Dead Run

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Yes, Mr. Friday. He left you fifty thousand dollars. The rest goes to a nephew, who apparently lives out west somewhere.”

  There was a change in the expression on Friday’s face this time. His lips pursed a little, as if he had tasted something sour. “You’ve met his nephew?” Heimrich said.

  “James Jackson. James Something-or-Other Jackson. Yes, he’s visited here a couple or maybe three times since I’ve been here. Lives in Seattle, I think. Yes, I’ve met Mr. James Something-or-Other Jackson.”

  Heimrich waited for more. He didn’t get it. “I take it,” he said, “you weren’t much taken by Mr. James Jackson? James Worthington Jackson, actually.”

  Friday got up and stirred the fire, which hadn’t needed it. He sat down again. “Well, Inspector, he was Mr. Jackson’s nephew. Son of his younger brother, who died some years ago, I understand. Mr. Jackson had been very fond of his brother, I think.”

  “Of his brother’s son?”

  “I wouldn’t really know, sir. He didn’t talk about his nephew much. To me, I mean. And James What’s-His-Name never stayed very long. Only two days, the last time. Last June that would have been.”

  “Tell me something about him, Mr. Friday. How old is he about? What does he look like?”

  “Twenty-five or so, at a guess, Inspector. Not very tall. Didn’t look much like Mr. Jackson. Has yellow sort of hair and wears it pretty long. The way lots of them do, nowadays. I suppose you could say he’s good-looking, if you like the type.”

  “As you don’t, I gather?”

  “Can’t say as I does much, suh,” Friday said. He had lapsed into dialect which was obviously a parody.

  Heimrich thought a moment. Then he said, “Oh, he’s that type, is he?”

  “You could say that, Inspector. You could certainly say that.” Friday had reverted to his normal speech after his brief venture into what amounted to Uncle Tomming. “The type that calls people “boy.’ People with my color skin. So—yes, you can say I’m prejudiced against the type, Inspector. We all have to be prejudiced against something, I guess.”

  “Don’t have to be, Mr. Friday.”

  “All right, Inspector. Make it ‘are.’ No, I wasn’t much taken with Mr. James Worthington Jackson. But not my business, was it? He was my employer’s nephew.”

  “How did Mr. Jackson feel about his nephew? Didn’t you gather anything? Get any feeling at all?”

  “He never said anything to me about the boy. He wouldn’t, would he? Not in so many words, anyway.” He stopped, as if he had finished. He looked at the fire. When he spoke, it was as if he spoke to the fire. “You ask if I got any feeling about it,” he said. “I guess I did. It seemed to me Mr. Jackson got uptight when his nephew was here; wasn’t sorry when he left. But that could be because I got uptight myself. And, after all, you say he left James Worthington most of his money, so I suppose he got along with the boy better than I thought.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “had nobody else to leave it to. Happen to know whether he had any other relatives, Mr. Friday?”

  “If he had, he never mentioned them to me, Inspector.”

  “Last here in June,” Heimrich said. “Only a couple of days, you say. Know where he went from here?”

  Friday shook his head. He said, “Back home, far as I know. Back to Seattle. He’d flown to New York, way I got it, and rented a car at the airport. Drove the car back to the airport, I suppose. Got another plane to the West Coast. But that’s just what I supposed, Inspector. Nobody told me anything.”

  “Probably the way it was,” Heimrich said. “What time in June was he here, do you remember?”

  “Toward the end of the month, way I remember it,” Friday told him.

  Heimrich could feel that Forniss was growing restless. Forniss believes in the direct approach.

  Possibly Forniss was right.

  “About this inheritance you’re to get, Mr. Friday,” Heimrich said. “You say Mr. Jackson told you—at least implied to you—that you’d be in his will. That you expected to be left something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know, I mean did he tell you, that it would be this much? Fifty thousand is a nice sum, isn’t it? To me, anyway.”

  “To anybody, I’d think,” Friday said. Now he looked directly at Merton Heimrich. There was no hostility in his regard. There was merely steadiness. “No, Inspector,” he said. “He didn’t mention any amount. No, I didn’t think it would be that much. Are you going to say that people have been killed for less? Because I know they have, Inspector Heimrich.”

  Forniss came into it then.

  “For the loose change in their pockets,” Forniss said. “Let alone fifty grand.”

  Bertram Friday said, “Yes, sir.” But he continued to look at Inspector Heimrich.

  “Tell me about last night, Mr. Friday,” Heimrich said. “You were here, in this house?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t a night to be out of a house, Inspector. Not if you had a house to stay in.”

  “No. Did anything happen? Anything out of the way?”

  “A tree fell down,” Friday said. “I thought at first it had hit the house. That must have been about ten o’clock. Maybe ten thirty. I’d been in bed a couple of hours. It woke me up.”

  “Begin earlier,” Heimrich said. “I mean earlier yesterday evening. From, oh, about six on.”

  About six thirty, Samuel Jackson had called from the office. He said it was beginning to ice in the village and that he wouldn’t try to make it home. That the power probably would go off, and that Friday was to try to keep the house from freezing up. That was all. “He didn’t need to tell me to keep fires going,” Friday said. “That was just—oh, something to say.”

  “He told you he was going to have dinner at the inn?”

  “Didn’t need to. What he often did when the weather was bad. Maybe he told me last night. More likely, he just assumed I’d know. He—well, he had habits, Inspector. Like most of us.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “So you kept the fire burning?”

  “Fires, Inspector. There are four fireplaces in the house. It’s an old house. Probably once fireplaces were all they had to heat it. I kept all four of them going.”

  “And?”

  “Fixed myself something to eat. Ate it here by the fire. Read a while and—well, listened to the wind and the rain on the windows. Now and then went around and checked on the fires. Then the power went off, so I went up to bed. Set the alarm for midnight, so I could have a look at the fires.”

  “But you say the tree’s falling woke you up before then?”

  “Ten or ten thirty. I put some clothes on and went out to see what had happened. Found it had missed the house and I went back to bed, because there wasn’t anything I could do about it until morning.”

  “During the evening. After around nine, say. You didn’t hear anything else, Mr. Friday?”

  “Just the wind howling. And the rain. And trees banging down a few times. It was a pretty noisy night, Inspector.”

  Heimrich agreed it had been a noisy night.

  “Was there something you think I might have heard, Inspector? Something special?”

  “Might,” Heimrich said. “Just might. With the wind and everything, probably not. You didn’t hear a car, Mr. Friday? Last night or this morning?”

  Friday merely shook his head. But, as he looked at Heimrich, his eyes inquired.

  “About halfway up the drive,” Heimrich said. “A couple of hundred yards from the house, at a guess, there’s a little side road. The remains of one, anyway. You know the place I mean.”

  “Yes. It leads—used to lead—to a sort of parking lot. Anyway, a cleared space where guests could leave their cars. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson used to give some pretty big parties, I understand. Had to have space for a good many cars to park. That was quite a while ago. Long time before I went to work for Mr. Jackson. What about this old road, Inspector? Pretty grown up now. And doesn’t go anywhere. Not anymore.”

/>   “Some time last night or this morning,” Heimrich said, “somebody drove a car into it. As far as the car would go. A big station wagon, Mr. Friday. Like, as nearly as the Lieutenant and I can tell, the one that was used to kill Mr. Jackson. It’s pretty much wedged into the underbrush now. We’ll know more when it’s been dragged out You don’t know how it got there, Mr. Friday? How it got to be hidden there?”

  “Where it would be sure to be found,” Friday said. “Where I’d be the most likely person to have put it. Assuming I was half-witted. No, Inspector, I don’t know how the station wagon got there. Or anything about it. Mr. Jackson didn’t own a wagon. Never has. And I don’t. He has—had—a Mercedes. Drove it to the office and wherever he needed to go. There’s a Ford I use. For marketing. That kind of thing. No station wagon.”

  “This one,” Heimrich said, “probably belongs to Father Armstrong. If it’s the one we’re looking for. By the way, Charlie—”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “I was thinking of that, M. L. If Mr. Friday will show me where a telephone is?”

  Friday would. Forniss called the barracks and told them they could stop looking for a dark blue Pontiac station wagon, and come and get it. And that they’d need a wrecker to get it out from where it was. And that the nearest wrecker was operated by Purvis’s Garage. And that the lab boys were to go over it very thoroughly, with special attention to the rear end, and the right rear fender. And that, yes, he knew it was Christmas Eve.

  Heimrich was standing up, with his back to the fire, by the time Forniss had finished telephoning. Bertram Friday was standing too.

  “We’ll be getting along,” Heimrich said. “We’ll probably be coming back To go over any papers Mr. Jackson may have kept here at the house. That sort of thing.”

  Friday said, “Yes, Inspector.”

  “One other thing,” Heimrich said. “You say—imply, anyway—that Mr. Jackson was a man of habit. Like going to the inn for dinner in bad weather.”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “Have you noticed any change in his habits recently?”

  “Can’t say that—well, there’s this photography thing he’s been going in for the last year or so. Home movies sort of thing. Never went in for that until—oh, last spring sometime. Mostly he took pictures of squirrels, birds, butterflies even. And old Woody. He’s our resident woodchuck, Inspector.”

  “Ever run these movies off for you, Mr. Friday?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Was he good at picture taking?”

  “Seemed all right to me, Inspector. Got some good shots of old Woody. Rambling off. Sitting up, looking innocent the way they do just before they eat up a garden. They walk funny, Inspector.”

  Heimrich knew that woodchucks walk funny, and that they eat up gardens. He had never thought them particularly photogenic. Except that all animals have moments of being so. Even human animals.

  Bertram Friday went out of the house with them. He switched on a floodlight, set well up on the front of the house. It illuminated the parking area. They went to the police car; Friday went to his fallen tree. The shriek of his chain saw drowned the grinding of the car’s starter. It followed them as they drove down the long driveway in the gathering darkness.

  It was too dark to see the station wagon, deep in the stub of a road which had once given guests access to a cleared field where they could leave their cars for big parties given in gayer days by Margaret and Samuel Jackson. Sam Jackson had given no parties in the years Heimrich had known him. He had not attended many.

  “As he says,” Forniss said, as they neared Van Brunt Pass, “fifty thousand is a nice round figure. And where this damn wagon is ditched is an easy walk from the house. And last night wasn’t a good one for long walks, was it? Where now, M. L.?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Anybody’d like to pick up fifty thousand. And it would have been a convenient place for Friday to have ditched the wagon. If, as he said, he was half-witted. Only, he doesn’t seem so to me, Charlie. I’m going to knock it off for today, so you can drop me at home. Tomorrow we’ll see what the lab boys make of the wagon.”

  Forniss turned the car left onto the pass. There were still patches of ice on the pavement. Thawing had finished for the day. The car skidded as he turned it up High Road. It wasn’t a serious skid. Neither was the one at the turn into the Heimrichs’ steep driveway.

  “I’ll call you at the barracks in the morning,” Heimrich said, as he got out of the car. “We’ll see what the lab boys come up with and where we go from there.”

  Forniss said, “Yep.” He added that people are hard to get hold of on a holiday, especially when the holiday is Christmas. He drove away.

  The raging wind tried to blow Heimrich down on his way to the front door of the house. It did not succeed. Hippopotamuses are hard to blow down.

  Chapter 10

  It was bright and warm in the house. The fire was dancing on the fireplace; now something to look at, not to huddle in front of. They had found a tree—a symmetrical tree which reached almost to the ceiling. Susan had found the tree ornaments and got new strings of lights. One string was twinkling red and green. Colonel lurched to his feet when Heimrich went into the room. He looked at Heimrich mournfully. Mite came from somewhere to rub against Heimrich’s ankles. Then he went to sit in front of the fire. Colonel lay down where he was, having, apparently, already overtaxed his strength.

  Heimrich said “Hi!” and Susan came out of their bedroom. Heimrich took one look at her face and said, “What’s the matter, dear?”

  “It’s all right, Merton,” Susan said. “Everybody’s all right, dear. Only I’ve been trying to get you, and at the barracks they didn’t know where you were.”

  It was unlike Susan, who had grown used to a policeman’s variable whereabouts. Something was wrong. Or had been wrong. She came across the room to him and he put his arms around her.

  “We’re all all right,” Susan said. “Everything’s all right. It really is, darling. Really.”

  “Only?” Heimrich said, and tightened his arms about his wife.

  “Somebody shot at them,” Susan said, and drew back a little so she could look up at him. “At Michael and Joan. They’d gone out so he could show her the river, with the sun setting on it. Only out on the terrace, dear. Only for a minute, because it’s so cold and windy.”

  “Shot at them?” Heimrich said. “On the terrace? With what, Susan?”

  “Michael thinks it was a rifle,” Susan said. “From the Larkins’ field, he thinks. The bullet hit a tree, he thinks. The big ash. Beyond where they were standing. It—it must have come close to them, Merton. Very close to Joan, they think. She says—well, that she could almost feel it, it was so close.”

  Air resists a bullet; a bullet stirs the air.

  “You say Michael thinks the shot came from the Larkins’ field,” Heimrich said. “He didn’t see who fired it?”

  “No. They were looking at the river, they say.”

  “Side by side. Where are the kids, by the way?”

  “In Michael’s room. Joan’s shaken up again, of course. As who wouldn’t—”

  She stopped, because Joan Collins and Michael came out of his room into the living room. Joan looked all right, except that, as they came in, she kept pushing back long hair which didn’t, as far as Heimrich could see, need pushing back.

  Michael said, “Hi, Dad. Mother’s been trying to find you.” Joan smiled. It was rather a tight smile.

  “Your mother’s told me what happened, Michael. You must think this is a violent village, Joan.”

  She smiled again. The smile was, Heimrich thought, a little more relaxed. She shook her head, but not with much resolution.

  “From the Larkin land, you think, Michael.”

  “Pretty sure,” Michael said. “From that little knoll. Where they used to have that weird little summer shelter with benches. Where nobody ever sat, as far as I can remember. They called it something strange. Something that sounded—oh,
archaic, somehow.”

  “A gazebo,” Heimrich said. “Something you can sit in and gaze out of. It blew down years ago. In a hurricane which came a little inland. And blew part of the roof off the old high school. The town hadn’t insured against wind damage, because it never blows that hard here.”

  “I remember,” Michael said. “We got an extra two weeks’ vacation.

  Conversations tend to wander. Heimrich put a curb on this one. He said, “You think it was a rifle, son?” That was what it had sounded like to Michael Faye. “Sort of sharp. Not hollow like a shotgun.” But he was just guessing. “We were looking at the sunset. Or the start of the sunset. On the river. Behind the cliffs, you know.”

  Heimrich knew. He and Susan often sat on the terrace and watched the sun go down behind the highlands beyond the Hudson. But in the summer, not in weather like this.

  “About what time was this, Michael?”

  Michael thought it had been about four thirty. About then.

  They had just finished stringing the lights on the tree, and trying

  them out. One string hadn’t lighted, but he had found the loose

  bulb and tightened it.

  “Put a coat on,” Heimrich said. “You can show me where you » were.

  There was nothing to check the wind which tore across the terrace. Fifty miles an hour, Heimrich thought the wind was blowing. Or what Charlie Forniss probably would call fifty knots. And it was very cold on the terrace.

  “About here, we were,” Michael said. “Joan was a little ahead. I was holding onto her shoulders, so she wouldn’t blow away. We’d just stopped when somebody shot at us. From over that way.” He turned and pointed.

  Beyond the stone fence which marked the limit of the Heimrich land, the ground rose gradually. In one place it rose more steeply. That was the knoll Michael had mentioned; the one he now pointed toward. Heimrich took this from his memory; it was too dark to see anything beyond the reach of the terrace floodlight. It would have been about where Michael was pointing that the gazebo had stood. It would be about two hundred yards from the terrace. Within possible rifle range. By a good marksman, who might have allowed for lead time, and fired a little ahead of the moving couple. But they had stopped walking toward the outer edge of the terrace. Which might account for the fact that they were still alive.