“A quarter of a century ago,” Curtis said. “You must have had a busy morning, captain.”
“We try to find things out,” Heimrich said. “Leave no stone unturned, as they say. Anyway—Sarles told you, and told me, that he didn’t see Mr. Bedlow until after Bedlow’d found his wife’s body. Also—that he didn’t see you, Mr. Curtis. Perhaps that was what you were really after—had he seen you. Was it?”
“Since he didn’t,” Curtis said, and again shrugged his shoulders. “Couldn’t have, since I wasn’t—”
“Now Mr. Curtis,” Heimrich said. “Wait. Before you say it again, wait a minute. Your fingerprints were there. With Mrs. Bedlow’s. Fresh prints, and our men aren’t wrong. You didn’t get your car out of the Chronicle garage at four-thirty. Three-forty-three, exactly. They keep records. Maybe you didn’t know that. Had plenty of time to get up here by a little after five, if you drive Jaguars the way most people drive Jaguars. The mud on your tires is the same kind of mud—same composition, same acidity and that sort of thing—as the mud at the entrance to the service road, where somebody drove in and, finding the road in bad shape, left a car and—”
“No,” Curtis said. “It isn’t really enough, is it? To prove anything?”
“I wouldn’t,” Heimrich said, “count on that, Mr. Curtis. It may be a little tedious—take a little time. Waste it, for both of us. Unless—did you kill her, Mr. Curtis? Perhaps because she wouldn’t leave Bedlow and—come back to you? If you did, stick to your story, by all means. The lawyer you’re going to need will need the story—need everything you can give him, naturally.”
Norman Curtis leaned back in his chair again and put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. The response interested Heimrich.
“You’re charging me?”
“I may. Well?”
“You seem,” Curtis said, “to have picked up quite a good deal about quite a good many things. A for effort, anyway.”
Heimrich closed his eyes. He sighed.
“I was in the guest house,” Curtis said. “With Ann. Because she asked me to meet her there.” He paused. “This,” he said, “isn’t going to sound too good, probably. With both of them dead. But—I killed neither of them, nor wanted to. And—it wasn’t at all the way you guessed, you know. Quite the reverse.” He paused for a longer time. “It’s going to be a bit difficult,” he said. He lighted a cigarette. He held it between thumb and forefinger and looked up at the glowing end.
VIII
It had been a morning for asking questions—asking them here, there and everywhere. A good many people had participated—Heimrich himself and Forniss, Trooper Crowley and other troopers; the city police. The answers given did not have directly to do with who killed Ann Bedlow, born Lynch, and James Bedlow—killed both or killed either. The questions had one purpose and were aimed at one over-all answer: Who are these people? These two dead and these living? What makes them tick, and where have they ticked and how?
As he waited for Norman Curtis to begin a story which was going to be “a bit difficult,” Captain M. L. Heimrich knew a good deal about his man—the man who, after staring at the lighted end of a cigarette for some seconds, put the other end between his lips and drew deeply, and let out a cloud of smoke.
Norman Curtis—christened Norman Oliver Curtis; appearing in Who’s Who in America as Curtis, Norman (Oliver), b. San Francisco, July 3, 1919—had been graduated from Stanford and been a newspaperman since. He had worked in the Far West; he had worked in the Middle West and in the East; he had, it was evident, been good at his trade. He had been qualified as a war correspondent in 1943, and been young for it; he had, instead of writing about the war, gone to fight it. He had enlisted in the Marine Corps and before he got out of it he had been a first lieutenant, with quite a record. (And, it now appeared, a .45 automatic to take along into civilian life, illegally but, as he had already pointed out, by no means uniquely.) He had been a foreign correspondent for several papers, most recently the Chronicle. He had, inevitably, written a book about the world in general.
All of which had been easy enough to learn, to note down in the mind. It had not been difficult to learn that Curtis, who had never married, had gone around a good deal, four years or so before, with Ann Lynch, who could read a weather script on TV with the best of them, and sing adequately, caress an electric roaster with loving tenderness. Forniss knew a Broadway columnist well enough to wake him at a little after nine on a Sunday morning. (Periodically, Heimrich is surprised at the number of people Sergeant Charles Forniss knows.)
“I suppose,” Norman Curtis said, having exhaled another cloud of smoke, “that you’ve found out Ann and I used to—call it see a lot of each other? To get it to make any sense, I’ve got to start with that.”
“Anywhere,” Heimrich said. “Anywhere that makes sense to you, Mr. Curtis.”
Five years before—at a party; a party celebrating something or other. Curtis hadn’t, now, the faintest idea what. A very beautiful young woman. It was difficult to explain what she had—you could add up all the things and they didn’t total to the whole. Was he making any sense?
“I met Mrs. Bedlow,” Heimrich said. “In Palm Beach. A few weeks ago.”
Curtis looked, momentarily, somewhat surprised. Which, momentarily, amused Merton Heimrich. May not a policeman be like any other man, and even go to Palm Beach?
Then it wouldn’t be necessary to explain why he, Norman Curtis, had fallen—fallen hard. He wasn’t a kid; hadn’t been then. He’d played the field. The field had, abruptly, narrowed to one young woman—a TV girl with a dark dramatic streak in silvery blond hair. Curtis had fallen; he began, after some months, to believe Ann had fallen too.
“Look,” Curtis said. “This is one of the difficult things. I’m executive editor of the Chronicle. In all that matters, I’ve been running the paper.” He paused, suddenly, and seemed to be looking at, turning over, an entirely different thought. Heimrich had no great trouble in guessing at the new thought—what happens to me, Norman Curtis, now that the boss is dead? Now that, Heimrich assumed (and make a note to find out) the paper went to Bedlow’s daughters.
“Anyway,” Curtis said, “I’d be naïve to argue that Ann didn’t think of that, realize I could give a bright, beautiful young woman a hand up where it counted. Introduce her to the right people. See that our TV boy didn’t overlook any little items about Miss Ann Lynch, the beautiful weather girl. Only—not need to see to that, of course. Our TV boy is a bright boy. The boss’s girl friend gets the breaks. I don’t argue she didn’t know that, and take it into account. Or—what the hell?—that I didn’t either. Only—”
He shrugged his shoulders again; shrugged away the past.
“One of the right people I introduced her to was the boss,” he said, and his tone was dry. “Mr. James Bedlow, with a large part of the money in the world. It turned out that he was—more what she had in mind. She was very nice about it. And very final.”
He paused again. He was afraid he was giving a wrong impression of Ann Lynch, who had become Ann Bedlow. He didn’t, particularly now, want to do that—to make her sound merely an opportunist, turning from a good chance to a better one. It wasn’t, he wanted to make clear it wasn’t, any sacrifice for any girl to marry the boss. A bit old for her, counting years—sure. And—quite a man, whatever the years.
“I met Mr. Bedlow,” Heimrich said.
So—Curtis needn’t labor it. With Ann and Bedlow married, three years ago, Norman Curtis and Ann had remained friends. They’d even remembered, lightly, the year when they were more than friends. Now and then—when the boss had been away on a trip, for example—he had taken Ann to the theater. “Or whatever.” And—
“This is difficult, too,” he said. “She was a hell of a good kid, and for a while I was in—for a while I was fond of her. And she’s dead. She liked to be able to ring me up and say, ‘Norm, the boss is out of town and I’m rattling around. Want to take me to dinner?’ Not entirely because sh
e was rattling around, wanted to be taken to dinner. To show herself, maybe me that—well, that you can drop an option without—” He crushed a cigarette out and said, “Hell.” He shook his head.
“It’s a human thing,” he said. “And she was human as hell. Suppose she liked to feel that most men would come running if she said the word? That I still would?” He paused again.
He was afraid that, however hard he tried, he was giving a false impression. Ann had, he was certain, not been two-timing the boss. Certainly she hadn’t with him—hadn’t offered to and—“All right. Say I’m a Boy Scout. The boss is—was—a friend of mine. I try not to two-time my friends.”
Curtis seemed, Heimrich thought, to be slightly embarrassed by the admission. (Or, wanted to seem so? Was building up a character as he went along?)
“Anyway,” Curtis said, “I met somebody else. This past winter. So, a couple of times when the boss was away and Ann said did I want to buy her a drink, I said I was sorry, but I was tied up. And was. And—all right, it occurred to me she was a little piqued. Piqued’s a nice word, don’t you think, captain?”
Heimrich briefly closed his eyes.
Only that, no more than that. He had thought. A finger beckons and is ignored. Is the finger losing power? Because—because it is losing grace? He had thought. Until the previous Monday—
“She called me up at my apartment,” he said. “From here. At about—oh, a little after nine. She said she was coming into town and did I want to take her to lunch? I said sure I wanted to, but unfortunately I couldn’t. Which was straight—I had a lunch engagement I couldn’t break. Not with—a business engagement.”
And then—“I was surprised as hell”—she had said that this was important; that she wanted to see him and “get something settled” and see him privately. Of course, if he couldn’t make it that day—
He couldn’t. Some other day during the week or—
She had hesitated and then spoken more lightly. When she had said “important” she didn’t mean that it was as pressing as all that. She had thought, since she had to come into town anyway, that lunch might be nice. He was coming up for the weekend, wasn’t he? As usual when they had opened the house?
He was.
Then—how about Thursday? If he could get up about five or so, she’d meet him in the guest house by the pool.
“I said, ‘What the hell?’ or something like that,” Curtis told the two solid men, listening in the sound-proofed office. “I said, we’re going to play post office? She laughed at that, and told me to wait and see and that she’d expect me. And hung up.”
“She was calling from here?” Heimrich said, asking the first question in some time.
She had said so.
“Go ahead,” Heimrich said.
Curtis went ahead—went ahead to say that he’d been—“call it flabbergasted”—and that as the week went on he hadn’t felt any better about it, and grown uneasily to feel that Ann was up to something. He began, even more uneasily, to suspect what and to like no part of it. At one time he had thought of arranging urgent weekend business out of town. “Or have a grandmother die in San Francisco.”
He had rejected that. If there was something to be “settled” between him and Ann, some kind of showdown coming up, well—have the showdown.
“Look,” he said. “You can believe this or not believe it. It was the first time I’d had a notion that—well that there was anything to have a showdown about. That it amused Ann to think she still had me on a string, for all she’d thrown me back—sure. I realized that. But—not as anything important. As just one of those confused things that happen along the way. And that it hadn’t amused her to find out that—well, that when she pulled on the line it came in empty. And—was going to get emptier and emptier. But that there was anything more to it—”
He spread his hands to finish the sentence.
About his movements Thursday afternoon, Heimrich had been right, Norman Curtis told them. He had got his car from the Chronicle garage earlier than he had said; had driven to the house and, instead of using the drive, gone to the back road. He had found it too muddy; pulled into it only far enough to be off the blacktop; walked up to the guest house; found Ann already there and—
“Before you go on,” Heimrich said. “Why did you deny this earlier, Mr. Curtis? And—why all this skulking around back roads?”
“Because I thought it would merely confuse the issue,” Curtis said. “And—well, you’ll see if you’ll wait. As for the back road—she’d said she wanted to see me privately, and in the guest house, not the main house. If I was going to play along at all—would you expect me to go up to the house with a brass band?”
He waited, then.
“All right,” Heimrich said. “Mrs. Bedlow was there.”
Curtis looked at both of them for a moment. Then he leaned back in the chair and put his hands behind his head again, and looked at the ceiling—and spoke to the ceiling.
“She said,” he told the ceiling, in a voice without expression, “that she was going to divorce the boss. She said she had made a mistake, and that she knew it now. She said she had been a fool and that—” He hesitated for a moment. “That I had always been the one. She said the boss was too old and that she was bored and that she and I—”
He stopped suddenly. Then he let the chair tilt forward and looked at Heimrich.
“She said a lot of things,” he said. “A—a lot of things. And—she was so damned sure, captain. So-so pathetically damn sure. And I—I felt like the heel of all time, because I’d told her a lot of things in the old days and thought they were true then—and they were true then, I guess and—and now—” He paused again. “I felt like a heel,” he said. “I feel like one now, telling about it. Kissing and telling—that’s one thing. Not kissing and—” He did not finish. Heimrich waited.
“She’s dead,” Curtis said. “She’d—above anything else she’d have hated to—have anybody know. I—when we found out it wasn’t an accident, we thought it was a tramp. Were as good as told that. I hadn’t seen anybody hanging around the place, so I couldn’t help. If I admitted being there—well, you’d have got this out of me. What good would it have done? The—” He paused again. “The dead ought to be allowed dignity,” he said.
“You told her no, I gather,” Heimrich said. “And?”
“I said I was sorry, but that things weren’t the way they had been. That I didn’t feel the way I had before. That what was between her and the boss, or wasn’t—that that was between her and the boss. I said the usual things that don’t mean much—I said, let’s forget this ever happened. Let’s both forget. And that I was sorry as hell about it and—the usual damn fool things.”
“How did she take it?”
“What difference does that make now? It hadn’t anything to do with what happened.”
“Now Mr. Curtis.”
“Not well,” he said. “She didn’t take it well. She said a lot of things.” He put both hands on the desk, the hands made into fists. “Which I’m not going into,” he said.
“About you and this somebody else?”
“Which I’m not going into,” Curtis said again.
“Had she told Mr. Bedlow about her decision? And—that she was going back to you?”
Curtis tilted his chair back again. He spoke to the ceiling again. He said she had said she hadn’t. Had he believed her?
“I had no reason not to.”
“Now Mr. Curtis. Did you?”
“Then.”
“All right,” Heimrich said. “She didn’t take it well. She was—upset, naturally.”
“She was—call it upset,” Curtis said. “That’s a nice easy word. I tried—well, what I tried didn’t do any good. So I said again that I was sorry as hell, and that there it was, and left. And got the car and drove around here—to the house. And said, of course, that I hadn’t seen her. And then the boss went out to find her. And—did find her.”
“Mr. Curtis,”
Heimrich said, “did it occur to you that he might have found her alive? Might have suspected before or—been told then? When she was upset. People say a lot of things when they’re upset. Things they wouldn’t otherwise. Found her alive and left her dead? Perhaps not meaning to kill her. Struck her in a—a rage. Done the other things to cover up? Did you think that? Or anything like that?”
“He wouldn’t have hurt her. Or any woman.”
“Is that something you think now, tell yourself now? Because he’s dead too. Or—were you sure of that at the time? Didn’t think at the time that he had been a violent man before. And might have been again?”
“Captain,” Curtis said, “what difference does it make what I may have—wondered about? He’s dead. Somebody killed him. I don’t know who and I don’t know why. I know I didn’t.”
“When you found Mr. Bedlow, you thought he had killed himself?”
“Yes.”
“Because he was depressed about his wife’s death? Or—because of remorse?”
“Captain,” Curtis said, “I didn’t try to work it out. I told the others and called the police. I didn’t stand there wondering about things.”
“It was when you showed the body to the sergeant here that you saw that the gun was yours?”
Curtis nodded his head.
“And?”
Curtis looked at Heimrich, looked intently.
“All right,” he said. “I saw that it wasn’t a contact wound. And—all right, I wondered about that.”
“And when we confirmed what you suspected—that it was murder, not suicide—it was then you decided to tell us about meeting Mrs. Bedlow just before she was killed?”
“Yes,” Curtis said. “I thought—it’s not as simple as some thug hiding out in the guest house. I thought—they’re going to need all they can get, whether it has anything to do with it or not.”
That was, Heimrich told him, very wise of him. And that was, for the moment, all. And could he suggest some place where they might talk to the others—one at a time. Miss Winters’s office, perhaps?
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