“I’ve told you,” he said. “I was mixed up.”
Heimrich, waited.
“All right,” Timothy Gates said, “I’ll tell you again. There was this thing I told you about. Then I was in a hospital for a good while. Then somebody decided I was a hero. I got three guys killed and—”
“I know what you did,” Heimrich said. “It was quite a thing to do. But go on, Mr. Gates.”
“I get these guys killed,” Gates said. “But I’m all right. I can walk around, I can dance with girls. I’m a hero, to boot. They bring me back here and the President gives me the medal and says I’m a great guy and they take a lot of pictures of me.” He paused. He looked intently at Heimrich. “The President’s a good joe,” he said. “He said the right things, as if he knew what he was talking about. But all the time I could hear this friend of mine screaming and then saying, ‘I’ll be O. K., Connie. I’ll make it. I—’” Gates stopped.
“You can’t forget,” Heimrich said. “You will, in time.”
“I’ll be dead in time,” Gates said.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. Go on.”
“The public relations boys wanted me to do a lot,” Gates said. “Be interviewed. Make speeches. Go on television programs. Like a movie actor. So I did all that for a couple of weeks and then said, ‘Look, I want out.’ I had it coming and they knew I had. I wanted to get out from under. Even my folks—they kept on thinking I was a hero. Even my father. But all the time I kept hearing this guy screaming and talking about his girl. When I went to parties, like this one at Mr. Chapman’s, I heard him. When I got drunk I heard him. I got the idea if I got away from the whole thing, got out in the country, I wouldn’t hear him.” He stopped. “I grew up in the country,” he said. “Outside Baltimore. I remembered it used to be quiet.”
He turned, then, and looked again out into the quiet night.
“I walk into this,” he said, still looking through the window at the night. He spoke slowly. “This girl. You’d think somebody’d been at her with a bayonet. I’m in the middle again. Medal of Honor winner held for girl’s murder. Everybody saying, ‘Yeah, you teach these kids to kill and you can’t stop them.’ People looking at my father and mother and thinking, it’s tough on them to have a son like that and—” He stopped. He turned back to Heimrich. “All right, sir, there it is,” he said. “I say I’m from Chicago. Say my parents are dead. Without thinking. It was a fool thing.”
Heimrich nodded. He said, “You were mixed up, naturally.”
“Not mixed up enough to kill anybody,” Timothy Gates said.
Captain Heimrich nodded again. He closed his eyes. For a moment he did not speak.
“You turned into the lane—Plum Lane, they call it—early this morning. You don’t know precisely what time, because you had thrown your watch away.” Gates started to speak, but Heimrich shook his head. “How long were you walking before you found Miss Monroe’s body?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Timothy Gates said. “A couple of hours or so. I didn’t walk fast.”
“No,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. Now Mr. Gates, do you remember the period you walked in the lane?”
Gates looked at him. He said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”
“I didn’t phrase it well, probably,” Heimrich said. “Do you remember the period consecutively? You see what I mean now? From the time you started until you looked down and saw Miss Monroe’s body, your memory isn’t—well, say, broken? As if you had—”
“All right,” Timothy said. “Did I blank out some time? That’s it, isn’t it? Do I remember everything I did?”
Heimrich nodded. Now the muscle under the tall youth’s eye began to jump again.
“Sure I do,” he said. “Sure I remember!”
Heimrich closed his eyes. With his eyes closed, with faces invisible, voices often revealed much. There had been a kind of violence in the voice of Timothy Gates.
But Heimrich did not press the point, if there was a point to press.
“The girl your friend talked about,” Heimrich said. “Told you about, called to when he was dying. Her name was Connie, you said?”
“Yes,” Gates said. There was puzzlement in his voice now, Heimrich thought.
“You saw a picture of her, probably.”
“A good many times,” Gates said. “Do we have to—”
“Yes Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “For a moment, anyway. She was a good-looking girl?”
“That’s right,” Gates said.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said, “did she look at all like Miss Monroe. Miss Virginia Monroe?”
“What the hell?!” Gates said.
“Did she?”
Gates seemed to think a moment. He waited so long to speak that Heimrich opened his eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Gates said, finally. “But as I remember it, she was quite different. A different type altogether. What’s the point of it?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “None, probably.” Heimrich stood up then. He said, “Thanks for explaining things, Mr. Gates,” and had Timothy Gates looking at him strangely.
“You’re not locking me up?” Gates asked.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “You like to push things, don’t you? Want them settled. No, I’m not having you locked up, Mr. Gates. Go back to the Inn.”
Gates stood then. He still looked surprised. He went toward the door.
“I’ll probably want to talk to you again, naturally,” Heimrich said, as Gates’s hand was on the knob.
Gates turned. His smile was lop-sided. The muscle twitched.
“I couldn’t be more surprised, sir,” he said, and his speech was, in phrasing, in inflection, for the first time that of a well-mannered boy from Maryland.
Heimrich and Forniss watched him go out. Forniss said, “Is he nuts, do you think?”
Heimrich shook his head slowly.
“We don’t know that, do we, Charlie?” he said. “He could be, naturally. He was hit hard, wasn’t he? Knocked sidewise, in a way.”
“Yep,” Forniss said. “I’d say so. The tic comes and goes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “With the strain, I’d think.”
“This about the girl,” Forniss said. “This girl Connie, who he saw the picture of. Whether she looked like the Monroe girl. I don’t think I get it, either.”
“No,” Heimrich said. “Well, probably there’s nothing to it, Charlie. But he feels very guilty about his friend, you know. Very mixed up, as he puts it. If Miss Monroe had looked a good deal like her, if she’d been behaving normally with men, you know, and Gates got too mixed up—came on Miss Monroe in the lane, thought she was this Connie, thought she wasn’t faithful to this friend of his—” Heimrich stopped. He shrugged wide shoulders.
“Well,” Forniss said, and his voice was heavy with doubt. “It’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it?”
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “It is, naturally. But so is his meeting her in the lane at all.”
Forniss looked surprised. He said he had thought that pretty thin. Heimrich said, “Naturally.” He said he didn’t like coincidences any more than the next policeman.
“Still,” he said, “there are coincidences, Charlie. Very annoying things, they can be. Now and then you have to accept one.”
“Well,” Forniss said.
“One,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t want to accept two, of course. One’s too many, naturally.”
Forniss merely nodded to that. Heimrich looked at his watch, found it was after eleven.
“I’m staying over at the Inn,” he said. “There’s nothing on the car, Charlie?”
“Nope,” Sergeant Forniss said.
“We’ll have to start dragging in the morning,” Heimrich said. “You’ll get that started, Charlie?”
“O. K.,” Forniss said. “You think it’s somebody around here, then?”
“Now Charlie,�
� Heimrich said. “We don’t know yet, do we? See you in the morning, Charlie.”
Heimrich went out, a very solid man. He seemed to fill the doorway as he went through it.
It occurred to Captain Heimrich, sitting in the substation office the next morning, that, during the night, they must have stopped half the MGs in Westchester County. Not a little inconvenience apparently had resulted to not a few people; considerable indignation had been expressed; the intelligence of the State police had been, on more than one occasion, adversely remarked upon. One young lady had offered to bite the intervening trooper and had refrained, according to the report, because she did not consider him clean enough. This had incensed the trooper, who was as clean as a man riding a motorcycle can reasonably hope to be. They had found one man for whom they had been looking for a considerable time, a by-product which would please the authorities in Schenectady. There were always by-products of one kind and another, so that confusion was augmented. They had not found the right MG.
The telephone rang at eight thirty-five. Heimrich listened and said, “All right, Charlie” and went out to his car. He drove a mile or so on a black-surfaced road, which seemed to glisten darkly in the slanting sun. He pulled off the road where there were already several cars, and two tow-trucks, and a dozen men. One of the trucks was halfway down a slope to the water, the other, attached by cable to its sister, was on the road.
There had been a gap in the guard rail here, Heimrich saw. It was not a newly made gap. A month ago, perhaps, something—he hoped, without confidence, that the something had not been a hurrying car—had struck the wooden rail, breaking it, leaving a section unprotected. The road supervisor had not got around to fixing it. Things like that happened.
Forniss came over to Heimrich and said, “Got a hook on it. One of the boys had himself an early swim. It’s the one we want.”
“Now Charlie,” Captain Heimrich said. “Did he get the license number?”
“O. K.,” Forniss said. “It’s an MG. It went off the road here, where the rail’s down. It left tracks. You think it’s another MG?”
“Now Charlie,” Captain Heimrich said. “I shouldn’t think so, naturally.”
“Take it up!” a man yelled from near the water.
The tow truck nearest the bank of the East Belford Reservoir took up slack on the cable which reached down into the water. Its helper on the road tightened the line between the two. The lower truck spun wheels in soft turf, got purchase as aid came. Slowly, the trucks moved. Slowly, up a steep bank, the little MG came. It caught on a rock and something gave and from the water’s edge a man swore and another yelled, “Hold it!” But it was too late to hold it, and the sports car came out, dripping, bedraggled. It came easily, then, up the slope and to the edge of the road. A fender in front hung limp; a rear tire was flat; the little car was muddy.
It seemed empty at first, when Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss looked into it. But the clothes were there, wadded together, tangled around the brake pedal. Heimrich lifted them out—a white silk dress, sleeveless, high-necked; a net brassière, a girdle which could be crushed in one of Forniss’s big hands.
The water had washed them, lessening the stains. Heimrich held the white dress up, at arm’s length. In the front of the dress, a little to the right as he held it before him, there was a rent. The material had been cut cleanly. He put the dress on the seat of the car and picked up the brassière. At the bottom, to the left a little, the hem which had held it tight beneath a young breast was cut.
“You see how it was, Charlie,” Heimrich said, and Charles Forniss nodded slowly. He looked at Heimrich.
“It doesn’t fit,” Forniss said.
But Heimrich shook his head.
“Oh yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I’m afraid it does. Fits the way it was, naturally.”
He turned away, holding the wet clothing.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll take these. Bring the car in.” He motioned with his head. “Come on, Charlie,” Heimrich said.
Chapter V
Liz Monroe had got up about eight. She had breakfasted alone; she had gone up to her grandmother’s room, as she did each morning. But Mrs. Jackson, plump and white-haired, pink-cheeked, had intercepted her in the upper hall. Mrs. Jackson had made much of shushing, had all but held a finger to her lips, although they both walked on carpet, were a dozen feet from Mrs. Penina Saunders’s door. “She’s sleeping, Liz,” Mrs. Jackson whispered, after she had shushed. “The poor dear. Let’s let her get what rest she can.”
Liz Monroe had said, “Of course.”
“It’s all so dreadful,” Mrs. Jackson said, with the air of one who would have paled at the dreadfulness, had nature been inclined to cooperate. “For everybody. I dread to think of her being told.”
Liz said she did, also. She said they would have to wait until Dr. Crowell decided.
“Dear Dr. Crowell,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Such a wonderful doctor, isn’t he? So up to date.”
Liz had agreed. She had gone downstairs, feeling the house empty. It had often been; considered objectively, as Liz now tried to consider it, there was no greater emptiness than there had frequently been before, when her sister had been in the city, her grandmother in the suite upstairs, sleeping the frequent sleep of the very old. It was only that now the emptiness had a new dimension. The house was empty for the future, as well as for the present.
Liz went out into the June morning. She wore blue denim slacks and a blue-gray shirt and, after she had looked at the perennial border, gardening gloves. Swanson never quite got to all the weeds; in mid-June it is never quite possible to get to all the weeds. Liz sat on her heels, the rising sun warm on her back through the thin shirt, and pulled. It was something to do, during this time when so much seemed to have come to a halt.
The Saunders house was on a corner, on what was too large, too spreading, to call a lot, perhaps a little small to qualify as an estate. Toward Main Street, the lawn ran smooth, with great maples on either side of the walk from the house. At the side, on Kendall Avenue, there was a low stone fence, and against this the peonies were blooming and the delphinium. It was a good year for peonies, Liz thought—to think of something—and pulled at weeds. She had been weeding for half an hour or so when a man’s voice, seemingly very near, said, “Miss Monroe.”
She looked up. Then she stood up. Timothy Gates was standing near, although beyond the low wall.
“I saw you from in front,” he said. “I came around.”
He was very tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired. The muscle jumped in his left cheek, just below the eye.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You’re not afraid, are you?”
She had drawn back. She realized she had drawn back.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” Gates said. “You were last night at the Inn. You don’t need to be. Will you listen to me?”
“I don’t know what you want,” Liz said. “But no, I’m not afraid. Why should I be?”
“Maybe you think something’s the matter with me,” he said. “Maybe that I went crazy and killed your sister. Do you think that?”
He had his hands on the low wall, and leaned toward her.
“I don’t know who killed Virginia,” Liz said. “The police will find out, won’t they?”
“It was a hideous thing,” he said. “Whoever did it. Wasn’t it?”
She nodded. She stood straight, slender, her shoulders squared.
“I have to talk to someone,” he said. “I thought I didn’t want to any more, but that doesn’t work. I’ve been awake most of the night and walking around for hours.” He shook his head, as if to shake something from his mind. “It’s a pretty little town,” he said.
Again she nodded.
“I didn’t kill your sister,” Gates said. “I know I didn’t. I remember all of walking through the lane. All of it.”
He looked at her very intently.
“He thinks I blanked out,” Gates said. “Went out of
my head and killed her and don’t remember it.”
“He?” she said. “Heimrich?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what he thinks.”
She did not answer at once, and he did not wait for an answer.
“Do I look like that?” he asked her. “Look at me, won’t you? Do I look like a man who would do that?”
She looked at him across the wall. He returned the look, his eyes demanding.
“No,” she said. “You don’t look like that.”
“You were afraid of me last night at the Inn,” he said, as he had said before. “Do you remember O’Neill’s play—about the stoker? The Hairy Ape, that was it. The girl on the ship looked at him as if he were some kind of monster. That’s the way you—”
“That’s not true,” she said. “You imagined it. You’re not at all like that, of course. You know you’re not.”
“Whoever killed your sister was some kind of monster,” he said. “I was walking along an hour or so on this street”—he gestured behind him—“I don’t know what it’s called.”
“Kendall Avenue,” Liz said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “This woman—she had a bag, she was going marketing, I guess—saw me coming and went over to the other side of the street and kept looking at me. She was afraid, you see. She’s seen me around and knew the police suspected me and—” He broke off.
“Probably she just went over to get in the sun,” Liz said. “Or in the shade, whichever it was. Or had to cross some time to get where she was going, and decided to cross then.”
He stood up; he shook his head. He touched the place on his face where the muscle jumped, and held his finger there, as if to hold the muscle quiet.
“I got to thinking,” he said. “I thought about you and I thought, ‘She was afraid, too. Perhaps there is something.’ I know I’m mixed up, you see. I told the captain about that. I thought, ‘I want to tell her how sorry I am about her sister, anyway. I’ll see if she’s afraid because—’” He stopped for a moment and moved his hand away from his face. The muscle did not jump, now. “I thought about the way you looked,” he said. “I thought you looked like somebody who’d tell me the truth. And like somebody who wouldn’t be afraid if there wasn’t anything to be afraid of.”
Stand Up and Die Page 6