“Just keeping things straight,” he told the big man, mildly. “Went up there on the scooter?”
Marley had. And, again, what difference did it make?
Heimrich did not answer that. He said, “And left the scooter down on the road and walked up to the house?”
Marley couldn’t see what Heimrich was getting at, what he was making a point of. The driveway was steep and rough, more than the scooter could handle. “With a man my size on it.”
“Walked up the drive? Or the path?”
“Now listen,” Marley said. “What’s this all about? And what path? You said it was O.K. to get the wagon and—”
“Just getting things straight,” Heimrich said. “Coming down the drive in the Buick you met a young woman coming up?”
“Yes. A woman with a damn big dog on the seat. She had to back down.”
“Then?”
“This is damned pointless,” Marley said. “But all right. Went down the road a few yards to where I’d put the scooter off to the side. So somebody wouldn’t run over it. Loaded it into the wagon and came back here. Had lunch here. For lunch I had shirred eggs and sausage and—”
“Now Mr. Marley,” Heimrich said. “I realize this seems trivial. How long did it take you to load the scooter?”
“Maybe you know what you’re after,” Marley said, in a tone of doubt, but of resignation. “Five minutes or so. Maybe ten. It’s heavier than it looks and you’ve got to get it set so it won’t roll around.” “You didn’t go back to the house later?” Heimrich said. “To, say, pick up something you’d forgotten?”
“I certainly did not. And now suppose you tell me what the hell you are after.”
Heimrich hesitated. He let an expression of doubt, of indecision, appear on his face. He thought how much more adeptly almost any of these people, including Marley, could arrange on a face an expression suitable to the occasion.
“Well—” Heimrich said. “I suppose there’s no harm in saying this much. Somebody’s been poking around up there. Seems the door got left unlocked somehow.”
“Poking around? Took something, you mean?”
“That’s just it,” Heimrich said. “Something no good to anyone. Design for a fabric. Collins had done it to show to Mrs. Faye. Susan Faye. She was the young woman with the dog. On her way up to have a second look at the design. Been a bit shaken up after we found the bodies, naturally. Didn’t really look at it.”
He sounded puzzled. He said it didn’t seem to make much sense, but that there it was. Why anybody would want to steal a fabric design—
It was time for a slip.
“Whatever Mrs. Faye felt was wrong,” Heimrich said, in an abstracted tone, “it certainly didn’t have anything to do with—”
He caught himself. He looked (he hoped) somewhat embarrassed.
“Wrong?” Marley said.
“All right,” Heimrich said, “I said more than I meant to. Mrs. Faye got one of those notions women get. Thought there was something wrong in the studio. Something there that oughtn’t to be, or the other way around. It’s all very vague. Something that didn’t belong in—”
Again he stopped and shook his head in self-reproof.
“Wait a minute,” Marley said, which was what Heimrich was already doing. “Something to do with the—deaths? Something that didn’t belong in the picture, you were going to say?”
“Now Mr. Marley—”
“Wrong with the setup,” Marley said. “Makes you not so sure Collins killed Peggy, the way it looked?”
“Well—”
Marley would be damned. He got up from the table.
“This vague—feeling—of this Mrs. Faye,” he said. “That’s all you’ve got to go on?”
“Well,” Heimrich said. “The chief thing, I suppose.”
“And she doesn’t know what it was? Only ‘something’ in the studio?” He shook his big head. “That sounds a lot like intuition to me,” he said.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Of course, it’s more or less Mrs. Faye’s line of country. Spot things you and I wouldn’t, perhaps.”
“But,” Marley said, “in spite of being so vague about it, she’s sure it wasn’t this—what did you call it—design?”
“Seems to be.”
Marley didn’t get it. Why, he wanted to know, would anybody—he supposed Heimrich meant somebody with something to hide about the murder—steal a design that hadn’t anything to do with anything? Why, come to that, think it had something to do with something?
“I wish I knew,” Heimrich said. “We’ll just have to keep plugging, apparendy. I’m afraid Mrs. Faye’s memory won’t improve. She doesn’t think it will. Anyway, you say it wasn’t you.”
Marley said it sure as hell wasn’t.
Heimrich was sorry he’d interrupted Mr. Marley’s work. He would just have to keep asking around. Did Mr. Marley know where he could find the others? Mr. Dale? Miss Waggoner? Mr. Latham? Mr. Zersk, although of course Mr. Zersk wasn’t staying at the hotel.
Dale had driven into New York to have lunch with somebody. Marley didn’t, he said, know about the others. He hoped to God young Georgie-Porgie was working on a scene he couldn’t seem to get through his head. He hoped with Zersk.
Stir up the animals. It was hard to be sure whether he had stirred up Mr. Marley. It had not been apparent. He had, he suspected, merely persuaded Mr. Marley that the case was in the hands of extremely doddering detectives.
He found Anton Zersk and George Latham together, as Marley had hoped. They were not, however, working on a scene, unless the scene included badminton, which Heimrich doubted had been played in the old Dutch days along the Hudson. Bowling would have been more like it. Zersk and young Latham were being noticeably athletic on the badminton court of the Cold Harbor Motor Lodge.
Heimrich doddered for their benefit. Neither had stolen the roll of drawing paper. Both were suitably puzzled as to what purpose such a theft would have served; properly, but no more than properly (so far as Heimrich could determine), interested in, and blank about, what Susan Faye could have seen wrong in the studio.
“Chris and I did go in there,” Latham said. “Before we did that—re-enactment.”
“By the way,” Heimrich said, “Miss Waggoner’s idea or yours? The re-enactment.”
It had been hers; Latham smiled at it, in retrospect. He said that Chris had a lot of ideas.
They had gone into the studio to look at the nude portrait of Peggy Belford, having read about it in the newspapers. And?
“The guy sure could paint,” Latham said.
They had, certainly, taken nothing out of the studio.
Where, now, was Miss Waggoner? If she wasn’t at the hotel, where Latham had taken her after they left the Collins house, neither knew.
“She might have noticed something in the studio,” Heimrich said. “Maybe it was something only a woman would notice. Mind asking her, if you see her before I do?”
This was, primarily, to Latham, who certainly would ask her. Although, if it had been anything obvious, he supposed she would have mentioned it at the time.
Heimrich drove back to the Inn. Miss Waggoner was not in her room, nor in any of the public rooms. Forniss, however, was in the taproom, meditatively consuming beer.
X
The reporters had left the taproom, apparently in a pack. Reporters have a tendency to move in packs. Heimrich moved into the taproom’s coolness and joined Forniss, at the table, in a beer.
“Our friend Fielding was here yesterday,” Forniss said. “Looking for Miss Belford.” Fomiss’s voice reflected some satisfaction. Heimrich said, “Oh?” encouragingly.
Forniss had come back to the Inn half an hour ago, after most of an afternoon at a telephone. To which he would come later. He had been hailed from the desk by Miss Sneed—Miss Amantha Sneed, the Inn’s bookkeeper, filling in at the desk, for a couple of quiet afternoon hours, as she did a good many afternoons. As she had done the afternoon before. Miss Sneed had sa
id, “Oh! Sergeant Forniss.” Forniss had gone over.
“Oh,” Miss Sneed said, “I don’t suppose it’s anything. But there was a man here yesterday when I was on enquiring about Miss Belford. Oh, the poor thing.”
The “poor thing,” it appeared, had been Miss Belford, not the enquiring man.
The man had asked whether Miss Belford was registered there and, on being told she was, had asked her room number and, being given it, had used the house phone. And had been unanswered. He had looked into the public rooms—into the taproom, the lounge— and, shaking his head, gone out.
“Fielding?” Heimrich said, and Forniss said, “Listen.”
“Who does this sound like?” Forniss said. “ ‘Portly man.’ ‘Very’ portly. Partly bald. Wasn’t wearing a hat. Noticeably husky voice. Wore glasses. Rimless bifocals. Miss Sneed had seen him before. Thought he was a local who has dinner here now and then. Not one of the regulars; doesn’t think he actually lives in Van Brunt. Sort of a semi-local, apparently.”
“Observant woman Miss Sneed,” Heimrich said. “Still— Although I’ll admit it fits.”
“So,” Forniss said, “I found Mrs. Oliphant. Told her what Miss Sneed said. Mrs. Oliphant said, ‘Goodness. That must have been Mr. Fielding,’ and told me that Mr. Fielding and Miss Belford had been married, she understood, and divorced. And said, ‘Goodness, these movie people,’ and then that she shouldn’t have said that, with poor Miss Belford dead and all like that.”
Mrs. Oliphant is the owner of the Old Stone Inn. She finds “all like that” a convenient catch-all, although it is sometimes difficult to determine what she has caught in it.
Heimrich said, “Hm-mm.” He pointed out that none of this placed Roland Fielding at the Collins house, with a gun in his hand.
“Nope,” Forniss said. “But—somebody could have told him where she was. Also, he’d know about Collins. And the house. And, probably, the swimming pool. And that Belford liked swimming pools.” He paused. “Two thousand a month is still a lot of money,” Forniss said.
“We’ll ask him,” Heimrich said. “Also, what he was doing this afternoon. Since—”
Forniss listened.
“Huh-uh,” Forniss said. “Mrs. Faye went there about ten? The first time. And—about ten we were talking to Fielding. So, he couldn’t have looked in the window and watched her. Only—you’re sure somebody did?”
“Now Charlie. No.”
“Could be,” Forniss said, “our going there worried him. Got him to wondering. Had he missed something when he killed them? Left something that might give him away? And, remembered that Collins had worked on the design while he was there—while they were supposed to be waiting for La Belford.”
“Which,” Heimrich said, “is pure, unadulterated theory, Charlie.”
“Yep,” Forniss said. “Wondered if maybe there had been something phony about that, like maybe Collins had left a message and he’d missed it. So he goes up to see, on the chance he can get in and look, and if there’s somebody around, he’s a sightseer. What the newspaper boys call morbidly curious. They having done their damnedest to stir up the curiosity.”
“Hm-mm,” Heimrich said.
“That way,” Forniss said, “we get around his not watching Mrs. Faye through the window.”
“We’ll ask him,” Heimrich said. “Also—see that he knows the design was the wrong thing to steal.”
Forniss lighted a cigarette. He raised heavy eyebrows.
Heimrich told him of the stirring up of animals.
“Only,” Forniss said, “suppose our man, instead of going back to the house to have another look, goes to Mrs. Faye and—tries to persuade her to remember?”
“Let’s hope not,” Heimrich said. “I made it pretty definite that she’d tried to remember and couldn’t. That she didn’t think she was going to be able to. The sensible thing would be to go to the house and look.”
“Let’s hope our man is sensible,” Forniss said. “Now, about L.A.”
About L.A., as reported upon, via telephone, by Ben Cohen, et al., at considerable toll cost to the New York State Police:
If Heimrich thought, or had hoped, that there was something suspicious about the death from too much Nembutal of Gertrude Marley, Forniss was afraid Heimrich was going to be disappointed. The police were satisfied; beyond that, the press was satisfied. Forniss was satisfied himself.
Mrs. Marley had taken the Nembutal on going to bed one night some eighteen months previously. Marley had been at home; he had been in his study going over a preliminary treatment of The Last Patroon. He had gone up to his own, adjoining room, around two o’clock in the morning, and had gone quietly so as not to waken his wife. It was not until ten o’clock the next morning that he discovered wakening her would have been impossible.
She had been depressed. Marley said that, and that he had not thought it serious. And a doctor said that, and that he had not thought it serious either, but that it was not always possible to tell. The doctor blamed himself.
Chris, not sixteen then, away at school, had not agreed—had insisted, with a child’s desperate violence, desperate belief, that her mother would never have taken her own life, that death must have been accidental. The police had been tolerant; everybody had been tolerant. It had, formally, been left accident or suicide, since it did not much matter—since there was no suggestion of homicide.
“Too bad, in a way,” Forniss said. “Marley kills his wife, La Belford finds out about it and puts the squeeze on and—exit La Belford. Nice simple pattern. Only, nothing to hang it on. Suicide while in a depression; state of depression verified by medical evidence.”
“It would have been a nice pattern,” Heimrich said. “The doctor was a doctor?”
Forniss raised his eyebrows.
“Psychiatrist?” Heimrich said. “They have some queer ones out there, from all I hear. An M.D.?”
“Oh,” Forniss said. “Not an M.D., Cohen says. Psychoanalyst. Why?”
Forniss could consider it merely curiosity. That, plus the fact that they did have some queer ones out there. More than most places, possibly, although the “lay psychoanalyst” was not unknown elsewhere; was not, either, to be confused with a psychiatrist who might place great reliance on psychoanalytical theories and methods or might not. It probably didn’t make any difference.
“This man,” Forniss said. “A—” He referred to notes—“A Dr. Robert Wiley, is very popular with the movie people, Cohen says. You’ve had the Wiley treatment or you might as well be normal, and if you’re normal, where are you?”
“Any of our little group?”
It was characteristic of Forniss that he had found out, although, in his own mind, accepting Mrs. Marley’s death as suicidal; regarding things related to it as, therefore, of little importance. Zersk had been a patient of Dr. Wiley, Cohen had heard. He had never heard that Dale had been.
“By the way,” Forniss said, interrupting himself, “Dale’s real name, believe it or not, is Herman Dobbling. Or was, anyway.” He paused. “Except that everybody knows that—I mean, if Belford had been, say, the only one—” He shrugged his shoulders.
He regarded his empty glass. He signaled to Harold, the barman.
“You know,” Forniss said, “it could be that Collins was the one somebody was really after. You’ve thought of that?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “The other seems more likely but, yes. So Zersk was a patient of this—doctor?”
“Yes. And Peggy went around with him, only not as a patient as far as Ben knows, for a while. After she was separated from Fielding. Instead, as everyone expected, with Marley.”
“Expected?”
Cohen had said that there had been rumors. He said that there were always rumors about Peggy Belford. He also said that there had not been anything to prove that Peggy had not been a friend both of Marley and his wife, and there was nothing to make this association strange, since Peggy was frequently in pictures Marley produced. Had Cohen, inciden
tally, thought it strange that Peggy was so often in Marley pictures?
“Because she couldn’t act?” Cohen had said. “Most of them can’t. Most of them don’t look like she looked.”
Mrs. Marley’s money had gone to her daughter, not to her husband. And her lawyer had been appointed Chris’s guardian. And Marley, interviewed at the time of his wife’s death, had said that this had long been arranged between them and that he had thought it eminently fair, since a large part of the money had been earned by Chris’s father.
“For my money,” Forniss said, “Mrs. Marley’s death, and what she did with her money, doesn’t hook up.”
“Apparently not,” Heimrich said. “Go ahead, Charlie.”
Dale—whether once a Dobbling or not—was generally considered a good egg; indeed, a very superior egg. He had a big fruit ranch and, when not “working”—“they’re only working when they’re doing a picture,” Forniss said—managed it himself. He had not remarried since Peggy had divorced him. “Apparently plays the field in a casual sort of way,” Forniss said. Dale had paid Peggy alimony, reputedly large, until her marriage to Fielding, but the payments stopped with the marriage.
“Come back to Fielding all the time,” Forniss pointed out and got a mild “Now Charlie,” for his pains.
Zersk was more interesting. He had escaped, with his wife, from Czechoslovakia some ten years before. He had already, on the Continent, made a considerable reputation as a director, chiefly for the stage but also for motion pictures. “Got going early, apparently,” Forniss said. “In his thirties now.”
Zersk had taken out first papers. It would soon be time for him to become a citizen. He had directed, for Marley—and so for Allied Pictures—several films in which Peggy Belford appeared. It was rumored that he did not share Cohen’s tolerant view of her acting. There were also rumors that M. G. Drisken did not.
“But,” Cohen had said, “Marley’s hot just now, so they let him have it his way pretty much. Anyway, as long as she’s box office.”
Forniss had said that Zersk was more interesting. Why?
Forniss hesitated. He said that he didn’t, God knew, want to sound like the late senator. On the other hand—
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