Accent on Murder

by Frances Lockridge

  “Such a pretty little neighbor, Walter,” Miss Elvina said, when Brinkley had introduced them. “So pretty,” Miss Martha said. But already, Dorcas was not entirely sure which was Miss Elvina and which Miss Martha. “We’re always the first,” Miss Martha (or Elvina) said and Miss Elvina (Miss Martha?) said, “Always. I can’t think why. But we always are, aren’t we, Walter?”

  “So much the better, Martha,” Walter Brinkley said, and moved a chair needlessly, but indicatively, for Dorcas and, when she was in it, sat on the sofa beside the Misses Monroe. He sat on the edge of the sofa, prepared to bounce.

  “The old Adams house,” Miss Elvina (it had to be Elvina) said, and Dorcas smiled and looked at her, and had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.

  “Where you and Caroline live,” Walter Brinkley said. “The last time an Adams lived in it was fifty years ago.”

  “Walter,” Miss Martha said, as if about to tap him with a fan. “You’re making fun again.”

  “And it’s not,” Miss Elvina said, unexpectedly, “as if you were a spring chicken, Walter.”

  “It’s his having been away so much,” Miss Martha said. “In New York.” She spoke, Dorcas thought, as if New York, fifty-odd miles down the Harlem Division of the New York Central were some place incredibly remote.

  “And London,” Miss Elvina said. It was odd, Dorcas thought, how much nearer, for some reason, London sounded in the gentle, aging voice. They both looked at her; then they looked at each other.

  “So nice young people are coming back,” Miss Martha said, and Miss Elvina said, “So very nice.” “You know,” Miss Martha said, “somehow she reminds me of dear Gertrude. When we were all girls. The hair?”

  “Gertrude had brown hair,” Miss Elvina said. “But I see what you mean, dear. There comes Jerry Hopkins, Walter.” Miss Elvina was, Dorcas realized, sitting so that she could look through a window toward the driveway. “In that funny little red car.”

  “Matches his complexion,” Miss Martha said, but without malice.

  Walter Brinkley stood up, then. A pretty, dark-brown girl in a green uniform went to the front door. And Harry Washington came with a tray with a frosty glass on it, and said, “A daiquiri, Miss Cameron? Seems like I remembers.” He did.

  “And,” Miss Elvina said, “those new people from the old Mansfield place.”

  “The new people, Elvina,” Walter Brinkley said, “have lived in the Mansfield place for over a dozen years.”

  “You’re making fun again,” Miss Martha said. “Don’t mind him, Miss Cameron. Your cousin’s Navy, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Dorcas said. “She’s—”

  “Mr. Hopkins,” Walter Brinkley said. “Jerry Hopkins. This is Miss Cameron, Jerry.”

  “The old Adams place,” Jerry Hopkins said. He was short and wide and, as promised, red of face; he spoke somewhat hoarsely, but with vigor. He said, “Elvina. Martha.” He said, “Short scotch, Harry.”

  “The Adamses were Navy people,” Miss Elvina said.

  “Army,” Miss Martha said.

  “I’m almost sure, Navy,” Miss Elvina said. “But, it really comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “Well—” Dorcas said, and then Walter Brinkley touched her gently on the shoulder and said, “Some people’d like to meet you.” She stood up and smiled at the Misses Monroe, and, guided, moved with him a little way into the room—the room which, very rapidly, had begun to fill.

  “They’re sweet,” she said.

  “Yes,” Walter Brinkley said. “There’s never been anything to sour them, of course.” He had been guiding her toward the bar, toward, she supposed, introductions to those now clustered at the bar. (There was, Dorcas decided, a time to come to the party; a time everybody—except the Misses Monroe; herself—came.) Brinkley stopped and she stopped with him. He said, “Of course. Indiana.” She smiled and shook her head, not in negation, but to show herself for the moment lost. “Say something,” he told her. She raised eyebrows. “Anything,” he said. “Say, ‘What am I doing here among all these old people?’”

  “All right,” she said, and said it. “But that isn’t the way I feel,” she added.

  “Southern part of the state,” he said. “Not extreme south. But nearer Kentucky than the lake.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Where I come from? Yes.”

  There was a little puzzlement in her voice.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” Brinkley said, but did not at all speak sorrowfully; spoke rather as if he were pleased. “A wretched, intrusive habit of mine. I’ve fallen into bad hobbies.”

  “Oh,” she said. “The way I speak. It’s so evident? But I went to school in the East.”

  “Smith,” he told her, accurately. “You must forgive a puttering old man.” He blinked slightly. “Professor,” he added, with distaste. “Yes, Elvina and Martha are sweet old things. Their grandfathers—both of them—made a great deal of money. The Monroe house on Main Street has twenty-three rooms. For two little old ladies. Past presidents of the garden club, of course.”

  “And,” she said, “arbiters?”

  She pleased him. His pleasant pink face told her that. He chuckled to tell her that.

  “Arbiters emeritus,” he said. “I’m afraid most of us are, in our various fashions. Emeritus, I mean. Let’s find you some of the younger ones. And a drink.”

  Her glass was empty. There were younger ones. (The younger ones seemed to be, also, the later ones.) By six there were a good many people—in the room, on the terrace; younger ones and older ones and those in between. They had names that flickered into the mind and flickered out of it—out, at any rate, of hers. There were people called Sands and people called Farnley. There was a Mrs. Belsen, who was rather taller than six feet, and had a tiny voice—tiny and distant, so that Dorcas felt herself stand on tiptoe to listen. There were Thayers and Abernathys and some people named Craig. (Scotch-and-plain-water people, most of them.) The Craigs—she was much younger than he and a little, somehow, more urban—had, Dorcas gathered, been away for some time and were, in a sense, being greeted. Possibly, to a degree at any rate, the party was being given “for” them, although this was not ever specifically made clear. There was, as there always was, a young man with that Where-have-you-been-all-this-time? look in his eyes, although he said nothing so obvious, and he was pleasant. And, after a time, forgettable.

  There was, in short, the uneventful, friendly blur of any cocktail party—the blur of people met and parted from; of conversations begun and almost at once ended, of words overheard and almost at once forgotten, of groups which formed only to dissolve and to re-form. Walter Brinkley, she realized, had, especially during the first half of the party—the time up to and including equilibrium: that moment when it was apparent that most of those who were coming had come and those who were leaving early had not yet begun to leave—unobtrusively kept the groupings fluid.

  It was true that, along toward seven—by which time Dorcas had almost given up on Caroline and Brady Wilkins—a certain pattern did develop. The party tended to divide itself between terrace and living room, and it was, generally, true that the division was by age groups, with the younger—the “ranch-house set”—on the terrace and the older—the “emeritus set”—inside. But the Craigs were inside, and she, at any rate, was young. And Walter Brinkley was back and forth, and seemed adaptable to both groups although, Dorcas realized, professors do not retire before sixty-five or so. (Really, a woolly lamb, Dorcas thought.)

  The Misses Monroe fluttered away, in the antique Rolls, almost precisely at seven. This was one of those meaningless things Dorcas remembered afterward, when she tried to remember things with meaning, although with no assurance that meaning lay in anything which had happened at Walter Brinkley’s party.

  It was after the Misses Monroe had gone that, inside, near the bar, she found herself part of a group which included a middle-aged couple who looked only vaguely familiar, and turned out to be the Thayers, and Brinkley
and a solid man with a square face—a face which appeared to have been carved from some dark wood.

  “On my hobbyhorse again, my dear,” Walter Brinkley said, and held her arm lightly. “Oh—this is Captain Heimrich. He’s a cop.” The word “cop” sounded, just perceptibly, as if Brinkley’s mind put marks of quotation around it.

  “No,” Brinkley said, “I don’t say I could do that. Not as well as he did.” He broke off, turned to include her. “We’re talking about a man on the radio,” he said. “Years ago. When you must have been in pigtails, or whatever the modem counterpart is. A man who could tell, most of the time, what part of the country people came from, sometimes down to quite special areas, by hearing them talk. A parlor trick, in a way, but he was good at it. I was just telling the captain here that the game wasn’t—fixed. Skeptical men, policemen.”

  “Now Mr. Brinkley,” the man named Heimrich said, detached, pleasantly amused. He had very blue eyes.

  “And,” Brinkley said, “that an especially acute ear is necessary. An ear more acute than mine. But that the differences are there, if one can hear them. Even when people try to hide them. Cover them up.”

  “He,” Dorcas told the others, “spotted my home state. And the school I went to.”

  “Only today,” he said. “After hearing you speak rather often. And, Indiana is quite easy. Even with an overlay. This radio man could do it in minutes.”

  “I,” Mrs. Thayer said, “can’t tell that she speaks differently from anyone else. Probably, Walter, you were merely lucky.”

  “Say ‘drawing,’” Brinkley told her.

  “I certainly shall not,” Mrs. Thayer—she was gray-haired, had a golfer’s complexion, was firm of voice. “I shall do nothing to encourage you, Walter.”

  “Say ‘It would be merry to marry Mary,’” he told her.

  “What a ridiculous thing to say,” Mrs. Thayer said. “Pay no attention to him, Miss Cameron. He’s a phoneticist.”

  “Emeritus,” Brinkley said. “You do make it sound bad, Hilda. I—”

  He was interrupted. A tall, gray-haired man, a man with a long face—oh, of course, Mr. Craig—made the interrupting sound, a tentative clearing of the throat. He was standing beyond a slender black-haired woman who had her back to them—oh, yes, Mrs. Craig. Walter Brinkley, indicating that he was listening, listened.

  “Walter,” Craig said, “I’m sorry—we’re both sorry. But—”

  Brinkley, Dorcas thought, looked a little surprised, and then at once regretful, with a host’s regret.

  “The fact is,” Craig said, “Margo’s come up with a headache. Thinks I’d better take her home.”

  Brinkley said, “Oh,” and that he was sorry and moved out of the group to say something to Margo Craig which Dorcas—moving away herself, since the group was broken—could not hear. Mrs. Craig shook her head and then Brinkley went with the Craigs across the room toward the door.

  “A delightful party,” the solid man said, filling a pause, standing beside Dorcas. He was, she realized, taller than she had thought—his solidity somehow masked his height. The policeman, the “cop.” It was a little odd, she thought without really thinking about it at all, that Professor Brinkley should know a policeman. The policeman smiled down at her, not asking a reply to a remark obviously meaningless—a remark made to fill a pause. There was, however, something companionable about his smile. “Too bad to have a headache in the middle of it,” he said.

  “The poor thing,” she said, and they both moved away from the bar, to let other people move to the bar.

  They moved toward the front of the room, where the people were fewer—together, but not in any real sense, together.

  “A—” Heimrich began and stopped, because the girl was not listening, was looking through the window—the wide window at the front of the living room. A Cadillac came up, and Ben got out of it and went around it and held the door open, and Mrs. Craig got in. Craig gave him something and Ben smiled and nodded and Craig got in on the other side and the big car moved off. But when it had completed half a turn, it stopped so that an open car could come through, and in behind it. Then the Cadillac pulled away.

  “Oh,” Dorcas said. “They finally—” And then, in quite another tone, she said, “Oh!” again, and moved toward the door, forgetting Captain M. L. Heimrich. A pretty thing, Heimrich thought. And who does she see?

  She saw, obviously, a young woman with honey-colored hair, in a white dress, and a tall, black-haired man in slacks and a sports jacket and another man—not so tall, wiry, with sandy hair. They were getting out of the open car. It was they—one of them, at any event—that the pretty little girl with red hair was hurrying to meet. A polite little girl, well brought up, in too much of a hurry to say goodbye.

  The sandy-haired man was the one she hurried to, Heimrich saw. They look fine together, he thought.

  “Captain,” Hilda Thayer said, coming up behind him, touching his arm. “Do you really catch murderers?”

  III

  A PLEASANT PARTY, Heimrich thought, driving away from the remnants of it at a few minutes before eight—driving toward the setting sun, toward the other side of Westchester County, toward his room at the Old Stone Inn in Van Brunt, which recently he had found a convenient place to live when he was not compelled by circumstances to bunk down in the Troop K barracks. Some of the new and some of the old at the party.

  He thought of the Misses Monroe and smiled and shook his head a little. In another few years, he thought, there would be no more Misses Monroe. Not anywhere. And, although the houses might stand for years yet—stand until they burned down, which is the expectable final fate of frame houses—there would be no more of the big white houses, either. It would not matter if the houses stood for a long time yet, some of them—this was particularly true across the line in near Connecticut—with Revolutionary cannon balls embedded in ancient timbers. They would, if they did not burn down first (and if zoning authorities permitted, as after much fussing they usually did) be converted into multiple family dwellings. The old white houses on the many Main Streets.

  State troopers rode horses in those days, he thought. The distance he would drive from North Wellwood to Van Brunt in an hour or so must have taken a long time on a horse. On the other hand, there must have been much less need to hurry in those old days—fewer people must have meant fewer crimes. Not, he supposed, that the people in the big white houses were essentially more law-abiding than those in the new, often vari-colored, ranch houses, “contemporary” houses. They might even have been inclined to take things into their own hands; the grandfathers of the Misses Monroe had certainly taken a good deal into theirs, and with fewer restrictions on the taking. Which might, one would suppose, have conditioned them to accept, in general, fewer restrictions on everything.

  In another few years, he thought—having nothing else of special interest to think about—there will be no more mixtures of the old and the new such as had made Professor Brinkley’s party gently interesting. (He could not contend that it had been wildly exciting.) The pretty girl with the dark red hair—she and her cousin and her cousin’s husband and the sandyhaired young man she had gone with such innocently revealed eagerness to meet—they and their friends would take over. (Of course, they were not really of the “ranch-house set.” They were Navy, which made a difference. But everybody was something, which made a difference too.)

  The Misses Monroe and, no less, the Brinkleys, the Thayers, the other big-white-house people, wouldn’t be around much longer. Which, Heimrich thought, is true everywhere, of course. Except that here, in Northern Westchester, in Northern Fairfield, too, there is a more immediate overlapping than in many places, so that one can see more clearly what is going on—see the old, the rural, dissolving in the strong solvent of the new, the semi-urban. (Well, then, the “exurban.”)

  The Misses Monroe, the Mrs. Belsens, did not, he supposed, following the meandering blacktop beyond Katonah, toward Yorktown Heights, realize in any real sens
e that this final change was going on. (There were still presidents of garden clubs, who still wore hats, usually, and appropriately enough, with flowers on them.) Oh, they knew, of course—by and large, in his considerable experience, they were observant and intelligent people. But they did not feel the change they saw; did not really believe in it.

  The Professor Brinkleys, of course, both knew and felt. But there were not many Professor Brinkleys, who were of “the big-white-house set” more or less by chance; who might have come from, lived, anywhere. (Except, as the professor himself would have been the first—very much the first—to point out, for a matter of accent. How he did ride that hobby! And, to be fair, how interesting he made it!) And the Craigs—the Craigs felt it strongly enough, and tried to hold it back. They tried to hold it back not only on the material level—with zoning laws, with stratagems to maintain what they so commonly called the “rural character” of such areas as they preferred to keep to themselves. They tried to hold it back on the more subtle, seldom openly admitted, basis of class.

  Heimrich wondered, idly, whether it had not been the presence, at the professor’s party, of so many of the ranch-house set, commuters, which had given that pretty Mrs. Craig her sudden headache. Or—and at this thought he grinned to himself—the presence of so clearly a lower class individual as a policeman.

  Craig. Hadn’t he heard something about a Craig? A Paul Craig?

  Idly, for want of anything better to do, Heimrich flipped the cards of that mental filing cabinet all good policemen maintain. “Craig.” No, no Craig. Not anything, then, with which he had had to do directly. Something he had heard about. Therefore, not in the filing cabinet. If anywhere, in the catchall of loose ends.

  It remained vague, without outlines. He did not worry it; it was not worth worrying. Something—wasn’t it?—about the rather unforgiving attitude Craig had taken toward someone—an employee?—who had done some small thing another man might have passed over, not called the cops about. “There’s a mean bastard for you”—hadn’t someone said that about a man named Craig, after quite correctly listening to Craig, quite properly taking the steps indicated? Possibly—something like that. The outlines did not appear. No problem of mine, Heimrich thought; no problem then or now.