, Inspector O’Malley was getting to be altogether too much like the elder Clarence Day. Life with O’Malley was something, too.
    He got Mullins out of the detectives’ room and sent him south, into the jaws of the inspector. He went in search of Laurel Burke, known sometimes as Mrs. Oscar Murdock. It would be interesting if George Merle, when he made his last visit to anyone, had thought he was visiting Mr. and Mrs. Murdock. It would be, perhaps, even more interesting if he had thought he was visiting only Mrs. Murdock, whose first initial was “L” for Laurel.

5
    T UESDAY , 9:30 P.M. TO 10:20 P.M.
    Mary Hunter had seemed to be moving in a dream after Joshua Merle left Charles. She had finished her drink in a dream and eaten—or moved her food in a semblance of eating—in a dream. After one or two efforts by Jerry North which brought almost imperceptible, but unquestionably negative, movements of the head from Pam—they had left her in the dream. And having dinner with a sad, if pretty dreamer, haunted by her discovery of murder—and very possibly, Pam thought, by something more—had not encouraged either appetite or conversation. So the Norths had appeared almost as dreamy as the girl; it was evidently only absent-mindedness which led Jerry to order fresh martinis after they were at their table. Presumably it was only abstraction which led him to drink his thirstily, and his prolonged gaze at Pam’s half-full glass after he had finished was evidently only the gaze of a man who was thinking of something quite different. He seemed quite surprised when Pam pushed the half-full glass toward him, but the surprise passed quickly, with the martini.
    The girl had merely acquiesced to their suggestion that a hotel on lower Fifth Avenue would be handy to where they were, and when she walked between them—the necessary block or two—she might have been a sleepwalker. Only after she had registered and turned to the Norths from the desk did she make an effort to shake the mist from her mind.
    Then she tried to make her voice casual, or seemed to try. She said they had both been wonderful.
    â€œIt was an amazing thing for you to do,” she said. “You must have thought I was crazy—to call that way on people I didn’t know. To drag you into—into my mess.”
    Jerry said it wasn’t anything. The girl said oh, but it was. Pam looked at both of them. She spoke suddenly, with no abstraction at all in her voice.
    â€œDo you know,” she said, “you talk as if we’d filled in at bridge. Or paid your bill at a restaurant because you’d left your purse at home. Or told you that Commerce Street is two blocks down and one to the right.” Pam paused. “Only it isn’t, of course,” she said. “It’s—where is it, Jerry?”
    â€œWell,” Jerry said, “it’s not really down at all. It’s straight across, just about where Fourth Street and Twelfth Street cross.”
    â€œYou,” Pam said, “are thinking of Bank Street. Not that it isn’t perfectly natural—Bank—Commerce. But I meant the Cherry Lane Street. That’s Commerce. And it’s downtown, with a theater on it. Or used to be.”
    Jerry North ran a hand abstractedly through his hair.
    â€œLook, darling,” he said. “Who gives a damn