Show Red for Danger

by Frances Lockridge

  “Now Mr. Alder,” Heimrich said. “Keep it, by all means. But, in fact?”

  “Hell,” Alder said. “They both played around. Who doesn’t?” He was not answered, since an answer might have taken time. “So—phfft, as somebody used to say. Then—the big league. Francis Dale, no less.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes briefly. He opened them and repeated the name.

  “Why not?” Alder said. “She was a dish. Frank likes dishes. In a quiet, marrying way, you understand.”

  Heimrich said he understood. He said he would gather that this marriage had been—what? A step up?

  He could call it that.

  “And,” Susan said, “she slipped off it? Or, stepped off it?”

  “Well,” Alder said, “Dale’s a good deal older. Anyway, it lasted a couple of years and they rifted.”

  “Which must,” Susan said, “have presented a problem.” Alder looked at her enquiringly in the dim light.

  “Not too much of a problem. Incompatibility. Everybody can have one incompatibility,” he said. “So then a man named Fielding. Roland Fielding. Not in the profession, so it didn’t matter. Nobody’s ever heard of him. Automobile dealer, or something like that.”

  “Until?”

  “About a year ago. Extreme cruelty. But no publicity to speak of. Nobody gave a damn. Which brings us back to this.”

  “Which is a problem?” Heimrich said.

  “Two pictures on the shelf,” Alder said. “Not counting The Last Patroon. What do you think of that as a title, by the way? We’re sort of making a survey.”

  “I think,” Susan said gravely, “that it lacks something.”

  “What I keep telling them,” Alder said. “What’s a patroon? they’ll want to know, and figure it’s a misprint. Anyway. Our demure milkmaid and what have you gets herself killed in an artist’s studio and so she’s obviously no better than she should be and so what do we get? Pressure groups. So—”

  He looked at Heimrich intendy.

  “I don’t,” Heimrich said, “see what can be done about it. Actually, of course, Miss Belford was merely having a swim in a pool owned by a former husband, and was wearing as much as attractive girls normally do under such circumstances.”

  “You don’t get it,” Alder said. “Listen—the man was an artist. He did paintings.”

  Heimrich said he was sorry. He stood up.

  “Listen,” Alder said. “You got me off the track. Why couldn’t it have been an accident? Say he was cleaning his gun, maybe. She’d dropped in for tea, because she and her former husband were on the friendliest of terms and she was in the neighborhood anyway. And he was cleaning his gun and—” Alder stopped.

  “You see the difficulties,” Heimrich said. “He’s cleaning his gun, while he’s serving tea. It goes off by accident and kills Miss Belford. And then—what? He cleans it again and it goes off by accident and kills him?”

  “Well—”

  “Mr. Alder, did you really expect what you call ‘co-operation?’ A hush-up of some sort?”

  “If you mean me,” Alder said, and stood up too. “No, I guess not. Not that that sort of thing hasn’t happened.”

  “Not here,” Heimrich said. “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “All right,” Alder said. “Marley said make a pitch and I made a pitch. I’ll pass the word.”

  “This Mr. Framingham,” Heimrich said. “He may as well stay in Hollywood. Hold M. G.’s hand.”

  “Don’t,” Alder said, “expect me to tell him that, captain.” He started off. He stopped. “Somebody said,” Alder said, “that there was a portrait of La Belford in the studio. A nude?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “God,” Alder said, hopelessly, and went on toward the panel truck. Susan Faye said, “Oh Mr. Alder,” and he stopped.

  “Could Miss Belford act?” Susan asked.

  He looked at her for a moment. Some light from the house was reflected on his face.

  “My dear girl,” Alder said, “what possible difference could that make?” and went into the truck and drove it off. They watched him go down the drive.

  “From another planet,” Susan Faye said and Heimrich said, “Yes,” and then, “Well—”

  “Goodnight, Merton,” Susan Faye said.

  Buy With One Stone Now!

  IV

  The parking lot of the Old Stone Inn was filled. Business normally was good on Saturday nights; this night it seemed excessive. Heimrich found a place for his car and went in through the taproom. Sergeant Forniss loomed in the center of a group of eager men, and one eager woman. He looked at Heimrich over heads and raised his eyebrows and Heimrich nodded. “Here’s the captain,” Forniss said. The group moved to Heimrich. “M. L.?” the Times said. “That right, captain?” That was right. “First name?” the News said. “M. L. will do,” Heimrich said.

  “The sergeant,” the Herald Tribune said, and spoke accusingly, “the sergeant says it was murder and suicide. You sure about that, captain?”

  “That,” Heimrich said pleasantly, “is certainly what it looks like. As the sergeant has probably told you.”

  “The bullets match?” That was the Associated Press.

  “One of the bullets was badly damaged,” Heimrich said. “They were both from a thirty-eight automatic. There was a thirty-eight on the floor under his hand. Fired twice. But the sergeant’s told you that.”

  “What we want to know,” United Press-International said, “are the police sure that it was murder and suicide? Do they write it off?” “I don’t know quite what you mean by write it off,” Heimrich said. “Certainly we’ll continue the investigation until we’re entirely sure. As of now, the facts seem to speak for themselves.”

  “Hell,” the Mirror said, expressing a consensus. “A one-day story and—poof. And, it’s got everything.”

  Heimrich smiled slightly. He said he appreciated their feelings.

  “Isn’t it possible,” the Times said, “that further investigation may disclose discrepancies?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Heimrich said.

  “Quote you as saying that?”

  Heimrich said it seemed to be a harmless enough thing to be quoted as saying. As long as they stopped with that. If there was the implication that the police, officially, were not satisfied—

  “Captain,” the News said, “for my money, you aren’t satisfied.”

  They all waited.

  “I have no reason for thinking Collins didn’t shoot Miss Belford and then kill himself,” Heimrich said.

  “Tried to get her to come back? She wouldn’t? He killed her?”

  “Now Miss Grady,” Heimrich said. “How would I know about that? I wasn’t there, naturally.”

  “The whole movie crowd,” the Mirror said, “has clammed up on us, captain. Why, if it’s the way you say?”

  Heimrich didn’t know. He assumed they wanted to avoid adverse publicity.

  “Or,” the Mirror said, “know something you’re not telling us.”

  “Gentlemen,” Heimrich said. “Miss Grady. If they do know something, I’ll try to find out what it is. If it seems to be part of the story, I’ll pass it along.”

  “With deletions,” the Herald Tribune said, but without animus.

  Heimrich did not answer that.

  “There’s a story,” the News said, “that she was posing in the nude when he shot her.”

  “She was wearing a swim suit,” Heimrich said. “There’s nothing to indicate she was posing for him, or had been recently. She was his model years ago, as you probably know. Also his wife.”

  “She was a lot of guys’ wife,” the Mirror said, sternly. “Frank Dale’s, for one. You know that?” The implication was that Heimrich would be unlikely to. Heimrich said he did; said it in his best “so what?” tone. “I suppose you know your business,” the Mirror said, in a voice of doubt.

  Heimrich did not answer that either. He said, to the group in general, that that was all he had. Asked, he
said they would not, now, be allowed in the house; that after the police were through there, a tour might be arranged. He said that the house had a glass wall and that if any photographers wanted to shoot through the wall he had no objections. He was told that it was dark now, and didn’t he know it, and that flashbulbs would reflect in the glass. He said he was sorry.

  They began to give him up, then. The Times, politely, gave him up first; the others followed. The Mirror was last. “In the Daily Mirror,” the Mirror said, “it’s going to be mystery shrouds the death of. I can tell you that right now.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, and gestured to Forniss with his head. They went out into the small lobby between taproom and dining room.

  “Get anything?” Heimrich said, and they walked to the front of the lobby and stood at a window, from which they could look out into the night; could look under dark trees to Van Brunt Avenue, and the lights of the drugstore across the street, and cars passing between them and the stores.

  “Collins picked up the pictures,” Forniss said. “Got there about a quarter of four, according to Miss Burns.” He considered for a moment. “Miss Myra Burns,” he said. “Stayed about half an hour and loaded the pictures in his jeep and drove off. Take him—what? Ten, fifteen minutes to get back to the house. If this Miss Burns is right about times he—”

  Probably Myra Burns was right, Heimrich thought. He remembered her. A litde bird-like woman who had once been discharged as librarian because the committee—headed by one Orville Phipps, as in those days almost everything in Van Brunt was headed—had objected to her supplying The Atlantic Monthly to library patrons, holding The Atlantic subversive. Heimrich smiled inwardly, remembering Myra, who hopped so from twig to twig. But probably she was right about times. Anything having to do with the more cultured things of life received Myra Burns’s full attention.

  “—would have got back around four-thirty,” Forniss continued. “So if the doc is right about times, or near right, he had half an hour or so to kill her. Time enough. Only—”

  He stopped to let Heimrich finish. Heimrich closed his eyes briefly and nodded his head briefly.

  It would have given Collins, certainly, plenty of time to kill before five o’clock, when the examining physician was reasonably sure Peggy Belford had been dead. Heimrich went over it in his mind. Collins had, say, left the house at three-thirty, driven in to pick up his pictures, picked them up, driven back, got home by, say, four-thirty. And killed by five? Time enough, physically; all the time in the world, physically. And conceivably, of course, he could have worked himself up to murder while driving home; brooded himself to violence about whatever made him brood.

  “It doesn’t give him much time to get worked up to it, does it?” Forniss said, having arrived, apparently, on collision course.

  And that, of course, was it. Say, arbitrarily, that Collins had killed his former wife because he had set his hopes high that she was about to return to him and had been told she wasn’t. That, perhaps, she had found still another man. Things like that happened. But they did not happen like that—not flatly, logically.

  Murder of that sort came as the climax of a great emotional surge; murder like that was the breaking at the crest of a wave of love and hate. This would be particularly true of a man like Brian Collins, if Susan Faye was at all right about the kind of man Collins had been. (If she were really right, of course, no such emotional storm would ever have arisen in Collins’s self-sufficient mind, however much time was allowed.)

  Suppose it had started before he left. That he had brooded over it and made up his mind. Heimrich tried to suppose that—to suppose a man of seething passion turning that passion off arbitrarily, saying, “Excuse me a minute. We’ll finish this later. Now I’ve got to go in and pick up some pictures at the library.” And coming back and picking up precisely where, at high pitch, he had left off and— The answer, Heimrich decided, was “Nonsense.”

  They were left then with a man, who was not the type anyway, coming in at four-thirty, putting his pictures in the studio, working himself up to it—and saying, “Excuse me while I get my gun?”—and killing, all by five? It was not a reasonable place to be left. Of course, the doctor could be wrong. Heimrich doubted it; the doctor had allowed himself leeway. Two hours. Of course, Collins might have killed the girl before he left. The time limits allowed that. And gone in and got his pictures and come back and, belatedly, “worked himself up” to suicide?

  “Miss Burns didn’t notice anything out of the way about Collins when he came in?” Heimrich asked Forniss. “Like as if he’d just killed somebody.”

  “No,” Forniss said. “He was a litde earlier than she had expected was all. He didn’t say why. Actually, all he’d said was that he’d be in sometime before six, when the library closes. She kept saying, ‘There wasn’t any definite time.’ Also that she couldn’t believe it. ‘Not in Van Brunt!’ ”

  Sergeant Forniss has a heavy voice; he did, nevertheless, manage to suggest Myra Burns, whose conversation was chirped.

  “I’m sure she did,” Heimrich said. “Charlie, does mystery shroud death of?”

  “Nothing proved,” Forniss said. “Made up his mind on the way back, could be.”

  “Nothing proved,” Heimrich agreed. “If you had a guest, Charlie. Somebody who’d dropped in during the afternoon for a swim, say. Somebody you had old times to talk over with, perhaps. And, had an errand you had to do. Before six.”

  Forniss waited; Heimrich spoke slowly.

  “Around six,” Heimrich said. “Old friends—call it friends—might want to have a drink together. It’s the usual time. You might say, ‘Look. I’ve got to drive in to the village and pick up these damn pictures. Can’t get out of it. Why don’t you have another swim and read a good book or something, and I’ll go in and get them and be back by cocktail time and we’ll have a drink or two for auld lang syne.’ ”

  “And he finds somebody’s shot her while he was away so he kills himself?”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “There’s a chance—”

  “Captain Heimrich!” The voice was low, almost husky. It was very specially a woman’s voice. Heimrich turned.

  “You must do something,” the girl said. “You can’t let this happen. This—injustice!”

  The voice was too old for her, Heimrich thought, the thought involuntary. She could not be much more than seventeen.

  She wore a black dress which hugged a figure worth hugging. She had black hair, loosely curled, hanging almost to her shoulders. She had great dark eyes in an oval face and her skin was unexpectedly white, but with a glow under it. She wore silver earrings and a silver chain around her neck and black shoes with tall heels the diameter of pencils. There was nothing whatever wrong with any part of her, except that she was certainly not over seventeen, and oddly costumed for it, and for a country inn on a summer evening.

  Heimrich looked at her and waited. She looked up at him, dark eyes very wide. And, standing so trimly perfect, she turned her right foot so that the toe pointed in. She didn’t know that, Heimrich thought. How she would have hated to know that.

  “Injustice?” Heimrich said.

  “I was in there,” she said, in the same husky voice. “Having a drink. Trying not to think. I—heard.” On the word “heard” her voice suddenly went up almost an octave. “Heard,” she said, darkly, hauling it down again. “They will drag his name into it. Without mercy. Without thought of what it will mean.” She paused for a second. “Without caring,” she said, and there was desolation in the low voice.

  There was a great deal of desolation in it. Heimrich felt inadequate to respond appropriately to so much desolation, particularly since he had no idea what she was talking about. Keening about, actually. He thought, further, that they usually wore bobby socks and saddle shoes and sweaters, didn’t they? Well, perhaps not sweaters on as warm an evening as this.

  “I’m sorry,” Heimrich said. “Drag whose name into it, Miss—?”


  “Waggoner,” she said. “Chris Waggoner. My name means nothing.”

  Which was, at least for the moment, entirely true.

  “Paul Marley’s my stepfather,” the girl said. “He’s the producer of all this.”

  And this she said crisply, in a matter-of-fact tone, rather as if it were an explanatory footnote.

  “I am talking about Francis Dale,” she said, in what Heimrich was beginning to recognize as her other voice. “They will crucify him.” She paused. “Blazen his name,” she said. “Because once, years ago, he had this moment of—weakness.”

  Heimrich was, for an instant, caught on the thorn of “blazen.” He pulled himself loose.

  “You must do something,” the girl said. “Find some way to stop them.”

  It seemed improbable that this intensity was concentrated on what he began to suppose it was. But he could think of nothing else.

  “You’re talking about the reporters?” he said. “The fact that they’ll mention that Mr. Dale was at one time Miss Belford’s husband?”

  “That he was here,” she said, intensely. “At the scene of the crime. Don’t you see? What people will think? What it will do to him?”

  “Scene of the crime?” Heimrich repeated, going to what might be the heart of the matter, if it had a heart. “You mean, the house, Miss Waggoner?”

  “Of course not,” she said, and said that much in the impatient tone of a girl of seventeen correcting an elder. “Here. In this—whatever it is. Do they call it a town?”

  Heimrich decided not to try to explain that. “I can’t,” he said, “control the newspapers. But I doubt that they’ll insinuate anything about Mr. Dale. Just what is it you’re afraid of?”

  “An artist,” she said, and now was again the—Heimrich sought a term. Actress, certainly. In tragic role, beyond a doubt. “A great artist. Sensitive. He must be protected.”

  Assuming she was still talking about Francis Dale, Heimrich considered briefly. A good actor and a veteran at it, beyond a doubt. A man of quivering sensibility, who would be “crucified” because his name was mentioned in accounts of his former wife’s murder? Heimrich doubted it. He had seen Dale several times since the company had been on location in Van Brunt. Dale had not looked like a man who quivered readily.