A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  Then, just when things should have seemed more reasonable, safer, than they had before, I suddenly found myself wishing I had the automatic that somebody else had. I saw the Pooh shiver a little, and heard her say it seemed to be cooling off, finally. It wasn’t, really, but we both felt as if it were.

  “I wish he would find that damn gun,” I said.

  The Pooh just nodded. She didn’t seem, any longer, to be sure he would—not in time, anyway.

  “We’ve got to remember we don’t know anything,” I said.

  “I hope nobody thinks we do,” the Pooh said.

  It was about midnight, then. We went to bed. The Pooh went to sleep before I did—and woke up before I did. I didn’t know what had awakened me and I looked at the Pooh. The moon had worked around so that its light fell in the bedroom window. It touched the Pooh’s face; only her face. Her eyes were open and she was listening.

  Then I heard what there was to listen to—the crunch of feet on the gravel of the drive. Someone was walking toward the house. Whoever it was wasn’t, I thought, making any more noise than he had to. On the other hand, he wasn’t making as little as he could; he could have walked on the grass, beside the drive. Then I decided there were two people, not one. Then I got up, not making any noise myself. I found a robe and got into it. For the moment, the Pooh lay there, her face turned toward me. The moonlight seemed to reflect in her eyes, which were very wide open. Then she twisted and was out of bed, too, groping in the semi-darkness for something to put on. She found something; her whiteness disappeared into slacks and a blouse.

  The footsteps had stopped. Whoever was coming had got to the door and stopped. Or had they—I was pretty sure there was more than one—realized the noise they were making and, a little late, got off on the grass? I opened the door into the living room and went out into the darkness there and I could hear the Pooh moving behind me. There was no sense in waiting for the people outside to move first. That was probably what Eldredge had done. I reached back and touched the Pooh, and pushed her back a little toward the bedroom, indicating what I wanted her to do—and what I knew, of course, she wouldn’t really do. Then I went across the living room, being careful not to bump into anything, and got to the door leading onto the terrace and listened. I couldn’t hear anything. I hoped to God whoever it was had gone away. I didn’t want to open the door. I wished I had the automatic. Then I grabbed the door, which opened inward, and pulled. Anyway, there wouldn’t be any light behind me; anyway, the terrace was bright under the moon.

  The terrace was bright—and it seemed damn crowded, although there were only two people there. They were standing close to the door, as if they had been about to knock. I said, “All right. What do you want?,” and spoke too quickly—spoke, in spite of myself, excitedly. Only after I had spoken did I realize I was talking to Dwight Craig and Ann Dean.

  “We woke you up,” Ann said. “We thought you were awake.”

  I looked at my watch; it was a few minutes after two.

  “There’s a light on,” Craig said. “We saw it from the road.”

  They could have done that, if there had been a light on. There hadn’t been.

  “There wasn’t any light on,” I said.

  “That’s why we didn’t knock,” Ann said. “When we got up here, there wasn’t any light. But we were both sure we’d seen one.”

  “You could have seen the moon reflected in a window,” the Pooh said. She hadn’t gone back where it was safer, of course. She was right there beside me.

  “It might have been somebody with a flashlight,” Craig said. “It didn’t seem to be moving, though.”

  It might have been something they’d made up; something to temporize about, now that we were awake.

  “We wanted to see you,” Ann said. “Mrs. Otis particularly. To see if—”

  They didn’t look dangerous, standing there, side by side—standing quite closely together. They looked rather attractive, as they both had that afternoon in the tree shade at the Hibbards’. But it was certainly one hell of a time to come calling.

  “Come on in, then,” the Pooh said.

  I moved enough to let them come on in. They did. I turned on lights and looked down at myself and decided I wasn’t dressed for company. I went back into the bedroom, leaving the door open, and found slacks and a shirt and put them on. I came out and the Pooh was mixing drinks and Ann and Dwight Craig were standing watching her. In the light they both seemed to be tired, and strained. They didn’t seem threatening.

  “We’ve been in town,” Craig said. “We went to the office.”

  It was a little odd to hear the “we”; Saturday afternoon they’d been ready, apparently, to take each other apart, and not bother about the pieces. Now Craig used the plural pronoun as if he had forgotten there was a singular one. I don’t know why that should have made them seem even less threatening, since presumably it doubled their strength, if they wanted to exert their strength. All the same, it did.

  “We think they’re looking for you,” the Pooh said. “Captain Heimrich and the rest. They didn’t know where you’d gone. Did they find you?”

  “No,” Craig said. “Nobody found us.”

  “You know Eldredge is dead?” I asked them, and from their expressions they didn’t know. Craig swore, and Ann put a hand on his arm.

  “We didn’t know,” Ann said. Her attractive wide mouth looked stiff.

  I told them about Francis Eldredge—all of it, including the cow. When I told them the time at which, according to Mrs. Jackson’s ears, Eldredge had been shot, Ann said, “We were together then. At the—”

  Then she stopped and looked at Craig. Then she said, “At the inn, weren’t we, Dwight?”

  Dwight Craig nodded, slowly. His independent eyebrow was, I thought, more variant than ever. He looked at Ann, and she nodded, just perceptibly. Until that moment, I had supposed they had been together, uninterruptedly, from the time they passed us on the road in the late afternoon until then. Now I thought they hadn’t been.

  “No, Vix,” Dwight said. He had seen my face, apparently. “There was a little matter of half an hour. Apparently the wrong half hour.”

  “We don’t have—” Ann began, and then stopped. Apparently she changed her mind in mid-sentence. Apparently she decided they did have to admit the little matter of half an hour. They didn’t have to admit it to us, but they did.

  They had, when they left the Hibbards’ front yard after Ann had driven her car back from pushing us, planned merely on a short drive in the Jaguar, which could create its own breeze—which could create a hurricane, if a hurricane was desired. They had— “Well,” Craig said, “we got to talking.” They had driven around aimlessly, found themselves near the Birch Hill Inn at six-thirty and stopped for a drink. The place had been fairly crowded and, from a few minutes before seven until almost half past seven, they had not been together. Ann had, oddly enough, been working.

  They had been at the bar, and Mr. Prescott, the very charming, moderately young, man who operated the inn had come over and greeted Ann and been introduced to Craig and asked if he might not buy them a drink. Then, after they had finished it, he had wondered whether Mr. Craig could spare “this charming lady” for a few minutes, since there was something he wanted her advice about. Craig had said he guessed so, without enthusiasm, and Ann had gone with Mr. Prescott to learn that he was thinking of re-decorating the rooms upstairs for overnight guests and wanted her to make some suggestions and bring around some fabrics. It looked like being too good to miss, and Ann had got interested; they had looked at all the rooms, she had made sketches and suggestions, and it had been about seven-thirty when she had got back to the bar and Craig, who was there and, they both agreed, morose. They had decided to stay at the inn for dinner, then, and Mr. Prescott—with apologies for intruding his business on their pleasure—had sent them a bottle of champagne.

  “Of course,” Ann said, “Dwight was right there at the bar the whole time. It’s just that
we weren’t actually together.”

  It was that, I thought; it was also a little more than that. Instead of one reliable witness who knew him, Craig would have to rely on people at a crowded bar who probably couldn’t be sure he hadn’t taken fifteen minutes out to go off and kill somebody. It wouldn’t have taken longer than that; the inn was only two or three miles from the old Eldredge place, and the Jaguar had wings.

  “What the hell?” Dwight said. “I didn’t kill Eldredge. Why should I?”

  He looked at me, over his glass, with a certain challenge. I said, O.K., he hadn’t, and that I didn’t know why he should have.

  “I stayed at the bar,” he said. “I drank a couple of scotches.”

  “Nobody doubts it, Dwight,” Ann said. “Nobody at all.”

  Dwight Craig finished his drink rather abruptly.

  “What then?” the Pooh said. “You went to New York? To the office? Your office?”

  They had, it seemed, felt as the Pooh and I had felt—that we had to do something. I didn’t see why the pressure was on them as it was on us, since nobody had stolen an automatic from Craig, but apparently they felt it was. Evidently, Heimrich had made them feel that or, at any rate, made Craig feel it. “It was my idea,” Craig said. “I took Vix along for—for the ride.” He looked at her. He would, I thought, like to take her for a lot of rides.

  What they had done wasn’t exactly burglary, since Craig had a perfect right in the office of Townsend Associates, being an associate and, furthermore, had all the necessary keys, including one to the locked file. Craig didn’t explain, specifically, what he had hoped to find, but I supposed he had had a hunch. He didn’t say what it was. He said they had merely wanted to look around. They had looked, naturally enough, in the section of the file devoted to the Blends account, which was a pretty big section of the file. They had not found anything interesting. Then—

  “We found this,” Craig said, and showed us “this.” This was a letter. It was typed. It read:

  “Dear Townsend: You can have one but not both. P. J.”

  It was cryptic enough, and abrupt. But to me it didn’t mean anything. Craig and Ann Dean looked at us as if it should, or as if they hoped it would. They looked at the Pooh with special hopefulness, I suppose because Paul J. Barlow had been her uncle. It didn’t, I gathered, mean anything to the Pooh, either.

  “It was all we could find,” Ann said, and there was apology in her tone. “It seemed—odd.”

  It did, somehow—meaningless, but odd. The curtness was not especially odd; Uncle Tarzan was apt to be curt. But there was also, I felt, a kind of contempt in the phrasing, as if Uncle Tarzan had been writing to an acknowledged inferior. I couldn’t imagine why Jovial George had wanted to keep it, but I assumed he had.

  “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” the Pooh said. “It must to you, Mr. Craig. At least, you are in the best position to guess.”

  Craig didn’t say whether he guessed or not. He said, “We thought you might have some ideas, Mrs. Otis.”

  The Pooh shook her head. I shook my head, although nobody had, it seemed, expected me to produce ideas. I asked why he didn’t take it up with Jovial George himself.

  “I may,” Craig said. He grinned, suddenly. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I found it in a drawer of George’s desk. Snooping. It might be hard to explain.”

  I thought it might be very hard to explain. I thought that Craig was not, by nature, a random snooper in other people’s desks, and that he had snooped this time on a fairly definite hunch—looking, that was, for something specific. I thought this curt note from Uncle Tarzan to George was what he had been looking for, or part of it, and that he had expected it to mean to us—anyway to the Pooh—what it meant to him. I wondered why they had waked us up to show us this—and if that was really all they had waked us up for.

  I had been holding the letter. I started to hand it back and somebody knocked briskly on the door. This was not, evidently, our night to sleep. I opened the door, and Captain Heimrich was standing there, with Forniss behind him. I thought, O.K., this is it. But Heimrich looked beyond me at Craig and Ann Dean. He said, “I wonder if I might come in, Mr. Otis,” and came in.

  “You know, Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said, “we’ve been looking for you. And Miss Dean, naturally.”

  “You didn’t say anything about staying around,” Craig said. “We—we went for a drive.”

  “Now Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Craig.”

  “We weren’t—” Ann said, and Captain Heimrich interrupted her.

  “No, Miss Dean,” he said. “As Mr. Craig says, you weren’t asked to stay around. You were quite at liberty to take a drive, naturally. To New York, wasn’t it?”

  Very clearly, he knew it was.

  “We ended up there,” Craig said.

  “At your office,” Heimrich said, as if he were agreeing with something Craig had already said. “You parked in front of it for about an hour—quite legally, of course, since it was Sunday. Your car is noticeable, naturally. One of the men in New York noticed it”

  “Look,” Craig said. His slightly lop-sided face was angry. “You had an alarm out for us? Why?”

  “Now Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “I like to know where people are. Well, did you find anything?”

  “Not a damn—” Craig said, and Ann shook her head at him. “Nothing that makes sense,” Craig said. “A letter. Where is it?”

  I had it; I gave it to Heimrich. Heimrich read it. Craig told Heimrich where he and Ann had found it. Heimrich said it was quite interesting, naturally. I didn’t know whether he meant the letter itself, which didn’t interest me greatly, or the fact that Craig thought it important, which did. Heimrich, however, said he’d just keep the letter, if Mr. Craig didn’t mind, and put it in his pocket without waiting to find out whether Mr. Craig minded or not. Craig said, “All right,” being left with little else to say. Ann asked, apparently since nobody else seemed to have a question ready, how Heimrich had found them. He said, “Now Miss Dean” and that a parkway policeman had picked them up on the Saw Mill and sent the word along; that when they hadn’t reappeared elsewhere, it had seemed possible they might have stopped in to see us.

  “By the way,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes. He was still standing up, but he closed them anyway. “By the way, why did you, Mr. Craig?”

  “I thought the Otises might be able to make something of it,” Craig said. “They’re—in it. P. J. was Mrs. Otis’ uncle. She might know more about him than I did.”

  “Such as what, Mr. Craig?” Heimrich asked.

  “Whether he was—” Craig began and stopped. “I don’t know, precisely,” he said. “It was just a notion.”

  “Now how would you put it, Mr. Craig?” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes. “What Mr. Barlow’s attitude was toward, say, Mrs. Townsend? Is that what you thought Mrs. Otis might know about, Mr. Craig? Is that what you had in mind?”

  “It was just a notion,” Craig said, “I didn’t have anything specific in mind.”

  “Now Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. He sounded regretful. “Now Mr. Craig.”

  Craig merely shook his head.

  “Tact is very admirable, Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “We all agree to that. Sometimes it is a little foolish, naturally. Sometimes it is quite foolish.”

  “All right,” Craig said, “what do you mean by ‘attitude’?”

  “Now Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “What do you think? Was he in love with her? Want her to leave her husband for him? Did Mr. Townsend find out about it, get jealous and kill Mr. Barlow? Was that your notion?”

  “No,” Craig said.

  “Or were you afraid I’d miss the possibility?” Heimrich asked him. “Want to bring it to my mind? Decide to try it out on Mr. and Mrs. Otis to see how it went down?”

  “Am I trying to involve George?” Craig said. “No, the answer is. I’m—” He stopped.

  Heimrich waited for a moment, politely. Craig merely shook his hea
d. Then Heimrich asked another question, in the same quiet, unexcited voice he had been using, not pushing the question at Craig, not dramatizing it, just asking it.

  “Why did Mr. Barlow object to your marrying his daughter, Mr. Craig?” Heimrich asked.

  Craig’s aberrant eyebrow jumped. And then he looked, quickly, at Ann Dean. Ann’s eyes widened and now her whole face, not only her mouth, seemed to stiffen. As Craig looked at her, she raised one hand and touched her lips with her fingers—merely touched them. Craig appeared to be trying to find something in her face, and not finding it. He went on looking, and Heimrich did not hurry him. He waited for more than a minute, which can be a long time, before he said, “Well, Mr. Craig?” His voice was as quiet as before. Craig turned and looked at him.

  “Miss Barlow told me, Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “That you and she wanted to get married. That her father objected. She said she didn’t know why. Why, Mr. Craig?”

  “All right,” Craig said. “Because he thought I wasn’t the right man, I suppose.”

  “Now Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “Why should he think that, do you suppose? Because you were divorced?”

  “Possibly,” Craig said. “That may have entered into it. He didn’t talk to me about it. He talked to Paulie.”

  “You didn’t go to him?” Heimrich asked. “Have a showdown? Find out where you stood?”

  “I did not,” Craig said.

  “But you would have eventually?”

  “I suppose so,” Craig said. “There wasn’t any hurry.”

  “Wasn’t there?” Heimrich said. “I should have thought—Miss Barlow is a very attractive young woman, Mr. Craig.”

  “Sure,” Craig said. “Very.”

  “She seemed to think you had talked to her father, Mr. Craig,” Heimrich said. “Why did she think that, do you suppose?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Craig said. “As I told you, I hadn’t.”