With One Stone
Page 17
“Get down!” Susan said, following Colonel, quickly if not quite with bounds. “Push the monster. Push!”
Heimrich made the more flattering of two assumptions—assumed she spoke to him, of Colonel. He pushed.
Colonel whimpered; stood on four legs, looked up at Heimrich with what appeared to be tears in enormous brown eyes. He heard Susan approaching. He wheeled, rather as a trailer truck might wheel. He doesn’t love me any more, Colonel’s eyes told Susan. He—there’s only—
He jumped toward Susan, who said, “No. Down, Colonel!”
Nobody, least of all Susan Heimrich, expected any response to this. Oh, after reproachful looks, after the whimpers of the betrayed, Colonel might move off, with the air of a dog about to shoot himself. He would not lie down, or sit down, or—
So, moving toward her man, as he moved toward her, Susan stepped sidewise to circumvent the monster. And Colonel did not so much He down as collapse in her new path.
She stumbled over him, and then it was Heimrich’s turn to bound—to catch her, dog between them.
“This,” said Susan, clinging, “is known as falling into each other’s arms.”
Colonel sat up again, interposing mammoth head and shoulders between their bodies. They leaned toward each other, chests almost touching, feet a dog apart. And, as Heimrich regained balance, lifted Susan over dog, for a moment held her cradled, they both began to laugh—laugh helplessly, so that her slender body shook in his shaking arms.
“The exquisite moment of reunion,” Susan said, when she could speak again. “The lyric moment!”
Michael Faye stood in the doorway of the house and regarded them gravely. He was a grave small boy.
“He’s been having obedience training,” young Michael said, in a small grave voice. “Good afternoon, sir.”
Heimrich carried Susan around Colonel, who had decided to lie down again, and put her feet on turf. He said, “Good afternoon, Michael,” and held out a hand, and the boy came across the grass and took the large hand, and looked up at the big man. And then, quite unexpectedly, pressed himself against Heimrich, friendly as a kitten. Heimrich put an arm around the boy and held him close.
“We’re glad you’re back,” young Michael said. “Aren’t we, Mother?”
“Yes, Michael,” Susan said, her voice as grave as her son’s, “we’re glad he’s back….”
She herself had been back since three, she told him—back in time to build the fire they sat in front of, with the bulk of the reclining Colonel cutting off most of the heat.
“Emily had to go right back to town,” she said. “Your sister’s tactful, isn’t she? Because otherwise you’d have had to sleep on the sofa and—”
“He could have my room,” young Michael said. “Could have had. I could have slept on the sofa.”
“Of course,” Susan said. “Aunt Emily had an engagement, I expect. There isn’t a thing in the house, dear. She didn’t know when to expect us and—”
A “thing,” so used, is a thing to eat.
“Susan,” Heimrich said, “what time did you start this morning? At what unearthly hour?”
“Not unearthly,” she said. “It was almost six. I thought—well—I didn’t have anything else to do. I mean—” She looked at young Michael. Young Michael was reading. Let reading children read. “I always thought it would be that Russel Parsons,” Susan said. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve been keeping abreast. Radio. Newspapers.”
“No,” he said, “why did you think it would be Parsons?”
“I used to read his columns,” Susan said. “They were full of hate—always full of hate.”
When there is not a “thing” in the house, people go to a restaurant, or go hungry.
The taproom of the Old Stone Inn makes provision for its younger guests. The standard provision, served in an old-fashioned glass, is composed of ginger ale, with a dash of grenadine, a cherry, and a slice of orange. Lumps of ice are added to this and, from a sufficient distance, the end product somewhat resembles an old fashioned. Young Michael would much have preferred the simplicity of a Coke, but he is a polite boy.
“What did he hate?” Heimrich asked, when they had been served. “Or shall we talk about your drive back?”
“Trucks, chiefly,” Susan said. “To say nothing of house trailers, which we needn’t, need we? All kindness, it seemed to me. All effort to make people happier. And not, it seemed to me, because the means were wrong. He always took that position, of course, and sometimes he may well have been right. But—he was against the goal. Anyway, I’m glad he was the one. I thought he couldn’t be.”
That had, of course, been the plan, Heimrich told her. On a train to Chicago when Ann Bedlow was killed; in New York when James Bedlow died and again when Robert Lynch, as inept at blackmail as at art, had been murdered. The first simple—a late plane, under an assumed name. The others simple too, but not as obvious.
“He merely,” Heimrich said, “used the office telephone to dial the house phone—entirely separate lines, different numbers. Making sure, of course, that the extensions in the office were cut off so they didn’t ring. Taking advantage of the fact that the front door key also worked in the lock of the office wing.”
“I wish,” Susan said, “you’d start over. Mr. Curtis fired him. He wanted to go on—being an influence. Perhaps he felt it was carrying on a mission. If Mrs. Bedlow died, and then her husband died, Mrs. Parsons would inherit the newspaper. Which really meant that he would inherit it, and, I suppose, the syndicate. So?”
Parsons had overheard, on one of the numerous extensions of the house phone, Ann and Norman Curtis make arrangements to meet Thursday afternoon in the house by the pool. Possibly, Parsons had merely been lucky—happened to pick up a phone at the right moment. More probably, Ann had said something about having a telephone call to make, and he had listened in, on the chance. That had been Monday.
He had had plenty of time by Thursday to make arrangements—including a plane reservation under the name of Askew. The meeting of the two must have seemed to him an ideal occurrence—a chance to kill Ann, who had to die before her husband if the paper was to go to Mary, under circumstances which would make Curtis the inevitable suspect.
“Whatever else he hates,” Heimrich said, “he hates Curtis. For firing him. He hoped to get two birds with one stone.”
He might well have done precisely that if it had not been for the “tramp” who had been living in the guest house. Two suspects to be sorted out, instead of one to be pinned down. Hence, delay. Hence, from Parsons’s point of view, uncertainty—a hitch.
When it proved that only one of the two birds had certainly fallen to the stone, Parsons decided to speed up his timetable. Bedlow would have had to die in the end, of course—it was to be presumed that he would have died by “suicide,” induced by grief. But there would have been no hurry if the police had not, disappointingly, failed to arrest Curtis.
Parsons decided to get on with it—“Remember,” Heimrich said, “this is what I’m pretty sure happened; what we’ll say happened”—when he flew back from Chicago and found Curtis still at large. He knew about Curtis’s gun. “Curtis says he made no special secret of it; has a vague memory of mentioning it to Parsons.” He bought ammunition for the gun—“We’ll probably find out where”—and got the gun itself. He was pretty certain that Bedlow would be in the office wing up to a little before six on Saturday, and that Curtis would be in the other office—Leonard Young’s office.
Susan said, “Young?”
“The secretary who was in London,” Heimrich said.
Parsons had let himself into the office wing through the door which opened out of Miss Winters’s office. Probably he had listened at the connecting door to Bedlow’s office and heard Bedlow doing something—perhaps talking on the telephone. Conceivably, of course, he had made an appointment with Bedlow in advance. “We don’t know about that, and maybe won’t if he doesn’t talk.”
&nbs
p; He used the office telephone to dial the house number, told his wife he was in New York. Then he had moved fast—“must have moved fast.” He had gone into Bedlow’s office, shot Bedlow and dropped the gun by him—“the idea being to make it look like a bungling simulation of suicide”—and got out. He had got back to wherever he had parked his car out of sight, waited the hour and a half or so it would have taken him to drive up from New York; showed up full of shocked surprise.
“His real surprise,” Heimrich said, “was probably when, again, we didn’t snap up Curtis. About then, probably, Parsons began to think we were as stupid as cops ever came.”
“Why didn’t you?”
It wasn’t, Heimrich said, entirely tangible. Perhaps it merely didn’t “feel” right. Perhaps it had not seemed to him that the criminal fitted the crime.
“Mother,” young Michael said, “if you and—and Uncle Merton are going to have another one, can I have a Coke instead?”
Their varying needs were supplied.
Parsons had, by then, done all he had set out to do—or almost all. Getting Curtis would merely have been icing on the cake. And, after all, he could fire Curtis when he got the paper. Everything had gone pretty much as planned—and then Robert Lynch showed up.
“I suppose,” Heimrich said, “he had seen Parsons hiding near the pool house—perhaps in the shower section. Possibly he had even seen him kill Mrs. Bedlow. Anyway, he decided to cash in. Wouldn’t have got his sister’s money for quite a while, and she had been supporting him. Called up and got Parsons on the telephone—that was the call, undoubtedly, that Parsons answered in the foyer—”
“You’re ahead of me,” Susan said. He caught her up.
“—and said was from a client who wanted to see him the first thing in the morning. So, to reconstruct—”
He had driven off in his own car, parked it somewhere near by, come back and got Curtis’s Jaguar, driven to Brewster and picked Lynch up, killed Lynch and carried his body to the pool, smeared a stone with blood and dropped the body in the pool. Then he had screamed to attract attention, and run—“must have run like hell”—back to the office wing. As soon as he got there, he made another call on the house telephone—a call from “the apartment” in New York.
“Screamed,” Susan said, “or yelled or whatever, to get Curtis to run down—be on the scene of the crime again. Knowing that this gardener was near by, might see him or even catch him?”
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “He could be pretty sure that Curtis would go to see what gave. Hope somebody might see him; that, at the worst, he would have to say again he’d found a body—a second body. On the other hand, he may have been sure Mr. Sarles was having one of his little trysts in the tool shed. A habit of his, I gather.”
“Unpleasant man,” Susan said. “I—somebody who knows you, apparently.”
She indicated with her head, and Heimrich looked as indicated. He raised a hand in greeting.
He raised it to a wiry man, with widely spaced gray eyes; to a slim dark girl, with short-cut hair. The man saluted in return; the girl turned, smiled, moved as if to come to their table. The man took the girl’s arm, guided her away; turned to smile over her head at Heimrich, to shake his own.
“Curtis,” Heimrich said. “And Dinah Bedlow.”
“Who,” Susan said, “want to be alone. As people sometimes do.”
“I,” young Michael said, “can go to the bathroom or something.”
She hugged him. Heimrich reached across the table and patted his shoulder.
“I don’t really have to go,” young Michael told them.
They had had dinner, were almost home again, with young Michael in the back seat and sleepy, when Susan said that she was, as usual, proud of her captain.
“To think of those mileages,” she said. “It was, then anyway, the only real proof you had, wasn’t it? That Mr. Parsons was lying?”
Heimrich concentrated on his driving for some seconds. Then he said, “Well—” and concentrated on his driving further. He turned between the boulders at the foot of the drive. He said, again, “Well—”
He said nothing further until he had stopped the car in the accustomed place in front of the house.
“As a matter of fact, dear,” Heimrich said, then, “checking the mileages on the Jag and the Thunderbird was something we certainly ought to have done.”
“Merton! Why you—”
“A slip-up that we didn’t,” Heimrich said. “Lucky that, by then, Parsons was a little—flustered. A bit embarrassing if he had—oh, asked for figures, say. However—”
“Merton Heimrich,” Susan said, “you are a most dishonest man, aren’t you? How can I believe anything you say?”
“One thing,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “I meant only trivial things, of course.” She looked into the back seat. “You’d better carry the boy.”
Heimrich carried the boy.
Inside the house, Colonel lay in front of what had been a fire. He wouldn’t even look at them. Colonel had had enough of people. People are simply not to be trusted. They desert dogs.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries
CHAPTER ONE
From the terrace, Susan Heimrich could not see the bus, but she could hear the screech of brakes as it stopped—hear the brakes go on and, as always, know a moment of trepidation. Should brakes really sound like that? This was hilly country; buses needed good brakes. Were these—? She stopped this thought, as always. You’re not that kind of mother, she told herself, as always. She heard the voices of children and then the harsh grinding sound as the bus started on—on along High Road to the turn into Van Brunt Pass. When the bus slowed for the turn its brakes protested again. But that was all right, now. It was a bright morning in very early June, and everything was fine now.
A very large Great Dane came up the steep drive, moving as if each step might be his last and as if he rather hoped it would be. When he came in sight of Susan Faye, standing on the terrace in the sunlight, he stopped and shook his head and Susan, as always, waited for him to lift a heavy paw and wipe his streaming eyes. He did not. He never had yet. He plodded on, a dog going nowhere of importance and, evidently, considering suicide.
‘He’ll be back, Colonel,’ Susan said, across bright grass. No dog should be so unhappy in so green a world. ‘You know he will.’
Colonel stopped, his great head hanging low. Then he plodded toward her on heavy feet, all too obviously making the best of an impossible bargain. The boy was gone. The boy would never come back. There was no point in being a dog. It wasn’t worth it.
He never learns, Susan thought. I wonder if he is really a very bright dog. Not that that matters. ‘Come here, Colonel. I’ll tell you again.’
Colonel came to the terrace. He collapsed on it, and put his head on his paws and looked up, from the tops of his eyes, at Susan Heimrich. She could go ahead and tell him again, and he wouldn’t, again, believe a word of it.
Five days a week he went down the drive with the boy, and waited with the boy. Five days a week the monster, with its terrible smell, came along and engulfed the boy and when Colonel moved forward, behind his small god, the boy said, ‘No. No, Colonel.’ Then Colonel sat down, his tail tucked under him, and wept. The monstrous, evil-smelling thing went off, the boy in it. And Colonel plodded back up the drive, although there was no point in that, or in anything.
‘He’ll be back,’ Susan said, gravely, to the mourning dog. ‘A little after three. And you’ll go, ten minutes too early, and sit in the drive and when you hear the bus you’ll bark once and gambol—’ She stopped. Colonel was not a dog to gambol. What, then? Lurch? ‘You’ll gambol down the drive,’ Susan told her dog, although really Michael’s dog, ‘and the bus will stop and he’ll get out. Don’t you remember?’
Colonel closed his eyes. The lies people tell to dogs! This one smelled all right, and scratched in the right places, but the lies she told.
She went to look for zinnias. It had been, at any rate, a fine spring for weeds. But there was one and there another and—for heaven’s sake!—a cluster of half a dozen, seedlings without room to turn around in. Plants are ridiculous, Susan thought, and got down on her knees and began to pull up weeds.
She was rather tall, and slender and in her late twenties. She had widely separated gray eyes, and brown hair worn short and rather square shoulders. She wore a man’s white shirt, which was far too big for her, with the sleeves turned back at her wrists—and, at intervals as she plucked out weeds, falling down over her hands. She wore corduroy slacks and tennis socks and old tennis shoes, and smelled slightly of insect repellent. The shad flies were venomous this year. (As every year.)
A boy off to school, a husband off to work, a country woman seeking timorous zinnia seedlings among aggressive weeds. Everything fine; everything placidly as it should be. Susan pushed aside a small tendril of guilt. Martha Collins would mind the store—the shop, but showroom really, on Van Brunt Avenue in Van Brunt Center; the little shop with the words ‘Susan Faye, Fabrics,’ lettered small and neat in the lower left-hand corner of the window. Tomorrow would be time enough for Susan Heimrich to assume that other identity, which now seemed so much less important than it once had. Tomorrow she would let weeds go (and wouldn’t they just!) and slap gouache on drawing paper. Today I am Mrs M. L. Heimrich, housewife and family weeder.