Dell Shannon - Case Pending

"Ah, poor thing," said Mrs. Demarest.

"She was on her way home from a roller-skating rink, alone because her boy friend's father, who disapproved of her, had come and hauled the boy home with him. Fortunately they're out of it on evidence. This time the handbag was taken, found a couple of blocks away, but as far as we can tell nothing was stolen. Now, take a look at me," said Mendoza, sitting up. "I'm visited by a hunch-it's the same killer-and I've got no evidence whatever, that means anything, to back me up- Not until you told me about this doll. Then I've got Mrs. Lindstrom's name, and then I find out she's living in the same neighborhood this time too, and where that does get me? If I checked back on all the people living around there, I might find half a dozen others who'd moved there from this general neighborhood in the last six months. One of those things… But, where d'you think I found this little piece of lace? On the floor of that skating rink. There's some vague evidence about a boy or a young man who's been in the habit of sneaking into the rink by an unused door, and who-so the dead girl complained to several people-stared at her in a 'funny way.' I think he's the one, but that's mostly another hunch and I know nothing else about him, I've got no line on him at all. Except that maybe he dropped this little strip there one time-and that doesn't say it came from the don. I say to myself, I'm woolgathering, all this doesn't mean one damned thing. And then this morning somebody leaves that doll carefully propped against the door of the precinct station down there-three blocks away from Graham Court."

"Well, that is queer," said Mrs. Demarest interestedly. "But this Mrs. Lindstrom, she wouldn't be the on-"

"There's not much to go on there either-yet. Her husband deserted her about a month before Carol was killed. There's a thirteen-year-old boy. All I know about him right now is that he's a big, strong boy-shot up early-big as a man, and probably strong enough to have done-what was done. I don't know if he did, or why he might have. I'm getting what I can about him, but-he shrugged-"you can see I've got no real evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation."

"I don't know 'bout your rules for that kind o' thing," said Mrs. Breen, "but it shorely is queer, all that. Don't seem hardly possible, though, that a boy thirteen-and why'd she want a doll so bad, her with only a boy?"

Mendoza sighed and stood up. "I haven't even got an excuse to go and ask her that-and she'd only tell me it was for her favorite niece back east, anyway. I'm hoping the factory can identify this definitely, and in that case I'll want you both to make formal statements about it…. Thanks very much, I'll let you know as soon as I can."

The phone call had come through, Sue said when she eventually got Morgan at the office after lunch, about eleven o'clock. It was the woman again, again sounding as if she were reading the message, refusing to answer questions, say anything else.

"I tried to- I thought if I could appeal to her, remind her of what she said before, what we-but she just gave a little gasp and said, 'Oh, I couldn't, Mis' Morgan,' and hung up. Dick-"

"Yes," he said, making meaningless scribbles on the note pad in front of him. Henry was there at his desk across the room, Stack right alongside under the other window; Morgan couldn't say much directly.

"Go on."

And what it came to was-right back to Graham Court. Seven o'clock, Smith's message said, at Graham Court, the address and apartment number carefully read out. Morgan might as well come to him, ran the message (insolently phrased, sounding the opposite in the woman's soft voice), and he needn't think account of things going haywire last night he'd stopped meaning anything he'd said. He'd be waiting alone for Morgan at seven, and this had better be the pay-off, or else.

"All right," said Morgan steadily, "I've got that. Seven, that's early. I'd better not try to make it home first. Mean?-just more bluster, is all-don't worry, hon. You'd better expect me when you see me, O.K.?"

He put down the phone and went back to his open case book there on the desk, pretending to check notes, add a word here and there, but not really seeing anything on the page.

Two things said themselves over in his mind. The apartment. And, Alone. (Smith, of course, unknowing that he bad any prior knowledge of the apartment, any other reason to be there.) It added up-for Morgan, and also to a couple of things that were no concern of Morgan's but interesting: that alone suggested that Smith had seen to it that neither the woman nor the boy had any idea how much money he was expecting, and that and the revealing of his home address suggested that very likely he was planning to decamp with the money, maybe at once. What it added up to for Morgan the murderer was safety-maybe.

Depending on where Mendoza's men were. He thought he might get some information on that point when he saw Mendoza an hour from now, with this stuff from the school.

From the time on Saturday night when the cold fact had penetrated his mind that the only real lasting safety was Smith dead, circumstances had been forcing on Morgan certain changes of his original plan he didn't much like. He looked at this one from all the angles; it was better than the street holdup in a way, and it would, of course, have to do. You were always seeing something like that in the paper. A man shot himself, hanged himself, slashed his wrists in the bathtub: no known reason, no prior threat.

The tricky factor was the timing. If Mendoza's men were inside, it couldn't be done at all: they'd be too close, and not unlikely in a position to know at which floor Morgan stopped. But if they were outside, then-which way, before or after the Lindstroms? Before, he thought. Quick and quiet up to the third floor, and no backchat with Smith: as soon as the door was shut behind him in Smith's place, and Smith away from it. And no fooling around with any attempt to muffle the shot, a suicide wouldn't bother and there wouldn't be time. Gun in his hand: prints. Thirty seconds? There had to be a good chance he'd have time to be outside the door again, at least, before anyone else got there. There was a narrower chance that he could get halfway down the stairs before that. People exclaimed, talked a little, wondered, before they went to see. The ideal thing would be Morgan standing in the secondfloor hall, just ready to knock on the Lindstroms' door, when doors opened and people came out saying, "Was that a shot?"

But Morgan halfway down (which was also halfway up) would do. I'd just got to the Lindstroms' door when- I knew it was a shot up here, I started up to see That was all he needed to say; none of his business, nothing to link him to an unexplained suicide.

Sue, of course no question here of passing it off as accident. It couldn't be helped. He'd got past worrying about the side effects; he was feeling now the way she'd said, Let's for God's sake get it done and over, any way at all.

Because, if he'd be honest with himself, he wasn't sure he could do it-that all this would come to any action in the end.

He had to do it, the only possible solution. He'd seen that clear on Saturday night.

Which of course was the point. If you got yourself wound up to a place where you were ready to do murder, you ought to do it right then while, so to speak, the spring was tight. He hadn't; he'd had three nights and nearly three days to think about it, and now he didn't know if, when the chips were down, he could really bring himself- He touched the gun under his coat; he'd been carrying it because he was afraid Sue would find it if he left it around the house. He thought angrily, uneasily, Ethics be damned: what loss is that hood? He'd decided this, he was just being a damned coward, to think You got a little cowardly when you were thirty-eight, with a wife and child and a mortgage on the house and debts and a job that paid just forty-two hundred a year.