With One Stone

by Frances Lockridge

  “That’s the name,” the whiskered man said. “Afraid I don’t—”

  He had a light, high voice.

  “Forniss. State Police.”

  The result was unexpected. Lynch had lifted his shot glass to pour its contents down his throat. He poured not a little of it on his beard—his fine brown beard. What reached his throat, he spluttered over.

  “You’ve got nothing on me,” he said, when he could speak. He peered at Forniss, as if through damp underbrush, and with large brown eyes. “Ask my sister. You’d have to have a complaint. I know that. And she wouldn’t sign it. You ask her.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Lynch,” Forniss said. “She’s dead, you see. Don’t you read the papers, Mr. Lynch?”

  X

  Captain M. L. Heimrich has a room at the Old Stone Inn, in Van Brunt Center. From the inn it is only a few miles to a house which was once a barn, from the terrace of which one can look toward the Hudson, if nothing more immediate commands attention. For some time, Heimrich has found the arrangement convenient. He was sitting in the room, the need for which had within a month or so ceased to exist, at a little after seven Sunday evening. He was waiting for a circuit to become available between Van Brunt and Port Royal, Virginia.

  Forniss knocked and walked in.

  “Well,” Forniss said, “I’ve found our tramp, anyway. Only, maybe it’s wrong to call a man who’s going to inherit a hundred grand, give or take, a tramp. He doesn’t read newspapers, our tramp doesn’t. Says not, anyhow, and it’s maybe so. He’s—”

  The telephone rang. Heimrich’s left hand shot for it. It was amazing how fast the captain could move when he was in a hurry, Forniss thought. Heimrich said, “Yes? Su—” into the telephone and then, flatly, “Oh. Well, keep trying, will you?”

  He put the telephone back and for a moment looked at it with resentment.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to make a call, Charley. Seems the damn circuits— The tramp?”

  “Name,” Forniss said, “of Robert Lynch. Half brother of the late Mrs. Bedlow. Sole beneficiary under his sister’s will, according to Goodhue. And, according to Goodhue, Bedlow gave his wife a hundred grand when they were married. Pin-money, sort of. How much she’s got—had—left I wouldn’t know. But—a hundred grand would buy a lot of pins, wouldn’t it?”

  “Quite a lot,” Heimrich said. “And he’s our tramp. What’s about newspapers, Charley?”

  “Doesn’t read them,” Forniss said. “Nor listen to radio or look at TV. No interest—let’s see if I can remember it—‘in the scurrying of the world.’ So, he didn’t know his sister had been killed. Half sister. As to breaking into the guest house, he said yes before I asked him and, also, what was I going to do about it, because his sister wouldn’t sign a complaint. Says it was this way—”

  Said, the brown-bearded man had in Dolan’s Shamrock Bar and Grill, his wasted drink replaced, that he had run out of money ten days or so before. Said he had decided to go up to the Bedlow house and ask his sister for enough to tide him over. “Actually,” Forniss said, “she made him an allowance, payable the first of each month. As long, I suppose, as he stayed out of their hair. He’s—well, say he’s an odd little guy. Likely to get in anybody’s hair. Goodhue told me about the allowance, and where his office had been sending it. But the landlady had heaved Mr. Lynch out. Said maybe he’d be at this bar a friend of mine runs and, sure enough.”

  “You,” Heimrich said, “have more useful friends than anybody. So? He went up. Without even telephoning first? Because they weren’t there ten days ago. A week ago yesterday.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “That’s the way he says it was. Because—he’d have had to use a pay phone. And he had just enough left for the fare to Brewster. So he says. Of course, he probably had the guest house in mind all along.”

  Heimrich nodded his head. He looked at the telephone, and back at Forniss.

  Lynch had, he said, ridden to Brewster and walked to the house and been surprised to find no one there. He had then, he said, discovered that he had misplaced his key to the guest house.

  Heimrich made a sound.

  “Sure,” Forniss said. “I don’t suppose he had either. Anyhow, he didn’t have it, so he forced the door. Says he found a screwdriver in the tool shed and used that. Says he stayed there from a week ago Thursday until last Wednesday. Says that then his sister walked down that way and he hailed her and she loaned him some money. Says he left right away. Wednesday, that was.”

  “A convenient day,” Heimrich said. “For a man who inherits a lot of money if a woman dies. Dies the next day.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Except for one thing, captain. The little guy says he was in Dolan’s bar Thursday from five o’clock for a couple of hours, and—Dolan says he’s pretty sure that’s true. Noticed him because he hadn’t been in for a couple of weeks, and he’s a regular, when in funds. And—he’s pretty sure it was Thursday.”

  “Dolan?”

  “Could be he’s wrong,” Forniss said. “But, I don’t think he’s lying.”

  “Of course,” Heimrich said, “a man who’s going to inherit a hundred thousand dollars makes friends, Charley. Might be he could influence people.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Only—I’ve known Ned Dolan off and on for quite a while, captain. I don’t think he lies more than most. And—I can’t see him sticking his neck out. So could be all we’ve got is a funny little guy with—”

  The telephone rang. Heimrich’s hand leaped toward it. Forniss could hear the distinct accents of an operator’s voice. “Ready with your—”

  “Meet you down in the taproom?” Forniss said. “O.K.?”

  Heimrich nodded his head quickly. Forniss was just closing the door when he heard Heimrich say, “Susan?”

  It was odd how young the captain’s voice sounded, Forniss thought, walking down stairs toward the taproom of the Old Stone Inn. Eager—like a kid’s voice, almost. Makes a guy feel sort of lonely, Forniss thought, as he went toward a corner table in the taproom.

  Of course, he thought, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen Ned Dolan. Could be he’s changed. A hundred grand is a lot of money. Wish somebody’d leave me a hundred grand. Fat chance. “Bourbon on the rocks, Harold.”

  It was ten minutes before Heimrich joined him. Heimrich carried a martini.

  “Mrs. Heimrich all right?” Forniss said, and thought that something lingered in Heimrich’s eyes.

  “Fine,” Heimrich said. “Says the Richmond paper is full of it. She’ll be home tomorrow night.” He sipped from his glass.

  “Well,” Heimrich said. “Let’s get on with it, Charley. I gather the lawyer cooperated?”

  Reginald Goodhue, lawyer for Bedlow and Mrs. Bedlow, had cooperated. Surprisingly. But some did and some were stuffy.

  “I don’t know that it gets us much of anywhere,” Forniss said. “But—”

  He had gone to find out where the money went, which is always a matter of interest when a rich man dies. Where it went, and how much of it there might be, and who might need it. The last had been what did not get them much of anywhere. Nobody needed money—nobody except a small bearded man who was not much of an artist nor very commercial.

  How much there was of it, Goodhue had said he couldn’t guess. It would, he supposed, be some time before anybody guessed. When a man like Bedlow dies, his net worth is not determined by adding totals in bank accounts. Say—and Goodhue did say—one hell of a lot. Say several millions, not counting the Chronicle—technically, Free Enterprise Publications, Inc.

  If she had been alive when her husband died, Ann Bedlow would have inherited half of the estate. (Count out bequests to charities, minor bequests to individuals. Unless Sergeant Forniss wanted the whole setup? For the time being, at any rate, Forniss did not.) Half of what they’d call the liquid assets.

  She would also have inherited a controlling interest in the Chronicle, that was, in Free Enterprise Publications,
Inc.

  “I’d got the idea somehow,” Heimrich said, at this point, “that Bedlow owned the whole shebang. Not that it was a corporation.”

  “He did,” Forniss said. “That is, he owned all the shares in the corporation. Seems he bought it, five years or so ago, as an individual and then changed it to a corporation. Seems there was a tax advantage. That’s what Goodhue said. And that it was a distinction without a difference, since the stock wasn’t for general sale, and wasn’t listed.”

  “An odd name for the corporation,” Heimrich said.

  Forniss had mentioned that to Goodhue, more or less in passing. He had been told that it wasn’t really odd—that it was symbolic of Bedlow’s whole attitude; that it summed up, in fact, his reason for buying the Chronicle in the first place.

  “Jim Bedlow,” Goodhue had said, “was a very conservative man, like a lot of rich men, and like a lot of rich oil men from the Southwest. He still got red when anybody mentioned Roosevelt. He thought the Republican party had gone to pot, too, and was no better than the rest of the softies who wanted everything handed them on a silver platter. He thought damn near everybody was soft on Communism and that there wasn’t a newspaper in the country—except maybe the Chicago Tribune—which wasn’t playing along.

  “He’d probably have bought the Tribune if it had been for sale. Since it turned out not to be, he bought the Chronicle. The Chronicle is—” He paused. “Opposed to Communism.” He said this dryly. Then he said, “We’re getting away from the point, aren’t we? The point of what you want to know. Now, with Mrs. Bedlow predeceasing, we come to—”

  They came to the contingent provisions, now the operative provisions. The same not very considerable specific bequests stood. The remainder was divided equally between the sisters, with one exception: Mary Parsons received fifty-five per cent of the stock of the Chronicle corporation; Dinah forty-five per cent.

  “Because Mrs. Parsons is the older?” Heimrich said.

  Forniss had asked about that. One of the many things Heimrich approves about Sergeant Forniss is that he asks about everything.

  Goodhue had said he supposed so—supposed that that was the chief reason. He didn’t, he pointed out, know what had gone on in James Bedlow’s mind. Mary’s greater maturity undoubtedly was a factor in her greater share. Also, Bedlow did not believe in divided responsibility. His general view was that somebody had to be boss. That far into Bedlow’s mind his lawyer had got. Bedlow did not keep that opinion secret. The lawyer had then tilted back in his chair and looked at Forniss and said that there was one other thing, which Forniss could take for what it might be worth.

  “It’s my impression,” Goodhue said, “that Jim thought Dinah had picked up some radical ideas somewhere. Maybe in college. He used to talk about ‘these damn commie professors’ and every now and then the Chronicle runs a what-about-the-younger-generation? editorial. Are-college-faculties-tinged? Radical ideas aren’t anything he wanted to seep into the paper.”

  Forniss said he gathered that Goodhue knew the sisters. Goodhue had seen a good deal of them at one time and another. Did Goodhue think Dinah had radical notions?

  Goodhue smiled at that—smiled widely. He said it was a matter of definition. He said the kid seemed to him to have a good, active mind, and an independent one. He’d never noticed, in his contacts with it, what he would consider any very radical notions. On the other hand—

  “You see, sergeant,” Goodhue said, “it all depends, that sort of thing, on where you stand. Jim—well, Jim stood somewhat to the right of Senator Goldwater. He dated the collapse of American civilization from the introduction of the income tax. It’s conceivable that some time or other Dinah said she thought there was something to be said for social security.”

  Bedlow had not, apparently, questioned the right thinking of his elder daughter?

  “Mary’s a nice girl,” Goodhue said. “And bright enough, for all I know. A bit more interested in horses than in social theories, perhaps. Also, there’s always Russ Parsons to guide her in the right direction. And I do mean right.”

  Forniss had, then, gone back to matters more pertinent. Without meaning to imply anything, the sisters did profit by Ann Bedlow’s death, collecting the profit when their father also died.

  “He said we’d be wasting time on that,” Forniss told Captain Heimrich, in the taproom of the Old Stone Inn. “And made it sound as if we would. Seems Bedlow was a generous man, and generous as hell with the kids. Each of them’s got her own bank account and daddy always kept the accounts nice and full. Goodhue doesn’t know precisely how full, but he doubts if the balance in either account ever fell much below twenty-five thousand.”

  Heimrich said, “Well—”

  “O.K.,” Forniss said. “You’re thinking that the other way it’s millions. Only—if a well’s always full, no matter how much you take out of it, it doesn’t matter too much how deep it is, does it? As a practical matter?”

  “Bedlow didn’t mind how much was taken out of it?”

  That, Goodhue had said, seemed to be the size of it. He supposed within reason—within what Bedlow thought reason. When a generous man has as much money as Bedlow had had, his ideas of what is reasonable expand.

  What it came to—came back to—was that the only person who profited and needed money was the little bearded man. But, suppose Lynch had killed his half sister for his hundred grand? He didn’t need to go on and kill anybody else.

  “Now Charley,” Heimrich said. “There might be a dozen reasons. Curtis doesn’t get anything under Bedlow’s will?”

  “Nope.”

  “Does he need money?”

  “Not,” Forniss said, “from what I hear. I’ve got a friend works on one of the papers.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Charley.”

  Charley’s friend didn’t know what Norman Curtis got a year. He could make a guess—the guess would be fifty thousand anyway, probably plus bonuses. Men as good as Curtis didn’t come cheap. If Bedlow had been in his right mind—which on the whole seemed extremely probable to Charley’s friend—he hadn’t tried to get Curtis cheap.

  “Because,” Charley’s friend said, “Bedlow probably knew a lot about oil and making money. But what he knew about newspapers—” He had spread his hands at that point, abandoning search for a simile which would mirror Bedlow’s vast ignorance of newspapers. “What he wanted the paper to say—sure, he knew that. And if it hadn’t been for Norm Curtis, my hunch is he’d have turned it into a straight propaganda sheet. They curl up and die if you do that—don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Don’t think they didn’t curl up and die. With Curtis running the Chronicle, it’s a newspaper.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. He opened them long enough to look at Harold, the barman, and hold up two fingers. He closed them again. He said it didn’t look too much as if money had been the motive. Which, he was afraid, was going to bring them back to Curtis.

  “Afraid?”

  “Now Charley,” Heimrich said. “He’s an able man, obviously. An intelligent one. Not that that enters, but still—”

  Harold brought drinks.

  “Opportunity both times,” Heimrich said. “Not that that proves anything. We don’t know precisely when Mrs. Bedlow was killed. When she died, yes. When she was killed, no. Might have lived minutes. Might have lived half an hour or longer. During the possible period, everybody was alone at one time or another.”

  “Nobody in the kitchen? When Mrs. Parsons went out for a snack?”

  “Yes. The cook. Also, in and out, Simpkins. Trouble is, Mrs. Parsons didn’t stay in the kitchen to eat her snack. Went out onto the back terrace, to get a breath of air while she ate it. The cook and Simpkins don’t know she stayed there; just think she did. Could have put her sandwich or whatever it was down, run out and killed Mrs. Bedlow, come back and finished her sandwich.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she didn’t like her, Charley,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know why. Maybe they’d had an
argument about a horse. So—we know Curtis could have killed her, and that Bedlow himself could. And that Dinah was alone in the living room and says she didn’t leave it, and that that’s only what she says. Also—she says she’s not in love with Curtis.”

  “You think she is?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I think I do, Charley. Which would give her a motive, perhaps, if her stepmother was getting him back. A familiar motive—but most of them are, naturally.”

  He sipped. He continued, talking—Forniss realized, and had expected—as much to himself as to the man beside him at the table.

  It was, Heimrich said, equally true—almost equally true—that no one had had exclusive opportunity to kill Bedlow. Again, Dinah had been alone in the living room. She could have gone into the office suite and her father’s office and shot him at his desk and had time enough, if Curtis had been as slow on the uptake as he said, to get back by the time her sister came downstairs, having just received a telephone call from her husband in New York.

  Forniss made a sound preparatory to speech.

  “Now Charley,” Heimrich said. “There are back stairs, of course. And a number of ways out of the house—it’s a hell of a big house, of course. Mrs. Parsons could have gone down the back stairs and out, and into the office suite through the outside door, and shot her father and run back up and come down again. The front door key opens the door to the office wing too.”

  It would, Forniss thought, have taken some running. He said as much.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “she’s the athletic type, but yes. And we pretty much run out of motive again, don’t we? Since money doesn’t seem to enter into it. Her father might have seen her kill her stepmother, but why did she kill her stepmother? Also, unless both she and Dinah are lying, there was a telephone call and somebody picked it up. Even if all she said to Parsons was, ‘All right, come as soon as you can,’ it shortens the time.”

  “He did call?”

  “She says so. He says so. Dinah says somebody called.”