The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  “How was she to know where I went after I dropped her? Why badger her about it?”

  There was still anger in his voice. But he was a little quieter. Had he shown more anger, more violence, than he had actually felt at first? It was possible. Carry the attack. Get there fustest with—with what? The loudest? In any event, Scott Lenox had been humored long enough.

  “I badgered nobody,” Heimrich said. “She thought you went home after you dropped her yesterday afternoon. Where did you go?”

  “You probably know,” Scott Lenox said. “Probably a dozen people couldn’t wait to tell you.”

  “Where did you go?”

  Heimrich’s voice was a policeman’s voice; the voice of a policeman who has got tired of waiting.

  “Drove down to The Flats. To the Three Oaks. I suppose this’ll get Armstrong in trouble but, to buy a bottle of sherry.” He paused for a moment. “Enid likes sherry,” he said. “Very dry sherry on the rocks.” He paused again. “And I know,” he said, “that Armstrong isn’t supposed to sell by the bottle. And everybody knows he does. To people he knows.”

  “He sold you the bottle?”

  “Probably,” Scott Lenox said, “he’ll deny it. To you, anyway. Almost have to, wouldn’t he? But—yes. A bottle of La Ina.”

  “You drove to the tavern, bought a bottle of sherry—illegally, but we’ll skip that—and then drove back? Where?”

  “Home.”

  “See anybody you knew at the tavern?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “About when was this?”

  Lenox thought about five-thirty. A few minutes one way, a few minutes the other.

  “And,” he said, “I know poor old Jasper’s place is about a quarter of a mile from the tavern. And that he was killed about five-thirty—that’s what you told Enid, isn’t it?”

  Heimrich nodded his head.

  “And that I could easily have made a detour. It wouldn’t take long, I imagine, to smother an old man with a pillow.”

  “Not long,” Heimrich said.

  “I didn’t. But that’s what you’d expect me to say, isn’t it? Whether it’s true or not.”

  “Now, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “Coming from Peekskill, you must have driven past the tavern. Why didn’t you stop then?”

  “Because,” Scott Lenox said, “I didn’t think of it then. I suppose that’s too simple for you? I let Enid out at her place and watched her go in and I thought, After I pick her up we’ll go to my place and sit on the terrace and she likes a very dry sherry on the rocks and I haven’t got any, so I’ll go get some. And I thought, It’s another five miles down the road to the nearest package store and maybe it closed at five, and Leo’ll sell me a bottle, if he’s got it. He’ll up the price a bit, because he’s breaking the law. But it’s a silly law anyway. Do you know that in some states—Virginia, for example—you can’t get a drink at a bar, and have to buy a bottle in a state liquor store? And that then you can go out and sit on a curb and drink the bottle?”

  With this man, Heimrich thought, one thing inevitably leads to another; one word to a dozen words.

  “And,” Scott said, “that in Connecticut a woman can’t sit within three feet of a bar?”

  The point was, Heimrich supposed, that Scott Lenox saw almost everything, was interested in almost everything.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You got a bottle of La Ina and took it home and, later, you and Miss Vance drank it. Sitting on your terrace.”

  “Not all of it,” Scott said. And added, “For God’s sake.”

  Smoke screen, Heimrich thought. Word screen. They might come to the same thing.

  “Miss Vance blamed herself for not lying?” Heimrich said. “Thought she should have said you were together until—oh, until six. Six-thirty. That’s how she thought she’d let you down?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought somebody might have seen you in The Flats at about five-thirty? So you hurried to me with your—admission? Wanting, let’s say, to get in first?”

  Scott Lenox looked at him for some seconds.

  “You twist things,” Scott said. “I rather thought you would. Captain Heimrich, will you leave the girl alone? Whatever you think of me?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes and shook his head. He said, “No, Mr. Lenox. Not anybody. Not until it’s finished.”

  “What reason would I have for killing poor old Jasper? Leaving the other two out of it?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “Jasper Mears knew something he wanted to tell me. Somebody didn’t want him to. I don’t know what it was. It could, I suppose, have been something you said to him during one of these talks you had with him. Something that took on new importance when your stepfather was killed. I don’t know.”

  “You twist things.”

  “No, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “Things twist themselves.”

  XIV

  In the flats it would be house to house, person to person; it would be a few questions, asked over and over: “Yesterday, some time between five and six, did you see an old Jeep around here? Very old. Lot of rattles and squeaks. License number YS7693? Yeah, Mr. Lenox’s Jeep.” “Did you happen to see a tall thin man, youngish, probably no hat, walking around here? On the road to old man Mears’s house, say? Could be from the direction of the tavern. Yeah. Oh, some time around five-thirty, say.” Of one man: “Did you sell a bottle of sherry to Mr. Scott Lenox yesterday afternoon. Yep, around five-thirty. Right now, Leo, we’ll forget the violation. Right now you just tell us, Leo.” Forniss would be the man who’d talk to Leo Armstrong.

  If they could place Scott Lenox wandering, afoot or in Jeep, in the vicinity of The Flats it might be time to talk to the Putnam County district attorney, to tell him what they had and see what he thought of it. Probably it would be thought enough to justify a longer, more formal, interrogation, with the district attorney sitting in; with, in the end, a formal statement, signed, admissible as evidence. Beyond that, Heimrich didn’t know. Beyond that, Heimrich was not too happy about it. Driving north on NY 11-F, Captain M. L. Heimrich was not too happy about any part of it. Turning toward the river on a twisting, climbing blacktop, Heimrich was somewhat gloomily convinced that, profitlessly, he pursued a shadow from the past—a shadow of irrelevance, cast by nothing pertinent.

  He drove between stone pillars which supported heavy iron gates, and wondered mildly whether the gates were, nowadays, ever closed against the uninvited. He drove on a manicured drive with tall evergreens on either side to a plateau and stopped the car and got out of it and looked down on the Mitchie swimming pool. A small girl in a bathing suit cried out shrilly, “Man coming!” Merton Heimrich walked down toward the pool and assorted Mitchies looked up at him.

  Johnny Three and Grace Mitchie looked up from the pool, their elbows on its edge, and Johnny Three called “Hi, M. L.” James, dog-paddling in the center of the pool, upended and disappeared. The smallest Mitchie, with an inflated tube around her middle, bobbed up and down in the shallow end. Her slightly larger sister, warning given, alarm sounded, jumped into the pool and swam across it and popped out on the other side.

  The oldest Mitchie was sitting in a deck chair, with a white toweling jacket around his shoulders. He turned and looked at the big man walking toward them and looked at him without any expression Heimrich could fathom. He was neither welcoming nor rejecting. He didn’t say “Hi” and he didn’t say, “You again! Get the hell out of here.” He was just a compact man with crisp white hair and sharp blue eyes looking at another man rather as if he had never seen him before. Walking in afternoon sunshine toward the pool and the Mitchies at and in it, Heimrich felt hotly overdressed.

  John Mitchie III said, again, “Hi,” and swung himself out of the pool. He’d taken care of himself since he captained a Yale swimming team, Heimrich thought. Standing on the edge of the pool, smiling at Heimrich, he might almost have been the boy in the picture, standing facing the pool in an exaggerated diving p
ose.

  “Who’ve you come to arrest?” Johnny Three said. He turned to Grace, still in the water. “Don’t say a word without advice of counsel,” he said. He was very gay about it and Heimrich, acquiescing, laughed. He said, “Nothing like that, Johnny,” and other suitable things—including that it looked cool in the water—and that there was one point on which, conceivably, they might be of help. As he said this he turned to the white-haired man and said, “At least, I thought you might, Mr. Mitchie.”

  “If this is still about the same thing,” John Mitchie said, “I think it’s unlikely, Captain.”

  He did stand up, however. He was strongly muscled, clad in swimming trunks, the jacket loose on his shoulders. There was a thin white scar diagonally across his chest. He must, Heimrich thought, be in his middle sixties. He didn’t look it.

  “But,” he said, “anything we can do.”

  “Homer Lenox,” Heimrich said, “seems to have been making enquiries about a man who died years ago in France. I’ve no idea why. But he—this man—apparently was in France about the time you were, Mr. Mitchie. Grant it’s an off-chance—”

  “It would certainly seem to be,” John Mitchie said. “There were a good many people in France during the few years I was there. Including Frenchmen, of course.”

  Heimrich remained acquiescent. He smiled.

  “This man was English,” Heimrich said. “Name of Hutton. Malcolm Hutton. Seems he died in 1924. In the summer of 1924.”

  Mitchie recognized the name. Heimrich knew that from his face before the older man spoke.

  “Malc Hutton,” Mitchie said. “Poor old Hutty. Why the devil did old Homer want to find out about him?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “All I know is he paid a London detective agency to find out about him.”

  Mitchie looked at him in apparent bewilderment. He shook his head.

  “Cases like this,” Heimrich said, “things that don’t explain themselves we try to explain. Irrelevant things. Things which seem irrelevant. It’s frequently a grasping at—”

  “Obviously,” Mitchie said. “You don’t need to explain, Captain. I haven’t the faintest idea how Malc Hutton concerned Homer. Unless—of course there was that silly book Homer was doing. And I suppose I’m in the book—not very flatteringly, I imagine—and Hutton was once a friend of mine.” He paused for a moment. “A good friend,” he said. “I still don’t see—” He stopped and shook his head. He shrugged his shoulders under the white jacket.

  “It can’t have anything to do with what you’re after,” he said.

  “I’ll admit I don’t see how it can,” Heimrich said. “I suppose somehow Mr. Lenox came across his name—”

  “Oh,” Mitchie said, “there’s no great secret about that, Captain. When my wife and I came back here from France—in twenty-six that was—the local newspaper interviewed me. The—what was the name of the sheet?”

  Heimrich told him.

  “That’s right,” Mitchie said. “The Recorder. I probably mentioned Hutton’s name—could hardly have avoided it, under the circumstances. Nosing around—doing what he called researchold Homer probably came on the article. I still don’t see—” Again he shrugged his shoulders. “But then,” he said, “I never understood the old boy. We didn’t get along.” He laughed, rather abruptly. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “There wasn’t anything special. He wanted to buy some land I own and I didn’t want to sell it, and that annoyed him. But we’d never had much in common, anyway.”

  “No hopes up,” Heimrich said. “You said you couldn’t have avoided mentioning Hutton’s name. Under the circumstances. What circumstances?”

  “Old Homer’s detective had an easy job,” Mitchie said. “All he had to do was to read back copies of the Paris Herald. Hutty and I were climbing together. In the French Alps. Without a guide, which was a damfool thing to do. But it was an easy climb and—”

  He stopped and his eyes narrowed and Heimrich thought he was looking back into the past.

  “Hutty wasn’t as good as he thought he was,” Mitchie said.

  “Probably I wasn’t either. Anyway, we fell. Fell quite a way down, and landed on a ledge and—well, we were there almost twenty-four hours. Hutty didn’t make it. I damned near didn’t myself.”

  Absently, he traced the narrow scar with a forefinger.

  “They thought I wouldn’t,” he said. “Damn near everything broken. Smashed up inside. Nearly two years before I was able—”

  He stopped abruptly, and this time there was an implication of finality in his stopping.

  He said, “That’s all there is to it. It was all in the newspapers.”

  He tossed the beach jacket onto a chair, scuffed off the canvas shoes he had been wearing, took two long, quick steps to the edge of the pool and dived into the water. He swam underwater toward the deep end of the pool, came to the surface, struck out toward the other end. He was a strong swimmer.

  “You see,” Johnny Three said, by Heimrich’s side, “he met mother while he was laid up. She helped nurse him. It upsets him to remember, M. L. The whole thing does. Grandfather Mitchie died while he was still in the hospital—nursing home. Whatever it was. He couldn’t get back for the funeral. And this Hutton—I guess he was pretty close to Hutton. Hutton was a painter too, I think.” He looked toward his father, swimming the pool with long strokes. He shook his head. “Hard to think of the old man in Paris in the twenties, isn’t it?” the old man’s son said. There was fondness in his voice.

  And in his vigorous, but quite matter-of-fact mind, Heimrich thought, wistful inability to grasp the idea that his father had once been young.

  Heimrich did not wait for John Mitchie II to finish his swimming. He had got what there was, he thought, driving toward home again. And what he’d got wasn’t much. He had no doubt that, as Mitchie had said, it had all been in the Paris Herald almost twenty years ago. Two young men, climbing alone and falling and one killed and the other brought near to death.

  It was odd that Homer Lenox had spent a hundred pounds on something so irrelevant—so obviously irrelevant. Malcolm Hutton had not, it was clear enough, been a member of any of The Families of Putnam County, New York.

  Not, Merton Heimrich thought, guiding his car between the boulders which made his driveway so hazardous, that anything about any of it was really clear.

  Michael, although immaculately dressed for tennis, was throwing a baseball at the practice net. Colonel was assisting him. Asked how the tennis lesson had gone, Michael guessed it had gone all right. “He’s teaching me a backhand,” Michael said, with no apparent enthusiasm. “He says I’ll probably never be a Budge, whatever that is.”

  Heimrich told him, briefly, what “that” was, and Michael listened politely and said, “Oh. I’d rather be a Terry,” and threw the ball, which bounced back sharply. The boy leaped lithely into the air and caught the ball. Colonel barked briefly in disappointment. People were all the time intervening between a dog and what was rightfully his. It occurred to Merton Heimrich that his stepson’s heart was not really in tennis.

  “Mother’s inside,” Michael said, still politely, and with acute perception of the location of Merton Heimrich’s heart. Michael added “Dad,” so, Heimrich thought, as not to seem rude.

  Susan was in the kitchen, washing lettuce, breaking it into pieces which included a minimum of spine, drying each piece carefully on a paper towel. She said, “Merton?” and, on being reassured, said, “The sauce is on and Charlie Forniss called. He’s at the substation. Larry’s working on Michael’s backhand. Michael’s having a great deal of trouble with his feet.”

  Heimrich turned her around and kissed her and said, “Something the matter with his feet?”

  “Oh,” she said, “just where to put them. In hitting a backhand. Or, what it came to most of the time, in that general direction.” She looked at him with care. “It will break,” she said, “when you least expect it, dear.”

  “This is its moment
, then,” Heimrich said, and went to the telephone. When he got Sergeant Charles Forniss, he said, “What’ve you got, Charlie?”

  “Armstrong sold young Lenox a bottle of sherry, all right. La Ina. Only bottle he had. The tavern isn’t exactly a sherry joint. Says he did it to be accommodating. Says it was sometime between five and six, but he doesn’t know exactly, on account of he doesn’t own a stopwatch. I told him to watch his step if he didn’t want the SLA on his neck, but he won’t.”

  State Liquor Authority could, if it got on Leo Armstrong’s neck, suspend his license.

  “No closer than that on the time?”

  “Not much. If he had to guess, he’d guess around half past five. Says he was busy then, which is probably true. It’s about the time he’d begin to get busy. Lenox just took the bottle and went. Didn’t stay for a drink. Leo knows Lenox, although Lenox isn’t one of his regulars. Says, ‘Not toney enough for him, I guess.’ There’s another thing. Only, I don’t know how good it is.”

  The other thing was Adam Mears. Mears, released after a night of drying out in the Hawthorne Barracks tank, had arrived at the Three Oaks Tavern to rectify his condition. Asked the questions everybody was being asked, Mears had said he sure as hell had seen that Lenox fellow.

  “The way he tells it is this,” Forniss said. “He was at the tavern yesterday afternoon and had a quick one. When he said ‘one’ Leo thought it was pretty funny. Mears said he left about five-thirty and was getting into his truck when Scott Lenox drove up. Said his truck didn’t want to start, and he was still trying when Lenox came out again, carrying a bottle. And—he says Lenox put the bottle on the front seat of the Jeep and then, instead of getting into the Jeep, walked off up the road. ‘Up’ the road would be in the general direction of old man Mears’s place. Adam Mears says his truck started and he drove home—lives down in the south end of The Flats, Adam does—and so he doesn’t know how far Lenox went or when he got back.”

  “You said you didn’t know how good it was?”