A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  “Had you told her you were going to?”

  Craig hesitated. Then he said he might have.

  “But you hadn’t got around to it?”

  “That’s right,” Craig said.

  “Didn’t quarrel with him about it, then,” Heimrich said. “He didn’t behave—autocratically? Threaten you in any way? Through Mr. Townsend, for example?”

  “I didn’t talk to him about it,” Craig said. His face showed nothing I could see.

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “he didn’t say, in effect, that you could have one but not both, as he appears to have said to Mr. Townsend? Meaning, in your case, his daughter or your job, naturally.”

  “I told you,” Craig said.

  “As things are now, you can have both, can’t you, Mr. Craig?” Heimrich said. “However—you didn’t talk to him, so he couldn’t have, could he?”

  This time, Craig said nothing at all. He merely looked at Heimrich, and waited.

  “Captain Heimrich,” the Pooh said, “isn’t it possible Mr. Barlow wouldn’t have wanted Pauline to marry anybody? Not only Mr. Craig—anybody?”

  “Now Mrs. Otis,” Heimrich said. “That’s an interesting point, naturally. Why should he?”

  “Sometimes fathers feel that way,” the Pooh said. “Isn’t that true, Captain? Sometimes they become a little mixed in their emotions toward their daughters, particularly when a daughter is all they have.”

  Heimrich regarded my wife with interest, which was natural, considering the way she looked. He also, I vaguely felt, regarded her with approval.

  “Go on, Mrs. Otis,” Heimrich said.

  “You know what I’m going to say,” the Pooh said. “Why should I, Captain?”

  “Do I?” Heimrich said. “Go on anyway, Mrs. Otis.”

  “Obviously,” the Pooh said, “the fact that Uncle Paul wasn’t really Pauline’s father might enter into it, mightn’t it? So, in his case, the emotions wouldn’t actually be mixed, would they? Wouldn’t be basically mixed?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Naturally not.”

  “But her feelings might still be mixed,” the Pooh said. “Feelings aren’t logical. She might have felt possessed. Even—outraged. Whether he was or not, she may have regarded him as her father. Emotions may have tangled in her.”

  “It might have been that way, naturally,” Heimrich said. “It’s a question of character, isn’t it, Mrs. Otis? Some young women might have felt caught—or even more. Some might not.”

  “Of character,” the Pooh said. “Of sensitivity.”

  Heimrich and the Pooh seemed to be going great guns; I felt somewhat left out, I supposed because both of them had, pretty clearly, thought of a point which had not occurred to me. There was no reason why Uncle Tarzan, since he wasn’t, except legally, any more closely related to Pauline than, for example, I was, shouldn’t have noticed she had grown into an appetizing young woman. There was no reason he might not have set up a wall against other men, on a paternal pretext, but not with paternal motives. He wouldn’t even have had fully to realize his motives weren’t paternal. And Pauline might have come to regard the whole situation as rather sticky.

  I had a feeling that Craig and Ann weren’t actually listening to this, which was odd, since the Pooh and Heimrich were talking about the girl Craig had wanted to marry and now, presumably, could marry if he still wanted to. They were listening to each other, but neither of them was saying anything.

  “You had thought of all this, hadn’t you, Captain?” the Pooh said.

  Captain Heimrich smiled, very briefly.

  “There are a good many possibilities, naturally,” he said. “There usually are. I try to think of most of them.” He paused. “It’s always quite interesting to find out who else thinks of them too,” he added.

  “Offers them to you,” the Pooh said.

  “Now Mrs. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Now Mrs. Otis.”

  Then Craig turned to Heimrich, rather abruptly.

  “You want us to stay here?” he asked. His voice was strained, harsh. “If not I’ll take Miss Dean home.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I’m through, for the moment. We’ll let Mr. and Mrs. Otis go back to sleep.” He turned and Forniss, who had been standing by the door, politely opened it. In it, Heimrich stopped. “I’ll want to see you all in the morning,” he said. “I’ll send somebody to let you know when.”

  Then he went.

  I offered drinks to Craig and Ann, but they merely shook their heads—merely stood, fixed, waiting for Heimrich and Forniss to be quite gone. The Pooh and I waited too. We all heard Heimrich’s car, which we had been too preoccupied to hear when it arrived, start up to leave; heard its tires crunch on the gravel. Then Craig turned to Ann.

  “No, Dwight,” Ann said. “I guess not.” She looked at the Pooh. The Pooh nodded.

  “They’ll let me stay here for the rest of the night,” Ann said. “Thanks all the same, Dwight.”

  “I—” Dwight said.

  “Thanks all the same, Dwight,” Ann said. There was something which might have been intended as a smile on her face. There was nothing in her voice—nothing at all.

  Dwight Craig turned, then, and walked out. He didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, we heard the Jaguar start up, down the drive.

  “Well—” I said, and nobody paid any attention.

  The Pooh fixed Ann a place to sleep on the sofa, and when it was ready the Pooh and I said good night and Ann merely nodded, with the twist on her wide mouth which was meant to be a smile, and wasn’t. Craig hit them in the face all right, I thought.

  After the Pooh and I were in bed—a little time after we were in bed—I heard something in the living room I thought was Ann crying. I turned to the Pooh, and she was lying in the moonlight with her eyes open. She turned to me and put her lips close to my ear.

  “Go to sleep, Oh-Oh,” the Pooh told me, and it was an order. It took me a while, but in the end I obeyed it.

  9

  The Pooh and I slept late Monday morning, making up for lost time. It was after ten—quite a bit after ten—when we got up and dressed quietly, so as not to waken Ann. It was almost eleven when the Pooh went out into the living room and found that Ann Dean had neatly folded the sheets and summer blanket and gone, leaving a note. The note said, “Thank you both. Probably I’ll see you later.” Apparently she had walked the three miles or so to the Hibbards’. I supposed she hadn’t wanted to see us, or anybody, until she had to.

  The Pooh and I had breakfast and waited for Heimrich to send for us. We talked, and didn’t get anywhere. We re-stated what we knew, and wondered what Heimrich knew—wondered if he had yet settled for anyone, if he had found my automatic (the Pooh wondered that; I remained certain he hadn’t), if he had added anybody to his list.

  The list, we agreed all over again, stood at four, counting the Pooh and me as one, which was how we counted ourselves. The Otises, Dwight Craig, Pauline Barlow, George Townsend, very possibly in that order. Unless he knew something we didn’t—which was entirely probable—Heimrich probably wouldn’t have either Faye Townsend or Ann Dean on his list. We couldn’t think of any good reason for Faye to have killed Uncle Tarzan, whatever his attitude toward her might have been. (She wasn’t any tigress to defend Townsend Associates with claw and fang or forty-five automatic.) Ann Dean was clearly out of it, so far as we could see. I made our own little list from what we knew, stressing motives:

  Orson and Winifred Otis: To get Uncle Tarzan’s fifty thousand dollars.

  Dwight Craig: To get Pauline Barlow, and the rest of Uncle Tarzan’s money with her, and to keep a job Uncle Tarzan might have planned to throw him out of.

  Pauline Barlow: To get Dwight Craig, and to tear down a wall her adoptive father might have built around her; perhaps also to get herself out of a pseudo father-daughter relationship which had turned, or was turning, to something else which frightened and disturbed her.

  George Townsend: To keep the Blends account, if Uncle
Tarzan was threatening to withdraw it; to keep Faye, if Uncle Tarzan was drawing her in.

  It was obvious we couldn’t have it all four ways, and the first way we knew it wasn’t, whatever Heimrich might think. If Uncle Tarzan had been developing a non-paternal interest in Pauline, then presumably he hadn’t, at the same time, been developing a covetous interest in Faye Townsend. If Uncle Tarzan had been planning to scotch Craig through pressure on Jovial George, then obviously he hadn’t been planning actually to withdraw the Blends account, which was what gave him pressure to apply. There might, I thought, be some way to go on canceling one thing with another until we came up with a remainder which had to be the right answer. The trouble was, we didn’t know which of mutually exclusive possibilities canceled another, since we didn’t know which was true. In the end, we tore up our little list and sat on the terrace and listened to over-heated birds lackadaisically conversing with one another. Then the mail came, and the morning newspapers.

  It made quite a story in both the Times and the Herald Tribune, and the Otises were rather embarrassingly prominent in it. The whole affair, evidently, was pretty much what the editors had ordered; there was so much in the story, indeed, that the headlines had a peculiarly crowded, jumpy quality; it’s hard to get “tobacco company executive,” “prominent advertising man” and “well-known writer of light verse,” to say nothing of “dairy farmer” (that was Eldredge, who became a somewhat subsidiary character, it seemed to me) into one-column heads and have any room left for significant verbs, such as “killed” and “investigate.” The Times, which has more space, thanks to condensed type, got this:

  Tobacco Executive

  Found Dead In Pool

  Of Mt. Kisco Estate

  ———

  Paul J. Barlow, “Blends’” Head

  Believed Murdered at Home

  of Advertising Director

  ———

  Dairy Farmer Also Found Slain

  ———

  State Police Seek Link Between

  Two Killings; Both Men Shot

  at Close Range With 45

  That, of course, only scratched the surface; the Herald Tribune, with prettier but more exigent headlines, scratched it even more lightly. But they both made up for it later and they were both pretty accurate. In both stories, I suppose necessarily, the Pooh and I were noticeable. It is difficult to find two bodies within twenty-four hours and not be noticed, particularly if you find one of them while taking an after-midnight swim in a neighbor’s pool. The Herald Tribune made a point of the “moon-lit” scene; the Times didn’t give the lighting a notice.

  The men who had written the stories in both papers did not, of course, indicate what their own suspicions were, and neither said that the police contemplated arrests in the near future. But neither got away from the obvious fact that the Otises—even if Winifred Otis was well known as a verse writer and her husband was “also a writer”—had had a pretty busy weekend finding bodies nor entirely avoided the implicit suggestion that maybe they had known where to look. Both papers had pictures of everybody concerned. The one of the Pooh almost did her justice, but the picture of me offset whatever disarming effect hers might have had. After looking at my picture in the Times, I thought “that guy’s story of losing his gun is pretty thin” before I entirely realized who it was I was thinking about.

  I read the story in the Times and the Pooh the one in the Herald Tribune. Then we switched. The Pooh loyally objected to the “also a writer” line and when I said I thought it covered the ground well enough, said, “I wish you would get around to writing a novel.” I told her this wasn’t a good time for it, and she agreed that was the best excuse I’d had so far. Then a young trooper came in a car and got us and took us to Pinewood.

  I don’t know why I had expected us all to meet again on the terrace where, so far as the Pooh and I were concerned, and so far as Ann Dean was concerned, it had started Saturday afternoon. I suppose I had some idea that Heimrich proposed to re-enact, if not the crimes themselves, the events immediately leading up to them. I should have known better, have realized that that was not Captain Heimrich’s way.

  The trooper took us across the terrace, which couldn’t have been used anyway, since at that hour the sun beat down hot on it, and into the living room. The Townsends, Craig and Pauline were there and none of them looked particularly happy; Jovial George managed only the smallest beam at us. They all looked hot—except for Faye—and tired. Even Faye looked a little tired, I noticed, when she got up to greet us. For a moment I felt that she was about to say it was so nice to have us drop in; for a moment, perhaps, she was about to say it. With Faye, and people like Faye, the response to a given stimulus is almost irresistible; if people come into your living room (or parlor or drawing room, or kitchen if you receive people in the kitchen) you advance and tell them how nice it is they have been able to drop in.

  Faye actually was the drawing-room type; looking at her that Monday noon, I realized I had been wrong in thinking of the room off the terrace as no more than a living room. The room was, for a country room, elegant in a subdued and yet debonair fashion. It was done chiefly in blond wood, with the chairs covered in printed linen, and on the wall opposite the fireplace a modern painting which was vivid without being arrogant. A very pleasant room, and one into which a lot of money had gone. A lot of money had gone into Faye, too, and I never realized it more than I did that day, when she was dressed very simply in a linen frock which picked up one of the tones of green in the furniture covers, and was wearing daytime lipstick and what I took to be a daytime hairdo. Faye said, “My dears” in a tone at once welcoming and full of commiseration; which indicated how dreadful everything was for everybody. There was only the faintest suggestion in her tone that it was especially dreadful for us. Perhaps there was not even that; perhaps I was merely self-conscious. I looked around for Heimrich, and didn’t see him. I saw George, who stood up and made a fuss about chairs, and whose radiance had markedly faded and who, uncharacteristically, had nicked himself while shaving. I wondered why he didn’t use an electric razor, and decided he probably had a shaving cream, or safety razor, account. I saw Craig, who looked angry, and Pauline who, as nearly as I could tell, looked scared—perhaps apprehensive is a better word. Then another trooper opened the screen door from the terrace and Ann Dean came in. She looked as if she hadn’t slept.

  Faye greeted Ann much as she had the Pooh and me, but without quite so much sympathy, and Ann said “Good afternoon, Mrs. Townsend,” and smiled faintly at the Pooh and me; her lips still seemed to be stiff. She said good afternoon to George, too, and nodded with another partial smile at Pauline and didn’t see Craig at all. He looked at her when she came in, and kept on looking at her until it was apparent that he wasn’t in any room she was in. Then he looked away, very quickly. We all sat down and the whole place began to feel like a doctor’s waiting room. We acted as people do in a waiting room—preoccupied, each a little suspicious of the others (who was next? how long would he take?), uneasy.

  Then Forniss opened the door from the little library off the living room and stood in the door, very massive and with no expression on his face at all, and looked around at us. I thought he was picking the first victim—looking for a nice, succulent one to feed to Heimrich. But then he turned back to the library and said, “All here, Captain” and stepped aside, so that Heimrich could come out. Heimrich had a brief case under his arm; he was rather like a university lecturer, bringing notes to the class. He put the brief case down on a little table and sat down behind the table. He did not open the brief case; he looked around at us rather as Forniss had, inquiringly, as if making up his mind which of us would prove the most succulent. I felt, then, that we were waiting for the curtain to go up, and that the moment should have been dramatic. It wasn’t that; I suppose because Captain Heimrich was not at all a dramatic man—not, at any rate, in any obvious sense. He was merely a pervasive man. He merely sat there, looked around, and se
emed to expect one of us to open a conversation. When nobody did, he closed his eyes, briefly, opened them again and said that this was a lot of trouble for everybody, naturally.

  “Things like this usually are,” he said. “Trouble for everybody. Because somebody thought murder was an answer.” He closed his eyes. “It wasn’t, naturally,” he said. “It merely raised more questions—mine, other policemen’s. It usually does, but people keep on trying.” He opened his eyes. “Quite possibly, people sometimes get away with it,” he said. “I don’t deny that. One of you thinks he has got away with it now, probably. Thinks that whatever we suspect, we won’t prove anything. Thinks he has been too ingenious for us. One of you.”

  He looked around at us again and shook his head slowly.

  I didn’t know how he made the others feel; one of the others might, for all I knew, be chortling inside, thinking he had been too ingenious; thinking that the solid man at the table was rather ridiculous with his brief case and had been rather ridiculous with his questions; thinking that getting us all there together and making his little speech to us proved the whole thing was about over and, from his point of view, safely over. If I had been the one he was after, I would have felt I was up against something too big for me—as if I were a mouse and Heimrich were a large, unamiable cat. I felt a little that way as it was. It was an extremely uncomfortable way to feel. I wasn’t the right mouse—and hoped Heimrich would notice that—but I was a mouse, all right. I stood off and watched myself being a mouse, and practiced (silently) a few mouse-like squeaks. Heimrich began to talk again. He talked rather slowly; he kept his eyes open, at first, and looked from one to another of us.

  One of us, he said, had taken advantage of a situation—a situation where there seemed to be safety in numbers. Usually, he said, that was not the case; usually, the problem of a detective was to find out which one of, usually at most, two or three people had a reason to kill, an opportunity to kill and the character which, under the particular circumstances, made killing possible, or even made it seem inevitable. Usually it was possible to eliminate all but one either on the basis of motive or that of opportunity. Usually, although more than one person might seem to have a reason to kill another, it became evident after a little thought that only one really did have. But in this case, at least half a dozen people had had, or might have had, or might have thought they had, adequate motivation. One person had realized this, and taken advantage of it. He had, further, injected an element which, he thought, added to his advantage, even made it insurmountable.