Killing the Goose (32 page)

He smiled faintly.

“We can't let him,” he said. “It almost fits. It doesn't fit. Why was she taking notes on the Purdy case, Jerry?”

Jerry explained that. It was not only the Purdy case. It was a series of cases—ten murder cases, all famous, all American. Her notes were to go to selected writers who were accepted as specialists in crime. “Like Edmund Pearson was,” Jerry amplified. Each was to write the story of one of the murders as a chapter in a book. Jerry was to publish the book. It had been his idea. It was not, he added, a new idea. Other publishers had done it; he had done it before himself, several years earlier. There was always a market for crime. As Pearson had proved; as Woollcott had proved; as dozens of lesser writers had proved.

“We did the digging for them,” Jerry said. “Miss Gipson did the digging for us. She was a researcher.”

When he decided on publishing the book and had needed somebody to do research, Jerry had decided against tying up anybody on his own staff—a rather small staff these days—on a long and detailed job. He had gone to a college placement bureau and Miss Gipson was the result. The rather unexpected result.

“I'd supposed we'd get a girl just out of college,” Jerry North said. “Most of them are—the research girls. Miss Gipson was a surprise. She'd been a Latin teacher in a small, very good college for girls in Indiana—Ward College, I think it was. She got tired of it or something and decided on a new field. She was a little surprised when it turned out to be murder research, but she was doing a good job.”

“I think,” Pam said, “she carried it too far.”

They looked at her.

“I only mean,” she said, “you don't have to go to the length of getting murdered. It's too—thorough.”

The two men looked at each other and after a while Jerry said, “Oh.”

3

W
EDNESDAY
, 12:10
A
.
M
.
TO
2:20
A
.
M
.

You started with a body and tried to bring life back to it, Pam thought, looking around the room in which Miss Gipson had lived. That was what you did in murder—that was what Bill Weigand had to do. She looked at him, standing in the middle of the room and looking around it, his eyes quick. He was building—trying to build—in his own mind the person who had been Amelia Gipson. He started with the body of a middle-aged woman; a body growing cold on a slab in the morgue; a body which said certain things, but not enough. The body spoke of regular meals, of comfortable life, of the number of years lived, of the manner of death. It told—it would tell—what the last meal eaten by a living person had been, and how long it had been eaten before death. It told of past illnesses which had been endured and survived; of an appendicitis operation many years before; of virginity maintained until it withered.

Those things the body in the morgue told of. But they were not the things which were most significant; which now were most vital. The body could not tell who had hated Amelia Gipson, or if anyone had loved her; it could not tell what she thought of things, and what others thought of her—of her tastes, her needs, her responsibilities. It could not tell where, in her life, had sprouted the seed of her death. These things—all the things Bill Weigand had to find out—lay now in the little things Amelia Gipson had left behind. They lay in this room, and its order; in the letters and notebooks and check-stubs in the secretary in the corner; in what men and women had seen and remembered about Miss Gipson that evening; in the contents of her medicine cabinet and her safe deposit box, if she had one. The things they had to know lay in what she had done in the past and what she had planned to do in the future. Research into death was at the same time research into life.

“She used scent,” Pam said, suddenly. “Does that surprise you? Either of you?”

“No,” Jerry said. “I don't think she used perfume, Pam. I didn't notice it at the office.”

“You must have had a cold,” Pam said. “You didn't mention it.”

“I didn't have it,” Jerry said.

Pam said all right. She said in that case it was because he smoked too much. Clearly, Miss Gipson had used perfume. It was still in the room.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I noticed it. But she didn't wear any tonight. I noticed that, too.”

“Something with ‘Fleur' in it,” Pam said. “Fleur de Something or Other. Fleur de what?”

Neither of the men knew. But Jerry admitted there was perfume in the room.

“For evenings, probably,” Pam said. “Although it doesn't seem in character, somehow. The way she looked. And being a Latin teacher in a girls' school. I'd have thought castile soap and perhaps a little talcum, if anything.”

Bill Weigand had crossed to the desk. He was looking through it, piling the contents of pigeonholes in neat order. He had left Miss Gipson's purse lying on the coffee table. It was all right for her to look into it, Bill told Pam absently, when she asked.

It was a very neat purse. Pam thought that it was much neater than any purse she had ever looked into—certainly much neater than her own. And it seemed almost empty. There was a change purse in it, containing a little more than twenty dollars. There was a social security card. No driver's license. A fountain pen. Four neat squares of cleansing tissue. No compact. No lipstick. No lists of any kind, scrawled on the backs of envelopes. No scraps of material, no hairpins or loose stamps or unanswered correspondence. It was hardly recognizable as a woman's handbag.

“And no perfume,” Pam said aloud. “In it or on it. Which is odd.”

Bill Weigand was reading a letter and Jerry stood by him, reading over his shoulder. Pam got up, leaving the handbag, and went into the bathroom. It was a neat bathroom. She opened the built-in medicine cabinet. There was a box of bicarbonate and a plastic drinking cup, a box of cleansing tissue, two toothbrushes and a can of tooth powder, a can of white talcum with no perceptible scent and a cardboard box from a druggist with a doctor's name on it and the handwritten instructions: “One powder three times a day two hours after meals.” On a shelf inset under the medicine cabinet were a comb and brush and a box of hairpins. Nowhere that Pam could see was there any perfume.

Nowhere in the apartment, she found, was there any perfume, except that which faintly haunted the air. So it was not Miss Gipson's perfume, but had been worn by a guest. It was a tiny discovery and, having made it, Pam decided it was of no importance; that it was not even a discovery. Because the perfume had probably been worn by a chambermaid while she was cleaning up the room. Pam went over, satisfied, and stood beside Jerry, behind Bill Weigand.

“Find anything, Pam?” Bill said, without looking up from the letter he was reading.

“No,” Pam said. “Except that she didn't wear perfume after all. It was a maid. Or somebody who came to see her. And she had indigestion. There are some powders in the medicine cabinet to be taken after meals. And there's nothing much in her purse.”

There had been more in it, Bill told her. One other object—a folding aluminum cup.

“You mean,” Pam said, “one of those things made of rings that catch on each other? They always leak and I haven't seen one for ages. I thought they went out when paper cups came in.”

He meant that kind of a cup, Bill told her. He had not seen one for a long time either. But Miss Gipson had had one in her purse and it was now in the police laboratory, because—

“Bill!” Pam said, “Jerry! To take her medicine in when she was away from home. After meals.
Two hours after meals
. But tonight she was a little late. Only not late enough.”

Bill Weigand put down the letter and turned to look at her and Jerry looked at her too. Then the two men looked at each other. Bill got up.

“In the medicine cabinet?” he said, and was already across the room to the bathroom door. He came out holding in a handkerchief the cardboard box of medicine, and they opened it on the coffee table. It was half-filled with folded papers. He opened the paper nearest the front of the box and sniffed the powder it held. He looked a little disappointed.

“Smells like medicine,” he said. “Not like sodium fluoride. But it is a little greenish.”

He answered the enquiry in their looks. Sodium fluoride, he said, was colored green in accordance with a requirement of the State law, to minimize the risk of confusing it with some harmless powder—as once, in another state, it had been confused with baking powder with tragic results.

“What's it for, anyway?” Jerry asked, and Pam and Bill Weigand answered almost at once: “Roaches.”

“That, by the way,” Bill said, “was how we got on to Purdy—the guy Miss Gipson was reading about. The Purdys didn't have roaches. He'd forgotten that when he arranged for an accident to happen to his wife. The whole building had been fumigated about a week before they moved in—and they had just moved in when Mrs. Purdy died. Mr. Purdy would have had a spot of trouble explaining that when we sprung it on him at the trial. It was something we had up our sleeves.”

As he talked, he opened another folded slip of paper and sniffed its contents. He shook his head and tried a third and shook his head again. Then he refolded the powder into the paper containers and put them back in the box.

“We need a chemist for this,” he said. “It seems to be medicine. But—”

“But the one she took tonight needn't have been,” Pam said. “Somebody could have filled one of these folders with poison and left it for her to take. Putting it in front, of course, where she would be sure to take it.”

“Would she?” Jerry said.

Pam thought she would. She thought that Miss Gipson had done all things in due order and that, with folders of digestive powder—if it was digestive powder—filed neatly in a box she would as neatly have removed them, starting from the front.

“In character,” Pam said. “But as a matter of fact, almost anybody would. It's the natural way to do it. So if somebody wanted Miss Gipson to die tonight, he would put a folder of sodium fluoride in front of the folders of medicine in the box and be pretty sure she would take it with her when she went out. Only—”

Only, Jerry pointed out, she might have carried a day's supply with her at a time. Or she might take them only irregularly; only when she needed them.

“But,” he said, “there is nothing to indicate that it made any difference precisely when she died, is there Bill?”

Weigand, still looking at the box, shook his head. He said there was very little at the moment to indicate more than that Amelia Gipson was dead of poison and that, unless she had lied as the last action of her life, she had not killed herself.

“But,” he said, “it's quite possible that somebody did put a folder of sodium fluoride in with Miss Gipson's medicine, figuring that she would take it sooner or later. If someone could get into the apartment and find the medicine—and knew she took it—it wouldn't be too difficult. And—”

“The perfume!” Pam said. “That's where it came from. The murderer was wearing it. Which narrows things down to women, or almost.”

“Almost?” Jerry repeated, and then, when Pam looked at him, said, “Oh.”

“Either reading,” Pam told him.

Bill urged her to keep it simple. He reminded her of Inspector O'Malley.

“Say it was a woman,” he said. “And don't bank too much on the theory. It may have been the maid who cleaned up the room.”

“Then,” Pam said, “somebody's going to have to smell the maids. Not me. It was too embarrassing, before.”
*

Bill Weigand agreed, without excitement. He said he would have it checked. Tomorrow. Not by Pam North.

“But,” she said, “how will somebody else know? That it's the same, I mean, or isn't, without smelling it. It won't last forever here, you know.”

“One of us will have to remember the scent,” he told her. “I'll have the boys bring in samples, if necessary. There probably aren't very many maids. They probably haven't been able to get very many maids.”

“All right,” Pam said. “What else? Here?”

There was, Weigand told her, a good deal else. Now he seemed more interested than he had before; it was as if he had been waiting to take up something more important. There were letters, he said. And bank records. He looked at Jerry curiously.

“Did you get the idea she needed a job?” he said. “That she needed it to live on?”

Jerry said he hadn't got any particular idea about it. He said that was the reason people usually got jobs. He added, thoughtfully, that he couldn't think of any other good reason.

“Well,” Bill said, “she didn't need the job. For one thing, she had better than twenty thousand in a cash balance at the Corn Exchange. And three savings accounts each up to the seventy-five hundred maximum. And in addition she seems to have been custodian of a trust fund. Anyway she's got a book of checks printed up for the Alfred Gipson Trust and she's been signing as trustee. How much did you pay her, Jerry?”

“Forty,” Jerry told him.

Bill Weigand raised his shoulders and let them fall. There, his shoulders said, was that.

“A discrepancy,” Pam amplified.

Jerry said it was all of that. But Bill had picked up a small sheaf of letters.

Jerry said he had been wondering. Then they got to the letters. Pam held out her hand and Bill Weigand picked one of the letters from the little sheaf and handed it to her. She read:

“Dear Aunt Amelia: I'm not going to get down on my hands and knees any more about it. What you say you are going to do is wicked and barbaric—it's no better than murder. It's terrible that there are people like you in the world. You know I love Kennet—that I always loved him—that what you found out didn't make any difference. I think you want to kill that—what's between Kennet and me. Maybe you can. But don't think I won't try to stop you—every way there is.”