Death of a Tall Man by Frances Lockridge

ten now. She walked down Madison and looked in several windows, and then, because she was enjoying her walk, went through Fifty-fourth to Park. It was three twenty when she reached Fifty-third. As she waited on the curb to cross Fifty-third there was a siren wail and a police car came very fast up Park, swung into Fifty-third and went west, lurching around the front of a car which had not stopped quickly enough. Halfway down the next block, it turned in toward the right-hand curb and slowed to a sudden stop. There were two cruise cars already parked there. And a crowd was gathering. As she watched, several people standing near her turned into Fifty-third and began to run toward the police cars.
    The police car which had come up Park was not a cruise car. It was a car she knew; it was the Homicide Squad car from Centre Street. She knew it very well. She had ridden in it—perhaps, she sometimes thought, illegally—with Bill Weigand. Where it went, there was trouble—a certain kind of trouble.
    It was another reflex, longer conditioned—and harder to explain—which led Pam North now to turn into Fifty-third Street, walking toward the police cars and the crowd gathering there. She did not run. She did not go eagerly. But she went.
    When Bill Weigand, Mullins, Detective-Sergeant Stein and Detective Barney Jones went into the offices of Dr. Andrew Gordon on the eighth floor of the Medical Chambers, there were already a good many people in the offices. There had been, for some reason not immediately apparent, a uniformed patrolman standing near a door which opened beside the elevators. Weigand and the others went around the elevators, following directions given them by the elevator operator, turned left into a broad corridor and went to another door outside which a second uniformed patrolman stood. He opened the door for them. Inside there was a waiting room and the first of a good many people. They looked up as Weigand and the others came in; they looked up with a kind of worried, half-frightened, expectation. They looked up with strained, puzzled faces. Bill Weigand had seen many faces like those. He did not seem to look at the people in the waiting room. But he saw them.
    One of them did not look up. She was blonde and slim, and she was lying on her back on a sofa against the wall. She was not looking at anything and her face was white; it was evident that she had fainted. Standing near her was a nurse. Tall, slender, broad-shouldered, the nurse was. Bill felt that, before she turned slightly to look at him, she had been looking at nothing. There was remoteness in the lines of her face; it was as if she had only partly returned from nowhere. At a desk, down the room from the entrance door, near another doorway guarded by another uniformed patrolman, a very young girl with long brown hair was sitting. She had been crying. A tall man, not much older than she, stood by the desk. He might have been looking down at her. Now, he was looking at Weigand, and with the other emotions—the emotions he shared with the nurse, and the girl at the desk—there was something else in his face. Antagonism? They’d see. There was still another man—a man in his middle fifties, at a guess—and he was standing in front of one of the upholstered chairs along the wall. He was standing as if he had just got out of the chair. He was a solid man of medium height, and he had short gray hair. There was strain and puzzlement on his face. No antagonism.
    Bill Weigand did not appear to look at any of these people and Mullins, Stein and Jones, following him; did not seem to look at them either. The four, in file, went toward the policeman standing in the doorway near the desk, and he saluted as Bill came up. There was sharp light momentarily on the wall behind him; in a moment there was another flash of light. The photographers from the precinct were at it. It was quick work.
    The lieutenant of the precinct squad was