18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Finish your coffee before you go, firehorse,” Susan Heimrich said. She smiled up at him. “Oh,” she said, “I knew all along it wouldn’t work.” …

  Heimrich did not drive fast from Putnam County down to Westchester, nor across Westchester to North Wellwood, which lies near its northeastern line. It took him almost an hour to cover the forty miles. He found Forniss at the state police substation, which had relayed word from the chief of the—three-man—police force of North Wellwood.

  Victim: Mrs. Arthur Powers, widow. Given name, Faith. Age, late sixties. (Precise age not yet established.) Retired Associate Professor of English Literature, Dyckman University. Former member of the school board, Town of Wellwood. Member of the board of directors, Community Center, North Wellwood. Time of death, eleven-thirty the night before or within a few minutes of that time. Cause of death, gunshot wound occipital area of the brain. Bullet recovered, but battered beyond identification. Apparently twenty-two calibre long. Body badly burned. Bandaged right-hand finger. Minor fracture which had been healing. Place of death, a gravel pit below Long Hill Road, which was north of the hamlet of North Wellwood; which branched from Main Street after Main Street had become Brewster Road; which partly circled the village.

  “How do you know when it happened?” Heimrich asked the trooper assigned to the North Wellwood substation.

  “People named Trowbridge,” the trooper told him, and looked at Lieutenant Forniss, who had already had the question answered and who gave Heimrich the answer.

  The people named Trowbridge, who lived about two hundred yards beyond the place the Powers car had broken through a guard rail and plunged into a gravel pit below, were turning out their lights and locking up their house at eleven-thirty, or a few minutes after that. They could fix the time with reasonable certainty. They had watched, on television, a motion picture which ran until eleven. They had watched news for half an hour. Gerald Trowbridge had gone to the front door to close it and lock it for the night when he heard the crash. Within seconds, he had seen fire leaping in the gravel pit. He had called the volunteer fire department and heard its siren begin to summon volunteers as he ran across the road and slid down the steep slope to the fire. He could not get near the car because of the leaping flames.

  “Trowbridge didn’t hear a shot?” Heimrich asked. “Before he heard the car crash?”

  Forniss looked to the trooper.

  “Got him on the telephone,” the trooper said. “After the autopsy report came through. He says he didn’t hear a shot. To notice, anyway. In the country, though, people get so they don’t—”

  The telephone interrupted him. “Probably that damn horse loose again,” the trooper said. “’Scuse me, sir.” He answered the telephone, saying, “Trooper Arthur, state police.” Then he said, “Why, yes, Professor,” and listened and said, “Anything you can tell us, sir. We certainly—”

  “Hold it a minute, Arthur,” Heimrich said. “Professor Brinkley, by any chance?”

  Trooper Arthur said, “Just a moment, sir,” into the telephone and put a hand over the transmitter and said, “That’s who it is, Inspector. He—”

  “Friend of mine,” Heimrich said. “About Mrs. Powers’s death?” The trooper nodded his head. Heimrich went across the little office and took the telephone from Arthur, who stood up to hand it to him. Heimrich said, “’Morning, Walter. Merton Heimrich.”

  “Inspector, is it?” Walter Brinkley said. “Congratulations, Merton.” There had been, since Heimrich had known him, almost always a rising note in Brinkley’s voice. There was none now.

  “Shocking thing about Faith Powers,” Brinkley said. “I find it hard to believe. Hurting to believe.” It seemed to Heimrich that Brinkley’s voice shook a little. “A terrible thing.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “She was a friend of yours?”

  “For a good many years,” Brinkley said. “Here. When we were both at Dyckman. A great many years, Merton. She was a fine person. It’s around town it wasn’t just an accident. At least, that’s what Clay Foster says. He’s editor of the local newspaper. Heard I had dinner with Faith last night. At the inn. Seems Sally Lambert—she runs the inn—told him we were there. And that it was unusual.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes, somewhat. And I don’t suppose there’s any significance but—” Brinkley let it hang for a moment. Then he said, “Perhaps there’s something I ought to tell you about. May be a waste of your time. But in view of this awful thing, I—” He paused again. “Telephones,” Walter Brinkley said, “are, to me, most unsatisfactory substitutes. Shall I come to the substation?”

  “You’re home now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait for me, Walter. I’ll be around. And did you tell whatever it is to this Mr. Foster?”

  “No. That is, that Faith and I had dinner, of course. At her suggestion. No more than that.”

  “Then,” Heimrich said, “don’t. Until you’ve told me whatever it is.”

  “Almost certainly not of importance,” Brinkley said. “But I did think of that, Merton.”

  “Ten minutes,” Heimrich said.

  “O.K.,” Brinkley said, a little to Merton Heimrich’s surprise. Heimrich had, of course, no knowledge that Brinkley was some paragraphs under the spread of “O.K.” throughout the world and was slightly obsessed with its variants, including “oke.”

  “They haven’t hauled the car up yet,” Lieutenant Forniss said, after Heimrich had hung up. “Got the road blocked off until we have a look, M. L. If you’re going to see Professor Brinkley…?”

  “Yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “You and Ray.”

  The telephone rang again. Trooper Arthur answered it. He listened. He said, “All right, we’ll get on it as soon as we can, sir.” He put the receiver back in its cradle.

  “Was the horse this time,” he said. “Olmstead’s horse. Rolling in the Burnsides’ garden. Pesky beast. Cliff Burnside’s snap beans were just beginning to show.” He shook his head. “Cliff will plant them early,” he said. “If it hadn’t been that damn stallion it probably would have been frost. Still …”

  There were barricades where Long Hill Road diverged from Main Street which, imperceptibly, had become Brewster Road. Crowley got from behind the wheel and cleared a path for the car. They drove uphill on a narrow blacktop for about a quarter of a mile. It was, Forniss realized, a “good” part of North Wellwood. Smooth driveways led from either side of the road and led far back to big houses, screened by trees. An odd place for a gravel pit, Forniss thought.

  A uniformed trooper stepped into the middle of the road and held up both hands to stop them. When Crowley stopped the car, the trooper came up to it. The car was identified only by its lengthy whip of radio antenna.

  “This road is—” the trooper said, before the length of antenna registered. Then he said, “Good morning, sir,” taking no chances. He said, “Just on ahead, beyond the bend.”

  They got out of the car and walked around the bend with the trooper. A tow truck was parked beside the road and two men sat in it, smoking. One of them said, “It’s about time,” when the three were abreast of the truck. He added, expectedly, that they didn’t have all day to sit there.

  There were no skid marks on the road. There was a jagged hole in the low timber fence which served inadequately as a guard rail. Beyond the rail the ground sloped, gradually at first and then precipitously, to the pit which had been dug for gravel. They stood in the fence gap and looked down—down for more than a hundred yards—at what remained of a bright blue Mercedes. Not much remained of it. Of its once gay color nothing remained at all.

  Deep furrows led from the gap the car had broken in the guard rail—led down the slope to the cliff bulldozers had created as they chewed gravel out of the slope. The car had plunged over the cliff.

  Forniss and Crowley went through the gap and followed the car’s tracks down the grade, which was gentle at first. “She didn’t brake,” Crowley said, his eyes on the furrow
s. “No,” Forniss said. “Dead. Unconscious, anyway.”

  “Didn’t go over headfirst, at a guess,” Crowley said, when they were at the brink of the gravel pit. “Hit something and—hit that.” He pointed to an outcropping of rock.

  The rock was scarred. Bright blue paint was imbedded in the scarred surface. “Fender, probably,” Ray Crowley said. “Swerved it around and then it rolled.” They could see on the steep side of the pit where the car had rolled. They had to go almost a hundred paces to the right until they came to a place where the slope was gradual enough for them to work their way down to the bottom of the pit. “Have to haul it up about here,” Crowley said. “Don’t envy them the job.”

  The car was on battered wheels when they got to it—the blackened metal which had been a gay and leaping car. The volunteer firemen had wrestled it upright when it was cool enough to touch and had got out of it the body of Faith Powers. The body had been badly burned, except for the face. By some chance, as the body tumbled in the tumbling car, the body’s face had ended with arms shielding it. Trooper Arthur had told them that. If it hadn’t been for that it might have taken them a long time to identify the body of Mrs. Powers.

  “Not much to tell us anything,” Forniss said. “Won’t be that much by the time they drag it up.” But he got down on the ground and looked under the front of what had been a Mercedes convertible. The front wheels had been wrenched apart. There was no way for Forniss to tell whether the steering had failed before the car plunged. Perhaps technicians could tell after the car had been taken apart—after there had been, in a way, an autopsy on the car.

  A truck trail led from the lower level of the pit in a wide circle and then, where the grade permitted, up to Long Hill Road. Trees had been bulldozed out as the pit was dug and pushed to the side and, not very completely, burned. Below the pit there was a brook and beyond that wooded land climbed gently to the next ridge.

  “Must have been a pretty little valley before they started digging,” Crowley said.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Must have been. Have to have a special permit to do this sort of thing, Ray. Funny the town let them, wouldn’t you say?”

  They climbed back the way they had come and Forniss told the trooper the tow truck could go ahead with it.

  “Happen to know who owns this land?” Forniss asked the trooper. “Who’s been digging the pit?”

  “Mr. Finch,” the trooper said. “Owns most everything that side of the road down to Main Street. Lawrence Finch, that is.”

  The trooper spoke as if the name should mean something to Forniss. It did not.

  “Live around here? This Mr. Finch?”

  “Half a mile up the road. Around a couple of bends. Big white house. Used to be one of the Bennington houses. Dates back God knows when.”

  “Couple of bends,” Forniss said. “Probably can’t see this hole in the ground from the house, can he?”

  “Shouldn’t think so, sir.”

  “He had a permit for the pit, of course?”

  “Around here,” the trooper said, “Mr. Finch can get a permit for most anything, Lieutenant. Mr. Trowbridge tried to stop it, from what they say. Said it was defacing. Of course, Mr. Trowbridge lives right up there—” He pointed. “Mr. Trowbridge can see it,” the trooper said. “Hear it, too, when they’re working.”

  Crowley drove the police car up the driveway to the Trowbridge house, from which one could certainly see the gravel pit.

  Gerald Trowbridge had gone into the city, as he did—his wife said—four times a week. Mrs. Trowbridge, who looked to Forniss like a youngish woman who spent a good deal of time on a golf course, was quite certain about the time they had heard a car crash through the guard rail, then heard the sound of rending metal as it plunged into the pit. “It was awful to hear.” The flames had showed almost immediately and leaped high. No, they had not heard the shrieking sound rubber makes on pavement when a car is braked and braked hard. No, they had not heard a shot. “Not to notice.” At the latest it had been eleven thirty-five when the car went through the rail.

  “She was such a gay little old lady,” Mrs. Trowbridge told them. “She drove what she called the jaybird like a bat out of hell.”

  She went out with them to their car and looked down, beyond the road, at the gravel pit.

  “It used to be so pretty,” she said. “So soft and—and gentle. I suppose he’s making a lot of money out of it. From what we had to pay the last time we had the driveway resurfaced.” And then the deeply tanned Mrs. Trowbridge said, quite unexpectedly to both men, “The self-righteous son of a bitch.” …

  “May as well see where she was heading,” Forniss said, as they neared the lower end of the Trowbridge’s long—and smoothly graveled—drive. Crowley turned the car left on Long Hill Road, and so in the direction Faith Powers had been going when she died.

  The road was narrow and full of curves and wound uphill for three miles. On their left, as they curved to the hilltop, there were large houses, all white, all far back from the road. Mailboxes were lettered with the names of the owners of the houses. They slowed a little when they passed a mailbox lettered LAWRENCE FINCH and looked up the driveway it was set beside. Finch’s house was just as white as the others, and larger than most.

  They went downhill for a little over two miles and the road curved sharply to the right and became South Lane.

  They followed South Lane back to the Main Street traffic lights.

  VI

  They sat on the terrace of Walter Brinkley’s house in the morning sunlight. Brinkley wore slacks and a yellow sports shirt, and was rounded but not paunchy under them. His hair was very white in the sun; it shone in the sun. Brinkley’s face did not shine. For the first time since Heimrich had known him there were lines on his smooth face and a kind of heaviness below his bright eyes. Brinkley told of the evening before.

  “You’re not sure this man who calls himself Pederson is really a man named Aaron Nagle, Walter?”

  “He could be,” Brinkley said. “Yes, he quite well could be. But it’s been almost ten years. And I have a wretched memory for faces. Really wretched, Merton.”

  “Tell me more about Nagle.”

  Walter Brinkley told him more about Nagle—a right-wing fanatic, a onetime, at any rate, member of the American Nazi Party.

  “A zealot,” Brinkley said. “Or, from another angle, a dedicated man. We often speak of dedication as if it were in itself a virtue. But a man may be dedicated to what we call ‘evil’ as well as to what we call ‘good.’”

  Through several years of acquaintance, which had deepened into friendship, Merton Heimrich had learned how much words meant to Professor Emeritus Walter Brinkley; how, sometimes, he seemed to pursue connotations into labyrinths.

  “Mrs. Powers was more certain? I mean that the man was Nagle?”

  “I think so. On the other hand, she wanted me to see him to confirm what she thought. So she could not have been certain, at least when she first saw him.”

  Did he think that Nagle had recognized them, or either of them?

  Brinkley shrugged the plump shoulders under the sports shirt. He had no way of knowing. Nagle had not given any indication that he recognized the two who, years before, had come publicly to the defense of his right to say what he wanted to say. He had not, so far as Brinkley had noticed, looked at them with any special attention. On the other hand, after their first brief, and insofar as possible shielded, scrutiny they had not looked at the thin dark man, drinking at his table at the end of the room.

  “He was there when you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “He came in with—what did you say the man’s name is?”

  “Finch. Lawrence Finch. He came in at almost the same time. A few seconds later. That’s not the same as saying he came in with Larry Finch, is it? They did not really seem to be together. Finch went into the bar. Nagle—if it was Nagle—went to the table and had his drinks there.”

  “About Mr. Finch?”
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br />   “One of the community’s rich men,” Brinkley said. “Prominent in almost everything. Was town supervisor for a couple of terms. He has a brokerage office in the city, I understand. He is also a vice-president of the North Wellwood Savings Bank. Faith thought he’s probably a Birchite but that may be merely rumor. He owns a good deal of property, particularly on Long Hill Road.”

  “A good place to own land?”

  “Estate land, they call it,” Brinkley said. “Yes, I suppose it is. Although there’s been grumbling about that since Ralph Barnes sold a house there to Thomas Peters.” He paused there and looked expectantly at Inspector M. L. Heimrich. For a moment, Heimrich felt that he was not living up to expectations. Then it came to him.

  “The lawyer?”

  “Yes,” Brinkley said. “That Peters.”

  “It was resented?”

  “Barnes’s sale to him? Yes, Merton. By a good many. Even before the club thing came up.”

  Heimrich could merely raise eyebrows to that and wait. Brinkley told him about the club. He showed him the anti-club broadsheet. Heimrich said, “Hm-m-m.” He put the mimeographed sheet in his pocket.

  “I think,” Brinkley said, “that Faith planned to put some money in the club—buy stock or whatever it is. It’s a corporation, so I’d assume it’s stock.”

  “She had money?”

  “A good deal, I think. She married rather late. Arthur Powers was, by my standards at least, a rich man. He died some years ago and, I suppose, left his money to Faith.”

  “No children?”

  “No. She must have been in her late forties when they married. A spinster. But not, I’d guess, an old maid in anything but a technical sense. She was always a gay person. When she was younger, a very good-looking woman.”

  “What they call left wing?”

  “Good heavens, no, Merton. An old family here, as her husband’s was.”

  Brinkley, who was usually exact in his phrasing, seemed to think that he had answered exactly.

  “Is Mr. Finch’s one of the old families?”