A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  He didn’t seem much interested in the cocktail party, and in not being I thought he was making a mistake. I thought it was interesting that Uncle Tarzan had been so unpopular with so many people at the cocktail party. But I thought it was Heimrich’s business, unless he started getting ideas about the blood on my shirt. I thought he probably would; I thought it was obvious that he would. The Pooh was a niece, and Uncle Tarzan might have left her something—or we both might have thought he was going to, whether he had or not. We’d found his body, I thought not long after it became just a body. There was blood on my shirt. And, of course, I had a forty-five.

  “By the way,” I said, “I’ve got a forty-five stuck on a closet shelf at home. Left over.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “A lot of them didn’t get turned in.” He’d closed his eyes and now he opened them. “We’ve noticed that,” he said. “Why do you mention it, Mr. Otis?”

  I was damned if I knew.

  “Because he was trying to wake you up, probably,” the Pooh said. “He doesn't like people to go to sleep when he’s talking to them. He didn’t kill Uncle Tarzan. Neither of us did.”

  “Now Mrs. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Now Mrs. Otis. I wasn’t asleep. I don’t know who killed Mr. Barlow. I’m not supposed to, am I?”

  “Naturally,” I said, “you’re not supposed to.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “All right, you two’d better go home. You left your car somewhere?”

  I told him where. He closed his eyes, for a moment and then opened them.

  “All right,” he said. “You may as well get along. If I were you, Mrs. Otis, I’d take a good hot shower.” He didn’t suggest I take a good hot shower, but almost everybody wants to cherish the Pooh. We got up and Heimrich said he’d probably drop in on us the next day, if anything turned up. He said he’d like a look at the forty-five. I said, “Sure, any time,” and we went to the door of the study Faye’d put us in.

  “By the way,” Heimrich said, “if Mr. Townsend’s back, would you ask him to come in?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  George was back—he was just coming onto the terrace—and I asked him to go in. Then we went down the path toward the swimming pool. We met the big sergeant coming toward the house and he stepped a little off the path so we could pass.

  There was quite a crowd around the pool—around Uncle Tarzan’s body and the whole area. A couple of men were searching around on the ground, using flashlights. We made a circle around the crowd and got into It, and It started, making the usual racket. As we circled to get on the road It’s lights slashed across the men by the pool, and they looked up, startled, I guess, by the amount of noise we were making. It backfired indignantly all the way out to the main road, and all the way to Mean Abode. We both took hot showers, as Heimrich had told the Pooh to do, and went to bed. The Pooh went to sleep very quickly and after half an hour or so I got my arm out from under her shoulders without waking her and went to sleep too. I dreamed about flying an airplane, with people shooting at me.

  The first thing Sunday morning, before the Pooh woke up, I went to the hall closet where I kept the forty-five—with no clip in it; I didn’t have any ammunition for it. I felt around on the shelf. The forty-five wasn’t there. It wasn't anywhere in the closet. I woke the Pooh up and we both looked all over Mean Abode and didn’t find the pistol. Neither of us could remember when we’d seen it last, or having taken it down from the closet shelf; the Pooh couldn’t even remember what it looked like, very precisely, but I could. It looked like a forty-five automatic, and I had been supposed to wear it on sorties, I suppose on the theory that, so armed, I could fight my way home across France if I got shot down. I hadn’t worn it; most of us hadn’t. I hadn’t, as a matter of fact, ever fired it at anybody. I’d fired it a few times at a target, and never hit the target. I wished, very actively, I’d never mentioned it to Captain Heimrich.

  “If you hadn’t, someone else would have,” the Pooh pointed out. “People knew you had it.”

  I supposed they did; I supposed that some time, to somebody, I’d mentioned it, and that somebody would remember I had. If you live in the country long enough, even two or three years, almost everybody somehow gets to know almost everything about you and you about them—all the trivial things, anyway. There’s a kind of osmosis of information in the country. No doubt some time somebody had been telling me how he always carried a gun in the glove compartment of his car and I’d said I had a gun, and wouldn’t carry it around on a bet because it might go off. I couldn’t remember telling anybody this, or not telling them. The whole affair, I told the Pooh, was going to prove very interesting to Heimrich.

  “You know,” she said—she was getting breakfast by then and came to the kitchen door—“you know, I don’t think he makes very many mistakes. Or that he’s really very sleepy.”

  I said I hoped she was right. I said I didn't see precisely what had given her this bright picture of Captain Heimrich, who seemed to me more like a block of mahogany—with, of course, blue eyes. I said I’d give her the blue eyes, when open. I said I’d also give her that he liked her verse, or said so.

  “I’m very glad he does,” the Pooh said. “Particularly since you seem to have lost your revolver. Do you want to do the eggs?”

  I said it wasn’t a revolver, and that I’d do the eggs. I put butter in the small frying pan and heated it until it was just a little more than warm, and took it off and broke four eggs into it, very gently. Then I put it back on a low fire and put a lid on it and watched the Pooh drain the bacon. She heated a platter and while the eggs were still soft enough to bubble a little, but not liquid, I slid them onto the platter with a spatula—that was the hard part; they break easily. We went out onto the terrace and had breakfast. Then we sat on the terrace, and drank coffee, and smoked, and waited for what happened next.

  It was very hot already, even in the shade on the terrace. There had been a little mist when we first got up, but it had burned away and you could sit there and feel everything getting warmer all around you. Because something was obviously going to happen next, we’d dressed more completely than usual—I had on slacks and a black tennis shirt, and the Pooh had on a cotton skirt, very wide, and a blouse. She looked as if she had slept twelve hours, like a child; as if she had never had a drink in her life and certainly not as if she had ever found the body of an uncle somebody had shot. We didn’t talk about that—about the ugly center of everything, I mean. We did talk a little about Uncle Tarzan and the Pooh said, “I hope somebody is really sad about it—sad inside” and that she wished she could be.

  “I’m really only sad about not being sad,” she said. “About nobody’s being really sad.”

  Probably, I said, his daughter was and the Pooh said she hoped so, but in a tone which didn’t indicate her hope was very vigorous.

  “People ought to live somewhere, for a little while,” she said. “Oughtn’t they, Oh-Oh?”

  I knew what she meant, but not any answer to it. I waited, so she would know I knew what she meant, and then said that her uncle would, probably, live quite a while in the minds of Heimrich, and other policemen, and other people—and, for that matter, in the newspapers. I said I wished I knew where that damned automatic had got to; failing that, that I knew when I’d seen it last. We went and looked for it again, although we knew we wouldn’t find it. We didn’t.

  It was about eleven-thirty when the telephone rang. The Pooh answered it and said, “Oh, hello, Faye” and listened and said, “Isn’t it” so I knew Faye Townsend had started off by saying how dreadful it all was. Then the Pooh said, “Oh, we’re all right, Faye. We’re making out.” Then she listened for several minutes, saying “Yes” and “All right” and “I see, Faye,” from time to time, to prove she was still there. Then she said, “We’ll be here. Thanks, Faye,” and hung up.

  “He’s been there all morning,” the Pooh said, and came back out to the terrace. “Asking questions. Faye says she doesn’t think he has
any more idea what it’s all about than she has—than any of them has. The sergeant’s name is Forniss, incidentally. Faye thinks they found something down by the pool, but she doesn’t know what.”

  “Probably the slug,” I said. “Or the cartridge case. That’s probably what they were looking for with the flashlights. To match up with my forty-five. But they’ll have to find it first, I guess.”

  “Well,” the Pooh said, “they’re on their way over here now, Faye thinks. I’ll make some fresh coffee.”

  I didn’t know whether that was a good idea or not, but left it to the Pooh. Just before the coffee was ready, the State Police sedan came up the drive and parked near It, and Heimrich got out. He was alone in the car. He came around to the terrace and said it was another hot day. He said, when the Pooh asked him, that iced coffee would be very pleasant and when she brought it out—and glasses for us, too—he stood up and took it and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Otis,” very politely. He said he hoped she hadn’t caught cold. Then he sat down with the coffee and closed his eyes, and drank some of the coffee, and said it was very pleasant there. I half expected him to say he hoped he hadn’t kept us from church, but he didn’t. He merely said he was sorry to bother us, and that he knew how Mrs. Otis must be feeling.

  “If you mean about Uncle Paul, I don’t want to pretend, Captain,” the Pooh said. “We weren’t very close. I almost never saw him.”

  Heimrich didn’t seem shocked by this; he wasn’t, apparently, one of those who believe there’s a moral obligation to be devoted to relatives. He merely nodded to what the Pooh said, without opening his eyes. Then he said they knew a little more, now.

  “The M. E.—that’s the medical examiner—thinks Mr. Barlow hadn’t been dead long when you found him,” he said, to both of us. “Perhaps only a matter of minutes. It’s impossible to be precise. The M. E. didn’t see the body for several hours. A few minutes. No more than an hour.” He opened his eyes.

  “Which,” I said, “lets us in, you mean.”

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Otis. I’m merely telling you the doctor’s estimate. Why should you and Mrs. Otis kill her uncle?”

  It took me a moment to realize that the question wasn’t rhetorical, that he really wanted to know. Then I said there wasn’t any reason. I told him we’d already said we didn’t kill Uncle Tarzan. “So does everybody, naturally,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes again. “I really don’t know—yet. Did you expect him to leave you money?”

  “We didn’t know,” the Pooh said. “Did he?”

  It was a perfectly reasonable question and, to us, a question with an important answer. I wondered a little, however, if perhaps the Pooh weren’t being a shade too direct.

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Forniss is finding out. Sergeant Forniss. He was with me last night. You’d speculated about it, of course? I mean whether he left you anything. But you didn’t know?” He had closed his eyes again.

  “We speculated a lot,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I’m sure anybody would. About that forty-five of yours, Mr. Otis?”

  “Apparently,” I said, “I’ve managed to misplace it, Captain.”

  He opened his eyes, then. I’d thought he would. But he closed them again almost at once.

  “That’s a pity,” he said. “When, Mr. Otis?”

  I told him what I didn’t know about the forty-five—where it was, when I’d seen it last—and what I did know—that it hadn’t been fired in years and that it should have been on a shelf in the hall coat closet. I asked him if he wanted to look for it, and he said, “Why?”

  “Because you can think I’m lying,” I said.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Suppose I did? Suppose I thought you came home last night and got the automatic and took it out in a field somewhere and buried it. Or threw it in a reservoir. Why should I look for it here? It isn’t here, of course. It’s a Colt, I suppose?”

  It was, or had been. I had no ammunition for it. I also had no permit for it, which you need in New York. None of this surprised him, apparently. He appeared to have gone back to sleep again. But he hadn’t, because he lifted his glass and finished his coffee. He said it was very good coffee.

  “Did you find the slug?” I asked him. “Or the cartridge case?”

  “Both,” he said. “The slug’s rather mashed up. Glanced off a rib, probably.”

  “But useful?” I asked. “If you find a gun?”

  He said oh yes, naturally. I asked him if I had been right about its being a forty-five and he said, “Quite right, Mr. Otis.”

  “Somebody stole Oh-Oh’s revolver,” the Pooh said. “Isn’t that possible?”

  “Quite possible, I suppose,” Heimrich said. “You mean, to kill your uncle with, Mrs. Otis?”

  The Pooh said she supposed so.

  Heimrich appeared to be waiting for her to go on. When she didn’t he said, “About the shirt. There was blood on it, as you thought. Mr. Barlow’s blood, probably.”

  I told him, again, I thought the blood must have been on the grass I’d dropped the shirt on. He said it could have been that way.

  “That car of yours backfired a good deal when you left last night,” Heimrich said. “I could hear it up at the house. Does it often?”

  “Always,” the Pooh said.

  “Do you remember whether it did when you were driving to the pool last night?” Heimrich opened his eyes now.

  “Yes,” the Pooh said. “I remember. It did. Dreadfully. It’s a nasty little car.”

  “Anyone not listening carefully could have thought you were shooting off firecrackers when you left,” Heimrich said. “Very large firecrackers. Or something even larger, naturally.”

  “Like a forty-five,” I said.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Not to anyone listening carefully, of course; only to someone ready to dismiss the sounds as coming from a backfire. Not having an automatic in mind, I mean.”

  I saw what he meant. The Pooh and I could have come up to the pool in It, backfiring as usual, kept the motor running (and backfiring), shot Uncle Tarzan and added merely one more explosion to the series, waited a while to be sure it worked and that nobody came, and then “found” the body. I said that the backfiring of It might have been useful enough to whoever killed Uncle Tarzan. A single shot probably would have brought people running, too fast; a fusillade would merely make people say, “Oh, there’re the Otises again.” Heimrich kept his eyes closed. He said, “Did you tell anybody you were going to the pool?”

  We hadn’t, of course; we’d decided on it only when we were driving away from the inn. So, as Heimrich didn’t need to say, and didn’t say, our explosive arrival had not been anything to count on.

  “If we had shot Uncle Paul,” the Pooh said, “after going to the trouble to confuse the issue, why would we have found the body? Why wouldn’t we just have driven away again?”

  Heimrich opened his eyes and looked at her and this time left them open.

  “Because you thought people would know you had been there,” he told the Pooh. “Would have heard you. So you took time to tidy things up. Perhaps your uncle didn’t fall in the pool, Mrs. Otis. Perhaps Mr. Otis had to push him in. That would account for the shirt, naturally; for the blood on it. Afterward, you tried to wash the blood off, and thought you had and decided to find the body. Probably Mr. Otis realized that the time of death can’t be set too exactly, afterward.”

  “Do you really believe that, Captain?” the Pooh asked. She merely looked interested, as if it didn’t have much of anything to do with us—as if she were asking Captain Heimrich if he really believed the earth is flat. She’s always interested in what people believe; she wrote a poem once that said, or felt as if it were saying, that what was true was the sum of the little things—but not the big things—people believed in. I don’t paraphrase it very well, probably. And it wasn’t meant to be a serious poem—I guess.

  “Not especially,” H
eimrich said, and closed his eyes again.

  “Or disbelieve it,” I said.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said, “it’s early for that, isn’t it? I do wish you hadn’t lost the pistol, naturally.”

  So did I.

  “You met Mr. Craig at the inn,” Heimrich said. “And Miss Dean. That was quite early? I mean, quite a while before you left?”

  I agreed we had, and that it had been perhaps three hours before we left.

  “And they left?” Heimrich asked.

  I said they had gone out the door from the tap-room. I said I didn’t know what they’d done after that.

  “Mr. Craig went back to the Townsends’, apparently,” Heimrich said. “Miss Dean went back to the Hibbards’. She lives there; has an apartment over the shop. At least, she says she did. She says she didn’t see anyone; that the Hibbards were either asleep or out somewhere. They say they were at the movies.”

  He was, it seemed to me, very free with information—more free with it than I’d have thought a detective would want to be. I’d have thought the idea would be to keep people guessing.

  “Mr. Craig and Mr. Townsend and Mr. Barlow had a business conference of some sort after dinner,” Heimrich said, being freer than ever. He looked at his glass, which was empty. The Pooh said, wouldn’t he like some more coffee, and he said it was very good coffee. We all had some more.

  “About an advertising campaign for Blends,” Heimrich said, when we were all fixed up again. “What they’d do in the fall, I’m told. Something about a television program. It was all very amicable.” He drank some coffee. “I’m told,” he added. Faye Townsend and Pauline had waited around for an hour or so and, when the men continued to confer, had gone to bed. After the conference, Uncle Tarzan had had a glass of milk and said he was going to bed, and had, at any rate, gone upstairs. That was, Heimrich said, apparently about eleven or eleven-thirty. After that, Craig had got his car and put the top down and driven around for an hour or so to get cool.