“I know what happens,” he said, “but what about it? That money will never be mine.”
“Suppose the boy dies, too?”
Rick started out of the chair, his face stiff and pale at the cheekbones, his eyes hard as they fixed on Manning’s round bespectacled features.
Legett moved in front of him, his tone placating.
“Easy, Mr. Sheridan. Right now we’re considering all possibilities.”
The county detective seemed not to have moved a muscle. He sat where he was, his gaze reflective. Under its spell Rick calmed down and measured his words.
“I didn’t kill my wife,” he said. “I happen to love my son very dearly.”
“Mr. Brainard tells us,” Manning continued as though he had not heard, “that his daughter got about fifteen thousand a year from that trust before taxes. That income is yours to do with as you please until the boy’s of age. In my book that’s a motive.”
He heaved out of the chair and put his notebook away. After a glance at Legett he said; “Let’s go down and get some of this on paper, Mr. Sheridan.”
“What about Nancy Heath?”
“She’ll have to come, too.”
“Why? She told you—”
“She’s a witness. She’ll have to sign a statement. There’s a policewoman with her now.”
“But—she lives in New York. How long will she have to stay?”
“I don’t know. But when she’s finished, if she wants transportation to New York, we can provide it.”
Chapter 4
Rick Sheridan never remembered too many details of the night he spent in the state police barracks. He told his story twice more and answered countless questions before a statement was typed and offered for his signature, and between such sessions there were times when he was left alone in the little office for considerable periods. Once a uniformed officer brought him a sandwich and coffee and later someone got him cigarettes from the machine in the hall. The sky was getting light in the east when they told him he could go, and as he passed the office at the front of the building Nancy called to him.
The furniture indicated that this was probably the office of the commanding officer but there was no one behind the desk at this hour, only Nancy and an attractive, dark-haired policewoman. They were having coffee and sitting close together in friendly fashion, for a moment Rick just looked at them in open-eyed amazement.
“Nancy,” he said. “Have you been here all this time? I thought you were home hours ago.” He looked at the policewoman and continued indignantly. “What’s the idea of holding her here all night?”
“They didn’t, Rick.”
“She wanted to wait,” the policewoman said. “Would you like some coffee?”
Such cheerful hospitality took the edge from his concern and he mumbled his thanks as he refused. Nancy put her cup aside and stood up. “Thanks awfully, Alice,” she said and shook hands with the woman as though they were good friends; then she was walking out the door with Rick, her arm locked with his.
“She’s really very nice,” she said.
“Who?” said Rick, his thoughts on more serious matters.
“Alice. She told me about her work. Some of it sounds fascinating.”
He gave her arm a shake. “Look, baby,” he said, having no time for her impressions of Alice, “when did you finish? When did they say you could go?”
“About two or a little after. They asked a million questions, mostly the same ones over and over.”
“Did they offer to take you home?”
“Oh, yes. But I told them. I’d rather wait for you.”
Rick shook his head. He sighed and let his breath out. To himself he said: What a girl. Aloud he said: “How did you know they were going to let me go at all?”
“I didn’t. They told me they didn’t know about that but I thought if they did let you out in time I’d rather ride to town with you. If they didn’t—well, someone has to deliver that True-Fruit art to Ted Banks this morning, and I could do it for you.”
They were at his car by then, and when he had opened the door he stopped to take her hands in his and smile down at her. When he saw the green eyes soften and smile back at him he sighed again.
“You’re wonderful,” he said. “I love you.… Get in. How about a shower and some breakfast?”
“I’d love it.”
In the light of day the living room showed obvious signs of the official invasion. Traces of dusting powder smudged the woodwork here and there, the ashtrays were filled to overflowing, and one wastebasket held a half dozen used flashbulbs. When Nancy started to straighten up Rick stopped her, saying he would call Mrs. Furman, the cleaning woman who came regularly three mornings a week.
“You can take your bath first if you still want it. I’ll get the coffee started and squeeze some oranges.”
During the night the breeze had shifted to the easterly quadrant, cooling itself before moving inland, and it was bright and pleasant at five minutes of eight as Rick drove up the ramp to the parkway. Little had been said since they left the house and presently Nancy voiced a thought that had been bothering Rick for some time.
“What are you going to do about Ricky?”
He could make no immediate answer to the question but he could see in fancy the camp buildings in the pine grove at the edge of the Adirondack lake. It was not the de luxe sort of camp that is advertised in some of the better magazines but it had been highly recommended by two of Rick’s friends, and he had been impressed by the man who had directed the camp for more than twenty years and by the number of college boy counselors who worked there each summer.
The values that Rick wanted his son to know were taught here in a simple and direct way and each camper had work to do. His allowance was limited and parental visits were discouraged except on Sundays; punishment, when necessary, took the form of additional chores and loss of privilege’s. His son had thrived on such a regime and Rick remembered the last Sunday that he had driven up there with Nancy, who had come bearing a gift.
When he had thanked her, Ricky had eyed the candy box curiously and then, glancing up, had asked if he could open it now.
“Of course,” Nancy said, and they watched him loosen the ribbon and lift the lid to find three layers of brownies neatly fitted inside.
“Boy,” he said joyously. “Brownies. Homemade, too.”
“Sure they’re homemade,” Rick said.
Then, as though aware of his obligations, Ricky extended the box. “Will you have one, Nancy?” he said, remembering that she had asked him to call her by her first name.
Nancy said no, that they were for him, and Rick, very proud now but finding a small lump in his throat, rumpled his son’s blond hair.
“Just be sure you share them with your tentmates.”
“Oh, sure, Dad,” the boy had said. “All the guys do.”
Rick’s thoughts jerked back to his problem when he heard Nancy’s voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t listening.”
“I—I was wondering if you’d like me to tell him. I could get the day off and drive up there—”
“No,” Rick said. “I want to talk to him but he may be off somewhere. They’re always having projects of some kind up there.” He drove another silent mile and said: “I think I’ll talk to Pop Wayne, the camp director, first. He understands a boy’s mind better than I do and Ricky thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world.”
“Next to you.”
“And I can see what Pop says and then fix it so I can call back again and talk to Ricky.” He hesitated, his thoughts depressed and uncertain. “Right now I don’t know what I want to say. I don’t know when the funeral will be or what Mr. Brainard wants to do or whether I should tell Ricky to come or tell him to stay.”
“Couldn’t you—well, sort of leave it up to Ricky? He’s nearly thirteen.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“You can probably sense how he feels about it when you talk
to him. It might be kinder to let him remember his mother the way he last saw her but I don’t think I’d be insistent no matter what he decides.”
They fell silent after that and it was not until they were on the outskirts of the city that he spoke of the other matter which could no longer be ignored.
“I’ve got to have help, Nancy.”
“About Ricky?”
“About me. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Unless the police find out who killed Frieda I may have to stand trial for murder.”
“I don’t believe it. How can—”
“And even if I don’t,” he said, ignoring the outburst, “I’ll always be under suspicion. Suppose they don’t try me? Suppose they don’t try anybody? The fact is, somebody did kill her. If this thing isn’t cleared up Brainard is going to keep on thinking I did it and got away with it. I certainly had good motives. People are going to keep wondering. How can Ricky be sure when he grows up? How would you like to be the wife of a guy whose first wife died in an unsolved murder?
“But I know you didn’t do it.”
She hesitated, and a sidewise glance told him that the thought had frightened her.
“Your friends will know you couldn’t have done it,” she said, but her argument was more stubborn than convincing.
“We’ll go to parties and even if people aren’t wondering they’ll remember what happened. We’ll never know for sure what they’re thinking and it’ll always be there beneath the surface. And that’ll be the best that can happen. I may even be in jail tomorrow and—”
“Please, Rick,” she cried. “Don’t talk like that.”
“But it’s true. He rapped the wheel with the heel of his hand. “So long as the police figure me as the prime suspect they’re bound to try to clinch the case. Let’s not kid about it. I’ve got to get something working on my side while I’ve still got time.”
She leaned back in the seat, shoulders slumping and her hands limp in her lap. After a while she said:
“Do you know anyone you can talk to?”
“I’ll call Neil Tyler, my lawyer, first and see what he says. I might as well get him prepared. Maybe he can recommend a good private investigator.”
“All right,” she said quietly. “And I can get time off from my job if there’s any way I can help.”
He put his hand on her knee and squeezed gently. “That’s better,” he said, and with the words, felt a little better himself.
Chapter 5
The sign on the door said: THE CROMBIE AGENCY and gave no clue as to the type of business pursued inside. It was on the fourth floor of a nondescript office building on Seventh Avenue in the forties, and when Rick Sheridan walked in he found himself in a small, squarish room furnished with a settee, four chairs, and a low table cluttered with dog-eared magazines. One wall had a glass window with a semicircular opening, beyond which a bright-eyed brunette sat at a switchboard. When Rick gave his name she smiled at him and pressed a button which clicked the latch of a door next to the window.
“Yes, Mr. Sheridan,” she said. “Mr. Crombie’s expecting you. Straight down to the corner office.”
Once inside, Rick saw that the open space beyond the switchboard was occupied by two girls who were working at their desks. On the right he passed three tiny, glass-partitioned cubbyholes, and that brought him to the office at the end which was not a great deal larger.
A desk had been moved diagonally across one corner. Seated behind it was a man of considerable bulk who wore cord trousers—the jacket was draped over a hanger and topped by a Panama hat—and a white shirt. He looked to be about fifty, his gray eyes were bright and keen behind the drooping lids, and in spite of his weight and the noticeable paunch he came easily to his feet.
“I’m Rick Sheridan,” Rick said. “I think Neil Tyler called you.”
Crombie offered a big hand that looked fat but proved to be surprisingly hard. “Sam Crombie,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Sheridan.”
Rick took the only other chair and Crombie let himself down in a desk chair which creaked with his weight. He tipped back and put his hands behind his neck, locking his fingers there. When he continued, his voice carried overtones of some hoarseness that seemed chronic but the cadence was low pitched, with a minimum of inflection.
“Mr. Tyler told me a little about what happened to you last night,” he said, “and you have my sympathy. I understand you and your wife weren’t too friendly but murder is always a shocking business even when it happens to strangers. I’m not sure what you have in mind, or if I can be of any help or not, but if you want to tell me about it I’ll be better able to make an intelligent comment.”
He swiveled his chair as Rick began to talk, hooking one foot on a drawer pull and his gaze fastened on the lone window which gave him a view of the walls of two nearby buildings. He made no interruption, nor did he shift his glance, until Rick had finished his account. After a few seconds of silent inaction, he swung the chair back and brought his gaze to focus.
“What you want from me is help in clearing yourself of suspicion?”
“Yes.”
“I can see why. But I think I should tell you now that we seldom get involved in a murder case. Our work is usually pretty routine—checking up on people for any number of reasons, security work, things like that. The police have the manpower, equipment, and specialists to investigate a murder; we haven’t.”
“Oh,” said Rick, his disappointment showing as his hopes faded. “Then you’d rather not handle it for me.”
“I didn’t say that I just wanted you to get straight what we can do and what we can’t. In this case there’s one way we might help. You say you didn’t kill her, so someone else did. With the outline you’ve given me it looks as if it was a murder that depended on circumstances rather than anything that had been planned. It apparently was done in a fit of anger—that’s usually the case when a woman is strangled—by a man who knew your wife was going to be there at that time. It’s possible, of course, that someone just happened to stop in at that moment after you’d gone. From what you say she was in a pretty nasty mood and—well, it could happen.”
He hesitated, his gray eyes busy with thought. “What I’m getting at is that whoever killed her—I’m ruling out a prowler now—had a damn good motive, at least to him. The desire to kill, maybe even the necessity to kill, must have been in his mind, and when the opportunity came he took it. Why?” he said, and answered himself. “Because he hated her or because he was afraid or her and knew she was a threat to his security or future.… Maybe I’m not putting this very well but do you get what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Rick said, because the picture Crombie offered helped to clarify his own thoughts.
“So we can do this: we can check into your wife’s personal life the last couple of years. We can find out who her friends are, who she’s been going out with and, unless she’s been living like a nun, who she might have been intimate with. It might help some if you’d tell me more about her, and yourself for that matter. What’s her background? How long have you been married?”
Rick told him how he had met Frieda and spoke of the elopement. He said they were kids at the time but he had already decided to drop out of college at the end of his junior year and go to Officers’ Candidate School.
“Had you met her father before you eloped?”
“Sure,” Rick said. “She had me out to the house for a weekend. When the old boy found out I had barely enough money to finish school he lost interest in me. When he learned I wanted to be an artist he went to work on Frieda.”
“Who thought up the elopement?”
“Well—we wanted to get married and there wasn’t any other way. I think one reason Frieda wanted to elope was to get away from her father. Her mother died when she was ten and her father always wanted a son, and he’s one of those guys who have to boss every operation they’re involved in. He dominated Frieda when he could, and made her decisions, and he forgot t
hat there were a lot of his qualities in hen She’d fight him—I guess it got to be a complex—but when she was young she still had to knuckle under. With me I guess she figured she would be herself for a change. Even later when she’d go back for the summer or a weekend she went on her own terms, and the funny thing is, the older she got the more bossy she got.”
“Like her old man.”
Rick nodded, offered a cigarette, which was refused, and lit his own. “She wanted to be a big shot,” he said. “She wanted to be important and be seen with what she thought was the right people. That’s why she wheedled fifty thousand from the executors of her mother’s estate and started this book publishing firm with another man.”
“Go back aways,” Crombie said in his flat hoarse voice. “Did you always want to be an artist?”
“Not when I was a kid. But I could always draw. I did cartoons for the high-school paper and kept it up in college for the humorous magazine. I began taking all the art courses I could and when I was in Germany I did some posters and filled two or three notebooks with sketches. The baby was born while I was over there and I arranged to get discharged in Paris, figuring on having Frieda and the boy come over so I could study a while longer on the G.I. bill.”
He paused, slouching in his chair as his thoughts embraced well-remembered details and recalling again his disappointment when Frieda had refused to come. For he had already signed up for certain courses, and had found a small apartment, all of which had to be canceled so he could take the next boat home.
“She was living with her father then and I didn’t even have a job, so I couldn’t argue. But I looked up some college friends and got a start with Byron & Cowles—that’s one of the better advertising agencies—doing layouts and roughs for dummies and direct-mail pieces.”
He digressed to speak of Frieda’s trust fund and said that by then she had begun to get the income from it.
The Third Mystery Page 19