I found out what they wanted, which had to consist of gin—unless there happened to be scotch left, which I rather doubted. I was, therefore, mildly lyrical about the advantages of collinses and both Heimrich and his wooden Indian agreed that collinses were precisely what they had in mind. You can, of course, usually get people to drink what you want them to, if they are pleasant people, reasonably sensitive to situations. And, after all, it was a perfect afternoon for collinses.
I made the drinks, shaking the gin and juice with ice until the mixture frothed, filling tall glasses and then adding charged water, which is the only way, although a good many people don’t seem to realize it. I decided not to put in the few drops of cream for each drink which I use sometimes, because there are people with conservative views about any mixture of cream and alcohol. I took the four glasses out to the terrace and sat down by the Pooh on the double chaise. It was relaxed and pleasant—and I sat there feeling intolerably stupid. The whole thing was, I simply hadn’t got the point.
Oh, I realized that George Townsend had killed Uncle Tarzan and, afterward, Francis Eldredge. I realized that Captain Heimrich had known that for some time—at least for a long enough time to have somebody tighten up the automatic choke arm on George’s big Buick, so that it would stick when he tried to start the motor, and the carburetor would flood. I realized, or assumed, that Townsend had done his killing because Uncle Tarzan had offered him the choice of giving Faye up quietly or losing the Blends account, and George had thought he saw a better alternative. (I thought, incidentally, that they had both gone to a good deal of trouble about Faye, who probably wasn’t worth it; I was still sorry for George, who had found out a good deal too late that she wasn’t worth it.) I supposed that Eldredge had known something which, if told, would inconvenience George. I got everything that was important, everything that was obvious. I still didn’t get the point.
“All right,” I said after Heimrich had thanked me and the Pooh had laughed, “I’ll ask the man. Please, Captain, how did I help? I mean, I realize I identified the gun but—”
“Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. He kept his eyes open, took a long sip, and smiled again.
“Look,” I said, “the gun you showed me—the gun I identified, and I’m damned if I know why—wasn’t my gun at all. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Heimrich nodded; he appeared to approve of me. I was a bright student. In time I would learn the alphabet, up to “f” anyway. “F” for failure, so far as I could see.
“And my gun, which is probably at the bottom of a reservoir, wasn’t the gun Townsend used to kill Uncle—Uncle Paul? Or Eldredge?”
Heimrich nodded again. He smiled again, and his smile was so friendly, now, that I answered it, and the Pooh, beside me, gave a low, engaging chuckle.
“All right,” I said, “then what the hell is it all about?”
“Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “I practically told you that yesterday. On Mr. Eldredge’s terrace. Your gun wasn’t used as a weapon. There was never any plan it should be. It was used as a quibble—a legal quibble. It made things a little difficult, naturally.”
He paused and closed his eyes.
“Now listen—” I said.
He opened his eyes, smiled again and took another drink. He said it was a very good collins. He said, “Now Mr. Otis. I am telling you.” He thereupon closed his eyes again.
“As I said yesterday,” Heimrich told the Pooh and me, “there are two parts to my job. Finding a murderer. Getting him convicted of murder. The second is often harder than the first. After Mr. Eldredge died, the question of identity was pretty much cleared up, naturally. But, at the same time, the quibble was pretty well established, too. The two things seemed to cancel out. We had our man; we were never going to get him—unless, of course, he gave himself away, publicly. You see it now?”
“No,” I said. I found I was grinning at him. “As you know damn well,” I said. I turned to look at the Pooh. She shook her head, to show she didn’t see it either; I hoped, but wasn’t sure, she wasn’t merely being polite.
Heimrich sighed. He was enjoying himself, I decided. That was all right with me; probably he had earned it.
“Now Mr. Otis,” he said. “Suppose I had arrested Mr. Townsend then. I could have proved motive—we already knew about Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Otis’ uncle. At any rate, we could have reconstructed a motive a jury probably would have accepted. We could have proved opportunity. But we could never have convicted. The only people we could have convicted at that stage would have been you and your wife. Since I didn’t think you had killed anybody, that got me nowhere.”
He reached out, with his eyes still closed, found his glass and drank from it.
“Which was, naturally, the whole point of the gun,” Heimrich said. “It was the reasonable doubt. Its existence, and its disappearance, made it impossible for us to convict anybody but the people who owned the gun, had motive, had opportunity. You see now?”
He didn’t wait, however, to be told whether we saw or not.
“Suppose,” he said, “that I had decided to arrest Townsend. Or, for that matter, Craig. Or Miss Barlow. Up to a point, I could build a case against any of them, and turn it over to the district attorney. And at that point, he would throw it back in my face, naturally. Because—imagine you’re on a jury, Mr. Otis. Imagine you’ve heard a case against—oh, Miss Barlow. A perfectly good case, with one exception—the defense says, ‘Where is this gun? This gun which belonged to Mr. Otis, who also had a motive, who also had opportunity. Stolen, Mr. Otis says. Perhaps it was’—the defense says—‘we don’t say it wasn’t. Our client didn’t steal it, of course. Nobody can prove she did. Perhaps somebody else stole it. Perhaps it wasn’t used. But—perhaps it wasn’t stolen. Perhaps it was used. The Otises seem like nice young people, they don’t seem particularly to have wanted money, we can’t prove they even knew they were going to get money. But, gentlemen of the jury, there is a doubt—a reasonable doubt. As his honor will instruct you—’You see it now, Mr. Otis? Until the gun was found, and it is never going to be found, we couldn’t convict anybody. You and Mrs. Otis were always in the way. No matter how strong a case we had against anybody else, you and the missing gun were still in the way. Townsend couldn’t count on our finding good motives for Mr. Craig and Miss Barlow; couldn’t count, in advance, on each of them having had opportunity. But he could always count on the gun. He’d planned it that way, and he had planned it very well. That’s why he stole the gun.”
“To involve us,” the Pooh said. Heimrich opened his eyes.
“Only in a sense,” he said. “It didn’t matter whether you were actually involved. For one thing, I’m not at all sure he knew, then, that you had a motive of sorts. All he needed was a question that could be raised, not an answer. Just an alternative that couldn’t be disproved.”
It was, Heimrich went on, as simple as that. Townsend had killed Uncle Tarzan, probably with very little advance planning, using an automatic of his own. Probably, at that time, the quibble hadn’t occurred to him. Probably, Heimrich said, it had occurred to him when, walking back from showing the trooper to the pool, he had heard voices from the library and, being naturally interested, had got close to an open window and listened. He had heard me tell Heimrich about my gun and even where it was kept. Then he had had his idea.
He knew Mean Abode, and that we kept miscellaneous objects in the hall closet. He knew that we, like a good many country people, didn’t lock up when we were home. (As a matter of fact, I remembered, we hadn’t even closed the door; only the screen. It was a night we wanted all the air we could get.) After giving us time to get to sleep—and the police time to leave for the night, which they did about two-thirty—he had driven over, parked the Buick down the drive, walked up and committed cautious burglary, and then driven away and disposed of the gun. (Heimrich merely assumed in a reservoir because that method made the most sense, and because Townsend had used a car. If he had not planned to dispose of
the gun in a reservoir a few miles away, he would not have needed a car. He didn’t, he repeated, assume we’d ever know unless Townsend decided to tell us—as, of course, he now might.) Then Townsend went home and went to bed, probably patting himself on the back.
“How,” the Pooh asked, “did you know the gun wasn’t ever used? That it wasn’t the right gun?”
“Because,” Heimrich said, “I’d have expected it to be left near Mr. Eldredge’s body. The wound wasn’t incompatible with suicide. It would have been a nice, neat circle that way, naturally—ending with the suicide of a murderer. Of course, I had to assume you two hadn’t found it and—reclaimed it. But I had already made the assumption that you were neither murderers nor half-watted.”
I wasn’t completely sure about the last, in so far as it concerned me. I didn’t, however, bring the question up.
There was—“naturally”—no point in leaving the automatic by Eldredge’s body if it wasn’t the gun used to kill Uncle Tarzan. Eldredge wouldn’t use one gun to kill Barlow and another to kill himself. It was possible that my gun had been used to kill Barlow, and then thrown away. But, if the gun used had been mine, I was the only one with a reason to throw it away—I and, of course, the Pooh. If it were being used by someone else to implicate us, then every trouble would be taken to have it found and, by ballistic tests, identified as the right gun. When the killing of Eldredge became necessary, the place my gun would be discovered became obvious—by Eldredge’s body. It wasn’t there.
“I still don’t see—” the Pooh began, getting in a step ahead of me. There were still several things I didn’t see.
“Why I didn’t merely pick you and Mr. Otis?” Heimrich said. “Well—I suppose because of the cow, as much as anything. You said you wouldn’t kill a cow, Mrs. Otis—that neither of you would. And, you know, that is precisely the kind of thing I believe.” He suddenly smiled at her. “You see,” he said, “one has to make the character fit the crime, naturally. If you had killed the cow—you or Mr. Otis, of course—it would have been deliberate, uncharacteristic, and—meaningless. It didn’t prove you had been shot at—or over, more likely—to hold you off while somebody got away. It merely proved somebody had shot a cow. I presumed it was accidental, as you both said. I couldn’t think of any likely circumstances under which either of you would have killed it accidentally. In addition, of course, Mr. Otis would have had to make up the right words. If he had made them up, he would have made them simpler. He would have said, in effect, that Eldredge had got out pertinent words—perhaps even a name. Not something which might have been ‘bright’ or ‘light’ and something which might have been ‘back’ and a third sound which might have been ‘three’ or, just as possibly, nothing at all.”
He looked at us out of bright blue eyes and I had a momentary feeling that he thought now everything was clear, even to us; that now he didn’t need to say any more.
“Go on, Captain Heimrich,” I said, “Give us the rest of it, naturally.”
“Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Otis.”
“After Mr. Eldredge died you knew the identity of the murderer,” the Pooh said, speaking very carefully. “You did say that?” Heimrich nodded. The Pooh took a sip from her glass. “From what Mr. Eldredge said?” she asked. Heimrich nodded again.
“You are,” the Pooh said, “a most exasperating man, Captain.”
“Now Mrs. Otis,” Heimrich said. “I don’t mean to be.” He considered the situation. “Perhaps I am,” he said. “I realize that. Well—I assumed that somebody had driven to your place to steal the gun after Mr. Barlow was killed. I knew, merely by looking around, that from his terrace, Mr. Eldredge could see the entrance to your drive. I knew, from seeing it, that your drive is too narrow to turn a car in without going up to the house.” He paused. “I rather like ‘Mean Abode,’” he told us. “At least—it’s better than something like ‘Dunroven.’”
Neither of us said anything.
“I knew that Eldredge had found out something which made it necessary to kill him. And I knew that the only car likely to be involved which had backing lights was Mr. Townsend’s Buick. The Jaguar hasn’t, Mr. Barlow’s Rolls hasn’t, the station wagon hasn’t. You wouldn’t have backed out of your own drive, or stolen your own gun, for that matter, but the—the object you call ‘It’ hasn’t backing lights.”
“Backing lights?” I said. Then I said, “Oh.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “That seemed the most likely. Mr. Eldredge died with a picture in his mind. A picture of lights, I guessed. First of lights—then that they were the backing lights on a car. At about three o’clock, probably. It all fitted—a car backing out of your drive, with the lights going on automatically. The Buick. Then we found out that Mr. Townsend had been talking to Eldredge on the telephone that afternoon. I assumed that, then, Eldredge had let out what he suspected. Probably asked Mr. Townsend for an explanation. And I found out, when Mr. Townsend broke in to explain that peculiar clicking you had heard on the telephone, Mr. Otis—to explain it away—that he was a man who might be—well, enticed—to speak before he got the full implication of what he was saying. Since it seemed necessary to get him to make admissions publicly I—well, I enticed him.” He sighed. “It took quite a time,” he added. “I was relieved that you decided to be helpful, Mr. Otis.”
“I still don’t know why I did,” I said. “I didn’t even know I was being. Why did I?”
Captain Heimrich finished his drink and, for a moment, held the glass out and looked at it.
“How did you persuade me to take a tom collins, Mr. Otis?” he said. “By letting me see—feel—that you expected me to, naturally. And, of course, I told you in so many words what I wanted. I said, ‘I want you to identify it, Mr. Otis.’ I didn’t say, ‘Can you identify it, Mr. Otis?’ As you said, in effect, ‘What’ll you have? How about a collins.’” He paused again. “Of course,” he said, “everybody was keyed up, by then. Tense. Perceptions were heightened, naturally. You knew what I wanted, even if you didn’t know why. Since you hadn’t killed anybody, it was to your advantage to play along.”
I digested this. I asked him what he would have done if I hadn’t been perceptive.
“Oh,” he said, “something else, of course. It would have taken longer. But Mr. Townsend was getting very—fidgety.”
There was a longer pause. Heimrich closed his eyes.
“Captain Heimrich,” my wife said, “do you ever fish? I should think for game fish?”
Heimrich opened his eyes.
“Why no, Mrs. Otis,” he said. “I’ve always thought it must be very dull.” He hesitated. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t like to kill things, either. Naturally.”
He sat for a moment. I knew that if I offered another drink, he would go, and I hoped he wouldn’t. But then he said, “Well, Charlie?” to Forniss, and they both got up. They would, Heimrich said, have to be getting along. He shook hands with both of us, and so did Forniss—in whose hand I could feel tremendous strength, carefully not used—and then they got along.
The Pooh and I had another drink and sat on the terrace, relaxing—thinking about fifty thousand dollars, which we could do now without uneasiness; talking very little. The telephone rang after a time and the Pooh went to answer it. I thought about fifty thousand dollars until the Pooh came back. I turned to look at her and, as always, was glad I had.
“Mr. Craig,” the Pooh said. “He and Ann are at the inn. They want us to come over. It seems to be a celebration. Just the two of them.”
“Well,” I said. “We’d have to change and—”
“Now Mr. Otis,” the Pooh said. “Now Mr. Otis. It might be very interesting. If we don’t take a few chances we’ll never—”
So we went, of course. The Otises try not to miss out on things.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries
I
There was nottime to see, to see for remembering, all the pictures made by
sea and land, by the many bridges and by the fishers on the bridges; the pictures clear in sunlight which was bright yet somehow soft; the pictures glimpsed and then hurled past, hurled backward by the ponderous, headlong progression of the bus. She could look ahead and see a bridge, with men and women—variously, sometimes grotesquely, now and then brightly, costumed—fishing from it and then they were on the bridge, seemed to be brushing the fishers, threatening to hurl them into the blue water or mangle them against the concrete guard wall over which they leaned. But when she looked back the fishers were still there, unperturbed, standing on, but now and then perilously backing from, a narrow concrete ledge between rail and roadway. She looked back once and a woman in a red shirt and tight blue trousers was leaning forward toward the rail, partly over it, and was pulling up a fish which wriggled silver in the sun.
If only she could remember that; if only there were time to remember any of it. But when the bus slowed, when it stopped, it was always on a key where the road ran only straight, like a road anywhere, with frame buildings on either side and gasoline pumps and signs offering fried shrimp, and jewfish and lime pie. There were pictures everywhere, there were pictures even where the bus stopped—at Tavernier, on Key Largo; at Marathon, on Key Vacas; at the lower toll gate, on Big Pine Key—but the best pictures went backward at sixty miles an hour, on straightaways at seventy. The bus had no time for pictures. The bus was implacable. It hurled itself south, not taking breath, and hurled itself toward the sea—toward the southernmost end of everything. It had started where the road started, she thought—in Maine the road started, didn’t it?—and forced its way the length of the seaboard. “From Northern pines to Southern palms.” As it neared the end of its unrelenting journey it went faster, through a swirl of pictures, of light and color, toward the final blueness of the sea. It would not stop when the road ended; it could not stop. It would continue to the end of the springboard and off it, into blue water. It would plunge into the water and throw up great waves on either side, and at the top the waves would break into spray and sparkle in the sun. Then the bus would go on, with blueness all around, and fish would swim outside the windows and look in at the people and—
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