Murder Comes First by Frances and Richard Lockridge

there. Aunt Thelma could have put the poison in the capsule bottle. There was even a motive of sorts. Pam found herself sketching it. Sandford told her it was the silliest damn thing he’d ever heard, as the waiter brought vichyssoise. Pam agreed to this.
    â€œWhat do the police think?” Sandford asked her, and Pam briefly raised her shoulders.
    â€œProbably nothing yet,” she said. “I’d think Mrs. Hickey might interest them. She won’t tell what she and your aunt—aunt-in-law?—quarreled about.”
    â€œOh,” Sandford said. “That. Probably about Paul and Lynn Hickey. They want to get married. Lynn’s mother was on their side. Lynn wants to make a man of Paul, probably. He could stand having it done, don’t you think?”
    â€œHeavens!” Pam said. “I only met him for a minute. Isn’t he made?”
    â€œWhat?” Sandford said. “Oh—not entirely. Grace coddled him. And, I guess, wanted to keep on doing it. She thought Lynn was ‘hard,’ and wouldn’t be good for Paul. So—she thought, or pretended to think, Lynn wanted to marry Paul because he’ll inherit what Grace had. She probably got around to telling Rose Hickey that and—well, there’d be your quarrel.”
    â€œIs Lynn?” Pam asked.
    Sandford looked puzzled for a moment. “Hard?” he said, then. “No, I shouldn’t think so. She can take care of herself.”
    â€œAnd Paul Logan too?”
    â€œProbably,” Sandford said. “But I can’t see either Lynn or her mother doing—well, what was done. I told the lieutenant that, incidentally. But of course, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know much about people.”
    They were at coffee, by then. He wanted to know what the police would do next.
    â€œAsk questions, probably,” Pam told him. “Try to trace the poison. Dig into things.”
    He nodded, abstractedly. He paid the check. He said it was good of her to have come.
    â€œI’m sorry I couldn’t help,” Pam North told him. “But I told you I couldn’t.”
    He said he knew. He said he had hoped there might be something, anything; that he had hoped she would remember.
    â€œYou see,” he said, “I keep wondering if the two things aren’t hooked up, somehow—Grace’s murder and this man’s trailing me, I mean. Because I’m certain Sally has nothing to do with it.” He paused. “With any of it,” he said, his eyes insistent on Pam’s. Pam could not answer that, not being sure of anything about it. She thought she ought to call the aunts.
    â€œJust what you call a ‘medium man,’” Sandford said. “Following me, waiting for me to come out, going away before I did. It doesn’t make sense.”
    Abstractedly, she said again she was sorry she couldn’t be more help. It had been just a medium man. She thanked Sandford for the lunch, wondering a little why he had asked her and why she had accepted. On the sidewalk she declined to be dropped anywhere, saying she was walking down to Saks to shop. She walked with Sandford west to Madison, where he was catching an uptown bus; she walked down Madison, looking in windows casually. She stopped at one to look at sports clothes, and was conscious that someone had stopped beside her. She walked on, found a store which promised telephones, and called the Welby from a booth. The aunts were still engulfed.
    She left the booth and was vaguely conscious of a youngish man, well-dressed enough, looking at magazines in a rack by the door. Momentarily, she was puzzled that she had noticed him at all and, if at all, why with a faint consciousness of familiarity.
    She walked on to Fiftieth and turned west in it to Saks and there walked through broad aisles to the stocking counter. She bought stockings and walked back across the store to men’s handkerchiefs. She bought Jerry a