The Norths Meet Murder by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online

stains on the right hand.
    â€œYou get that from holding on when you drag,” Mullins assured him. “If you let go, you don’t get them, see?”
    Weigand said he saw, saying it abstractly as he examined the face. The wound told him nothing, but he looked thoughtfully at the bristle on the undamaged cheeks. The beard had grown since death, but it seemed to have grown irregularly—here and there the detective saw hairs much longer than those around them. And the short sideburns, instead of ending sharply, were irregular. The man had shaved hurriedly and badly when he shaved the last time and—then Weigand realized why, and rubbed his own cheek reflectively. He, too, had recently bought an electric shaver, and was having trouble learning to use it. Unaccountably, it missed hairs now and then, and it was hard to get a clean line at the sides. It left stray beard hairs standing belligerently among their clipped neighbors.
    It might, Weigand realized, put them on to something. With his own razor there had come a guarantee blank, valid only when it had been filled in with the name and address of the purchaser and sent to the district office of the manufacturer. If, now, this man filled out such a blank and mailed it, his name and address would be on file with the company—along with, he added sadly to himself, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. If he had bought the same kind of razor Weigand had bought himself; if he had sent in the guarantee blank as, thinking of it, Weigand remembered he himself had not. “Do it tomorrow,” he thought, and pulled himself back to the matter at hand. Was it, he wondered, worth the trouble? He decided it was, and looked sympathetically at Mullins. Mullins caught the look, which he knew of old, and an expression of foreboding overspread his face.
    â€œNow, Loot,” he began, “listen—”
    Weigand told him, crisply, what he had to do—he and Perkins and Washburn. Mullins’ expression lightened a little at the news he was not to be the only victim. They would get hold of the manager of the Clipper Shave Company and he—with Perkins and Washburn—would go over the records of guarantee slips returned. They would copy out all showing identified purchases within two weeks—“better make it three,” Weigand corrected himself—and tomorrow they would get enough men on it to make the rounds.
    â€œTonight?” said Mullins, drearily. “I gotta work all night?”
    Weigand’s sympathy was mild and his instructions unaltered. “Tomorrow you can get some sleep,” he promised. Mullins went unhappily to the telephone to break the news to Perkins and Washburn, and to try to persuade one of them to uncover an officer of the company. Mullins said “Yeah” and “That’s what I told him” into the telephone, glanced around to see if Weigand had relented, learned he had not, and, eventually, went about his chore. And now, Weigand realized, he would do it diligently and exactly, missing nothing. Weigand looked at the body and had another idea, but decided it could go until morning. He could, he decided, do with some sleep himself, and went home to get it.

4
    W EDNESDAY
    8 A.M. TO N OON
    He went to sleep in his small apartment uptown thinking that it might be rather fun to be married to somebody like—well, like Mrs. North. He awoke in the morning and groaned to find it day again, and constabulary duty to be done. He made himself coffee and toast and decided the world was screwy; he smoked his first cigarette and was mildly dizzy for a moment; he answered the telephone. Mullins, sleepily, reported a list of four hundred and thirty-two names, all over town, and said he was turning it in and going to get some sleep. Weigand called Headquarters, reported, and found that the squad could allow him three men to check the four hundred and thirty-two names, and felt that preliminary work, at least,