Free The Norths Meet Murder by Frances Lockridge

he weren’t a policeman,” Mrs. North thought, of Weigand. “People with blue eyes and chins like his are, usually. Stubby chins.”
    â€œWhat?” called Mr. North from the other room, making Mrs. North realize that she must have been speaking aloud.
    â€œStubby chins,” Mrs. North called back. “Friendly, sort of.”
    There was a considerable pause, and then Mr. North said, “Oh,” vaguely.
    â€œDon’t you think so?” Mrs. North called, still looking out the window.
    â€œNo,” said Mr. North. “Anyway, I wouldn’t call his that. It’s got a point.”
    Mrs. North continued to look out the window, watching a man across the street, who was burrowing into the waste in a trash-can, and every now and then finding something and dropping it into a burlap bag he carried.
    â€œListen,” said Mrs. North. “We’re being watched. He’s put a tail on us.”
    â€œWhat things you must read!” Mr. North said, coming in to look. He looked.
    â€œIt’s just a rag-picker,” he said. Mrs. North looked disappointed, and said she thought sure it was a tail.
    â€œAfter all,” she said. “We found it. I think it would be very irregular if we weren’t tailed. As if we weren’t important.”
    â€œNonsense,” said Mr. North, but he looked at the rag-picker more closely. The rag-picker still looked like a rag-picker. “Nonsense,” said Mr. North, more firmly. “You’ve been reading things. It was Weigand you meant about the chin?”
    Mrs. North nodded, and said he didn’t look much like a detective to her. He was too—Mrs. North stopped.
    â€œWell,” Mrs. North said, “he talks just like anybody and he took off his hat and he smokes cigarettes, so he’s not like a man from Headquarters. But did he talk about jade?”
    â€œJade?” said Mr. North. “I don’t get it.”
    â€œNo,” said Mrs. North, “he didn’t. So he’s not like an amateur. He’s just like anybody else—brown hair and blue eyes and a little tall, but not very, and just thin like anybody else. And he dresses like anybody else.”
    Mrs. North’s tone was, Mr. North thought, vaguely accusing, as if she didn’t like the detective he had provided for her.
    â€œWell,” Mr. North said, “he’s a lieutenant. So he must be all right.”
    Mrs. North nodded, and said there might be something in that.
    â€œHe’s nice,” Mrs. North said. “As a person, he’s nice. But he seems very irregular to me. Not like Mullins.”
    No, Mr. North agreed, he wasn’t at all like Mullins. Mullins represented type casting.
    Weigand and Mullins turned the corner and went on toward Fifth Avenue and Mrs. Brent. They came to a drugstore and Weigand turned in and found a telephone booth. He telephoned Headquarters and had a man assigned to keep an eye on the Buano house and its occupants, which could be done from a café in the semi-basement across the street. Half an hour later, Second Grade Detective Cohen found the café and was pleased to discover that he could sit at the bar while keeping the Buano house under his eye. It was only a slight flaw, he decided, that he would have to stick to beer; after all, there were peanuts to go with it, and peanuts were fine. Looking back on it afterward, Detective Cohen decided that it was one of the pleasantest cases he had ever worked on.
    Weigand and Mullins left the drugstore and went on to No. 34 Fifth Avenue. A crowd stood outside it and stared aloft, and a couple of uniformed men told it to move along and open up, and pushed it aside when it threatened to block the sidewalk. Inside the lobby two more uniformed men peered through an increasing haze of cigarette smoke at half a dozen reporters; and the doorman, who had retreated from the outside crowd, expressed dignified disapproval, as well as some