Murder Has Its Points Read Online Free PDF Page B

“one of you heard the shot. To recognize? To locate?”
    Nobody had.
    â€œNot even something you thought was a backfire?”
    â€œNot,” Pam said, “to pick out from everything else. That is, probably we all heard it but not really. If you see what I mean.”
    Foley looked at Pearson. Upsetting experience this lady had had, seeing a friend shot right in front of her, having to notify his widow. Not used to things like that. “Sure,” Pearson said. “Happens that way all the time. Well—”
    â€œNo reason to keep you four here,” Foley said. “Somebody got your names?”
    Somebody had.
    â€œJust in case,” Pearson said. “Well—”
    â€œBill!” Pamela North said. “We’re over here.”
    William Weigand, captain of detectives, Homicide, Manhattan West, came across the small and pleasant lobby. He stopped in front of them and looked down.
    â€œWhat’s this I hear?” Bill Weigand said. “You’ve had another author shot out from under you, Jerry?”
    Gerald North nodded his head, gloomily.
    â€œHell of a way to run a publishing house,” Bill Weigand said.

3
    Captain William Weigand, in his small office in West Twentieth Street, had been about to call it a day, since even policemen must sometimes call a day a day. The report, coming to him as a matter of routine, that there had been another sniper victim, and this one dead, had not at first seemed sufficient reason to start the day over. It had been a long day already and had ended, satisfactorily, with an arrest—Antonio Spagalenti had not, after all, been in his office when his wife was strangled in their apartment in lower Manhattan. It did not appear to be true that the scratches on his face had been inflicted by the family cat. The Medical Examiner’s laboratory reported that Mrs. Spagalenti had scratched someone. And it was easy enough to prove that Antonio Spagalenti had found a new interest in life, and a blond one.
    Another sniping, and particularly a fatal one, was certainly unpleasant. It was, however, a thing which the precinct detective squad, with the precinct uniformed force, could handle as well as anyone, which probably was not going to be too satisfactorily, and no reflections on anybody. If Homicide West needed to get into it, Lieutenant Stein could lead it in. Stein had arrived when due, and been told, “Nothing but this, John,” and shown “this.” “Sniper killed, this time. Killed a man named—”
    Bill Weigand had had to look again at the report to give Lieutenant John Stein the name. The victims of snipers are impersonal, being merely unlucky. “Anthony Payne,” Weigand read. “Seems to have been a writer of some—”
    Bill Weigand stopped so abruptly that Stein looked at him almost anxiously. Bill Weigand said, “Damn it to hell,” using half his voice, the other half having, somehow, lost itself.
    He did not know a man named Anthony Payne. But he and his wife Dorian had been invited to a cocktail party being given in celebration of the publication of a new book by an Anthony Payne and—if Antonio Spagalenti had really been scratched by the family cat—might well have gone. Invited by North Books, Inc., formally, with an informal comment: “Dinner after? G.N.” Party at—Bill checked his mind. Hotel Dumont. He looked again at the report he still held out to Lieutenant Stein. Payne had been killed in front of the Dumont.
    Sergeant Aloysius Mullins had already called it a day. He would, for a few hours more, be spared the knowledge. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley was presumably at home. He would have to know. He would turn alarming red; he would, without doubt, shout, “Not again!” O’Malley would scream, in agony, “Not those Norths again!” He did not have instantly to know. Tomorrow the news could be broken, gently.
    There