16-Murder Can't Wait

by Lockridge, Richard

  Brinkley did not think he had met Stuart Fleming after that, and he had seen very little of Angus. He did not suppose that anyone had seen very much of Angus Fleming, except his wife and his brother. As to the people the younger Fleming saw, Brinkley knew little. He supposed people of Fleming’s own age-people who lived in the area; people who came up from New York for weekends.

  “Young men and women who go around in open cars,” Walter Brinkley said, and there was, Heimrich thought, a faint wistfulness in his voice. “In little sports cars. The girls with their hair—” He stopped and shook his head. He said, “How is Susan, Merton? When are you bringing her over to see me again?”

  “Fine,” Heimrich said. “Soon, if you ask us.” He stood up.

  “I haven’t helped,” Brinkley said. “I suppose you can’t stay for a drink and for—yes, Harry?”

  Harry Washington opened the door and came out onto the terrace. He was a very different Harry Washington—he was a tall, grave man, immaculate in white jacket and white shirt and black trousers.

  “There is a telephone call for you, captain,” Harry said. “One of your men. On the living room extension.”

  Heimrich went to the telephone. The one of his men was Raymond Crowley, and Crowley was somewhat excited. Heimrich listened. He said, “Keep him there. I’ll be along.” He put the receiver back and went to the terrace.

  “Know a man named Steele, Walter?” he said.

  “Who he is. Golf pro at the club. A rather—” Brinkley paused and considered for a moment. “Rather harsh man,” he said. “Why?”

  “He’s showed up at Stuart Fleming’s place,” Heimrich said. “To ‘tell the bastard where to get off.’ He seems to be quite drunk.”

  “Early in the day to be,” Professor Brinkley said. “And … late to tell Fleming anything.” He paused briefly. He said, “I’m a gossipy old man,” and paused again. “Steele,” he said. “Robert Steele, I think it is. He has a very pretty wife, Merton.”

  III

  The Angus Fleming house was square and white, and there was a white fence around it. On one of the fence posts were the figures 1720. For a moment, Nathan Shapiro assumed the figures to represent a street address and thought it a little odd, since there was, properly, no street. Then he realized that the figures told when the house was built. Almost two hundred and fifty years ago people had been coming to this remote place, this country place, and building houses in it. Nathan Shapiro sighed.

  He went with Sergeant Charles Forniss along a flagstone walk and onto a porch. There was a knocker on the door and Forniss let it fall twice, clang twice. The door was opened almost immediately. The woman who opened it was slim and blonde and very pretty. She wore a black dress and said, “Oh, sergeant. I don’t know whether—”

  Her voice was soft and sad.

  “This is Lieutenant Shapiro from the city, Mrs. Fleming,” Forniss said, and his own heavy voice was low. “He had come up to see your brother-in-law.”

  “Poor Stuart,” the pretty blonde woman said. “Poor, poor Stuart. But come in. I’ll see if Angus is up to—you do want to see Angus?”

  “For a minute or two,” Shapiro said. “I realize how he must be feeling.”

  “They were close,” Mrs. Fleming said. “Very close. Come in. If there is any way he can help—we can help….”

  She led them into a low-ceilinged room. Little windows were open in the room, and white curtains moved in the breeze which came through the windows.

  “I’ll see,” she said, and started to walk across the room. She walked well, Shapiro thought. After a few steps she stopped and turned.

  “I don’t know whether you know,” she said. “My husband is—is sick. Very sick, I’m afraid. Do you really need to see him, lieutenant?”

  He would like to for a moment, Shapiro told her. But if Mr. Fleming was not up to it—

  A man appeared in the doorway through which they had come into the room. He was tall and thin and his face was white. As he stood in the doorway he put a hand out to the doorjamb and steadied himself, but even so steadied he seemed to sway a little. He looked very old, Nathan Shapiro thought. It was hard to believe that this ancient, shaken man was the brother of the strong young man who had lain bloodily dead in the little shining house.

  “Darling,” Enid Fleming said. “You shouldn’t-”

  “It’s all right,” Angus Fleming said, and his voice was strong and young. What vitality he has left is in his voice, Shapiro thought; and then thought, this man is dying.

  “These gentlemen want to see me?” the dying man said in his vitally living voice. He let go of the doorjamb and very slowly, very uncertainly, walked into the room. He found a chair and put a hand carefully on either arm of it and lowered himself slowly, carefully.

  “They’re from the police, darling,” Enid said. “This is Sergeant Forniss—it is Forniss?” Forniss nodded his head. “He’s the one who called to tell us. And this is Lieutenant Shapiro from—from the New York City police, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Nathan Shapiro said.

  “He came up to see poor Stuart,” Enid said. “I don’t know….” She turned to Shapiro and looked up at him and waited.

  “Your brother wrote the New York County district attorney, Mr. Fleming,” Shapiro said. “He had something he wanted to tell and I was sent up to listen. About, apparently….”

  He told the dying man, who sat very still in the chair and still held onto the arms of the chair, what it had apparently been about, how it might relate to what had been done to Stuart Fleming. Before he had finished, Angus Fleming began to nod his head, and then Shapiro stopped.

  “He told me something about it,” Angus said, and again the vitality in his voice was an anomaly, a thing hard to believe. “A boy who played football the last two years at Dyckman. Who had been approached with a bribe offer, and was sure others on the squad had. He had come to Stuart as an attorney to ask him what to do. My brother was going to go with him to the district attorney, but then this accident laid him up.” He stopped for a moment and looked over Nathan Shapiro’s head. “My brother was strong,” he said. “Good on skis.”

  When he said that the vitality went out of his voice; his voice shook a little as, even in the chair, holding to the chair arms, his body seemed to shake.

  “He did not tell me the name of this football player,” Angus said then, and looked again at Shapiro, and the strength was back in his voice. “Told me only what I’ve just told you.”

  “Told us both,” Enid said. “You remember, dear? Told us both.”

  “Yes,” Angus said. “Both of us. Only as much as I’ve told you. You think he was killed to keep him from talking?”

  “It may be,” Shapiro said. “Did you tell anybody else what your brother had told you?”

  “No,” Angus said, but then Enid Fleming half closed her eyes and Shapiro looked at her and waited.

  “I may have,” she said. “I’m not sure. One of the girls at the club, perhaps. You think…?”

  “We’re groping around,” Shapiro said, and spoke sadly, like a man who gropes. “If Mr. Fleming was killed because of this, somebody—somebody in what people keep on calling the syndicate-found out that he knew too much. And, I suppose, that he had evidence which might prove what he knew. He must have told somebody with the wrong connections. Or the boy who went to him may have. Do you know, Mr. Fleming, whether he talked about this to anyone other than you two?”

  “No,” Fleming said. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have expected him to. For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of the girls at the club has the kind of connections you’re talking about.”

  “No,” Shapiro said, “I don’t suppose they would have. Sergeant?”

  “Only,” Forniss said, “I suppose neither of you heard the shots? I know it’s upwards of a mile but sounds carry at night. Your brother’s house is west of here, and what breeze there was last night was from the west. You were both here, I suppose?”

  �
��Where else would we be?” Angus Fleming said. “No, I didn’t. But I take sleeping pills. Enid?”

  “No,” Enid Fleming said. “I heard nothing.”

  Which was that, Nathan Shapiro thought, as they walked down the flagstone path to the car. Which was nothing. A woman at a club who was, to Enid Fleming, merely a possibility, and merely “one of the girls.” Nameless. There doesn’t, Nathan Shapiro thought, seem even enough to go on for me to bungle.

  “He’s a sick man,” Forniss said. “This blood disease—blood cancer—what’s the name of it?”

  “Leukemia,” Shapiro said. “Something people die of. Mostly, of course, young people. How old is Fleming, at a guess?”

  “Late thirties, I think.”

  “He looks a hundred,” Shapiro said and shook his head sadly.

  He was a tall man and, from the looks of him, a powerful one. He had close-cut black hair and widely spaced black eyes; his cheekbones were prominent, and from them his face went down in flat planes to a stubby jaw. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and light gray slacks and sandals. He got up from the terrace chair he had been sitting on when Heimrich walked toward him and as he stood he swayed for a moment and then caught himself. For this hour in the morning, or for any hour, Robert Steele was noticeably drunk. To Heimrich he said, “What the hell gives?” His speech was a little thick.

  Heimrich looked at Trooper Raymond Crowley, who was also a big man and who was a sober one.

  “Came tooting up in that,” Crowley said, and pointed to an elderly, rather beaten up Ford. “Wanted to know where the bastard was because he was going to kick his teeth in. Didn’t say why and hasn’t said why yet. Clammed up when we told him why there was no point in kicking Fleming’s teeth in, if there ever had been. Makes out he didn’t know Fleming was dead.”

  “Damn right I didn’t,” the black-haired man said. “And who the hell are you?”

  Heimrich told him who he was. Robert Steele swayed slightly.

  “Now, Mr. Steele,” Heimrich said. “Sit down. You’re under the weather.”

  Steele told Heimrich what could be done about that. But he sat down.

  “All right, Mr. Steele,” Heimrich said. “Why’d you want to beat Fleming’s teeth in?”

  “Kick ’em in,” Steele said. “It’s none of your goddamn business. Somebody else got to the bastard first.”

  “Oh, it’s my business,” Heimrich said, and sat down facing the drunken, still obviously angry man. Or—too obviously drunken, too obviously angry? “This your first trip here this morning, Mr. Steele?”

  Steele didn’t know what the hell Heimrich was talking about.

  “Some time between two and four this morning it was,” Heimrich said. “Somebody stood outside Fleming’s bedroom window and used an automatic. Effectively. You own an automatic, Mr. Steele?”

  Steele said what could be done about that. He had, it occurred to Heimrich, a somewhat limited vocabulary. But Steele looked at Heimrich very intently from his sharp black eyes, and the eyes didn’t look particularly as if the man were drunk.

  “An automatic,” Heimrich said. “You know what an automatic pistol is, don’t you? Own one?”

  “Hell, no,” Steele said. “I got hands.”

  He held them out to prove it. They were big, powerful hands.

  “If you killed him earlier,” Heimrich said, “and if people around here know you had a grudge against him, it might seem like a good idea to you to come around making loud angry noises. And saying you didn’t know he was dead.”

  Steele again demonstrated the limitations of his vocabulary. But he made an addition. “You’re nuts,” he told Heimrich. His voice was noticeably less fuzzy than it had been at first.

  “You’re the golf pro at the club near here,” Heimrich said. “That right? To start with?”

  “Willow Pond Golf and Tennis,” Steele said. “Anybody can tell you that. There last season, going back this. When they get through extending the damn thing, if they ever do. Now it’s par seventy, for Chris’ sake.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “What did you have against Stuart Fleming?”

  It was none of Heimrich’s goddamn business. Heimrich closed his eyes. He said, “Now, Mr. Steele, it is, naturally. How did it happen you didn’t know Mr. Fleming had been killed? Probably the whole township knows by now. You live around here?”

  “At the club. A couple of lousy little rooms go with the job. We can even eat with the white folks.”

  “We?”

  “I’ve got a wife,” Steele said. “Like the white folks. And a damn sight better look—” He stopped abruptly. “What the hell business is that of yours?” he asked Heimrich. Heimrich sighed and thought, momentarily, that he might be catching the habit from this sad New York lieutenant.

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I heard you have a wife, Steele. A pretty wife. You spend the winters around here, Mr. Steele?”

  He opened his eyes with that and was in time to see Robert Steele blink slightly. They get set for one thing and you try something else. Sometimes it is unbalancing enough to help.

  “What the hell bus—” Steele began and Heimrich cut him off. Heimrich said, “Answer me, Steele.”

  “Florida this last winter,” Steele said. “What the hell’s a golf pro supposed to do around here in the winter?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Heimrich said. “This pretty wife of yours go along with you?”

  “Leave her the hell out of this,” Steele said, proving that he knew the clichés. But he did not, Heimrich thought, use this one with much confidence.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “What’s your wife’s name, Steele?”

  “None of your—” Steele began, but then he looked full at Heimrich, who was looking full at him. “Catherine,” he said.

  “She go south with you this winter? And—let’s drop this none of my business, shall we? Because it could be you’re in something of a spot, Steele. Did she?”

  “All right,” Steele said, “she didn’t. So what the hell?”

  “Stay on at the club?”

  “Rented a room from some people we know.”

  “Why didn’t she go to Florida with you? Because you two weren’t getting along very well?”

  “We got along fine. She got this job and—” He stopped.

  Got along, Heimrich thought. Not get along. Heimrich said, “What job?”

  “She was a secretary before we got married,” Steele said. “What the hell kind of a job’d you think?”

  A man opens a new law office in a village; he needs a secretary, an answerer of telephones. (If telephones ring.) He looks for a local girl—

  “Stuart Fleming’s secretary?” Heimrich said.

  “Dead or alive,” Steele said, “he’s a no-good bastard.”

  “Now, Steele,” Heimrich said. “Beside the point, isn’t it? Your wife got a job with Mr. Fleming. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “So what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” Heimrich said. “What would there be? What do people call your wife, Steele. Nickname. Short name. Cathy, isn’t it?”

  “Sure it’s Cathy.”

  “When did you get back from Florida?”

  “What the hell bus—” Steele began, and then shrugged his wide, powerful shoulders. “Monday,” he said. “Last Monday.”

  “And moved into these rooms at the club.”

  “So all right. So why not?”

  “No reason,” Heimrich said. “Your wife move in with you?”

  “Getting the rooms squared away first,” Steele said. He did not, now, sound in the least intoxicated.

  “You expect her to move in with you?”

  “Listen,” Steele said, and started to stand up. Crowley moved to stand back of his chair. Steele did not get up. He said, “She’s my wife, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “She’s your wife. Funny, though, after you’ve been gone for—what is it, several months?—she wouldn’t want to be
with you as soon as she could manage it. You got back Monday. It’s Friday. You’ve seen her?”

  “You’re damn right I’ve seen her.”

  “Been staying with her in this room she’s rented?”

  “I told you I went back to the club. What the hell’re you trying-”

  “When did you see her last? Yesterday?”

  “So I saw her yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “At the bas—At Fleming’s office.”

  “Any chance, Steele, she told you she wasn’t coming back? That she’d found somebody else? Told you the somebody else was Fleming? Or—let you guess it was Fleming?”

  Steele stood up then, and when Ray Crowley started to move his hands, Heimrich shook his head. Then Heimrich stood up. He was as tall as Robert Steele and somewhat heavier. The additional weight was the weight of muscle.

  “I’ve got a notion,” Steele said, “to knock your goddamn block off.”

  “Now, Steele,” Heimrich said. “We all get notions. I don’t think yours is so hot.”

  They faced each other for a moment, and then Steele said, “The hell with it,” and sat down again. And then he spread his strong hands apart, in a gesture of resignation.

  “All right,” Steele said. “You’ll find out sooner or later anyhow. Cathy and I—hell, something began to go wrong last summer. Maybe she got tired of being married to a pro at a fifth-rate club. Maybe—I don’t know what the hell happened. So, when the club closed down for the winter, we thought maybe if I took off for a few months we’d—well, think it over. Find out things were all right. And—we would have. If it hadn’t been for this bastard Fleming. Guy with money. Member of this goddamn club, not just a guy working there. Moving in on—the hell with it.”

  “She told you yesterday that, definitely, she wasn’t coming back to you? Because of Fleming?”

  “Part of it,” Steele said. “That she wasn’t coming back. Not now, anyway. She said Fleming hadn’t anything to do with it but—hell, I knew better. And she damn well knew I—”