Dead Run

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  The fumes from the oil stove hadn’t been conducive to sleep. Nor had the oil stove done much to warm the kitchen. The small teakettle of water, still warmish from the last gasps of the water heater, was still not much more than warmish from its night on top of the oil stove. That led to warmish instant coffee. And bread could be toasted at the fire.

  “I could warm us eggs, I suppose,” Susan said. “Do we want faintly warmed eggs?”

  The decision was against faintly warmed eggs. It was for brief, and chilling, face washing in cold water. (There was still water in the pressure tank; there was no telling how much. There was enough water to flush toilets—this once, anyway.)

  “We’ll both go to the inn for breakfast,” Heimrich said, and was firm about it. “Tell you what, we’ll take a room there. A room with bath.”

  “And come back every half hour or so to keep the fire going.”

  “And come back every hour or so to keep the fire going,” Merton agreed. “The sun will warm things up a little.”

  He went to the window and looked at the thermometer. It was covered with ice. Finally, he located the mercury column. It showed twenty-five. Unless, of course, it was showing fifteen. Susan fed Mite, who had been talking about it, and Colonel, who was too depressed to say anythiing, but who consented to eat. They put more logs on the fire. Heimrich got the can of kerosene from the garage and refilled—and then relighted—the fuming stove. They went out into the sunlight.

  And a million tiny suns dazzled their eyes. Each smallest twig, each pine needle, sparkled at them. This was true as far as they could see. The whole world glittered.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Susan said. “How can anything so beautiful be so ugly?”

  Heimrich, who was backing the Buick to face it down the drive—and discovering that the sun still hadn’t had time or strength to melt the ice, and thinking that fifteen had probably been right on the thermometer—said “Mmm.” But the “mm” was appreciative.

  On Van Brunt Avenue, even the low slanting sun, helped by sand and the modicum of salt mixed with it, had begun to melt the pavement ice. Once they had skidded down to it, making the Old Stone Inn wasn’t bad—not if you stayed at twenty. The parking lot was still glazed, but one of the Purvis boys—Jeremiah, Junior, or Jacob?—was tossing rock salt on it There were three cars in the lot and one of them was a state police cruiser. They went into the taproom. There was a fire in the room. There was nobody behind the bar. Corporal Asa Purvis and Lieutenant Charles Forniss were sitting at a table near the fire. Both were drinking coffee.

  Susan said, “Good morning, Charles. Hi, Asa,” and, to Heimrich, “I’ll go see Mary about a room. With bath. For periodic rise. And I’ll see about breakfast.”

  She went into the lobby.

  Heimrich said, “Morning, Charlie. Corporal.”

  Asa Purvis stood up, more or less at attention. He said, “Sir.” (Young Purvis could, on occasion, be a little trying.) Forniss said, “Morning, M. L. Quite a night, wasn’t it? People sliding into trees all over the place.”

  “Here, into other people,” Heimrich told him and joined them at the table. He said, “Oh, sit down, Asa,” to the still-standing Corporal of the New York State Police. Asa said, “Sir,” and sat down. He sat erect, still somewhat at attention.

  Heimrich asked him what he had got from his father. Purvis took a typed sheet out of his pocket and looked at it. He handed it to Heimrich. “Seventeen wagons pretty regularly,” Asa said. “All kinds, seems like.”

  Reading the list of owners, license numbers, and makes of station wagons, Heimrich nodded his head. “All kinds” was right—Pontiacs and Oldses, a variety of Fords, Chryslers under several model names, an American Motors or two. One Cadillac, which was a mild surprise. Heimrich hadn’t known Cadillac made a station wagon. Probably a special job for—for Farmington Crothers. Well, Crothers could afford to have a Cadillac made to his preference. Probably a Rolls, come to that.

  All but one of the cars carried Putnam County plates. The exception had a “V” prefix. (Which, Arnold Goldberg had once assured Heimrich, stood for “Vestchester.”) The names of most of the owners were known to Inspector Heimrich. They told him nothing. Oh, he rather doubted that the Reverend Dr. Francis Armstrong had backed his 1970 Pontiac wagon into Samuel Jackson and then reversed it to run Sam Jackson over.

  “None of these been in for repairs?” Heimrich asked Asa Purvis.

  None had. “Nobody had been in for anything, when I stopped by,” Asa said, and added “Sir” to make it official. “Things are still pretty much iced up, Inspector.”

  Forniss said they sure as hell were. He said that all the cruisers operating out of the barracks were still wearing chains. “But the generator’s working O.K.,” he added.

  The morning waitress came in through the lobby from the dining room. She carried a tray with a coffeepot on it, and a cup and a small pitcher of cream and some packets of sugar. She said, “Good morning, sir. Mrs. Heimrich said to bring this in. And she’s ordered breakfast, sir. And she says you’d better have some too, Inspector. She said, ‘Tell him that’s an order.’”

  Steam was coming from the spout of the coffeepot. Fragrance was coming, too. The lukewarm instant at home hadn’t smelled of anything. Or tasted of it, either.

  “Tell her to go ahead,” Heimrich said. “Tell her I’ll be along.” He poured himself coffee. It steamed in the cup. He added cream.

  “Mrs. Heimrich says will soft-boiled eggs be all right,” the waitress said.

  “Tell her I’ll be along in a few minutes,” Heimrich said. “Only, don’t let them put the eggs in yet.”

  “And bacon? She said to ask you about bacon.”

  “All right, bacon,” Heimrich said. “In—oh, about fifteen minutes. Tell Mrs. Heimrich I’ll be in.”

  The waitress said, “Thank you, sir,” and went back where she had come from. Heimrich drank coffee.

  “Corporal’s filled me in,” Forniss said. “Could be it’s just vehicular homicide, couldn’t it? Just some damn fool not looking where he was going?”

  “He told you about Miss Collins, Charlie? What it looked like to her?”

  “Yeah. Only, I take it she’s a kid pretty much. And probably tired as hell after that drive down from Hanover. Tired kids—all kids, sometimes—see things that aren’t there. Imagine things, if you know what I mean, M. L. Get—oh, worked up.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “we both know that happens. And not only with kids, Charles. And Miss Collins isn’t that much of a kid and I don’t think she was that tired. I’ve talked to her. I don’t think she’s hallucinating. She may have been wrong, of course. But I think she saw what she says she saw. And if she did, it’s murder one.

  Charles Forniss said “Mmm.” He said, “I didn’t know Mr. Jackson except to say hello to. He seemed like a nice old guy. Why’d anybody want to kill him? Figure he was mixed up in something?”

  “He was a nice guy,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know what he was mixed up in, except drawing wills and making out contracts and things like that. And handling legal matters for the bank.”

  “Foreclosures, maybe? Can make people sore, being foreclosed.”

  Heimrich said he didn’t know, and that they’d have to try and find out, wouldn’t they? He finished his coffee. He felt it dissolving morning grumpiness. He poured himself another cup and drank it quickly. He stood up.

  “Don’t forget you’re supposed to have breakfast, M. L.,” Forniss said, as one friend to another. “Susan’ll be upset if you forget.”

  “O.K.,” Heimrich said. “O.K. You’ve had yours?”

  “At the barracks.”

  “All right. Jackson had a secretary. A Miss Arnold, I think she is. Maybe she’ll show up at his office, and maybe she won’t. Try to get in touch with her, Charlie. Tell her we’d like to talk to her in—oh, about half an hour. At Jackson’s if that’s all right with her. I’ll go eat those damn eggs.”

  Breakfast is not He
imrich’s favorite meal. Also, he thinks he weighs at least enough. He is wont to think of himself as resembling a hippopotamus. He went through the lobby into the inn’s dining room.

  Susan was alone in the dining room. She was alone at a table for four. She was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee.

  “I ordered for you,” she said. “Soft-boiled eggs and bacon and coffee. The kids are having breakfast in their rooms, Mary says. Special dispensation. She had to tell some people named Barkston the inn doesn’t run to room service. Mary’s talkative this morning.”

  Heimrich said “Mmm” and helped himself to coffee from Susan’s pot.

  “It’ll be cold,” Susan said. “They’re bringing you fresh.”

  Susan was right. And they did bring him fresh, with the bacon and eggs. The eggs were, as Heimrich had expected, almost hardboiled. He ate them anyway. He also ate his bacon. He even ate most of a piece of toast. Susan watched him approvingly. When he had lighted a cigarette, she said, “And now, dear?”

  Heimrich raised his eyebrows.

  “And now, what do we do, dear? Drive Joan back to the house to get her car? So she can go on to New York and spend Christmas with a father who climbs walls?”

  Heimrich drew deeply on his cigarette. He poured himself more coffee. Susan waited. He sipped from his refilled cup and, again, inhaled deeply. Finally, he said, “I suppose so. Suppose we have to. Only—” He stopped speaking and looked over his wife’s head at the ceiling. Again Susan waited.

  “Only,” he said, “I’d like her to stay around for a while. Maybe look at a few station wagons. Go over what she saw a couple of times, maybe. But I don’t like to make Mr. Collins climb walls.”

  He drank coffee. He said, “Tell you what, Susan. Suppose you ask her to stay around for a day or two. Or urge her to drive to New York and pluck her father from whatever wall he’s climbing and then come back here. Tell her it’s just a request. That she can go in if she really feels she has to. All right?”

  Susan supposed it was all right. She did say, “Why me?”

  “Because I’ve got to try to find out who killed Sam,” Merton told her.

  “Poor dear, Sam,” Susan said. “He never hurt anybody, did he? Why this—this awful thing?”

  “I don’t know, dear. We’ll try to find out.”

  “It wasn’t just an accident, Merton?”

  “It could have been, yes. But from what the girl saw—” He finished with a shrug of his shoulders. “She seems a bright girl, Michael’s Joan.”

  “Yes. And you want her here so—so that you can keep an eye on her. See that nothing happens to her. That’s it, isn’t it? Not to look at station wagons.”

  Heimrich finished his coffee. He stood up.

  “All right,” he said. “That does enter in. There’s a chance somebody may think she saw more than she did see. Or remembers seeing. But don’t tell her that, dear. Just try to persuade her to call her father and tell him she’s dreadfully sorry, but she’s held up. Or whatever she wants to tell him. That she’ll be home for New Year’s Eve, or whatever.”

  He looked down at his wife, who smiled and nodded her head.

  “I’ll try, Merton,” Susan said. “And then go back to the house and tend the fire. And try to pacify the animals. You won’t need the car?”

  “Charlie’s got a car. Then come back here for lunch. O.K.?”

  “Yes. About one?”

  They agreed on about one, give or take. It was Susan who interpolated the “give or take.” She is familiar with the uncertainty of a policeman’s hours.

  She lighted another cigarette after she had watched her tall husband walk to the lobby and through it. Even when he’s just walking it’s as if he were dancing, Susan thought. Merton Heimrich does not remind his wife of a hippopotamus.

  Joan Collins and Michael were coming down the stairs when Heimrich walked through the lobby. They looked to be all right. He said “Good morning” to them and went on toward the taproom. He stopped and turned back. “Your mother’s in the dining room,” he said. “Wants to be sure you’re both all right.” Then he went on.

  It had been a foolish thing to say, he thought. There was no reason they shouldn’t be all right—no real reason.

  Both Charles Forniss and Asa Purvis stood up this time when Heimrich went in. Asa stood straighter. Also, Asa was not smoking. There was no rule against smoking while on duty, except in Asa Purvis’s perhaps overdedicated mind. Forniss did grind out his cigarette.

  “All set with Miss Arnold,” Forniss said. “She’s waiting for us at the office. First name’s Alice. She sounded upset as hell on the phone. And can’t think of anything she can tell us about this terrible accident.”

  “Maybe there won’t be,” Heimrich said. “But well have to see, won’t we? Corporal!”

  Asa Purvis stood even straighter as he said, “Sir!”

  “What I want you to do is to drive around and look at station wagons,” Heimrich told him. “You’ve got your father’s list?”

  “No, sir,” Purvis told him. “You’ve got it, Inspector. I gave—”

  Heimrich said, “Of course, Asa,” and took out of his pocket the typed list of station wagons regularly serviced by Purvis’s Garage at The Corners. He gave it to Asa. He said, “You know what to look for?”

  “Yes, sir. Dents. And blood on tire chains, any that have chains. And try to find out whether any of them was being driven last night. That right, sir?”

  There was the faintest possible suggestion of reproach in young Purvis’s voice. It belonged there, Heimrich thought. Coffee had not entirely dissolved the morning grumpiness. You don’t tell a good cop to do the obvious. And Asa was shaping into a very good cop. Heimrich ought to say he was sorry. He said, “You’re entirely right, Asa. We’ll be at Mr. Jackson’s office for a while, if you turn up anything.”

  They went out of the taproom into the glittering sunlight. Sun and salt had melted the ice from the parking lot, although it was still cold and the wind still blustering. Purvis went to his squad car. He drove out ahead of Heimrich and Forniss and turned south on Van Brunt Avenue.

  There were still icy spots on NY 11F as they walked across itspots evergreens had shaded. But most of the pavement was free of ice, and drying. Traffic was having no problems. They had to wait to cross through it.

  Samuel Jackson’s office was on the second floor of a venerable white house, set back some fifty feet from the avenue and a hundred yards or so nearer The Corners than the Old Stone Inn. The Walthrop Insurance Agency occupied the ground floor. They climbed stairs. The door at the top of them had a ground glass panel with “Samuel Jackson, Attorney and Counselor-at-Law” lettered on it.

  They opened the door and went into Sam Jackson’s outer office, an office Jackson would never again walk through. It was a small room, on the avenue side of the old house—a house which had been somebody’s “mansion” when NY 11F was a dirt road, probably, and certainly a road without a number. It was a rather dark, small room; the sun was still hours from its west-facing windows.

  The woman sitting at the desk facing the door was not looking at the door. She jumped in her chair when she heard the door open, and then turned to face them. Her movement was almost convulsive. She had been looking out one of the windows at the street; looking fixedly at the traffic moving on Van Brunt Avenue. Looking without seeing. And she had, Heimrich thought, been crying.

  She was, he guessed, in her late forties or early fifties. Her grayish blond hair was set in ripples. Her chin quivered a little. She was a small, neat woman, and when she spoke it was in a small, neat voice, which quavered.

  She said, “I’m afraid Mr. Jackson—” and did not go on. She merely looked at them. Her small mouth twitched.

  Heimrich said, “Miss Arnold?” and she nodded her head. She spoke again, and this time her voice was steadier.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Jackson can’t—” she said, and again did not finish. Heimrich told her who they were and she said, “Oh.�
� The sound shook on her lips. She said, “It’s terrible, isn’t it? I can’t really believe it. He was such—such a fine man. Nobody told me until I got here and I thought—thought he’d stayed overnight in his office, because it was such an awful night. He does sometimes when the weather’s bad. I thought perhaps he was still asleep, although he’s usually here before I am. Then I thought, perhaps he’s decided to take the day off because it’s Christmas Eve. Then the telephone rang and—” Her voice broke.

  They waited. Her eyes filled, and she got tissue out of her desk drawer and dabbed them.

  “It was Mrs. Cushing at the inn,” she said. “She told me what had happened—the terrible thing that has happened. Right across the street. The terrible accident to Mr. Jackson. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’re trying to find out how the accident happened. I was home by then. So I don’t know anything about it, except Mrs. Cushing said he was run over by a car. Right in the parking lot.”

  She shivered. She said, “I’m sorry. It’s terribly cold in here, isn’t it?”

  It was cold in the little room—the room the sun wouldn’t reach until midafternoon.

  “Yes, it is, Miss Arnold,” Heimrich agreed. “Perhaps we’d better go into Mr. Jackson’s office. The sun ought to be coming in there, oughtn’t it?”

  “I can’t tell you anything, Inspector. And I don’t know—”

  “Mr. Jackson was a friend of mine,” Heimrich said. “Had been a friend for years. He’d want you to help us any way you can. We do have a few questions we’d like to ask you. Perhaps we’d better go into his office.”

  She said, “Well, I guess it’ll be all right.”

  She still didn’t seem at all certain it would be, but she got up from her desk and went ahead of them to a closed door. She opened the door and they followed her down a rather long, and very dim, corridor, to a door at the end of it. She opened that door, and they went after her into a large room and a bright one. Morning sunlight streamed into it through two floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a big desk in front of the windows. There were two telephones on the desk and an Aladdin lamp, not lighted. It looked as if Sam Jackson had been working at his desk after dark the evening before. And he had been forearmed against the vagaries of country electricity.