Accent on Murder

by Frances Lockridge

  “And,” Heimrich said, “make an offer?”

  She doubted it. For one thing, anything she—or anybody, for that matter—would be likely to pay for a design would be peanuts compared to what a man like Collins got for, say, a magazine cover. For the other thing—“All right,” Susan said, “I’ve got my own style. It’s what I’ve got to—it must be just around the next bend.”

  Heimrich drove slowly around the next bend, which was extremely sharp, and stopped the car abruptly since there road ended and so, apparently, did earth. Twenty feet more, and they would have rolled off into the sky. (Which would have been a violation of traffic regulation, because there was clearly a sign which said “Stop,” as well it might.) Heimrich looked at Susan enquiringly.

  “There,” she said, and pointed. A few feet ahead a narrow driveway, almost a trail, went off to the right—went to the right and went up. “He likes privacy,” Susan said, with no special inflection. Heimrich turned the car carefully into the driveway and started up it. “Of course,” Susan said, “he has a four-wheel-drive one.” Heimrich moved the gear selector to point at “L” and realized that, in the year or so he had driven this car, that had never been necessary. Even a “four-wheel-drive one” would, he thought, need to wear spikes for this in slippery weather.

  Trees overhung the road, so that they climbed through a tunnel—a twisting tunnel. If they met anybody else coming down—well, somebody would have to back. The upbound car, presumably. Which would be—

  They did not meet anyone; they made the last turn without meeting anyone. And ahead there was, abruptly, a clearing and a house—a sleek house as Susan had promised; a house largely of glass and redwood; a house on one long level. The car rolled onto a smooth expanse of gravel; a turnaround which seemed to be, at the same time, the front lawn of the house. Heimrich swept the car around until it faced the way they had come, its back to an open garage where a jeep and a Buick station wagon stood shoulder to shoulder. They walked across gravel to flagstones and across flagstones to a frameless glass door. At least, Heimrich presumed it was the door, since it had a glass knob set into it. It was part of a glass wall under a wide, upward-pitched overhang. Sun in winter, shade in summer, Heimrich thought and looked into the room.

  Brian Collins’s desire for privacy stopped, evidently, with a hidden house. Once the house was found it was as un-private as—as, obviously, a goldfish tank. A fishtank was precisely what, standing at the glass door in the glass wall, one looked into. Thirty feet or so from the wall Heimrich and Susan Faye looked through, seeking signs of movement within, there was another wall, also of glass. And beyond it the sunlight, entering through yet another wall of glass—this one at right angles to the partition wall, and on their left as they looked into the house—flickered on water.

  “Tricky,” Susan said. “A swimming pool inside, but with sliding glass panels on the west so that it can, in a way, be moved outside. There doesn’t seem to be anybody home. Of course, there’s a lot more to the house. Probably he’s in the studio and—” She did not finish. There was a glass button almost invisible in the glass wall. She pressed it. Faintly, from within the fishtank house, they could hear chimes.

  There were chairs—low and modern chairs, various in shape—in the room on which the door would open, if somebody would come to open it. Several of the chairs were grouped around a free-standing fireplace, with a hood on it. Heimrich looked at the grouped chairs and at the same time Susan pressed the glass button again and the chimes sounded again. And Heimrich said, “Wait, Susan.” He spoke in a level, somehow distant voice, as if he gave an order to someone he did not know.

  She turned to look at him. But he moved away from her, down the glass wall of the house, still looking into the house. A dozen feet from her he stopped and leaned a litde forward, toward the glass. He stood so for several seconds and then came back.

  “Collins wears a beard?” he said and when, slowly, in a puzzled tone, she said, “Yes. A beard like—” and stopped, Heimrich said, “I’m afraid there’s trouble,” and pulled on the glass knob in the door. It resisted. He pushed. It did not resist.

  “Better wait,” he said, and went in, and she did not wait, but went in after him—went after him toward the grouped chairs. And then, seeing, she made a little, gasping sound and put both slim hands up to her face.

  A man with a pointed beard which had been yellow, almost golden yellow, but now was matted red, sat in one of the chairs—slumped in the chair. His right arm dangled over the chair’s low arm, the hand lax, open. Below the hand, on the tile floor, there was a stubby automatic pistol.

  The wound in the man’s right temple was a torn and blackened wound. A contact wound. And the story was told. Heimrich stood looking, not moving closer—not yet. Then he started to turn away and Susan said, in a voice unlike her voice—in a voice half whisper, riffled air—“Look!”

  She pointed and he looked—looked at a slender foot, with painted nails. A foot only.

  They went around the fireplace—the pedestal of a fireplace.

  The dead girl wore a brief bathing suit, a golden yellow bathing suit. She had tawny hair of deeper gold and she lay on her back with one leg drawn up; lay relaxed, as if she rested, with arms flung out; rested gracefully, perhaps in conscious grace. And she had been shot just below the left breast, and there seemed to be very little blood. They would know better when they moved her.

  She had been very beautiful until—Heimrich bent down and touched the skin of the extended, perfect leg. The skin was perceptibly cool to the touch. It was nothing to go by, nothing at all sure to go by. He bent lower and touched the tile floor. Perceptibly cool; cooler than the body. Which would have made a difference. But, at a guess, the girl had stopped being beautiful, in any sense that mattered at all, several hours earlier.

  Which was, he thought, a little odd, and stood straight and continued to look down at the body of Peggy Belford, co-star with Francis Dale in The Last Patroon, being filmed on location.

  “Did—” he said, without turning, and then realized that, seconds before, he had heard Susan’s feet on the tiled floor. He turned sharply. She was standing on the other side of the room, near the door to the terrace. She had her back to him and her hands were over her face. He went to her quickly. She did not turn, did not move, until he put his hands gently on her shoulders. She leaned back against him, then, and he could feel her body shaking against his. He held her slender body against his sturdy one and waited until the shaking—it was as if she were having a chill—ended. Then her body moved as she drew air deep into her lungs.

  “All right now,” she said. “It’s—he killed her? Then himself?”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Heimrich said.

  She turned. He let his hands fall from her shoulders. They were no longer needed. She faced him, looked up at him and her gray eyes were, he thought, strangely dark. Of course, the light came from behind her, which might be it.

  “I didn’t—” she said, and stopped and he saw the muscles move in her slender neck as she swallowed. “Didn’t know it looked like—the way it does look.”

  “I know,” he said. “Susan—don’t you want to go sit in the car? Or—take the car back?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “It’s—it’s like some hideous parody.” He closed his eyes momentarily. “The—the gold-colored bathing suit,” she said. “And—and Brian’s beard. I never thought of it as gold-colored before and—and this awful place. Like a—tank.”

  Goldfish. Dead goldfish in a gigantic goldfish bowl. And death a grotesque, labored joke.

  “Of course,” Susan said, and her voice was different, almost an everyday voice—“the suit blended with her hair. That’s all that means. And—she had been swimming?”

  “I don’t—” Heimrich said, and went back across the room and touched the golden bathing suit on the slender, curving body. It felt slightly damp. But he could not be sure; it would not be anything he would be able to swear to, if it
came to swearing to things. He came back to Susan and said, “Probably,” and then, “Do you know where he kept his telephone?”

  She didn’t. She supposed there would be one in his studio. “Through there,” she said, and then, “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  It would be better, Heimrich thought, if she got out of this tanklike house; away from the chill of death. Heimrich shook himself, mentally. The chill, now that he had got around to noticing it, prosaically of air conditioning. And a man and a woman dead, not goldfish.

  “Wait a moment,” he said, and left her where she was standing and went back to the bodies, this time to that of Brian Collins. Collins had died in gray slacks and a blue polo shirt; a short-sleeved polo shirt. Heimrich touched one muscled forearm. He went again to the girl’s body, and again touched the slim brown leg. The girl’s body was perceptibly cool. The man’s was not. Which would mean, other things being equal, that she had died before the man. But—other things are seldom equal. She had lain, almost naked, on a cool tile floor. He had sat in a chair, with most of his body clothed.

  And, suppose Brian Collins had killed Peggy Belford—Peggy the beautiful; La Belford the exquisite—for reasons unknown and then, for reasons not too difficult to guess, himself. Suppose that and it was still not necessary to suppose the two actions had been as nearly as possible simultaneous in time. It is easier to kill another than one’s self. Men have been known to need three shots for self-destruction, so anxiously does the body flinch away. They have been known to take hours steeling themselves for the attempt.

  Anyway, a doctor could tell him more. It was high time to get a doctor on the way—a doctor and the rest. He turned to Susan and she came to him, but did not look at the bodies. She led him to a door in the wall beyond the fireplace—a quite conventional plastered wall—and said, “I think it’s this way,” and they went into a hall. At the end of the hall there was the open doorway to a kitchen. At right angles, leading toward the rear of the house, was another corridor, wood paneled. “Sliding doors,” Susan said. “All the doors slide.”

  The house, Heimrich realized, was built like an L, a fact which was not apparent when one approached it from the front. This corridor ran along the foot of the L. It ended in a studio, with slanting skylight. There was an easel, draped with canvas; framed pictures were stacked against walls, their faces to the walls. And, leaning against a desk, there were half a dozen canvases, framed, tied into a bundle.

  There was a telephone on the desk. Captain Heimrich used the telephone, a switch to start a machine.

  “Look,” Susan said, when he had finished, and he looked. She had lifted the shrouding cover from the picture on the easel.

  The girl in the painting was not wearing a golden bathing suit. She was not wearing anything at all. She lay—as, in the other room, the dead girl lay—on her back on a green tile floor, with one perfect leg bent at the knee and lifted; with the head back on the floor and tawny-colored hair swirling about it. The face was turned a little toward the painter. It was a lovely face.

  “There isn’t any doubt, is there?” Susan Faye said, and Heimrich shook his head slowly. There wasn’t any doubt. This very beautiful naked girl, delineated with exquisite attention to detail, was beyond question Peggy Belford.

  “My guess would be,” Susan Faye said, “that it was painted several years ago. And—Brian Collins loved beauty. Why would he kill anything so beautiful?”

  The question could be assumed to be rhetorical. It could not, in any case, be answered. The statement—

  “Why several years ago?” Heimrich asked.

  “Because—” she said, and broke off. “I’m not an expert,” she said. “It’s only an impression. If it’s important—”

  Heimrich lifted his shoulders a little.

  “An expert might be able to tell,” she said. “But—how long have they been here? The movie people?”

  They had been around for about two weeks.

  “Pigments fade,” she said. “It’s—oh, there’s a patina. Easier to see than to explain. I’m fairly sure that this wasn’t painted within two weeks. I’d doubt if it was painted within two years.”

  “Fairly?” Heimrich said.

  “All right,” she said. “More than that. But, I’m not an expert, Merton.”

  “He never said anything about her?” Heimrich asked. “About knowing her.”

  This time she shrugged, quickly, almost impatiently. She had told him that she barely knew Brian Collins. She had no idea whom he might have known, might not have known. He had never mentioned knowing Peggy Belford. “But,” she said, “I doubt if he would. Because—oh, because she was so well known. People would have said, ‘You mean you really know her? Tell me—’ It would have been like saying ‘the’ Brian Collins.”

  It was not too clear; it was clear enough.

  “Only,” Heimrich said, “with them here—with the subject brought up. Almost anyone might have said—‘Oh, I knew her once. She posed for me once, as a matter of fact.’ ”

  “Until he called me this morning,” Susan said. “Asked if I wanted to look at a design, I hadn’t spoken to him in—months. So—I’ve no idea what he may have said since the subject was ‘brought up.’ And—you’re being very like a policeman, aren’t you?”

  He smiled at that, and again the smile re-formed, revealed, his face.

  “Now Susan,” he said. “I am a policeman. There’s no getting around it, naturally. You thought you’d find a fabric design on the easel?”

  She had. It was because she had that she had lifted the drop sheet which covered the picture on the easel. It would have been the natural place for Collins to place his design for her to look at. The most obvious place. Clearly, he had not chosen the obvious place. It didn’t matter now.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Still—he did expect you. Unless, of course, something—the thing between him and Miss Belford—put it out of his mind. Still— You’d know this design if you saw it? I mean, he gave you some idea about it?”

  She smiled faintly at that, smiled inwardly. You didn’t tell people about designs when you could show them designs. She shook her head. “But,” she said, “I’d know it was a fabric design. Not—” She looked at the picture on the easel. “Not a portrait. But—it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  He said, again, that it didn’t matter now. And, again, he said, “Still—” and looked around the studio; looked at the canvases on their stretchers, leaning against one another along the walls. He turned one so that it faced them. It was characteristic—rooftops in very clear air. He tried another.

  “It won’t be on canvas,” Susan said. “On paper. Rolled up or, maybe, thumbtacked to a drawing board. About—oh—” She measured in the air; measured what seemed to be more or less a square, the sides four feet or a little more in length.

  Heimrich abandoned the canvases. He moved along the wall, looking for a drawing board with paper thumbtacked to it.

  “The point is,” he said, “Collins expected you. Unless— Susan, you’re sure it was Collins who called you? Asked you to stop by, look at the design?”

  “Of—” she began, with confidence. But she stopped with that. “A man called,” she said. “Said he was Brian Collins. You mean, am I sure from the voice? No. Except that there wasn’t anything wrong with the voice. Nothing unexpected. You think it was somebody else? But—why? And, he called hours before—before this could have happened.” She considered, was careful. “Somebody called,” she said.

  Heimrich said, “Hm-mm,” and then, “This?”

  He turned to face a drawing board with heavy paper taped—not thumbtacked—to it. He held it up. The paper was covered with colored blotches, irregular in form. Yet it was not haphazard.

  “Yes,” she said, and moved a little way, and back, and a little to one side, and back. “That could be it. Or one of them, if he did several.” Heimrich, acting as easel, waited. “You can see what he was after,” Susan said. “But—busy.” She said this,
Heimrich thought, more or less to herself. “And—” she said. “But it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that we’ve found it. So—it wasn’t somebody else to—to get me here. And why would anybody?”

  Heimrich had not, he said, the least idea. A question came up, even a very minor question. You answered it if you could. Answered it as you went along, if you could.

  A plodder’s way, Heimrich thought, leaning the board back where he had found it. And—his way. Which couldn’t be helped. And there was certainly no point in telling Susan that he, clod that he no doubt was, considered Brian Collins’s fabric design—well the word seemed to be “alarming.” He could not see, even remotely, what Brian Collins had been “after.” He tried to imagine the design, printed on cloth, as the cover of, for example, a sofa. He abandoned the effort. Probably it was the sort of thing that anyone with imagination, anyone with a sense of color, would find admirable. Even exciting. Susan had certainly looked at it; for a moment, he thought, she had forgotten other things—even this evening’s other things—while she looked. A thing—a perception—he didn’t have. So—

  Heimrich went over and stood in front of the painting of Peggy Belford. It, at any rate, spoke for itself; made no demands he could not meet.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Susan said.

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Do you know,” he said, “whether he did much of this sort of thing? Most of the things of his I remember were—oh, the edges of roofs; streets—villages. This is—what, Susan?”

  “Calendar,” she said. “Oh, superior calendar, I think. But—his style, if you’re thinking somebody else did it. Also, it’s signed.” She pointed. The canvas was signed in the lower right-hand corner: “B. Collins,” in the just decipherable blur of a painter’s signature.