Murder within Murder Read Online Free Page A

it,” he said. “That’s the way he thinks it ought to be. Simple. Suicide. Unfortunately, she wrote us a note.”
    â€œWhat kind of a note?” Pam said. “Non-suicide note?”
    Weigand looked at Pam North with approval. He said, “Right.”
    â€œShe was taking notes,” he said. “On the Purdy murder. Writing them out very carefully in a notebook, in ink—very carefully and clearly. And we almost missed her note to us—did miss it the first time. Then Stein thought that while the last thing she had written almost fitted, it didn’t really fit. The last thing she wrote was: ‘I have been poisoned by—! It didn’t finish. Just ‘I have been poisoned by—’ and a scraggly line running off the page.”
    â€œThen how,” Pam said, “can even—can the inspector think it was suicide. If he still does.”
    Bill Weigand said the inspector still wanted to.
    â€œAnd,” he said, “he can make a talking point. You see, she was taking notes on a poison case. The death of a woman named Lorraine Purdy, who was killed, curiously enough, with sodium fluoride. Presumably by her husband, although we were supposed to think by accident. But it wasn’t accident—it was Purdy. He ran for it and got himself killed in an airplane accident. O’Malley wants to think that the last thing Miss Gipson wrote was part of her notes on the Purdy case.”
    He smiled faintly.
    â€œWe can’t let him,” he said. “It almost fits. It doesn’t fit. Why was she taking notes on the Purdy case, Jerry?”
    Jerry explained that. It was not only the Purdy case. It was a series of cases—ten murder cases, all famous, all American. Her notes were to go to selected writers who were accepted as specialists in crime. “Like Edmund Pearson was,” Jerry amplified. Each was to write the story of one of the murders as a chapter in a book. Jerry was to publish the book. It had been his idea. It was not, he added, a new idea. Other publishers had done it; he had done it before himself, several years earlier. There was always a market for crime. As Pearson had proved; as Woollcott had proved; as dozens of lesser writers had proved.
    â€œWe did the digging for them,” Jerry said. “Miss Gipson did the digging for us. She was a researcher.”
    When he decided on publishing the book and had needed somebody to do research, Jerry had decided against tying up anybody on his own staff—a rather small staff these days—on a long and detailed job. He had gone to a college placement bureau and Miss Gipson was the result. The rather unexpected result.
    â€œI’d supposed we’d get a girl just out of college,” Jerry North said. “Most of them are—the research girls. Miss Gipson was a surprise. She’d been a Latin teacher in a small, very good college for girls in Indiana—Ward College, I think it was. She got tired of it or something and decided on a new field. She was a little surprised when it turned out to be murder research, but she was doing a good job.”
    â€œI think,” Pam said, “she carried it too far.”
    They looked at her.
    â€œI only mean,” she said, “you don’t have to go to the length of getting murdered. It’s too—thorough.”
    The two men looked at each other and after a while Jerry said, “Oh.”

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    W EDNESDAY , 12:10 A . M . TO 2:20 A . M .
    You started with a body and tried to bring life back to it, Pam thought, looking around the room in which Miss Gipson had lived. That was what you did in murder—that was what Bill Weigand had to do. She looked at him, standing in the middle of the room and looking around it, his eyes quick. He was building—trying to build—in his own mind the person who had been Amelia Gipson. He started with the body of a middle-aged woman; a body growing cold on a slab in the morgue; a