Death by Association

by Frances Lockridge

  They started to leave the court after the fourth game, but their final opponents were waiting and there was, Shepard pointed out, no reason to get cooled off. So they stayed on and played again, and this time won all four. This time Mary Wister kept count. She served her game and won it from fifteen, thanks—oh, certainly, thanks—to Shepard’s daring and determined interceptions. In that game, she hit the ball nine times in serving and once off the ground. With Shepard serving, she did not touch the ball. From the opposing woman she accepted service three times, netting once; from the man five, outing once. In four games, she had eighteen times the agreeable, or depressing, feeling of a tennis ball against the gut of a swinging racket. But they won—all told they had won seventeen games of the twenty played and their nearest competition—oddly enough the Silvermanns, who played for fun—had a won total of thirteen. “Nice going,” Shepard assured her as they walked to the pavilion. “Knew we could do it.”

  “The Davis Cup safely home again,” she said, not having intended to say it.

  He looked at her for a moment and then laughed.

  “All right,” he said. “I like to win. Don’t you?” He smiled. “You think I take it pretty seriously?”

  “Oh,” Mary said, “no. Everybody likes to win.”

  MacDonald and Heimrich got up as they approached. MacDonald extended congratulations and Heimrich, his eyes open, nodded to second them. Shepard stared at the black sling across Heimrich’s linen jacket. “What,” Shepard said, “happened to you, captain?”

  “Nothing serious,” Heimrich said. “Nothing at all serious, Mr. Shepard. You play a good game.” He paused. “Aggressive,” he added.

  “Had a good partner,” Shepard said. He pulled on a sweater. He looked, now that he was no longer running, hot and a little tired. He zipped a case over his racket; clamped it into a press. He said he was for a shower; he said he would be seeing them; he said, “Thanks a lot, partner,” to Mary Wister. He went. Mary supposed she’d better do the same. She put on a white tennis jacket.

  “I wonder,” Heimrich said, “if you could put it off for—oh, say half an hour, Miss Wister? If you’re not too tired, naturally.”

  “Why yes,” she said.

  “To talk to Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “Tell him what you told us.”

  “Of course,” Mary said. “If—if you want it that way.”

  “He does,” Heimrich said. “I gave him an outline. He wants to hear it from you.”

  “I suppose he denies it,” Mary said. “But, all right. I can’t vouch for any of it, of course. Why not—”

  “Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said. “He does deny it, naturally. But I’d like to do it this way. If you’re not too tired.”

  She wasn’t. Ten minutes later, in the Penguin Bar—which, at a corner table, gave more than the expected amount of privacy—she told William Oslen what Rachel Jones had told her. The situation was curiously informal for the story; it was incongruous to sit at a corner table, with a long drink at hand, and tell this unlikely story of intrigue to an open-faced man with a brush haircut, make these utterly improbable accusations. As she talked, as she watched bewilderment and disbelief spread on Oslen’s face, the story she had been told, and now retold, seemed entirely preposterous.

  And when she finished, William Oslen called it that. He shook his head over it. He said, “But I barely know the girl,” in the accents of a good Eastern school. He spread agile hands in a gesture of bafflement. “Why would she tell this story? This idiotic lie?”

  He looked at Heimrich, at Mary, at Barclay MacDonald. He shook his head hopelessly. “She must be crazy,” he said. “Or—after notoriety?” The last was half a question. None of the three he spoke to offered him an answer. He shook his head again.

  “I barely know her,” he repeated. “She’s studying at a place in New York—studying piano. I’m on the board—sometimes I listen to the piano students. Give them advice. I met her that way and—well, she’s a pretty girl. I took her to dinner once or twice; to a concert or two. I hadn’t any idea I’d meet her here. That she’d tell this crazy story—” Words appeared to fail Oslen. He spread his hands, which were so much more expressive than his face, than his voice.

  “Did you expect to meet Mr. Wells here?” Heimrich asked.

  “Wells?” Oslen repeated. “I didn’t know him, captain. I knew of him, of course. Knew the swell job he was doing to smoke out the commies. I’d never met him. I didn’t expect to meet anybody here I knew. Just to spend a couple of weeks loafing around in the sun before the spring tour.”

  That was, Heimrich told him, very natural. “Now Mr. Oslen,” he began, but Oslen leaned toward him suddenly.

  “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you get the girl here? Have her repeat this—this yarn of hers? To my face?”

  He turned quickly to Mary Wister.

  “I don’t mean—” he said.

  “I understand,” Mary said. “I wondered that myself, captain.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “The trouble is, Miss Jones doesn’t seem to be around. They’ve been trying to find her. That is, the deputy sheriff has, since I told him the story about noon. She’s not around.”

  They waited.

  “Hasn’t checked out,” Heimrich said. “Her things are in her room. She hasn’t had breakfast here, or lunch. They haven’t been able to pick her up in town.”

  Mary looked at him.

  “Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said, “I don’t know, naturally.”

  “Something’s happened to her,” Mary said. “I broke my promise and—”

  “Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said. “Now Miss Wister. I did nothing until around noon, when I couldn’t find her myself. What did you think she wanted the time for, Miss Wister?”

  Mary hesitated.

  “You mean,” she said, “she wanted time to—to run away.” She looked at Oslen, who shook his head, who offered a blank face. “You mean that, captain?”

  “That would seem most likely, wouldn’t it?” Heimrich said. “If, as Mr. Oslen tells us, her story is preposterous, her disappearance might make it appear more creditable. Or she might think it would. Also, makes it harder to disprove, naturally, since she can’t be cross-examined. And, of course, if there were any truth in her story—I don’t say there is, Mr. Oslen—she might feel she was—safer—away from here.”

  “There is,” Barclay MacDonald said slowly, “another possibility, of course.”

  He looked at Oslen.

  “I tell you—” Oslen began, hotly.

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Oslen, Of course there is another possibility—perhaps several possibilities. Mr. Oslen, not knowing she had already talked to Miss Wister, thinking she might talk to someone, may have made it impossible for her to talk. There are other possibilities, naturally.” He closed his eyes. “There always are,” he said. “There always are.” His voice sounded tired.

  “I can’t stop your thinking what you damn well please,” Oslen said.

  Heimrich did not open his eyes. He said, “Now Mr. Oslen. You can’t, can you?” Then he opened his eyes. “At about twenty minutes to one this morning,” he said, “somebody jabbed me with a knife. From behind. He’d waited in a shadow by the entrance and after I’d walked past him, used this knife. I heard his movements and had time to fall away from it. So he only scratched my shoulder. That wasn’t, probably, what he’d planned. He didn’t wait to make sure.” Heimrich paused. He opened his eyes.

  “Doctor MacDonald was out on the pier about that time, he tells me,” Heimrich said. “Miss Wister was—I suppose in your room, Miss Wister?” She nodded. “And you, Mr. Oslen?” Heimrich said.

  “The hell with this,” Oslen said.

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes again. “If you like, naturally. But somebody’s going to ask you. One time or another, you’re going to answer. Where were you, Mr. Oslen?”

  “In my room,” Oslen said. “Asleep.” He paused. �
��Alone,” he said. He looked hard at Heimrich.

  “Where was Sibley?” he asked, and his voice was hard, insistent. “That idealistic wife of his, who thought Wells was such a funny, funny man?” He mimicked, not particularly well. “You’ve thought about Sibley, haven’t you?”

  “About Judge Sibley?” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Oslen. What is there to think about Judge Sibley?”

  “I don’t know,” Oslen said. “All I know is what everybody knows—that he’s up for confirmation to this post, whatever it is. That there’s some doubt about him, as a risk. Or seems to be. That the committee’s digging into his—associations. That Wells had been asked to appear before the committee. Next week, I think. But he can’t now, can he?” He waited. “Can he?” he repeated.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “No, he can’t appear, Mr. Oslen.” He opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve thought about Judge Sibley, naturally. I’ve thought about several people. Judge and Mrs. Sibley were in their room. They’d just gone to bed, or were getting ready to go.”

  “So they tell you,” Oslen said.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “So they tell me. You weren’t in town yesterday evening, Mr. Oslen?”

  “No,” Oslen said. “I had a drink or two in the lounge. Played a little on the piano. It needs tuning.” He shuddered, seeming to hear discordant sounds. “Keeps my fingers loosened up, is about all.”

  Heimrich said, “Umm-h.” He said that he had been wondering about that; about Mr. Oslen’s opportunity to practice.

  “You hadn’t made any special arrangements to have a piano available?” Heimrich asked. “To keep in practice?”

  “No,” Oslen said. “I don’t need all that.”

  Heimrich said he saw. He opened his eyes.

  “By the way,” he said, “when does your tour begin, Mr. Oslen?”

  Oslen thought a moment. “A week from tomorrow,” he said.

  Heimrich nodded, abstractedly.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess—” But then he stopped. He shrugged and, from the expression on his face, wished he had not.

  “Probably,” he said, “all this is needless—a blind alley. Probably our man’s García, after all.” He nodded, as if to himself, as if affirming an idea. “That was his sister I was talking to last night,” he said to MacDonald, to Mary. “At a night club in town,” he added, including Oslen. “She calls herself Rita Abelard.” He shook his head. “They think up remarkable names,” he said. “She’s a strip tease girl at this club,” he told Oslen. “A rather pretty girl, in a fashion. Blond.” He paused. “Blond on purpose, naturally,” he added. “She’s Cuban, and actually rather dark. She takes drugs; has for several years. She says Wells started her.”

  “Of all the crazy—” Oslen began.

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Oslen. I’m afraid that it’s only quite recently that Mr. Wells—put on his armor. Started his crusade. Before that—” He spread his hard, square hands, so different from the expressive hands of William Oslen. “Before that he had a somewhat varied career,” Heimrich told them. He closed his eyes.

  Heimrich, Mary Wister decided, was about to be a sieve again. She looked quickly at MacDonald, who nodded just perceptibly.

  “They,” Heimrich told them, had been checking up on Bronson Wells. Naturally. Some they got from New York, some from Washington, part in Key West. He did not argue they had it all, or would ever have it. They had aspects of a man, possibly not the man himself, almost certainly not all of the man. But that was usually the way. Heimrich nodded his head; he kept his eyes closed, but appeared to be thinking aloud. When he spoke of making the character fit the crime, he told them, he meant both sides of the crime, the active and the passive. A certain man might commit a certain kind of crime, or the crime of, say, murder, in a certain way, responding to a certain provocation, using a certain weapon. It would for example—and for the simplest example, naturally—be more likely that García would use a knife if he wanted to kill than that, say, the doctor here would. Certain motives might be adequate for one man and not for another. The character of the murderer would determine the texture of the crime-in part. The character of the victim was equally a factor. Both had to be considered.

  “So,” Captain Heimrich said. “To get back to Mr. Wells.”

  They had, he said, got quite a distance back into the life of Mr. Wells, who had been born in Chicago, very poor, in 1905 and who, still very poor, had joined the Communist Party in the early twenties. He had been in New York, then, trying to get on the stage. He had not been particularly successful.

  “He may have blamed what they call the ‘system,’ ” Heimrich said. “He may have been what other people call an ‘idealist.’ It’s one of the things we don’t know.”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Oslen asked. “He was a commie.” The big pianist shook his head. “Who wasn’t poor once?” he asked. “Who liked it?”

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “Nobody, naturally. I’m merely trying to give you a picture.”

  But, Mary wondered, why? What a strange kind of policeman! But then, she thought, I don’t know much about policemen; not really enough to tell whether this one is a strange kind.

  At any rate, Heimrich said, Wells had joined the Communist Party. For some years, apparently, he had made his living at whatever came to hand. “Probably,” Heimrich said, “some odd things came to hand. It’s one of the things we don’t know too much about. He seems to have had a few small parts on the stage.” But Wells’s main interest was in work for the party. In the early thirties, he went on the party payroll as a professional organizer. “At, I imagine, barely enough to live on,” Heimrich said. “It isn’t a lucrative profession.” He looked at Oslen, he seemed about to speak. “Now Mr. Oslen,” he said, “it isn’t, you know.”

  “How the hell would I know?” Oslen asked. “They get plenty from Moscow, if you ask me. But I don’t know anything about it. I keep telling you that.”

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Oslen.”

  “A crazy little halfwit tells you a story,” Oslen said. “A story crazy on the face of it! You believe—”

  “Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said, “you don’t know what I believe, do you? I was talking about Mr. Wells.” He waited, but Oslen merely glared at him, without speaking. “So—” Heimrich said, and got back to it.

  Bronson Wells had worked in the party for ten years or more, as a paid agitator. There was no secret about that. He had an office at the party’s headquarters off Union Square. He was, in a minor way, one of—Heimrich hesitated—call it the front men for the party. Then, in 1945, something happened. Quite suddenly, so far as could be determined, he dropped out of the party’s councils.

  “That sort of thing often happened,” Heimrich said. “He got thrown out. Maybe the line zigged and he zagged; I don’t know. Somebody decided he was a deviatlonist. The next year, he turned up here, in Key West. He went back to making his living as he could.”

  One of his ways, and perhaps the most legitimate, Heimrich told them, was as a master of ceremonies at one of the honky-tonks. He introduced the girls; he invited big hands for them. He told jokes between numbers; now and then even sang a little. He had done similar work in New York from time to time.

  “A leerer in chief,” Barclay MacDonald said.

  He was told, by Heimrich, that that put it very neatly. Bronson Wells, although he was pretty old for it, was a leer leader. He was also, apparently, engaged in other activities, in several of which the police were interested; in one of which, the Federal Government was interested. He was, at the least, on the fringes of the narcotics racket.

  Oslen shook his head at that; shook it with the air of a man listening to the flagrantly improbable, finding it too improbable even to deny.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “it wasn’t proved, naturally. Otherwise, he’d have been picked up. But the sheriff says there isn’t much doubt about it.”

  O
slen spread his hands.

  “García’s sister is an addict,” Heimrich said. “She denies she is now; admits she was; says she got started by Wells. She’s still an addict, whatever she says. Heroin, now. She says she started on marijuana, which is probably true. She had been going to business college. Her brother—their parents are dead—was very proud of her. Now she’s a strip tease girl. García blames Wells; she admits her brother’s threatened Wells, in the past. I talked to her last night. She wanted to talk to me.”

  She was, Heimrich told them, afraid for her brother—naturally. García denied to the deputy sheriff that he had seen Wells, or thought about him, for years until he saw him on the dance floor of The Coral Isles. He admitted he had been surprised at seeing Wells—violently surprised. But he denied that he had seen Wells afterward. The authorities were sure he had, partly because of the cigarettes Wells had in his pocket—a brand García smoked, as did many other Key Westers. The authorities were sure they could, given time, prove it.

  “Which,” Heimrich said, “they can, the girl thinks. Because it’s true. She says Wells looked them up and offered to help—to see that she got out of the club, and out of Key West, and went back to business school or whatever she wanted. She says that, after some talking, her brother was convinced Wells really wanted to help, although he told Wells they didn’t need help. ‘We don’t,’ she told me. ‘I’m all right, now. I’m going north in the spring and get out of all this.’ ”

  The three of them had talked for an hour or so, Rita García, who called herself Abelard, had told Heimrich the night before, sitting at a table in the night club, pinkish light from a shaded bulb falling on her face. It had ended amicably; the three had had a drink together and then coffee—Cuban coffee. Wells had left them and taken a cab back to the hotel.

  “She wants me to see her brother, get him to admit this,” Heimrich said. “If it’s the truth, she’s right, naturally.”