Murder Can't Wait

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  What had Stuart Fleming been up to at the Cavalier Lodge? If the bartender was a truthful man, which was by no means certain, Fleming had been trying to establish the identity of a couple who had registered under his name. Why? Was it part of his investigation into the still unverified effort of gamblers to fix football games? That seemed very unlikely unless—

  “It could all be a cover of some sort,” Shapiro said, with no conviction in his voice. “The lodge could be a hangout, a headquarters. Somebody—Spiros, I suppose—may have thought we’d get onto the fact that Fleming was nosing around there and provided us with an explanation of sorts. It doesn’t explain.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “the times don’t fit. In October Fleming wasn’t nosing into this fix. So, they’d presumably never heard of him. Of course, there may never have been a Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming in October.”

  “The Christmas card,” Shapiro said. “A plant to bewilder policemen? Why, captain? An invitation to come up and nose around? The last thing they’d want if they’re clients.”

  The whole thing a backfire laid by Stuart Fleming? To indicate he had been investigating a purported impersonation, when there had been no impersonation, when he himself had entertained a “Mrs. Fleming” for a night or two and thought somebody was on to it? With a loss of trust fund to result?

  A lot of questions. Susan brought sandwiches, brought fresh coffee. (And brought more Sanka.) She remained to listen.

  Delayed malice on the part of one Lucius Clappinger, Ph.D.? It appeared he knew enough to know how “misbehavior” would damage Stuart Fleming; was quite bright enough, and, Heimrich thought, conceivably malicious enough, to have arranged a frame. But what good is a frame if the victim is not fitted into it? He had not been, until the day he died. Or Angus Fleming had not been told. Or had lied. There seemed no reason why he should have lied; it was highly improbable that the other executors would have revoked the trust without informing Angus. Cat and mouse? A threat held over the head of Stuart Fleming, which Fleming had, during his January visit to the lodge, been trying to dispel?

  Or—all of this having nothing to do with what concerned them? Stuart Fleming shot to death by Steele as a hired killer or by Steele as a vengeful husband? Or—Angus Fleming the killer, also to avenge what some men call their honor? And a suicide afterward, in remorse? Or a suicide because he had grown tired of waiting, and opened the door to dallying death?

  Or—a suicide because he suspected, or knew, that the last thing in his fading life had slipped away—that his wife had slipped from his weakened fingers into strong, young hands? The hands, say, of a man named J. Henry Patchen? Patchen said that his relationship with the Flemings was entirely casual; his with Enid Fleming merely one of the golf course, and shared participation in a forthcoming tournament. Patchen did not, of course, have to be telling the truth. Nobody had to be telling the truth.

  The telephone bell rang in the house and Heimrich went to the house. The boy, Shapiro decided, had gone off duty. “I was thinking of sending Michael to this Pawling school,” Susan said thoughtfully. “I think I won’t.” Heimrich came back.

  It was probably nothing. A man had called the Angus Fleming house and asked to speak to Mrs. Fleming. Trooper Nicholas had answered the telephone. He had been unable to get the man to identify himself. The man had said, “Just wanted to tell her how damned sorry we all are. Call again the morning.” Nicholas thought he sounded as if he had been drinking.

  “A friend after a few drinks overflowing with sympathy, probably,” Heimrich said. “People get that way. Nicholas is a thorough boy.”

  “We could keep this up the rest of the night,” Shapiro said. “And I’m not helping. I may as well get back to—”

  A car came up the driveway. When it came into the light it was a car marked STATE POLICE. The tall young man who got out of it was in civilian clothes. Heimrich said, “’Evening, Crowley,” and Corporal Raymond Crowley said, “Told me to bring it up, captain. Afraid there’s not too much in it.”

  “It” was a typed report.

  “What you think may be important, Ray,” Heimrich said. “I’ll go through it later.”

  “Nothing I can see,” Crowley said and then, “No, thank you, Mrs. Heimrich. Keeps me awake” to an offer of coffee. “There’s this—”

  “This,” laid beside the typed report, was a checkbook of the North Wellwood bank. It was a checkbook Stuart Fleming had used up on the previous twenty-first of March. It ran back to the previous October. Of the many stubs—records of checks paid to grocers and liquor dealers; to plumbers and men who plowed snow; to the realty company through which his house had been rented, and later, his office rented—Crowley had place-marked two.

  One was more complete than stubs usually are. Something called “Confidential Inquiries, Inc.,” had been paid two hundred and fifty dollars on the twenty-fifth of January.

  The second stub, dated 3/31, was drawn merely to “Con. Inq.” It was for the same amount.

  “Well,” Shapiro said. “Well, well. You know the outfit, captain?”

  Heimrich did not.

  Confidential Inquiries, Inc., was a private detective agency. It had its office in Manhattan.

  “Standard brand of snoops,” Shapiro said. “Mostly divorce work, but aren’t they all? Chap named O’Brien runs it. Retired cop. Got up to—let’s see—lieutenant I guess it was. Nothing against the outfit I’ve heard of.”

  Heimrich said, “Mm-m-m.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I’ll pay him a call in the morning. Make the usual pitch about privilege, probably. Talk when I make the usual license pitch.” He sighed. “It’s a repetitious life, isn’t it, captain?”

  Heimrich said, “Mm-m-m.”

  “Angus Fleming’s will’s in it,” Crowley said, and pointed at the report. “Called in about that. There’s a lot of other stuff. Most of it’s the usual—” He stopped, in deference, Heimrich amusedly supposed, to Susan’s presence. “Detail,” Crowley finished, Heimrich thought rather weakly.

  “Happen to turn up the milkman?” Heimrich asked the corporal.

  Crowley had, for what it might be worth. He sounded a little puzzled. The Angus Flemings got dairy products from North Wellwood Farms, Inc. They got it through the service of one Morty Frinkle, and got it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. They got it usually about noon, or a little after. (Except in the winter, when God knew—God and the town road boys.)

  On that Friday, at about noon, Frinkle had found the back door left unlocked, as by agreement it always was. He had put into the Fleming refrigerator a bottle of heavy cream, a pound of unsalted butter, a dozen brown eggs (they preferred white eggs, but he’d run out), and a quart of homogenized milk.

  “Milk and cream,” Heimrich said. “Glass bottles or cardboard containers?”

  Glass bottles.

  Crowley looked a “Why?” but Merton Heimrich had closed his eyes.

  “This man Frinkle,” Heimrich said, without opening his eyes. “He didn’t know whether the Flemings were at home? That was the arrangement—they’d leave the back door unlocked when they weren’t? But also when they were?”

  “Seems to have been,” Crowley said. “Lots of people do around here.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “We do ourselves. Bad habit, but we do ourselves.”

  Nathan Shapiro finished his Sanka and also a sentence he had begun some time before. “May as well get back to town,” Shapiro said. “Let you know what O’Brien has to say after he gets through spluttering.”

  He started the long way back to Brooklyn, through the country’s alien night.

  XIV

  It was going to be another warm day; a day very warm for April. Merton Heimrich garnered minutes, lying in bed. He listened to birds. They would be mostly robins this early in the spring. Some time, he would learn more about birds. She was interested in birds; she knew the calls of birds. He heard her moving outside. It would be a fine day to lie longer in bed; to get up at leisure;
possibly, after a time, but the time not measured, to go to the club for tennis. She enjoyed tennis. Afterward, they could sit on the terrace—a terrace rather like that of the Willow Pond club on the far edge of Westchester County—and have a drink or two and then lunch. The lunch would not be especially good, but they would not care. Or, if they cared, they could leave the club for the Old Stone Inn. Or come home from the club. That would be the best. To come home from the club.

  “If you want anything hot,” Susan Heimrich said, from the living room which was also the dining room.

  It had all been a pleasant dream, Merton Heimrich thought. A dream which did not include having a murderer to catch. He got up and briefly, since he of necessity got up in front of a mirror, looked at himself in it. He saw a big, powerful man with hard flat muscles; a man, for all his size, with no suggestion of a paunch. A hippopotamus, Merton Heimrich thought; an aging hippopotamus. He covered hippopotamus with slacks and polo shirt, and doused his face and washed his hands and went out where things were, presumably, losing heat.

  Young Michael, already at table, stood up. He was dressed for baseball. He said, “Good morning, sir.” They were foolish, Heimrich supposed, to worry at all about that sort of thing. It came out of things young Michael read. It would be outgrown.

  Susan came from the kitchen, wearing an apron over slacks and shirt. “Wow!” young Michael said. “It’s pancakes and sausage, Dad. Wow!”

  Colonel began to knock at the door. He had his morning out. God was within. When Colonel knocked at a door, which he did by lumbering into it, the door was in peril. “Fool dog,” Michael said, and went to let dog in.

  Heimrich put pancakes on his plate, after a long sip of coffee, which had remained hot. He buttered and added sausage to his plate and poured syrup. The telephone rang. “Damn,” Susan Heimrich said. “If just once—only once.”

  Post-mortem examination of the cadaver of Angus Fleming—and what a point to start a day on!—established that death had resulted from a massive overdose of barbiturate and that Fleming had drunk milk before he died. That he had also eaten a chicken sandwich. It also established advanced deterioration of the body, which was that of a male, white, weighing one hundred and twenty-four pounds and—

  Heimrich thanked Records for its promptness and went back to pancakes and sausage, which had cooled. “Angus Fleming. Barbiturate poisoning,” he told Susan. “May I go out and practice?” Michael said, and was told he could, if he had finished his milk, and finished his pancakes. Colonel sat erect and looked thoughtful at the table, wriggling his nose. “No sausage for you,” Susan told him. He went to the door to wait for god to come and let him out. The telephone rang.

  “Damn,” Susan Heimrich said. “Can’t we have just one meal? Any meal? Breakfast or lunch or—”

  “Mrs. Fleming wants to see somebody, sir,” Heimrich heard. “This is Trooper Follard at the house. She says it’s important that she see somebody. She’s got something she had to tell somebody.”

  “The doctor?”

  “Hasn’t come yet, sir. But Mrs. Fleming says she’s all right, and the nurse—well, the nurse says, ‘I wash my hands of it. I’ll tell doctor I wash my hands of it.’”

  “I’ll be along,” Heimrich said. “Tell Mrs. Fleming I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You’ll finish breakfast,” Susan said, and stood slim and erect in front of him and had dropped the apron somewhere. So few of them can wear slacks, Heimrich thought, and proudly pulled to him one who could.

  “Eat your breakfast,” Susan told him, when she had lips free to speak with. “You taste a little of sausage. I love you too.”

  Heimrich ate his breakfast and told Susan that it had, suddenly, become very pressing that Mrs. Enid Fleming tell something to somebody. He supposed about a husband who had taken enough Nembutal to kill himself.

  “You can guess,” Susan told him. “You’re very good at guessing.” She regarded him. “You are,” she said, “as a matter of fact very good. You’ll be back?”

  “I don’t know,” Merton said.

  “Damn,” Susan Heimrich said.

  There was one good thing about Saturdays. The subway trains from Brooklyn, while filled at eight-thirty in the morning, were not so unbearable as on other days. Some time, conceivably, he would be assigned to Brooklyn headquarters. Or even to a district squad. No—now he was stuck with it. He’d need to go captain, or acting captain, to get a district. The department, which had already made one unbelievable mistake in regard to Nathan Shapiro, would hardly compound it.

  It would be pleasant to be off duty on a day like this. He and Rose could go to Prospect Park and sit on a bench, and talk to squirrels and to each other and let the little dog walk on grass. The little dog liked to walk on grass, after his first surprised inspection of it. If it were an off day, they could go to a movie in the afternoon. Or, perhaps better, not go to a movie in the afternoon.

  Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, on duty, left the Lexington Avenue express at Grand Central, and walked a block east in Forty-second Street, and rode an elevator to the twelfth floor and opened a door lettered CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES, INC. and told a girl at a desk marked Information that he wanted to see Mr. O’Brien.

  “Have you an appointment?” the girl said, in the accents of the Bronx—a very refined area of the Bronx. Shapiro sighed and was mildly tempted to tell her to come off it. Instead, he showed her his badge and gave her his name. She would see if Mr. O’Brien was free, and used the telephone.

  There was another girl in this outer office. She was typing. She was not blonde and beautiful, either.

  Shapiro, directed, opened a door marked Private and went into a room with several desks, and men at two of them. A squad room of sorts, Shapiro supposed, and went on through it to another door marked Private. He knocked on this one and a heavy voice said, “Come in” and he went in.

  Sean O’Brien, erstwhile lieutenant, N.Y.P.D., was a spreading man behind a wide desk. He had a wide red face with blue eyes which looked small in it, probably because the face was undergoing expansion. He made a small movement as if about to get up, but settled back, and said, “If it isn’t Nate. Job hunting?”

  Nathan Shapiro would not have recognized Sean O’Brien among a hundred, meeting him elsewhere. He had no thought that O’Brien would have recognized him if he had not just heard the name Shapiro on his office telephone.

  “Not yet, Sean,” Shapiro said and pulled a chair up and sat in it, facing O’Brien across a desk. “Official business. You were hired a while back by a man named Stuart Fleming. Lives upstate a ways. That is, did live upstate a ways.”

  O’Brien said, “Was I, Nate?”

  “Fleming’s dead. You maybe know that, Sean.”

  “So?”

  “What did he hire you to do, Sean?”

  Sean O’Brien shook his head slowly, a man pitying ignorance. He said, “Now, Nate. You ought to know that that’s privileged info—”

  A detective’s life is a repetitious one. There were the necessary references to the obligation of a licensed private investigator to co-operate with the authorities. There were gloomy references to the transience of the licenses of those who did not.

  There were counter references to the highly confidential nature of the relationship between private investigator and client. It was noted that an agency which did not scrupulously respect a client’s right to privacy would not stay long in business.

  “We’re playing tapes at each other, Sean,” Shapiro said. “Give.”

  Sean O’Brien looked like a man who was thinking it over, but he was not really thinking it over.

  “Since he’s dead,” O’Brien said. “To put a tail on a man named Patchen. Something Patchen. Oh, all right.” He picked up his telephone. He said, “Gracie. Bring in the Fleming file, huh, Gracie?”

  While they waited, which was briefly, O’Brien said that they had, as he remembered it, sent Fleming a couple of reports. He also mentioned that Fleming owed them mo
ney, and who was going to pay it? The question, evidently rhetorical, was not answered, except by a shrug of the shoulders. Gracie, who was the typist in the outer office, brought the file. It was not a thick file.

  O’Brien said, “Here you are,” and tossed two flimsy sheets across the desk to Nathan Shapiro. At the bottom of the second sheet were the initials “C. S.”

  On the two sheets “C. S.” had reported, with times, the activities of “Subject” during the last two weeks of March. “Subject” equaled J. Henry Patchen.

  It took Shapiro some minutes to skim through the entries made by “C. S.” in re subject. For the most part, Patchen’s activities from 3/15 to 3/31 appeared to have been routine. On each of the two Mondays included in the period he had gone, early, to the showroom of the automobile dealer in Brewster and, with a break for lunch, waited there for people to come in and buy automobiles. He had taken prospects for demonstrations, “C. S.” duly following. It occurred to Shapiro that the operative could hardly have avoided being spotted; it is hard to tail a man anywhere, it is extremely hard in the country, in small towns, where a recurrent alien becomes noticeable.

  On other days of the week, Patchen’s activities had been less circumscribed. He started work later on those days; sometimes did not go near the showroom but drove the countryside, stopping now and then to call on prospects. On those days he usually lunched at “WP Cl”, and lunched long, according to the time notations in the report.

  On the afternoons of both Tuesdays and both Thursdays he had driven to New York and parked as near as he could to an apartment house in the Village. He had gone into the apartment house, usually at about two and come out of it around five or a little later. He had gone in alone; come out alone.

  But, on each of the four days, a “Miss X” had arrived, by taxicab, from ten to fifteen minutes after Patchen had gone into the building, and had left it, and walked toward Fifth Avenue, ten to fifteen minutes after he left. Once she had been able to flag down a cab before she got there.