Murder Can't Wait

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Mrs. Drake had close-cut white hair and was noticeably a spare woman. Her narrow face, resolutely dominated by her nose, was deeply tanned. It was also deeply wrinkled. Her eyes had a curious independence in her wrinkled face. She was in her late seventies and rode with the Van Brunt Hunt. When she walked, as she did now a few steps toward Heimrich, she limped slightly. Two years or so before a horse had fallen with her. She had not, certainly, fallen off a horse. “See that she gets a good rubdown, Jones,” Mrs. Drake said, without looking at the man who was leading the mare toward the stable. She continued to look at Heimrich.

  “Captain something or other,” Mrs. Drake said.

  Heimrich supplied his name, which he did not doubt that Mrs. Emily Drake had remembered perfectly. He was still, policeman or not, trespassing on private grass—on, moreover, Drake grass.

  “You want something?” Mrs. Drake said. Then she said, “I heard them. Thought it was a fire.”

  “The sirens,” Heimrich said. “No, it wasn’t a fire, Mrs. Drake.”

  “Then,” Mrs. Drake said, “come out with it, man.”

  “Annette Weaver has been shot,” Heimrich said, coming out with it. “Killed. Sometime late yesterday afternoon, or yesterday evening. We’re trying to fix the time.”

  Mrs. Drake did not seem to be shocked. She did not seem to be particularly startled.

  “What do I know about the time?” she asked the large policeman who had married Susan Upton.

  “Now, Mrs. Drake,” Heimrich said. “Probably nothing, naturally. Were you at home here yesterday between—oh, say five in the afternoon and about ten?”

  He gave latitude; the police doctor had given latitude. A good deal too much latitude, to Heimrich’s taste.

  “Certainly,” Mrs. Drake said. “Where else would I be?”

  Heimrich merely looked down at her. He closed his eyes, which were very blue.

  “Don’t,” Mrs. Drake said sharply, “be patient with me, Captain Heimrich. I may be an old woman—”

  “Now, Mrs. Drake,” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes. “In the house? Or outside on, say, the terrace? And, of course, did you hear a shot?”

  “Both,” Mrs. Drake said. “I’m not immobilized. Inside, resting. From—oh, between four-thirty and six. On the terrace for a while after that. Having a drink or two. Inside, having dinner. No, I didn’t hear a shot. Or pay attention to it. You know what I mean, young man? It’s perfectly legal to shoot varmints.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I know there’s shooting in the country, Mrs. Drake. There were other people in the house, I suppose?”

  “Servants,” Mrs. Drake said. “You may as well come and sit down if this is going to take all day.” She walked off, limping slightly, toward a terrace which ran along the front of the house, beyond the turnaround. Heimrich followed her. Instructed by gesture, he moved a chair for her into the shade. She sat upright in it—slight and old and imperious in riding breeches and closefitting jacket. She said, “Get on with it, Captain.”

  There had been her personal maid in the house between the hours Heimrich had allowed. A parlor maid, of course. The cook. Plimpton, the chauffeur, probably had been in his quarters over the garage. She would not know about that. The gardener might have been anywhere; the stableman probably had been in the stable. “Getting on with his work, I hope.” She had no idea whether any of them had heard a shot. How would she have?

  “Your sons? Your daughter-in-law?”

  Florence Drake had, for part of the time, been on the terrace with her mother-in-law, having a drink with her. Stephen Drake had got back from the city about six-thirty, as he usually did. After he had “freshened up” he had joined them. It had begun to drizzle at, she thought, a little before seven and they had gone inside to the drawing room.

  “Your other son? Oliver?”

  Heimrich would have to ask him. He had called during the afternoon—“I was exercising Trixy”—and left a message with one of the maids that he was going into town and would not be back until late on.

  She was, thinking back on it, almost certain that she had not heard a shot while they were on the terrace. And there was nothing the matter with her ears. After they had gone into the house it was unlikely they would have heard a shot in the Weaver house. “This is a solid house, Captain.” She was sorry she could not help him. She did not sound sorry. He stood up and thanked her; told her that somebody would be around to talk to the servants.

  “Waste all the time you want to,” she said. “There’s nothing the matter with my ears. I heard the car plain enough.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes momentarily. He said, “Now, Mrs. Drake. The car?”

  “All you asked was whether I heard a shot,” she said.

  He looked down at her. There was, he thought, amusement in her sharp, almost black, eyes.

  “You didn’t like Mrs. Weaver, did you?” Heimrich said. The amusement went out of her eyes; sharpness came back into them. For a moment Heimrich thought he was about to be told that he forgot himself; that one did not ask personal questions of a Drake.

  “Not in the least,” Mrs. Drake said. “Are you insinuating something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nor,” Mrs. Drake said, “did half the town. Particularly after that performance at the picnic? You know about that?”

  “Something.”

  “Ask your own wife about it, then,” she told him. “You’ve bothered an old woman long enough, Captain.”

  He was sorry he had bothered her. It was, unfortunately, part of his job to bother people. About the car? That he hadn’t asked about?

  After they had gone in, while they were finishing a drink and waiting for dinner to be served, they had all heard a car. It had sounded near by; as if it were coming up the drive. It had made a racket. “One of these contraptions,” Mrs. Drake, who was driven in a Rolls, told Heimrich. The car, from the sound, had stopped some distance from the house and then—Stephen had been pretty sure—turned around by backing into the lane and, presumably, gone back down the drive toward the road.

  “Not that it’s unusual,” Mrs. Drake said. “All the time people come nosing in here. Looking for the Weaver house, mostly. Go the wrong way at the fork. Strangers. City people, probably.”

  “Contraption?”

  “What they call a sports car.”

  The time?

  Did he think she looked at her watch every time she heard a sound? “Between seven-thirty and eight, I suppose. We were inside, as I told you. We’d had—” She put her head back, as if consulting the sky. “Were on our third drink. I was, at any rate. We dine at eight. Yes, between seven-thirty and eight. Nancy!”

  The last word was spoken somewhat more loudly. It brought response—brought a woman in a black and green uniform who carried a tray. There was a decanter, slim and filigreed in gold, on the tray, and a wine glass which matched it. Mrs. Drake said, “K’you” and, when the tray was beside her on a table, poured herself a glass of what Heimrich assumed was sherry. Heimrich looked at his watch, involuntarily.

  “No need to,” Mrs. Drake told him. “Ten-thirty or close to it. Up since six.” She sipped from her glass. “Won’t offer you one,” she said. “Too early. Stephen said it sounded like a Porsche. Some such thing. Said it needed a tune-up. Knows a good deal about contraptions, Stephen does. Has one himself, you know.”

  “A Porsche?”

  “Doesn’t sound right,” Mrs. Drake said. “Little pint-sized thing, though. Ask your Susan about the picnic, Captain. Showed the kind of woman my former daughter-in-law was. Why somebody might decide to kill her.”

  Heimrich said he would. He left Mrs. Drake drinking her morning sherry.

  III

  Heimrich walked back along the bridle path to the smaller, more recent, house on Drake Ridge. Several of the police cars were gone. One marked car remained, its radio talking to itself. Forniss’s car remained and Heimrich’s own.

  Ralph Weaver had called the barracks, via secre
tary. He had been told that the news was bad and, as gently as the desk sergeant could manage it, what the news was. “Took it pretty hard, Nat says,” Forniss told Heimrich. “On his way up. Want I should take him over?”

  “Over” meant to the morgue of the Van Brunt Memorial Hospital, which occupied a site which had been that of the Van Brunt house itself before Mrs. Cornelia Van Brunt had been sent to prison for killing the town supervisor and leaving his body for burning.*

  “Or,” Forniss said, “you want to talk to him first?”

  “Have him identify,” Heimrich said. “Bring him around to the Inn afterward. I’ll meet him there.”

  “However you want it, M. L.” But there was curiosity in Forniss’s voice.

  “Take him an hour or better to get here,” Heimrich said. “I want to hear about a picnic. And ask people about a Porsche. Heard anything from Ray?”

  Forniss had not.

  Heimrich drove down a narrow, rutted driveway from the Weaver house—a driveway badly in need of a few loads of gravel, or of an entire resurfacing. He reached the fork where the drive to the Drake house branched from it. No. Where it branched from the Drake drive, as a minor tributary to a main stream. Heimrich edged his car around the fork and drove slowly toward the Drake house. After about a hundred yards he stopped the car and walked back to look at a lane which led, to the right, from the driveway. A farm lane once, obviously. Two streaks of dust now. Useful for trucks to lumber along if Mrs. Drake hayed the fields beyond.

  No trucks recently. If the fields had been hayed at all in this dryest of years, the mowing had been done in July. There would be no second crop.

  But a car had been run into the lane, and not too long ago. There were tire tracks in the dust; blurs in the dust. Nothing, Heimrich thought, that the best of the lab boys could make anything useful from. However …

  Backed in, Heimrich thought. Driven out and down the drive toward the road beyond. A narrow-gauge car. The sports car Mrs. Drake had heard? The tracks might have been made days before. There had been no rain for ten days except for last night’s sprinkle.

  Two-tenths of a mile it had been from the Weaver house to the fork. A hundred yards up the other drive to the lane. He had come two legs of a triangle. He looked across toward the Weaver house, visible through the trees. If one cut across from there to here, walking the base of a triangle, one would cover not more than two hundred yards.

  Heimrich crossed the drive, which did not need resurfacing, which did not need anything, and looked over a stone fence, across cleared land which sloped upward. The field grass was high. And brown. Heimrich could not see, from where he stood, evidence that anyone had come that way, climbed a wall to get back to a car parked for flight. Get Crowley to have a look, though. One of the several things Crowley was good at.

  Heimrich backed his car down to the fork and, after a good deal of wheel-twisting, turned it toward the road. When he reached the blacktop, he drove toward Van Brunt Center.

  There hadn’t been a prospect in a month, Brock & Brock, Realtors, represented by Mr. Reginald Graham, told Corporal Raymond Crowley. Slow market for houses in that price range. Eighteen-thousand-dollar ranches now. They were moving. Especially up in Phipps Acres, with one-acre zoning pushed through. What it came to, the community was changing character. Probably a good thing, but it meant the big houses didn’t move. And the Weaver place—quarter mile of, face it, bumpy driveway. Ruts a foot deep. Commuters. How’d they get out in the winter? That was what they wanted to know.

  “So nobody from here took a prospect to the Weaver house yesterday? Used an Association key?”

  “What I’ve been telling you,” Reginald Graham told Corporal Raymond Crowley. “Sure we’ve got a key. Member of the Association, aren’t we?”

  Brock & Brock had come third on a list of eight. The Putnam County Agency, Inc., per Robert Phipps, had been second. They had not been near the Weaver house the day before. Louise Pemberton, Real Estate, had been first. “Yes, we have it listed. Nobody’s shown the least interest. Is it true somebody killed the poor thing?”

  News moved faster than Raymond Crowley, which was to be expected.

  He had started with the larger agencies. He came down, last, to Leslie Brennan, Real Estate, but with no sign on a small Colonial house on Brickhouse Road to identify it. Crowley rang a doorbell and a dog, who sounded large and indignant, barked at him from behind a closed door. It was warm by midmorning; the front doors of most houses on Brickhouse Road stood open. He was about to give it up when a slender young woman came around the house from, Crowley thought, the garden. She was dressed for gardening; she had been kneeling on damp soil in denim slacks. Her hair, which was soft around her face—and a little damp on her forehead—was dark brown. She took off gardening gloves as she came around the house.

  Yes, she was Mrs. James Brennan—Leslie Brennan. Yes, the Weaver house was one of her listings.

  “But nobody has come to me about it,” Leslie Brennan told Crowley. She had a low, soft voice. Her brown eyes, as she looked up at him, were unexpectedly large. There was a smudge on her right cheek.

  “People who are interested in big houses usually go to the big agencies,” Leslie told the tall policeman, who did not look like one in his sports jacket and slacks. “Has somebody broken into the house, Mr.—?”

  “Crowley. No, it’s …” he paused. News had not been ahead of him here. But it did not matter. By now the news was everywhere else in Van Brunt; in an hour or so it would spread over the country. Mrs. James Brennan would only need to turn on her radio, light up her television, to hear it.

  “How dreadful!” Leslie Brennan said, when Crowley told her. “It’s—I can hardly believe it. She was so—so beautiful. When I was in my teens—” She stopped and shook her head. “Some of us tried to dress like her. Wear our hair the way she wore hers,” Leslie Brennan said. “It just doesn’t seem possible anyone would want to hurt her. Have you and—I suppose it’s Captain Heimrich?—any idea who …?”

  They had not, yet. They had just got started on it. Mrs. Brennan had a key to the lockbox at the Weaver place? She hadn’t used it the day before, of course. He understood that. She was quite sure she hadn’t—oh, misplaced it? Easy enough thing to do. Or, conceivably, lent it to somebody?

  “Of course not,” Leslie said. “We never do. Wait.”

  She opened her front door and a very large German shepherd rose to welcome her—rose on hind legs, with forepaws reaching for slim shoulders. Leslie said, “Down, Lady,” and the big bitch dropped to four feet, and was rubbed behind alert ears in recompense. Leslie went beyond her big dog into the house and Lady stood behind the screen door and stared at Crowley, regarding him, he hoped, with detachment.

  The slim young woman—hell of a good figure; most of them can’t really wear slacks—came back. She had a key with a tag dangling from it. “Association of Realtors” was printed on the wooden tag. “Here it is,” she told him and held it out. He took it and looked at it, since she had gone to the trouble of producing it. He handed it back. She had probably been working too hard in the garden. The sun was high enough now to beat down on a gardener. It had tired her; she was a little thing. The hand which took back the Association key seemed to shake a little.

  Crowley said, “Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Brennan,” and was told it had been no bother.

  “I was ready to take a break, anyway,” Leslie Brennan said. “Isn’t it strange how weeds never seem to need water when everything else does?”

  Merton Heimrich opened the door of the shop on Van Brunt Avenue which had “susan faye, fabrics,” in italic lettering, on the lower left-hand corner of its show window, and fabrics draped behind the window. Colonel came from the shop’s rear room. Colonel, seeing Heimrich, collapsed in front of him with a thud. Susan was on the telephone. She said, “I thought it would be about eighteen yards. Of course I’ll get it over to Mr. Frankelman. Yes, eight dollars a yard.” And hung up.

  “The
dog wants the air conditioning turned on,” Susan said. “It’s not really warm enough. It uses up water. I keep telling him. What is it, Merton?”

  She had been working on a design, Heimrich thought, looking down at her. There was a fresh streak of orange on the smock she wore when she stood in front of paper thumbtacked to a drawing board and put poster colors on it until a design appeared. There were a good many streaks and dabs of color on the smock, but the orange was fresh.

  Colonel got up from the floor, since nobody was paying attention to him, and ambled into the rear room, which was the workroom. “Don’t eat the paint,” Susan said to the big dog, and spoke absently. “It’ll make you sick again.”

  Colonel paid no attention.

  “Have you solved it already?” Susan Heimrich said to her husband. “And taking the rest of the day off?”

  Heimrich said, “Now, Susan. Nat—” He stopped himself. “No,” he said. “A long way from that.”

  She waited. Sometimes he told her of progress made. More often he did not.

  “Sometime late yesterday,” Heimrich said. “Late afternoon, early evening. Shot once in the throat. Severed an artery.”

  “Dreadful.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “it always is.”

  “She was beautiful. So few really are that, you know. Only a few days ago she was on TV. In an old movie. Or, perhaps, doing a commercial for something which other women were supposed to think would make them look the way she looked. I remember now. It was that. Something to set the hair. She cooed at us.” She considered. “Which was certainly out of character,” she added. “After that show she put on at the—oh, is it that, dear? You left before it, didn’t you?”

  “Intuition,” Heimrich told her. “Yes. Quite a performance, Mrs. Drake says it was. And that you were there and could tell about it.”

  “The poor duchess,” Susan said. “Annette was a little drunk, Merton. More than a little drunk. You remember the loudspeaker?”