21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  Heimrich looked down the long room toward the bar and, finally, saw a familiar face. Harold, until he had retired a year or so before, had been the bartender at the Old Stone Inn.

  “Scotch and soda,” Sam Jackson said, and Mary said, “Could I have a daiquiri, please?” And Heimrich said, “Look who’s tending bar, dear,” and took Susan’s arm and guided her down the room, among the strangers—a good many of whom, he thought, looked like being contemporaries of their host—toward the familiar face. When they reached the bar, Harold said, “Inspector. Mrs. Heimrich. The usual for both of you?”

  The words had a pleasant sound. Susan said, “Please, Harold,” and then, “No. I think I’ll have a gin and tonic.” Heimrich merely nodded his head at Harold, and Harold mixed a gin and tonic and a dry martini. He twisted lemon peel over the martini.

  In the few minutes they had been in the big drawing room, it had become almost crowded. At the open double doors Arthur Jameson still was greeting arriving guests. People Heimrich did not know were converging on the bar, smiling, polite and clearly thirsty. “We’re blocking traffic,” Susan said, and they edged away from the bar, holding their glasses carefully, saying, “Sorry. If we may?” and getting smiles and polite movements from people they did not know. They reached what was, moderately, a clearing.

  It was occupied by a tall, white-haired woman in a long black dress. The white hair was somewhat scanty; the long, deeply tanned face was crisscrossed by tiny wrinkles. She had a needlessly long, strong nose. She looked, Merton Heimrich thought, as if she had been well baked. She looked as if she had spent many summer days on golf courses.

  She was not alone in this momentary breathing space. On one side of her was a tall and substantial young man with blond hair cut short. His dinner jacket was dark blue and his “black” tie matched it. He had a wide smile which appeared to have been grafted onto his face. Bored politeness fixes smiles in place.

  On the other side of the woman in black was a startlingly pretty young woman—a slim young woman in a sleeveless white dress. She had blue eyes of surprising size and blond hair which drifted in waves to her shoulders. Her smile, too, looked fixed in place. But so, Heimrich thought, must ours. He also thought, hopefully, that there must be chairs somewhere. Somewhere, preferably, in a corner. They had almost smiled past the three when the whitehaired woman said, “You must be Susan Upton.” She spoke firmly, in a low, strong voice.

  Susan turned, and Merton Heimrich turned with her. The woman in black stepped toward them; her stride was long. Late sixties or early seventies, Heimrich thought. And not moving like it. She made him think of a long-legged bird.

  “I’m Ursula Jameson,” she said. “You are Susan Upton? I don’t forget faces.”

  “I was, Miss Jameson,” Susan said. “A long time ago. I’m Susan Heimrich now. It’s such a lovely party.”

  One can only stick to the truth so long, Merton thought. He made appropriate noises which included Ursula Jameson’s name.

  “I know,” Miss Jameson said. “Of course I know. Your husband’s some sort of a policeman.”

  “This is my husband, Miss Jameson,” Susan said and her voice, to her husband’s mild surprise, was almost as firm as Ursula Jameson’s, although a great deal younger. “Inspector Heimrich, of the New York State Police.” She paused for a second. “Bureau of Criminal Identification,” she said.

  “It says ‘Faye’ on the window of that shop of yours,” Miss Jameson said. “F-a-y-e.”

  “My first husband was named Faye,” Susan said. “He was a Marine Corps officer. He was killed in Korea, Miss Jameson.”

  “Pity,” Miss Jameson said. Under the circumstances, Merton Heimrich thought, it was a comment somewhat ambiguous.

  Miss Jameson turned partly away from them. It was, Heimrich thought, as if her nose turned and the rest of her followed it. She turned toward the tall young man and the slight and very pretty girl. She said, “You two,” and the girl said, “Yes, Miss Jameson?”

  Looking at the two, Heimrich had thought their smiles had relaxed somewhat and that they had moved a little closer together. But now the girl’s smile was as politely fixed as before and the man’s might have been stenciled on his lips.

  “Susan Heimrich,” Miss Jameson said. “And her husband. He’s a police inspector.”

  The very pretty girl said, “Mrs. Heimrich. Inspector. I’m Dorothy Selby. This is my cousin, Geoffrey Rankin.”

  “Distant cousin,” Rankin said. He had a deep, pleasant voice.

  “I—”

  “Miss Selby’s helping Artie with his book,” Ursula Jameson said. “Mr. Rankin lives in New York. He’s—you’re a lawyer, aren’t you, Rankin?”

  “Yes,” Rankin said. “Can I get drinks for anybody? Miss Jameson? Dot?”

  He looked at his own tall glass, which was empty. He looked at the glasses in the Heimrichs’ hands, which were not.

  “Bourbon,” Ursula said, the firmness in her voice unabated. “With a little plain water and not too much ice.”

  The tall young man looked down at the pretty girl.

  “Scotch and soda, Jeff,” Dorothy Selby said. “A weak one, please.”

  “All right,” Geoffrey Rankin said. “Only your mother’s not here.” He went off from their little—and shrinking—clearing, carrying three glasses.

  Dorothy looked after him and laughed lightly and turned back to the Heimrichs and Ursula Jameson.

  “We probably don’t make much sense,” Dorothy said, primarily to Susan and Merton. “My mother doesn’t much approve of drinking. And, as Jeff said, she’s not here. She was dreadfully sorry, Miss Jameson. But these clients—she’s in real estate, you know.”

  Rather suddenly, Merton Heimrich did. “In Cold Harbor,” he said. “Florence Selby. That’s it, isn’t it? A niece of mine and her husband bought their house through her a few years ago. Mr. and Mrs. John Alden.”

  All party conversation is irrelevant to everything. Dorothy said, “Yes?” in a voice of great politeness, which seemed to ask Heimrich to go on with a fascinating conversation.

  Heimrich looked down at Susan for rescue. Susan said, “Mr. Jameson is writing a book?”

  “No fool like an old fool,” Ursula Jameson said to that, or apparently to that. “About time to get people to start eating.”

  With that she went away, toward her brother, still waiting at the double doors for late-comers, but waiting now in a small group.

  They watched Ursula Jameson, her black dress whipping around a rather bony figure, as she walked toward Arthur Jameson and his little group. She walked with long strides.

  “She’s a dear, really,” Dorothy said. “She does rather mother him, I suppose. Although actually she’s a couple of years younger. Yes, Mrs. Heimrich, Mr. Jameson’s writing a book. I do typing for him. Shorthand when he wants to dictate. It’s about the Jamesons. They came from England in the sixteen hundreds and had a tremendous land grant. Cold Harbor was part of it. It reached almost down to Van Brunt, actually. Not quite, but almost. The first Jameson built this house. Part of it, anyway. An English family surrounded by people from Holland, they must have been.”

  Heimrich said, “Mmmm.” Susan was more inventive. She said that it all sounded very interesting.

  “Arthur thinks it is,” Dorothy said. “And it really is, Mrs. Heimrich. It’s going to be a very interesting book.”

  Methinks the lady, Heimrich thought. He looked at his glass and emptied it. He looked at Susan’s, which was two-thirds emptied. “Maybe we’d better—” Heimrich said, and Geoffrey Rankin edged toward them, carrying two tall glasses and a short one on a tray. He looked at the three and said, “Miss Jameson get tired of waiting? It’s rather a crush at the bar.” Dorothy indicated the far end of the room with a motion of her head. Ursula had joined her brother in the little group of which he had been the center.

  “Better get us refills, dear,” Heimrich said to his wife. She looked up at him and then at Dorothy Selby and Geoffrey Rankin. She
nodded her head slowly. They went away toward the bar.

  There must be forty people in here by now, Heimrich thought. Voices were rising in the room; the room clattered with voices.

  “You said we could leave early,” Merton said, down to Susan and keeping his voice very low.

  “Not this early,” Susan said. “And probably it will thin out a little when people start to eat. They wanted to be alone. You could tell by the way they looked at each other.”

  “They’re cousins,” Heimrich said. “I do know what you mean, if you mean the pretty girl and Rankin.”

  “Distant cousins, he said,” Susan told him. “The way we used to look at each other, I suppose.”

  “Right number. Wrong tense,” Heimrich said, and looked down at her. She smiled and nodded her head and said, “All right.”

  “And this,” Heimrich said, “is sure as hell no place to be alone. Come to that, it’s no place to be. Who are all these people?”

  “Worthy citizens,” Susan said as they moved on toward the crowded bar. “The one over there in a sort of purplish dress is Mrs. Parkins. She was in the other day looking at fabrics. She likes them purple. I don’t run to purple much. And the big woman over there is Mrs. Turner. The one in the yellow dress. She redid her living room last summer. It came to yards and yards.”

  They managed to wedge up to the bar. There they ended beside Sam and Mary Jackson, for whom Harold was making drinks. Sam said, “Making out?” Merton Heimrich said, “Barely. Yes, Harold, when you can get to them.”

  Harold said, “Right up, Inspector,” and filled a long glass half full of ice and measured gin onto it and flicked open a bottle of Schweppes. He mixed a martini with very little vermouth in it and poured it in a chilled glass and twisted lemon peel over it and threw the lemon peel away. The Inn is certainly going to miss him, Heimrich thought, and clicked his glass against Susan’s tall glass.

  “There’s going to be champagne in the dining room,” Harold said. “Banquet room would be more like it. Taittinger, no less. Cases of the stuff.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Susan said, with no conviction in her voice. They moved away from the bar, to make room for others who were not waiting for Taittinger. The Jacksons moved away with them.

  “At eight o’clock,” Sam said, “I suppose we all raise our glasses and sing, ‘Happy birthday, dear Arthur.’ I don’t know what’s got into the old boy. Always been a bit of a ritualist, but all this—” He ended by shrugging his shoulders. He looked at the watch on his wrist. He said, “Fifteen minutes, I make it,” and Heimrich looked at his watch and nodded his head.

  “I,” Mary Jackson said, “would like to sit down.”

  “In the First World War,” Jackson said, “my father said they always synchronized their watches before they went over the top. So they would know the exact time they died, he used to say. Let’s find a place to sit down.”

  It proved a difficult thing to do. Too many others were of the same mind. But finally they found a small sofa empty, and Mary and Susan sat on it while their two men stood in front of them. And voices clattered all around them. The voices were higher than they had been earlier. Rather shrill laughter had begun to cut through the voices. It was, Merton Heimrich decided, precisely the sort of party he liked least. The drive home would be almost thirty miles. Probably it would be raining.

  “Buck up, MX.,” Sam Jackson said. “That’s the old boy.”

  Sam Jackson, Heimrich thought, was getting a little drunk. Or perhaps it was only that his nerves were fraying.

  Melodious chimes sounded, soft over the shrillness. Arthur Jameson’s guests began to flow up the room toward the double open doors. Jameson himself was no longer there, nor was his sister.

  “Once more into the breach,” Jackson said, and held a hand down to his wife. He pulled her up beside him. The four of them joined the slow current which flowed up the room. “It’s like a procession,” Susan said. “In some medieval pageant.”

  “Enter lords and ladies of the court,” Heimrich said, and put his empty glass down on a convenient table. Susan put hers down. With the Jacksons a few steps ahead, and the speed of the procession picking up a little, they reached the open doors and went into the square entrance hall they had come in through. A heavy man neither of them had ever seen before sat in one of the unrelenting wooden chairs. His eyes were closed, and his glass tilted in his hand.

  They went across the entrance hall. More glass doors stood open on the far side of it. They went into another long room—as long and wide as the drawing room they had had their drinks in.

  A table ran down the center, and candles flickered on it in silver candlesticks. There were candles, too, in sconces on the walls. The long table was covered with white linen which fell precisely to the floor; there was food the length of the table—food in bowls of ice, on platters, in warming trays. As they came through the doorway, men in white jackets held silver trays out to them, and champagne bubbled gently in the glasses on the trays. Two men in white aprons and chef’s caps stood, seemingly at attention, near each of the long walls. Nobody was taking food from the long table. Everybody was waiting for something.

  From behind a screen at the far end of the room, music filtered out, softly—the music of a violin and a piano.

  The guests who had preceded the Heimrichs into this room—this banquet hall-stood near the walls and sipped from their glasses. After the earlier chatter over their drinks, they were strangely quiet. They were all looking toward the far end of the table, where Arthur Jameson stood, tall and slender and, Heimrich thought, almost obtrusively immaculate. He stood and smiled and waited.

  And Dorothy Selby, slender in her sleeveless white dress, and looking very young, stood beside him.

  When all the guests were inside—there must be forty or more, Heimrich thought—the doors to the entrance hall were closed behind them. For a few seconds, Jameson still stood erect and smiling. The slim girl beside him smiled too.

  The music stopped. Then Jameson spoke; his voice projected only slightly.

  “Friends,” Jameson said. “Very dear friends. I have asked you here to join me in celebrating my good fortune—my most extremely good fortune. Dorothy here has done me the honor—the very great honor—to consent to become my wife.”

  Then he leaned down and kissed Dorothy Selby on the lips.

  For a moment there was complete silence in the room. Then people began to clap their hands, and then the guests began to surge down toward Jameson and the girl. By candlelight, Heimrich thought, Jameson looked older than he had before. And Dorothy Selby looked younger.

  The music started up again. The men in chef’s caps moved away from the wall to the long table, and one of them began to carve a turkey. Another began to slice a ham, and a third lifted a silver ladle over something which simmered in a tureen. The fourth took up knife and fork and began to carve something on an enormous platter halfway down the table.

  Heimrich looked over heads.

  The man was carving a suckling pig. The pig had an apple in its mouth.

  For God’s sake, Heimrich thought, and followed Susan to plates and silverware on a table which crossed the long table at the near end of it.

  A man in a white jacket began to snap open small tables and set them along the walls. Another man brought chairs for them. Guests began to pick up plates and knives and forks and intricately folded napkins.

  But nobody sang “Happy birthday, dear Arthur.” There wasn’t even a birthday cake. There would, Heimrich thought, have been too many candles.

  *Heimrich arrested Mrs. Cornelia Van Brunt for murder in Burnt Offering.

  3

  It had been only a little after eleven when they got home. It had not been raining on the drive home. Merton had tipped Teddy Carnes a dollar for the car parking, and Susan had thought that too much—had thought that if others were as generous, Teddy would be on his way to another, and even noisier, Honda. But Heimrich avoids carrying silver. It jingles in the
pocket. They had driven almost ten miles on their way home before either of them said anything.

  This is not unusual when the Heimrichs are driving, particularly when they are driving at night—most particularly after Merton Heimrich has had a drink or two. His observation of the road ahead is then intent and unwavering. Susan sometimes helps him watch it. They had driven ten miles when Susan looked at the big man beside her, who did not look away from the road.

  “There is only one word for it,” Susan said. “The word is ‘preposterous.’”

  Heimrich did not take his eyes from the road. He said, “‘Archaic’?”

  “If you’d rather,” Susan said. “Perhaps ‘unbelievable? The whole thing, I mean. That poor girl.”

  Heimrich said, “Mmmm.” For five miles he did not say anything else. Then he said, “She won’t be. Poor, I mean.”

  Susan waited some time before answering. She waited another three miles or so. Then she said, “I suppose so. She seemed like a nice child, but I suppose so. Her family’s as good as his, or almost, but that doesn’t count any more.”

  “But not as well off,” Heimrich said. He switched the heater on in the Buick. “As for the other, I’d guess it counts with Jameson. Counts one hell of a lot. Did you see the coat of arms on the wall at the end of the lounge?”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “A leopard rampant on what looked like a field of daisies. Or was it couchant? Or was it a field of marigolds? All that and a wing collar too. How old did Sam say he was?”

  “Seventy-three,” Heimrich said. “Or perhaps seventy-two. He’s what they call well preserved.”

  “That’s the word we were looking for,” Susan said. “‘Preserved.’ In amber, whatever that may mean. Or, ‘fossilized’?”

  Heimrich agreed with an “Mmmm.” He drove on, at not much over forty miles an hour. Several cars passed him. He does not mind being passed on the road. He turned off NY IIF into High Road and drifted up it. The Buick climbed up the steep driveway. It was much cooler when they got out of the car. The chaises and tables on the terrace looked forsaken. They seemed, Susan thought, to be shivering.