With One Stone

by Frances Lockridge

  The big sergeant and the good-looking younger man got into the car again. This time, Dinah thought, they were really going. This time they really went.

  “Washed their hands of us,” Mary said.

  “Let’s hope,” Dinah said, and managed lightness—but, still not knowing why, did not feel any lightening.

  “I,” Mary said, “am going over to Silas’s and ride a while. Shake all this out. Want to come along?”

  “Silas’s” was a riding stable. Mary rented horses there, from time to time—now that she no longer had a horse of her own. When you marry and move to town, you cannot take a horse along.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Dinah said.

  “Respect for the dead? If that’s it—”

  “You can respect the dead as much on a horse as anywhere else,” Dinah said. “It’s chiefly that I can take horses or leave them alone. Also, I’ve got a book to read.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “O’Hara, or the Elements of Sexual Physiology. If that husband of mine finally calls. Or even comes—”

  She paused. Dinah waited.

  “Oh,” Mary said, “tell him where I am. And that I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  It was, then, a little after three in the afternoon. Dinah went to her room and read O’Hara and went to sleep over him. When she awoke, she was surprised to read the passage over which she had dozed. Could it be, she wondered mildly, that she lacked the normal—responses?

  She was surprised, also, to discover that it was almost five o’clock. She must have slept for an hour or more. Well, she had slept fitfully the night before.

  She showered and changed, not hurrying over it. She went down to the living room, and again was the first. It was, uncomfortably, as it had been Thursday afternoon. She felt, strangely, that it might start again, might be replayed. Ann might again come perfectly down the wide staircase, dressed for her usual walk. Mary might come and then her father and then—Norm. In the “contraption.”

  The contraption was no longer in the turnaround. Garaged, finally. Unless Norm had—

  She was sure he had not. He and her father were in the office suite, and hard at it. Whatever it was this weekend. The pulverization of Democrats, she assumed. Except for those few staunch souls who came from Oklahoma and Texas, and held the proper views toward labor unions. Well, like father, not like daughter. What did Norm really think of it, she wondered. His, she supposed, not to reason why. A technician, doing a job. Like the Missouri Democrat who now commanded the New York Herald Tribune.

  The telephone rang in the foyer. She started toward it—Simpkins would, presumably, be getting the cocktail cart ready. If things were to return, however superficially, to normal. It was nearing six.

  She had taken only a few steps when the bell stopped ringing, midway of a sequence. Somebody had picked it up.

  It was ten minutes, and five minutes before six, when Mary Parsons came down the staircase.

  “That husband of mine,” she said, as she came into the living room. “Now he’s leaving New York. Just leaving. And you know what? He’s been in Chicago with this prospect, looking at whatever the prospect—prospects. And didn’t even know about—about what’s happened. And wonders what kind of a heel I must think he is, not even calling.”

  “He’s coming now?”

  “Just leaving. Been at the office, cleaning some things up. The way he drives it’ll be an hour and a—”

  She stood so that she was looking, past Dinah, down the living room. She stopped so suddenly that Dinah turned.

  Norman Curtis was coming through the door which led to the office wing. He came hurriedly; he closed the door hard behind him, and it was almost as if he closed something behind the door—shut something behind the door. When he first started up the living room toward them, he moved as if, at any moment, he might begin to run.

  Then he saw them, and did not run, but came on more slowly. When he was near enough, they could see how white his face was, could see that his lips moved, almost convulsively, against his teeth.

  He did not say anything until he was nearly to them.

  “Your father’s—hurt,” he said, then, and spoke quickly, in rather a loud voice. “He’s—” He stopped, and put his right hand to his forehead. It was almost as if he hit his forehead with his right hand.

  “Not hurt,” he said. “He’s—dead. The boss is dead.”

  Dinah drew her breath in a gasp—a gasp part sob. She started to run down the room toward the office door.

  His arms stopped her.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “You’d better not, dear. It looks—” He held her away from him and looked at her steadily.

  “I’m afraid he’s shot himself,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

  She looked at him, dark eyes wide.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  He looked over her head, then, at Mary.

  “Nothing,” he said, as if he had not said it before. “We’ll have to call the police.”

  The best motel rooms nowadays have everything. Space, automatic air conditioning, wide-screen TV, wall-to-wall carpeting—everything but pets, of which motels take dim views. The Carolinian in Wilmington, North Carolina, is one of the best motels. In addition to everything, the Carolinian has room telephones. It is true, of course, that the telephones seldom ring; when on the road, motel-hopping, one is cut off from the world. And a pleasant thing, too, Susan Heimrich thought.

  She had, to be sure, used the telephone to call Van Brunt. Everything was fine in Van Brunt. Colonel had chased a deer. He had not caught the deer. The preceding day, a deer had chased Colonel. “Not really!” Susan had said and been told, in the unexcited voice of a grave small boy, “Yes, one really did.”

  That had been before they had driven a few blocks to dinner. Now they had driven the few blocks back. Now, relaxed, sitting side by side on a sofa built for two, sipping moderate nightcaps, they watched wide-screen television.

  “Such a fine clear picture,” Susan said, in a very relaxed voice. “Isn’t it too bad it isn’t of something?”

  And then the telephone rang. They did not believe it, momentarily. In motel rooms, telephones never ring. Nobody knows one is in a motel room.

  “Mistake, obviously,” Merton Heimrich said. But the telephone rang again, as if to answer him. He looked at his watch as, reluctantly, he left the sofa and walked to the telephone. The time was nine o’clock—nine o’clock of the evening of Saturday, the second of April.

  Heimrich said, “Speaking,” and then, “Oh. Hello, Tom.”

  And, hearing that, Susan drew a breath in and let it out regretfully. She knew who “Tom” was; she had met Tom. A very nice guy, Tom was—a very nice captain, uniformed force, New York State Police, stationed at Hawthorne Barracks. And, a captain who had gone to the trouble of tracing them—tracing them from the motel in West Palm Beach where they had stopped to make a reservation for Friday night in Brunswick; from the Oak Park in Brunswick to the Carolinian in Wilmington. Run to earth, they were now. Of which no good would come. Susan finished her drink. She got up and turned the TV off.

  “Read about that,” Heimrich was saying. “Thought it looked a little off beam, naturally. But—”

  He stopped. He listened, without speaking, for several minutes. Susan could hear the soft grating of a distant voice; could not make out the words. Then Heimrich said, “Charley’s pretty sure?” and listened again. After a time he said, “He did, did he? In person?” After a further time, he said, “Andy’s a good man, of course.” He listened further.

  “We’re the hell and gone from anywhere,” Heimrich said, and Susan, briefly, hoped that no large part of Wilmington, North Carolina, was listening in. “I’ve no idea. Also, I’ve got a car and—” He appeared to be interrupted, this time briefly.

  “Very nice of him,” Heimrich said, in the tone of a man who means nothing of the kind. “I’ll have to check. Call you back.” There was another brief pause. �
�Fifteen minutes,” Merton Heimrich said. “Half an hour.”

  He hung up. He turned to look at Susan. He said, “Damn it to hell,” in the tone of a man who means precisely that. She waited.

  “James Bedlow’s dead,” he said. “Shot. Supposed to look like suicide, but Charley Forniss says it doesn’t. Not enough. The commissioner’s got an idea it’s too big for Charley. Not that Charley’s not a good man. Only—not enough rank for a big one. By which he means—Bedlow’s got a lot of money, owns a newspaper.”

  “Damn it to hell indeed,” Susan Heimrich said. “You’re ordered back?”

  Not precisely, Heimrich told her, still standing by the telephone on the table between the wide beds. If he could make it, it would be appreciated. They could, of course, send rank—the proper B.C.I. rank—down from Albany. In the person of Captain Andrew Lacey. Lacey’s hands weren’t empty but—this was a big one. On the other hand—

  “The air field’s a couple of miles,” Susan said. “I noticed the signs coming down. There’ll be a plane—”

  “You,” Heimrich said. “What about you? We could leave the car here and—”

  “The car,” Susan said, “is full of things. Including most of my clothes. Including pecans, two bags of oranges and heaven knows what all. And I am a thoroughly competent driver and it won’t be the first time I’ve done a few hundred miles—”

  She stopped. There was no need to go into that. She had been younger—a good deal younger—when she had driven half across the continent to an air field where a man named Michael Faye was training; a husband named Michael Faye—a husband long dead. There was no need to go into that.

  “I don’t like it,” Heimrich said. “The idea of you—” He shook his head. “They can just as well send Lacey down. It’s two days driving and the last one long and—”

  She got up, then. If I were a cat, I’d bush, she thought. Doesn’t he know yet—not even now? I don’t break; I don’t need to be packed in cotton wool. I’m—damn it, I’m me. Isn’t he ever going to learn? Learn that if there isn’t enough me to take care of myself, there isn’t enough me to matter—not enough me to love, to be loved? That it takes two for this—not one and a fraction; not one and something that breaks if you drop it? All this time I’ve been trying to tell him that, Susan Heimrich thought, and I’ve been talking against the wind. The great oaf—the dear, clumsy, unfair, great—

  She advanced on her large husband—a slender woman with squarish shoulders and long legs and the fire of independence bright in her eyes.

  “You’ll pick up that telephone,” Susan Heimrich said, “and—uh?”

  She was in his arms. He did not hold her as if he thought her breakable. He said, “Whoa!”

  “If you think—” she said, regaining breath.

  “Whoa!”

  “You treat me as if—” she said.

  He did not say “whoa” this time. His method was more effectual. It did not require words.

  “If you think just because you can make me go all jell—”

  He stopped her voice again, stopped her moving lips again. He released her; she looked up at him.

  “I can’t,” Heimrich said, gravely, “use the telephone if I have to prevent, by force, interference with a police officer in the performance of. And so forth.”

  “Kiss me,” Susan said. “And use the telephone.”

  It was damply chilly at Idlewild when the plane from Washington set down. It had been pleasant enough in Wilmington when he boarded a smaller plane—boarded it at the last moment, and watched Susan drive the car out of the parking lot, head back to the motel. But he had thought of the warmth of the room she was returning to, alone, and the softness of the weather did not warm him. It had been chilly in Washington, where he made his connection. It was almost cold, here at Idlewild. The trouble with airplanes, Heimrich thought, is that they are too sudden.

  A car was waiting. That had been arranged for, was expected. Charles Forniss was the driver of the car. That had not been expected.

  “You could have sent someone,” Heimrich said.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “And wasted time. Sorry we had to—barge in on you. Both of you.”

  “Now Charley,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. Bedlow was killed, you think?”

  “Put it this way for a starter,” Forniss said, and started the car with the sentence. “How often does somebody shoot himself and hold the gun eight inches, maybe a foot, away from his head? Just for a starter.”

  “Not often,” Heimrich said. “We’d need more but—not often. For the rest?”

  “The wrong kind of man,” Forniss said. “I talked to him. If he shot himself it would be because he was all broken up over his wife’s death. Despondent. He wasn’t. He was mad as hell. As if—” Forniss paused for some seconds. “Somebody’d jumped his claim,” Forniss said.

  It seemed, momentarily, an odd simile. Bedlow had been an oil man; possibly that was the connection. Heimrich did not comment.

  “You’ve read about her?” Forniss said, driving north on Van Wyck Expressway; driving rather fast through the pre-dawn darkness.

  “Snatches,” Heimrich said. “You’d better give it to me, Charley.”

  Forniss talked as he drove, keeping his eyes on the road. There was little traffic; it grew warm in the car. In Heimrich’s mind, it began to take shape.

  “Intended to look like an accident, you think?” he said, at one point. “Or, to look like murder camouflaged as accident.”

  He could take his choice, Forniss said. One would, of course, have expected the stone to be hidden. On the other hand, they could only guess at the circumstances. Someone might have known Jason Sarles was near by; have thought he would have heard a tossed stone falling.

  “There was a tramp? That wasn’t staged?”

  “There was somebody in the guest house. Broke in. Ate there and slept there. For a couple of days, at a guess. Sure, it could have been a plant.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “whoever was there may have nothing to do with it at all. Except to create temporary confusion.”

  Forniss said, “Yep” and went on with it.

  “Curtis flatly denies he’d been in the place since last fall? In spite of the fingerprints?”

  “Yep. He’s lying.”

  “And Bedlow denied he had gone into the guest house?”

  “Yep. He may have been lying. If he’d gone in, incidentally—one in and looked around—he might have seen that one of the beds had been used. Might have jumped to conclusions.”

  “Wrong ones?”

  Forniss thought so. They would know more when the lab boys finished certain tests. But he thought so. Which wouldn’t prove anything special, and would prove nothing whatever about James Bedlow’s state of mind.

  “Likely to get violent if he—jumped to a conclusion? Rightly. Or wrongly.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “I’d think so. Only—doesn’t work out very neat, does it? She’s dead, but so’s Bedlow. And—this is the thing, captain. What’s got our friend Knight in a stew. You know Knight.”

  It was a statement, not a question. But Merton Heimrich sighed an answer.

  “Curtis—he’s the executive editor of the Chronicle and was working on something with Bedlow—you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “The gun Bedlow was killed with belongs to Curtis. He admits it. Which is enough for Mr. Ferguson Knight.”

  “And—not for Sergeant Charles Forniss.”

  “Not yet,” Forniss said. “Not by a long way. Maybe you can make Knight listen to reason. You see—”

  VII

  You keep remembering things, Dinah thought—things which were bright and are dark now; things which catch in your throat, spread blackness on your mind. That is what grief is—part of what grief is. The rest is more ache than pain; the rest is a dull heaviness. And with it—with the heaviness—a stubborn disbelief. It is not true my father is dead; I am in a slow, dark dream. But he is dead; it is not a dream.r />
  They said at first that he had killed himself, but that was impossible. Even they, who did not know him, had seen that it was impossible—that a man such as he had been does not kill himself. They had not said, in so many words, that they did not believe he had killed himself, but she was sure they did not. At first—the night before—she had felt, still dully, glad that they were not making that mistake about her father; not, in that final way, detracting from the man he had been. It was not until later that she realized what it meant. If he had not killed himself, he had been killed. Somebody had killed him. And—with Norm’s gun. With Norm’s gun.

  Norman Curtis had said that almost at once; had said it to the tall, solid sergeant, when the sergeant came back. That had been within half an hour of the time Curtis had telephoned; said that James Bedlow was dead, and of a gunshot wound. Before the sergeant—Forniss, that was his name: Forniss—there had been two uniformed troopers in a car with a red light flashing on its roof.

  “He’s shot himself,” Curtis said, when Forniss came in.

  The sergeant and the younger man who had come back with him had gone with Curtis to the office. In a very short time, other men had arrived—men with cameras; men in uniform and out of uniform. Dr. Smith had come—Dr. Smith, the coroner. He had worn a dinner jacket. Of course—they were having the first Saturday dance of the season at the club. He had stayed only fifteen minutes or so; the police—in uniform and out of uniform—had stayed longer and the four of them had waited in the living room, with a uniformed trooper standing in the foyer, now and then looking at them.

  Four, because Russel Parsons had come. He had arrived a little before seven-thirty, and the drive and turnaround had been so full of police cars by then that he had had difficulty in finding a place to put the Thunderbird. He had said, “The boss? Not the boss!” when he was told, and there had been incredulity in his sensitive face, in his deepset eyes, before a look of shock replaced it. He had put his arms around Mary, then, and held her close, comfortingly, and stroked her hair.

  Norman Curtis had come back within a few minutes after he had taken Forniss to the office wing; he had been in the living room with Mary and Dinah when Russ Parsons had arrived. It was he who told Parsons; brought the incredulity to the expressive face.