Then she sat down again and covered her eyes again, and her shoulders trembled. Patchen looked at Heimrich and shook his head, the head shake offering shared regret, shared pity. He really had his rat, Heimrich thought, and went to the door to the hallway and opened it and nodded to Forniss, who brought the yellow-haired bartender in with him. Heimrich held his hand out and Forniss gave him the picture.
“Now, Mrs. Fleming,” Heimrich said. “Something you’d better look at before you go on.”
She did not move, did not uncover her eyes.
“Before you get in any deeper,” Heimrich said. “Because, as Mr. Patchen says, it’s really no good.”
He waited a moment and she moved her head from side to side, her hands still covering her face. But then she said, “What did you say? I didn’t hear what you said.” She took her hands down and looked up at him, and her eyes were wet. He held the picture out and she looked at it and did not seem to see it. But then she saw it and took it from him and looked at it.
“I don’t know these—” she said, and stopped. Then she said, “It isn’t me. Nobody’ll believe it’s—” And she stopped again.
Then she stood up, suddenly, and tore the picture in half and looked at Patchen.
“You’re a louse,” she said. “A grade-A louse.”
He looked down at her for a moment and then he turned on Frank Pesco. “I ought to have hit you harder,” he said. “Hit you twice as hard.”
“Wouldn’t try it,” Frank said, and moved closer to Forniss. “Wouldn’t try it, mister.”
“It’s all lies,” Enid said. “All lies. The picture—somebody faked the picture. You—you faked the picture, Mr. Patchen. You’re trying—I don’t know what you’re trying. To—is it to get money somehow? Are they paying—”
“It’s no good,” Patchen said. “I keep telling you it’s no good.” He turned to Heimrich. “I paid this,” he said, and gestured toward Frank, “to keep his mouth shut. She—all right, she insisted I pay him. That was last October. If she—if it was all a scheme to get Stu’s money I didn’t know it. I thought—” He spread his hands. “Hell, I thought it was just a roll in the hay.”
“Is this true, Mrs. Fleming?” Heimrich said. “That you planned to tip the executors that your brother-in-law had stayed at this lodge with a woman? Probably using an anonymous letter? Decided not to because, after you’d persuaded Mr. Patchen to pay Pesco here to keep his mouth shut, you decided it was too risky? That Pesco wouldn’t stay bought?”
“It’s all lies,” she said. “It’s all lies.”
“Look, Mrs. Fleming,” Pesco said. “You can’t mix me up in anything. So maybe Mr. Patchen here gave me a pretty good tip. On account of I gave him good service. But then Mr. Fleming showed up at the lodge and—look, I’m not going to be mixed up in anything.”
“You are,” Heimrich told him. “Mr. Patchen and Mrs. Fleming were there, weren’t they? Paid you not to remember they were? And Stuart Fleming gave you a better tip, didn’t he? For better service?”
“They were trying to play a dirty trick on him,” Frank Pesco said. “Didn’t like to see—”
“Any loose change getting away,” Heimrich said. “Well, Mrs. Fleming?”
“It’s all—” she said and stopped and looked at Patchen and said, “You really are a louse, aren’t you?” She turned to Heimrich. “All right,” she said. “I went there with him. It—it was a bad thing to do. But he was the one who registered us under Stu’s name. I—I didn’t even know he had until afterward. I—I know now what he planned. To have the trust go to Angus and—and Angus couldn’t live very long and he thought I—thought I would marry him after Angus died and—you’re scum, Henry. Scum of the scum.”
“It won’t do any good,” Patchen said. “Calling me names won’t—”
“I didn’t even know he had registered us that way,” Enid Fleming said, and turned away from Patchen, turned toward Heimrich. “That’s true, captain. That’s really true. I didn’t know until Stu told—”
And then she made a little gesture, almost as if to cover her own lips.
Heimrich waited a moment, but she did not go on.
“Yes,” Heimrich said, “that may have been the way it was, Mrs. Fleming. Your brother-in-law told you he had found out about this episode last October. Found out because the lodge sent him a Christmas card and he wanted to know who had been impersonating him. Probably told you he had had detectives following Mr. Patchen. Had checked up here at the house and found that you were away—had gone to New York to shop, gone any place you invented for the occasion—at times which coincided with Mr. Patchen’s going to an apartment house in Barrow Street. And told you he was going—going to what, Mrs. Fleming? Tell your husband?”
“He told you this,” she said. “He told you that.” And pointed at Henry Patchen. “I don’t know what other lies he told you. I’m just finding out what kind of scum….” Her voice trailed off and stopped.
“Not lies,” Patchen said. “Why don’t you tell him yourself? Tell him what you told me?”
Her hands tensed, the fingers bent. They were pretty hands, Heimrich thought. But claws are not really pretty. Rats are not pretty either, but policemen can make use of rats.
“All right,” Patchen said. “You’ve tried to drag me into something. He told you that he’d take what he knew to your husband—you want me to go on, Enid?”
“They’re your lies,” she said. “Tell your lies.”
And she spoke dully. It was almost as if she withdrew herself. But Heimrich did not think she had given up.
“All right,” Patchen said again. “He made her an offer. She could go to Reno and get a divorce. He’d do what he could to see she got a good settlement. If she did it that way, and didn’t put his brother through the—I guess he meant the strain—of knowing the truth. If she wouldn’t—well, he’d tell Angus, prove it to Angus. And then Angus would get a divorce under the New York State law and she—well, she wouldn’t get anything. And she said we ought to—to do something about it. I told her she was crazy. That there wasn’t anything we could do. It never entered my head that she—” He stopped.
Now her hands moved like claws, flexing and unflexing. For a moment she looked at the tall young man, the man with a boyish face, and Heimrich thought she might at any instant leap up at him, tear at his face. But she used only words.
“He said you were no good,” she told Henry Patchen. “Angus told me you were no good—oh, from the first he knew that. Before-before there was anything. You’re—you’re as low as they come, aren’t you? There isn’t anything you—” She did not finish that. She turned to Heimrich, and her voice was lower but not much lower.
“You see it, don’t you?” she said. “Now you see it. I—I thought Angus had killed his brother. Angus! I should have known he—he would never have hurt anybody. But—this.” She gestured behind her toward Patchen. “Don’t you see? Through marrying me.
After Angus—after Angus was dead. Went there and—wait a minute. We often left the house unlocked. So the grocer could leave things. The milkman could get in. Lots of people around here do. Don’t you see?”
She paused for a moment and looked at Heimrich. He had closed his eyes. He said, “Go on, Mrs. Fleming.”
“He’d know when we weren’t here,” she said. “See us both at the club. Knew Amelia had left us. I told him that. When we were at the club he could sneak in and get Angus’s gun and—that’s what he did. Stole the gun and killed Stu. And if anybody found the gun, it would be Angus’s gun. Don’t you see?”
Heimrich opened his eyes, and then he shook his head.
“Now, Mrs. Fleming,” he said. “It wasn’t that way, was it? Patchen here was being followed. And he knew he was being followed, because you’d told him, hadn’t you? So he couldn’t be the one, could he?”
Charles Forniss, standing beside the yellow-haired bartender, with one big hand on the flabby man’s shoulder, looked at Heimrich, but Heimrich did not l
ook at him.
“You say you saw your husband coming up the stairs that morning,” Heimrich said. “Say he told you he’d been unable to sleep, had gone out for a drive. But it wasn’t that way, was it, Mrs. Fleming? It was the other way around, wasn’t it? He saw you, didn’t he? That was why he had to die, wasn’t it? Why you and Patchen here couldn’t wait for him to die?”
“Listen,” Patchen said, and his voice was high, violent. “Listen to me. I didn’t have anything to do with—with anything. If she—if she killed—”
“Be quiet,” Heimrich said. He did not need his rat any longer; would need him, but did not need him now. “That was the way it was, wasn’t it, Mrs. Fleming? Your husband saw you coming up the stairs, the way you said you saw him coming up, and—”
“No!” she said, but she screamed the word. “No—no! He didn’t really see—”
She stopped. Then she said, “Anything,” but she said the word as if she knew it didn’t matter.
“The two of you together,” Heimrich said. “That was the way it was, wasn’t it? Because Stuart Fleming could give his brother evidence for a divorce. A divorce from which you, as the guilty party, wouldn’t profit. But with Stuart dead and his trust reverting and your husband only a little time—perhaps only weeks—from being dead—”
She began to say, “No,” again, to say it over and over. But her voice seemed, as she repeated the word, to wither slowly.
“As for your husband,” he said, “the milk came before you went to the club, didn’t it? You warmed it for him and left it in the jug, didn’t you? With enough Nembutal in it. That was the way it was, wasn’t it? Being fairly sure he’d come back here when you and Patchen went to play golf….”
“There wasn’t anything in the milk,” she said. “There couldn’t have been anything in the—”
Once more she stopped herself; once more she had not stopped herself soon enough.
“No,” Heimrich said, “there wasn’t anything in the milk. Couldn’t have been, as you say. Because when you and Patchen—”
“Not me!” Patchen said, Patchen shouted. “What she did I don’t-”
“He told you to shut up,” Forniss said. “Didn’t you hear the captain tell you to shut up?”
“When you and Patchen came back,” Heimrich said. “Came back and found it had worked, you emptied the milk you’d put the overdose in out of the jug, didn’t you? Washed the jug and washed the glass he’d drunk out of? And warmed fresh milk, milk with nothing in it, and filled the jug again. And poured some of the milk into the glass, and one of you—you, I think, Patchen—drank from the glass, so that it would show it had been drunk from when we found it. And—your husband was still alive. You could put his fingerprints on the jug, on the glass, couldn’t you? Which of you did that? He was unconscious. Did one of you hold him up—you, Patchen? So that you could get the prints in the proper places. And the other—you, Mrs. Fleming—hold the glass, the jug, in tissue and press your husband’s fingers against them. Did—”
“You can’t prove any of this,” Patchen said, and his voice was quieter now. “You’re bluffing. I don’t know what she did. Only that I wasn’t in on—but you can’t prove anything, can you?”
“I can ask a question,” Heimrich said. “The district attorney can ask a lot of questions. And you’ll answer them, Patchen. You’ll run for cover like any rat. All right, Mrs. Fleming, where’s the other pint of milk?”
She merely shook, her hands again covering her face, her slim body again shaking.
“You see,” Heimrich said, “a quart of milk was delivered about noon yesterday. The vacuum jug holds a pint. If it was filled only once, Mrs. Fleming, where’s the other pint of milk?”
She swayed a little, and then went, uncertainly, almost blindly, to a chair and sat in the chair.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Patchen said. “I didn’t even know—not really know—what she’d done. She—she told me to get rid of the empty bottle because—”
He stopped with that. But Merton Heimrich didn’t doubt he’d start again. A rat starts squealing in a corner, a rat keeps on squealing.
It was very pleasant to have him home for lunch, although it wouldn’t last. It never lasted. It was pleasant to be told about it; to think, once more, that this large man of hers was a good man at his job. It was pleasant to hear him grumble, mildly, about the fact that the milk she gave him, insisted he drink, was skim milk.
“Why not just leave the milk bottle there?” Susan Heimrich said. “Say—oh, say that one of them drank the extra pint?”
“Because,” Heimrich said, “they had slipped up. Forgotten that Angus Fleming’s prints would have to be on the bottle. Forgot until they had called for help, probably until they heard the sirens. There wasn’t time, then. So Patchen put the bottle in his car and afterward threw it away somewhere—somewhere we’ll never find it. They didn’t say they’d drunk the extra milk because—well, because they were worked up, frightened. I was rather afraid they might. Probably their lawyers will think of that. But—Patchen will keep on ratting. He’s not much good, as Angus Fleming said he wasn’t.”
As an act of solidarity, Susan had joined Merton in skim milk. She sipped from her glass with no special enjoyment.
“Mr. Patchen wasn’t actually being followed then,” she said. “When she killed Stuart Fleming. Fleming had called off histrailing dog.”
“Now, Susan,” Heimrich said, “there’s that, naturally. But they didn’t know that. And neither Charlie nor I thought to mention it. Gave Patchen a feeling of false security, as it happened. Made his ratting easier.”
“They were in it together. From the start—from this impersonation at the lodge. With the idea of doing Stuart out of his trust fund?” She paused for a moment. “With that idea among others, of course.”
Heimrich said he was quite sure they had been in it together; that he was equally sure Patchen would try to lay it all on the woman to save his skin; that sooner or later she would try to lay the blame on him; that in the end neither would get away with it.
“When Frank Pesco showed up at the lodge it spoiled their first plan,” Heimrich said. “They let it drop for a time, perhaps wouldn’t have done anything further if Stuart Fleming hadn’t got this Christmas card—this entirely routine advertising card—and started to check up. When he kept on checking up, got close, gave Enid the choice he gave her, they decided they’d have to move if she wanted the money. They thought that this other checkup he was making—the one into a possible attempt at a football fix—would give them a cover; send us off into the underbrush. As it nearly did.
“She went to her brother-in-law’s house after Mrs. Steele left. Patchen says she told him that she was going to tell Fleming which of his alternatives she’d take. Says—Patchen does—that that was all she was going to do, as far as he knew. Says he didn’t have any part in anything else.”
“A rat,” Susan said, and Heimrich said, “Oh, yes. Useful things, rats can be.”
“Found that Fleming had gone into the bedroom to lie on the bed, where he’d be more comfortable. Shot him. Found the reports from the detective agency. Probably—we’ll know when she begins to do her own talking—found whatever he had on the football fix. Destroyed that, too, hoping we’d blame it all on gangsters.”
He paused and finished his skim milk.
“Why didn’t they just wait for Angus Fleming to die?”
“Probably,” Heimrich said, “because he had heard the car come back the morning she killed his brother. Didn’t actually see her, I think. But suspected. Questioned her about it. And about the missing automatic. So they had this spur of the moment plan—kill him, make it look like suicide, blame him for his brother’s murder.”
Susan looked at the Hudson, and after a moment said, “Proof? A missing pint of milk isn’t much.”
“Now, Susan,” Heimrich said, “they’ll give us the proof. When each tries to clear himself, lay it on the other.” He lighte
d a cigarette. “It’s risky business,” Merton Heimrich said. “Murder two by two is very risky, my dear.”
In the house the telephone rang. There was no boy on telephone detail; the boy was playing baseball. Heimrich got up and walked across the terrace. It’s wonderful the way my big one moves, Susan thought. It’s dreadful how much he has to move away. Damn!
Whatever it was, Stuart Fleming had had his fingers on it, Nathan Shapiro thought, sitting at his desk, thinking over the day. And Stuart Fleming’s fingers were cold, and his mind dead. Too bad Patchen and Enid Fleming hadn’t waited a few hours more. Wouldn’t have mattered to them. Shapiro sighed.
The trouble was, there was something to it. One of the other football-playing boys had been approached by a man named Jones. So they would have to go on with it, starting where Fleming had started, and it would be a long dull business. And I’m not the man for it, Shapiro thought. They ought to know I’m not the man for it.
He looked at his watch. His day’s tour of duty was over, and long over. He stood up and walked to the door of the little office they had so ill-advisedly put him in. He opened the door and the telephone rang.
He hesitated for a moment, but then he went out and closed the door behind him. He could hear the telephone ringing behind the door until he was a good way down the corridor.
He felt some guilt until he could no longer hear the telephone ringing. Then, insofar as that was possible, his spirits lightened. He was going home to Brooklyn. Tonight, damn it all, he was going to walk the little dog. And afterward he was going to take Rose to the movies.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries
I
Leslie Brennan turned her car from the blacktop into the narrow road which served as driveway to the Drakes’ big house on the ridge and to the smaller house which was Annette Weaver’s. She slowed almost to a stop. Confident as Mr. J. K. Knight had sounded on the telephone, she did not really believe that he would find the turnoff. The sensible thing to do would be to wait here, making her little car a marker. The sensible thing to do would be to get out and stand where the drive branched from the blacktop and be herself a marker.
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