Foggy, Foggy Death

by Frances Lockridge

  Forniss looked doubtful.

  “Character doesn’t fit the crime, apparently,” Heimrich agreed. “Still—suppose this, Charlie.”

  Forniss was invited to suppose that Nickel, also was lying; that his friendship with Marta was not inconsiderable and four or five years ago, as he said, but recent and—considerable. Haas had left High Ridge a few minutes before Nickel arrived, apparently, but could have encountered him either as Nickel was walking up the drive or as he was examining the flat tire on his car. Haas, who knew that Nickel was moving in on Marta, and moving Haas out, could have left his own car, gone back to say his piece, happened on Marta outside and said it to her, blown up, finally, and killed her. Afterward, one could suppose that Haas’s first idea had been to get away; that he had actually started away and driven for some miles before he cooled down enough to have a second, and saner idea—to come back.

  Forniss would, he said, like it better if Haas were a different man—less “sure of himself.” The trouble was, he pointed out, that you didn’t expect Haas to blow up. Better than Haas, better than Miss Mason by a lot, he liked Nickel. If—

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Any way we slice it, Nickel is on the other side of the fence. From us. Cops—men with angles. But, why? That’s the catch, isn’t it? You don’t see him blowing up.”

  Forniss shrugged his broad, heavy shoulders.

  “We don’t like the coincidence,” Heimrich said. “Or the phoney name, which makes all the argument about a coincidence absurd. Why the phoney name, Charlie?”

  Forniss shrugged again, but differently.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, “it could be he planned something. Something the murder interrupted; something he didn’t want his own name involved with. Or, of course, it could have been that someone here knew his name—not his appearance, just his name—and he didn’t want to be identified.”

  “The trouble is,” Forniss said, “there’s a hell of a lot we don’t know, captain.”

  There was, Heimrich agreed. So far, they knew only what people told them. “Most of which isn’t true.” They knew on that basis that nobody they had talked to killed Marta. They knew none of the others knew Nickel before that day. They knew Higgins didn’t have an idea the car was full of “jools.” But also, they knew Marta Bromwell was dead, and were certain she had been killed. “By,” Heimrich said, “someone here.” He closed his eyes, then, and said nothing for so long that Forniss got up and went to the window and looked out at the fog. It was getting no better.

  “It would help,” Captain Heimrich said, “to know where the car fits in. It’s a very odd thing about the car. The car sticks out.”

  Forniss nodded.

  “Because it’s extraneous,” Heimrich said, speaking with his eyes closed. “How far, would you say, from where the girl was killed?”

  “Where it was parked?” Forniss said. “Mile and a half by road. About half that across the fields, by the path through the swamp. Convenient if somebody wanted to get away after killing her. Only—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Only it wasn’t there. Higgins had it. Further, what would have been the point? Say it was Bromwell. Say he planned to kill his wife there. Go on and get in the car and make a getaway. All very pretty, but it doesn’t add. He might as well have put on sandwich boards ‘I just killed my wife’ and walked down Main Street in White Plains. Been picked up about as fast. Say it wasn’t Bromwell. It was still Bromwell’s car. The jewelry was Mrs. Bromwell’s. Who—” He broke off and opened his eyes.

  “Could have been the old lady, couldn’t it? Not that that would make much more sense. Or—Miss Mason. Lives here. Could get the car easily enough. Maybe could get the jewelry. Smash and grab—and run, Marta being the one smashed. Then Higgins did her in by taking the car. Only—what’s the sense of that, either? Murder because of jealousy; then running away from the only possible advantage—getting the man. Anyway—” He shook his head slowly. He paused lengthily. “The car,” he said, mildly, “is a nuisance, isn’t it?”

  “It could,” Forniss said, “be a coincidence. Part of something else.”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Now Charlie.” He closed his eyes. “Part of something else,” he repeated after a time. “What did the boys find out? About what we thought?”

  “Two men,” Forniss said. “One getting out and going away. No telling which way. Another coming along the road from toward Vista, walking around in front of the car and getting in. That’s what they think. No chance of using the footprints. Only a guess men made them. At a guess, however, made at about the same time. The guy who got out was taller than the guy who got in, probably. Took longer strides, anyway. Weighed more, probably. Everything ‘probable’ that isn’t, a guess.”

  You couldn’t, Heimrich said, blame the boys. They got what was there, naturally. And, they could assume the short man was Higgins.

  “He could—” Heimrich said, and stopped. “This story they all tell,” he said. “Marta Bromwell was being the little helper. Driving her mother’s secretary to the train. In this”—he waved toward the window. “Sound like her to you, Charlie?”

  There was, they also said, and Forniss pointed it out, the matter of the dog.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You got it there, Charlie? Bromwell’s version?”

  Forniss thumbed through his notebook. He read:

  “‘Wasn’t that a little unusual, Mr. Bromwell?’

  “‘Unusual? Oh—Marta had another reason. These kennel people in Stamford called up and said if she wanted her pick of litter, they’d appreciate it if she came in. Any time after six, they said. She had her order in for a bitch and had arranged to have first choice. Actually, she was dropping Miss Mason off on her way to the kennels.’

  “‘What kennels, Mr. Bromwell?’

  “‘Fairvale.’”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “Did we check?” Forniss shook his head. “We might as well,” Heimrich said, and Forniss reached for the telephone, got information, got the number, after a considerable wait got an answer. The answer was sleepy and disgruntled. Forniss asked and listened. He said, “Sure of that?” and, after listening again, “Keep your shirt on. This is the police.” He listened further and said, “Thanks. Sorry to wake you up.” Then he turned to Heimrich. He shook his head.

  “Doesn’t jibe,” he said. “They did call to say the pups were ready. This morning about ten. But—there was nothing about coming after six, or at any special time. Any time today. Any time tomorrow. And—they talked to a man. Man said he was Bromwell.”

  Heimrich said nothing for a time, and then he said, “Well.” After another pause he spoke again.

  “Bromwell’s mother said about what he did, as I remember it,” he said. “Marta Bromwell was to go there after six; had to be this evening. That was the impression, anyway. Accounted for her driving in the fog.”

  Forniss was already looking through his notebook. He found what he wanted and read it to himself. “Want me to read it?” he asked. “Pretty much the same story.” He was told not to bother. There was a much longer pause.

  “Remember the Brone case, Charlie?” Heimrich asked. “Not ours—out west somewhere—but remember it? Woman named Mrs. Brone driving home by herself from a late dinner at a country club, stops her car at a stop sign, somebody yanks the car door open, hits her over the head, drives the car off and into a lake? Takes a lot of jewelry Mrs. Brone was wearing. Everybody’s supposed to think a carefully planned hi-jacking. Only—Mrs. Brone was lucky. Water wasn’t as deep as planned, car stuck up; she came to and got her head out and began to yell. Remember, Charlie?”

  Forniss nodded.

  “So,” Heimrich said, “Mr. Brone’s put away for assault with intent. Very surprised man, Brone was, because he’d thought it was all so neat.”

  Forniss nodded slowly.

  “Part of the neatness,” Heimrich said, “was that Brone had driven in his own car to the place where he planned to ditch his
wife’s—and drown her. Walked back to the stop sign. Had something to ride home in afterward. Planned everything so well, Mr. Brone did. And forgot to take soundings.”

  Forniss nodded again, and there was another pause.

  “I wonder,” Heimrich said, “if Mr. Bromwell happened to read about the Brone case. Things like that can give people ideas, naturally.”

  Forniss said, “Ye—p,” dragging it a little. He added that they did at that.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, “it leaves us with spare parts. Haas. Nickel. Miss Mason. The fact that the little boy chose this afternoon to run away. Also, it didn’t work out like the Brone case. But—it could have been planned that way. And Higgins could have thrown a wrench in the machinery by taking the car. You like any part of it, Charlie?”

  Forniss hesitated. Then he said that the trouble was none of it worked out like the Brone case, if it was planned that way. Actually, as it worked out, Marta Bromwell had not driven to Stamford and so had not—

  “Naturally, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I’d noticed that. But, you’d think if somebody planned to kill Mrs. Bromwell, the same person did kill her. Wouldn’t you? Say we knew somebody planned to shoot a man and we got there and found the man strangled instead. We’d pick on the same somebody, naturally. The original somebody.” He closed his eyes. “Of course,” he said, “if we want to go far enough, make it elaborate enough, we can go another step. A second somebody sees the first somebody’s in a spot and takes advantage of it. Makes things complicated, though. Simpler if it’s Bromwell, giving his wife a phoney message to get her out in her car, planning to knock her off, taking the jewelry so he could throw it away—or hide it—later and make things look like robbery. Nice and simple that way.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said.

  “However,” Heimrich said, “there’s nothing much more to do tonight.”

  He stood up. He and Forniss went from the library through the East Room to the entrance hall. But there Heimrich stopped.

  “May as well take Mr. Higgins along,” he said. “Maybe we—” He broke off, and then made an impatient sound with tongue and teeth. “About the same time,” he said, “at the car. Suppose Higgins saw the other man? That would help, wouldn’t it Charlie?”

  Forniss nodded.

  “All right,” Captain Heimrich said, “have one of the boys get him. We’ll give him another chance.”

  But it was actually more than half an hour before one of the boys was sent to get Higgins, a fact which was to make a considerable difference to several people. The reason for the delay was simple: the butler came out of the corridor to the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee, saying that Mrs. Bromwell had sent him. The butler took the tray to a table by the remains of the fire in the East Room and Heimrich and Forniss, who had been hungry hours ago and forgotten it, remembered hunger again and ate.

  VII

  Karen was asleep and dreaming horribly; then, as if in the next second, she was wide awake. But the unhappiness of the dreams, the foreboding and the sense of desperate effort, somehow remained. She should not, she thought, have left the night light on. It was that which had shaped the dreams and that, surely, which had awakened her. She could hear no sound, and it did not seem—although about such things it is hard to be sure—that it was a sound which had awakened her. It was more as if there had been something alien in the room, and that could have been the glow of the night lamp, which almost always she flicked off just before she fell asleep.

  For a moment that explanation satisfied her, and she switched off the light and turned on her side, ready to go to sleep again. But sleep was not now ready to welcome her and now, even with the room dark, she felt again as if she were not alone in it—or, as if, sleeping, she had not been alone in it. This feeling was as persistent as it was intangible, and after a few minutes it began to be frightening. Someone had been in the room, looking at her as she slept; seeing her unconscious and helpless and, with that thought in her mind, sleep became not a refuge but risk, almost a peril. Karen turned and sat up in bed suddenly and now, needing light, being fearful of the dark, she switched on not the dim soft glow of the night light, but the reading lamp on the other side of the bed. Although the lamp was shaded, only just adequate as a reading light, it now seemed to glare in the room, flooding it harshly.

  The room was empty; she was alone in it. It had all been part of the dream, of the terror of the dream. (Now she could not remember what she had dreamed, but only the fright of it, and the great, hopeless effort.) She reached for a cigarette and, with this movement, faced the bedroom door. The door was not entirely closed.

  At first she could not believe this, and thought it a trick of the light. Quickly, she switched off the lamp by her bed and now, with the room dark again, she could see clearly that the door was partly open, light from the corridor coming dimly in around it. She turned her own light on again and swung herself out of bed on the side away from the door, keeping the bed between herself and the door. But the door did not move. She stood barefoot on the carpet, feeling the coolness of the room through the clinging fragility of her nightdress, and held her breath and listened. If someone were at the door she could surely, in the quiet of the house, hear some sound from the person there—could hear, if nothing more, the person’s breathing. But she heard nothing.

  Possibly, she thought, she had not fully closed the door. When she came in she had done only automatically the things one did—closed the door without thinking of it, undressed as unconsciously, apparently turned the night lamp on and forgotten to turn it off. It might be she had left the door unlatched, and that a current of air had moved it. Perhaps it was only that, only that almost imperceptible change in air movements, which had awakened her.

  She moved around the bed and to the door to close it but then, instead of closing it, and because she thought she heard a faint sound from the direction of the central stairway, opened it enough so that she could look out. The hall was empty and, although she waited a moment, she did not hear the sound again. She started again to close the door, but then opened it enough so that she could look the other way of the corridor, toward the window in which it ended and the door leading to Mrs. Bromwells big corner room. It took her a moment to realize that Mrs. Bromwell’s door, which opened out into the corridor, was standing wide. She could not see that there was any light in the room.

  There was no reason why this open door should alarm Karen, and she told herself there was none. Mrs. Bromwell had merely gone out for some reason and left the door open behind her. Probably she had gone to look in at the children as, when she was sleeping badly, she often did. Perhaps she had remembered downstairs something forgotten and gone to set it right and this, again, would have been neither unusual nor alarming. Karen was—and this, too, she told herself—nervously excited, so that ordinary things assumed unjustified importance. It was no part of her duty, or of her obligation, to superintend her employer’s comings and goings. Karen closed her door as noiselessly as she could, but with enough pressure to be sure that this time the latch caught, and went back toward her bed. She would have the cigarette she had reached for and not lighted; if she could manage it, go to sleep, if she could not, try to read. She went so far as to take up the cigarette and to snap her lighter. But then she let the flame burn without touching it to the cigarette and then, quickly, snapped the lighter closed.

  There was no use pretending that things were as they always were; no reason, and no safety either, in glossing over strangeness when the world had all turned strange. She pressed the end of the unlighted cigarette hard in an ash tray, as if extinguishing it, and turned away without realizing what she had done. She found a robe and belted it around her, found she still held the cigarette lighter and dropped it into a pocket. She found slippers and put them on. She went back to the door. Again she listened, and again heard nothing—or was there, from the downstairs hall, the faintest sound of movement?—and then went out into the deserted corridor
, closing the door behind her. She went quickly to Mrs. Bromwell’s room.

  The room was dark, and had a feeling of emptiness. Karen stood in the door and spoke Mrs. Bromwell’s name softly. There was no answer, and Karen spoke the name again, more loudly. When she still was not answered, she stepped into the room and pushed up the tumbler of the light switch by the door. Twin lamps went on on either side of an unoccupied bed—of a bed which had not been slept in. The room was empty. It took Karen seconds to realize that someone had been smoking a cigarette in it. It was seconds longer before she realized the wrongness of tobacco odor in this room.

  Mrs. Bromwell smoked, but only occasionally, and never in her bedroom. She could not understand people who smoked in bedrooms, considered it a habit at once slovenly and unhealthful. This was understood in the family, and when in Mrs. Bromwell’s room neither Karen nor Scott ever smoked. Now and then Marta had forgotten, or pretended to forget, and had had to be reminded. Yet tonight, someone had smoked there.

  It was nothing on which to build alarm. The most likely thing was that Mrs. Bromwell had broken her own rule after an afternoon and evening of unexampled strain. Or one of the policemen—Captain Heimrich or Forniss—had been in the room and, not knowing of the rule, had violated it. Or a trooper, perhaps not supposed to smoke in uniform, had stepped into the empty room for a few sheltered drags. It was so easy to explain that it was hardly worth explaining. Yet Karen found the faint, characteristic odor disturbing.

  Now, however, there was no one in the room, Mrs. Bromwell or anyone else, smoking or not. Karen turned back to the door, and tried to make herself realize that she was nervously magnifying inconsiderable things into terrors. She would go back to bed, try again to sleep. She would—

  But uneasiness was not to be dismissed; she could not abandon it. She would see if the children were all right—and, if Mrs. Bromwell were there, as was most probable, Karen would so find reassurance. She took a step toward the door of the children’s room, and then heard sounds which at first seemed to come from the end of the corridor behind her. Almost instantly, she realized that they did not come from there, but came from below, up the narrow flight of stairs which led from the second floor hall to the seldom used first floor of the west wing, ending there in a corridor which ran behind the West Room and into the servants’ quarters and kitchen area.