Murder Roundabout

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  As now she heard, but distantly, for seconds only half heard, a sound not of memory but of now—the sound of the telephone ringing in the house. She dropped the hook and went toward the house, almost running and thinking the telephone bell perhaps had rung several times before she heard it.

  It kept on ringing. The backdoor screen stuck at first, as it often did, and she wrenched at it. For what seemed a long time it remained recalcitrant. Then it opened.

  She ran along the hall to the telephone in the living room. It stopped ringing just as she reached out for it. She lifted it and heard the dial tone. Whoever had been trying to get her had given up. Which was exasperating. On pleasant days people calling people who live in country houses ought to wait with patience for an answer. Country people are seldom sitting by telephones on pleasant days. Someone from the city, probably. Perhaps—

  Suddenly, for no tangible reason, she was convinced that it was Jim who had called. If he had put the call through himself, he would have waited longer. But his secretary might not have waited. Perhaps Jim was having to go out of town and had tried to reach her to tell her so. Or, and this was more likely, he wanted her to meet him at the station and drive him to Purvis’s garage to pick up the Porsche. The Porsche which had, recently, been making such a discordant racket.

  She dialed “one” and “two-one-two” and the Manhattan number of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan, and, after a few rings, heard the number she had dialed repeated back to her by an operator’s voice. Mr. Brennan? And who was calling, please? Oh, just a moment, Mrs. Brennan.

  There was reassurance in hearing Jim’s voice and in the way the voice changed, softened, when he heard hers. No, he had not called her. Yes, he had left the car at the garage for a tune-up, but Billy Hotchkiss was going to pick him up. It looked now as if he’d be able to make the 5:04. “Trust me to try,” he said. “Among other things, it’s muggy as all hell here in town.”

  “I trust you,” Leslie said, and was surprised she said it and by the unexpected gravity in her voice. So, she thought, was Jim. He said, “You make it sound damn serious, baby. Are you all right?”

  She was all right. She had been digging up the glad bulbs. She heard the rasp of the intercom on her husband’s distant desk and said, “Try to make the five-oh-four. Good-bye,” and put the receiver back.

  She showered, and as she showered she thought, over and over, I do trust him. Of course I trust him. But, then, why do I need to keep telling myself I trust a man I have so entirely trusted for so long?

  She got fresh clothes, country clothes, from the closet and put them on the bed and then stood and looked down at them and did not see them. Then, again, the sound of a rasping motor filled her ears and she knew what she was going to do with the afternoon, had to do with the afternoon. It is childish, she thought. Some time I must grow out of it. Jim has told me that, gently but many times. And Father has told me. “Forsaking all others,” my father says, with seriousness as well as laughter in his voice. “You and Jim can work things out. If there are things to work out.” I must learn to stand alone with my husband, Leslie thought, and that today she was not going to do that. After all, she thought, it has been weeks since I went home. I can easily be back before Jim comes.

  She put slacks and country shirt back in the closet and dressed in a lightweight woolen suit, which was appropriate to the time of year if not to the temperature of this late September afternoon. Dressed, she went back to the telephone and again dialed a familiar New York number.

  The operator was sorry. Mr. Brennan had gone to lunch. Oh, Mrs. Brennan. Was there a message?

  “Tell him I’ve gone in to town to see my father. Tell him I’ll almost certainly be back before he gets home.”

  She telephoned again, again to New York. She said, “Oh, Mrs. Hobson,” and her father’s housekeeper said, “Hello, Miss Leslie. It’s good to hear your voice, dear. I’ll call the reverend.”

  “Can I come in?” she said to her father. “I want to talk to you.”

  He said, “Of course, Leslie,” as she had known he would. He did not ask what she wanted to talk to him about, as she had known he would not. Nor was she herself sure what, without disloyalty, she could tell her father, ask advice from him about. Like a child, she thought, I run to Father when I am uncertain, am disturbed.

  She started toward the rear of the house and the garage beyond it and then thought, Messages sometimes go astray in busy offices. I may be coming back in evening traffic. She got paper and wrote a note repeating the message she had left with the operator at the offices of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan.

  She drove the black Volkswagen on Brickhouse Road to NY11F and turned left. A big green car was about to nose out of the parking lot of the Old Stone Inn, and she slowed for it, but it stopped for her and she went on toward the city.

  The big car followed behind her. So, released by the light at The Corners, did several other cars.

  She followed familiar back roads to the Saw Mill River Parkway, and traffic thickened behind her. In it, she saw in her mirror, was the big car which had waited for her to pass at the exit from the Inn’s parking lot. She did not drive fast and a good many cars overtook her. The driver of the big car, which might be any big car, was sedate. It was almost, she thought, as if the driver were letting her, letting the little Volks, set the pace toward the city.

  She drove slowly, although the traffic was light, not impeding. And as the little car moved toward the city, doubt grew in her mind and, slowly, doubt became shadowed by a sense of guilt. Again, she thought, I am running home to Father; running to have my hand held, to be told that everything will be all right. I am doing, again, what I promised him and promised Jim, and most of all promised myself, I would not do. I am going behind Jim’s back, and Jim and I must stand face to face with nothing between us, and with nobody between us. It is hard to learn even simple things.

  Last night I should have told Jim what I feared—told him that the car I heard at the Weaver house sounded like his car; told him that I had been at the Weaver house and seen Annette lying dead and did not tell anybody what I had seen because I was afraid the fleeing car was his. If I had told him that he would have shaken his head in disapproval, but then he would have laughed, tenderly, and held me for a moment, and told me that what I feared was not true. I would have believed him. I am almost certain I would have believed him. I trust him.

  But I did not do that and now I know why I did not do that. I was afraid he could not answer as it was vital he must answer; that he could not deny. I shrank away from knowing; fled from knowledge. And, my doubt was disloyal. It was the final disloyalty.

  No, she thought, what I am doing now is the final disloyalty. If I tell Father what I fear, I will be denying Jim. He will never know what I have done. I shall not tell him and Father will not tell him. But I will know and live with the knowledge that I have betrayed him. That I have betrayed us both.

  I must, if we are to go on, stand face to face with Jim. I cannot hide behind my father, interpose my father between us. They have both told me, gently, that some time I must choose, and how I must choose. But it was never vital before that I cleanly make a choice. Today it is vital.

  I cannot, she thought, tell Father what I suspect. It is a thing Jim and I must face together.

  For a time, after she had made her decision, she thought of turning back; since, with it made, the visit to her father was without meaning. But she had told him she was coming; she would have to turn off the Saw Mill somewhere and find a telephone and tell him she had changed her mind. That would puzzle him, worry him. It would be difficult to explain and he would guess that the explanation was subterfuge. He is good at guessing.

  I will go on. I will tell him about the half-familiarity of a voice on the telephone. That I can tell him without disloyalty; about that I can ask him to advise me. He may think it a trivial thing to justify a drive of fifty miles. I will tell him that it is merely an excuse for seeing him, for talk
ing to him.

  She drove on toward the city. When the black Volkswagen turned off the Henry Hudson Parkway at Ninety-sixth Street, the big car turned after it. As did several other cars.

  She had to go several blocks out of her way to find a parking place near the tall, narrow house of the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Cunningham, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Church. She had to walk several blocks back. It was too warm in the city streets for even the lightest of autumn suits.

  It was cool in her father’s study on the second floor of the narrow house. An air conditioner hummed in one of the tall windows which overlooked a garden. Mums were bright in it this afternoon. Cunningham was standing by one of the windows, looking down at his garden, when Leslie came into the room. He turned toward her.

  Cunningham was a tall, lean man with thick gray hair. There were lines in his face and laughter wrinkles around his eyes. He wore dark slacks and a dark sports shirt, open at the throat which clerical collars had for so many years constricted. He smiled at his daughter and then, as, without speaking, he studied her face, the smile lessened and he came toward her, taking long steps down the long room. She said, “Hello, Father,” and he put both hands on her shoulders and looked down at her upturned face. After a moment he kissed her forehead. Then he said, “Was she so close a friend of yours, Daughter?”

  For an instant she was surprised. Her father often surprised her. But then she realized that, by now, everybody who read or listened knew that Annette Weaver was dead.

  “No,” she said, and shook her head. “It—it isn’t that, Father. I knew her—Jim and I saw her and Ralph sometimes. Not very often. But it isn’t that.”

  For some seconds he studied her face and, after a time, she smiled up at him and then his own smile returned.

  “While I think of it,” Cunningham said, “a man called a few minutes before you got here. Asked for you. A man named Knight.” He paused for a moment. “J. K. Knight,” he said. “He said he would call back.”

  She could feel the blankness in her face as she looked at the tall man. She began to shake her head.

  “But nobody knew—” she said and stopped. Then she said, “I don’t understand, Father. Nobody knew I was coming to see you.”

  Then she could feel her face change as she thought, They knew at the office. Jim’s office. I left a message for him. But Mr. Knight wouldn’t—

  “I see you’ve remembered,” her father said, and his flexible voice was gentle. “Who is Mr. Knight, Leslie?”

  “Nobody I’ve ever seen. A man who—who called yesterday and arranged to look at a house. We made an appointment. But he didn’t keep it. Why would he call me here? Know I was here?”

  “I don’t know, Leslie,” Cunningham said. “You’d better tell me all of it, hadn’t you? What you came in to tell me.”

  He led her across the room to a big desk and sat behind the desk and she sat in a deep chair at the end of the desk, where she had so often sat. She had sat there when she was a child, called home from school and listened as, gently, his own grief in his voice, he had told her that her mother was dead. She had sat there when she told him that she was going to marry James Brennan, and that James Brennan was a divorced man and that she knew how difficult that made the matter for an Episcopal churchman. She had sat often in the deep chair, talking across the desk to her father.

  There was a copy of Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” on her father’s desk this afternoon. It was Volume 4 of The Golden Bough and there was a slip of paper in it marking a place.

  It was hard to begin. She found she was looking away from her father, looking at the book on his desk because it was something to look at. She took a deep breath.

  Then the telephone on the big desk rang and Cunningham reached across to it and lifted it with long, strong fingers. He said, “Yes, this is Father Cunningham,” and listened. She could hear the grating of a voice through the receiver.

  “Yes,” Jonathan Cunningham said. “What did you say your name is?”

  Again the other voice grated from the telephone.

  “Of course,” Cunningham said. “Just a moment, Mr. Knight.”

  He held the handset out to Leslie, and she said, “This is Leslie Brennan.”

  “J. K. Knight,” the man said. “Owe you an apology, Mrs. Brennan. Fact is, we got lost, the wife and I. Perfectly sure I knew the way, but I got lost all the same. Idiotic thing to do. Dragged you over there in the rain. Anyway, I suppose I did?”

  “I went,” Leslie said. “But I quite understand, Mr. Knight. Perhaps we can make another appointment.”

  “We’ll do that,” the man said. “We’ll do that, Mrs. Brennan. Not the Weaver house, I guess. Upset the wife, probably. After what’s happened there. But—suppose I give you a ring next week sometime?”

  “Whenever you like,” Leslie Brennan told the man whose voice was not the voice of yesterday. “Or I can call you if you’ll give me your number and—”

  “In and out of town,” the man said. “Better way is for me to give you a ring. Sometime next week, then.”

  And with that the man who said he was J. K. Knight hung up.

  She held the receiver for a moment, looking at it. Then she handed it back to her father, who put it in the cradle. Again, as she looked at her father, she could feel the blankness in her face.

  “Not the man who called you yesterday?” Cunningham said.

  She shook her head.

  “Not at all the same voice,” she said, and to that he nodded his own head.

  “Not the man who called before you got here,” Cunningham told his daughter. “Different timbre altogether. Much deeper voice this man has.”

  “Father,” Leslie said, “will you do me the first voice? The voice of the man who called before I got here?”

  It was dark on the terrace at nine o’clock, with only a candle burning in a hurricane chimney, with a silver coffee pot standing on the table beside it. Two cigarettes glowed and dimmed and in trees katydids undulated, thinking it still was August. Some light spilled from the long house which once had been a barn, but it faded away before it reached Captain M. L. Heimrich and Sergeant Charles Forniss. Now and then Susan’s shadow showed in the light from the window and Heimrich looked at it fondly. But he listened to Forniss.

  “Explains why he hurried to draw out the money,” Heimrich said. “If he’s financially shaky. You think this friend of yours, this Clement Brothers, knows what he’s talking about?”

  Forniss did.

  “And you’re pretty sure your friend at the bank was really telling you what he wasn’t supposed to tell you?”

  Forniss was.

  “Drake’s hedging about the car they heard?”

  “Call it that,” Forniss said. “On the other hand, we’ve only got his mother’s word that he was ever positive. He isn’t now. Heard a car. Thought at first it might be Brennan’s car. Association of ideas he says now. Because Brennan might be driving up to go over legal business with him. Jumped to a conclusion, he thinks now. Says he thinks. Jumping away from it, now he thinks it over. Says he is. A cold fish, M. L.”

  He put his coffee cup back in its saucer with a little click. “Fill it up,” Heimrich said. “While you’re about it, fill them both up, Charlie.”

  Forniss got the coffee pot and filled both cups.

  “You think Steve Drake disliked his former wife?”

  “Yep.” Forniss paused to light another cigarette. “Only,” he said, “I think he’s a cold fish, like I said. Not a guy to get steamed up about people one way or another. Funny thing he said about her, wasn’t it?”

  “ ‘Illiterate in four languages,’” Heimrich said. “Yes. Only thing is, Susan and I ran into the Weavers now and then. Bound to, in a place like this. Her English seemed pretty much like anybody’s to me. Wouldn’t have thought of her as foreign-born. Ray’s spent a while up at the Drake house, Charlie. Nobody heard a shot. But a couple of the servants did hear a car. About the time Mrs. Drake and Stephen Drake
say they heard one. And Florence Drake heard it too, naturally. Drake stands by Drake.”

  “Could be Drake servants stand by Drakes. Could be it was a noisy red herring, couldn’t it?”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said, “at the moment anything could be damn near anything. There’s a private parking lot at the station and Jim Brennan puts the Porsche in it when he catches his train in the morning. Leaves the ignition key in, case the parking people have to move it. Only the parking people aren’t really around much, after the morning stampede.”

  “So anybody who wanted to could maybe take Brennan’s car out and run an errand in it and put it back. Anything to show anybody did?”

  “No. Or that somebody didn’t. Far’s we’ve got, Charlie. Brennan missed his usual train last night. Ticket takers get to know their regulars on commuter trains. Catch is, Brennan’s not all that regular.”

  “Mrs. Brennan ever drive her husband’s car, M. L.?”

  “Sometimes. When her Volks is in the shop, say. Yes, she could have driven it last night. Don’t know why she should have, naturally. Nothing the matter with her own little bug. Wasn’t early this afternoon, anyway. Saw it and her in it on the avenue. After I left the Inn. Going down in the direction of the shopping center in The Flats.”

  He lighted a cigarette and blew smoke into the darkness. Forniss could see it moving softly against the light from the candle in the hurricane lamp.

  “There’s this, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Could be that Brennan and Annette were having an affair. That Mrs. Brennan found out about it somehow. And—did something about it. Wouldn’t think her the type, offhand. But they don’t run to types, do they?”

  The question was rhetorical, the answer obvious. Forniss made it as a matter of form. He said, “Nope.”

  “Could have picked up her husband’s car at the station lot and driven over to the Weaver house—near the Weaver housein it. Don’t see why, precisely. Unless she wanted it heard, identified. To put a cheating husband on the spot. Killing two birds sort of thing.”