21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  Heimrich turned back to the open window. He started to pull down the lower pane. He stopped when it was halfway closed.

  A starter was grinding from the direction of the turnaround in front of the big house. The engine caught almost at once. It was a heavy engine and caught with a roar. Heimrich opened the window fully and leaned out of it. The corner of the house cut off his view of most of the turnaround. Then a big gray car backed into sight. It turned and went down the drive, gravel spurting under its rear tires.

  The trooper in the police car used his starter, and the engine caught. Another trooper ran out of the house toward the police car, which was already backing toward its own turn down the drive.

  “Mr. Rankin seems to be leaving us,” Heimrich said, and went out of the den, walking fast. Forniss went after him.

  When they had gone down the stairs, Heimrich went into a trot and Forniss ran after him. When they reached the turnaround, the police cruiser had left it, with gravel spurting. And the starter of a second police car was grinding.

  “Hold it,” Heimrich shouted to the trooper behind the wheel of the second cruiser. The sound of the starter stopped.

  “The car which went after the Chrysler,” Heimrich said. “What’s its number?”

  “Four-twenty, Inspector. Four-two-oh. You don’t want we should-?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. He went on to the Buick. He switched the radio on and got the usual clatter of voices. He took the transmitter off the hook.

  “Car Ten calling dispatch,” Heimrich said. “Come in, K. Car One-oh calling—”

  “Troop K dispatch,” a voice said through the clatter. “Come in, Ten. One-oh, come in.”

  “Heimrich. Car Four-twenty—repeat, Car Four-two-oh—is following a gray Chrysler Imperial on Route Eleven F. South on Eleven F, probably. Get Four-two-oh and direct it not—repeat not—to stop the Chrysler. Do not use siren. Follow at a distance and report movements of Chrysler. If it crosses city line, or appears to be about to, turn over to city police. Message clear?”

  “Message received, Inspector. Follow but do not impede.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said and put the transmitter back on its hook. He remembered he had forgotten to say, “Over and out,” which dispatchers expect as their due. He got out of the Buick.

  “On the run, looks like,” Forniss said.

  “Not too far with a tail on him,” Heimrich said. “Interesting to see where he runs to, naturally. My hunch is—”

  He did not finish. A half truck was crunching up the drive. There were two men in it, both in work clothes. As the truck turned to park, Heimrich could see the lettering on the side of its cab. It read, “Denny & Co., General Contractors.”

  “Men I called,” Forniss said. “Men with the dragline.” He walked toward the truck.

  The man who got out of the truck appeared to be in his sixties. He was lean and weathered. He said, “You the man called us? Furnish? Something like that?”

  “Forniss.”

  “So all right. Get the gear out, Ted. Where’s this damn lake?”

  “Over there,” Forniss said, and pointed. “You’ll have to go down a long flight of steps. The railing’s loose, so watch it.”

  “Bring it along, Ted,” the weathered man said to the larger, and much younger, man who was unloading a dragline from the truck. He went off in the direction Forniss had pointed out. Ted wrapped a considerable length of rope over a shoulder and took out a metal piece which looked somewhat like a big rake. He carried the line and the drag as if they were heavy, and went after the lean, weathered man.

  “All they’ll do’ll be worry the fish, probably,” Forniss said.

  “Probably,” Heimrich said, and walked off toward the house. Forniss went with him.

  Asa Purvis opened the door for them.

  “It’s my fault, sir,” Purvis said. “Should’ve stopped him. Only, I saw you and the lieutenant drive up and I thought we were covered and—well, I had to go, sir. I mean, you know how it is sometimes.”

  “We all have to go sometimes, Asa,” Heimrich said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “He’d just been wandering around,” Asa Purvis said. “Restless like. Looking out of windows and that sort of thing. But I didn’t get the idea he was going to—well, going to light out.”

  “None of us did,” Heimrich said, and went on into the house. He went into the long drawing room. There were only a few coals left in the fireplace. Ursula Jameson was sitting in front of it. She had changed from slacks to a black dress. She had smoothed her gray hair. Her nose jutted over lightly rouged lips. When Heimrich and Forniss were still half the room from her, Ursula Jameson said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Inspector. Where have you been?”

  Heimrich did not answer until he had pulled a chair up at the end of the sofa and sat down in it. Forniss went to lean against the fireplace.

  “At the hospital, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. “Dr. Tennant is still unconscious, and they don’t seem to expect any immediate change. Your niece is quieter now. Still in shock, of course, but quieter.”

  “Those awful stairs,” Ursula said. “I kept telling Arthur. Telling him over and over. He—when it was things about the house, he just let things drift by. Because things get to be too much trouble. You’re a young man. You wouldn’t know.”

  Merton Heimrich does not think of himself as a particularly young man. He let it go—let it, he thought, drift past him. He said, “I suppose not, Miss Jameson. You’ve been waiting for me, you say?”

  “That Rankin man,” she said. “Did he run away? Did you let him run away?”

  “He left,” Heimrich said. “He wasn’t under detention. Legally, quite free to go where he likes. As all of you are, of course.”

  “Well,” Ursula Jameson said, “maybe you know your business, Inspector.” The doubt in her voice was noticeable.

  “I hope so,” Heimrich said. “You’ve been waiting for me, you say. Have you thought of something you want to tell us? About your brother’s death? About Dr. Tennant’s fall?”

  “My brother was killed,” she said. “Murdered. I don’t know anything about Jim Tennant’s accident. Except that the railing came loose. My brother should have had it repaired a long time ago. I kept telling him about it. Of course, the doctor should have looked where he was going.”

  “Was he inclined not to?” Heimrich asked her, and she said, “What?”

  “To look where he was going,” Heimrich said.

  “He walked around thinking,” she said. “I will say that. Almost, sometimes, as if he were reading something when he walked. If that’s what you mean.”

  “What I’m asking about. Just trying to find things out. You mean, abstracted? Not watching where he was putting his feet?”

  “You could call it that if you wanted to. He was that way today after—after the awful thing about Arthur. Didn’t you sense that?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Of course, I met him for the first time today.”

  “Last night,” she said. “You must have met him last night. Or did Arthur forget to introduce you? He did forget sometimes.”

  Heimrich said he didn’t remember meeting Dr. James Tennant. He added that there were a lot of people at the party last night.

  “Arthur’s idea,” she said. “If he’d left it to me, the way he did most things. Not that arranging the party wasn’t left to me. Getting everything in and all those extra people. And the candles. Have you any idea how many candles we had to have?”

  Heimrich shook his head. He thought, She’s showing her age. People get rattled sometimes as they get old.

  “Ten dozen,” she said. “Ten dozen candles. And do you think it’s easy to find a suckling pig? And get it roasted properly?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” Heimrich said. He found his mind tending to wander. He wondered if the men pulling a line behind a rowboat were doing anything more helpful than disturbing fish. He wondered whether he had been right in his guess about Geoffrey R
ankin. He brought his mind back—back, apparently, to the difficulty of getting a suckling pig properly roasted. With, of course, an apple in its mouth. His mind stayed there only for an instant.

  “You said you’d been waiting for me, Miss Jameson. Had you thought of something you wanted to tell me? Something you’d remembered? About your brother’s death?”

  “Murder,” she said. “Why don’t you call it murder? You think I’m a silly old woman, don’t you?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Something you remembered? Perhaps something that, when you’d thought it over, seemed to have more significance than it had when it first happened?”

  “It didn’t really happen,” she said. “It was just a dream. I’m sure it was just a dream. I was just sitting here, brooding about it. But I’m sure it was just a dream.”

  “Suppose,” Heimrich said, “you tell me about this dream, Miss Jameson.”

  9

  She looked at the almost-dead fire, as if she expected to find her dream in it. Then, instead of telling about her dream, she got up and walked to the padded cord on the wall and pulled it sharply. There is no uncertainty about where she is putting her feet, Heimrich thought, as he had thought the night before when he watched her walk up the crowded room.

  She walked back to the sofa and sat on it, and looked down the room toward the end where the bar had been. Barnes came in from that end of the room. When he had come part way up the room he said, “Yes, Miss Jameson?”

  “The fire’s burned down,” Ursula Jameson said. “Will you build it up again, Barnes? It’s getting cold in here.”

  It did not seem cold in there to Merton Heimrich. Barnes said, “Yes,” and went down the room again. Ursula Jameson opened an oblong box on the table in front of her and took a cigarette out of it. She put the cigarette between her lightly rouged lips. Heimrich got up from his chair and flicked his lighter and held the flame out to the cigarette. He thought that the black-clad woman was postponing telling him about her dream.

  Barnes came back with a filled canvas log carrier. He knelt on the hearth and put kindling on the faint embers. He put logs on top of the kindling. He took a brassbound bellows from a rack on the hearth. He blew on the embers with the bellows and, after a little time, the kindling caught. He stood up. He said, “Will there be anything else, Miss Jameson?”

  “A Scotch and water,” Ursula said. “And just one lump of ice.”

  Barnes said, “Yes’m, Miss Jameson,” and started toward the far door, the now-empty log carrier dangling from his hand. Ursula Jameson said, “Wait,” after he had gone half a dozen steps. He stopped and turned back. Ursula said, “You, Inspector?” without looking at him, looking at the jumping flames which were edging around the logs.

  “No,” Heimrich said, and added “thanks” to it.

  She looked up at Charles Forniss, standing with his shoulders against the fireplace wall. She did not say anything. Forniss said, “I guess not, Miss Jameson.”

  She said, “All right, Barnes. Only one cube of ice,” and Barnes said, “Yes, Miss Jameson. One cube,” and went on down the room.

  She drew on her cigarette and continued to look at the fire. For such a big fireplace, the fire drew well, Heimrich thought. He said, “This dream, Miss Jameson?”

  “Probably it’s nothing,” she said. “Just a dream. When I was—”

  Barnes came toward them again from the far end of the room. He carried a tray with a glass on it. There was pale liquid in the glass and one cube of ice. He put the tray down on the table in front of Ursula Jameson, and she said, “Thank you, Barnes.” He said, “Thank you, Miss Jameson,” and went back the way he had come.

  It was, Heimrich thought, a little as if they were acting in a play, and the play late in its run so that movements and lines had become stereotyped. He watched Ursula Jameson lift her glass and sip from it. Again he said, “This dream, Miss Jameson?”

  “Probably,” she said, “it was just as I was waking up. I read somewhere that people dream mostly when they are just waking up. Probably what I heard was—oh, it could have been the maid knocking on my door to tell me. she had heard Jeff Rankin calling the police. And I got it all mixed up. Dreams are such mixed-up things, aren’t they?”

  She looked at Heimrich, who said, “Yes, Miss Jameson. They’re often mixed-up things.”

  “In the dream,” she said, “it seemed to be earlier. Seemed just to be getting light. I thought it waked me up, but I suppose I just dreamed waking up. It’s all vague—terribly vague. I dreamed I thought, But it’s Sunday. She’s not supposed to come on Sunday.”

  She looked into the fire, which now was burning well. She sipped again from her glass. Her cigarette was smoldering in the tray and she stubbed it out. It was, Merton Heimrich thought, as if she were redreaming this dream of hers. He did not say anything.

  “She ought to have something done about that car,” Ursula told the fire she was looking into. “It makes such a dreadful racket. But it wasn’t really the car, of course. It was the maid knocking on my door to wake me up and tell me—tell roe she thought something had happened because—”

  She stopped speaking and shook her head. Then she looked at Heimrich. “I’m not usually like this, Inspector,” she said. “It’s been a bad day. A terrible day.”

  “Yes, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. “It’s been a bad day. You thought—dreamed, I mean—that a car had wakened you just when it was beginning to get light this morning? A noisy car? Whose car, Miss Jameson?”

  “Whenever she came here to work with Arthur,” she said, “you could hear the car when it first turned into the drive. Rattling and banging. Almost anywhere in the house you were you could hear that car of hers. It got so that at a few minutes before nine I got to listening for that car to come banging in.”

  “Miss Selby usually came around nine?” Heimrich said.

  “Four days a week,” Ursula Jameson said. “She doesn’t come on Wednesdays. Did I say it was Dorothy Selby’s car?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I’ve heard the car she drives is rather noisy. It was her car in this dream of yours, wasn’t it?”

  “It was just the maid knocking on the door,” she said. “It—it just seemed like a car in the dream.”

  “Just as it was getting light,” Heimrich said. “That’s the way it was in this dream of yours? You didn’t dream you looked at your watch? Or at a clock by your bed?”

  “There wasn’t anything about a clock in my dream,” she told him. “There isn’t any time in dreams. Oh, sometimes they seem to go on for hours, but Jim Tennant says they often last only seconds. They’ve run tests of some kind, he says. He says the tests show when people are dreaming. He says they think everybody dreams but don’t always remember the dreams. And that sometimes when they do remember it’s hours after they’re awake.”

  “You just remembered this dream?”

  “It sort of came back after lunch. When I was lying down. Perhaps I dozed off and—and dreamed the same dream again. Could it have been that way, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said.

  “Perhaps it was while I was dozing that the doctor fell down those awful stairs,” she said, and seemed to shiver in front of the now exuberant fire. “Will he remember what happened, Inspector? Remember any of this awful day?”

  “They don’t know yet,” Heimrich told her. “A specialist is coming up from—”

  The telephone at the upper end of the room rang. It rang only once. Forniss had started toward it but stopped. Then Barnes came in at the far end of the room. This time he did not walk up the room, but called from just inside it. “There’s a telephone call for you, Inspector,” Barnes said, raising his voice. “You can take it there, sir.”

  Heimrich walked up the room toward the telephone in the cabinet. Ursula Jameson sat and looked into the fire. Heimrich spoke his name into the telephone.

  “Trooper Snyder, T. J., sir. Car Four-two-oh. We’ve been following a gray Chrysler Im
perial”—he gave the license number—“with radio instructions not to interfere with its movements.”

  “Yes, Snyder.”

  “Subject car proceeded to Cold Harbor. In the town it proceeded up Vine Street for about a mile.”

  He paused.

  “Proceed, Trooper,” Heimrich said, and Snyder said, “Huh?”

  “Go ahead,” Heimrich told him. “The car went up Vine Street. You went after it, keeping your distance. Do you think the driver saw you?”

  “Could be, I guess. We were cruising along slow like, as instructed. We were maybe a quarter mile behind him most of the time. Subject car wasn’t going fast, sir. Just sort of loafing along.”

  “Yes?”

  “We proceeded after subject car in Vine Street for seven tenths of a mile, sir. Subject car—”

  “All right, Snyder. You’re not in court. You mean the Chrysler. You followed it up Vine Street for seven tenths of a mile. Then?”

  “He turned into a driveway, sir. Off to the right. There was a sign at the foot of the driveway. It said, ‘Florence Selby, Realtor,’ Inspector.”

  “Go ahead, Snyder.”

  “We pulled up to the curb just before we got to this driveway,” Snyder said. “Rightly, there isn’t any curb. It’s more a road than a street, sir. We stopped maybe fifty feet before we got to the driveway. I got out and walked to the bottom of the driveway, leaving Trooper Gilson, B. T., in the car. I looked up the driveway, sir. There’s a big lilac bush there and I sort of stayed behind it, well as I could. I could see pretty good. Way I got it, sir, driver of the subject car wasn’t supposed to know we’d been trailing him.”

  “He probably did,” Heimrich said. “He drove up to the house and stopped the car in the turnaround. And, Snyder?”

  “Tall man,” Snyder said. “He got out of the car and a girl—a young woman, sir—ran out of the house and—well, they hugged each other, Inspector. Then they walked up to the house and went into it. He had an arm around her all the time, sir. Once they were in the house I couldn’t see any more, Inspector, so I waited maybe five minutes, and went back to the car. So we drove on past the driveway maybe a hundred yards, so’s we wouldn’t be in plain sight if he came out. The street dead-ends a couple of blocks up, so we figured when subject car left it would go back the way we’d come, so we turned the car around and parked headed what we figured would be the right way and waited a while. Maybe about ten minutes. We could see the foot of this driveway from where we’d parked. Maybe about ten minutes it was, and the subject car came out of the driveway and turned back toward the center of town. We gave it a good start and followed. On the main street, there’s a restaurant. Just called ‘The Tavern,’ sir. He drove into the parking lot and got out of the car and went into the restaurant. We drove past, slow like, and Benny got a chance to look in. He was on that side of the car, sir. He could see the bar through the window and there were three or four men standing at it and he’s pretty sure one of them was the driver of the subject car. So—hey!”