Killing the Goose Read Free Page B

of gangsters, I’ve got to go around and get to work. Tracing a baked apple from—from the counter to the morgue.”
    â€œBill!” Dorian said, firmly. “For heaven’s sake, darling!”
    Bill smiled.
    â€œNevertheless,” he began. Then the telephone rang again. He looked quickly at Jerry, who waved a hand; he said, “Lieut. Weigand speaking” into the telephone. He looked pained and held the receiving end a couple of inches from his ear.
    He looked at the others and made the word “Inspector” with his lips. He said, “Yes, Inspector?”
    He listened. He whistled softly. He said, “Right.” He listened again.
    â€œRight away, Inspector,” he said. “But how about the McCalley case? In the Greystone’s coffee shop.” He listened. “No,” he said, “I’m not sure it is. Something else has come up. A question of a baked apple.”
    Across the room they could hear the telephone splutter. Grinning slightly, Weigand held it farther from his ear.
    â€œRight,” he said. “But I’m not joking. I’m not sure it’s the Martinelli boy, and the reason is a baked apple. However—”
    He listened further, said, “Right” again, and replaced the telephone in its holder. He stood up.
    â€œInspector O’Malley,” he said. “In person. From a house on Gramercy Park. They found Miss Ann Lawrence dead there. Somebody hit her with a poker. A brass poker, O’Malley says.”
    â€œLawrence?” Pam said. “Ann Lawrence? Ought we—”
    Weigand shrugged. He said the Inspector seemed to think so. Apparently she had been important, since the Inspector went around in person; apparently she had money, since she lived in a house—her own house—on Gramercy Park. And apparently the Inspector was now ready to turn it over to Weigand.
    â€œTo assist,” Weigand explained, gravely. “To do the routine. And after I get there, our O’Malley will decide he has already done the important thinking, got everything well in hand, and had better leave detail to me. So he will go and play poker with the boys.”
    Weigand was amused, not aggrieved.
    â€œHe’s got a right,” Dorian said.
    â€œSure he’s got a right,” Bill told her and both of them smiled.
    â€œAnd the other one—the girl in the cafeteria?” Pam asked. “What about her?”
    Mullins, for the time being, Weigand said. After the time being they would see.
    â€œAnd now,” he said, “I’ve got to join the Inspector.”
    Pam said it was too bad. She said she had been thinking of a rubber of bridge. But she did not, and Weigand was a little surprised by this, suggest that they all go along and help. She said they would see Dorian got home and to come back right away if somebody confessed, or Inspector O’Malley had it all solved, and that it was nice that the department had let him come at all.
    After he had gone, Pam stood for a moment with her back to the closed door, and found Jerry looking at her speculatively. He was, she decided, puzzled. She waited for him to mention it.
    But after looking at her, he apparently decided to let sleeping issues lie, because when he spoke he seemed to be skirting murder rather elaborately, and to be about to return to the subject of Dan Beck, as if he had never left it. Pam waited, politely, until he reached what might be the end of a sentence. Then she spoke.
    â€œI think,” she said, “that we’d better all help Sergeant Mullins. About the baked apple. Because it’s going to confuse him dreadfully, without Bill. And because—because the girl was just a baby, really. Don’t you think?”
    â€œNo,” Jerry said, firmly.
    â€œI do,” Pam said. “I think we ought to.”

II. Tuesday, 8:10 P.M. to 8:55 P.M.
    It had begun to snow, which was discouraging, because already there had been