The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  She looked away from the sparkling river, looked toward the Mitchie place, looked over the wall of the Mitchie place. The swimming pool, midway between the small low house and the grimly heavy house of stone, had been filled. The children were in the pool, splashing in the shallow end. Grace Mitchie, in a white bathing suit, and wearing dark glasses, was lying on a canvas beach chair. The children must be screaming at each other, but Enid could not hear them. Vaguely, she wished she could hear the children’s voices, but they were too far away.

  She had thought she would hear a siren first, but they did not use a siren. She heard first the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway, and got up from the rock outcropping she had been sitting on and walked back toward the house—the house with the little squinting windows. Over the last few yards the police car lagged behind her. Then it stopped behind the Volkswagen and a uniformed man got out on either side. One of them was Raymond Crowley. Ray had been a senior when she was a freshman in high school. She had sometimes gone to movies with Ray Crowley.

  He was very serious now; very much a policeman now. He said, “Hello, Enid,” and said the words with solemnity. He said, “Mr. Lenox and Professor Wingate?” and she felt, oddly, that he was giving her a chance to correct a mistake—what must be a mistake.

  She said, “Yes, Ray. Both of them. They’re … inside. In the study.”

  The other state trooper was already walking toward the house. His feet were heavy on the porch flooring as he went into the house.

  “Warm for so early on,” Ray Crowley said. “Going to be a hot summer, probably.”

  It didn’t mean anything, and he did not speak as if it meant anything. It was a meaningless grouping of words, meant to fill the silence of waiting. She said, “Yes,” as meaninglessly, and then, “They’re both dead, Ray. Both old men are dead.” She looked down at her hands and saw that they were shaking. He said, “Take it easy, kid. Just take it easy.”

  Then the other trooper came out of the house, his feet again heavy on the porch flooring. He came up to them and said, “Yeah. Couple of hours ago, I’d figure. Gunshot. Only one gun, far’s I can see.”

  “This is Trooper Fergus,” Ray said. “Paul Fergus. This is Miss Vance, Paul.”

  “Ugly thing to walk in on,” Fergus said, and Raymond Crowley went to the police car and unhooked a handset and said, “Trooper Crowley. On the Far Top squeal. Both of them dead. Paul thinks maybe a couple of hours ago. Looks like it could be murder and suicide.” He listened a minute. He said, “O.K., we’ll stand by.”

  He got out of the car and came back and said, “On their way.” Then he said, “Like you to wait if you don’t mind, Miss Vance.”

  His calling her Miss Vance didn’t mean anything. Of course it didn’t mean anything, except that, as a policeman, he relayed a request of the police. Oh—an order from the police. She said, “Of course,” and went to the Volkswagen and got into it.

  Another marked police car, with two uniformed troopers, came, and then a panel truck with a red light on top of it and “NEW YORK STATE POLICE” lettered on its sides, and then a gray sedan, not marked, but with a very long, whiplike radio antenna. Two tall men in civilian clothes got out of the sedan and they went to the house. One of them stopped for a moment and talked to Crowley, who had gone to stand on the porch. Then they both went into the house and men got out of the truck, with cameras and what looked like attaché cases, and went in after them. After about ten minutes, one of the men in civilian clothes came out of the house, and walked to the Volkswagen and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Miss Vance. With you in a minute.”

  She said, “It’s all right, Captain,” and watched Captain M. L. Heimrich, New York State Police, walk toward his car and get into it. She could see him speaking into a telephone, but could not hear what he said. A black sedan came up and a man with a physician’s bag got out of it and went toward the house, spoke to Crowley—who appeared to be acting as a guide—and went into the house.

  She was glad that Ray Crowley was one of them. It did not make any difference, not any real difference. But it was easier that she knew Ray and it was easier too, although not of course to the same degree, that Captain Heimrich was another of them. Somehow, knowing Ray over years, knowing the captain too, if only slightly, bridged the—the kind of ravine between what was familiar, was ordinary and everyday, and this strange and dreadful, this almost unthinkable, thing which had happened on this warm and ordinary afternoon. A kind of continuity was established.

  Enid had known Susan Heimrich most of her life—known her as an older girl who was ahead of her in school; known her when she was Susan Upton and lived in a white house on a hill and Enid herself lived in another white house on another hill. (Houses in the valley were almost always white, then; they were almost always on hills. The Van Brunt houses and the Lenox houses; not so large by a good deal, but still on their own more modest hills, the houses of the Vances and the Uptons. Things had changed in twenty years. For one reason and another most of the hills seemed—well, to have flattened out.)

  A little girl named Enid Vance. An older girl named Susan Upton. The years between them long, as years are in childhood. Not a friendship but a knowledge of each other’s existence, the acceptance of kind by kind.

  Enid could remember the slight raising of eyebrows, the implied “tut-tutting” when Susan married a man named Michael Faye, who was all right—who to a girl of ten was a fine man to look at from a distance—but who came from a distance. Came, specifically, from ‘The Flats,” where houses were not especially white and certainly not on hills. The distance between the white houses and The Flats was not a far distance, if you measured it in miles.

  There was an odd kind of comfort, of reassurance, in thinking of these things while she waited for Captain M. L. Heimrich, who was Susan’s husband now, to come back from whatever he was doing in the gray sedan and ask her how she had happened, on a sunny afternoon in May, to find two elderly men bloodily dead in a small, dim room. It was comforting to remember that, one Saturday afternoon in the previous autumn, she had had cocktails on the terrace of the Faye house—no, the Heimrich house. There was no reason she should find reassurance in that routine fact, or that she should need reassurance in any fact, but she did. There was still a kind of quivering inside her.

  Heimrich got out of the sedan, smoothly for so tall, so noticeably solid, a man, and came the few yards to the Volkswagen. He had very blue eyes, in a square and very tanned face. When he stood beside the Volkswagen, he was a good deal taller than the car. He had to stoop low to speak to her through the open window.

  “An ugly thing to come on,” Heimrich said. “How did you happen to, Miss Vance?”

  “They’re both dead?” she said. “They killed each other?”

  “They’ve been dead several hours,” Heimrich said. “Since some time before noon, at a guess. The coroner will have a better guess, naturally. Now, Miss Vance—” But he stopped with that and, unexpectedly, he smiled. The smile made a remarkable change in his face.

  “This,” he said, “is going to give you a crick in the neck. And me one in the back. Suppose we go …” He paused again and looked around. “Suppose we go sit on the porch,” Captain Heimrich said.

  They went and sat on the porch, in wicker chairs side by side, at some distance from the front door, through which men came and went. Heimrich did not pay any attention to the men who came and went.

  “As to whether they killed each other,” Heimrich said, “we don’t know, Miss Vance. They may have. There seems to be only one gun—Mr. Lenox’s gun. Had a permit for it. But they may have struggled for the gun. We—”

  He broke off again. The man with the physician’s bag came out of the house and looked around, and Heimrich said, “Over here, doctor;” The doctor came across the porch.

  “Between ten this morning and noon,” the doctor said. “The professor once, which was plenty. And quick. Lenox a couple of times, which wasn’t so quick. No contact wounds.�
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  “Wingate could have shot Lenox,” Heimrich said. “Lenox might still have been able to shoot Wingate, if he could get hold of the gun. Not the other way around?”

  “Medically,” the doctor said. “That’s the way it looks, medically. Or Wingate could have shot Lenox and shot himself, if he wanted to hold the gun at arm’s length. If his arm was long enough. Which, at a guess, it wasn’t.”

  Heimrich said, “Thanks, doctor.”

  “Send them along,” the doctor said, and went along himself.

  “It looked as if—as if they’d been fighting,” Enid said. “Knocking things over.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Now, how did you happen to find them, Miss Vance?”

  She told him how. Now and then he nodded. Now and then he closed his very blue eyes.

  “He expected you this afternoon?”

  “Usually I came Fridays. Brought back what I had typed, took away what he had written during the week. There wasn’t any fixed time. If he was going out, he left his manuscript on the table in the hall. By the telephone. I left what I had typed and took what he had written. Oh, sometimes I didn’t have the typescript ready. There’d be other jobs—jobs there was a greater rush about. Then I’d call him up. He—he wasn’t in any hurry. No … deadline.”

  She wished she had used some other word.

  “He had been working on this book some time?”

  “He had been working on it for about a year. He wrote about twenty pages a week.”

  “It sounds,” Heimrich said, “like being a long book. Was he nearly through with it, do you think?”

  She thought so. He had almost finished with the Van Brunt family. Up to—

  “Mrs. Van Brunt died a few months ago, didn’t she?” Enid said, interrupting herself. “In prison?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, who had been instrumental in sending her to prison.*

  “Did Mr. Lenox speak much of Professor Wingate? I mean, enough to give you any idea of their relationship? Whether they were friends?”

  She shook her head.

  “Professor Wingate found books for him,” she said. “Books and—oh, old records. Old newspapers. Things like that. Borrowed books for him from other libraries. Sometimes brought things up here to him, I think.”

  “Help him with the book? The professor taught history. It would have been in his line.”

  She didn’t know. “Mr. Lenox did call him by his first name,” she said. “In a—as if they were friends. When he spoke of him, I mean.”

  “You never saw him here before? The professor, I mean?”

  She thought for a moment, and then shook her head. But then she remembered, and told Heimrich—who shut his eyes while he listened—of having gone into the library in, she thought, March, and of finding Lenox there, talking to Wingate. “They seemed friendly,” she said. “And—wait. As he was leaving—he had several books under his arm—Mr. Lenox said something about seeing Professor Wingate. ‘See you tomorrow night, Loudon.’ Something like that.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes and looked at her, and nodded his head. He said, “Was Mr. Lenox an easy man to get along with, Miss Vance? I mean, so far as you had contact with him, naturally.”

  “It wasn’t really—well, what you would call contact,” Enid said. “I mean, I’d take the manuscript and type it and bring it back. Sometimes, not often, I’d have to ask him about a word—something in his writing I wasn’t sure of. He was patient about that. Some people …”

  She was conscious of wandering from the point, if there was a point to wander from. Some people weren’t patient under such circumstances. Which had nothing to do with anything. Some people said, “For God’s sake, girl.”

  “You were last here a week ago?”

  She had been; had left typescript, picked up manuscript. “This,” she said, and put a hand on the briefcase on her lap. She opened the briefcase, took yellow paper and white typewriter paper out of it; flipped pages of the typescript to the last. “This is what I mean about the Van Brunt family,” she said, and held it out.

  “It is now,” Heimrich read, “necessary to recount the unfortunate events which brought about the downfall of a family for so many generations one of the most respected not only in the township to which it gave a name but in the whole of the Hudson Valley.”

  The late Homer Lenox had approached the events—there had been one central event: murder—uneasily, Merton Heimrich thought. Which was understandable; which was not germane. The half-formed suspicion that Lenox, prodding around in the past, might have prodded where it hurt someone of the present faded from Heimrich’s mind. Cornelia Van Brunt was beyond further hurt; her son, in prison, beyond hurting. Two elderly men had quarreled about something and managed to kill each other. That was, undoubtedly, what it was going to come to.

  It would be interesting to know, and it would be necessary to try to find out, what had led to so bitter, so fatal, a quarrel. There was no use guessing, and they might never know. Heimrich did not share Enid’s belief that placidity accompanied aging. One of the most violently cantankerous humans he had ever known had been a man in his eighties. Some entirely trivial thing might have set the old boys off.

  The girl beside him had found Lenox “patient.” But patient about one very unimportant thing. About other things—things perhaps as trivial to an outsider’s mind—he might have been—

  Heimrich opened his eyes, and decided to quit wasting time—his time and Enid Vance’s time. So—admit he didn’t, somehow, like the feel of it. Admit—

  Sergeant Charles Forniss came out of the house. He was a little taller than Heimrich and a little thicker. He came across the porch and the old boards he walked on made protesting sounds.

  “Prints of both on the gun,” Forniss said. “On the barrel. Lenox’s on the trigger guard. Nothing that’s any good on the butt, like always. Nothing on the trigger, like usual. Things knocked about a good deal. Papers and books all over everything. Only, there’s a little table—shaky little table—with a lamp on it, and the lamp’s still there. You noticed that?”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “On the other hand, they were a bit old for much of a brawl.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes and said he saw what Forniss meant. On the other hand, the professor had still played a good deal of golf. And Lenox, about whose athletic ability he knew nothing, had looked fit enough—as fit, that was, as a very dead man could. Looked as if he had been out of doors a good deal. Possibly just sitting somewhere in the sun, but on the other hand—

  “I think,” Enid Vance said, “that Mr. Lenox was a bird watcher.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes and said, “Yes, Miss Vance?”

  “I don’t really know why I said that,” she said. “Oh, I do, but it isn’t much to go on. Last week when I was here, he called down from upstairs somewhere and asked me to wait a minute, and when he came down he had a pair of binoculars. There’s that thing on the roof—”

  Heimrich had seen the thing on the roof—a railed platform; a vantage place which on a New England coastal house would have been known as a “captain’s walk.”

  “I thought of birds,” Enid said. “It was a silly thing to mention. You’ll want to keep the manuscript?”

  “We’ll put it with the rest,” Heimrich said. “When we sort things out.” He sighed, thinking of the sorting out there would be to be done. Sorting out of papers; sorting out of people. “You know his son, Miss Vance?”

  “Scott,” she said. “His stepson. Although Mr. Lenox did legally adopt him when Scott was a little boy. Yes, I know Scott.”

  She was conscious of studied detachment in her tone; thought her tone was almost one of wariness. She could not understand why, as if by instinct, she had used that tone. There was nothing to be wary about.

  There was nothing in Heimrich’s tone when he said, “Happen to know where we can get in touch with him?” to show that he had noticed any wariness in hers. “To tell him about his father.”

/>   “If he’s not at home—”

  “Doesn’t seem to be,” Heimrich said. “We called, and no answer. He works there, doesn’t he?”

  He worked there, banging out juveniles; banging out articles; banging out anything that would pay the rent.

  “He may have had to go into town,” Enid said. “To see his agent or—I don’t know, Captain.”

  “Probably that’s it,” Heimrich said, and stood up. “Well, no need to keep you any longer, Miss Vance. You’ve been through enough for one afternoon. More than enough.”

  It was dismissal. She went to her little car, and thought that, for a few moments, the two big men stood and watched her. But when, at the car, she turned to look back they were going into the house. She backed the car and turned, and then had to wait while an ambulance came up the drive.

  She drove toward Van Brunt Center, the empty briefcase on the seat beside her. Scott hadn’t said anything about going to New York. Probably he was merely out taking a walk. There was nobody in the tiny house he rented to answer the telephone when he was not there.

  * As recounted in Burnt Offering.

  III

  There was a bruise on the outstretched right hand of the late Homer Lenox.

  “Probably hit it against something when he fell,” Forniss said. “Lived long enough for the bruise to develop. Or, Wingate tried to knock the gun out of his hand with something. Here they are.”

  There they were, dressed in white, with stretchers. There were two of them, and one of them said, “O.K.?”

  Forniss looked at Heimrich, who nodded his head, and Forniss said, “O.K., boys.”

  They put what remained of Homer Lenox on the stretcher first, since that was handiest. They carried it out to the ambulance.