Death by Association

by Frances Lockridge

  “Three times a week,” Paul Shepard said, letting this pass. “And I’ve been working on it a month. Now—” He snapped his fingers.

  It was, their faces said, tough luck. “Tough,” Oslen said, for them. “He’d have done a good job.” He looked around at everybody. “Damn good job,” he said, to cinch it. “Kind of job that needs doing. Smoke out these reds.”

  Nobody disagreed.

  “Counteract some of this stuff we’ve been getting,” Oslen said, pursuing it, but not specifying. “Pinkos. Hope you can get somebody else to do the job.” The last was to Paul Shepard, who shrugged. It would, he said, be difficult. They would, naturally, try. He shook his head. The United Broadcasting Alliance, the UBA, wore black for Bronson Wells, through its accredited representative.

  “Some commie did it,” Oslen said. “Poor guy knew his life was in danger.”

  “You may be right,” Sibley agreed, with the dignity of a judge. “I imagine the FBI will look into that.” He paused, still judicial. “He was a great force,” Sibley said, with judicial finality.

  “Well,” Shepard said, and shrugged again. “How was fishing?” he asked William Oslen. “Want to have a go at it while we’re here. Even if it does mean getting up at six.”

  Oslen told them all how fishing had been, starting with his very early rising. They spent the next ten minutes in a boat with Oslen, going over the day, it seemed to Mary Wister, fin by fin. Bronson Wells, being already dead as a man, died again as a topic.

  After Oslen finished, they talked again by twos and threes, about matters of no importance—about the surprising warmth and the forecaster’s assurance it would be warm again tomorrow; about the steak dinner, with broiling in the open over charcoal, which was the Saturday custom of The Coral Isles; about the Marine Museum, where one could see sharks—although small ones, to be sure—swimming contentedly over enormous turtles which did nothing with equal contentment; about the sponges to be bought outside the museum and the pile of coconuts which waited there, fresh from palms, for customers who liked coconuts.

  The conversation was much as it had been the evening before, but this time there were no incidents. Mrs. Sibley did not drink too much; it was hardly possible, looking at her, to believe she ever had. Rachel Jones did not come surprisingly out of nowhere; she was merely there, and one of the group. No one, after the brief memorial service for Wells—and his never to be spoken commentary on the world today-talked at all of serious matters. No one admonished. And, as the hour passed, it seemed to Mary that there was a relaxation in the group which there had not been the evening before. By comparison, looking back, the other cocktail hour had been a little marred by tension, even before Mrs. Sibley marred it by losing her dignity. There was nothing like that this evening.

  The time for cocktails was almost over when Deputy Sheriff Jefferson came in through the main entrance and turned toward the desk. He spoke to the clerk there for a moment and then went around the desk and through a door which must, Mary thought, be that of the manager. She looked at Barclay MacDonald, who raised his eyebrows. The deputy came back through the door after a few minutes, and this time Grogan was with him. The two shook hands, with cordiality. As Jefferson turned to go, Grogan patted him on the shoulder, evidently with approval. The deputy sheriff went the way he had come. It seemed to Mary that there was a certain finality in their parting, as if something had been settled. Mary looked at MacDonald and, although she said nothing, he answered her without hesitation.

  “Looks like it,” he said. “Situation well in hand, which must be a relief to Grogan.”

  “Relief?” she repeated. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “I’d gather,” he said, “that the sanctuary is not to be invaded, wouldn’t you? That the guests will not be bothered?”

  She nodded to that.

  Then Captain Heimrich came through the entrance. Just inside, he paused and looked around for a moment; he looked toward the group and then walked across the lounge to it. He was, jovially, accused of being late. Room was made for him on a sofa; several helped him attract a waiter. Spurred by his example, they all ordered new drinks. Heimrich’s square face, in which the blue eyes were so unexpectedly alive, expressed nothing, except relaxation. After a moment, he relaxed further, and closed his eyes. But Mary had a feeling that he was, unhurriedly, with assurance, waiting for something.

  “What do you hear about—?” Oslen said, and jerked a thumb in the general direction of the tennis courts to conclude the sentence.

  “About Mr. Wells?” Heimrich said, without opening his eyes. “Why, I believe they’re making progress, Mr. Oslen. Quite good progress, I think. The sheriff’s office seems quite satisfied.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes, located his drink, picked it up and sipped, closed his eyes again. He seemed rather tired. He also seemed to feel that he had closed the subject. When Paul Shepard reopened it, Captain Heimrich appeared to be a little surprised.

  “You mean,” Shepard asked, “that they’ve got their man? Or woman?”

  “Now, Mr. Shepard,” Heimrich said. “I don’t think they’ve arrested anyone. They hadn’t an hour ago, anyway. They won’t be precipitate, naturally. Peace officers seldom are, you know.”

  “You’ve been working with them, captain?” MacDonald said. This time Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “Now doctor,” he said. “Observing. Professional interest, you know. As you might have in another man’s operation.”

  “I’m not a surgeon,” MacDonald said.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Nevertheless. One is interested in technics, naturally. One likes to look on. Merely that, doctor. The—research is all theirs.” He paused, and closed his eyes. “Particularly as they feel it’s entirely a local case,” he added. “It seems Mr. Wells used to live here and—may have made enemies.”

  “They’re crazy,” Oslen said. He did not speak with violence, but as one who merely selects an appropriate word. “Small-town cops.”

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “Why do you say that? They’re quite efficient, really. Why do you think they aren’t?”

  He opened his eyes and regarded Oslen. Oslen looked back at him for a moment, and then lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

  “I spoke out of turn,” he said. “You’d know better than I, of course. I merely thought—” He stopped.

  “Oslen thought some commie killed Wells,” Paul Shepard said. “To stop his spilling secrets, maybe. So did I.” He looked around. “I’m not sure I still don’t,” he added.

  He looked rather sternly at Captain Heimrich.

  “Don’t they know who Wells was?” Oslen asked.

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “They do know, naturally. They are considering various possibilities. Do you suspect someone, Mr. Oslen?”

  “I?” Oslen said. “My God, no. I merely—” He spread his hands in a gesture more fluid than one would have expected. Of course, Mary thought, he’s a pianist, an artist. I should have remembered.

  “Mr. Wells lived here for some time a few years ago,” Heimrich said. “Under another name, it seems. The police are quite sure he did make at least one enemy, and not because of politics. You may be right, naturally. But then, so may they, Mr. Oslen.” He closed his eyes. “It is their business,” he said. He paused. “There was also a matter of a package of cigarettes,” he said. “It does seem suggestive.”

  They waited; it occurred to Mary that they were supposed to wait; were even supposed to ask.

  “Cigarettes?” Robert Sibley repeated, asking.

  “Wells was carrying part of a package of cigarettes,” Heimrich said. “Not the kind you buy anywhere—Cuban cigarettes. Brown paper, Havana filler. Very strong and harsh. They aren’t for sale here at the hotel, but they’re very common in town, of course. Many of the Cubans smoke them.” He paused. “There are a good many Cubans here, naturally.”

  They waited again.

  “Since they’re not sold here at the hotel,” Heimrich said,
“the deputy sheriff thinks Wells picked them up in town. Last night. And that he may have met this enemy there, naturally. Been followed back here and killed. He apparently was killed behind the orchestra shell, incidentally, and carried or dragged over to where Miss Wister found him.”

  “Why?” Barclay MacDonald asked.

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Only one man really knows that. But the entrance to the staff dormitory is back of the orchestra shell. Some of the hotel people start work very early, naturally. They’d have seen the body if it had been left there.”

  “So?” Shepard said.

  “In general,” Heimrich told them, and now he spoke sleepily, “it is much easier to estimate the time of death if the body is found soon. As time passes, it becomes progressively more difficult. The doctor here will tell you that.”

  “Of course,” MacDonald said.

  “Of course,” Heimrich repeated after him. “The police feel the temporary concealment of the body fits in. Ordinarily, they think, it might have been almost noon before somebody—a tennis player, probably—happened to find it. Rigor might have set in by noon, don’t you think, doctor?”

  “Possibly,” MacDonald said. “A good many factors are involved. It was beginning when I examined the body. It might have been complete by noon if death occurred around four in the morning.”

  “And if it was complete,” Heimrich said, “death might have occurred eight hours before, or twelve hours—or twenty or more. Isn’t that right, doctor?”

  “On the basis of rigor, generally yes,” MacDonald said. “Of course, an autopsy—” But then he shrugged. “It gets more difficult as time passes, certainly,” he said.

  “I’m afraid,” Penny Shepard said, “that I don’t quite see what difference it makes.”

  “Now Mrs. Shepard,” Heimrich said. “The purpose of a killer is always to confuse, naturally. To create a fog and—hide in it.” He opened his eyes. “Of course,” he said, “a fog is impartial. It may hide the innocent as well.” He closed his eyes. Mary looked at Barclay MacDonald and slightly enlarged her own eyes. MacDonald raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He looked with speculation at Captain Heimrich.

  “They’ve been questioning one of the musicians,” Heimrich said, without opening his eyes. “They’re not holding him—yet. A man named García. Mario García. He leads the orchestra, actually. He plays the cornet.”

  (The cornet’s pure tone had. broken, shattered; it had become a cry, not music. A slender dark man in a white jacket had held the cornet high, and it had screamed in the night.)

  “They think,” Heimrich said, “that there was an involvement between García’s sister and Mr. Wells when Mr. Wells lived here before. Not a very pleasant involvement. Something to do with drugs, they think.”

  “Listen,” Oslen said, and spoke sharply. “You’re clear off the track. Wells wasn’t like that. He was giving everything he had to wake this country up.”

  “Giving?” Heimrich said. “Well, no doubt he was, Mr. Oslen.” He opened his eyes and looked at Oslen; then looked around at the others. “It isn’t my track,” he said. “I told you that. It’s what the police think.” He paused. “I thought you all might like to know,” he added, and closed his eyes again.

  “I still think they’re wrong,” Oslen said.

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “They may be, naturally.” He nodded slowly. “They may very well be,” he said. “In whole or in part. In whole or in part, Mr. Oslen.” He spoke slowly and then stopped speaking. It seemed to Mary Wister that he was uncertain whether to continue, perhaps to amplify. The others, she thought, had the same feeling. But if he planned to continue, Heimrich was not given the chance. An emissary in a red jacket came from the desk. New York was calling Captain Heimrich. “Oh yes. Thanks,” Captain Heimrich said, and went with the messenger. For a moment, those in the group looked after him; even Rachel Jones, who of them all had seemed most detached, kept her eyes on Captain Heimrich until he reached the desk and walked around it to a telephone booth at the far end.

  “I understand,” Judge Sibley said, after Heimrich was no longer in view, “that Captain Heimrich is a policeman. On vacation?”

  The question floated, seeking a recipient. Dr. Barclay MacDonald accepted it. He said that Heimrich was, actually, on sick leave, recovering from an injury. Sibley nodded.

  “Of course,” he said, “he has no authority here, has he?”

  The last was not really a question, although Sibley’s judicial, controlled voice rose at the end.

  “I suppose,” William Oslen said, “that a homicide man can’t help being interested in murder. Can’t be expected to keep his fingers out of the pie, even if it isn’t his pie.”

  No one answered this, even indirectly. Barclay MacDonald touched Mary’s arm. “What d’you say we eat?” he said. . . .

  MacDonald assumed that they would dine together, and the headwaiter assumed it. After a moment, Mary found that she assumed it too. Being with MacDonald had come to seem in the nature of things, although how that had happened remained a little obscure. Call it a shipboard acquaintance, Mary thought, and in her mind called it that. Call it an association out of the context of both their lives, engendered by chance circumstance, nurtured by the relaxation which, in spite even of the circumstance of murder, was part of being south in the winter, of finding the days warm and the evenings barely cool, and white with moonlight. Say they were both in the drift of summer in February.

  It appeared, however, that Heimrich had drifted elsewhere. The table was set for three, but the square police captain, whose bright blue eyes needed so much resting (but was that really it?) did not appear for shrimps in Coral Isles Sauce, for green turtle soup, for thick slices of admirable roast beef. They were at coffee before he came, and by then they were, idly, discussing him. Was he, in a special sense, a homicide man, Mary asked and the answer MacDonald did not know.

  “I met him in the car that brought us down,” MacDonald said. “He was pleasant, but not particularly communicative. It did come out, I’ve forgotten precisely how, that he’d been shot by somebody he was arresting for murder. He killed the man who shot him, and that bothers him. He said something about having let it go too far—but you heard him say that, when you were being so haughty with us. Why were you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I—I thought I’d had enough of people for the time being. Didn’t want to get—” She stopped, having almost said “involved,” which would have been a foolish thing to say, even an embarrassing one. She was not “involved” with this—this long drink of water. Thinking of him so, she smiled to herself, but not wholly to herself, since the smile was briefly on her lips.

  “I do remember something about it,” she said. “I’d have thought a policeman would get used to things like that.”

  MacDonald supposed most did, adding that he knew few. But there was, he said, no reason that an occupation, even that of policeman, should necessarily, and basically, change a man.

  “Even a doctor,” he said, “doesn’t always get used to death.”

  “He looks,” she said, “like a matter-of-fact man. But somehow—”

  He agreed with the implication of the unfinished sentence.

  “I had,” Mary said, “the feeling in there”—she indicated the lounge with a motion of her head—“that he was—waiting for something. For someone to do something, or say something. And—I was surprised he said so much. About Mr. Wells’s death, I mean.”

  He nodded to that, quickly.

  “A sieve,” he agreed. Then he stopped suddenly and his face changed. “Come to think of it,” he said, “you use a sieve to sift things out, don’t you? Say if you’re sifting—oh, gravel. Top soil. The small stuff goes through; the big stuff doesn’t. You separate and what you want, big stuff or small stuff, you keep. The rest you throw away.”

  He was, she said, turning it upside down. What they had both meant was that Heimrich had the retention powers of—


  “Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said, from behind her. “Now Miss Wister.” He sat down. He did not seem perturbed; he smiled amiably enough. “I thought all you people would be interested,” he said. “How are the shrimps this evening?”

  Mary flushed slightly.

  “I didn’t—” she began.

  “You’ll like the shrimps, captain,” Barclay MacDonald said, firmly. “Don’t embarrass the girl. What did you expect us to talk about?”

  “Oh, the murder, naturally,” Heimrich said. “It’s uppermost in your minds, of course. Very interesting thing, murder.” The waitress came. She took the pad on which Heimrich had written his order and beamed on him and said it was a beautiful evening, wasn’t it. She said, “They tell me you’re a detective.”

  “Do they, Mae?” Heimrich said.

  “From the FBI,” Mae said. “That poor Mr. Wells was a G-man too and-”

  “Now Mae,” Heimrich said. “You tell them they’re all wrong. After you bring me some shrimps, hm-m?”

  “Oh, you!” Mae said, and went.

  “To laymen, particularly,” Heimrich said, picking up without effort. “Actually, it’s very ugly.” He paused, and closed his eyes. “I don’t like murder,” he said, mildly. “I don’t like people who murder.”

  It was, of course, an affirmation against sin, and outwardly as obvious. But there was something in the very mildness of Heimrich’s tone, its studied quiet, which made the obvious almost impressive—and almost frightening. Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “There is no reason good enough for murder,” he said. “No provocation. You agree, doctor?”

  “I suppose not,” MacDonald said. “Some people seem to ask for it, you know.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “People who are murdered are often regrettable people, naturally. You were thinking of Mr. Wells?”

  “Not especially,” MacDonald said.

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Of Wells and—your brother, say?”