16-Murder Can't Wait

by Lockridge, Richard

  Robert Steele was not at the golf house. There was a caddy there, drinking a Coke. Could be Mr. Steele was up in his room.

  Heimrich went around the clubhouse and in through the front entrance. Directed, Heimrich climbed a wide flight of stairs and a narrower flight of stairs and knocked on a door. Invited, with no enthusiasm, he went in and Steele said, “You again,” with a preface to the remark.

  Robert Steele was sitting in a chair which needed re-covering, by a table with a bottle and a glass on it. The bottle was, Heimrich thought, soon going to need refilling. Steele was drinking blended whisky straight. One notes things of no importance. Steele was wearing shorts; he was barefooted.

  “Do you ski?” Heimrich asked, and noted that Steele, for all he probably drank a good deal, appeared to be in admirable physical condition. A very muscular man, but with no bunching muscles.

  Steele said, “For Christ’s sake.” He drank deeply from his glass. He said, “What the hell, copper?”

  Heimrich waited.

  “Tried it once or twice,” Steele-Stahlman said. “Too damn cold. Why?”

  “Know a place upstate a ways called the Cavalier Motor Lodge?”

  “Heard of it. No golf course.”

  “Ever been there?”

  “At those prices?” Steele said, and added one of his favorite words.

  “The course here,” Heimrich said. “About how long to go around? On the average?”

  “Christ,” Steele said. “Told me you play yourself. Foursome one thing; two another. How many balls do you lose? Take eight for a par four? Get behind four duffers who are stuffy about a play through?”

  “Two hours or so?”

  “Could be.”

  “Last January,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t fly up here from Florida? Maybe to check on your wife?”

  Steele made a suggestion in which Santa Claus was involved.

  “Quit it, Steele,” Heimrich said. “Did you?”

  Steele stood up. He stood steadily, and still held on to his glass. He said, “Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Robert Steele said, and spoke much more quietly. “I sure as hell didn’t.”

  Heimrich went down a narrow flight of stairs and a wider flight to the entrance lobby of the Willow Pond Golf and Tennis Club. The taproom opened off it; made a passage from it to the terrace. J. Henry Patchen was standing at the bar. He had changed to gray slacks and a dark green sports coat. Heimrich went into the bar and Patchen said, “Hello again, captain. Buy you a drink?”

  He himself was drinking a gin and tonic, and the sight of it, the persisting warmth of this unseasonable April afternoon, made Merton Heimrich thirsty.

  “No, thanks,” Captain M. L. Heimrich said. “Just something I wondered about. Do you ski, Mr. Patchen?”

  Patchen looked somewhat surprised, which Heimrich realized was somewhat reasonable.

  “When I get a chance,” Patchen said.

  Did he know a place called the Cavalier Motor Lodge?

  “Sure,” Patchen said. “Nice place. Only the slope is a place where they teach babies. If they happen to have any snow. Why, captain?”

  “Somebody mentioned it,” Heimrich said. “Thought my wife and I might go up for a few days later on. You ever happen to stay there, Mr. Patchen?”

  “No,” Patchen said. “It’s a place for people from the city. People who want to get in the country for a few days. I pretty much live in the country, captain. Don’t need to pay the rates they charge.”

  Heimrich went to his car and drove toward the west and thought of a terrace from which one could see the Hudson, and of a large dog and a small boy, and most of a tall and slender and gray-eyed woman named Susan, who would be fit to be tied. He hoped. Too big and awkward for her and, he might as well face it, getting along. Funny how he had never thought about things like that a few years ago. Funny how it would never have occurred to him to go home and call it a day. Cops ought to be single men, Merton Heimrich thought, turning the car toward the Hawthorne Barracks.

  An odd man, this Nathan Shapiro, Heimrich thought, and was momentarily puzzled by this divergence in his track of thought. Then he realized the connection—Shapiro had, momentarily, looked surprised when he walked onto the terrace and had, no doubt, thought it an odd place in which to get on with business. Possibly what he considered an irregularity was one of the things which had made the odd man Shapiro look so sad.

  XI

  Heimrich parked his car in its slot at Hawthorne Barracks and went up to his office, through the squad room of the B.C.I. Clearly a much more appropriate place to pursue the murderer of Stuart Fleming, to try to find out under what circumstances a second brother had died within hours.

  Charles Forniss was at his typewriter, and looked up and made a two-fingered salute, which meant he had something when Heimrich was ready for it. Heimrich went into his office, which was as stifling as he had anticipated, and examined his IN basket. The New York State Police might sometimes be short on manpower. It never lacked paper.

  A responsible officer of the North Wellwood bank, which was one of a chain of banks, had been able to assure an enquirer that Angus Fleming had a substantial account, details of which he would disclose on court order. But meanwhile—substantial was surely the word for it. The responsible official was willing, as a private individual, to go somewhat further. Angus Fleming had it in wads, partly from a considerable inheritance; partly from what he himself had made before illness forced retirement. So one never very probable possibility flickered out. Angus had not turned Cain for his brother’s trust fund.

  The bank did not administer the trust fund of Stuart Fleming. Stuart Fleming did have an account with the bank. It was noticeably less substantial than his brother’s. Yes, it would not be an impropriety to agree that he made quarterly deposits which might conceivably come from a trust fund. He had made one in October, when he opened his account, and another early in January and the last only a week or so ago.

  J. Henry Patchen sold cars for an agency in Brewster which handled Chryslers and two foreign makes; his efforts were chiefly to sell the foreign cars. “Has the right connections for that.” Yes, he was on retainer. Yes, he sold a reasonable number of cars. The agency was satisfied with Mr. Patchen; held him, in short, in the highest possible regard. Estimate of his probable annual income? That, really, could hardly be expected. That was a private matter. If the police thought it was not, thought the agency books might be inspected, the police could go through due process. (And the car the enquirer was driving looked to be in unusually good shape, and the agency could give him an excellent deal.)

  Stuart Fleming had played football for Dyckman for three years. Although Dyckman was Ivy League, Fleming’s name had appeared on the lists of several all-star selectors. (All-Eastern, to be sure; not All-American.)

  The rest of the paper seemed to have to do with other matters. Heimrich opened his office door and beckoned. Forniss came and brought his report with him, and his report looked rather long. He put it on Heimrich’s desk and sat down on the other side of the desk and said, “Cost the state something in toll charges. Not sure it’s worth it. Want to read or listen, M. L.?”

  The report would be in official stereotypes, which were officially approved; it would read slightly as if Charles Forniss, being duly sworn, was duly and properly testifying.

  “Talk it, Charlie,” Heimrich told the sergeant. “I gather your friend had something?”

  Forniss said, “Yep,” and then added, “Something. But I don’t know it gets us anywhere. Seems there was this assistant professor—”

  An assistant professor, not in the law school of the university, but in the college; by name, Lucius Clappinger. An assistant professor in his middle forties with a wife twenty years younger.

  Forniss’s friend had known Professor Lucius Clappinger slightly—had met him now and then at parties. Clappinger had been an odd duck.

  Heimrich
noted the past participle; knew Forniss would get to that.

  An odd duck Clappinger had been—argumentative and likely to lose his temper in argument. No give-and-take in him, Forniss’s friend had said, having been urged to tell all he knew, and all he guessed. “Been a bachelor until he was over forty,” the friend told Forniss. “Never learned that things are easier if you adjust.”

  “Ted’s married,” Forniss said. “A lot married.”

  Ted was the friend, then.

  “A scratchy sort of man, apparently,” Forniss said. “Stood in his way at the college, Ted says. Quarreled with the wrong people, apparently. Raised issues which weren’t worth raising. You know the type, M. L.”

  Heimrich said he knew the type.

  “Stayed an instructor longer than he should have, apparently,” Forniss said. “Was an assistant professor longer than he liked being. Old enough—more than old enough—to be an associate. Probably even a full professor. Ted says it stuck in his craw; made him even harder to get along with. And then, seems he fell for this girl. Been in some of his classes, the girl had. Married her after she graduated. Fell for her hard, Ted says. Never seen a man fall harder. Or—be more jealous. And then Stuart Fleming comes along—nearer the girl’s age and bigger than Clappinger and better looking. Happens often enough.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “it happens often enough. This Ted of yours sure something happened?”

  “No,” Forniss said. “Nobody was sure. There was a good deal of gossip in the circle they all seem to have moved in, and some said Clappinger was wearing horns and some said Fleming and Mrs. Clappinger were just flirting a little, and that the only trouble was that the professor was too cantankerous to understand. Point is, he sure as hell didn’t understand. Or maybe understood too damn well. We can have it either way. There was this brawl at one of those clubs they have down there. Clubs where you can be served a drink at an honest-to-God bar if you bring your bottle from a state liquor store. Liquor laws get me, M. L.”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “There’s not too much sense in them sometimes. The brawl?”

  Clappinger, apparently, had started it; Clappinger apparently had been drinking. It was a New Year’s Eve. “Ted was there. Said Fleming was nearer sober than a lot of them.”

  Clappinger had gone up to Fleming and had started shouting at him, using most unprofessorial language. Fleming was this and he was that and he had better, by God, stay away from Clappinger’s wife. “There was quite a crowd there, and the poor guy yelled his head off.”

  Fleming apparently had tried to quiet the older man, to soothe him down. He had said he didn’t know what Clappinger was talking about; he had said the usual things, and the usual things had done no good. Clappinger had kept on shouting, and finally he had thrown what was in his glass in Stuart Fleming’s face, and then moved in, swinging.

  “Barroom brawl,” Forniss said. “Not in that kind of a barroom, if you get it, M. L. All nice, well-behaved people. Faculty members and their wives and they’ve got some sort of a place serious writers go down there and there were some of those and—well, not the sort of crowd that’s used to drunks going off their rockers. All very embarrassing, Ted says.”

  Fleming had wiped liquor off his face and out of his eyes and was doing that when Clappinger hit him first. “Not very hard, probably,” Forniss said. “But with what he had.”

  Fleming had backed away and a couple of other men had tried to hold onto Clappinger, but the furious man—the frantic man—had wrenched loose and gone at Fleming again and then Fleming had pushed him away. “Just pushed, Ted says. Didn’t hit him. But Fleming was quite a man—we both saw that, M. L.—and he could push pretty hard. Clappinger went over backwards and slid a ways. It was—how’d Ted put it?—all very unseemly.”

  “Sounds like it,” Heimrich said. “And?”

  It was the sort of thing which doesn’t get in the papers, since nobody was hurt. It went through the town, but went the oral route. It had, presumably, got Clappinger in some trouble with the college authorities. Ted was only guessing about that. His guess was that it would have stopped there but—

  Clappinger wouldn’t let it, apparently. Went to the police and signed a complaint charging Fleming with assault. Which broke it open. Then he filed suit for divorce, naming Fleming as corespondent, and that broke it wider. “Raised quite a stink,” Forniss said. “Which seems to have been Clappinger’s idea. It’s Ted’s idea, looking back on it, that the professor needed a psychiatrist.”

  “Back,” Heimrich said. “How long back, Charlie? This happened?”

  “Four years ago. This party Clappinger broke up was a New Year’s Eve party. Four years ago last January.”

  “A long time to carry a grudge,” Heimrich said.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Only maybe not so long if you’re sort of nuts. You wait more than forty years to get yourself a wife and then some other guy lays hold of her. The Clappingers had only been married about a year, Ted says. Mrs. Clappinger was damn good-looking, Ted says.”

  “Was?”

  “Is, for all Ted knows,” Forniss said. “Only—not Mrs. Clappinger any more.”

  “The divorce went through?”

  “Nope. Not that one. That’s the funny thing—Clappinger withdrew his suit. Didn’t give any reason. Just withdrew it. Only, Mrs. Clappinger went back to mama. And then she went on to Reno. And where she is now, Ted doesn’t know, except he’s pretty damn sure she’s not alone. Not the type to be alone, apparently.”

  “The fiery professor?”

  “Resigned from the faculty. Took off, and nobody down there seems to know where he took off to. Bought himself a car and—took off. Not telling anybody anything.”

  “Tail between legs?”

  “Well,” Forniss said. “Maybe so. But—in a new Cadillac. Not the very biggest Cadillac, but assistant professors don’t make a hell of a lot, from what I hear. Not much more than cops.”

  Heimrich said, “Mm-m-m.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Could be he traded his wife in on a new Cadillac. In a way of speaking. Could be Fleming’s old man paid him off. To drop the suit and shut his mouth.”

  Heimrich said “Mm-m-m,” again. He closed his eyes.

  “Wonder,” he said, after a time, “if Mrs. Clappinger had got her divorce when Clappinger resigned? Took off?”

  “Asked that,” Forniss said. “Ted says he doesn’t think so.”

  “So,” Heimrich said, “he might have thought he was going to have his cake, or his Cadillac and whatever else he got, and eat it too. Have his wife too. That she wouldn’t leave a man with a nice new Cadillac.”

  “She did.”

  “Yes. Make a man bitter, maybe. The kind of a man Clappinger apparently was. It was because of Fleming, even if not to Fleming, he finally lost his wife. Could be he brooded about it and decided he hadn’t been paid enough.”

  “Four years is a hell of a long time to brood. Like you said.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “An abnormally long time. For a normal man. Only, he doesn’t sound very normal, does he, Charlie? Could be he needs a psychiatrist now even more than he did then, couldn’t it? As you said. Wonder if he came up North to brood, don’t you, Charlie?”

  “Probably,” Charles Forniss said, “it’s a red herring, M. L.”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “What we net mostly, isn’t it?”

  It was well after six when Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, in the small office assigned him—he hoped on a temporary basis—decided he could safely call it a day, and not much of one. He could, for once, get home for dinner, and after dinner he could go out, peacefully, and walk the dog. Unless Rose had already walked the dog.

  He and an assistant district attorney assigned to the Rackets Bureau had got what they could out of a husky, anxious man named Franklin Dell, junior at Dyckman, tackle the previous fall on Dyckman’s defensive squad. And what they had got, Shapiro and the assistant district attorney had agr
eed, left them pretty much where they had been—a gambling syndicate apparently was trying to move in on Dyckman. The syndicate apparently was looking ahead; looking from one football season to the next. But Dell could not pin anything down for them; not really pin anything down.

  He had been approached—called first by telephone; later kept an appointment in a restaurant—by a man who wanted to know if he could use a piece of cash. Dell could, he told them, sure use a piece of cash. His old man was pretty near going broke keeping him at Dyckman and what work he could find wasn’t helping much, and sure there was a sort of scholarship, but not one that helped a lot.

  The man had said his name was Jones, but “he didn’t look as if his name was Jones.” (This was slightly obscure to Nathan Shapiro, but not worth making a point of.) “Jones had said there would be money, pretty good money, for Dell and maybe a couple of other regulars on the squad—the holdovers from last year’s squad—if, maybe, they could go a little easy now and then; go easy when they were told and as much as they were told. Not enough to lose games they had a chance to win. Nobody was going to ask that and anyhow that could be risky for everybody. But, to take an example, say Dyckman was kicking a field goal and the other team—well, when the other team tried to rush the kicker, maybe Dell, say, could slip a little? Did Dell see what “Jones” meant?

  “I saw, all right,” Dell told them. “And I told him what he could do with his pretty good money. And I thought of going to the coach but—”

  But he had decided he didn’t really have enough to go on. And that, going only with what he had, he might get some of the other guys in a jam, perhaps in a jam they didn’t deserve to get in. Because, while Jones hadn’t mentioned the names of the “couple of other regulars,” he had said enough, as he talked about shaving points, to make Dell able to guess who he might have in mind. And the guys Dell guessed he might have in mind were swell guys and he didn’t think they’d fall for a thing like this and the point was they hadn’t yet. Did they see what he was getting at?