A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  After Faye had gone in, George had, he said, stayed on the terrace for another fifteen minutes or so. Then he had tried to telephone Eldredge. He said that and waited to be asked why.

  “Why, Mr. Townsend?” Heimrich said, obligingly.

  “You know,” George said, and managed a smile, and for a moment he was Jovial George again, “I’m damned if I know, exactly. I’d been sitting there, thinking, trying to puzzle things out and—well, I got to wondering what was going on. You know? What you were—” He paused. “Well,” he said, “what you were asking the rest of us. I hadn’t seen Eldredge and I was curious as to what he made of it and—well, what sort of questions you had been asking him, Captain. You see what I mean?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said. “It’s quite understandable.” He closed his eyes. “I rather expect things to get around,” he said.

  As it turned out, George told us, nothing had got around in this case, because Eldredge’s line was busy. As he said this, George seemed suddenly struck by a thought. He said that, anyway, it was apparent Eldredge was alive at about—oh, about a quarter of seven.

  I hadn’t planned to say anything; I felt that most of the things I had said already hadn’t helped the Pooh and me. But I said, “No, it’s a party line. We’re on it, too. It was tied up about then.”

  I told them about trying to get Eldredge myself, and hearing Doris, and then nothing, and then the childish—and at the moment extremely annoying—voices of the younger Jackson kids. All of this, of course, would tie up the whole party line, so that the busy signal when George dialed Francis Eldredge’s number meant nothing at all. I said all this before I realized that Heimrich, at any rate, knew that the Jackson telephone had been out of the cradle at, roughly, ten minutes after seven, when a gun banged in the receiver and—presumably—Eldredge started to die. It might also have been out twenty minutes or so before and, possibly, a few minutes before that when I had heard nothing at all on the line.

  “You thought there was someone on the line, Mr. Otis?” Heimrich asked. “Not merely that someone had left the receiver off?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I thought that.”

  I realized that the line might have been dead merely because the Jackson kids had already left the receiver off and were not, at the moment I tried to use the telephone, within prattling range. But it hadn’t felt like that; I had thought the line was actually in use, and that nobody was talking because somebody had gone away to get something—or perhaps, of course, because both people had run out of anything to say. In the last event, the people couldn’t have been the oldest Jackson girl and her friend Doris.

  Heimrich waited.

  “There was a feeling of people being there,” I told Heimrich, and felt foolish. I hadn’t consciously heard breathing, or anything else necessarily human. There had merely been a feeling of presence. I felt as if I were claiming extra-sensory perception, of which I’ve never been convinced. “Does it make any difference?” I asked Heimrich.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  I remembered.

  “There was a sort of clicking sound,” I said. “Perhaps that had something to do with it. I thought it might be the Jackson girl, or Doris, clicking her teeth.”

  Heimrich said, “Now Mr. Otis,” seeming to deprecate a levity I hadn’t intended.

  “I know the sort of sound he means,” Jovial George said, being helpful, coming to my assistance. “I’ve often heard it.” He tapped with a fingernail on one of the aluminum legs of the chair he was occupying. “Like that?” he asked. It wasn’t, exactly, but it was close. “Something mechanical, I’ve always supposed,” George said. “Something going on in the works.”

  The subject was pretty obviously exhausted, I thought, and Heimrich had closed his eyes, although that didn’t necessarily mean he thought so too. I told George I guessed he was right and Heimrich that probably it was merely that somebody had left the receiver off. I hadn’t, in my own telephoning, ever heard that particular click before, although heaven knows one hears enough strange sounds on a party line. If George had, it was all right with me.

  It seemed to me a good deal more interesting that George and Faye and Pauline had each been alone at about the time Eldredge was killed. It would have taken the slowest of them—whichever that was—not more than fifteen minutes to walk the three-quarters of a mile from Pinewood to the Eldredge place, as Eldredge had walked it the night before—fifteen minutes to get there, a couple of minutes to kill if one was in a hurry, another fifteen minutes back. Any of them, by the stories they told, had had time enough.

  “After you telephoned, Mr. Townsend?” Heimrich asked, keeping his eyes closed, but getting back to it.

  After that, Townsend had gone back to the terrace and waited for the little supper. Faye, Pauline and the little supper had appeared, simultaneously, at—oh, at about ten minutes of eight. He hadn’t been timing it.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “And Mr. Craig was still gone?”

  “He still is gone, so far as I know,” Townsend said. Heimrich nodded.

  “So any of you, including Mr. Craig, could have been here without any of the others knowing,” Heimrich pointed out. Jovial George said, “Now look here, Captain—” and then stopped, since the captain did look there and George, obviously, didn’t have anything to show, except indignation.

  “Of course, dear,” Faye said. “The captain’s right. He’s only doing what he has to do. It’s very obvious any of us could have killed Mr. Eldredge.” She looked at the Pooh and me. “Not only Oh-Oh and Winnie,” she added, probably so we wouldn’t feel left out. We didn’t. Faye also knew that the Pooh didn’t like being called Winnie, which, she had told me, she always associated with horses. The Pooh held out, wistfully, for being called Winifred, but almost never was.

  “I’m sure none of us did,” Faye added, it seemed to me rather naïvely. Heimrich merely nodded to show he heard. Then he said he was glad Mrs. Townsend recognized his position.

  “I understand you had considerable influence with Mr. Barlow,” he said. He opened his eyes, then. Faye made her eyes very wide.

  “Influence?” she said. “I don’t know what you mean, Captain. We were all very fond of Paul.” The emphasis on “all” wasn’t pronounced, but it was there. But, of course, Faye Townsend liked to emphasize words, sometimes for reasons not altogether clear, at least to me. A good many women do, I sometimes think; I’ve always been pleased that the Pooh emphasizes only for emphasis. But I’m always pleased about the Pooh; it has now and then occurred to me that I am even fatuous. I have no objection to being fatuous in a good cause.

  I looked at George as Faye spoke, but there was nothing to see in his face, or nothing I could see. He didn’t, apparently, think Faye might be protesting too much. Maybe they had all been very fond of Paul.

  “I hadn’t any special influence,” Faye told Heimrich. “Why did you ask?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. He said he liked to get relationships straight, and thanked Faye. He seemed slightly to have bored himself. Forniss came out onto the terrace again and Heimrich, without opening his eyes, said “Yes, Sergeant?” dashing my disbelief in extra-sensory perceptions.

  “Miss Dean is gone too,” Forniss said.

  “They went together,” the Pooh said. “I’m sorry. So much has happened. Don’t you remember, Oh-Oh?”

  I did, then. They had both passed us in the Jaguar while we were driving home that afternoon. They were going the way people are apt to go in a car like the Jaguar. I listened, and the rest did, while the Pooh said this and I nodded when Heimrich looked at me. I said I was sorry we’d forgotten to mention it earlier. I said that, for what good it was, they had been going west when they passed us. Heimrich nodded without opening his eyes. Then the telephone rang and Forniss went in to answer it, and Heimrich said, “By the way, Miss Barlow, is it correct that you were an adopted child?”

  “Yes,” Pauline said.

  “Not that it makes any d
ifference, naturally,” Heimrich said. “I realize that.”

  “Not in what I felt about father,” Pauline said. “Or about mother, while she was alive.”

  Heimrich again realized that. He asked whether she had always known she was adopted and she said, “For a long time.”

  “I didn’t know,” the Pooh said.

  “Didn’t you?” Pauline said. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t a secret.” She paused. “It wasn’t important,” she said. “Not to anybody.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, dear,” Faye told her and Pauline smiled at her, not very successfully.

  I couldn’t see we were getting anywhere, and I began to feel Heimrich couldn’t either. He knew now that nobody had an alibi, except the alibi the Pooh and I gave each other, which he probably considered as good as none. He’d been told George had tried to telephone Eldredge and not been able to get him; that all of them had been fond of Uncle Tarzan, not only Faye; that Pauline had for a long time known she was an adopted daughter, and that it didn’t make any difference; and that Miss Dean had gone off with Dwight Craig—gone west, at least to start. I failed to see that any of these crumbs made a loaf. Then Forniss came out again.

  “Parkway police,” he said. “One of them saw the Jaguar a few minutes ago. Going toward town on the Saw Mill extension. Clocked it and it was only doing fifty and didn’t bother it. Says he usually clocks foreign cars and convertibles with the tops down.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “You passed it along?”

  “They’ve got it in town,” Forniss said. “It’s pretty late, you know.”

  It was pretty late, obviously. The Jaguar could be a long ways now; it could have been even if the Pooh and I had remembered a few minutes earlier that we had seen it going toward the parkway.

  “Of course,” Faye said, “they may merely have driven into town for dinner, Captain. Although I would have thought Dwight would have—”

  She left the tail of another sentence to wag, lonely among the unborn.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Well—that’s about all for now.”

  It was unexpected. I had thought he would hammer at us, take us over and over things. I thought that was the way detectives worked. But he had seemed to accept all he was told; to be willing to let things drift. It seemed to me they were drifting nowhere.

  “All for now,” Heimrich repeated. He opened his eyes and looked around at us. “The important thing is to make the character fit the crime,” he said. “You all realize that, of course. When there are so many possibilities, naturally.”

  He stood up, and the rest of us stood up. We all waited, as if more formally to be excused.

  “Thank you,” Heimrich said. “I realize how unpleasant all this is. However—”

  The Townsends and Pauline hesitated a moment longer, and I thought George was about to say something. But Faye took his arm and they went to the Buick. George backed it around with great care; it was getting on toward dark; the Buick’s backing lights were sharp white circles. They went out and the car went down the drive. We watched it to the road—watched it turn on the road, pass the entrance to our drive and disappear around a curve.

  “Well—” I said to the Pooh, my tone as inconclusive as everything had been since the reporters and photographers, who were so very conclusive about everything, had left. “All right,” the Pooh said, and her tone was pretty much as mine had been. We started toward the end of the terrace and the path home.

  “Oh, Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “If we find that gun of yours.”

  I turned back. He was standing there looking at us.

  “I doubt if you will,” I told him. “Ever.”

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Do you? But if we should happen to—tonight, say—you’d be able to identify it?”

  “By the serial number,” I told him. “Not without that.”

  “I wonder if you couldn’t, Mr. Otis?” Heimrich said. “If it were—really necessary? It might be very helpful if you could, naturally.”

  I didn’t see how I could. I told him so.

  “Try to remember, Mr. Otis,” he said. “I really would. Think about it. You and Mrs. Otis both, naturally. Both think about it.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll think about it.”

  We walked down the path. There was still enough light for us to see the dead cow. On our own terrace we turned back to look at the Eldredge house, and the lights were on in the living room. I wondered if they had decided to look there for my gun. I didn’t think they’d find it, and told the Pooh so.

  “They might,” the Pooh said. “You know what, I’m hungry.”

  8

  This time, we did have sandwiches, after a drink. Then we had iced coffee. It kept right on being hot, and we stayed on the terrace until the mosquitoes drove us in. We didn’t talk about what was happening while we drank and ate, and not until we were inside. Then the Pooh said, “I think he expects to find your revolver.”

  I couldn’t see why he should. I know that, in theory, what people call “murder weapons” do turn up, but why this one should I couldn’t imagine. Whoever had it, and was using it to shoot people, would have half a countryside to hide it in and it would take the whole of the countryside, the whole of the State Police force, to look in all the hollows of trees, all the apertures between the rafters of garages, all the impenetrable thickness of hedges, in which an automatic could be hidden. And then it might well be locked up in the glove compartment of a car, or tucked away inside a snow tire in storage somewhere. As a matter of fact, whoever had taken it might by now have decided he was finished with it, and thrown it into a reservoir. It was absurd to think it would turn up, this night or any other.

  “All the same,” the Pooh said, “he expects to find it tonight. I wonder why?”

  I didn’t know why, if he did. Nor did I think that what he expected was certain, or even likely, to happen. I said he seemed to me a very odd sort of detective.

  “Perhaps,” the Pooh said. “I don’t know much about them, really. He’s a rather intricate man, of course.”

  I wasn’t sure he seemed that to me, but I always listen to the Pooh. So I said, “Go ahead, Grandma.”

  “Do you realize,” the Pooh said, “that he has us trying to solve things; that that was why we went to Eldredge’s? Probably why George tried to call Mr. Eldredge up? That, probably, Mr. Craig and Ann are off now somewhere trying to solve it? That everybody is except the one who knows the solution, but that he has to pretend to try, too? Don’t you see how Captain Heimrich has—has activated all this?”

  We had put on fewer clothes after we got home and were sitting in the living room with the lights off, for coolness and because the moon had risen. The Pooh was in the moonlight as she had been the night before and wearing not much more—wearing a bra and shorts. She didn’t look logical; she hardly looked real, leaning forward, with the moon white on her. Certainly, she wasn’t dressed for murder; everything about the scene had a kind of impertinent lack of appropriateness. The way she looked distracted me. I said, “Activated?”

  “Of course,” the Pooh said. “By asking questions, and letting everybody know what questions he asks and what people answer. By not telling us what he really is doing, or what Sergeant Forniss is doing, or what he thinks. By making us think, and worry and—and do something. By talking to Ann about catalytic agents while he, himself, is the catalyst.”

  I pointed out that, so far, this method had ended by getting Eldredge killed. It was evident, I thought, that Captain Heimrich hadn’t planned that, or known it was going to happen.

  The Pooh supposed he hadn’t, was certain he hadn’t. It had been a chance he had had to take, because he had to keep us moving.

  I said his method, if she was right about his method, seemed like being a somewhat wasteful one. It had already, I repeated, wasted Eldredge. Obviously, if one could stir up a murderer until he had murdered all the people whose activities might involve him, one would
end up with a solution. There would be one person left alive, and he would be “it.” It was a method which leaned hard on the theory of expendability. I said I hoped the murderer wouldn’t get around to us before Heimrich did; I said that, at the moment, we might do well to settle for protective custody.

  “No,” the Pooh said. “One has to act on the theory that people are reasonably sane. Often they aren’t, of course. But how else could anybody go about anything? You’ve pointed that out often enough, about driving, for example.”

  I had, of course. I had said that nobody could ever drive a car, or walk across a street for that matter, except on the theory that other motorists—and other people generally—weren’t going to lose their minds. You couldn’t count on that, but you had to act as if you could, or merely sit somewhere on top of a pillar, waiting to be struck by lightning. The Pooh expects people to be consistent as she expects them, within reason, to be sane. But, then, people who write poetry are usually saner than people who don’t—not so circumscribed, often, or even so predictable, but saner. I said, “All right, Grandma.” I said I hoped Heimrich was one of the sane ones.

  “He had to act as if Mr. Eldredge were a reasonably sane man,” the Pooh said. “A prudent man. On the assumption that anyone who knew anything would tell the police what he knew.”

  I said I supposed Heimrich had had to act that way and that it was too bad Francis Eldredge hadn’t been prudent. We speculated again about what Eldredge had tried to say—about the words “bright” (or “light”) and the word which might have been “back” and the sound which had perhaps been only an exhalation of breath, and perhaps a word—just possibly the word—“three.” We tried to put these words, about which we assumed I had been right—although it was anything but certain—into a sentence worth the effort a man dying had put into it. We didn’t get anywhere. The moon moved enough so that it no longer shone into the living room, and we talked almost in darkness for a time. Then, finally, I turned on lights.