The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  “Well,” Charlie Forniss said, “we’ve got to start with the fact that Adam would as soon lie as not. I’ve been nosing around a little. That’s his general reputation. Armstrong says, ‘I wouldn’t bank on anything that one says,’ and Leo ought to know him if anybody does. Of course, I don’t bank too much on what Leo says, come to that. Still …”

  The pause was a shrug of the shoulders.

  “Why would Mears lie about this, do you think?” Heimrich said. “Just to make himself important?”

  People who tell lies to the police to make themselves important are routine complications in a policeman’s life.

  “Could be,” Forniss said. “We both know it could. Also, Mears has got it in for young Lenox. Talks a good deal when he’s drunk, Mears does. And he’s usually drunk or on his way there. We’ve picked it up here and there and part of it’s from men who are pretty vague about it, and probably were pretty vague when they heard it. The general theme seems to be that young Lenox got a lot of information from his old man—that is, from Adam’s old man—and paid him off in peanuts. Says Lenox got a lot of stuff and put it in those fool stories he writes and made a hell of a lot of money out of it. And did the old man get his cut? Not so you’d notice it. That, nearly as I can get it, is the gist. Also, Scott Lenox never did an honest day’s work in his life. Also, Lenox banged that damn Jeep of his into Mears’s truck last summer and tried to get away without paying for the damage. There’s this much to that: They did bang together at The Corners last August. Mears tried to make a left turn without waiting, and Lenox tried to stop the Jeep and didn’t quite make it. Purvis at the garage says they pulled the front fender of the truck off the front tire, although expecting the whole fender would come off in their hands. And—Lenox paid them.”

  “You think Mears lied about Lenox to get him in bad?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Forniss said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. And Mears would sure as hell be a washout on the witness stand, if anybody was fool enough to put him on.”

  “Nobody else saw Lenox walking around?”

  “Nobody we’ve found yet. Want me to check it out with Lenox?”

  “You might as well,” Heimrich said. “Anything else?”

  There wasn’t, at the moment, anything else. Heimrich hung up and went back to the kitchen. Susan was, very vigorously, shaking a milk bottle.

  “Salad dressing,” she told him needlessly. “And I know I’ve got an electric beater. The only trouble with laborsaving devices is that they make so much extra work. There.”

  She put the milk bottle of salad dressing in the refrigerator beside lettuce wrapped in a linen towel.

  “For all practical purposes,” Susan Heimrich said, “dinner is ready. Boil the spaghetti and we’ve had it. Do you have to go off somewhere?”

  “No,” Heimrich said.

  “That,” Susan said, “is almost too good to be true. Probably it will turn out too good to be true. Meanwhile, it must be about that time.”

  It was about that time. They sat on the terrace and sipped slowly, and watched the late afternoon sun sparkle on the river. Michael threw a baseball at tight stretched plastic and caught it—or didn’t catch it—when it bounced back. Once Colonel caught it, to his evident surprise.

  “He’ll make a shortstop yet,” Heimrich said.

  “Except,” Michael said, “he’s no good on ground balls.”

  After a time, Michael said, “Excuse me,” and that he was going in and change and get a Coke, if it was all right for him to have a Coke.

  “It is quite all right, Michael,” Susan told him, and they watched the slim boy walk toward the house, with the very large dog following him.

  “If he would only get really interested in tennis,” Susan said, “he wouldn’t be so likely to go in for football when he goes to college. I’ll worry dreadfully if he plays football.”

  The danger, Heimrich, said, was some years off. Also, a good many pounds off. “It’s the big, bulky ones like—” Heimrich said, and Susan, seeing what was coming, said, “Merton. Michael said a funny thing as we were driving back from the club.”

  Naturally, Hippopotamus Heimrich thought, she doesn’t like to be reminded of it.

  “We were talking about the tennis lesson,” Susan said, “and Michael said that the pro was certainly interested in feet. I tried to explain that the position of the feet is important in tennis. He was polite. Do you think he’s almost too polite, dear?”

  “I suspect,” Heimrich said, “that he’ll outgrow it. The funny thing?”

  “Oh,” Susan said. “After we’d talked about tennis feet for a while, Michael began to think. You know how he does. Often right in the middle of things. After a time he said he was sorry, and that he had been thinking about the professor, and what a nice man the professor used to be. I said, ‘Yes, Michael,’ because there wasn’t much else to say. Then he said that talking about feet had reminded him of Professor Wingate, because the professor had asked him a funny question about feet. A week or so ago. I said, ‘What was that, Michael?’”

  She paused to sip from her glass.

  “Come to think of it,” she said, “it was rather a funny question. Professor Wingate asked Michael if any of the boys he played with had anything the matter with their feet. That was a strange thing to ask, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It was a strange thing to ask. Has any of them?”

  “Michael says he told the professor that he’d never noticed anything the matter with any of their feet. He said, ‘Why did you ask that, sir?’ The professor, Michael says, said he just wondered. It was an odd thing to wonder about, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “An odd thing.”

  Michael came back, then, followed by Colonel. The boy wore dark shorts and a yellow polo shirt. He carried a bottle of CocaCola and a glass, and came to join them in the hour for sipping.

  XV

  They were on the small terrace beside Scott Lenox’s small rented house. They were stretched on terrace chairs and looked, Sergeant Charles Forniss thought, very comfortable. Enid Vance had an old-fashioned glass on the table beside her, filled with ice and a liquid pale amber in color. On the table, handy, was a bottle of La Ina sherry. It was about two-thirds full. The fluid in Lenox’s similar glass was darker in color. Lenox, Forniss decided, was made of sterner stuff.

  “Oh,” Scott Lenox said, “you.” He spoke in a deep voice and with marked absence of enthusiasm. He did not get up to greet Forniss nor did he invite Forniss to sit down. Policemen do not expect cordial greetings.

  “About yesterday,” Forniss said. “When you went down to Leo Armstrong’s place for the sherry.”

  “So?” Lenox said. “What about it? I told your boss about it, Sergeant.” He did not speak loudly, but there was a kind of violence in his voice.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “You did at that, Mr. Lenox. Mind telling me just what you did?”

  “Yes,” Lenox said, “I do mind. I—”

  “Scott,” the girl said, softly.

  He turned and looked at her, his face still hard for a moment. But then the wide smile flashed briefly across his face, and he turned back to Forniss.

  “All right,” he said. “Sit down, why don’t you? Instead of standing there beetling? Make yourself a drink.”

  He gestured toward a table against the house wall. There was a bottle of bourbon on the table, and ice.

  “No,” Forniss said. “I guess not, Mr. Lenox.”

  But he did turn a chair around and sit down on it.

  “Just what I did,” Lenox said, a little elaborately, a little as if reading aloud from a primer, “was to walk in and up to the bar. I said, ‘Want to do me a favor, Leo? Save me a trip down to the liquor store?’ Leo looked around. There were only three or four people in the bar and apparently he wasn’t worried about any of them. He said, ‘Like what, Mr. Lenox?’ I told him like a bottle of La Ina sherry and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know, Mr. L
enox. Have to look. Maybe—’ He leaned down and pawed around, apparently among bottles racked under the bar. This what you want, Sergeant?”

  He was amusing himself, Forniss thought. He seemed to be easily amused. It was all right with Forniss.

  “Go right ahead,” Forniss said. “You’re doing fine, Mr. Lenox.”

  “The hell with it,” Lenox said. “I bought a bottle of sherry. Paid a dollar more than the going price. Took it out and got into the Jeep and drove home. So?”

  “When you came out of the tavern,” Forniss said. “Into the parking lot. See anybody, Mr. Lenox?”

  “Not that I—wait a minute. Yes. Adam Mears. Trying to start that junk heap of his. He was still there when I left. So?”

  “So,” Forniss said, “he says different, Mr. Lenox.” He told Lenox what Mears had said that was different.

  “No,” Lenox said. “Nothing like that. Maybe he was too drunk to know what he saw. He often is, apparently. Or maybe he was merely lying to—well, to keep his hand in.”

  He was casual about it. He no longer seemed disturbed or indignant. Not, of course, that his attitude proved anything. He might have known it was coming, been prepared for it. He might well think, as Forniss himself thought, that Adam Mears was not a witness worth bothering about. Forniss had hoped for a moment to get a rise out of Lenox. His hope faded, as violence faded out of Lenox’s voice. But it had been there.

  “Only thing is,” Forniss said, “it leaves us with two stories. Two stories that don’t jibe.”

  “Yes,” Lenox said, “I see that, Sergeant. So, you pays your money and you takes your choice.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Any idea why he’d want to lie about you, Mr. Lenox?”

  “Save his own hide, I’d think,” Lenox said. “If it needs saving. You’d thought of that, Sergeant?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “You’d be surprised the things we think of, Mr. Lenox. Did he have it in for you, you know of? Ever show any animus toward you?”

  Lenox was silent for a moment.

  “The man’s a drunk,” he said. “Gets drunken notions. Goes around telling lies about people. Knows, deep down, what he is—that he isn’t much. Tries to build himself up by pulling other people down. Ever meet that type, Sergeant?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “I’ve met a lot of types, Mr. Lenox. Aside from this story about your damaging his truck and refusing—”

  “I paid. It was his fault, but I paid.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “We’ve checked that out, Mr. Lenox. Aside from that, what stories to pull you down?”

  “Aside from the fact that I don’t work for a living—Mears knows only one kind of work, you know. He’s damned bad at it too, from what I hear. Aside from that—” He shrugged his shoulders. But then he said, “No. Wait. When he was trying—hell, to get me to buy him a new truck—he went wandering off into what was pretty much a tirade. Said I had plenty of money. Said I’d got a lot of stuff to make my Goddamned stories out of from his father, and taken advantage of the old man, who ought to have got his share. Half, anyway. Seemed to think—oh, that half would come to a lot of money. People like Mears get notions about people like me. Quite exaggerated notions, unfortunately.”

  “You didn’t-?”

  “I never wrote anything about anything I got from the old man. I never got even a germ from him.” He smiled again, suddenly. “Not a story germ, anyway,” he said. “The other kind, God knows.” He looked at Forniss for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed. “I gather Adam did some talking along that line,” he said. “To all and sundry?”

  “Some,” Forniss said. “Glad to have your side of it, Mr. Lenox.”

  With which, he got up and went away, leaving the two of them to sit in the sun.

  Heimrich skimmed on through Homer Lenox’s manuscript and blamed himself for skimming. If he was going to read The Families of Putnam County, New York—as, he presumed, the first and probably only reader—he should read carefully. Anything he wanted in it, anything which would help him, might well be buried in verbiage. What it came to, he thought, putting the final page upside down on the other pages, was that he had lost any faint belief that The Families had anything to do with anything. If Homer Lenox had been killed because of something he had written, the clue to his killing lay in what he had written during the past week. And that was ashes.

  Written, Heimrich thought, or been about to write. There was always that, for what good it was. It might have been in notes—in jotting which served as signposts to his way ahead. But if it had been, they had missed it while they had a chance. Such notes were ashes, too. Ashes, Merton Heimrich thought, are what my skull is full of.

  And then something stirred the ashes in his mind and he looked at Colonel across the room without seeing Colonel. It was a little after ten on Sunday evening, and he had been reading for some two hours. Colonel was absorbing the imagined heat of a nonexistent fire. Michael was, it was to be hoped, asleep. Susan, from the light in the bedroom, was reading. He hoped, for her sake, something livelier than the life’s work of Homer Lenox.

  The boy—that was it. The stirring had to do with young Michael.

  Heimrich sifted ashes. Feet—that was it. Loudon Wingate, history professor retired, had been interested in the feet of Michael’s playmates. Some sort of—call it fetishism? That seemed, somehow, unlikely. But the interest remained odd. And oddities, however apparently extraneous, are to be investigated. Loudon Wingate had also been a victim of murder.

  Looking toward a dog he did not see, Merton Heimrich wondered whether he had not misled himself. It was conceivable that he had concentrated on the wrong victim. He thought that, more than was wise, he had left the professor out of things—out, that was, of the possible shape of things. Without actually making up his mind that that was true, he had let his mind behave as if Loudon Wingate had been an incidental victim—a man killed merely because he happened to be around.

  Nothing in the retired professor’s apparently innocuous background appeared revealing. Heimrich ran what they knew of it over in his mind. A minor entanglement, years ago, with a girl in one of his classes—an entanglement so minor that the university authorities looked the other way. Nothing there. Something since he had come to Van Brunt. Something—

  Wingate had picked up the Journals of Dr. Cornelius Van Brunt (1865-1935) and had had them in the trunk of the ancient Packard when he went, for the last time, to the house of his friend Homer Lenox. Why?

  There was, Heimrich thought, no use in shaking his head, chidingly, at himself. He had had to start somewhere. Notes on patients a physician long dead had treated during forty years or so of practice, and that practice terminated more than a quarter of a century ago, had seemed to promise little. They might produce little. Still—Loudon Wingate had asked an odd question. A week or so ago, Michael had told Susan. Then, the question had been asked after Wingate had had time to read Dr. Van Brunt’s records.

  Heimrich took Lenox’s heavy manuscript back to the cabinet and put it away there, feeling somewhat as if he participated in an interment. He brought back the two heavy volumes into which Dr. Van Brunt, for reasons of his own, had bound the records of his practice.

  The records started in June of 1895. (“1865-1935” referred to the span of a man’s life, not of his professional career.) His first patient had been “Van Druyten, Phyllis, 6, temp 99.1. Bed. Restr. act.” A small girl had, Heimrich thought, caught cold—caught cold and been put to bed and told she couldn’t play for a few days, until her fever went down.

  Heimrich had a sudden, and at first unaccountably vivid, mental picture of a scene—of a doctor, bearded, sitting beside a bed with a child in it, and looking in fond bewilderment at his youthful patient. Then Heimrich placed the picture—it was a real picture, a lithograph, at one time hung in the waiting rooms of many doctors with the blessings of the A.M. A. It was called, Heimrich thought, “The Family Doctor.” The doctor in the picture appeared, to Heimrich, to be wondering what
the hell was the matter with the child.

  Merton Heimrich erased the irrelevant picture from his mind. He got on with it.

  This he could justifiably skim. He set his eyes, as one sets a trap, to snap at familiar names—at patients who had been Lenoxes or Mearses, Van Brunts or Vances or Mitchies or Uptons. Or, of course, Wingates. Not that he expected Wingates.

  During the first few years the patients had not been too numerous, and a good many of them had been Van Brunts. The family had rallied. But in a few years Dr. Van Brunt’s practice began to increase. The increase was abrupt; Heimrich guessed that a senior physician had retired or died. Familiar names began to crop up. Members of the Mears family had died; new Mearses had been born to take their places. A Van Druyten had fallen off a horse and broken his arm. A Vance had passed the crises of pneumonia. (Pa.Cr.) A Van Brunt had died of ac.in. Acute indigestion, Heimrich supposed; the abbreviations were sometimes cryptic. For which, presumably, read “coronary thrombosis.”

  Heimrich’s eyes began to blur. Faded handwriting on paper discolored by the years strains eyes. There was, he thought, no point in going blind over it. It would be easier tomorrow, by daylight. He reached up toward the switch of the lamp he sat under, and his fingers closed on it, tightened—and relaxed. The trap in his tired eyes snapped.

  “9/3/98. M/M John Mitchie.nm. 7-4. he.ped.malf.”

  Heimrich looked for some time at the entry in faded ink on yellowed paper. He looked at it until he no longer saw it, and for the most part he looked into his own memory, checking points in his memory. He drew a line connecting the points, and a pattern was outlined. It was not entirely clear; it was evident that several reference points still were missing. It might take time to locate them. Well, time was always available.

  Heimrich closed the bound volume of the Journals of Dr. Cornelius Van Brunt and carried it and its companion volume to the cabinet, to lock them up for the night. He closed the door of the cabinet, but then reopened it and took the bulky sheaf of newspaper clippings back to the lamp and flipped through them until he found the one he wanted. He looked carefully at the picture of John Mitchie III poised on the edge of the swimming pool. He saw what he remembered seeing—an athletic young male human, sound in all respects.