18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “You rather jump around, don’t you, Merton? No, not in the sense you mean. His father moved here from Connecticut, I think. Or perhaps it was his grandfather. It was his father, I’ve always understood, who bought a great deal of land when land was relatively cheap. From farmers, probably. It’s bad farming land.”

  “Barnes?”

  “What about Barnes? A good neighbor. Very pleasant, intelligent sort of person. So is Lucile. What about them? Because they sold a house to Mr. Peters?”

  “I don’t know, yet, what about anybody, Walter,” Heimrich said. “I suppose I meant, an old family hereabouts?”

  Barnes had not been. He and his wife had bought a house—the house he sold to Peters—about twenty years before. They had had young children then—or youngish children. Brinkley understood they had previously lived on Long Island.

  “Long Hill Road is tricky in the winter,” Brinkley said. “A school bus skidded off it when the Barneses lived there. Nobody hurt, really. But it worried Lucile, who worries a good deal anyway, and they bought the house down this road. Rented the other, off and on. Speaking of Lucile’s being a worrier, did I tell you she’s worried about this new couple down the road? In the Barnes house?”

  “No, Walter. Why?”

  Brinkley told Merton Heimrich what Faith Powers had told him about Lucile Barnes’s concern for Eric and Ann Martin. It probably, Brinkley said, was an exaggerated concern. He paused for a moment. “I guess it is,” he said. “Lucile and Ralph apparently got to feeling they’d let the Martins in for something. Perhaps a repetition of their own unpleasant experiences. They were more or less harassed out of North Wellwood, you know.”

  Heimrich didn’t know. Walter Brinkley told him about the things—the little, niggling things—which had been done to harass the Barneses.

  “Trivial things, really,” Brinkley said. “Nothing overt, as somebody’s shooting Peters was overt.”

  Walter Brinkley was disturbed today, Heimrich thought. Usually he was direct, succinct. Usually he remembered, very precisely and in order, what he had said or not said.

  Heimrich said, “Shooting, Walter?”

  “According to Harry,” Brinkley said, “Peters thinks it was accidental—a boy with a new rifle. Perhaps that is what he prefers to think, or to say he thinks. And apparently he was only grazed, the second time. Missed entirely the first. Warning shots? As the police call them?”

  “Possibly,” Heimrich said. “Details, Walter.”

  Brinkley gave what details he had to give. He said that Harry Washington might know more. But Harry was in town marketing. If Merton wanted to wait?

  “I’ll see Mr. Peters,” Heimrich said. “Let’s get back to last night for a moment. You and Mrs. Powers left the inn about when?”

  They had left at a little after nine. They had had several drinks—“Faith wanted to talk, drinks went along with it”—and duck flambé for two, which took a little time to prepare. Yes, finished coffee at a little after nine. Yes, he thought Nagle had still been there, then. No—wait. Nagle had finished his dinner. Another man had come in; a much younger and bigger man. This younger man had gone into the bar and Nagle had joined him there.

  “As if Nagle had been waiting for this other man?”

  It could have been that way. It could have been a coincidence. Brinkley was sure, or almost sure, that Nagle and the other man had been standing together at the bar when he and Faith left.

  “On the other hand,” Brinkley said, “I believe it’s quite a sociable bar. Strangers get to talking.”

  Nothing was very easy to put a finger on. Which, of course, was usual at this stage of any case.

  “You and Mrs. Powers,” Heimrich said. “You had come in your separate cars. You both live here on Hayride Lane. You were more or less in sight of each other on the way back? Until she turned off at her house?”

  “Oh, no,” Brinkley said. “Her car was still there when I drove off. You see …”

  They had gone together out to the parking lot, and Faith had got into her bright blue Mercedes. But then she had said, “What time is it, Walter?” Then it was nine-twenty.

  “She didn’t wear a watch herself?”

  “I was under one of the lights. She wasn’t. And the moon was just rising. It was full last night, you know.”

  “Yes. You told her it was nine-twenty. Then?”

  Then …

  “I have to make a telephone call,” Faith Powers said. “I may as well make it here. You go along, Walter. And—thanks for joining me. For helping.”

  She got out of her car and walked back toward the inn.

  “She walked,” Brinkley told Heimrich, “with what seemed to me a special kind of determination. Oh, what seems to me now, of course. Hindsight, I suppose. Perspicuity after the fact.” He paused and for a second closed his eyes. “When it will do no good,” Brinkley said.

  He felt now, Walter Brinkley told Heimrich, that, over coffee and just before they left their table, Faith had been debating something with herself. She had been silent for perhaps ten minutes. “Abstracted. As if she were, as we say, turning something over in her mind.”

  “You think, now, that she finally decided something after she had got into her car? Decided on a course of action which included making a telephone call from the inn, instead of waiting until she got home?”

  “It felt like that,” Brinkley said. “More exactly, feels like that now.”

  “The top of her car was down?”

  “It almost always was, except in bad weather. It’s not really ‘down,’ Merton. That model has a top which is lifted off.”

  “From the inn there’s more than one way back to Hayride Lane?”

  “Several. Country roads lead into one another. The most direct way, of course, is along Main Street to South Lane, with a jog into Hayride.”

  “The way you took last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would one way be by Long Hill Road?”

  “Roundabout, but yes.”

  “It was a pleasant night,” Heimrich said. “A pleasant night for a drive, if one felt like driving. And the moon, the full moon, was pretty well up by—say by eleven-thirty.”

  “It was then?”

  “A few minutes later,” Heimrich said. “Near enough then, yes.”

  “There would have been enough light to—to aim by?”

  “For a man with good eyes. Eyes he’d given time to adjust to dimmer light. While he waited.”

  Heimrich stood up. He said, “I’ll check things at the—” and stopped, because the telephone rang in the house. For a moment, Brinkley ignored it. Then he started up and said, “I’d forgotten Harry isn’t …” and bounced into the house, trailing an unfinished sentence behind him.

  Heimrich waited. After two or three minutes, Brinkley bounced out again. He looked worried.

  “This Mrs. Martin I was talking about,” Brinkley said. “Wanted the name of a reliable service station. One with a truck. Some time last night, somebody let the air out of the tires of Mr. Martin’s car. Out of all of them. Martin had to take their station wagon to drive to work. Leaves her stranded.”

  Brinkley looked up for a moment at his tall friend.

  “She has a pleasant voice, this Mrs. Martin,” Brinkley said. “There was worry in it, of course. She comes from Kentucky, incidentally. But went to school in the East.”

  Merton Heimrich was familiar with Brinkley’s ear for regional origins. Brinkley’s recognition of accent had once been very useful. He was tempted to ask what part of Kentucky Mrs. Eric Martin came from, being moderately sure that Brinkley could tell him. He curbed his tendency to wander on bypaths.

  “You were able to give her the name of a service station?”

  “Reagan’s,” Brinkley told him. “They’re usually very prompt.” He paused for a moment. “Used to be, anyway,” he added….

  Vandalism is not often a concern of Heimrich’s, whose concern is primarily with murder. But at the foot of Brinkl
ey’s driveway he turned his car to the left, which was away from the village center.Brinkley had told him that that was the way to go and that the Barnes house was about a mile along the road.

  Heimrich turned his car up a smoothly graveled drive toward a square white house. The tires crunched on the gravel. In front of the house a not very young sports car sat flatly on the gravel. It looked dispirited.

  As Heimrich pulled the unmarked police car in behind the deflated MG, the door of the house opened and a slim young woman with dark red hair came out onto the porch. She wore a yellow, sleeveless pull-over and dark blue slacks and when she saw Heimrich getting out of his car she said, “Oh,” in a disappointed voice.

  “State police,” Heimrich told her. “Cap—” He caught himself.

  “Inspector Heimrich. You’re Mrs. Martin?”

  She nodded her head.

  “But I didn’t …” she said, and looked down at him from the porch, puzzlement in her face. A very pleasant face, Heimrich thought it; a rather thin face and a face to look at twice.

  “I was at Professor Brinkley’s when you called,” Heimrich said. “Did you get hold of this service station?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “They seemed a little vague. Will send somebody when they can. But it sounded more like if they can. Not at first, but after I told them it was the Barnes house.”

  Little niggling things, Heimrich wondered.

  “Also,” Ann Martin said, “somebody threw garbage at the foot of the drive yesterday evening and I got two rather strange telephone calls. But we hadn’t notified the police. And—you did say ‘Inspector’?”

  This was with an inflection of surprise, almost incredulity.

  Then she said, “There’s something else? Eric—my husband?”

  Her lips trembled and the words trembled.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Nothing about Mr. Martin. About Mrs. Powers. Faith Powers.”

  Her lips firmed, but she shook her head, this time evidently puzzled. Heimrich had supposed that, by then, everybody in North Wellwood knew.

  “What about her?” Ann Martin said. “I’ve only just met her but she seems so nice. So sweet.”

  “She’s dead, Mrs. Martin. She was killed. Last night.”

  This was, he was almost certain, news to the slender young woman with dark red hair. From the expression on her face, he thought it bad news to her. She turned and opened the screen door and made a beckoning gesture and he followed her into the house.

  “It’s hard to believe,” Ann Martin said, and said with Heimrich had supposed she would; said what is always said. “She was so alive. Even meeting her once.” Ann broke the sentence, ending it with a slowly shaken head.

  “When was that?” Heimrich asked her.

  She told him of Faith Powers’s sudden, friendly appearance the day before; of their lunch at the Maples Inn. She was sitting so that she could look through the open front door and down the drive, and at the limp sports car. There is no great point in talking with somebody who is thinking of something else. Heimrich said, “The telephone, Mrs. Martin?” and Ann Martin pointed. Heimrich went to it and dialed and got, “State police. Trooper Arthur.”

  “Know a service station called Reagan’s?”

  “Yes, Inspector. Mike Reagan’s.”

  “Get on to them, will you? Drive over if you’re covered there. About a call a Mrs. Martin made for service. At the Barnes house. Somebody let the air out of her tires. A nuisance to her, naturally. Tell them we’d like them to get somebody over. Tell them as soon as possible. O.K.?”

  It was. What an inspector tells a trooper to do always is.

  “They’ll be along,” Heimrich told Ann Martin, and sat where he could see her face. “Mrs. Powers came here to see you. You didn’t expect her to?”

  “I’d never seen her or heard of her,” Ann told him. “But she said Lucile Barnes—Lucile and her husband own this house—had called her up and …”

  She was a good reporter, Heimrich thought, listening.

  “I thought her concern, Lucile’s concern, was—oh, I suppose groundless. It wasn’t, apparently.”

  “These two men at the inn,” Heimrich said. “Do you know which one she thought she recognized?”

  Ann shook her head.

  “Was one of them a thin, dark man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody you recognized?”

  “No, Inspector.”

  “This garbage in your driveway? Not merely something thrown from a passing car?”

  “When my husband shoveled it up, it half filled one of our trash cans. And—people don’t carry dead rats around in their cars, do they?”

  “Seems unlikely,” Heimrich said. “These telephone calls? Before your husband got home?”

  She told him about the telephone calls.

  “‘Meddling’? That was the word this woman used? And, not to pry?”

  “Yes.”

  “You felt she knew who you were? But that the man who called first thought you were Mrs. Barnes?”

  “Yes. It’s confusing, isn’t it? Somebody wants to get rid of the Barneses. Think they have come back. And somebody else wants to get rid of the Martins. But what could it have to do with Mrs. Powers’s death?”

  “Now, Mrs. Martin,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know that it has anything, naturally. You’ve no idea what the woman meant when she told you not to pry?”

  “No. Unless—” She broke off, and lines appeared for a moment between eyebrows which were dark, but not as deeply red as her hair.

  “I worked on a documentary for UBN,” she said. “About conditions in the deep South. It was objective. Or meant to be. It turned out to be difficult to be objective, Inspector. About the Klan. The White Citizens’ Councils. We weren’t popular.”

  “Is it generally known, do you know, that you worked on this documentary?”

  “There was a long list of names in the credits,” she said. “Mine was one of them—my professional name. Langley. I shouldn’t have thought many viewers read the names. But Faith Powers apparently did. And at the post office I gave my professional name too, of course, because I get mail under it.”

  “This club that’s being planned,” Heimrich said. “There seems to be a bit of fuss about it locally. You know about it?”

  “Mrs. Powers told me.”

  “You hadn’t known beforehand. Didn’t, let’s say, come here—you and your husband—because you’d heard about it?”

  “No. Why on earth—oh. You mean to scout out the lay of the land for the network? No, Inspector. Certainly not.”

  “But such—what do they call it?—reporting in depth. Is that it?”

  “A phrase they use. Yes.”

  “Might be possible?”

  Again thought crinkles appeared between her blue eyes. And Heimrich closed his own blue eyes while he waited for an answer.

  “They might think so,” Ann said, and spoke thoughtfully. “The affiliated stations in the South might like it, I suppose. I hadn’t thought of it. Not really.”

  But are thinking of it now, Heimrich thought.

  “Your husband,” Heimrich said. “Is he connected with UBN too?”

  “Good heavens, no,” Ann said. “He’s an electrical engineer. Designs devices. Things I don’t understand at all. He’s associated with a firm called Hurst Electronics, and they’re doing work for the Navy. They have a laboratory—factory, whatever it is—in New Canaan. That’s why we came here. So Eric could drive to work.”

  “For the Navy,” Heimrich said. “Secret devices?”

  “‘Restricted’ is the word they use,” Ann Martin said. “Yes. At least, Eric had to be cleared. Navy Intelligence was all over the place for a while, he said. That was before we met.”

  Heimrich said he saw. He said, “Did you ever hear of a man named Nagle, Mrs. Martin? Aaron Nagle?”

  “Patriots United? Yes. Oh, yes indeed, Inspector. They were supposed to be around in Mississippi when we were working there.
Nagle himself—he’s the head of them, apparently—was supposed to be around. We tried to find him, but most of the people wouldn’t admit they’d ever heard of him. Or of this Patriots United. We felt—I felt, anyway—that some of them were afraid of Patriots United and that some of them were covering up for it. They cover up a lot of things—who’s a Klan member, except for the spokesmen, of course. Oh, they let us film part of a Klan meeting. A rigged part, we thought. Not as well rigged as they thought it was, actually.”

  “You were objective, naturally?”

  “Oh,” she said, “entirely. Stuart—Stuart Leffing—wouldn’t have it any other way. He produced it, you know. And he’s a very scrupulous man, Inspector.”

  “About this Patriots United. A right-wing organization of some sort? According to what you people heard?”

  “A kind of underground, I think,” she said. “A terrorist organization. Their spokesmen—Nagle isn’t one of them, so far as I know—admit they’re caching arms. For guerrilla warfare against the Communist take-over.”

  “You never were able to prove that they had—call it a gang—in Mississippi when you were making this documentary?”

  “No. We had—the crew had—a couple of cameras smashed. The local police, the local sheriffs, were very concerned. Said it must be somebody from outside. And Jimmy Powers—he was one of the interviewers—got beaten up. Outsiders, again. Communist agitators, probably. Or what they call ‘nigras’ when they’re being polite in the presence of the Northern press.”

  “By the way, Mrs. Martin,” Heimrich said, “were you born in Kentucky?”

  “Louisville. But what on earth?”

  “Nothing,” Heimrich said. “Oh, curiosity. Professor Brinkley said he thought you were. And educated in the East.”

  “Smith,” Ann Martin said. “From just listening to me on the telephone?”

  “He’s writing a book on regional accents,” Heimrich told her. “Quite an ear for them. Placed me for western New York within fifteen minutes of the time we first met. Have you any idea when the air was let out of the tires?”

  She had not. She supposed after dark, but that was merely guessing. It could have been almost any time after Eric left the car in front of the house. After, that was, they had shoveled up the refuse in the driveway.