With One Stone

by Frances Lockridge

  Curtis had been looking at the wall opposite where he sat, and looking at it as if he looked through it. He was not, now. He was looking at Heimrich, and there was intentness in his eyes, in his face. He looked very alert, Forniss thought. Not dazed at being caught. Curtis, it occurred to Sergeant Forniss, was not going to be a push-over. Which was, he supposed, why the captain had decided to go about it this way.

  XIV

  Heimrich closed his eyes.

  “Now, Mr. Sarles,” he said, and there was weariness in his voice, “just what I said, of course. How did you happen to be there so—opportunely?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, ‘opportunely,’” Sarles said. “I heard this yelling and ran toward where the yelling came from and there he was. Just got through killing this poor little—”

  “Mr. Sarles,” Heimrich said. “You say you heard yelling. A shout? A scream? As from someone in great pain? Or in great fear?”

  “Somebody being hurt, I’d say,” Sarles said. “Hard to tell, captain, but that’s the way it sounded.”

  Assurance had come back into his voice.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Heard it from where, Mr. Sarles? Where were you when you heard this—scream?”

  “In the tool shed,” Jason Sarles said. “Hundred yards or so from—”

  “I know,” Heimrich said. “Working? At that hour of the night?”

  “Sleeping,” Sarles said, and now the assurance had faded again. “Got a cot there and—”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “a house of your own. With a bed in it. Do you often prefer the cot in the tool shed?”

  “Listen,” Sarles said, and his heavy voice was harsh, antagonistic. “What’s this all about, mister? I caught him for you. Way you’re nosing around, a guy’d think—”

  “Now Mr. Sarles,” Heimrich said. “We like to get the whole picture. You just happened to be in the tool shed tonight. Instead of at home in bed.”

  “None of your damn—” Sarles said, and started to get up. And Forniss moved and stood behind him and said, “Take it easy, mister.”

  Sarles looked around. He sat down.

  “O.K.,” he said. “It’s none of your business, all the same. The wife and I had a little argument, the way people do, and I got tired of yammer-yammer and came over here. Mrs. Fleming, she’s the cook, fixed me some supper. You want to know what I ate?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I take it you were alone in the tool shed?”

  Heimrich was damn right. Sarles was emphatic about that. Very emphatic. And what was Heimrich trying to prove?

  “Nothing,” Heimrich said. “If you and someone else had heard this scream—”

  “I tell you, there wasn’t nobody else. Who else would there be, mister?”

  “Now Mr. Sarles. How would I know? You say nobody. So—you heard this yell. Or scream. You jumped up and ran down—across—to the pool. And—”

  And—had seen Norman Curtis standing at the edge of the empty pool, at the deep end, looking down into it.

  “With this stone in his hand?”

  “Now wait a minute,” Sarles said. “I can’t swear to that, mister. There wasn’t much light and I hadn’t waited to get a flash. Matter of fact, I guess not. Because, before he heard me, he crouched down and I guess picked the rock up. Planning to throw it away, wouldn’t you say? Only—I got there too quick.”

  He had got there, running down the path, too quickly for Curtis to more than start to turn. He had grabbed Curtis from behind.

  “He tried to get away,” Sarles said. “Wriggled like an eel, like they say. Only it didn’t do him any good. Got him from behind and he didn’t have a chance. He yelled once the way a man does when he’s grabbed and then kept trying to break loose. Didn’t have a chance. I got pretty good muscles, captain.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Heimrich said. He opened his eyes and looked at Sarles. “Before you grabbed him,” Heimrich said, “did you say anything?”

  “Hell no. What’ja expect me to say? ‘Excuse it, please’?”

  “He didn’t turn until you were on him,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t say who you were. So all he knew, I suppose, was that somebody had grabbed him from behind.”

  “He knew damn well he’d killed the little guy,” Sarles said. “Knew he’d been caught at it.”

  During the struggle, Curtis had dropped the stone he had picked up. Then somebody had put a light on them from up the path. Curtis had stopped struggling. He hadn’t made any further resistance. “Knew when he was licked.” When they had come a little way up the path, Sarles had seen that it was Miss Bedlow with the flashlight, and her sister behind her. Miss Bedlow had made a “funny little noise.”

  A funny little noise, Dinah thought, dully. It falls apart—everything falls apart. And I make a funny little noise. The funny little noise life makes when it falls apart. And thought, dully, what’s the use of all this? Why does he go over and over it?

  “All right, Mr. Sarles,” Heimrich said and Sarles started to get up. “Only,” Heimrich said, “we’d like you to stick around for a while. Something might come up, naturally.”

  “All I know is I caught him,” Sarles said. “And I gotta work tomorrow, whatever. So—”

  “Captain,” Mary Parsons said, “can I say something—ask him something?”

  Heimrich looked at her. He said, “Of course.”

  “Mr. Sarles,” Mary said, “you didn’t like Ann—I mean Mrs. Bedlow, did you?”

  “She was all right,” Sarles said. “Why’re you asking that, miss? Trying to make out I—”

  “Oh no,” Mary said. “Only—Father’d given you notice, hadn’t he? Because you were rude to Mrs. Bedlow and she told him about it. Or—was it rude, Mr. Sarles? Or—something else?”

  Sarles’s red face was redder still. And—he wet his lips. Which was interesting, Merton Heimrich thought.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sarles said, his heavy voice harsh. “Nobody fired me. Your father wouldn’t do that sort of thing, miss. Not on the word of—”

  He stopped, abruptly. Then he turned to Heimrich.

  “She’s lying, captain,” he said. “Don’t know why she’d want to lie. If the boss wasn’t dead—”

  “Now Mr. Sarles,” Heimrich said. “But he is, isn’t he. You didn’t do anything to offend Mrs. Bedlow? So that she’d complain to her husband?”

  “Nothing.” He turned to Mary Parsons. “Why you want to lie about me, miss?” he said. “Trying to make the captain here think maybe I—rather it was me than Curtis, maybe? Well, it wasn’t. So if you—”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “Your father told you this, Mrs. Parsons?”

  She nodded her head. She said, “And, as he says, Father’s dead.”

  “Not what offended Mrs. Bedlow?”

  “No. Which—well, which made me wonder.”

  Jason Sarles merely stared at her.

  Heimrich said that he saw. He turned to look at Norman Curtis, but then the front door opened and a trooper sergeant came into the foyer and signaled with a movement of his head to Forniss. And signaled again, with a nod, toward Heimrich. Forniss jerked a thumb. Heimrich went into the foyer and then, with the uniformed sergeant, outside. He was gone several minutes. They waited. He came back and sat where he had sat before.

  “Well, Mr. Curtis?” Heimrich said.

  Norman Curtis looked at Heimrich; his eyes, his whole intelligent face, seemed to consider.

  “Captain,” he said, and it seemed to Dinah as if he spoke of something with which he was not really concerned. “Captain, you’ve got a good deal of evidence already, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Enough to arrest me. Am I to consider you have?”

  “No.”

  “But will?”

  “As you say, there is already a good deal of evidence, Mr. Curtis. Did things happen tonight the way Mr. Sarles said they did?”

  “Captain,” Curtis said, “I appreciate you
r point of view. You like to get people talking, don’t you? Part of your job. I know quite a few people who talked themselves into jail, don’t you? Or—worse. Talking before they saw a lawyer.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It happens. With guilty people, Mr. Curtis.”

  “You’d have to say that. Probably believe that.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I’d say it, of course. I do believe it. But you don’t have to talk. As you know. It might save time. Even save trouble. But, you don’t have to talk.”

  Curtis leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, looked at the ceiling.

  How often I’ve seen him do that, Dinah thought. And look down again and smile at me. I wish I could turn off memory, the stream of memory, as one turns water off at a tap.

  “Taken down and may be used as evidence?” Curtis said, to the ceiling.

  “Not taken down,” Heimrich said. “For the moment. However—before witnesses. You realize that.”

  Curtis nodded his head, still with hands clasped behind it.

  “I didn’t kill Mrs. Bedlow,” he told the ceiling, in a steady, distant voice. “Or the boss. Or this poor little guy Sarles is so sorry for. Why was he killed, incidentally? Lynch. Why would I kill him, for example?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes for a moment, and did not answer for a moment.

  “Well,” he said, finally, “Robert Lynch was the man who’d been living in the guest house. He admitted it; his fingerprints will prove it. He said first that he wasn’t there after Wednesday, when he got in touch with his sister and she lent him some money. We have reason to believe that that wasn’t true—that he was there Thursday. So, I suppose, don’t you, Mr. Curtis, that he saw something Thursday. Something he thought he might cash in on?”

  Curtis sat up in his chair. He even leaned slightly forward, and looked at Heimrich intently. He nodded. He said he supposed it was that.

  “Not me,” he said.

  “Lynch must have made an appointment,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps telephoned. Perhaps wrote a letter. I don’t know, at the moment. Can you tell me, Mr. Curtis?”

  “No.”

  “Probably came up by train,” Heimrich said. “Some time tonight. There’s a train gets in a little after eleven. Probably was met. Brought back here and killed. Your car, Mr. Curtis, is pulled into the service road. About where it was before—was Thursday afternoon.”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “No comment,” Curtis said.

  “Very well. You want to comment on what Mr. Sarles has told us?”

  “There’s not much point in denying I was there, is there?” Curtis said. “Or that he grabbed me. From behind. I don’t say he wouldn’t have been too strong for me anyway. Aside from what he says, Dinah and Mary both saw us struggling. So—he came up behind me and grabbed me.”

  Heimrich waited. Norman Curtis leaned back again.

  He hasn’t looked at me once, Dinah thought. Or at Mary or Russ. It’s as if we weren’t here. What is he trying to do? It’s—why, it’s as if only he and Heimrich were here; as if it were all between them, and nothing else counted.

  “I heard this shout,” Curtis said, and spoke to the ceiling, and spoke slowly and carefully. “The shout, or scream—it sounded to me, as Sarles says it did to him, as if somebody had been hurt. I went to see. Down the back stairs, which were nearest.”

  He paused. Heimrich said nothing, but merely waited.

  He thought the sound had come from the direction of the pool. He ran that way. When he got there, he saw nothing.

  “By the way,” Heimrich said, “did you have a flashlight?”

  He hadn’t stopped to find a flash. There was enough light to see his way. Enough when he got to the pool to see that there was no one there—that the whole area seemed deserted, the path empty and the area around the pool itself; the guest house dark. But then he had looked into the pool. There had been light enough—starlight, light from a crescent moon. The other end of the pool, the shallow end, was the end in shadow.

  “You assumed he was dead?”

  “Yes. I would have gone down to find out. Given time. I wasn’t given time.”

  “The position of the body,” Heimrich said. “It was very much the same as that of Mrs. Bedlow’s body?”

  Norman Curtis straightened up. He shook his head as he looked at Heimrich; there was a suggestion of something like a smile on his lips.

  “Good try,” he said. “I didn’t see Ann in the pool. Not until the boss was carrying her up to the house. Isn’t that called entrapment, captain?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Entrapment, legally, is somewhat different. The stone, Mr. Curtis?”

  After he saw Lynch in the pool—Lynch’s body in the pool, as he had been sure then and knew now—he had started toward the shallow end, planning to go down the steps there, and along the pool floor to the body. But as he moved, his foot had hit something and he had bent down to see what it was; seen it was a jagged piece of rock and thought there were stains on it; lifted it so that he could see it more clearly and—

  “And,” Curtis said, “got jumped. Heard him coming but didn’t have time even to turn around. The stone did have blood on it, captain. I got some on my hand—right hand, too. There’ll be traces under the nails, I imagine.”

  “Probably,” Heimrich said. “The person who—cried out. You thought it was a man?”

  Norman Curtis had returned to his previous posture, hands behind head, eyes on the ceiling. He said, “Yes.” He couldn’t identify the voice? “No. I imagine a scream is like a whisper in that.”

  “Mr. Curtis,” Heimrich said, “the tool shed is somewhat nearer the pool than the house is. If you and Mr. Sarles started from the two places when you heard the scream, how did you happen to get there first? By some seconds, at the least, since you had time to see the body, pick up the stone?”

  “Maybe I run faster,” Curtis said. “I don’t know, captain. Maybe Sarles was asleep. Maybe—why not ask him?”

  “Very well,” Heimrich said. “Were you asleep, Mr. Sarles?”

  Jason Sarles said, “Sure.” He said it very quickly, as if wanting to get it on the record. He said he had to get up and put something on. “Sleep raw,” he said, in the tone of one who imparts information of moment.

  “I was awake,” Curtis said. “Dressed as I am now. Lying on the bed but not asleep. The head of the back stairs is very close to my room.”

  (I was dreaming about a dress, Dinah thought. About—surely it was about a dress? And it was important, and then I—my dream—solved itself and it was the need for a dark dress. Only—that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. I’ve got to remember—Away from her, beyond the glass partition, words went on.)

  “I take it, Mr. Curtis, you didn’t know Mr. Sarles was sleeping in the shed?”

  “I know very little about Mr. Sarles’s habits,” Curtis told the ceiling. “I didn’t even know he slept raw.”

  “Did any of you know? That he was sleeping in the shed tonight, of course?”

  As he asked that, Heimrich looked first at Russel Parsons, who shook his head; then at Mary, who shook hers; finally at Dinah. He thought from her dark eyes that she was far away. “You, Miss Bedlow?” he said, and she said, “What?” and he repeated the question.

  What was the point of that? she thought. That wasn’t the point. The point was—wait. Wait.

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t know—”

  Her sister interrupted. She said, “Wait, captain,” and he turned to her.

  “Mrs. Fleming said something,” she said. “Before dinner, I think. That Jason was—what did she say? Something about being up to his old tricks, and something about him and that wife of his, and not blaming the wife. I didn’t listen, really. I asked Russ later, though, what he supposed she meant by ‘his old tricks’ and Russ said—well, that he could guess. And that having a home from home, even a tool shed, might come in—”

>   “A bunch of damn lies,” Jason Sarles said, more or less under his breath. “All a bunch of damn lies.”

  (The dream hadn’t been about a dress. But—about clothing somehow. The way somebody was dressed? It had seemed so important in the dream; it was, in the dream, as if she were about to know something. Norman hadn’t gone to bed, was still dressed. That wasn’t it. Of course that wasn’t it. Sarles slept naked—what could that have to do with anything? The way somebody was dressed—)

  “By the way, Mrs. Parsons,” Heimrich said. “You mentioned this to your husband—it’s a trivial point, of course—before he received a telephone call? From a client, I gather? Making an early morning appointment?”

  “I don’t–”

  “Yes,” Russel Parsons said. “I remember. Before the call.”

  “What did you mean, exactly. That you could guess?”

  Russel Parsons hesitated. He said he couldn’t see what it had to do with what Heimrich was trying to find out. “Still” trying to find out, and with that he looked at Curtis, who did not look at him—who seemed to find the ceiling of continuing interest. Parsons said he didn’t know anything; that he didn’t like to butt into anybody else’s affairs, that—

  “Now Mr. Parsons.”

  “Well—I’ve heard, don’t know anything about it, really—I’ve heard that Mr. Sarles is a bit of a chaser. Finds the tool shed—” He paused. “Convenient,” he said. “None of my business, and I don’t see that it’s any of yours either, captain.”

  “Probably not,” Heimrich said, and Sarles said, still under his breath, “Telling lies about a man,” and nobody paid any attention to this. “You took the call in your own room, Mr. Parsons? Yours and Mrs. Parsons?”

  “Why,” Parsons said. “Yes I guess—no. We’d cut the bell off for the night. Extensions all over the place and when they go off at once it damn near rings the roof off. The extension down in the foyer’s left on and our room’s more or less at the head of the stairs. I half expected this man to call and I went down to answer it.”

  “About when was this?”

  “My God,” Parsons said, “talk about being thorough. Call it nine-thirty. Thereabouts. I left—oh, in half an hour or so, and drove back to town. Easier than getting up at the crack of—”