Dead Run

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  He himself had just got fed up with sitting around a shop to which nobody much came. Well, about two weeks ago. All right, he had closed up the shop in the middle of the gift-buying season. “Thing is, I’d pretty well sold out and a shipment I had coming didn’t show up. So I didn’t have much of anything to sell.”

  With nothing much to sell, and not many buyers anyway, Jackson had decided “to take myself a little vacation.” He had driven up into the mountains to a ski lodge. “Dinky little place, but one I could run to.”

  “Seems a very confiding sort,” Heimrich commented. Forniss agreed James Worthington Jackson seemed to be a forthcoming man. “Drove up in his station wagon,” Heimrich said. “Came back by bus and taxi?”

  “Yeah. What he told this O’Halloran.”

  “Somebody repossess the Pontiac?”

  “Way he tells it, the car conked out and he left it to be repaired. Doesn’t remember offhand the name of the garage he left it at, but he can find it again. Thinks it was in a town named Lone Wolf. Or maybe Wolf Run. But he can find it”

  “Being checked out,” the teletype reported. “Will advise.”

  “Very cooperative people in Seattle,” Heimrich said. “Lucky it turned out you did know somebody on the force, probably. So?”

  So Jackson had taken a bus back to Seattle, and a cab from the bus terminal. And he had planned to get a friend to drive him up to get the Pontiac. Early next week, they’d told him it would be ready. The garage was having to send away for parts.

  But now Jackson didn’t know. Did O’Halloran know about the funeral arrangements for his uncle? O’Halloran didn’t.

  Neither did Heimrich. The body, possibly by now, certainly by tomorrow, would be at the local undertaker’s. (Who called himself a “mortician” and his place of business a “funeral parlor.” It was known locally as “Marty’s Layaway.”) “We’ll call him tomorrow,” Heimrich said. “Soon as we know. Suit his convenience, of course, if he’s flying East. They get a description of him, Charlie?”

  “Sort of. About five eight, they say. Doesn’t weigh more than a hundred twenty, is O‘Halloran’s guess. Hippie type, O’Halloran says. Apparently because he’s got long hair.”

  Heimrich said, “Mmm.” Forniss said, “Yeah. There are airplanes, of course. But the cab picked him up at the bus terminal.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll have to do some checking,” Heimrich said. “The lab boys come up with anything more?”

  The scrapings of red paint from the right rear fender of the station wagon they had were chemically identical with those taken from Joan Collins’s Volks. The serial number of the Pontiac had been forwarded to the New York Motor Vehicle Bureau, which was closed for Christmas. They would determine whether the Pontiac was Father Armstrong’s. The slug dug out of the Heimrichs’ ash tree wasn’t going to be of any help. Nothing to compare with anything. The two cold troopers on the Larkins knoll hadn’t found a cartridge case and had, as directed, knocked off. Forniss would put more men on it tomorrow, if Heimrich wanted. He doubted if a cartridge case would come of it.

  “Well see tomorrow,” Heimrich said. “Meanwhile you call it a day, Charlie. I have, far’s I know, anyway.”

  Policemen can see no further into the future than civilians. On the whole, they probably can see less far. Michael had brought blankets out for his sofa-bed, as what Heimrich suspected was a symbol of conformity to the prejudices of ancients, when the doorbell rang. “Who on earth at this hour?” Susan said, and Heimrich went to find out, looking at his watch as he crossed to the door. It was ten minutes after eleven, certainly an odd hour for a drop-in caller.

  The doorbell had been rung by a slim youth, slim despite a heavy short coat. His regular-featured face looked a little pinched with cold. He wore a knitted wool cap which came down over his ears. He said, “Sorry, sir. I’m looking for Inspector Heimrich of the state police.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes? Well, you’ve found him. You’d better come on in out of the cold, I guess.”

  The youth came in. He took off the stocking cap and loosened his coat. His blond hair, with the cap off, was short, was almost a crew cut

  “I know it’s too late to be bothering—” he said, and stopped in midsentence. He said, “Hi, Mike. I didn’t know you’d come down.”

  Nobody who knows him well calls Michael Faye “Mike.” Michael looked, slowly, at the slim youth.

  “I don’t know that I—” Michael said, and the slim blond youth shook his head and smiled.

  “Tennis last summer,” he said. “You were too good for us. Miles too good. I’m Alan Lord. No reason you should remember me, I guess. Just another lousy tennis player. At our court. Last June it was. None of us belonged on the same court with—”

  “Sure I remember,” Michael said. “Hi, Alan.”

  Michael’s not much of a liar, Heimrich thought. He didn’t know this boy from—well, from Adam. Except, now, as a bunny tennis player. So this is Alan Lord, adopted son of Burton Lord, deceased.

  “May as well take your coat off, Mr. Lord,” Heimrich said. The boy was probably about Michael’s age, and so rated the “Mr.” “This is Mrs. Heimrich. And Miss Collins. You wanted to see me about something?”

  “Yes, I did, sir. But—well, I guess I thought you’d be more like the others. Like that man Cochran, I guess. He—well, he badgered my mother. Oh, good evening, Mrs. Heimrich, Miss Collins. Sorry I barged in on you like this. I—I just happened to be going by on my way home and I thought—” He stopped. After a moment he said, “I guess it wasn’t such a good idea, maybe.”

  “All right, son,” Heimrich said. “What was the idea? To tell me to quit badgering your mother? I didn’t badger her. The District Attorney asked me to check with her before Mrs. Kemper goes on trial. I explained that to her. Does she say I badgered her, Mr. Lord?”

  “No, sir. She didn’t put it that way. It’s just—well, she’s been through enough, hasn’t she? His getting shot by this—this whore of his. I’m sorry, ma’am. I shouldn’t have put it that way. But it’s the way it was.”

  “I’ve heard the word,” Susan said. “So has Miss Collins, I imagine.” She looked at Merton Heimrich, who towered above the slight young man. “You’d really better take your coat off, Mr. Lord. It’s warm in here.”

  Lord took off his heavy short coat. Under it he was wearing a dark gray business suit, and a white shirt and a dark blue necktie. Dressy for the country, she thought. Perhaps, of course, he had spent the evening in the city and was on his way home. If so, he had left the mother about whom he was so concerned alone on Christmas Day.

  “You stopped by to ask me to lay off your mother,” Heimrich said. “Not—well, not to be rough on her, as I gather you think Detective Cochran was. You didn’t need to, Mr. Lord. I think your mother will agree with that. And Mrs. Kemper isn’t a whore. She and your father were having an affair. She doesn’t deny that.”

  “Not father, sir. Stepfather. My real father is George Nolan, Inspector. You’ve probably heard of him. Most people have, I guess. He’s quite well known, sir. I’m Alan Nolan, really. Ought to be, anyhow.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I’ve heard of your father. As you say, he’s very well known. So was your stepfather, come to that.”

  Alan Lord had no immediate comment After almost a minute, he said, “I suppose so, sir. In a different sort of way, though. Dad is—I guess you’d have to call him an intellectual, wouldn’t you?”

  Heimrich felt no such compulsion. He let it ride.

  “I mean,” Alan said, “Mr. Lord put on a lot of plays. Not very good plays. I’d think. Old-fashioned comedies and things like that, you know. Not—well, not really with it, if you know what I mean.”

  Heimrich supposed he did. Plays, the boy probably meant, which had been approved by members of an antique generation; tottering oldsters like—well, like Inspector Merton Heimrich. But all Heimrich said was, “A good many people seem to have liked them, son.”

  “Oh,” Lord sai
d, “my stepfather made a lot of money out of them, all right.” His emphasis put the word “money” between quotation marks. It was rather as if he spoke of offal. “Dad was blacklisted once. Somebody—McCarthy, I think it was—said he was a Communist He wasn’t, of course. But a lot of papers dropped his column.”

  The evil that men do lives after them, Heimrich thought. Not very vividly in this young mind, seemingly. Also, it was getting late.

  “I’m sorry if you think I badgered your mother, Mr. Lord. I didn’t. Just wanted to get things straight for District Attorney Peters. About your stepfather’s murder. You weren’t at the picnic when it happened, your mother tells me.”

  “No, sir. We were running out of ice and Mother asked me to go get some. Anyway, he was making that speech of his, so it was all right with me.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And your mother was in the kitchen, conferring with the caterers. So neither of you saw Mr. Lord killed. That’s the way it was?”

  “Yes. But there wasn’t anything we could have done about it, Inspector. Nothing anybody could have done about it. She was in the next field when she shot at him. A hundred yards away, maybe. What they tell me, anyway.”

  “Pretty good shooting,” Heimrich said. “Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Lord?”

  “I guess so, sir. She was a member of the rifle team at the club. I guess she was pretty good. Some of us aren’t too bad, you know.”

  “Us, Mr. Lord?”

  “Of them was what I meant to say, Inspector. Turned out I wasn’t any good at it. Couldn’t hit the side of a barn, as people used to say. No better with a rifle than I am with a racket, and Mike can tell you how bad that is.”

  Michael didn’t say anything, which, of course, was a way of saying something.

  “Guess I’m just an iceman,” Lord said. “Way my stepfather thought of me, anyway.”

  Heimrich smiled indulgently, the smile accepting and discounting an obvious libel.

  “I doubt if he did,” Heimrich said. “Anyway, icemen are useful. Were in my early days, anyway. And you did get ice for the picnic, didn’t you?”

  Young Lord grinned at that. He nodded his head. Then he said, “Yeah. And as a matter of fact, it wasn’t all that easy. I had to go three places. Tony, he’s the guy runs the Gulf station, had run out. So had the Sunoco station down the road. Had to go clear down to the shopping center to find a machine that still had ice in it. And I got the last two bags. I was supposed to get at least four. Decided to take what I could get, before people had to drink warm drinks. Two was plenty, way things turned out.”

  Which, Heimrich thought, was one way of putting it. That the picnic had collapsed when its host had been murdered was another. There hadn’t, by the time Alan Lord had got back, been much demand for ice.

  “All right, Mr. Lord. Probably I won’t have to bother your mother again.”

  “Look,” the slim boy said, “I’m the one doing the bothering. It was a fool idea, anyway.”

  He reached for his coat and began to shrug into it. “Ought to have had better sense,” he said. He took a step or two toward the door. He stopped and turned. “Hope all of you will forgive me,” he said. “Good night, sir—Mrs. Heimrich, Miss Collins. Probably be seeing you around, Mike.”

  Michael Faye said, “Sure.”

  Heimrich went to the door with him, and Lord fitted the stocking cap on his head and went out to his car. His car, Heimrich noted, was a Mercedes sports model. Young Lord could afford to put quotation marks around the word “money.”

  Heimrich went back to the fire, welcome now after the cold blast through the opened door.

  “You didn’t recognize him when he first came in, did you?” he said to Michael.

  “Not at first, Dad. Last summer he was wearing his hair long. Down pretty near to his shoulders. Had to put a strap around it when he was playing tennis. But I told you that, didn’t I? And that he was a bit of a weirdo.”

  “Yes, Michael,” Heimrich said. “You did tell me that.”

  As he undressed for bed, after making sure lights were off and doors locked and saying good night to Michael on his sofa, Heimrich wondered why his stepson thought of Alan Lord as a “weirdo.” A well-brought-up, polite young man, he had seemed to Merton Heimrich. Perhaps a little given to “sirs”: undoubtedly a little impulsive. Not, it seemed, too deeply grieved by his stepfather’s death. As Susan had pointed out, there is no “ought” about affection. Joan Collins’s affection for her “real” father was, apparently, minimal. Her affection for Michael Faye was, almost as evidently, not.

  Kids are funny, he thought, hanging his shirt over the back of a chair. Michael is funny about his emphasis on the sofa, his ostentatious lugging out of blankets. Kids make assumptions about their elders: parents, particularly, have forgotten the bright joy of sex, if, indeed, they ever knew it. Well, probably he had felt the same way about his own parents.

  Susan was already in her bed, but her eyes were open. Her eyes said “Yes . . .”

  The sun was bright the next morning. The wind had died down. The window thermometer said six below zero. The frigid Buick, resentful of a night in an unheated garage, declined for a long time to take any part in the proceedings. The starter ground for minutes before getting even a reluctant cough. Finally, the engine caught. When he put the gear lever at “R” the engine stopped again, with what appeared to be finality. Not in this weather, the Buick said. It took a lot of grinding to make it change its mind. Fortunately, the battery stayed alive and vigorous.

  Backed out of the garage and turned toward the drive, the Buick didn’t want to go forward, either. It was, however, a little easier to cajole. The little evergreen by the drive hadn’t made it. It was lying flat, its slender trunk broken. It was still matted with ice.

  What with one thing and another, including Susan’s insistence that two cups of coffee were inadequate as a breakfast on an icy day, Heimrich was almost half an hour late at his office in the headquarters building of Troop K. Forniss wasn’t in yet; he had, after all, been at it until almost midnight. The lab had found nothing that would prove, or disprove, that the Pontiac station wagon had backed into a man and killed him. That it had sideswiped a red Volks was another matter. Paint analysis had proved that to the satisfaction of the lab. Nobody, of course, could tell about a jury. And it might have grazed another red Volks.

  The tire chains on the Pontiac were as worn as was to be expected considering Father Armstrong’s habit of having them put on in late fall and removed the following spring, come snow or no snow. The chain on the left rear was, in fact, lacking a crossbar. It was a wonder the chain had stayed on the tire. The salvage crewtwo troopers—had had to take the chains off before they could drive the wagon to the barracks. This had meant jacking the car up on soft ground and climbing under it. It had been a nasty job, but neither of the troopers had been killed doing it

  The rifle slug from the ash tree was not going to be of use to anybody. Banged up beyond the powers of any comparison microscope to untangle. And they had no rifle to compare it with, assuming comparison had been possible. The only rifle concerned was locked up at the county seat, waiting to be entered as Exhibit A in the trial of the People of the State of New York v. Loren Kemper. Oh, the slug probably was from a .22 caliber rifle like the alleged murder weapon in Carmel.

  There were papers in Heimrich’s In basket. They included last night’s teletype from Seattle. It was what Forniss had said it was.

  There wouldn’t be anything further from Seattle until, at best, afternoon. It was still—what? Half-past six in the morning in Seattle. Three hours’ difference in time. Enough to make it possible for someone to force a Volks off the road at about eight thirty in the morning and make it to the Newark airport and show up in Seattle about four in the afternoon? Heimrich doubted it, but it could be checked out. Probably Charlie Forniss had already checked it. No, certainly not time enough to ditch a Pontiac station wagon off the driveway to Sam Jackson’s house and then get on
to Newark. In what? Another wagon, which had brushed another red car? A matter of coincidence? A possibility which could be rejected, if not quite out of hand. The most outrageous coincidences are still conceivable, if to policemen unwelcome. A million-to-one chance, but still a chance. Charlie to check flight schedules to the West Coast, when he got in.

  Meanwhile—

  Meanwhile, Heimrich’s telephone rang. He said “Yes?” to it. District Attorney Jonathan Peters was calling. Would Inspector Heimrich hold on a minute? People with secretaries always expect other people to hold on a minute.

  It was more than a minute. Then it was, “Peters here. Who’s this?”

  “Heimrich. You called me, Mr. Peters.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. They tell me you were up here yesterday. Poking around, apparently. Seeing this Kemper woman. That right, Inspector?”

  “I saw Mrs. Kemper, yes.”

  “What the hell about? Nothing for you people to be messing in, way I see it.”

  District Attorney Peters was going to be difficult. Heimrich had expected he would be.

  “About a probable murder in Van Brunt, Mr. Peters. Which is, as you know, an unincorporated village.” The state police do not operate in incorporated communities unless requested to. “And the Lord place is beyond the Cold Harbor limits.”

  He had not needed to add the last. He finds Jonathan Peters somewhat annoying. He had for years.

  If his comment had irritated Peters, Peters decided to lay irritation aside. For the moment, anyway.

  “What do you mean probable murder, Heimrich? You talking about that hit-and-run?”

  “Intentional hit-and-run, Mr. Peters. The way it looks to us. Hence, murder, Mr. Peters. The victim, Samuel Jackson, Mrs. Kemper’s attorney. So, I went to ask Mrs. Kemper about him. Matter of routine, you know.”

  “The hell I do. But I can’t stop your nosing around, I suppose. Damn nuisance, all the same. So is Jackson’s getting himself killed, come to that.”