The Dishonest Murderer by Lockridge Frances & Lockridge Richard

Author:Lockridge, Frances & Lockridge, Richard [Lockridge, Frances & Lockridge, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780792722083
Google: KFpsCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00B3DADBE
Goodreads: 654249
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1949-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

VII

Saturday, 3.40 p.m. to 6.15 p.m.

AFTER she had got into the taxicab a few blocks down Broadway from the building in which she had left a man who grinned at death, Freddie Haven merely sat for a moment. The taxicab, warm, redolent of cigar smoke, was for that moment less a vehicle than a refuge. But then the driver had turned and looked at her and had said, “Where to, lady?” and she had had to find an answer.

Apparently the police had already been told that the man Smiley had been murdered. Presumably, arriving so soon, they could tell within half an hour or so when he had been shot. Therefore, her reasons for avoiding the police became less exigent. But they did not cease to exist. She did not know how precisely a physician could see the time of death; she assumed that final precision remained contingent on circumstances, even if the body was quickly found. A physician might be able to say, for example, that Smiley had died between two and three o’clock. Then if her father had been in the apartment until two-thirty …

“Lady,” the driver said, his voice intentionally patient. “You want to go some place, lady?”

“The Waldorf, please,” she said.

She did not know why she had, so suddenly, thought of Howard Phipps. She did not really know him well, although she had seen a great deal of him. It was only that now, as in the early hours of morning when she had made that ill-advised visit to the Gerald Norths, she felt an almost desperate need to share with someone, someone responsible and skilled, the anxieties which obsessed her. “It must be,” she thought, as the taxicab started up, “because I suddenly feel lonely. It is as if Dad weren’t around any more.”

It was not so much – surely, she told herself, it is not so much – that she was by nature dependent. It was rather that, since she had been grown, she had always had someone with whom to share things: share happiness and sorrow, and the little fears of life, and the perplexities. There had been her father, after her mother died. Then there had been Jack, for so desperately short a time; then her father again. Now, for the moment, with her father thus involved, and thus surrounded and cut off from her, there was no one. So she had thought of the Norths, so now she thought of Howard Phipps.

Bruce had trusted Phipps, and relied on him. Bruce would not so have trusted anyone who was not competent, able to meet situations, what her father would call “savvy”. And, except for Celia, except for herself, Phipps had been closer to Bruce than anyone, would thus be more involved in these circumstances which, vaguely and inconclusively, appertained to Bruce’s death.

The cab went up Seventh Avenue and past the narrow building, hemmed between big neighbours. There were three small police cars in front of it now, and a large sedan which, presumably, had brought other men from the police.

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