The Distant Clue

by Frances Lockridge

  ‘Colonel!’ Susan shouted at him. ‘Down, Colonel. Down, dog.’

  Colonel did not down. He did stop his threatening advance on the man who was walking up the drive. The man had climbed the steep slope from the intersection of drive and highway, and walked very slowly, as if the climb had tired him. He stopped when he saw Susan, but then began to walk on toward the house, toward her and the bristling dog.

  He was, seemed to be, a very old man. He was not a tall man, and he was very thin. Even from the distance, which was more than a hundred feet, Susan could see the gray, irregular stubble on his old face. He wore black trousers and there was a tear in the right leg; he wore broken-down black shoes which had once been dress shoes; he wore a dark shirt and a small cap—a cap which was a kind of parody of the little caps worn by sports car addicts. He trudged on up the gravel of the drive, and Colonel barked, but stood, and the little old man did not look at the dog. He looked down at the gravel, at his feet, as if he were counting the steps—the many, many steps—he took.

  A tramp, Susan thought—a tramp in a region where there were almost never tramps. A poor old man coming for a hand-out. And no wonder Colonel had barked. Dogs are snobs. This poor old man—this tired, harmless old man—was badly dressed. He looked unwashed and it was entirely possible that, to Colonel, and even at this distance, he smelled unwashed. And—and here lay the final thing, the final outrage—he was a stranger and on foot. Strangers come in motorcars, not on foot. Any country dog knows that.

  ‘Down, Colonel,’ Susan said again. ‘And quit that yapping.’

  ‘Yapping’ was hardly the right word. Colonel was an enormous dog, with an enormous bark. The bark echoed through the rolling countryside.

  ‘Down!’ Susan said, with all the firmness, the violence, she could put into her voice.

  And at that precise instant, as if in obedience, the little old man fell down. He fell and did not try to catch himself, and lay unmoving on the gravel. He was a huddle of darkness in the bright morning.

  Susan ran toward the fallen man, at first across grass, then along the drive, gravel crunching under her quick feet. When she was quite close she saw more clearly, and for an instant checked her movement; in that instant, involuntarily, put fingers up to her lips. Then she went on, toward the man who was bleeding on white gravel, in the sunshine. She got down beside him, on her knees. The blood was very bad. It came dark from his open mouth. His eyes, too, were open.

  At first she thought the eyes were sightless, but then she thought there was expression in them, and leaned closer. And then he tried to say something—something that was blurred; something that was almost as much gurgle as speech.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and leaned closer to the old man. The cap had fallen off as he fell, and his hair was long and gray and dirty. He tried to speak again, and again the sound was almost inaudible.

  It was like a word, or part of a word—a word with an ‘ell’ sound in it. A name? She could only guess. Perhaps merely an expletive—a hopeless, beaten, ‘Hell!’ Again she said that she did not understand, and started to say that she would get somebody—get help. But he tried once more.

  This time the single word he spoke was more, she thought, like ‘well,’ than anything. A ‘well’ of protest, or of resignation? The man’s eyes—they were pale blue eyes—seemed to demand that she understand, seemed desperately to plead. Once more he tried to speak, but this time more blood gushed and no word, or part of word, came from the lips. Then the eyes went blank.

  Susan knew that the old man was dead. It is not a thing of which a layman can be sure, but she was sure. He had hemorrhaged and died. The blood from his mouth was a trickle, now, and then that, too, stopped, as the heart had stopped.

  Susan Heimrich stood up and looked down at the dead man. Then, for the first time, she saw that the blood in which the thin body lay had not come only from the open mouth. One side of the dark shirt was soaked with blood, heavy with blood. The man had hemorrhaged, but not as she thought. The frail old man had been hurt—had been hurt to death.

  It was too late for any help she could give. She turned from the body and ran toward the house. The big dog still stood, rigid, the hair bristling along his back. ‘Come, Colonel,’ Susan said, and heard shrillness in her own voice. Colonel came. She held the screen door open for him, and he went with her into the house. Inside, he began to whimper.

  She spun the dial quickly, but it seemed a long time before she heard the words she waited for: ‘State Police, Sergeant Blake.’

  ‘Neil,’ she said. ‘Susan Heimrich. I—’

  ‘Why,’ Neil Blake said, ‘hello, Mrs—’

  ‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘Is the captain there? I’ve got—’

  ‘Right away,’ Sergeant Neil Blake said, and it was almost right away. A deep, familiar voice, said, ‘Heimrich,’ and she started to identify herself and needed only to start the name. He said, ‘What is it, dear?’ and spoke quickly, anxiously. Then he listened.He asked only one question—‘You’re sure he’s dead?’

  She said she was sure.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Susan, you’d better—’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and again her voice was strange in her own ears. ‘Only, you’ll—’

  ‘We’ll hurry,’ Heimrich—Captain M. L. Heimrich, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New York State Police—told his wife.

  Susan did what she had not needed to be told she had to do. She went out of the house, fastening a whimpering dog in it, and forced herself to walk down the drive to where the man lay dead. There had been no change. The eyes were open still. They were dead eyes. The flow of blood from the body had ended. The blood had not spread much. It had soaked into the gravel of the drive.

  Susan went back to the terrace and sat down and looked at the huddle of darkness on the white drive. When a man dies of violence, nothing must be changed—nothing moved, nothing touched, nothing permitted which will blur a picture. Susan sat and merely watched, and there was nothing to watch. Once the dark huddle seemed to waver, seemed almost to move. Sunlight on the gravel is blinding me, she thought, and for a moment closed her eyes. When she opened them the dead man was still again.

  It seemed a long time before, in the distance, she heard the sound of a siren.

  There were uniformed troopers in the first car—men from the substation, which was nearer. She knew neither of them, but one of them knew her and said, meaninglessly, ‘Sorry about this, Mrs Heimrich.’ There was really nothing to say to that. She said, as meaninglessly, ‘I know.’

  Then Heimrich came, and Sergeant Charles Forniss with him. They got out on either side of the unmarked sedan—a solid, square man, a tall man, on either side of the low car. The man who came quickly across the grass had very blue eyes. He held out both hands.

  Susan Heimrich stood up.

  ‘All right?’ he said and looked at her—looked with care, to be sure she was all right. She said, ‘Of course,’ and her voice was her own again. She spoke rather crisply.

  Merton Heimrich smiled faintly. He said, ‘All right, I won’t baby you.’ But he put an arm around her shoulders for a moment, and held her close to him. Even a policeman on duty might, he decided, be allowed as much as that.

  Sergeant Forniss sat on his heels by the body and looked at it. He did not touch it. He stood up and came toward the terrace and Heimrich removed his arm from his wife’s shoulders. Susan felt an instant of loving amusement, in spite of everything. Forniss said, ‘Morning, Mrs Heimrich,’ and then, to Captain Heimrich, ‘Yep. He is. Looks as if he was shot.’

  ‘Where he fell, then,’ Heimrich said, and Forniss said, ‘Yep. Right there, I guess.’

  Susan looked up at Heimrich.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘you say he walked up. Walked up for perhaps a hundred feet. Bleeding heavily. And no blood trail the way he came. You didn’t hear a shot?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is, I don’t remember hearing a shot. The dog was
making a racket. I—’

  She was interrupted. Another sedan came, and men got out of it—men not in uniform; a man carrying a camera; men carrying cases which held the tools of the technician’s trade. The man with the camera began to take pictures. Then another car came up and a man with a black bag walked from it, to the body, and sat on his heels beside it and used a stethoscope. He went around the body and squatted on the other side of it, avoiding the blood as well as he could. He got up, looked around and saw Heimrich, and came to them.

  ‘As a mackerel,’ he told Heimrich. ‘Shot. Probably grazed the aorta—nicked it.’

  ‘From a distance?’

  ‘Now captain,’ the doctor from the coroner’s office said, ‘how’d I know that? If he was shot with an automatic pistol, no. If he was shot with a rifle, depends a lot on the rifle, doesn’t it? Know when we take it apart.’

  He didn’t, Heimrich knew—and after a second Susan knew—mean a rifle when he spoke of ‘it.’

  The man with a camera took more pictures of the huddle of darkness on the gravel. Then a technician squatted and took prints from dead fingers. A man with a sketch pad made a plot. An ambulance came up behind the coroner’s car and two men in white got out of it, followed by another man in white. The coroner’s man nodded and walked toward the last of the men in white and said, ‘DOA, doctor. Gunshot wound, apparently.’ The man in white said, ‘Thanks, doctor.’ Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss walked to the group around the dead man, and this time Heimrich sat on his heels and looked for some time at the body. He stood up and said, ‘All right, doctor. He’s yours,’ and started to walk back toward the terrace. One of the troopers said, ‘Captain,’ and Heimrich stopped, and the trooper said something to him that Susan could not hear. Heimrich turned back and, this time standing, looked again at the body. Then he made a motion with his head to Forniss and the two of them walked back toward the terrace. Men in white put the body of the frail old man on a stretcher and put it in the ambulance. The ambulance backed out into the road and after a moment they could hear it start up, and then hear its siren start.

  It was quick; to Susan it seemed somehow perfunctory. She thought this feeling irrational, but it persisted. They found a body and photographed it, and took fingerprints from it, and took it away to be ‘taken apart.’ There ought, she thought, to be something more. She could not think what more—only something. She realized that Heimrich was looking down at her, and that there was no hardness in his face.

  ‘There’s a routine, Susan,’ he said.

  ‘Only—’ she said.

  ‘When you see it happen,’ he said. ‘Alive, and then dead. A different thing, naturally.’

  He listens to my thoughts, Susan thought. I must mind my thoughts.

  ‘Very different,’ she said. ‘Who was he, do you suppose? Why coming here?’

  ‘Ackerman,’ he said. ‘Trooper Ackerman. He thinks he’s a man named Tom. He doesn’t know any more than that. Or not much more. Lives in a shack in the woods somewhere around here. Does odd jobs now and then. Ackerman thinks he knows one of the places he worked. We’ll see. Now—will you go over it again?’

  ‘Colonel barked,’ she said. ‘You know the way he barks. He went to the road with Michael and came back, the way he always comes back, and lay down to—lay down to die, you’d have thought. You know how he is. I was weeding and he started barking and—’ She looked down toward the driveway and interrupted herself. ‘When Michael comes home,’ she said. ‘That—place. He shouldn’t see all that—that—’

  ‘I know,’ Heimrich said. ‘We’ll do something before then. Colonel barked—’

  She told it all again, more slowly, more carefully, by far, than she had told it on the telephone. She had thought the old man a tramp, coming for a handout. She had been sure he was dead and had thought only of telephoning Heimrich. She had left the big dog locked in the house. ‘He was terrified,’ she said. ‘And—and angry, too.’

  ‘Blood frightens them,’ Heimrich said. ‘Angers them too, sometimes. You didn’t hear a shot?’

  She shook her head. Colonel had been barking at the man—barking very loudly. But there was more.

  ‘I may have heard it,’ she said. ‘Almost must have heard it, mustn’t I? How far away could it have been?’

  ‘Some distance,’ Heimrich said. ‘With a rifle powerful enough. We’ll know when they’ve got the bullet. If they get the bullet, and I think they will. But not out of earshot.’

  ‘You hear things that don’t register,’ Susan said. ‘In the country, a good many shots. And since Ollie Perrin took up this hobby—’ She shrugged rather square, slim shoulders under the absurdly large shirt, which was Merton Heimrich’s shirt. ‘Call it,’ Susan Heimrich said, ‘voluntary deafness.’

  ‘Was he at it this morning?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But, he might have been. And I’d have heard, thought, “There’s Ollie at it again,” and not remembered. I might have.’

  Sergeant Forniss made the small, enquiring sound of one left out.

  ‘Our next-door neighbors,’ Heimrich said. ‘The Oliver Perrins. You can’t see the house—good-sized house, sort of—’ He looked toward Susan.

  ‘Unassertive modern,’ she said. ‘Sometimes called contemporary. You can’t see it when the leaves are out.’

  ‘Quarter of a mile or so,’ Heimrich said. ‘That way.’ He gestured toward the east, away from the river. ‘Same ridge. Last few weeks, Perrin has taken up target practice. Revolver. Target. Bunker of sorts. All quite legal, Charlie. And—’

  ‘And,’ Charles Forniss said, ‘a hell of a lot too far. Only—’

  ‘Now Charlie,’ Heimrich said. ‘Look for yourself.’

  He gestured again. Cleared land to the east of the house which had been a barn, and still rather looked it, extended for almost two hundred feet, and ended with a stone fence. Beyond that, the rising land was wooded.

  ‘Coming up the drive—’ Heimrich began, and Forniss nodded his head, and said, ‘Yep.’

  ‘It is,’ Susan Heimrich said, ‘impolite to whisper. Or to talk in a foreign language.’

  ‘Coming up our drive,’ Heimrich said, ‘the old man would have been walking north. He was shot in the right side. If someone—someone with a revolver—had come from the direction of Perrin’s house, he would have had a long shot—long with a revolver—from the other side of the wall. If he’d climbed the wall, you’d have seen him. Unless—’

  ‘No,’ Susan said, ‘the old man didn’t turn. He was walking straight up toward me when he fell. Slowly. Almost plodding. But as if he knew very well where he was going. As I think back, with a kind of determination. I thought he wanted a handout but—’

  ‘Yes,’ Heimrich said. ‘He may have been coming to see a cop. And all he said was something that might have been “Hell,” or something like that. Or, “Well!” In—what? Affront?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. ‘It doesn’t sound very adequate for a man who’s just been shot. There’s Ollie Perrin now.’

  They looked in the direction she was looking, the direction in which Heimrich had just gestured. A tall man in a polo shirt and walking shorts was standing on top of the stone fence. He jumped down from it, lightly, and walked toward them across the grass.

  ‘Hi, neighbors,’ Oliver Perrin said. ‘What’s the rumpus?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Oliver Perrin was deeply tanned; his black hair was brush-cut. Very Ivy League, Susan had thought when they first met the Perrins, and had found no reason to change her mind. Perrin’s greeting had been lighthearted from the fence top; he had been smiling cheerfully. But as he walked toward them he sobered, matching his mood to that of the Heimrichs, of Sergeant Forniss. When he was quite near he said, ‘Trouble?’

  ‘A man dead,’ Heimrich said, and gestured toward the drive. ‘There.’

  Oliver Perrin looked at the dark place on the white drive. He turned.

  ‘Shot,’ Heimrich said. ‘Did you hear
a shot about—’ He paused. ‘Within the last hour?’

  Perrin shook his head. He said, ‘Who?’

  ‘All we know at the moment,’ Heimrich said, ‘probably a man named Tom something. An elderly man. Supposed to live somewhere around here in a shack and—’

  ‘Old Tom?’ Perrin said, and there was incredulity in his voice. ‘Why the hell would anybody want to shoot Old Tom?’

  Heimrich didn’t know. Perrin knew the man he called ‘Old Tom’?

  ‘Strange old cuss,’ Perrin said. ‘Crazy old cuss, I guess. But harmless. You mean he didn’t come around here?’

  ‘No, Ollie,’ Susan said, and was told that that was funny, because he thought Old Tom went everywhere. They waited.

  ‘You’d go out some morning,’ Perrin said, ‘and there he’d be. Maybe raking the drive. Maybe weeding a flower bed. Often as not something you’d been planning to do yourself, and hadn’t got around to. You’d say, “Hi, Tom,” and he wouldn’t say anything, just go on working.’

  ‘You mean,’ Susan said, ‘He’d just come and start doing something? On his own?’

  ‘Yes,’ Perrin said. ‘Always something that needed doing or, anyway, that there was no harm in doing. He’d work an hour. Maybe he’d work three hours. Then he’d look you up and say, “All for today,” and you’d pay him. “Whatever it’s worth,” he’d say, and whatever you gave him he’d put in his pocket and go off. I thought he went everywhere. You’re sure he never came here?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Susan said, and Perrin said, again, that that was funny. Then he snapped his fingers. ‘Probably the dog,’ he said. ‘Probably he was afraid of the dog.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. ‘This morning Colonel barked at him and he didn’t pay any attention.’

  Perrin shrugged his shoulders. He said it was just an idea. He said, ‘Yours must have been the only place he didn’t—tidy up. Only place for a couple of miles around. Been coming to us, when he felt like it, pretty much since we first moved in. You never even heard of him?’