In this case, the law would require—and most properly—more than Heimrich at the moment had; more, that was, than a conviction deeply rooted in observation of a number of people. The law would prefer an eyewitness, or several. This the law was not likely to get; this it seldom got. Failing such witnesses, the law would like opportunity and means, preferably exclusive. It did not appear that, in connection with the murder of Bronson Wells, the law was going to get anything so precise. At least—Heimrich mentally checked off names—at least four persons, and more than that if one cared to go a little afield, had had opportunity, in the sense that they were not provably elsewhere, and otherwise engaged, when Wells was stabbed. The means—about which the coroner’s physician was less specific than Heimrich would have liked, except that a long knife had been used—were available, or at least not demonstrably unavailable, to any number of people. As for motive—
Heimrich sighed. Except in one case the motive was evident. In that case, it could be presumed.
It was not tidy; not at all tidy. But then, murder so seldom was. It was open at both ends, and not too tight in the middip. But that was often the case. The significant clue was so seldom left to be stumbled over; the most careful investigation so often accounted for everything except what was significant.
Well, Heimrich thought, it is time to prod. It was time to arrange a happening.
Captain Heimrich got up, being careful not to jiggle his right arm—which was a nuisance, as was the absence of his alter ego, Sergeant Forniss; as was, for that matter, his lack of authority and expert technical aid. (The vagueness about the knife now—that was really an irritation.) However—
Heimrich walked through the enclosed porch and through a door which led into the lounge. A young man in a red jacket was cooing his name. The young man led him, with proper deference, to a telephone. Heimrich identified himself and heard the voice of Chief Deputy Sheriff Jefferson. Heimrich listened. After a time he said that he wasn’t surprised, naturally. He listened further. He said that it was, of course, up to the sheriff.
“However,” Heimrich said, “I think it would be a mistake.” He listened again. “Oh,” he said, “because I don’t really think he’s your man. Even if you can prove his friends lied for him. And—I don’t want others to.” He listened again. “One other, if you prefer,” Heimrich said, and listened once more. “Tonight, I think,” he said. “If you take him in now, and word gets around, I don’t think anything will happen. Why should it?” Once more he listened.
“I don’t want to go into it here,” Heimrich said. “Of course, it’s your case. You don’t want to make a mistake on it. I think that arresting García would be a mistake. Tonight, at any rate.” He listened. “I think he’ll be around in the morning,” Heimrich said. “You can make sure of that, naturally.” He listened once more, this time for longer. He said he was not trying to be mysterious; he pointed out that he was talking through the hotel switchboard.
He said, “Why not play it my way, for tonight at least? If you can come here, I’ll explain why.” He listened briefly. “I don’t want to leave now,” he said. “Otherwise I would.” He waited. “Call it on a silver platter, if you like,” he said. “Naturally, I may be wrong. I think the chance is good.” He listened.
“Now sheriff,” he said. “Now sheriff. I’ll give things a push.”
He listened once more to the voice on the telephone and said that that would be fine. He told Deputy Sheriff Jefferson that they would be seeing each other, and hung up. Then he went around the hotel desk to the door of the manager’s office and knocked and was admitted. A few minutes later he came out and walked down the lounge.
The Shepards and Judge and Mrs. Sibley were drinking together. Mrs. Shepard smiled, and beckoned to Heimrich, but Heimrich shook his head and went on. The four of them looked at him, and Heimrich thought he could feel their uneasiness. At any rate, Heimrich hoped he could. He met Oslen just before he reached the stairs to the floors above and Oslen said, “Hi,” with unexpected amiability. Heimrich said, “Good evening, Mr. Oslen,” and started to go on.
“Listen, captain,” Oslen said. “I flew off the handle this afternoon. It’s not your fault if Rachel made up this crazy story. I realize that. And, sure, you had to ask me about it.”
“Now Mr. Oslen,” Heimrich said. “That’s all right. Perfectly natural.”
“Haven’t you found her yet?” Oslen asked.
Heimrich for a moment appeared to hesitate. Then he said, “I think I know where she is, Mr. Oslen. I’m quite sure I do, in fact.”
“She’s all right?” Oslen said. “Crazy little fool or not, she’s—well, hell, I hope she’s all right.”
“Naturally,” Heimrich said.
“What the hell?” Oslen said. “If I get a chance to talk to her, she’ll crawl out of the whole thing. You can bet on that.”
He waited. Heimrich looked at him.
“Now Mr. Oslen,” he said. “Now Mr. Oslen. You wouldn’t really want to bet, would you?” He looked at the taller man, looked into a guileless, open face; straightforward eyes. “Not bet your life on it, surely?” Then, before Oslen could say anything, Captain Heimrich walked on. He thought Oslen would join the Sibleys and the Shepards; he hoped he would. He wondered with interest what the five would make of one another now, how they would talk, how uneasy they would be and how suspicious. He hoped he could guess, and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
It took him some minutes to find the middle-aged woman in the blue uniform. He found her coming out of a room, with towels over her arm. He said, “You’re Ella, aren’t you,” and noticed something like fear in her eyes.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It was a perfectly natural thing to do. There’ll be no trouble if you do what I ask.”
“I don’t know—” the maid began.
“Now Ella,” Heimrich said. “Of course you do.” He told her what he wanted her to do.
“Please, sir,” she said. “I can’t do that. I—I promised. Anyway, if they see me with a guest, they’ll fire me. It’s a rule.”
“Now Ella,” Heimrich said. “I’m not exactly a guest, you know. I’m a policeman. We’ll go now, Ella.”
It was then a few minutes after seven.
“Over beyond the tennis courts,” Mary Wister said. “A very strange building—like a prison, really.”
They were beside an open widow in the Penguin Bar; they were sipping long drinks, slowly. Outside the vari-colored lights which lay cupped at the bases of palm trees had been turned on; the light of the moon softened them, so that they seemed, improbably, aspects of the moonlight. In the patio, waitresses in . white blouses and Guatemalan skirts of many mixtures, were setting tables; white-jacketed boys carried chairs to them down the stairs from the main dining room. In the semi-cylinders of two bisected tanks, mounted on iron trestles, charcoal was flickering in blue flame.
“—one little door,” Mary said. “The whole thing seems to be triangular.” She looked across the table, answered MacDonald’s half smile, and its implication. “It doesn’t matter, Mac,” she said. “I’m just—just talking.”
“No,” MacDonald said. “As a matter of fact, I saw it too. I asked.” He nodded to himself and to her. “I’m learning from the captain,” he told her. “When I want to know something, I ask. It’s the water shed.” She looked puzzled. “It’s full of water,” he said. “Not of prisoners. Just of water.” She shook her head to that.
It was, he told her, reasonably simple. Key West one thought of as part of the mainland, as—so much any Key Wester would tell you, without being asked—the southernmost tip of the mainland. This was true, but only technically—only by the grace of the causeway which linked it with the rest of Florida. It was nevertheless an island, and a coral island at that. As coral an island, he told her, as one could find in the southernmost seas. And, being the kind of island it was, it had no indigenous fresh water.
Mary looked doubtful. She said, “But—”
>
“Oh,” MacDonald said, “it has fresh water, now. Some years ago, the Navy built a pipeline, a conduit. You can see it, here and there, as you drive down.”
Through the conduit, by grace of the United States Navy, Key West enjoyed water, but not in quantity. There had been enough and to spare when the line was first constructed, but the city had continued to grow. It had grown as a place for tourists—for people who wanted summer in winter, without the decorations of Miami Beach; for people who wanted houses and apartments for the colder months; for the fewer who were willing to endure Key West’s unrelenting summer for the lazy peace which came to the little city in the hottest days. The water supply had not grown with the community.
Before the conduit was built, the people who lived on the little island had trusted to rainfall. They had gathered it from roofs, hoarded it in cisterns, used it sparingly. To some extent, for some purposes, those who wished to be sure of their supply—who wanted to squander water, as The Coral Isles squandered it on hedges, and on bougainvillaea, on thirsty lawns—held to the old fashion, and saved the water as it fell, draining it into storage. The triangular building, with the spreading silvery roof, was in fact a considerable cistern. If one could look into it, one would be looking into a covered lake.
“You mean,” Mary asked, “that we’ve been drinking it?”
To that, Barclay MacDonald shook his head. They drank, he told her, water from the mainland, by courtesy of the Navy. The grass and the trees drank water more immediately provided by God.
“Oh,” Mary Wister said, relieved. He grinned at her, and motioned to the bar waitress. Mary hesitated; was told that it was her doctor’s order.
“My doctor?” Mary said, before she thought, and was looked at with amusement.
“Entirely,” Barclay MacDonald said. “Hadn’t you noticed?”
He looked at her, and waited. She was conscious of his waiting, and conscious, for the first time in many years, of an uncertainty more than superficial. So she pretended; so she said, “All right, doctor,” limiting acquiesence to the matter of a second drink. This seemed, on the whole, to amuse him, but he ordered the drinks. They sat over them, looking out through the window, watching the hurrying waitresses, the busy boys in white jackets; watching the blue flames which leaped higher, now, under the steak broilers.
“To change the subject,” MacDonald said, after a long moment of silence, “I think our captain is arranging for something to happen.”
“Arranging?” she repeated.
MacDonald suspected, he told her, that that was the way Heimrich worked—his way out of the two most probable ways. He was, he said, assuming that there was a kinship between the search for a truth in, say, medicine, and for another, say, in criminal investigation. If so, he would say there were two ways.
“I am changing the subject,” he said, carefully. “For now. It will come up again, you know.”
“Go on,” she said. “What two most probable ways?”
“Accumulation,” he said. “Postulation. Getting together everything you can find, hoping that a pattern will emerge from multiplicity. Postulating a pattern, seeking support from the observed. You decide the world is round; you discover support in the appearance first of the superstructure of ships. You view the physical world, presume a pattern of roundness, arrange experiments to prove your theory.” He considered. “In science,” he said. “In criminal investigation. But neither method is often used exclusively.”
She waited again. He smiled at her across the small table.
“I change the subject,” he said. “You wanted it changed?”
“I don’t know, Mac,” Mary said. “Go on.”
“Neither excludes the other,” he said. “Both methods are used together. Heimrich, I imagine, collects facts until he can guess at a pattern, but not until he can prove a pattern. Until he has a hunch. We all do that. Then, in my field, we conduct experiments intended to prove the hunch. Controlled experiments, we call them. Say we assume that the incidence of cancer of the stomach varies inversely with the presence of free hydrochloric acid. We get a hunch that is true on the basis of general observation. Then we accumulate more information, controlled, channeled, to the end of proving our theory. Or of disproving it, but with a provisional bias in its favor.” He paused. “It’s not a particularly good example,” he said. “But no matter. I’ve fallen in love with you, you know.”
“I—” she said, and stopped.
“You know,” he said. “But there’s no hurry. I suspect that Captain Heimrich arranges experiments. I suspect that talking to García’s sister, in public as he did, was an experiment. He wanted to make something happen.”
“But nothing—” Mary began, and stopped again.
“Yes,” MacDonald said. “He got himself stabbed. Not fatally. Quite superficially, really. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fatality wasn’t intended.” He considered his phrasing and shook his head over it.
Mary didn’t, she said, see what Heimrich had proved, except that steel will penetrate flesh.
MacDonald was not sure. One could, he pointed out, guess. If the stabbing was connected with the interview Heimrich had had with García’s sister, then the first thought would be that she had said something which incriminated García; that, hearing of it, García had taken steps. The second thought would be that that was too easy; that someone had taken advantage of the situation to make it appear that García had acted so, on such provocation. That the wound was superficial rather bore this out. Of course, Heimrich must have hoped to trap his man—and hadn’t.
“You’re oblique,” Mary told him. MacDonald shook his head to that.
“Not I,” he said. “The circumstances. Perhaps the murderer. Perhaps the captain. He is—”
But then Barclay MacDonald stopped.
“What do you see?” he asked Mary. “You’ve gone—”
“Wait!” she said, and looked fixedly out the window. Her head moved slightly as her gaze followed someone, or something. Then, quickly, she looked back.
“The girl,” she said. “I’m almost certain. Rachel Jones. Only—she’s dressed as a waitress. She’s putting glasses on tables. But I’m certain—” She looked out of the window again. “I’m almost certain.”
“Yes,” MacDonald said. “I think that’s what Heimrich meant. A place like this takes a big staff. They are housed in the dormitory, you know—near where—where you found Wells. I imagine they come and go. That if you were willing to pay, you could make it worth someone’s while—a chambermaid’s, say—to hide you in the dormitory.”
Mary was looking out the window again. She started to speak without turning her head. “But you wouldn’t—” she began, and broke off. Barclay MacDonald watched her profile and, although he waited her words with interest, he waited also without impatience, pleased with what he saw.
“Captain Heimrich,” Mary said. “He’s coming this way. And—he passed right by the girl I’m sure is Rachel Jones and didn’t see her. He—”
She turned, now, and looked toward the door which, from the patio, opened into the Penguin Bar. MacDonald turned in his chair and looked with her. After a longer interval than either had expected, Captain Heimrich came through the door, the black sling in which his right arm rested sharply outlined against a white jacket. He saw them at once, and appeared surprised to see them. He seemed about to pass on through the bar, acknowledging their presence only abstractedly. But Mary Wister said, “Captain Heimrich,” and he stopped and then came to their table. He was offered a drink; he hesitated; he decided to accept a drink. MacDonald beckoned to the pretty girl who served in the bar. Heimrich decided on rye and plain water.
“Captain,” Mary said. “Wasn’t that Rachel Jones out there?”
“Out there?” Heimrich repeated. Mary indicated the part of the patio visible through the window. Heimrich looked through the window, mild interest in his face.
“Dressed as a waitress,” Mary said. “You passed a few feet from he
r. Didn’t you see her?”
“Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said. For a moment he continued to look through the window. “You have good eyes,” he said then, and turned from the window. He appeared to hesitate. “Yes,” he said then. “I saw her, naturally.”
His tone was casual, oddly casual it seemed to Mary Wister. She looked at him, her eyes opening a little more widely. After a moment, Heimrich nodded. But then he closed his own eyes.
“But—” Mary said, and her voice was puzzled. “Aren’t you going to do anything? You were looking for her.”
“Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said, and his eyes remained closed. “What do you expect me to do? Arrest her?”
Mary made a quick gesture, dismissing that, labeling that subterfuge.
“She’s in danger from Oslen,” Mary said. “You know that. You’ve said as much.”
“Have I?” Heimrich asked. He opened blue eyes. “Did I say that, Miss Wister?”
“Of course she is,” Mary said. “Anybody can see that.”
Heimrich said, “Now Miss Wister.” He regarded her. “We haven’t any proof, you know,” he said. “No evidence.” He paused again. “However,” he said, “we’ll pick Miss Jones up, naturally. In time.”
Mary merely looked at him. She continued to look at him while the pretty girl brought his drink; while, a little absently, he lifted the glass and drank.
“I don’t—” she began then, but at the same time Barclay MacDonald spoke.
“You knew where she was, didn’t you?” he asked Heimrich. “You’ve known for some time now, haven’t you, captain?”
“Now doctor,” Heimrich said. He looked for a moment at the glass in his hand. “Perhaps I guessed,” he admitted.
“And did nothing?” MacDonald asked the question; it had been sharp in Mary’s mind.
“Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “She hasn’t been harmed, has she? Or done harm?”
“You’re very casual,” Mary Wister said. “Unbearably casual.”
Heimrich looked at her thoughtfully. He shook his head.
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