17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  She filled Heimrich’s cup again, filled her own. She heard the grating sound from the door and the big man came through the door. The girl’s dead, she thought, when she saw his face, saw the way his blue eyes had narrowed slightly. He has to live too much with death.

  But what he said was, “You said something yesterday about a lunch today? A hen party? At Annette Weaver’s?”

  “Yes,” she said. “One of those things one gets—” But she did not finish.

  “She won’t be giving lunch,” Heimrich said, and told Susan why.

  The police doctor was squatting beside the body. As Heimrich went into the entrance hall the doctor snapped his bag shut and stood up. He said, “Twelve hours. Perhaps a few hours longer.” It was a little before ten in the morning. “Bullet hit a main artery,” he said. “Nicked the spinal column. She bled to death.” He looked down at his shoes, which had blood on them. He moved away from the body, out of the blood. The blood was no longer fluid. It was still gummy. He looked down at the body. “Must have been pretty,” he said.

  Lipstick glared on the colorless face he looked at. The blond hair was matted with her blood. It must have been a bad thing for Harriet Larkin to walk in on when she came to work at nine that morning. Heimrich went from the entrance hall into the living room and said, “’Morning, Charlie,” to Sergeant Charlie Forniss and, “Ray,” to Corporal Raymond Crowley.

  Forniss was a big man; taller by an inch or two than Heimrich himself; heavier by ten pounds or so—a very big man in a dark gray suit. Crowley was a good deal younger and weighed less and wore a tweed jacket and slacks. Harriet Larkin, who cleaned for a good many people—including once a week the Heimrichs—sat on a sofa and her hands covered her face. She took her hands down and said, “Oh, Captain!” There was hardly more color in her face than in the face of the dead woman in the next room. There was usually a good deal of color in Harriet Larkin’s round face. It was usually a cheerful face.

  “I just came in the back way like always,” she said. “Only the back door was open. And she hadn’t had breakfast. And I came in to start on the living room and there—” She stopped and covered her face with her hands again. She began slowly to shake her head. Then she took her hands from her face and looked down at her feet and Heimrich looked at her shoes. There was dried blood on them.

  “Spread out to the telephone table,” Forniss said. “Had to walk through some of it to call us.”

  The call had gone to the nearest substation at nine-eleven. Forniss, sitting in for Heimrich, had got the report at ninefourteen.

  There were flashes from the entrance hall. Cliff Aarons was taking the last pictures of a face, of a body, which had been photographed so many times over so many years—the face and the body made for the camera.

  “The back door was open,” Heimrich said. He looked at Harriet Larkin, who nodded the head she again held in her hands.

  “Closed it when she came in,” Forniss said, and moved his head toward Harriet to indicate who had closed the door. “Supposes she did. Could have come that way, whoever it was. But probably didn’t, M. L.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “Key in the front door,” Forniss said. “On the outside. And—seems the Weavers had the house up for sale.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Heimrich said, and waited again. Forniss had been fifteen minutes ahead of him; Forniss had used the fifteen minutes.

  “Had one of the key boxes the real-estate people put up,” Forniss said. “Open when we got here. No problem to force it, of course. Anybody with a screw driver. Only, it hadn’t been forced. Somebody used a key.”

  “The owners have a key, naturally,” Heimrich said. “To the box. Handy if they forget their house key.”

  Forniss said, “Sure. There’s that.”

  “Shot, the doctor says.”

  “Yep, that’s what he says. Went through her neck. Maybe in the floor under her. Maybe anywhere. Thirty-two, at a guess. But that’s just a guess. From maybe three-four feet away. At a guess. She might have walked a few feet, the doc says. Probably didn’t, I’d say. Only blood’s where she was lying, so far’s Ray and I could see. It would have spurted.”

  Cliff Aarons stood in the doorway between entrance hall and living room. His camera dangled from the strap around his neck.

  “Got the lot,” Aarons said. “Leo’s about finished, too.”

  Leo Phillips made sketches of the bodies of the murdered, and diagrams which showed how and where they lay.

  “Must have been quite a looker,” Aarons said. “Before she got messed up this way.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “She was quite a looker, Cliff. Name of Annette LeBaron mean anything to you, son?”

  “Jeeze!”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “A general reaction. Ten years or so ago a pretty universal reaction.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Cliff Aarons said. “Annette LeBaron. Well, I’ll be damned.”

  There was the sound of a siren near by—on, Heimrich thought, the narrow, winding road which served the Weaver house, and for part of its way the Drake house, as a driveway. The ambulance, he supposed, coming to carry off what had once been so beautiful—so famously beautiful. The press would be on it; God, how the press would be on it once the press heard about it.

  “Annette LeBaron found shot to death; state police rule out suicide.” And the rest of it. Heimrich could supply most of the rest of it, without the aid of a newspaper’s morgue. One knows much about one’s neighbors in communities like Van Brunt, especially when one’s neighbors are famous. And more especially, of course, if one happens to be a policeman. Not that, until now, Annette Weaver, once Annette LeBaron, had been a concern to the police.

  “I’m supposed to be at Mrs. Bronson’s,” Harriet Larkin said, taking down the hands which had hid her face, covered eyes against what eyes had seen.

  Heimrich looked at Forniss, who said, “All she’s got to tell us, for now,” Forniss said. “Unless you?”

  Heimrich seldom covers again ground Sergeant Charles Forniss has covered. He said, “Go along, Mrs. Larkin. Anything else turns up, we’ll get in touch. You kept your wits about you, Mrs. Larkin.”

  “She was murdered, wasn’t she? Somebody killed her, didn’t they?”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Heimrich told her. “Ray—see that Mrs. Larkin can get her car out, will you?”

  There was a jumble of cars in the small turnaround in front of the Weaver house. Harriet Larkin’s little Chevy would probably be blocked by the cars of troopers, of the lab boys, of Forniss’s and his own. And, now, by the ambulance. But the ambulance would not be there long. “Go out that way,” Heimrich said, and indicated the way he meant, which was toward the dining room to which the living room opened, and not through the hall where the body lay. No, they were picking the body up now. Where the blood from the body lay.

  Harriet Larkin, who now looked much better, led the way and Ray Crowley followed her. He’d have to see to the moving of a good many cars, Heimrich thought. Not as many as there had been at the picnic, which he had left—been called from—some time before Annette Weaver began to tell her neighbors off. Taken him, on the Fourth of July, ten minutes to get his car out so he could go across Putnam County and across most of Westchester to look at a body which had lain in underbrush for far too long a time. And, that day, somebody had parked his car in a blocking place and gone off with the key. Which had been an infernal nuisance, as well as the worst of country manners.

  No, not the worst, perhaps. Annette’s own had been the worst. A hostess does not tell her picnic guests what she thinks of them, particularly over a public address system. Even when, as presumably had been true, she has been drinking a good deal and is, as she had been that day, fed to the teeth with Van Brunt and most of those in it. Too bad I’d had to leave, Heimrich thought; be interesting, now, to know whom she lit into most. Not that it will need to have had anything to do with this, naturally.

  “Her husband?” he said
, to Forniss.

  “Barracks is trying to reach him,” Forniss said. “Don’t know if they have. Want I should—”

  “May as well,” Heimrich said. “The key to this key lockbox. In the box?”

  “No,” Forniss said. “That’s sort of the point, M. L. Course, maybe it’s in Mrs. Weaver’s handbag or somewhere. Could be the boys will turn it up. Meanwhile …”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “There’ll be that, naturally. A job for Ray, Charlie.”

  “The Association, or whatever they call it, will have a list.”

  Heimrich said “Yes” and went out through the entrance hall, in which no body lay. At the front door he paused and turned to one of the two men who were dusting everything within reach.

  “All clear,” the man said. “Smudges on both knobs. What you usually get off door knobs.”

  Heimrich went outside, fingerprint powder gritting on the palm of his hand as he turned the knob.

  The lockbox supplied by the Association of Realtors was oblong and made of metal and would, as Forniss had said, be easy enough to force. And, as Forniss said, it had obviously not been forced. It had not been dusted, and Heimrich waited until, on instruction, it had been. He opened the small metal door, needing no key. There was nothing in the box except the hook from which a door key could be dangled. He closed the box. The door to it did not have a snap lock. To relock it, an Association key would be necessary.

  Heimrich stood for a moment and looked across a lawn which sloped gently from the house to a stone fence, beyond which trees stood, diminishing in height as the ground sloped more sharply toward the valley. The Weavers’ grass isn’t as burned as ours, Merton Heimrich thought. They must have had great confidence in their well. After the picnic, especially, they must have needed to do a lot of watering. Many feet scuffle the life out of grass and most of all when grass needs water.

  A car’s motor started up and Heimrich turned and watched while Ray Crowley backed a police car enough to clear a way for an ancient but very shiny Chevy. Mrs. Harriet Larkin drove her Chevy out and down the narrow, rutted drive toward the distant main road—and toward the Bronsons’, where cleaning was to be done and news to be told. In an hour or so it would be all over Van Brunt.

  Corporal Raymond Crowley got out of the car and Heimrich beckoned him and told him what was needed. What was needed was a list of real-estate agents who had keys to the small oblong boxes the Association of Realtors provided people who had houses for sale. What was needed was an agent who would say, Yes, he had shown the Weaver house the day before; Yes, he had unlocked the box there and used the key to the house and left the key in the front door of the house. Or, alternatively, had, against the rules, lent his box key to somebody else.

  Heimrich did not suppose that Crowley would find a realestate agent to say any of these things. House owners with Association boxes had duplicate keys to them. The chances were that Mrs. Weaver, returning from somewhere, had opened the box herself and got out the key to her own front door, and opened the door to death. Death which had come in through the unlocked back door and waited in the entrance hall. Country people, leaving their houses for brief periods, seldom lock their houses thoroughly. There is not much point to it. Isolated country houses are always vulnerable.

  Heimrich looked across the surprisingly green lawn. A few hundred yards along the ridge he could just make out the Drake house—Mrs. Drake’s house. Someone there, if someone happened to be listening, might have heard the sound of a shot. And might, since the sound of a shot is not unusual in the countrymany bear grudges against woodchucks—have thought it not worth mentioning. He would, Heimrich thought, send a trooper up to ask.

  He went back into the Weaver house. Nobody had been able to get in touch with Ralph Weaver to tell him his wife was dead. He was not at the office of Ralph Weaver Associates, Inc., or at that of Ralph Weaver Enterprises. Nor did Weaver & Goldsmith, Inc. know his exact whereabouts. He was expected by all at any moment. A request to call Hawthorne Barracks, New York State Police, would be transmitted.

  Forniss and two troopers were looking for a bullet and had not found one. They were looking among Mrs. Weaver’s possessions for anything that might be helpful—looking through her several handbags, through her desk. (In one of her handbags, of which she had five, they found the key to her front door. In another they found her key to the Association box.)

  Heimrich went through the house and out the back door and, beyond it, there was a well-marked path leading along the ridge. It led toward Mrs. Drake’s house. It had the look of a bridle path but of one not often used. Heimrich decided he might as well walk it himself and discover whether anybody in the Drake house—in Mrs. Drake’s house—had heard shooting the late afternoon or early evening of the day before. He checked off, as he walked, the occupants of the Drake house who might have been around. Mrs. Drake herself might well have been; Oliver Drake might have been anywhere—at his office in Van Brunt Center, working on architectural drawings, on the golf course of the Van Brunt Country Club; Stephen Drake might, or might not, have been back from the city and the offices of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan. Florence Drake might have been at a meeting of the garden club. Or, for that matter, actually gardening, although that was rather less probable. And there were, of course, the servants.

  It might, Heimrich thought, walking under trees through which morning sunlight trickled, have been better to have sent somebody else to ask the Association of Realtors about keys. Ray Crowley was getting good at asking questions, especially of people like the Drakes. His family had been in the Van Brunt area for a long time, and it was an all-right family—not a Drake family or a Van Houton family, or such a family as the Van Brunts themselves had been before the trouble, but an all-right family. Crowley was not an upstart, as Annette LeBaron must have seemed to Emily Drake when her older son brought a motion-picture actress to live in the Drake house in the town of Van Brunt.

  That had been some years before Heimrich himself had come to live in Van Brunt, in a long low house which had once been a barn; with a woman now no longer named Susan Faye, although that was the name which still identified her fabric shop on Van Brunt Avenue, which is also NY-11F. And also with her son and, inevitably, with an enormous Great Dane who was named Colonel and seldom answered to his name. Heimrich had heard of Stephen Drake’s marriage to Annette LeBaron, as one hears of a community’s past when one moves into a community and becomes a part of it. Nobody seemed quite to understand how it had happened, Heimrich thought, walking nearer Mrs. Drake’s large white house on Drake Ridge. From what he had since come to know of Stephen Drake, lawyer (more or less by inheritance), Drake was not the sort to marry a famous motionpicture actress, notably beautiful in a world of competitive beauty.

  Born “LeBaron,” Annette Weaver had been? Heimrich rather doubted that, now it was advisable to think about it. “I christen thee LeBaron,” somebody in Hollywood might have said. “Hupfledecker won’t do at all, you know.”

  But Annette herself had done beautifully in Hollywood. Ten years or so before, she had now and then been compared to Katharine Hepburn, with the proviso that she couldn’t act like Hepburn, or come near it. There had been a delicate beauty in her face and slender loveliness in her body. Under her high cheekbones there had been gentle hollows which cameras turned into shadows of mystery and enticement. Any man would have wanted the Annette LeBaron of those days and it was generally assumed, and by nobody denied, that not a few had got her. But it was Stephen Drake who had married her. Married her and, when his father died and he had returned to the propriety of being a Drake, brought her to the town of Van Brunt in the Hudson River valley, where there had been Drakes for many generations.

  It had not lasted, of course. Probably nobody had thought it would and Heimrich suspected that Emily Drake herself, the Mrs. Drake, had been more certain than anyone that the situation would be suitably evanescent.

  Six years ago that must have been, Heimrich thought, and came to
the end of the bridle path and to the lawns surrounding the big house which had been the Drakes’ for so many years. Mrs. Drake hadn’t used as much water on her lawn as the Weavers had used on theirs. When you are native to a country place you do not put unfaltering trust in wells, however deep the wells may be and how long have proved themselves.

  Two years with Stephen Drake, and in the big house which was always, inevitably, Mrs. Drake’s, there being only one of that name, whoever might borrow it. (As Florence Drake, although by birth a Van Houton, was borrowing it now.) The house Annette had been murdered in had once been a Drake house—been the house of Philip Drake’s brother. Heimrich could not remember the name of the brother, and did not much try to. There are pebbles which may safely be left unturned. Had the nameless brother left the house to his older nephew, and had it, possibly as part of a divorce settlement, gone then to the beautiful woman who had died in it? That might be worth looking into; might be a pebble worth rolling over. In due course.

  After Stephen Drake, and even more briefly, James Brennan had been Annette’s husband. And now Brennan, with another wife—but still a junior member in the law firm of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan—had come to live in Van Brunt. And rented one of the lesser Drake houses. And—wait a minute. Hadn’t Brennan’s wife become a licensed real-estate agent? Susan would know; she and—wait a minute—Leslie Brennan had become friends. Oh, of course, their dogs had met on Van Brunt Avenue a year or so ago. Two slim women had been tugged together.

  The lawn he crossed sloped up to the stables. Mrs. Drake was getting off a horse, which a stableman held for her. The horse was sweating. Mrs. Drake was sparse and cool. When she was off the horse she looked intently at Captain M. L. Heimrich. Her eyes were sharp and almost black.

  “Young man,” Mrs. Emily Drake said in a strong voice and an impatient one, “this is private property. Whoever you—”

  But then she broke off and looked even more intently and for some seconds at the big man who continued to walk toward her, on private grass.