It came fast after that. Sam was looking at his watch. He pushed back his chair. “Come on, girls. Sorry to leave you, Rosetta, my pet, but we can make the seven-fifteen if we step on it.” Brian signaled to the waiter, took out a bill. “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” He waved the man away, Julie rose without demur. It was then, as she turned to pick up her gloves and purse, that she saw the man and woman.
They were standing side by side in the mouth of the aisle that opened on the corridor to the right. Julie didn’t know the woman, noted nothing about her, except that she was tall and darkly handsome and wore a leopard-skin coat. The man was Bill Conroy. He looked much as he had looked that afternoon when he left Mouse tearing his flowers to pieces in Sarah’s study, handsome and sulky and in a bad temper. His attention had been focused on Mouse earlier. It was on her now. Thirty feet of space filled with seated figures intervened between them, but there could be no mistaking that deliberate, intent and prolonged scrutiny. Bill Conroy and his companion were staring, not at Rosetta or Brian or Frances or Sam, but at her.
Julie’s heart was beating thickly. Her anger had vanished. Another emotion took its place. The emotion was fear. None of the others appeared to have noticed Conroy. Rosetta was pouting over her half-finished cocktail and Frances was getting leisurely to her feet. Julie said on a breathless note, “Hurry, or we’ll be late,” put her back to the distant archway where Bill Conroy stood with the woman, and started precipitately for the exit under the clock, in flight, without knowing why or from what, for the second time that day.
There had been no police at the wedding, there were none at the funerals, at any of the funerals in point of fact. Before the second crop of those strange and dreadful removals matured, attention had shifted elsewhere. The first death took place two days after Margaret Tilden or Mouse, as she was called, married Lieutenant Joseph Westing in the Jennings house on Twenty-second Street. Alice Camber, a maid in the Hotel Sandringham, died suddenly while on duty. The hotel physician, a Dr. Mull, said heart, and let it go at that. Alice Camber was a married woman. She and her husband didn’t get along too well. Her sister put up a howl, mentioning insurance, and an investigation was ordered.
The facts that developed, however, were simple and clear and pointed at death from natural causes. Alice was a chambermaid and her wages were regular. Will Camber was an upholsterer’s assistant and his were not. On Saturday night, which was Alice’s night off, she was in the habit of taking home a bottle with which to smooth out the wrinkles in domesticity and create a temporary, if alcoholic, accord. She had done so on the Saturday preceding her collapse and death, which took place on the Sunday following. Unfortunately, on that particular Saturday night, Will Camber had also brought home a bottle out of the proceeds of a bill unexpectedly paid by a longstanding debtor. The union of two pints of rye followed the familiar pattern of headache, nausea and general debility on the inevitable morrow. Alice Camber reported for duty at the Sandringham at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning feeling, as she said, like “nothing on earth.” It was a grisly prophecy. At five in the afternoon she was dead.
Unfortunately, her body had been cremated. Except for that the inquiry was thorough. There were no attendant circumstances to arouse suspicion, and, at the end of twenty-four hours, “case closed” was written across the voluminous and careful report.
Alice Camber’s death didn’t go entirely unrecorded. Christopher McKee, the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, was an extremely busy man. World War I had graduated him from Army Intelligence into the New York Police Department via the appeal of the then commissioner for a trained criminologist. World War II had enormously increased the Scotsman’s responsibility—which was the continued safety of one of the few great cities left lighted in a darkening world.
Alice Camber picked herself from the day sheet dated November thirtieth and slid into a niche of McKee’s memory.
It was on December the second that the second casualty occurred. On that day a Mrs. Sally Fenway dropped dead at the feet of her hostess at a cocktail party in a Park Avenue apartment. Again heart was diagnosed. A friend who had been seated with Mrs. Fenway said that she had become ill after drinking a Martini. She had hoped that the illness would pass, but she had steadily got worse. When she went to ask her hostess, a Moira Jackson, to let her lie down some place and call a doctor, she had succumbed.
Mrs. Fenway was a wealthy widow with a home in Greenwich. She had come into the city to do some shopping on the two o’clock train and had then gone on to the party. She wasn’t strong anyhow. She had had stomach ulcers for years and wasn’t supposed to touch alcohol. Her death might have been written off as due to natural causes if Mr. Jackson, the husband of the woman giving the party, hadn’t died on the succeeding night in much the same fashion as his wife’s deceased guest.
That did raise a furor. Mr. Jackson, a cotton broker of fifty, was in blooming health when he sat down at the dinner table on his return from his office. Three quarters of an hour later he was dead. Christopher McKee went and saw. He acknowledged to himself ruefully that he didn’t conquer. He talked to Mrs. Jackson, he talked to Mrs. Fenway’s relatives, he talked to the guests who had been at the cocktail party and to the servants. At the end of twelve hours of intensive work he ended up where he had started, which was no place—except for the autopsies. Mrs. Fenway and the cotton broker had died of poison. The poison was hydrocyanic acid. There was no cyanide either in Mrs. Fenway’s Greenwich house or on her person; there was none in the Jackson apartment. There was no reason why either of them should have been killed. Yet they were both dead. Suicide was out of the question. Had they bumped into the chain lightning of practically instant annihilation by accident or was there design behind it?
Alice Camber marched out of McKee’s memory onto the stage. He went into the chambermaid’s death more closely and in person. Her symptoms, described in detail by two of her fellow workers, paralleled the symptoms that cyanide would have produced. He decided that there was a lethal link between the chambermaid, the wealthy social widow from Greenwich and the cotton broker of Park Avenue, a link that sprayed death from its hidden coils. The conclusion was obvious and terrible. There was a poisoner loose in New York, an unidentified and anonymous poisoner who struck right and left without ostensible discrimination, unchecked and at will.
The difficulties of isolating this killer were enormous. Neither Mrs. Fenway nor Mr. Jackson had ever been at the Hotel Sandringham nor had they known Alice Camber in any other setting. The Sandringham was a large and busy hotel with a transient trade, and Alice’s duties had brought her into contact with a number of guests. Except for a hangover, she was all right when she left home. It was from one or through one of the guests that she must have obtained the poison that killed her. A check on the Sandringham’s patrons was begun. Meanwhile, warnings were sent out to every precinct in the city to be on the alert for the first traces of a sudden illness. For one whole day nothing happened. Late on the afternoon of December the fourth the call for which McKee had been waiting and which he had been fearing came in. The poisoner had claimed a fourth victim. A woman had been stricken in the ladies’ room on the upper level in Grand Central Station.
She wasn’t dead—yet. The Scotsman was out from behind his desk and shoveling into his coat almost before the receiver settled into its cradle. Everything was in readiness. He said, “Pierson, Kent, Fellowes,” quietly, and the three men in the outer room jumped to their feet and followed the Inspector’s swift flight down the stairs and out into the bitter winter dusk of the dingy side street. The Cadillac was parked at the curb between the wan green lights. The detectives piled in. McKee said “Grand Central” to the man at the wheel and the long black car leaped forward.
“You think it’s safe, Doctor?”
“As safe as it will ever be, Inspector.”
“You’re not going to be able to save her?”
“There’s