The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  Heimrich got up firmly and walked lightly—although seeming to himself to plod—back to the house. There he disposed of the empty beer can.

  The times counted; the times came first. Who stands to profit? Is he free at the time? Those things are starting points. Between ten in the morning and noon the two men had been killed. (At a physician’s guess, which the physician would be first to admit was not final.) Scott Lenox could have made it. So, as far as Heimrich knew, could Enid Vance. They seemed like nice enough young people, but a policeman cannot share a small boy’s confidence about people. Five thousand dollars isn’t much to kill for, but killings have been done for less, and by amateurs. And if Scott and Enid had joint plans for the future, the five thousand would be only a kind of bonus. Like a hilltop house which had been a barn.

  Heimrich left the house which, along with a large dog and a grave small boy, he had married when he married Susan, and went to his car.

  Get the times straight first, if the times could be got straight. Asa Purvis had had no luck with the time of the library burglary. People had been asleep, or minding their own business, when the library door was forced, or the Person Unknown had been also invisible, or very quiet. He would, of course, have tried to be both. A Miss Shively, who lived on Jackson Road, back of the library, had heard sounds around midnight, but had taken them to be caused by drunks reeling out of the Old Stone Inn. Miss Shively, however, lived in a world of reeling drunks, and was surrounded by “gin mills.” “Poor old lady,” Asa Purvis had remarked, unofficially, in reporting her statement.

  A fire is a different matter. A fire on the top of a hill can hardly be invisible, particularly from the top of another hill.

  At a little after one, Heimrich drove between massive stone pillars, in one of which a flat stone had been set. On the flat stone the word “Mitchie” had been carved—probably, Heimrich thought, by some long-dead sculptor of headstones. The iron gates stood open. A man was riding a big mower over beautifully green grass. Another man was raking what Heimrich would have considered an already impeccable bluestone drive. The man raking the gravel stood aside. Adam Mears, old man Mears’s son. What a lot of Mearses there were around, and how they ran the Van Brunt social gamut, from Henry Mears, cashier of the bank, to Jasper Mears, old man Mears, who lived alone in one of the few remaining hovels in The Flats. Heimrich wondered if the Mearses appeared among the families in Homer Lenox’s book. He supposed they might; he had a vague impression that one Obediah Mears had been a Revolutionary War general. Time weathers families down, as it does mountains. Bill Mears owned a prosperous hardware store; Adam Mears, who was probably a cousin of some sort, was a part-time gardener. When, as Susan had said, he was sober.

  Heimrich said, “ ’Afternoon, Adam” and Mears, leaning on his rake—and, Heimrich noticed, swaying a little—made a sound which was presumably one of acquiescence. Heimrich drove up the curving, impeccable drive, with tall evergreens on either side. He came out on a plateau, to a turnaround between lawns smooth as putting greens, and got out of the car and looked south. Far Top was certainly visible enough on its adjacent hill. A Jeep station wagon stood in the driveway. Scott Lenox checking up on his inheritance?

  A brown man in white swimming trunks said, “Hi” and Heimrich walked across perfect grass toward the swimming pool and toward John Mitchie III—commonly called Johnny Three—who got up from a canvas chair and said, “ ’Afternoon, M. L.” Merton Heimrich disapproved of the initials so used almost as much as he did of his given name, but had never been able to think of a preferable alternative to either. He said, “’Afternoon, John.”

  Johnny Three was of medium height; a compact, deeply tanned man. He would have spent part of the winter in Florida or, conceivably, in Arizona. Or at Palm Springs, for that matter. Johnny Three was a stockbroker, but not assiduous about it. The assiduous Mitchies had been some generations back. Merton Heimrich had always found John Mitchie III a very pleasant man, although his contacts with Mitchie had been few.

  Michael and John Mitchie’s son James were friends. Now and then Michael spent the day with James at the Mitchies’, mostly in the swimming pool. Now and then, Heimrich had driven him there, although Susan did more often.

  “Fix you a drink?” Mitchie said, and Heimrich said he guessed not. “Hell of a thing about poor old Lenox,” Mitchie said. “And the professor too, of course. Hard to think of the two old boys blazing away at each other.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “None of you here heard the shots?”

  “I wasn’t here,” Mitchie said. “Slaving in town. But I asked Grace whether she and the kids heard anything, and they didn’t. Only—well, you know how it is—shots don’t mean too much in the country. If you want to ask her yourself?”

  “Not since you asked her.” Heimrich raised his shoulders. “Your father?”

  Johnny Three shook his head decisively. He said, “Not a chance, M. L.” Heimrich waited. “Yesterday was Friday,” Mitchie said, clinching the point. Heimrich closed his eyes and waited. Mitchie looked at him for a moment and then said, “Sorry, Captain. No reason you should know Dad’s habits. Friday’s his day in town.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “Clockwork,” John Mitchie said. “A thing for each day. Fridays, Dad drives into town. Has lunch at the club, with three other men. Always the same three, I guess. Friday afternoons he plays bridge. It’s … immutable.” He paused and then said, “You don’t know my father, do you, Captain?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I met him once when I brought Michael here. But, no, John.”

  “It’s since mother died, I suppose,” Johnny Three said. “Certainly it’s been that way since he built Grace and me this house, and we came here to live. And that’s—” John Mitchie III leaned back in his chair and looked at the sky—“that’s since James was two. Comes to nine years or thereabouts. He thought the city wasn’t a place to bring a boy up in and—but that doesn’t matter, does it? It’s only that he couldn’t have heard shots here after, at a guess, about ten in the morning. Not on Friday. He gives himself plenty of time to drive the Bentley into town. I’ve driven in with him a couple of times.”

  John Mitchie sighed, and Heimrich smiled slightly. Johnny Three drove a Mercedes. He did not drive it slowly.

  “He did this yesterday?” Heimrich said. “Drove in to New York?”

  “Yesterday was Friday,” Johnny Three said. “If you mean, did I see him start—no, I didn’t. But it’s a hundred—hell, a thousand to one that he left pretty much on the stroke of nine, and got to the club at noon or a little after, and that the doorman—Ned, the doorman’s name is—drove the Bentley to the garage for the afternoon. As it’s a thousand to one that tomorrow he’ll come over here and we’ll have lunch by the pool, and that next Wednesday we’ll go there for dinner.” When he said “there,” Johnny Three gestured toward the big fieldstone house, the house which was rather like a fortress. “But you can always ask him, M. L. He’ll have finished lunch by now.” Mitchie reached to a table and took a wrist watch from it and looked at the watch. “Just about now,” he said. “At four, if he feels it’s warm enough, he’ll come over for a swim. Unless we’re having people he doesn’t like, which we aren’t today. Then—”

  Mitchie laughed suddenly.

  “You ask a simple question,” he said. “Did we or didn’t we hear shots? You get—hell, you get a play by play. What it comes to, Captain, the old boy fascinates me. Look, how’s for a swim? We’ve got trunks to fit anybody.”

  Heimrich, hot in the sun, looked at the crinkled water in the pool, and was tempted. But he was wasting time already, had obviously wasted it now for some minutes. He said he guessed not. He said there was one other point.

  “Some time last night,” Heimrich said, “somebody built a bonfire over at Far Top. Burned up some papers. Did you or Grace happen to see a fire over there, John?”

  “No,” Johnny Three said. “I can answer for both of us. For the kids, too. We had dinne
r—oh, about seven-thirty. We sat around a while and talked to the kids, and then the kids went to bed. Grace put them to bed, but their rooms are on the other side of the house. Then we came out here and sat around for maybe a couple of hours—maybe until around ten or ten-thirty, and had a drink and went to bed. If there’d been a fire over there up to that time one of us would have seen it. And said something—‘Hey, lookie!’ probably. ‘Who’s burning trash over at the Lenox place?’ maybe. When’s this fire supposed to have been set, M. L.?”

  “Now, John,” Heimrich said. “What I’m trying to find out. Not before around ten-thirty apparently, or you and Grace would have seen it.”

  “May as well make—” John Mitchie said, and started to get up, because Grace Mitchie came out of the sleek house. She was sleek as the house—a dark young woman in a white bathing suit. She smiled and said, “Merton!” and “Where’s Susan? Working on a day like this? Why didn’t you bring Michael, at least?”

  “She probably is,” Heimrich said. “Michael’s playing baseball. John says you and he didn’t see a fire over near Far Top last night.”

  “Poor Homer,” Grace said. “Isn’t it the most dreadful thing? The most unthinkable thing? No, we didn’t see a fire, did we, John?”

  Then she dived into the pool and swam across it, and put her elbows on the rim and said, “Why don’t you show Merton where the trunks are, Johnny Three?” …

  A likable pair, with three likable kids, Merton Heimrich thought, and walked across perfect grass to the big house. A tall Negro man in a white coat answered the door and said, “Sir?” Heimrich identified himself, said he would like to see Mr. Mitchie.

  “Mr. Mitchie paints at this time, sir,” the man said. “I’m afraid—”

  “Tell Mr. Mitchie I’d like to see him, if you don’t mind,” Heimrich said, and the man said, “Sir,” and closed the door—rather, Heimrich thought, as if he were bringing down a portcullis. But after only a minute or two he came back and opened the door more widely and said, “If you will, Captain.” He led Heimrich through a long corridor, and to a room on the north side of the fortress. The room had a big, slanting window to the north.

  John Mitchie II was a compact man of medium height, and looked a great deal like his son. He was wearing walking shorts and a blue polo shirt and there was paint on both. He was looking at a canvas on an easel, and continued to look at it after the servant said, “Captain Heimrich, sir.” Heimrich looked at the canvas too. Colors leaped from the canvas; after he had looked at it for a second Heimrich began to see form amid the colors—or to think he did. He wished Susan were there to tell him whether he did.

  “Well,” John Mitchie II said, without turning, “what do you think of it?”

  Heimrich considered briefly. Heimrich said, “Mm-m-m.”

  Mitchie turned abruptly, his canvas shoes shuffling on the bare floor. He had white hair, cut in a brush. He had sharp blue eyes, at the moment narrowed.

  “Profound,” he said. “What do you want, Captain? You apparently convinced Robert it was important. He knows I paint at this hour.”

  Heimrich told him what he wanted.

  “Yesterday was Friday,” Mitchie said. “I drive into the city on Fridays and play bridge. I heard no shots. I go to bed at tenthirty. I did not see a fire at the Lenox place. Robert!”

  The man in the white jacket had gone out after he announced Heimrich. He had not gone far. He opened the door to the studio room and said, “Sir?”

  “Did you see a fire in the direction of Far Top last night?”

  Robert said, “No, sir.”

  “Well,” Mitchie said, “there you are, Captain,” and turned back to the canvas.

  And there, evidently, he was, Merton Heimrich thought. He said, “Thank you, Mr. Mitchie,” and Robert said, “This way, sir.”

  At least, John Mitchie II had wasted little more of time already wasted, Heimrich thought, and walked back to his car. Grace and Johnny Three, both in the pool now, waved to him, and he waved back to them. He had got no further on, Heimrich thought, and turned the car in the big graveled turnaround. He had fixed no times—no time of shots, no time of fire. He had discovered that John Mitchie II was a painter, which probably anybody in Van Brunt could have told him.

  He drove down to Route 11-F and south on it, and up another steeply climbing, narrow road to Far Top. If Scott Lenox was still there, and didn’t already know he was an heir, it might be a notion to tell him, to see how surprised he was.

  VII

  The vintage Jeep stood in front of Far Top, and was empty. As Heimrich drove his own car around the boulder which the drive circled, he slowed and looked at the house—looked up at the house. Scott Lenox and Enid Vance were on the platform on top of the house. Apparently they had not heard Heimrich’s car.

  Enid, slim in a dark green suit, as she had been the afternoon before, was looking through binoculars. The tall, almost gangling, man was standing with an arm around her, and was pointing with his free hand. They were looking south toward Van Brunt, which was not so far when one followed the line of sight as when one followed meandering roads. Heimrich wondered what, so intently, they were looking at in Van Brunt, and drove on around the boulder. They heard his car then, and when he got out of it and looked up both were at the platform rail, looking down at him. The binoculars, cased, hung from the tall thin man’s shoulder. As Heimrich looked up at them, Scott Lenox said, “Hi, Captain. Looking for us?”

  Scott Lenox was wearing his glasses. After he had looked at Heimrich through them, he took them off and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and got “O.K.” for an answer. Then the two on the roof went down the steps to the catwalk, the girl first, and the few feet along the catwalk and disappeared. Heimrich went up on the porch and waited. He heard them before he saw them.

  “It’s too big for any use,” Scott Lenox said. “We’d rattle in it.”

  Which, Heimrich thought, seemed to settle one point, if it had needed settling—settled two points, actually.

  “And,” Scott said, nearer now, almost down the first flight of stairs now, “it would cost a fortune to heat.”

  Which, Heimrich thought, left a point somewhat obscure. They came out onto the porch and Enid said, “Good afternoon, Captain.” Scott said, “Is the place supposed to be off limits or something?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “There’s nothing in the house which interests us now, Mr. Lenox.”

  “A middle-size white elephant,” Lenox said. He sighed. It was, Heimrich thought, the sigh of a proprietor of a white elephant.

  “I gather,” Heimrich said, “you’ve heard your stepfather left it to you?”

  “Byron Simpson is a sieve,” Scott Lenox said. “Shake him and he gives. Call him on the telephone and he gives. Very unethical for a lawyer, I’d have thought. But convenient.”

  “You called him on the telephone?”

  “Yes. Unethical of me, Captain? Natural curiosity, I’d have thought. Of which I have at least one man’s share.”

  Enid turned and looked up at him. Heimrich thought she frowned slightly.

  “My girl,” Scott said, “wishes I would exercise discretion. She should know better.”

  He looked down at “his” girl. His wide-mouthed smile flickered briefly. The girl’s hands moved in gesture of tolerant, perhaps amused, resignation.

  “I telephoned my late stepfather’s lawyer, Byron Simpson,” Scott said formally, a man making a serious statement, correcting previous flippancy. “I asked if he cared to tell me who my stepfather’s heir was. He said I was. Do I sound grasping, Captain? Indifferent to the niceties? I assure you I am both.”

  He was also, Heimrich thought, self-conscious. Quite possibly, he was shy. Conceivably, he wished to anticipate criticism.

  “Scott,” the girl said. Her voice was soft. But her tone admonished. He put his right hand on her right shoulder and drew her to him. He did not answer her otherwise, but he did not
go on talking.

  “Mr. Simpson told you you are your stepfather’s heir,” Heimrich said. “I don’t suppose that surprised you very much, Mr. Lenox?”

  “No,” Scott said. “For one thing, I don’t know who else there would be. The Lenox family ran out with him, Captain. He tried to splice me on. As better than nothing, nearer a Lenox than anybody else. Yes, I thought he’d leave me the—” he paused momentarily—“the family seat,” he said. “And, Enid and I have been looking it over, Captain. It’s a luxury we’ll find it difficult to afford.”

  Scott Lenox appeared to be a sieve himself. One did not even need to shake him. He appeared to shake himself. Up, Heimrich wondered, to what point?

  “Did Mr. Simpson give you an idea of the extent of your stepfather’s estate?”

  “No,” Scott said. “I—well, I didn’t say, ‘How much did the old boy leave? What’ll he cut up for?’ However you’d ask a question like that.”

  “Why?”

  The girl answered that.

  “Because,” she said, “he merely tries to be hardboiled, Captain. He tries very, very hard.”

  “The trouble with my girl,” Scott said, “is that she’s fond of me. Makes allowances; has learned to look on the bright side. Nurtures illusions, thus making the best of a bad bargain. I arouse in her, for reasons not clear to me, the protective instincts traditional with—”

  “Scott,” the girl said, gently, “you talk too much, don’t you?”

  He looked down at her. She turned her head and looked up at him.

  “Yes,” Scott said. “I talk too much.” And then, somewhat to Heimrich’s surprise, but apparently not to the girl’s, he kissed her. The kiss was brief; it was by no means flippant.

  “There,” Scott Lenox said, when he had finished kissing his girl. He continued to hold her against him, but faced Heimrich.

  “Let’s consider my character analyzed,” he said. “As to asking Simpson for the details, I could guess nearly enough. He owned this house and about ten acres. He had an income—a family income, I suppose—which probably ended with his death. Things like that do, don’t they?”