The Dishonest Murderer by Frances Lockridge Page A

shivered, momentarily, in the warm car. It had all gone wrong; everything had gone wrong.
    It had been wrong to go to the Norths’, to seek from strangers some contact, some reassurance, in a world which had become obscure and baffling. It had been an impulse, a movement made without consideration. Her father and the man with the fat face, the fat voice, had gone into the library and, even after the door closed behind them, she had continued to go up the stairs toward the second floor of the duplex. Then, almost without knowing it, she found herself going down the stairs again, finding a coat in the foyer closet, going out into the outer foyer, ringing for the elevator. It came, after a little. Ben, the operator, had looked at her (she thought now, had not thought then) strangely. “It’s snowing, Mrs. Haven,” he said. “Snowing hard.” He had meant it, she thought now, as a warning, as a caution. But she had only nodded. When the car stopped at the ground floor, and the door opened, Ben had started to speak, had said, “Well, Hap—” and had stopped and seemed embarrassed. “Happy New Year, Ben,” she had said, and tried to smile and gone across the lobby and nodded again when the doorman had asked if he could get her a taxi. “Try to,” he had said.
    She had been lucky, if being expedited in error could be considered luck. He had got a cab almost immediately and then, only when she was in it, had she realized that she did not even know where these strangers lived. It had been precisely that unplanned, that meaningless. A slight woman with wide eyes, with a kind of interested eagerness in her manner, had conveyed—by the movement of her lips? by the expression around her eyes?—that she knew something to be wrong, that she felt sympathy. And because of that, because of that nothing, Freddie Haven was in a taxicab, not knowing where she was going, seeking a contact which could not help in a world suddenly shaking around her.
    She had had the cab driver stop at a drug store; she had had him wait while she looked in a telephone book. Against all probability, she had found Gerald North listed, and an address near Washington Square. She had still been lucky, thought herself lucky at the moment. She had gone on in the cab.
    And it had not been lucky. She could not think, now, what she had expected, had hoped for, what kind of help she had thought Mrs. North, Pamela North, could give her. Whatever she had hoped for, that, certainly, the had not got. She had, she thought, given herself away, and was surprised by the shape the thought took, by the implication that she had something to conceal. To conceal from whom? The answer was evident—from Lieutenant Weigand, the Norths’ friend; the detective who was trying to find out who had killed Bruce.
    The police car stopped for another light. It waited there, in the storm, its lights falling on swirling flakes, isolated. The man at the wheel, a tall man, now hatless, did not turn or move. She saw only the back of his head, but suddenly she remembered his face. It had been thin and sensitive, troubled by the message he had brought them. Remembering his face, she found that he became, in some curious fashion, a companion in the car, a sharer of this isolated small area of warmth.
    â€œIt’s a bad night,” she said. She had not thought she was about to speak. She realized that the meaningless words were, must sound like, an appeal. “Speak to me,” she was saying. “I am lonely, afraid. Speak to me. I am confused.”
    â€œYes,” the man said. He did not turn, and he started the car.
    â€œYou’re Sergeant Blake,” she said. “The one who came to tell us.”
    â€œYes,” Blake said. It was odd, she thought, how seldom anyone said, fully, the word “yes.” There was a sound for “yes,” a sound varied by the speakers, sometimes “yeah” or