“Hello, Susan. Inspector,” Lyle Mercer said. Susan said, “Hi,” and thought that Lyle, who was always a pretty child, had never looked prettier than she looked then, in a sleeveless white dress, in the chair next to the one Wallis stood behind. Merton Heimrich said, “Morning, Miss Mercer. Wallis.”
“Been trying—” Wallis said as the Heimrichs sat in the vacant chairs at the table for four, and as he himself sat. A boy in a white jacket who looked somewhat harried said, “Get you something, Inspector? Mrs. Heimrich?” Heimrich said, “Gin and tonic, Joe,” to the boy, who was a senior at Van Brunt High School on weekdays and a club waiter on weekends. Heimrich looked at Susan and said, “Make it two gin and tonics, Joe.”
“—to get you on the phone,” Wallis said.
“We’ve been horseback riding,” Susan said.
“I didn’t know—” Lyle said and let it hang.
“We don’t much,” Heimrich said. “Neither of us has for years. Turned out we remembered how. Anyway, Susan did. Floated her horse over stone walls.” He paused for a moment. “Over near Brewster, Mr. Wallis,” Inspector Heimrich said.
To that, Wallis said, “Oh.” Then he said, “I thought you felt there wasn’t anything—” and broke it there.
“Second thought,” Heimrich said. “What did you call us about, Mr. Wallis?”
“All right,” Wallis said. “I still don’t like to be had, Inspector. To have the paper had. I telephoned this Pointer—man who was going to marry the girl. He—say he came to mind.”
“We agreed on that yesterday,” Heimrich said. “Get him, Mr. Wallis?”
“Around midnight,” Wallis said. “Earlier there wasn’t any answer. He’d been out on a party, I gathered.”
“That kind of party?”
“From his voice, yes. But he was coherent enough. And didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Want ads? What want ads? I told him what want ads. He said, ‘Why the hell should I?’ and then, ‘Think it’s something I want to be reminded of, whoever you are?’ I’d told him who I was. He said, ‘What the hell makes you think I’d plant ads like those?’ Only thing is, Inspector, he was practically yelling at me. As if—well, as if he’d been caught up with. Put in a corner.”
“You tell him why you thought he might have sent in the ads?” Heimrich asked him and said, “Thanks, Joe,” for two tall glasses.
“That I understood he was going to marry Miss Gant,” Wallis said. “That having her die the way she did must have upset him a lot. And that there seemed to be a chance that the ads had been put in by somebody who wanted to bring it all up again. Who wanted to upset the Wainrights. Somebody who suspected that there was something more than an accident in the girl’s death and wanted the Wainrights to start suspecting too.”
“And he?”
“Said, ‘You’re crazy, man,’ and hung up. I tried to call him back and didn’t get any answer.”
“He said ‘plant’ the ads?”
“Yes.”
“Say flatly he hadn’t sent them in?”
“Not flat out. No. What I tried to call back to get him to do.”
“You think he felt cornered,” Heimrich said. “Because he had planted the ads, naturally. And that being asked about them excited him?”
“I thought it might be that way. Inspector—” He stopped. He said, “I’m horning in, I suppose. What made you change your mind about it, Inspector?”
“Now, Mr. Wallis,” Heimrich said, “I’m not sure I have. Just thought of something that made me curious.”
Lyle sipped her drink. She looked from one man to the other as they spoke.
“It started with my newspaper,” Wallis said. “Miss Mercer and I told you about the ads.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “And got Susan and me up at seven this morning to ride on horses. No, there’s no story, Mr. Wallis. I doubt if there ever will be.”
“I’m not trying to dig up a story,” Wallis said. He took a swallow from his glass. He said, “Oh, maybe I am. It’s my trade. Mostly it’s I don’t want to be used. And—that I feel I slipped up. Anyway, that my paper did.”
Heimrich said, “Naturally.” He also closed his eyes. He drank without opening them. Then he said, “Did you happen to know any of these people, Mr. Wallis? You knew of Gant. The girl’s father. Ever, say, interview him about anything?”
“What the hell?” Wallis said. He looked at Heimrich and Heimrich opened his eyes. “No,” Wallis said. “I never did. Why’d you ask that, Inspector?”
“Curiosity,” Heimrich said. “That’s part of my trade, Mr. Wallis. As it is of yours.”
“All right,” Wallis said. He jutted his head toward Heimrich. “You didn’t find out anything this morning? Or if you did you’re sitting on it. Is that right?”
“I looked at a stone wall the girl died against,” Heimrich said. “And, beyond another wall, at the house she’d lived in. I talked to the troopers who checked it out and found nothing to indicate it wasn’t an accident. I asked a man named Wiley to look at the clipping of a story he wrote about it.”
“Which I—” Wallis said and stopped as Heimrich nodded his head.
“Which you borrowed from Wiley,” Heimrich said. “In the course of playing detective, Mr. Wallis.”
“He isn’t,” Lyle said. “We aren’t doing that. We aren’t doing that at all.”
“Now, Miss Mercer,” Heimrich said, “perhaps I used the wrong words. You say ‘we,’ Miss Mercer?”
“Lyle had dinner with Mrs. Wainright last night,” Wallis said. His voice grated. “We were going to tell you about that. This ‘playing detective’ business.”
“Skip it,” Heimrich said. “I used the wrong words. Tell me about it, Miss Mercer.”
She hesitated.
“Tell him, child,” Wallis said. His voice didn’t grate. Well, Susan thought. Well, well.
Lyle told about the murky and embarrassing dinner she had had the night before with Florence Wainright. Merton Heimrich listened with his eyes closed. When she had finished it was some seconds before he opened his eyes again.
“You hadn’t known her before you went there to ask about the advertisements?” he asked her then. “Her or her husband?”
“No. I did meet Mr. Wainright at the hunt-club breakfast. But no, I hadn’t known them before. Oh, that they had bought the Kynes place last—when was it, Mr. Wallis?”
“Late last fall some time,” Wallis said. “Perhaps early winter. Henry Peterson passed the word along, I remember. Made an item. With ‘through Henry Peterson, a local real-estate agent.’ He wanted it ‘realtor’ but there are limits.”
Heimrich said, “Hmmm.” He said, “Just wanted somebody to talk to, you say, Miss Mercer?”
“It seemed that way.”
“But you did tell her you and Mr. Wallis had come to me about the advertisements?”
“It slipped out,” Lyle said. “I hadn’t planned to.”
“She seemed sober when she joined you at the Inn? Got intoxicated later?”
“When she came in there was nothing to make me think she wasn’t sober,” Lyle said. “I thought that she had snapped back pretty fast. Earlier, at her house, she was—well, pretty wobbly, Inspector. But maybe it was a headache. She said it was. Maybe she had taken something for the headache that made her—made her droopy.”
“When we took her home from the Inn she was stoned,” Wallis said. “She passed out in the car. Her brother-in-law—man named Gant—and I had to pretty much carry her into the house and upstairs. Her maid, I guess, had to put her to bed.”
“Gant?” Heimrich said. “Man named Bruce Gant?”
“Yes. Brother of her late husband. Makes him the uncle of the girl who got killed, doesn’t it? And—wait a minute—he was staying at the Wainright house in Brewster when the girl was killed, wasn’t he? It’s in Ed Wiley’s piece.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his sports jacket. He tried other pockets. He said, “No. Must have left it at my place
.”
“I want to look at it,” Heimrich said. “Pick it up after lunch. Anything special in it? I know Bruce Gant was at the house, Mr. Wallis. And several other people, apparently. Pointer, for one. Another man about Pointer’s age. A ‘Kenneth something,’ according to the trooper who checked it out. A ‘good-looking blonde, maybe in her thirties.’ Who, according to the story the troopers got, was riding with Gant. They rode back when they heard shots. Anything about them in the Sentinel’s story?”
“That they were house guests,” Wallis said. He jutted his head, not at any of the others. He made a light fist with his right hand and tapped his head with it. He turned and jutted his head at Heimrich. “Kenneth Gaitbridge,” he said. “I’m pretty sure of that. The son of old friends of the Gant family. The woman I don’t—wait a minute.”
They waited a minute.
“Elizabeth something,” he said. “Far as I can get. A cousin of Mrs. Wainright. Didn’t describe her, but I suppose she could have been the good-looking blonde.”
He put both hands on the table and started to push himself up from it. He said, “Take me fifteen minutes to drive down and pick up the morgue envelope. O.K.?”
“Finish your drink, Mr. Wallis,” Heimrich said. “After lunch will be plenty of time. You’re both sure that Mrs. Wainright was really, as you say, stoned when she left the Inn?”
“Inspector,” Lyle said, “I watched her get that way. She had five bourbons. I signed the check for them. She—while we were at the table—she just gradually fell apart. It—it was awful to watch. She was—” Lyle stopped for a moment. “I was sorry and embarrassed for her and there wasn’t any way to get her to stop. She—she just wasn’t there, Inspector. I doubt if she’ll remember any of it.”
“Perhaps not,” Heimrich said. He motioned to the waiter, and when Joe, still harried, came, Heimrich gestured toward his own empty glass. But Susan shook her head and Lyle Mercer pushed her half-full glass away from her. Wallis looked at his own glass, which was almost empty, and shook his head.
“Then skip it, Joe,” Heimrich said. “Let’s have a look at the menus.”
Joe said, “Sure thing, Inspector,” and went off. He came back with menus. He said, “Mike’s getting to be quite a tennis player, Inspector. He said to tell you he’s here and that he’s had a sandwich and that he signed your name and is it all right.”
“Tell him it’s all right,” Heimrich said. “And that if he’ll wait till we’ve eaten we’ll drive him home,” Susan said. “If he wants to go home,” Heimrich said.
They ordered. Lunches at the Van Brunt Country Club are sandwiches and salads. Lyle Mercer had a tuna-fish salad; the others had hamburgers. Heimrich said, “Riding horses works up an appetite,” and had two hamburgers.
“Think what it must do to the horses,” Susan said. “They get all the exercise.”
They went in two cars back to the Center, and the Heimrichs waited in the Buick while Robert Wallis went into the Citizen building and came out of it with an envelope. He gave it to Heimrich, who said, “I’ll get it back to you.” Wallis went over to his car, in which Lyle still sat, clearly waiting.
“We’re going out to look at leaves,” Lyle said. “Mr. Wallis lives right here and never looks at leaves.”
When they turned into Van Brunt Pass, which is one of the ways to their white house above the Hudson, Susan said, “The child’s about twenty, Merton. How old do you suppose Mr. Wallis is?”
“Middle thirties,” Heimrich said. “At a guess.” He said nothing further until he had turned the car into High Road and off it up a steep driveway. Then he said, “Come to that, dear, I’m a lot older than you are.”
“Not fifteen years,” Susan said. “Anyway, we’re different. Didn’t you know that, darling?”
9
Sunday night a low-pressure area which had been lurking for days over New England and pulling up almost summer air from the south moved off the coast. There was a brief thunderstorm, which only momentarily cut off power. “It used to stay off for hours,” Susan said. Colonel, who is antagonistic to thunderstorms, went to the door and barked at this one. “We’re getting almost urban,” Susan said, when the power came on again. Merton Heimrich closed windows, and the air that blustered at him was autumn air.
It was a bright and cool Monday morning, which was a break for two troopers with rakes. Trooper Henderson had showed them the place and Inspector M. L. Heimrich had told them where to rake—a strip at least ten feet in width and at least a hundred in length along a wall that marked the boundary of the land owned now by one James P. Stirling and formerly by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Wainright.
“A twenty-five cartridge case,” Trooper Latham said. “They’re not very big, sir. Be easy to miss.”
“Try not to,” Heimrich said. “Take your time, both of you. We’re a year late already. A few more hours don’t matter, naturally.”
The air was reasonably cool in the field which sloped down from the fieldstone-and-white-clapboard house a few miles northeast of Brewster, New York. But the sun was hot on the two men with rakes. Latham took off his shirt. Trooper Jenkins kept his on. He’d never been able to tan decently.
The sun did not reach into Inspector Heimrich’s office—a corner office now that he was no longer a captain—at Hawthorne Barracks, Troop K, New York State Police. With windows open, air flowed pleasantly through the office. It was suitable, and on the whole pleasant, to have fall come back again. There may be frost tonight, he thought, as he piled papers from the IN basket on the desk in front of him and, for the most part, put “M.L.H.” on them and put them in the OUT basket. There were a good many more papers to initial than there had been when he was a captain. For the most part, then as now, the initials indicated that reports had been through channels and were ready for files.
Nothing over Saturday and Sunday of special interest to the B.C.I. A man had walked into a tavern in Peekskill with an automatic and begun shooting at everybody in sight. Two dead, one in critical condition. All of it the concern of the Peekskill police, not of the State Police, who intervene in cities only on request. A man shooting at a Woodchuck had hit a neighbor instead. The neighbor was expected to recover. A couple in a Mercedes had missed a curve on Route 123 in Lewisboro and gone, at an estimated seventy, into a stone wall. It had happened at about two o’clock Sunday morning. The car clock, judging by what remained of it, had stopped at 1:59. Nothing living remained of the two in the car, who had been in their late teens. The boy’s blood showed a high concentration of alcohol.
Nothing in the reports he read to concern M. L. Heimrich, as Inspector, New York State Police. Much to concern him as Merton Heimrich, a man concerned by many things—by guns and knives and kids who drove fast cars on narrow roads and counted on reflexes which alcohol had dulled to substitute for skill and experience they didn’t have. And now never would have. Kids even younger than a young woman who had been thrown from a horse into a stone wall.
She, on horses, had been experienced. That, at least, was what people had said of her, told a reporter—probably Edwin Wiley himself—of the Brewster Sentinel. People get thrown from horses often and do not die of it. Arms go up by reflex to break falls, to protect the vulnerability of heads. Anyone wanting a girl dead would, surely, have thought of some more certain way to kill her. I’m wasting time, Heimrich thought. Because somebody put an advertisement in a weekly newspaper offering a wedding dress for sale and put it in to run on the anniversary of a girl’s violent death. Because, if the girl had lived some months longer, she would have inherited the capital of a trust fund which apparently was large. Not germane to anything, Heimrich thought. If they find a cartridge case, which they will not, it will prove nothing.
He sent for the most recent edition of Who’s Who in America and looked under the “G’s” for Gant. Two Gants, neither named either Robert Lee or Bruce. Apparently Robert Lee Gant had not been as important as Wallis had thought him to be. Still—head of a corporation which had made a s
pectacular merger with another, permitting affluent retirement to some place in Virginia.
Of course, Heimrich thought. Wrong reference book. He sent for Who Was Who in America. It had to be rummaged for, but it was found.
GANT, Robert Lee, industrialist; b. Warrenton, Va., Jan. 7, 1895; s. Leland and Ruth (Albemarle) G.; ed. Warrenton public schools; grad. Choate; A.B. Princeton; grad. Harvard Business School, 1918; m. Florence Tracy, Feb. 17, 1945; 1 dau., Virginia. Emp. salesman General Products Corp. 1912; exec. v.p. 1936; pres. 1940; chmn. bd. 1953–58; bd. dir. Tootle Nat. Bank, Warrenton, since 1932. Served as ens. USNR, World War I. Mem. Warrenton Country Club, Warrenton Hunt Club, Princeton Club (Richmond), Standard Horse Breeders’ Assn. Address: Gant’s Courthouse, Warrenton, Va. Died Sept. 20, 1963; buried Gant’s Courthouse.
Heimrich pushed Who Was back on his desk and returned to Who’s Who. Wainright. Several. None with first name of Paul.
For some minutes Heimrich looked across his desk at an uninteresting wall. “Wedding dress. Size 10. Never used.” “Winchester rifle. Telescopic sight.” “Bay stallion.”
They added to nothing. Paul Bryson Wainright, termed “distinguished architect” by the Brewster Sentinel. Not in Who’s Who. Who’s Who is somewhat haphazard in the selection of its biographees. Conceivably, of course, the Brewster Sentinel was even more haphazard in its use of the word “distinguished.” Heimrich sent for the Manhattan telephone directory. There were a good many Wainrights. Yes, “Wainright Paul B archt” with an address in West Forty-sixth Street; “res” with an address in the East Sixties. The East Sixties address was, Heimrich thought, in an area where apartments cost money. Which the Wainrights obviously had. The house in Van Brunt had cost money. So had the one near Brewster.
Adding to nothing, Heimrich told himself. Drop it, Heimrich told himself and looked at the uninteresting wall across his desk. Heimrich picked up his telephone and said, “Ask Lieutenant Forniss to come in when he’s free, will you?”
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