Murder Roundabout

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Forniss let the telephone ring a dozen times in the Heimrich house. Perhaps they were on the terrace. Perhaps they had gone for a walk. Nice night for a walk.

  He gave it up and called the barracks. Captain Heimrich wasn’t there, either. No, he had not called in. Sure, when he did he would be told that Mrs. James Brennan had recovered consciousness and that Sergeant Forniss had talked to her. And he would be asked to leave a number where Sergeant Forniss could reach him.

  Forniss went out of the hospital to his car and pointed it down to 11F toward the barracks.

  “Nothing to worry about if you keep your mouth shut. A hell of a lot if you don’t.”

  The man’s voice came distinctly through the transom’s opening. Probably never been in a hotel room with a transom before, the man hadn’t. Never thought to look to see if there was one. Careless of him, after all the thoughtful trouble he had gone to in other respects. Too much trouble, and too thoughtful. But that sort of thing happened, fortunately for the police.

  “So when this Captain Heimrich starts asking you questions, you don’t know what on earth he’s talking about. Maybe he won’t believe you. He’s a nosey bastard.”

  Susan took her husband’s hand and pressed it gently.

  “Keep your mouth shut and he can’t prove a damn thing.”

  Cynthia Willams’s answer, spoken softly, with an evident catch in her low voice, was inaudible.

  “Her word against mine,” the man said. “Not the brightest thing I ever did. All right. Letting her get away sure as hell wasn’t. But she didn’t see my face because the sun shield was down and when she lit off over the fence the cars were between us. Didn’t look back anyway. Just took off. What she says against what I say. And maybe she can persuade them she recognized my voice and maybe she can’t. So you keep your mouth shut, baby, and—”

  “No,” Cynthia Williams said. “I won’t do it. You killed her. You think I’d have played along if I’d known what you were going to do? Will play along now?”

  Her voice was up now. She was projecting with her actor’s voice. The room was her room. She knew about the transom. She—

  Heimrich looked down at the floor. The bottom of the door cleared it by almost half an inch. He was standing in front of the door, and close to it. If she was facing the door she might, dim as the corridor light was, see shadows under the door, moving as a man shifted his weight a little.

  “I’m damn sure you’ll play along,” the man said. “Make it damn sure if I have to. But I won’t have to, will I, baby? You say you called up and pretended to be Nettie and asked Jim Brennan to come up and that you did that because I’d asked you to. Tell them that and what do I say?”

  “Lie,” Cynthia said. “You’re good at that.”

  “That I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That if you did pretend to be Nettie it was your own idea. That I don’t know what the idea was. But that you’d been after me to get a divorce from Nettie and marry you, and that I said no soap. That I don’t know, but maybe you did the killing yourself—jealous woman bit, baby. Tricked Brennan into being around, so there was a chance it would be laid on him.”

  “What you did yourself. Tricked me into helping you do.”

  She still projected. The man heard it, this time. He said, “You’re talking too damn loud, baby. Who do you think you’re playing to, baby?”

  She doesn’t know, Heimrich thought. To the shadows of feet she can see through a crack under a door. Hopes she can see.

  There was the sound of movement behind the door. The girl said, “Stay away from me!” But her voice was low again.

  “You’ll play along,” the man said. “Keep your mouth shut. You’ll damn well play along. If they do catch up with you. Maybe—”

  He stopped suddenly.

  “Maybe you won’t have a chance to,” he said. “Could be that’s the best way, baby. Pretty sure they wouldn’t believe this rigmarole of yours about my getting you to call. But maybe it would be simpler if they never heard it. Think of that, baby? Open window right behind you and five floors down and—”

  Heimrich backed across the corridor and took two long strides for momentum and kicked flat against the doorknob, with all his weight behind his foot. The lock broke and the door flew open.

  Ralph Weaver had his back to the door. He whirled as it opened and had a revolver in his right hand. The girl had faced him across the narrow room. Behind her there was an open window—wide and a big window.

  Weaver started to bring the gun up. He fired when it was only part way up, still pointed at the floor.

  That was all he had time for. The edge of a hard hand hit his wrist and the revolver flew out of his hand. That did not stop him entirely. He came at Heimrich, lunging. Heimrich hit him once on the side of the jaw. That stopped him.

  The girl screamed. Then, violently, she turned and went toward the window.

  Heimrich stepped over Ralph Weaver on the floor and started after the girl. But he did not need to. Cynthia Williams had one idea in mind. She slammed the window down. It went down with a crash.

  Susan Heimrich stood in the doorway to Room 517. He promised we wouldn’t make any noise, Susan thought. And that, under the circumstances, the thought was rather ridiculous.

  XV

  By nine o’clock the following evening, as Captain Heimrich drove his car carefully between the boulders which mark the beginning of his steep driveway, numerous essential formalities had been gone through. And Heimrich was tired and driving slowly, as a tired man should. He also wanted a drink. He wanted food. Both of these needs would be met. He wished he were as hopeful about the rest of it.

  He drove the car into the garage and nestled it beside Susan’s station wagon. He walked from garage to house and light poured out through an open doorway and Susan stood in the light and, after a moment, young Michael stood beside her. A slender boy still; probably too light for football. But growing fine. The two in the doorway swayed slightly, as Colonel bumbled between them. Inside, after the traffic jam was broken, Merton Heimrich kissed his wife and shook hands with young Michael and scratched Colonel behind his left ear.

  An ice container waited on the table and the ingredients for martinis, including House of Lords gin. There was also, in the event he had returned to normal, a bottle of bourbon and a small pitcher of water. There was a Coke for Michael. There wasn’t anything for Colonel.

  He’s so very tired, Susan thought. And, he doesn’t look relaxed as he usually does with a job done. I wish they would make him an inspector so that he could sit behind a desk and have other people to kick in doors and knock revolvers out of hands. Only, of course, he wouldn’t just sit behind a desk.

  He poured bourbon for both of them. Martinis, Susan decided, were for another day, a different day. He poured Coke on ice for Michael, and Michael said, “Thank you, sir.” But then he said, “Dad.” He looked at his mother and his stepfather through grave gray eyes. He said, “Come on, Colonel,” and Colonel lumbered up from the floor and followed god toward a boy’s bedroom. At the door, Michael stopped and Colonel bumped into him. Michael said, “Go in, dog,” and then, “Good night, mother. Dad. I’ve got homework” and carried Coke after his dog into the room which was his.

  Susan said she would get things ready and was asked to finish her drink first. They sat in front of the fireplace, in which a fire was laid. It was much cooler than it had been the night before, but not really cool enough for a fire. Heimrich lighted the fire. Susan waited. Sometimes, when a case was finished, he told her about it. This time it was inevitable that he should. Not, she thought, that I really helped him break down a door, take a gun away from a man.

  For several minutes, as they watched fire leap against logs, they said nothing. Heimrich sipped his drink, tossed a cigarette into the fire. When he began to speak he spoke slowly, his voice tired. He began on a tangent. He said that Leslie Brennan had developed a poison ivy rash and that, with that added, she was a miserable young woman.
But she was a clearheaded one. She was sure that it had been Ralph Weaver who telephoned her, pretending to be a J. K. Knight, arranging for her to go to the Weaver house. She was sure that it had been Weaver who had chased her through clogged fields, and that he had chased her to silence her.

  “A voice she couldn’t identify at first,” Heimrich said. “A pursuer whose face she didn’t see. Preston Fowler is representing Weaver. Fowler’s very good. Charlie Forniss thinks that he—that any good defense lawyer—can tear her story into shreds of tissue paper, and Charlie’s talked to the girl.”

  James Brennan had spent most of the day with his wife, a good deal of it alone with his wife. A nurse who had been in and out said they seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, but that they stopped saying it when she was in the room. She said that Brennan seemed to be doing most of the talking, but that Leslie was listening—listening very carefully.

  Weaver himself was not, of course, talking at all. There was no reason to think he would. He had nothing to gain by talking.

  He had been arraigned in the city on a variety of charges—resisting arrest, assault, discharging a firearm within the city limits, and illegal possession of said firearm, a .32-caliber revolver. He had been taken from the city to Putnam County, and by that time Preston Fowler had taken over. Through Fowler, Weaver had waived preliminary hearing. He had been bound over for action by the grand jury, then in session. Presumably, the grand jury would indict. What a trial jury would do was anybody’s guess.

  “We heard him admit he had chased Leslie,” Susan said.

  “Chased ‘her,’” Heimrich said. “No name. We heard Cynthia Williams accuse him of ‘killing.’ We didn’t hear him admit it. Of arranging for her to call Brennan, pretending to be Annette. He didn’t admit that, either. We heard him talk about an open window and a fall of five floors. He’ll say, if Fowler puts him on the stand, and I’m not at all sure Fowler will decide he needs to, that he was merely warning her there was a window open behind her.”

  Cynthia Williams was being held as a material witness. She was out on bail, arranged for by Shively of The Bottom Drawer. She was entirely willing to talk—to say that she had called Brennan and pretended to be Annette and asked, told, him to come to the Weaver house. She had not known what Weaver planned. She said that over and over.

  What Weaver told her he planned did not involve murder, any sort of violence. He had told her—she said he had told her—that he was pretty certain his wife and Brennan were having an affair. That he had a detective following Brennan. That if they could trick Brennan into going to the Weaver house, nature would take its course. That the private detective would observe the course that nature took.

  “He was trying to get evidence for a divorce,” Cynthia said. “That’s what he told me. So we could get married.”

  “She believed that?” Susan said and Merton Heimrich said that, now, she said she had believed it. Perhaps, he said, because she had wanted to believe it.

  “And,” he said, “he’ll deny anything of the kind ever happened, as we heard him say he would. And that it will be her word against his. Which is true enough. He’ll confuse the issue. Which, naturally, was the whole idea. He may get away with it. I’m very much afraid he will get away with it, Susan.”

  “From the start,” Susan Heimrich said. “He decided to kill his wife. Why?”

  Almost certainly for money, Heimrich told her. She was planning to divorce him, and told Brennan she was. If she did, she would hold out for either heavy alimony or a lump settlement. Weaver didn’t have the money for either. She would demand an accounting of fees due her and paid to him as agent. The demand, and a demand for immediate payment, might very well bankrupt Weaver. It might, conceivably, get him charged with embezzlement. All that could be avoided if Annette died. In New York he would get a third of what she owned. In California he would get it all. So he decided it was time for her to die.

  The catch was obvious. Once the investigation started, Weaver himself would be the most obvious suspect, having the most to gain. He decided to provide alternates and chose the Brennans. Because, at a guess, Annette had mentioned a “dear, trusting little wife” in her Fourth of July speech and Weaver had done some addition and come up with a total—Brennan and Annette. It was entirely possible that Annette had confirmed his addition. It would, Heimrich thought, have been like her.

  Get the Brennans there, with not very likely stories to explain their presence. Trust the police to find they had been there and to suspect them.

  “As,” Heimrich said, “we did. Oh, it was too intricate, and he kept trying to add to it. Leslie Brennan said something—she’s not sure what—which made him think she recognized his voice as that of the man who said he was Knight. That worried him, naturally. He tried to do something about it, first by calling her at her father’s, as Knight, and trying to disguise his voice. Then by having somebody else call. Hoping to confuse the issue. Not knowing the bishop is good at voices. We don’t yet, incidentally, know who made the second call. I’d guess an out-of-work actor, for money—merely to read lines which probably seemed harmless enough.”

  Heimrich looked with reproach at his empty glass. He started to get up, and Susan said, “No. You’re tired,” and filled both their glasses. She brought the glasses back. She asked how Weaver had known Leslie was going to her father’s.

  “Followed her, she thinks. At least, she thinks somebody did.” He sipped. “It’s all—tissuey,” he said. “I’m sure we’ve got the picture. So’s Charlie. So’s the D.A., but he’s not happy. You see, dear, the Brennans were there. Suspected each other and tried to cover. Brennan did lie to us.”

  Heimrich paused for a moment and looked into the fire. Susan waited.

  “Changed lies in midstream,” Heimrich said. “A simple lie first. He wasn’t there at all. Then, when I made him believe I suspected Leslie, a bigger and better lie. A lie about a big car standing in front of the Weaver house; a car the murderer had come in, naturally. A lie about a sound he first took to be a backfire. Later, with a good deal of innocent surprise, realized must have been a shot.”

  The “shot,” Heimrich told Susan, fixed the time of the murder at a time when the “big car” was there and Leslie’s car wasn’t. And, of course, at a time when Brennan himself was in his own car, two fields away.

  “There wasn’t any big car at all?”

  Heimrich looked at his wife with some surprise. He shook his head.

  “No big car,” he said. “Only a big red herring. And not a very plausible one. The backfire was especially—” He hesitated for a moment before he said “fishy,” as Susan thought he well might. Then he said, “He described a big car—big modern car, obviously, since he couldn’t even guess the make. But cars like that don’t backfire. A thousand to one they don’t. The habit’s been bred out of them.”

  “You didn’t believe in the car from the start?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “When did Weaver kill his wife?”

  Heimrich shrugged his shoulders.

  “Before his invited guests arrived,” he said. “Fifteen minutes before; half an hour before. Waited around to be sure they showed up, I’d think. And that will be hard to prove, like the rest of it. After they did show—probably while Leslie was in the house, finding the body—he drove his own car out of the garage in the rear and on to New York. Avoiding Van Brunt, if he had any sense. Thinking he’d wrapped things up in a neat package, for us to unwrap.

  Heimrich got up and stood with his back to the fire.

  “He should have left it that way,” Heimrich said, and Susan thought he spoke to himself as much as to her. “Left well enough alone. But murderers often don’t. Get the jitters. As Weaver did when he followed Leslie to her father’s house, or near enough to guess that was where she was going. And to worry about what she was up to and to guess about it. It was a guess growing out of his jitters, but it was a right guess.”

  “If she hadn’t turne
d off on the side road coming back?”

  “He’d have followed her home, I think. And made it certain she wouldn’t identify any more voices. Left another body, I think, for another Brennan to find. And—try to explain. Which wouldn’t have been easy—not with his other lies on record. As they still are, for our friend Fowler to point to. The Brennans were there. So, equal opportunity. So, reasonable doubt.”

  “Not in your mind.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Now, Susan,” he said. “No. But my mind’s not enough. I am quite sure I know what happened, and Charlie is sure. But will a jury be?” He spread doubtful hands. He said, “He may get away with it. Of course, he did discharge a firearm within the city limits. There’s always that.”

  He turned and poked the fire. A little puff of smoke came out into the room. The draft pulled most of it back into the fireplace.

  “A few years ago,” he said, “a murderer stood in front of a smoky fireplace. There were twigs of poison ivy in the fire and he was very susceptible to ivy. I arrested him in a hospital.”

  Heimrich went back to his chair and to his half-finished drink.

  “The man who chased Leslie Brennan went roundabout,” he told Susan, although he seemed to speak to the leaping flames. “Went up along a wall until he found a gap. And lost her as a result of that. Must have realized he might. Must have had a compelling reason. The ivy on the wall was the only reason which came to mind—to my mind.”

  He sounded as if mention of his own mind depressed him deeply.

  “Such as it is,” Susan said, and then she laughed at him. He continued for a moment to look into the fire. “Come off it,” Susan said, and laughed again. He turned to her then and, after another moment, laughed with her. He was told that that was better, much better. He was told that he had, after all, found a murderer who went roundabout, and that because he remembered a chance remark.