Free Murder within Murder by Frances Lockridge

it’s Backley,” Stein said. “Backley is another member of the firm. He’s out of town, but’s expected back this evening. Mason says Backley is the man who has really handled the Gipson affairs and had most of the personal contacts with them. He says we’ll want to talk to Backley.”
    Weigand nodded. He said they would.
    â€œAnd,” he said, “with the children.” He tapped his desk gently. “Rather soon,” he added.

5
    W EDNESDAY , 10:20 A . M . TO 1:45 P . M .
    Amelia Gipson had completed research into three murder cases before she provided one. The results lay on Pamela North’s desk in neat typescript. They were summaries; the skeletons of old tragedies. The one uppermost was headed: “Notes on the Joyce Wentworth Murder for Mr. Hill.” Mr. Hill was the writer who would put the intangible flesh of words on the skeleton of fact Miss Gipson had provided. It was cut to Mr. Hill’s taste, was the Wentworth murder. It was unsolved and meaningless; it piqued the curiosity which it so little satisfied. It would give Mr. Hill room to turn around in, which was what Mr. Hill liked. His own series, “Fancies in Death,” presented—some suggested more than anything else—the spectacle of Mr. Hill turning around. The whimsically macabre was Mr. Hill’s dish.
    With the Wentworth case, Pam North decided, Mr. Hill could do practically anything—hint at things most strange and wonderful. Nobody was ever going to call him to account, setting cold fact against his artful imagining. There was very little cold fact.
    The coal of Pam’s cigarette, which was held in the hand against which she rested her cheek as she read, nestled in her hair. There was a faint, acrid scent of burning hair. Pam sniffed, said, “Oh, not again ” aloud to herself and brushed at her hair violently. She got up and looked at it in a mirror and said, without surprise, “Damn.” She went back to the script.
    Nobody knew who had killed Joyce Wentworth, or why she had been killed. It was likely, unless Mr. Hill could dream up a solution, that nobody would ever know either of these facts. Joyce Wentworth had been a tall, slender girl with a thin, sculptured face and pale red hair. She had earned her living by wearing clothes which looked on her as they would never look on anyone else—by walking, with a faint and detached smile on her really lovely face, through the aisles of one of the big Fifth Avenue stores. Sometimes, although it might be eleven in the morning, she wore evening dress; sometimes, although it might be August, she wore furs; often she wore suits and street dresses, but always it was possible to tell that she was not merely a customer, but a dream provided by the management. Women who had rather more than Joyce Wentworth’s figure, although not always so judiciously arranged, sometimes identified themselves with the dream and purchased the evening dresses, the furs, the coats and suits and street dresses which she made resplendent. And often they wondered, afterward, what it was that had gone wrong between dream and realization.
    Joyce Wentworth had been wearing her own clothes, which were merely clothes and not creations, when she had been killed. She had been walking from the bus stop nearest her home in the Murray Hill section—a one-room-and-bath home, quite in proportion to her salary—and it had been not quite dark on a winter’s afternoon. It was assumed she was walking home; she had been talking to one of the salesgirls at the store on the bus, and had said she was going home.
    That was in 1942—December 11, 1942—and the streets were partly lighted but not light enough. Apparently somebody had hidden in the shadow of a building entrance, let the girl pass and then stepped up behind her and stuck a kitchen knife in her back. Whoever it was had left the knife there and walked away. The girl had managed to walk