He didn’t need to. Alan Lord came in by a door at the far end of the long room. He was wearing a yellow sports shirt, long-sleeved as accorded with the weather outside, and dark slacks. He spoke as he walked toward them.
“You said you wouldn’t bother us anymore,” he said. There was stridency in his voice.
“Said I hoped I wouldn’t need to,” Heimrich said. “But one or two things have come up.”
“So you’re going to bother my mother again,” Alan Lord said. “You may as well know, I’m going to stick around while you do. Whether you want me to or not.”
“Oh, we want you to,” Heimrich said. “Your mother’s on the way down, Mr. Lord. We’ll wait for her, shall we?”
“I suppose you’re going to say the District Attorney sent you,” the boy said.
He is a boy, Heimrich thought. At the moment a petulant boy. He said, “Just sit down, son. Your mother shouldn’t be long.”
Alan Lord sat down, near the fire. He scowled. But then his face lighted up as Amelia Lord came into the room from the entrance foyer. He said, “Good morning, Mother. These men are—”
“Yes, dear,” Amelia said. “I see the Inspector and Lieutenant Forniss are here again. What is it this time, Inspector? More questions from Mr. Peters to make sure what I’m going to say at the trial? We’ve been over all that, haven’t we? And I’m quite clear in my mind about all of it.”
Heimrich was sure she was. However, one or two points had come up.
He and Forniss were both standing, now; looking down at mother and son.
“One of them is this,” Heimrich said. He took the sliver of metal out of his pocket. He held it out toward Alan Lord, who took it. The boy looked at it and turned it over in his hands. Then he looked up at Heimrich and shook his head.
“Doesn’t mean anything to you?” Heimrich said. “No idea what it could be?”
“No. Just a little piece of iron. Steel, maybe.”
“Or where we might have found it?”
Alan merely shook his head at that one.
“It may be a broken piece of tire chain,” Heimrich told him. “The yardman swept it up on your garage floor just now. Says you told him to sweep out the garage today, Alan. Pretty cold day for that, I’d think.”
“Quigley does outdoor work for us, Inspector. Isn’t much for him to do this time of year.” That was Amelia Lord. “And in the garage he’d be sheltered,” she added. “They say it’s very cold and windy out. Alan was quite right to give him a job under shelter.”
“I suppose so,” Heimrich said. “You use chains on the Cadillac, Mrs. Lord? Or on the Mercedes?”
“I don’t think so. My son takes care of that sort of thing. Now that Burton isn’t around to do it. Do we ever use chains, Alan?” He did not appear to hear her. He was gazing into the fire. She said “Alan?” again, this time more sharply.
“No, Mother,” the boy said. “People don’t so much nowadays. Snow tires are much better than they used to be. They put steel studs in them nowadays.” He looked up at Heimrich. He held the strip of metal out and Heimrich bent down and took it from him. Heimrich scrutinized it, turning it over in his fingers. He nodded his head, presumably at what he saw, then he put the metal strip back in his pocket
“You don’t know it’s off a tire chain,” Alan Lord said. “And I don’t know how it got in our garage, if it did, like you say.”
“It is a little hard to identify,” Heimrich said. “But it was on the garage floor. The yardman saw it. Saw Lieutenant Forniss pick it up. We’ll have the lab boys check on it.”
“Is that all you came for, Inspector?” Mrs. Lord asked. “Just to show my son a piece of scrap metal?”
“No, Mrs. Lord. Not quite all. Before Mr. Kemper died, were you and your husband at all friendly with the Kempers? Being close neighbors, as you were?”
“We knew them. The way neighbors get to know one another in the country. Only casually, however. And several years ago. Not recently. Not my son and I, that is. Not since Tony Kemper died so suddenly.”
“Did you ever go to their house, Mrs. Lord?”
“A few times, perhaps. For drinks, and things like that Of course, Alan—”
She stopped. Stopped a little abruptly, Heimrich thought. She looked at her son.
“What Mother means, Inspector,” Alan said. “Two or three years ago, I used to use their pool sometimes. They asked me to. It was while they were still putting ours in, you see.”
“The Kemper pool is beyond their house,” Heimrich said. “From here, I mean.”
“Yes, Inspector,” Amelia said. “Where that woman says she was when my husband was shot. When she shot him.”
“That’s where she says she was,” Heimrich agreed. “Alan, when you were using the pool, after you’d used it, did Mrs. Kemper ever invite you into the house? For a Coke, say? Or a glass of iced tea, say? Because probably they were hot days when you used to use the pool. Sometimes, as you say.”
“Once or twice, I guess. I didn’t know about her and—and my stepfather then, of course.”
Heimrich said he saw. He said, “By the way, when you went over to use the pool, how did you go? I mean, did you walk across the field or drive over?”
“Drove, mostly. Like you say, it was usually hot weather.”
“And went in through the house? And then out to the pool?”
“Not mostly. Once or twice, maybe.”
“Really, Inspector,” Mrs. Lord said. “What is the point of all this? All this triviality? My son used the pool over there a few times. Before I found out that that woman and my husband were sleeping together. Not afterward, I assure you.”
“You told him about this affair?”
“Yes. I thought he ought to know. My son and I don’t keep things from each other. To get back. What possible difference can it make how Alan got to that pool of theirs?”
“Probably none,” Heimrich said. “Another thing that’s probably trivial. You used to wear your hair quite long, my son tells me. When did you—”
“Your stepson,” Alan said. “He wouldn’t want you to call him your son.”
“No?” Heimrich said. “He’s never said so. Never indicated he minded. When did you decide to have your hair cut, Alan?”
“For God’s sake, mister. Some time last summer, I guess. Before I went back to college, anyway. Because it got too hot. The guys at college kidded me about it a good deal. Said I’d turned out square. That sort of thing.”
“Just because it was too hot? Long hair was too hot?”
“Well, it annoyed the old man, wearing my hair long. Mr. Lord, I mean. Of course, everything about me annoyed him. Just my being around annoyed him.”
“Alan,” his mother said, “you oughtn’t to say things like that. It isn’t true, Inspector. Burton was very fond of Alan, really. After all, he was the one who insisted on adopting him.”
“He wanted me to be called Lord, is all. Lord of the manor or something. Carry on the name. Even if it isn’t mine to carry. If he was so fond of me, why did he have me move out to the garage apartment? The chauffeur’s apartment, really. Just so I wouldn’t be in his hair so much. That was why, wasn’t it?”
“No, dear,” his mother said. “He suggested you move out there because he thought you’d like a place of your own.”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “Away from you. So I wouldn’t be around to remind you of my real father. So there wouldn’t be a Nolan around. Why he changed my name, wasn’t it? When I was too young to know the difference. What he thought, anyway. Not that he’d have given a damn. And because I look like my father. Just shut the Nolans out altogether, and he knew it. That’s the way it was, and you know it, Mother.”
Amelia Lord answered this with a sigh. A somewhat theatrical sigh, Heimrich thought; Then she said, “Really, dear. The Inspector isn’t interested in all this. In your strange notions about Burton. Why should he be?”
Alan didn’t answer that. He merely shrugged his shoulders.
It was going to dead-end there, Heimrich thought. Which was a pity.
“You got your hair cut short just after the Fourth of July, Alan,” Heimrich said. “According to your barber, anyway. Way you remember it?”
“Could be. Sometime last summer, like I said.”
“Speaking of the Fourth, Alan. You were out getting ice when your stepfather was shot. That’s right, isn’t it? What you told me? Had to go clear into Cold Harbor for it, because the two nearer places had run out?”
“Sure. Like I told you.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “I was pretty sure that was what you told me. Only there’s a catch in it, boy. There was plenty of ice in the machine at the Gulf station. And at the Sunoco station down the road. You see, both machines had been refilled early that afternoon, because it was such a hot day and there was so much demand for ice. So why did you he about where you were, Alan? Because you wanted to show you weren’t some other place?”
“Inspector,” Amelia Lord said. “You don’t—” But then she stopped speaking, and her face seemed to fall apart as she looked at her son.
His smooth young face did not seem to change.
“He had it coming,” Alan Lord said. His voice was steady. He looked not at Heimrich or his mother, but at the fire. “He did Mother dirt with that trashy woman. She should never have left my father. Now she’s free to go back to him, isn’t she? Now they can get married again, can’t they? And we can all be together, the way we ought to be.”
Nobody answered his questions. Amelia Lord got up from her chair and walked out of the room. She walked like an old woman.
Alan turned in his chair. He watched his mother walk out of the room. He looked like a small boy, Heimrich thought—a small boy who was about to start crying.
Chapter 15
It was a little after six when Heimrich ran the Buick into the garage. It was still cold, but the wind had died down and stars were out. The house was warm and the fire burning. And lights glowed and twinkled on the Christmas tree. Susan was in the kitchen, and she said, “Hi, darling,” and looked up at him. “So it’s finished,” she said, although he had not told her anything. He kissed her and said, “Yes, wrapped up, dear. All over but the shouting.”
“I could tell from your face,” Susan said. “Your face tells a lot, when you let it. But the shouting? You don’t look in a shouting mood. It was the boy?”
“You’re a good guesser,” he told her. “Yes, the boy. And I’m not doing the shouting. District Attorney Peters will take care of that, when I tell him he didn’t see what he thought he saw, told the grand jury he saw. Yes, the boy’s confessed. He wanted to sign it Alan Nolan. Said he’s through being a Lord. We told him he had to sign his legal name. That he could apply later to the courts to have it changed.”
He looked down at her.
“Yes,” Susan said, “I could too, Merton. Go sit by the fire. I’ll make them.”
Heimrich went and sat by the fire. Susan made the drinks.
“Two murders,” Heimrich told her, as they raised their glasses. “His stepfather, and then Sam. He’s a weirdo, as Michael said he was. Seems to feel that both killings were entirely—well, logical. Understandable. Lord was an intruder: it was as if he had shot somebody who was breaking into a house. And Sam—he seems to think that was self-defense. It was this way—”
Briefly, he told her how it had been. When he had finished, she looked at the fire for a time. Then she said, “I think we could both do with another drink,” and went to get them. When she brought them back, she said, “Michael ought to be back almost any time now, if there’s a cab.”
Heimrich said, “A cab?”
“At the station. For the six forty-two. From New York, dear.”
Heimrich knew where the six forty-two came from, usually at about seven. He didn’t, offhand, know why Michael Faye would be on it.
“Mr. Purvis brought Joan’s car up this morning,” Susan said. “Not long after you left. She said she would drive on into the city, and her father, and Michael said, not without him she wouldn’t. And—well, she didn’t make any fuss about that, and they went off. Around ten, I’d say.”
“Didn’t want to leave her unprotected,” Heimrich said.
“I suppose so. Or—didn’t want to leave her, period. I think they’re both pretty serious about it, Merton. Dead serious.” She shook her head at herself. She had not meant to say “dead.” Merton Heimrich does not need to be reminded of death.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “I think they are, dear. You don’t mind?”
“Mind? Why should I mind, dear?”
“You’re his mother, Susan. I thought mothers were supposed to mind. Young leaving the nest. Mothers mourning.”
“We don’t run a nest, Heimrich.” She calls him by his last name when he is being obtuse, and she is a little annoyed. “Our son is grown up. He—” She stopped, because car lights shone through the glass of the front door.
“Speaking of our son,” she said, and went to open the door for him. She switched on the floodlight.
But the car, instead of backing for a turn and a trip back to the Van Brunt station, was going into the Heimrich garage. And it was a red Volkswagen. Susan left the front door and went, instead, to open the kitchen door.
“It’s me again,” Joan Collins said.
Michael, carrying a suitcase in either hand, spoke from behind her. “It’s us, she means,” he said.
“Only,” Joan said, “I wanted him to drop me off at the inn. Only he wouldn’t.”
“The inn,” Michael said, “isn’t a safe place for her. So—well, I just brought her home. I don’t mind the sofa at all.”
“My father,” Joan said, “had to go to Miami this afternoon. On business, he said. He said we could stay in the apartment. After we told him, that is. But Michael wanted to bring me back here. But I do think I really ought to stay at the inn. And—”
“No inn,” Susan said. “Told him what, dear?”
“Why,” Joan said, “that we’re going to get married. We only decided that while we were driving in this morning. Michael convinced me we might as well. And we really haven’t anything against marriage. At least, I guess we haven’t. I hope you don’t mind, Susan.”
Susan smiled at the long-haired girl. She put an arm about her tall son, and took Joan’s hand in her own free hand.
Heimrich, standing with his back to the fire, said, “I think this rates a drink, my dears.”
“And,” Susan said, “steaks. I’ll start water running on them.”
Joan went out to the kitchen to help turn on the water. Heimrich went out to the breezeway to get the charcoal started.
It was a little after eight when Heimrich woke up the next morning. Nobody else woke up. Susan slept peacefully in her bed. Michael, although he had brought blankets and a pillow out for the sofa, was not sleeping on the sofa. Heimrich had not really supposed he would be. Heimrich drank orange juice while the coffee dripped; he soft-boiled an egg and toasted a slice of bread. The fire had died down behind its screen during the night. He did not rebuild it. With the house comfortably warm, fire would be for the evening.
Heimrich called the barracks and told the duty sergeant what he wanted done. He was about to go out for the Buick when Susan came into the living room. She said, a little dreamily, that it had been quite a party. She added, “Our son doesn’t get engaged every day, of course. Is there coffee?”
Merton Heimrich assured her there was coffee. He put on his heavy coat while she got her coffee. When she came back she looked at the sofa. “Apparently Michael didn’t sleep there last night,” she said.
“Did you expect him to, dear?”
“No, Merton. You’re off to the barracks?”
“Carmel,” Heimrich told her. “To listen to Mr. Peters shouting.
She said, “Be careful,” but not what he should be careful of.
The Buick was not enthusiastic about starting, but it was not as stubborn as it had been the day
before. The weather was not as stubborn, either. It was a sunny day and a windless one. Up to the low twenties, Heimrich guessed it was. Might reach up to freezing by midday.
He was in the outer office of District Attorney Jonathan Peters at ten o’clock, the time of the appointment the duty sergeant had made for him. At ten twenty-five he was told that Mr. Peters would see him now.
“Sit down, Heimrich,” Peters said. He sounded grumpy; he looked grumpy. “Understand you’ve been meddling.”
“Discharging my duty as a police officer,” Heimrich said. “And getting a confession to murder. To two murders. You mind, Counselor?”
It was clear from his expression that Peters did mind.
“And,” Heimrich told him, “here’s a copy of the boy’s confession. All according to Hoyle. Duly signed, with the kid’s legal name. Ready for the next session of the grand jury. Same One that indicted Mrs. Kemper?”
“No. New panel. Session starts in February. Damn it, man, I saw her shoot him.”
“Saw somebody,” Heimrich said. “Somebody wearing dark slacks and a yellow shirt. Somebody with long hair. It was a hazy day, Counselor. Anybody could have made a mistake. Seen what he was expected to see. Only it was Alan Lord, not Loren Kemper. Roughly the same size, the two of them. But not the same shape. Which was what Sam Jackson saw and took a picture of. And died because of. All in here, Mr. Peters.” He slid the copy of Alan Lord’s confession across Peters’s desk.
Peters looked at it. He did not immediately pick it up.
“All right,” Heimrich said, “I’ll tell you about it, if you’d rather. Although it’s all there. A little rambling and self-justifying, but all there. Young Lord didn’t like his stepfather. Thought he had broken up the marriage of his mother and his real father. As probably he did. We haven’t checked that out yet. And then Lord had this affair with Mrs. Kemper and got caught at it. ‘He was unfaithful to my mother,’ way the boy puts it. A traditionalist of sorts, the kid is. Lord was an intruder, between his father and his mother. And between his mother and himself, come to that. He doesn’t quite realize that part of it, I think. Oedipus creeps in.
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