The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  “So when mother married Homer I was jealous,” Lenox said. “I quote from the textbooks. And when he killed her—”

  He stopped abruptly and, Heimrich thought, listened to the echo, the revealing echo, of what he had just said.

  “I suppose I’ve answered your question, haven’t I?” Scott Lenox said. “I didn’t know it was still there, Captain—a boy’s bitterness. Entirely irrational. The poor guy was driving on a bad night on a bad stretch of road. I’ve driven that road a lot of times. It’s better paved now, and there’s a guard rail now, and it’s still a bad stretch. The car skidded and went into the ravine, and two people were killed and he wasn’t—because the door on his side happened to fly open and the way the car turned he happened to be thrown clear. And he did his damnedest to rescue her. There were scars on his hands.”

  He stopped, and looked at nothing, and Heimrich could guess what, standing away from it, yet part of it, he saw.

  “She must have been screaming,” Scott Lenox said. “My mother must have screamed while she burned to death. I wonder how long he heard that screaming. Don’t you, Captain? For weeks, do you suppose? Or did he hear it until he died?”

  Then, although he continued to look away, to look into the past, he did not speak for seconds, for a minute, for another minute. The time of silence seemed long, but Heimrich did not break it.

  “All right,” Scott Lenox said then. “I thought it was all gone, all rationalized away. All right, doctor. Once I hated him, doctor. Once I could have killed him because of what he’d killed.” He looked at Heimrich now. “I don’t think I like you much, Captain,” Scott Lenox said. He looked at Heimrich very steadily. “If at all,” he said.

  “No,” Heimrich said; “I don’t suppose you do, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Until you dug into it, it was buried under twenty years,” Lenox said. “And—it was buried there Friday. It was dead Friday.” But then he stopped and shook his head. “I suppose there’s no use saying that, is there? Because it wasn’t, and now we both know it wasn’t. I thought it was—” He shrugged his bare shoulders.

  Heimrich stood up. After a second, Scott Lenox stood too.

  “I don’t like you,” Scott said. “But I don’t think you’re a fool, Captain. Why would I wait twenty years?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “There’s that, naturally.”

  “I didn’t kill the old men.”

  “All right, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t kill the old men.”

  XII

  Heimrich drove from the stone cottage on Elm Street, and the lanky man who didn’t like him much, to the state police substation north of The Flats. Forniss was there, was talking on the telephone. He said, “All right, Mr. Mears. We appreciate it. About fifteen minutes, then.” He hung up and said, “ ’Morning, M. L. Set it up with Henry Mears to go over Lenox’s bank account. He’s going over to let the boys in. Very cooperative, Mears is. Anything he can do to help, and it’s a terrible thing about poor old Jasper.”

  “Young Lenox’s account too,” Heimrich said. “And the professor’s, I suppose.”

  Blackmail payments sometimes can be traced through bank accounts. No pebble should be left unturned.

  Heimrich listened to the results of the turning over of other pebbles. There was a film showing in Peekskill which corresponded to Scott Lenox’s sketchy description of the picture he and Enid had seen the afternoon before. There had been a matinee, starting at three and ending a little after five. Neither the girl at the ticket window nor the man at the door knew either Scott or the girl and nobody looks at anyone who buys tickets or turns them in at the door. The theater had its own parking lot, which was unattended and probably had been filled. Nobody had noticed; it was usually filled on Saturday afternoon. There was a parking lot across the street, which was attended. The attendant did not remember an especially elderly Jeep, but there were a lot of Jeeps. There had also been a Land Rover. “Built like tanks, the damn things are.”

  Nothing had come of the continuing patient efforts to check Scott Lenox’s presence in, or absence from, the Forty-second Street library in New York on Friday. One of the men John Mitchie II had lunched with had confirmed lunching with him at about one o’clock on Friday, and playing bridge with him during the afternoon. And he had been rather huffy about it, being a man who got huffy when people asked damfool questions about things which were none of their business. Post-mortem examination of the body of Jasper Mears had revealed that he was a white male of advanced years, but fairly well preserved, and that he had died of suffocation—all findings consistent with the theory that he had been smothered under a pillow. Professor Loudon Wingate had, some twenty years before, been a little unfortunately involved with a student, female, but Dyckman University, which disapproved of such involvement, had not found it necessary to take action.

  “Homer Lenox was in a car accident in 1941,” Heimrich said. “His wife and Ernest Vance—he was Enid Vance’s father—were killed in it. You might have it checked back.”

  Forniss said, “Yep.”

  “Lenox was very lucky. Wasn’t hurt to speak of.”

  Forniss said, “Oh.”

  “Mrs. Ernest Vance had divorced her husband some time before his death.”

  Forniss said, “Tchk.”

  “Homer Lenox and Mitchie—Mitchie Two—weren’t on good terms. I don’t know why.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said.

  “Mitchie’s wife, a French girl, died a few years after he brought her here. After an operation. I don’t know for what.”

  “All right,” Forniss said, “I’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel.”

  It did seem to come to that, Heimrich thought, driving back to the Center. No pebble unturned, no haystack unsearched, no barrel unscraped. And nothing tangible coming of any of it. And a large part of Homer Lenox’s manuscript unread, and all of Dr. Cornelius Van Brunt’s ledgers.

  Heimrich parked in front of the Van Brunt Annex and church bells began to ring. The Episcopal church had a carillon, and one of the bells was out of tune. The Congregational church had a single, rather mournful, bell. The Unitarian church didn’t ring bells.

  He would, Heimrich thought, climbing three flights of stairs in the Van Brunt Annex, be expected. He would not be welcome. Of course, Enid Vance might have gone to church. He knocked on a door with a ground glass panel, and “Enid Vance, Your Secretary” lettered on it.

  The door was opened almost at once by an erect young woman in a black dress. She had large and very dark brown eyes and they smouldered at Heimrich. “I thought so,” Enid Vance said, in the voice of one whose worst expectations are fulfilled. “Come in, I suppose.”

  He went in. He followed her through the small, neat office he had seen the afternoon before. The hood was not on the electric typewriter now; there were sheets of paper in the typewriter. On a rack at eye level there were typescript sheets, which, presumably, Enid Vance had been copying. She opened a door and he followed her from the office into a living room, also small and neat, which had windows overlooking Van Brunt Avenue. There were a good many cars in the street. Most of them, Heimrich supposed, were occupied by people answering the call of the church bells.

  She turned and faced him.

  “So it’s my turn now,” she said. “My turn to be badgered. The way you badgered Scott.”

  “Questioned,” Heimrich said, and looked down at the girl. He had seen a spunky little chipmunk face up to the enormous Colonel once, to Colonel’s astonishment. He remembered that the chipmunk got away.

  “I’d call it badgering,” Enid said. “About things which have nothing to do with what you’re supposed to be after. Things faraway and long ago. Do you enjoy it?”

  The chipmunk had jumped up and down, more or less in Colonel’s face. This distracted Colonel, and the chipmunk, who seemed to have had that in mind, went into a hole in a stone wall. Colonel bumped his nose against the wall.

  “I gather Mr. Lenox called you up,” Heimrich sa
id. To that the girl said, “Oh, sit down,” and sat down herself. Heimrich sat down facing her. “Of course he called me up,” she said. “Said you’d probably be around.”

  She looked at him intently.

  “He said you were tricky,” Enid said. “Are you tricky? Did you trick him?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t call it that, Miss Vance. I’m sorry he felt it was that way.”

  He had an unexpected feeling that she had asked the question candidly, and had listened to the answer. Of course, a detective can seldom accept feelings.

  After she had looked at him for some seconds, Enid Vance nodded her head.

  “He’s a complicated person,” Enid said. “He assumes everybody else is. He sees stratagems.” She paused and continued to look intently at Captain Heimrich. “Actually,” she said, “it’s quite easy to get him to talk. I suppose you knew it would be.”

  “I asked him questions.”

  “When he puts things into words,” she said, “the things—I don’t know how to say it. Get bigger than they really are, more intense than they really are. It’s as if—oh, as if the words, just the phrasing of the words enlarges what he is saying. Do you have any idea what I’m trying to say?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “Listen,” Enid said. “I won’t have him hurt. It isn’t fair he should be hurt. And don’t get the idea I’m downgrading him. There’s more of him than both of us put together.”

  It had been quite a chipmunk, as Heimrich remembered. He said, “All right, Miss Vance.”

  “He doesn’t need my protection,” she said. “Anybody’s.”

  Heimrich leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “Then why give it to him, Miss Vance?” Heimrich said. “Why be so afraid for him?”

  “Because—” she said, and then suddenly put her hands up, her fingers digging against her forehead. “Can’t you leave us alone?” Enid said. “We—people have a right to be left alone.” She took her hands down and looked at him, and he opened his eyes. “Haven’t they?”

  “Not always,” Heimrich said. “Not when people have been killed. Miss Vance, a very old, almost helpless, man was smothered to death. Two other men were killed. They weren’t left alone, were they?”

  “He had nothing to do with that. We haven’t. But—you badgered him. And all because he once—once a long time ago, when he was a boy—was bitter about something. You dragged it out of him. Made him remember. And don’t you see, he remembers it as more than it was. That’s what I was trying to say. He puts it into words in his mind and it—grows.”

  He did not say anything. He merely waited.

  “All right,” she said. “I am defending him. And that’s absurd. There’s nothing to defend him against. A feeling a boy had years ago. A sensitive boy.”

  “Now, Miss Vance,” Heimrich said, “did you know he felt this way about his foster father?” She started to speak. “All right,” Heimrich said. “Had felt this way. Years ago, as you say. Did you know about that until he told you just now? When he called you to say I’d probably be around?”

  She looked at him without speaking for some seconds. Then she said, “No, Captain.” He looked at her and, after a few seconds, she again said, “No.”

  “But you must have talked about it, you and Mr. Lenox. About the accident.”

  “There was nothing to talk about. What was there to talk about?” He did not answer, but waited. “Oh,” she said, “we have sometimes. About how it affected both our lives. About—oh, as something we had—call it shared—long before we knew each other. Could have known each other. No—I don’t really mean shared. I was a baby when it happened.”

  “Yes. Do you remember your father at all, Miss Vance?”

  “I wouldn’t, would I? I was—I must have been about two when he was killed. Sometimes I feel as if I did, but I don’t really. Why? What difference does that make?”

  “None, probably. Has Mr. Lenox ever said anything to you to make you think he thought it wasn’t an accident?”

  She looked at him blankly. Then she said, “I don’t know what you mean, not an accident.” But as she said that, her face changed, and Heimrich thought she did know what he meant. He thought it came as a new idea to her. Or, of course, that he was thinking what she wanted him to think.

  “That Homer Lenox planned it,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes and spoke slowly. “Planned to kill your father and Mrs. Lenox. Planned to make it look like an accident.”

  She looked at him for some seconds. Then she said, “I think Scott’s right. I think you’re what he called tricky. I don’t think you believe anything—anything so awful, so preposterous—yourself.”

  “Now, Miss Vance,” Heimrich said. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. It’s what Mr. Lenox may have thought. May have brooded over.”

  “He never said anything like that. Never thought anything so—so unreal, unbelievable. I’m sure he didn’t.”

  She got up suddenly and went to the window and stood looking out, looking down at the cars on the street below. After a time she turned.

  “What you’re doing,” she said, “is making things up, isn’t it? Inventing things to support a theory you’ve got. An easy theory. One that will make things easy for you. You’re no good at your job. That’s it. You can’t find out who really killed Mr. Lenox and the professor and poor old Jasper Mears. Since you can’t, anybody will do. Because you have to find somebody, don’t you? You don’t care who. Just somebody. Anybody you can make up lies about and—”

  She spoke very rapidly. Her face was flushed. Her dark eyes were very bright. The chipmunk had danced in terror, but in fury too, in front of the big dog. Heimrich remembered he had been very sorry for the chipmunk and had started to yell at Colonel, and had moved toward him to drag him away. He remembered, also, that the chipmunk had managed things well enough on his own.

  The girl went back to her chair and sat down, and again covered her face with slim-fingered hands. She was trembling, Heimrich thought. He did not say anything for a time. Then he said, “Now, Miss Vance. I don’t believe you really think all that, do you?”

  She took her hands down.

  “You wanted me to fly apart, didn’t you?” she said. “Planned to make me. You want to hurt him, don’t you? Hurt both of us? And make me help you hurt him.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not hurt anybody. Find out what happened. You didn’t know, until today, that Mr. Lenox felt bitterness toward his stepfather. Don’t know whether he ever questioned that his mother and your father were really killed by accident. All right. That’s all it comes to, Miss Vance.”

  She was quieter now. When she spoke, her voice was quieter.

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t all it comes to, is it? I’m not a fool, Captain Heimrich. You think he brooded over—over what happened when he was a boy. Finally killed his foster father because he hated him for what he thought he’d done. You really think that makes any sense, Captain? That anybody would believe that?” She looked at him. She said, “Open your eyes! Listen to me!”

  Heimrich opened his eyes. He said, “Oh, I’m listening, Miss Vance. Put that way, you’re quite right, naturally. But—there’s more than that, isn’t there?”

  “I suppose,” she said, “you mean the money, don’t you? The money Scott inherits. That’s why you’ve made your mind up, isn’t it?”

  “Now, Miss Vance,” Heimrich said, “I haven’t said I’ve made my mind up. But the money is there. The money is a fact. I can’t ignore facts.”

  “You can twist them. Twist them into the shape you want.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I can’t do that. You just said you’re not a fool. I don’t think you are. You know I can’t do that. And I think you know I’m not trying to do that. Don’t you?”

  She looked at him for some seconds, seemed to be studying him. And then, a little to his surprise, she slowly nodded her head.

  “I guess you’re not,
” she said. “I guess you’re just doing what you have to do. I—I thought you were trying to hurt him.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Just trying to add things up. You didn’t feel any bitterness toward Homer Lenox yourself, Miss Vance?”

  “No,” she said. “No bitterness at all. There was no reason to.”

  “You’ve been going to his house for—for about how long? To get material to copy, to take back what you’d copied?”

  “Oh, about a year.”

  “Did he ever make advances?”

  As soon as he used the word he thought it archaic, a formal statement word. The puzzlement on her face confirmed his doubt. She said, “Advances? No, he paid me when I took the copy to him—oh. You didn’t mean that, did you?”

  Heimrich smiled, and shook his head.

  “Passes,” she said. “Did he make passes. No, of course not. He was an old—” But she stopped. “I sound naive, don’t I?” Enid said. “I’ve heard about old men—some old men. He wasn’t like that at all. He—” She broke off and again looked at Heimrich, seeming to study his face. “You’re at it again, aren’t you?” Enid Vance said. “If he had made passes and Scott had learned about it, Scott would—it would have been another reason for Scott to hate him. You try to pile things up, don’t you? Well, there was nothing to add to your pile. Of course, it can be I’m merely lying to—”

  She spread her hands, in a gesture of hopelessness.

  “I haven’t said you’re lying,” Heimrich said. “You and Mr. Lenox went to a movie yesterday afternoon, didn’t you? In Peekskill?”

  “You jump,” she said. “Yes. He told you that. You think, with his foster father dead so recently we were—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Quit worrying so much about what I think, Miss Vance. The movie ended about five. What did you and he do then?”

  “Drove back here. Scott dropped me off. I wanted to freshen up. So did he, I suppose. He picked me up again about seven and—” She stopped. Heimrich waited.

  “It was after eight when we got to the inn,” she said. “And the inn is just across the street. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it. Does it matter?”