This was no time for that. The big policeman thought Norm had killed Ann, had killed Father.
And so, she thought—so does Russ and, if Russ, then Mary, too. She had become sure of that as, in a parody of the familiar, they had had cocktails before dinner—had had them sitting in front of the fireplace, although it was by then too warm for a fire. A dead cocktail hour, in front of a dead fireplace.
Only—not really dead. An hour or so which had seemed to vibrate. Yet no voice had been raised, no charges made.
She had gone for a walk after Heimrich was through with her—a walk to get away, to be alone. She had walked down the drive to the road and then, for some little distance, along the side of the road, and then had come back on the back road—the service road—and then across fields, which had been soft under foot and in some places muddy. When she had gone down the drive, there was a police car near the main road, and a uniformed trooper sitting in it. He had looked at her for a moment and then smiled, and raised a hand in salute.
When she returned to the house, at a little after five, the car in which Heimrich had come was gone from the turnaround, and only Russ’s Thunderbird stood there. (Even the most commodious garage finally reaches capacity.) She had gone up and changed and found, to her own vague surprise, that she was putting on such clothes (except remembering to put on dark clothes) as she usually wore down to cocktails and dinner, when only family was there. And she went down at the usual time, which was a few minutes before six.
Russ was already there and stood up and came to her and looked, with concern, into her eyes and, as if what he found there reassured him, said, “Good girl. You’ll do,” and patted her gently on the shoulder.
She said, “Oh, I’m all right,” and felt that she spoke like a child. Somehow, he always made her feel like a child—feel much younger than anybody eke. It was, she thought, because Russel Parsons seemed rather unfairly gifted with maturity. When she had seen him once on a panel interview show, he had somehow made the others on the show appear a little immature, and this applied to the man being interviewed as well as to the others who interviewed. It was partly, she thought, the way he looked—he was youthfully handsome in an extraordinarily mature way. It was partly, of course, his voice, which had none of the rough edges of youth. Presumably, of course, it was also, and basically, the mind behind these appearances. Anyway—
“It’s got much warmer,” Mary said. “Almost like real spring. Are all the policemen gone?”
She, also, had changed for the cocktail hour.
“But not forgotten,” her husband said, and then Simpkins opened the double doors at the end of the room and wheeled the drink cart in, precisely as if it were any day of any month of any year. And, just as he had wheeled the cart to its appointed place—near, not in front of, the fireplace—Norman Curtis came in from the office wing.
He was, Dinah thought, the only one of them who was at all surprised to find things proceeding in so ordinary a fashion. But he revealed this, if he did reveal it, only by the expression on his thin, mobile face, and the expression was fleeting.
“Shall I, sir?” Simpkins said, as he always said. And a nerve jumped in Dinah’s mind. Surely not—not this. Not carrying it this far.
Simpkins spoke to Russel Parsons and Parsons said, “Never mind, Simpkins, I’ll take care of it,” very much as James Bedlow had usually said. Simpkins said, “Thank you, sir,” which was what he always said.
A parody, Dinah thought; a—a pretense. My father’s dead. Ann’s dead. A twist of lemon, please. No olive, please. Don’t spill blood on the carpet. Blood is so hard to get out of carpets, don’t you find? There’s almost nothing worse than blood to get out—
She had not been conscious of his movement—his quick movement. She was conscious of a thin, hard hand on her shoulder.
“All right, kid,” Norman Curtis said. “Snap out.”
There was nothing especially tender about his voice; it had none of the consoling texture of Russ Parsons’s voice. She turned and looked up at him. There did not, so far as she could tell, seem to be any particular concern in his widely spaced gray eyes.
“O.K.,” she said. “Consider me snapped.”
It was (she thought, remembering in sleeplessness) the best moment of the evening. Which certainly said something about the evening.
They did not, after those first formalities, make any real pretense that things had returned to normal. Give us that, Dinah thought; we’re not that—phony.
It was Mary who, lifting her glass, said, “Well, cheers,” in a somewhat mournful voice, and added, immediately, “What a thing to say—a dreadful thing to say.”
“Yes,” Russ Parsons said. “A bit stiff-upper-lippish, my dear. Considering the spot we seem to be in.”
But as he said that, he looked—looked flatly—at Norman Curtis.
“Russ!” Mary said. “A spot? We’re not in a—in anything. Some dreadful man—”
That was to be Mary’s theme—reiterated; said over, in varying words, too frequently, too doggedly. Some dreadful man—some tramp. Had killed Ann. Had come back to steal and broken his way into the office wing.
“The lock wasn’t broken,” Norman Curtis said to that.
Then—a skeleton key or something like that. Or—some body had forgotten to lock the door. Those trick locks, where one only pressed a button and—
Which remained Mary Parsons’s theme. For the record, Dinah thought—that’s what they say. “For the record.”
Dinah did not (lying sleepless) remember all of it; remembered the feel of it, not the shape precisely, nor the words. Quite early, during the first drink—she had only one and she thought Mary no more—but Norm had had at least three martinis, and it had seemed to her that Russ was drinking a good deal more than he usually did, and drinking more quickly. But showing it no more— Quite early, Norm Curtis had said that they may as well know, since the police knew.
“To set your mind at rest, Parsons,” Norm had said, and had not raised his voice, and there had been nothing unusual—nothing specially unusual—in the fact that he used the surname. “To set your mind at rest—in addition to fact that somebody used my gun, I was at the guest house Thursday evening. Met Ann there.”
“Met Ann there?” The question was Mary’s; the tone one of disbelief.
“Yes,” Norman Curtis said. “At her request. To talk over something I’ve no intention of going into.”
He looked at Dinah, then. His eyes, she thought, asked something. She did not know what. There was only shock in her mind. Why, she thought, numbly, I’m not even surprised. It’s as if I had known all along. It’s as if—
“Except,” and now Curtis looked away, looked at Parsons, “except that it had nothing to do with her death—with anybody’s death.”
“Of course not,” Mary said. “As if we’d think—”
“It’s what the police may think,” Parsons said. “Isn’t it, Norm?”
His voice was very understanding. Too understanding—the tension grew with the concern in Russel Parsons’s voice. It was, Dinah thought, as if he humored Norman Curtis.
“It was some dreadful man,” Mary said. “Why do we—sound like this? As if—as if the police would—”
“The point,” Curtis said, “is why the police haven’t already, Mary.” He looked suddenly at Parsons. “Isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Parsons said. Did his tone still humor? “That’s the point. So—perhaps nobody’s in a spot after all. Except—this tramp they’re probably still looking for.”
It should have been soothing. It was not soothing.
“Don’t you agree, Norm?” Parsons said, in the same tone. “Now that you think it over?”
“I think it would be very pleasant,” Norman Curtis said. “Very convenient for—for somebody. I think it’s very unlikely. If I were a man named Heimrich I’d arrest a man named Curtis.”
Dinah spoke then. She said, “No, Norm. No! Don’t say a thing—”
&
nbsp; He smiled at her; really smiled. (As at a child?)
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s said or not, Dinah,” he said. “It’s there. Leaving it unsaid doesn’t help. But—all right.”
(It came back in bits and pieces, as she lay sleepless—lay so that she faced the windows and the pale light of night. The way he had smiled came back and she thought: Not as at a child or to a child.)
It had been Russ Parsons who had put it to them—one of us, one of the four of us, if not a tramp or—
He stopped in mid-sentence.
“Or,” he said, “that strange little brother of hers. I wonder if they’ve thought of the brother? Or whether—” He raised his shoulders, let them fall.
“We might drop a hint?” Norman Curtis said. He said it, it seemed to Dinah, thoughtfully.
“He’s only a half brother, really,” Mary said. “So it wouldn’t be so—so shocking.”
At that, Russ had shaken his head, slowly, sadly; had said that it was, at the best, shocking enough. He said that it was easy to forget the salient thing, the really shocking thing.
“Ann, most of all,” he said, slowly, his expressive voice heavy with the thought. “Lovely and gay and—and dying messily. The way of her dying—graceless huddle of a body which had been all grace. She would have hated that—that lack of elegance, of dignity. To die in a little dirty water, in corduroy slacks and wearing muddy shoes—” He let it trail off. “I’m getting maudlin,” he said, more crisply.
(There had been, Dinah remembered now, a pause after that, and a kind of heaviness. She supposed this was because others remembered, as she remembered, the immaculate elegance—that was really the word; trust Russ to find the word—which had been Ann Bedlow. There would have been, of course, a little dirty water in the swimming pool—water from rain, from melted snow.)
Russ Parsons himself broke the silence his words—his epitaph—had caused. He said that the brother—half brother; what was his name? Oh yes, Lynch—would certainly bear thinking about. He had wondered if the police were doing enough thinking about him. Since, he supposed, Lynch would get whatever money Ann had to leave.
Mary picked that up; it was as if it had been tossed to her, and she was quick.
“Father gave her quite a lot when they were married,” she said. “Really quite a lot. If it wasn’t some tramp, then I’d think the police would—” She broke it, and sighed. “Only,” she said, “this man Heimrich. He isn’t really very intelligent, is he? Like a big—dray horse.”
In spite of eyerything, Dinah had been briefly amused by that. Mary did, really, have horses on the mind. But, Dinah wondered, has she ever actually seen a dray horse? Because certainly I never—
“I don’t think,” Norman Curtis said, “that we can count on that, Mary. I doubt that Heimrich misses much. And—I sure as hell hope he doesn’t.”
“Of course,” Parsons said. “We all do, don’t we? Being innocent.” He finished what was in his glass. “The only trouble is,” he said, “our friend Lynch wasn’t here. And—the four of us were here. They’re bound to think of that, I suppose.”
He looked at Norman Curtis.
“Oh,” Curtis said, “you make it clear enough.” His voice was quite without inflection. “Especially me,” he said.
“Norm!” Mary said. “Russ didn’t mean—”
And Russel Parsons, cutting through her words, said, “Of course not, Norm. You’re reading things in. I didn’t mean—”
“Sure,” Norman Curtis said, in the same tone.
“Of course,” Mary said, “we don’t know he wasn’t here, do we? This man Lynch. He never had any money and Ann was always helping him out. And he’s some sort of an artist type.”
(Probably never on a horse in his life, Dinah thought, briefly.)
“Oh,” Norman Curtis said, “we’ll all vote for Lynch, won’t we? Give it to him by acclamation. Right, Parsons?”
It had been fifteen or twenty minutes after that that Simpkins announced dinner; they had talked, with increasingly numerous pauses, during that time, and talked of only one thing. And, got nowhere, except to an expressed—but how deeply, by all, felt?—agreement that Lynch probably was their man or, more precisely, the police’s man. Norman Curtis had, Dinah remembered, spoken less and less often as they waited….
He went to meet her in the guest house. Went to meet in secret. She summoned him and he went to meet her, as often she must have summoned and he gone. How often? How—how recently? During those months I thought he and I—
She turned her mind from that, closed her mind to that. Think of anything, not of that. Think of nothing. Think—
After a time she slept again. She was awakened, when she woke next, by some sound; she thought the sound of a door closing. She lay for some seconds, before she was awake enough to realize what had wakened her. Then, sleepily, she got up and went to a window and looked out.
There was no car in the turnaround. There was nobody in sight, no movement. She looked at her watch, then. It was still not midnight.
I dreamed it, Dinah thought—dreamed a noise and was wakened by it. She went back to bed; went again to sleep.
She slept only long enough to dream that she was trying to remember something—something terribly important. It kept slipping away in the dream. It seemed to be something about a dress. Oh—that was it. She must have a black dress for her father’s funeral. That was all it was; the sleeping mind was tying a reminder string around its finger. Of course that was all it was.
She was awakened again, this time by someone knocking on her bedroom door. She had, her watch told her, been asleep less than a quarter of an hour.
Heimrich decided (Forniss concurring) that a ride, in a police car, from downtown New York to Hawthorne Barracks might be just the thing for Mr. Robert Lynch. Such a ride would give him both time and occasion for thought. During it, he might remember that it was the previous Thursday afternoon, not Wednesday, that he had left the guest house on the Bedlow estate; that it was Friday, not Thursday, when he had returned to his usual table, and his usual drinks, at the Shamrock Bar and Grill. A ride in a police car is often stimulating.
Between taproom and dining room at the Old Stone Inn, Forniss stopped at a telephone booth. The New York City police—and specifically those of the Charles Street station—would be glad to cooperate. They would pick Mr. Lynch up and detain him pending the arrival of a State Police car. Did Forniss want him booked for anything? Vagrancy, perhaps? Or as a material witness? The latter was always a convenient cause for detention.
“Not,” Forniss said, “unless he asks for it. Makes a pitch. I doubt if he will. Probably he’ll be glad to cooperate.”
The answer to that was, “Oh yeah?” They would call Forniss when Mr. Lynch was well in hand. At the number given; if not there, at the barracks.
The soup du jour was homemade vegetable.
“This newspaper friend of yours, Charley,” Heimrich said, as they waited for homemade vegetable. “You happen to ask him anything about Mr. Parsons?”
Forniss had not made an issue of it.
“He’s not on the Chronicle, any more,” Forniss said. “In the publicity business. But we know that. Doing fair to middling. Left the paper eight-nine months ago. What do we want?”
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Nothing, probably—nothing your friend would have. Nothing we don’t know—that he had a political column for two or three years, and that it was syndicated all over the country, wherever enough right-wingers were gathered together. That he lectured a bit, viewing with alarm usually. That he was a fairly regular panel member on ‘We Ask the Questions.’”
Forniss said, “Yep,” and waited.
“Only thing is, Charley,” Heimrich said, “he strikes me as a man who would have liked that. Gratify his ego, wouldn’t you think? Keep him in the public eye. And, since I’ve no doubt he’s sincere in his beliefs, give him the satisfaction of advancing the cause of righteousness.”
“
O.K.,” Forniss said. “I didn’t read him much. Lot of people think the way he thinks. I do myself.” He paused. “Mostly,” he said.
Heimrich knew this. It is not necessary for co-workers to see eye to eye on all matters.
“Now Charley,” Heimrich said. “I know. The point is—why quit the job? Because there’s a lot more money in doing publicity? I’d have thought he was doing well enough as it was, wouldn’t you? A share in the syndicate fees, probably. A bit here and there from lectures. And the TV panelists don’t work for free.”
“Well,” Forniss said, “I can give my boy a ring.” He moved as if to get up and go give his boy a ring.
Heimrich shook his head. There was no great hurry; after all, his was little more than passing curiosity. If there was a question worth asking, which was by no means certain, it was unlikely that the answer would get them anywhere. Possibly Parsons had merely got bored with writing columns. Possibly he was making a great deal of money as a publicity agent. Still—Forniss might give his friend a ring. Sooner or later. Just to fill in the picture.
It was a little after nine when they finished dinner, and the New York police had not reported the collection of Mr. Robert Lynch. “Probably having dinner himself,” Heimrich said. “Would this be a good time to get this friend of yours?”
It would be a reasonable time to try; Forniss’s friend did rewrite on a morning paper. He would, presumably, be doing it. Forniss went into a booth, and Heimrich waited in the lounge of the Old Stone Inn. Forniss was in the booth about five minutes and came out and shook his head.
“Not much help,” he said. “All he knows was, one day Parsons was there, big as life, writing his column, and the next day there wasn’t any column, and hasn’t been since. Month or so later, Parsons opened this publicity office of his. Doing all right, far’s my friend knows. Hadn’t thought about it particularly one way or the other, my friend hadn’t. Actually says, far’s he’s concerned, good riddance.”
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