The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  He stopped at the Three Oaks. It was very busy now. Another bartender was helping Armstrong, and a girl was serving tables. There were a good many kids in the barroom now. Fugitives, Heimrich supposed, from New Jersey restrictions. He hoped they would all safely make the twisting approach to Bear Mountain Bridge. It was too bad that even sober kids are usually inept drivers.

  Armstrong thought that Adam Mears had showed up around five, had a couple of drinks, gone away—presumably gone home to eat—and come back around seven. “He wasn’t too drunk for me to serve him,” Armstrong said, and was firm about it. Yes, Adam had been in earlier in the afternoon and had a drink at the bar. No, Armstrong had not sold him a bottle to take out. Captain Heimrich ought to know that that was against the law in New York State. How about his buying the captain a drink? Heimrich said No to that. He said, “Watch your step, Leo,” and Leo Armstrong looked at him with astonished innocence.

  Forniss had put the clippings in a big envelope and they bulged the envelope. He said, Yes, among the places they had found Adam Mears’s fingerprints had been on the coffee can with the money in it. They did not appear to be where they would have been if Adam had opened the can, but nobody could be certain about that If he had, it had not been to take the money.

  “Knock it off for the night, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I’m going to.”

  He drove north to the Old Stone Inn and went into the taproom. Scott and Enid were at a table in a corner and were talking with animation, and each had a cocktail in front of him. The animation diminished somewhat when Merton Heimrich approached, but that was natural. A couple newly engaged, and also newly heirs, may be expected to prefer to be alone.

  “Of course,” Enid said, asked if she had made carbons of Homer Lenox’s manuscripts. She had made two carbons. She had not delivered them to Lenox; he had not wanted them. She had kept them in a cabinet. So far as she knew, they were still in the cabinet. If it was important, she could—

  She started to push the table away.

  “Just let me have your key,” Heimrich said. “I’ll check.”

  They both looked puzzled, Scott a little elaborately so. But Scott Lenox, Heimrich was beginning to think, usually did elaborate. Part, probably, of his defense of whatever he might be defending. Shyness, for example.

  Heimrich took the key and walked across the street to the Van Brunt Annex. A trooper, not in uniform, was sitting on the steps inside, where he was supposed to be sitting. He was smoking a cigarette, and put it out quickly. Heimrich said, “Rather advertising your presence, aren’t you? Smelled that cigarette of yours when I came in downstairs.”

  He went on upstairs and into Enid Vance’s office, which was very neat, its electric typewriter hooded against dust. The carbons of The Families were where she had said they would be. Either Person Unknown had not thought of carbon copies or had not got around to trying to get them or—or he had no use for them. In which case, obviously, Heimrich himself had been wasting time plodding through a dull book.

  Heimrich left the carbons where they were, and the watching trooper—standing now, his cigarette ground out—where he was. Everybody knew Scott Lenox’s Jeep, and would know he was having dinner at the Inn, and could guess Enid was with him. It might look like an opportunity to Person Unknown.

  Heimrich did not really believe any part of that. He had been, he thought, barking up the wrong book. He took the key back to Enid and told her the carbons were where she said they were.

  “What’s about the carbons?” Scott asked him.

  “Nothing, apparently,” Heimrich said. “Routine. Where have you two been since I saw you last?”

  They had been watching a movie in Peekskill. “A very routine picture,” Scott said, with gravity. “Pursuit of elusive murderer by dogged policemen. It went on and on, avoiding its foregone conclusion.”

  “I’m sorry you had a dull afternoon,” Heimrich said, with equal gravity.

  Scott Lenox smiled his sudden wide smile.

  “Now, Captain,” Scott Lenox said, “did I say we had a dull afternoon?”

  The city police of Peekskill, New York, cooperating, were making a list of the films being shown in the city. It would not be a long list. One of the pictures would concern a wily criminal pursued by a plodding policeman, and the law would, in the end, triumph. There would have been an afternoon showing of this picture. Heimrich had no doubt whatever as to any of this. If Scott and Enid had not actually been at such a movie—had been, perhaps, smothering an old man to keep an old man from talking—they would have made sure that such a movie existed and that they could have been at it and got to the Inn in time for dinner. It is still necessary to verify the obvious. Murderers make mistakes, which is one reason they are usually caught. Heimrich wished the catching were as inevitable as the writers of motion picture scripts made it.

  Colonel lay sprawled in front of a fireplace in which there was no fire. Young Michael, it was to be hoped, slept. There was light from the partly open door to her—to their—bedroom, so it was to be assumed that Susan read in bed. Merton Heimrich sat in front of a table piled with yellowed newspaper clippings, seeking a needle probably in some other haystack—the needle which would point to an answer. The question to be answered was “Why?”

  It hung this time, as not always, on that answer. Often it was “How?” and, with that answer found, the final “Who?” also answered. In this case, “How?” was not a question. Get on with it, Heimrich told himself, and got on with it, although with no confidence that that would get him anywhere. Old Mears had clipped extensively from newspapers. Probably he had done it to pass an old man’s time. Probably what he had known that got him killed had been only in his head.

  It was not, certainly, apparent in a column-long news story which began, “When the recommended methods are scrupulously followed, no danger whatever exists in the use of the brand of bottled gas known as Certex, the regional sales manager of the Certex Corporation assured a reporter for the Putnam Recorder in an exclusive interview at his office in the Frobisher Building yesterday. Safeguards built into the container are, for all practical purposes, foolproof.

  “The regional manager, George Snaith, explained—”

  Having read that far, in mild bewilderment—service to an advertiser, presumably. But backhanded service certainly—Heimrich read on, illustrating the law of inertia. He was halfway down the close-set column before he was enlightened.

  A container of the bottled gas Certex had blown up in the kitchen of a lunchroom on Main Street—blown skyhigh, safeguards and all. The lunchroom had been demolished; the cook had been painfully, but it was hoped not fatally, injured. Had the old man cut out this rather remarkable news story because he thought it funny? In a somewhat grim, a somewhat depressing, way it seemed so to Heimrich. Probably all the clippings were of no greater meaning. An aging man had wryly watched the world go round. A thousand to one he had not found in newsprint the secret which stopped its revolution for him.

  “Heads Yale Swim Team,” was the caption over a two-column cut of a muscular young man standing, clad in shorts, on the verge of a swimming pool, his toes clutching the rounded edge. “John Mitchie III, of Cold Harbor, who has been named Captain of the Yale University swimming team.” Closer, certainly, than the explosion of foolproof gas to the matter at hand, but not close enough. Johnny Three had been at his office in New York when Homer Lenox and Loudon Wingate had been shot to death in a house on a hill opposite his own. He had caught an early train to Garrison, the nearest stop, and played bridge with friends while on it. Heimrich knew Johnny Three could swim. He had seen him swimming. That he had captained a swimming team a dozen years ago was not relevant to anything.

  Heimrich put the picture of John Mitchie III, somewhat improbably posed to dive, on the regrettably small pile of clippings looked at and found meaningless. He burrowed further into the regrettably large haystack still unturned. He found nothing for half an hour. Then he found a sheaf of cuttings, clipped togethe
r, about the arrest and trial of Cornelia Van Brunt on a charge of murder, and of her son Henry on several charges, including complicity in homicide. Heimrich identified these clippings and laid them aside. They could tell him nothing he did not know….

  “Miss Enid Vance, daughter of the late Ernest Vance, after graduation from a secretarial school in the city, has opened an office in the Van Brunt Annex, in Van Brunt Center, and plans to provide general secretarial services.”

  Nothing he did not know; nothing which was secret….

  He went on. People he had never heard of had died and their passing had been noticed, at varying length. Miss Florence Shivery, of Van Brunt Center, had been threatened with a slander action by Leo Armstrong, proprietor of the Three Oaks Tavern, who alleged that his character had been defamed in the course of impromptu remarks made by Miss Shively at a meeting of the Van Brunt Garden Club. Merton Heimrich wondered, mildly, what had come of that. He also wondered, even more mildly, when it had happened. Few of the clippings were dated. Some clippings had yellowed less than others; a few appeared to be quite recent. It was all guesswork.

  One of the clips most yellowed, so tender with age that it threatened to crumble in Heimrich’s fingers, was of an interview with John Mitchie II on “his return from abroad, after several years in France.” Mr. Mitchie was “entirely recovered from serious injuries sustained in a climbing accident.” He was glad to get home. He was accompanied by his wife, whom he had married in Paris. He—

  It was a lengthy article; full attention was paid to an event of importance. It ended in midsentence with the injunction, “Turn to Page 5.” Mears, it appeared, had not obeyed instructions.

  Heimrich turned the clipping face down, and then discovered that two smaller cuttings, almost equally yellowed, were clipped to it. He unclipped them.

  The one uppermost was brief. “Announcement was made today of the birth of a son to Mr. and Mrs. John Mitchie II, of Cold Harbor. Both mother and child are reported in excellent condition in the Sloane Maternity Hospital in New York.”

  There was no date.

  The second clipping was a bit longer:

  “Mrs. John Mitchie II, the former Renée de Chapvivny, died Tuesday in Cold Harbor Hospital after an emergency operation. Mrs. Mitchie, who came to this country with her husband only a few years ago, was in her middle twenties.

  “Mrs. Mitchie is survived by her husband and a son, John Mitchie HI, aged five.”

  The light in the bedroom had gone off. Colonel twitched a little, perhaps dreaming of the chase. Perhaps the big dog, who had not for a long time chased anything more formidable than a loop of leather, dreamed of pursuing deer across wide fields.

  Heimrich lighted another cigarette and thought he was smoking too much. He rubbed his eyes, being sure he was reading too much. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. But the unsifted pile was small, now. Tomorrow he might be busy. He rather wished he knew at what. Tomorrow things might begin to break. He could hear no premonitory cracking sounds.

  He picked up another clipping. This one was folded; a strip was folded around it. The strip was a headline. It had run across the front page of the Putnam Recorder in—in July of 1941. This time old Mears had cut to preserve a date line.

  The streamer headline read:

  Two DIE AS CAR CRASHES; ROAD CONDITIONS BLAMED

  Under it there was a bank head:

  PROMINENT LOCAL CITIZENS

  KILLED IN CRASH

  And then the story:

  “Mrs. Homer Lenox, of Far Top, and Ernest Vance, a resident of Van Brunt Center, were killed early Sunday morning when the car in which they were returning from a country club dance skidded on Route 109, crashed into a ravine, and burned. Mrs. Lenox’s husband, who was at the wheel, was thrown clear and escaped with only minor injuries, most of them sustained during his desperate attempt to aid his wife.

  “The accident occurred during a heavy thunderstorm at a point about two miles west of the Center. Here the road, which is highly crowned, curves sharply in its descent from the ridge on which the Van Brunt Country Club is situated. There have been numerous accidents on this section of the road, particularly in wet weather, when the road surface is very slippery. Resurfacing of this stretch of Route 109 has been urged for several years, and has been long advocated by the Recorder.

  “As the state police reconstruct the tragic accident, the car, a 1940 Chrysler, skidded on the wet surface and Mr. Lenox was unable to regain control. Mr. Lenox was taken to the Cold Harbor Hospital suffering from shock and second degree burns of both hands and arms. He is reported in satisfactory condition by hospital authorities, but has declined to see the press.

  “The three had attended—”

  They had been to a dance at the club. Vance’s car had failed to start, probably because it had been standing in heavy rain, and the Lenoxes had offered to drive him home. “Mr. and Mrs. Lenox and Mr. Vance were friends of long standing.”

  A ravine bordered the road at the place of the accident. (The Recorder had long advocated the erection of a barrier to prevent precisely such tragedies as had now occurred.) The car had turned over as it “plunged” into the ravine and caught fire almost at once. Vance and Mrs. Lenox had been trapped in the burning car. From the nature of his injuries, the county coroner believed Vance had died almost instantly. Mrs. Lenox had burned to death.

  Mrs. Lenox—Mary-Anne Lenox—had been thirty-four years old; Ernest Vance two years older. Mr. Lenox, “member of a prominent New York law firm,” was forty-two. Besides her husband, Mrs. Lenox was survived by a son, Scott, 10, by a previous marriage. Mr. Vance, whose marriage had ended in divorce, was survived by a daughter, Enid, 2.

  “That this needless tragedy underlines the need for action not only in regard to Route 109, but to other perilous highways in the area, was agreed to by Ralph Birdhouse, township road supervisor, when interviewed by a Recorder reporter. He pointed out, however, that the voters had recently rejected overwhelmingly a proposal for a bond issue which would have provided necessary funds.”

  More than twenty years ago a man and a woman had died and left two children parentless. To a child of two a father probably was no more than a friendly shape; to a child of ten and fatherless, a mother might be more than the adult mind could compass, or remember. Heimrich’s own mother had died when he was in his late twenties, and she had been dear to him. But he could not remember what she had been to the boy of ten he could now recall only vaguely.

  A young woman and a not much older man joining to murder two old men because one of them, more than twenty years before, had been a cause of other deaths? And, from all that showed, an innocent cause—at the worse inept, a man who bungled others into death. It was preposterous, Merton Heimrich thought. Enid and Scott must have known for many years how their parents died—known and done nothing. Enid had worked for Lenox, been on friendly terms with him, or professed to have been. Scott did not profess any special affection for his adoptive father, but denied any animosity to him—denied it, at any rate, by implication.

  It was, perhaps, a little odd that Scott, when he said that his mother had died shortly after her second marriage, and that he thought Homer Lenox had loved her, had not mentioned how she died. Possibly he had assumed that Heimrich knew.

  Heimrich finished the clips and put them with the others, and put all in the big envelope. If the needle had been in the haystack, he had missed it. The manner in which a man and a woman had died long ago could not be the secret which had cost an ancient man his life some hours ago. It had been anything but secret.

  And so, of course, had all of this—all the chaff in this rejected haystack. What is printed is no longer secret. And if there had been anything in these clippings to endanger a murderer they would not have been left for a policeman to read. Person Unknown still, it was to be assumed, had matches.

  Of course, Merton Heimrich thought, there may be more motives than one for any crime, and one may reinforce another. With this not very
conclusive thought, Merton Heimrich went to sleep.

  XI

  Heimrich was accused, as he ate a coddled egg on Sunday morning, and two strips of bacon (since it was, after all, Sunday), of having been up to all hours. He was told that even policemen need their sleep.

  Susan looked at him across the table through very clear gray eyes.

  “It’s worrying you, isn’t it?” she said. “More than most of them do.”

  They always worried him; he was a worrying man. How worrying a man he was sometimes still surprised Susan. One expects the smaller animals to be the worriers, since they have so much the greater need. One looks at surfaces, she thought, waiting for the big man to answer. If he wanted to answer. A few years ago I saw a big, solid man and thought, A big, simple man—probably a stolid man; certainly a man it would be easy to predict, if it were worth the trouble of predicting. He’s down this morning, Susan thought. It isn’t going right.

  “I’ve a feeling I’ve got off on the wrong foot,” Heimrich said, and lighted a cigarette and looked at the coal, as if it, too, perplexed him. “Probably it’s that book he was writing. Because he was writing it, writing about the past, I got the notion the explanation lay in the past. I’ve been prodding around in the past, looking for something which probably isn’t there.” He dragged on the cigarette. “So much of the past makes a man feel old,” he said. He smiled to lighten that, but the smile was not particularly light.

  This will be a new one, Susan thought. Not only a hippopotamus. An old hippopotamus. Men are—

  “Nonsense,” Susan Heimrich said. “Not you. What did keep you up to all hours?”

  He told her.

  “Smothered the old man!” Susan said. “Because of something he was going to tell you? You thought the clippings might tell you what?”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “You look at what’s around to look at. The clips were around to look at. All there was to tell me about the old man, except that a couple of months ago he somehow got hold of a bit of money and bought things with part of it. Things which didn’t fit in with the way he lived.”