18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “All right,” he said. “What’s up your sleeves?”

  Strothers told him what was up their sleeves, or might be.

  “The town won’t like it,” Foster said. “Wants to be left alone, particularly right now. I suppose it’s about this club?”

  “The feel of the town,” Strothers said. “About the club, of course. The opposition to it.”

  “And poor Faith Powers?”

  “If that comes into it, Mr. Foster. Do you think it does?”

  “There’s an Inspector Heimrich working on it,” Foster said. “And a Lieutenant something or other. Seem to be interested in her financial setup. At least this lieutenant is.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Forniss,” Ann said.

  “Seen her lawyer about her will,” Foster said. “Talked to Larry Finch, who was her broker. Hasn’t anything to say to the press.

  Which is me until the boys get up from town. Which—” He broke off to look at the watch on his wrist. “Which ought to be any time now. Afternoons seem to be relying on AP. Which, at the moment, is me. Times has a couple of men on the way and I’m standing by for them. I’m a stringman for the Times. Stringman for damn near everything, come to that. A stringman—”

  “Mr. Foster,” Roy Strothers said, and his voice was low, with just a hint of impatience in it, “I’m forty-five years old. I’ve been a newspaperman for more than twenty of them. I know what a string-man is.”

  And then, suddenly, Clayton Foster laughed. His laughter was unexpectedly gay.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We go to press tomorrow night. Getting the run on the two last sections started this afternoon. It’s a smalltown weekly, Mr. Strothers … Mrs. Martin. This time every week I get jumpy about it.”

  “I always get jumpy,” Strothers said. “It’s a jumpy occupation. The feel of the town? You’ll know, if anybody.”

  “Jumpy too,” Foster said. “And don’t I know. Last issue, we ran a story about the club on the front page. And about the opposition to it. About this open letter from the Preservation Association. See that, either of you?”

  “Both of us,” Ann said. “There was one of them in my mailbox yesterday. I’ve shown it to Roy.”

  “Impartial, our story was,” Clayton Foster said. “Only impartiality isn’t prized very much most of the time. Every group wants a newspaper to be impartial on its side. Also, I wrote an editorial, same edition. Favored the club. As—what did I say?—as an experiment in brotherhood. Walt Brinkley jumped me about that. Said that ‘brotherhood’ had got to be a mushy word. Said it was a pity, but there it was. Very interested in words, the professor is.”

  “Others jumped you for other reasons?” Roy Strothers asked the thin, vibrating man.

  “You’re damned right. Cancellations of subscriptions. Letters from the ones who always write letters, but more of them. Telephone calls. Some of them from people who’ve known all along I’m a Communist. That I’ve tried to cover it up by taking a stand against this black power thing, but that now I’ve shown my true colors.”

  “None for you? In favor of this club?”

  “Some. Quite a few, actually. One thing I tell myself. People who are civilized—tolerant—they’re not the ones who write letters. Make telephone calls. Which, before you say it, is being impartial on my side. The way—” He broke off and looked rather sharply at Strothers and Ann Martin.

  “You too,” he said. “This documentary which stirred up the dear old Southland. Not much of which got to see it, of course. You both worked on that?”

  “Yes,” Strothers said. “Very impartial, we thought it was.”

  Foster laughed again.

  “You take the point,” he said. “It’s sharper for the editor of a small-town weekly. On the other hand, our readers forget. Something else comes up. Traffic light at Main and Clinton? Waste of the town’s money? Or vital to our growing community? Extension of Interstate Seventy-six through the west part of the township? Is the Sentinel to stand idly by?” He paused again. “A lot of clichés in our trade, Mr. Strothers,” he said. “Coming in and, I’m afraid, going out.”

  But just now it was the interracial club?

  Just now it certainly was. There had been an open hearing the week before, held by the Zoning Board of Appeals. Clayton Foster had covered it; it had been, he told them, a doozy. Most of those who spoke, and in a good many cases yelled, had been against the club. “Talked like this open letter from the Preservation Association, only a lot more so, some of them. Talked about black power. Talked, one or two of them, about ‘niggers.’ Not a word one often hears around here. But, again, it’s the violent ones who go to town meetings, usually. The moderates stay at home and look at TV.”

  “Nobody for it?”

  “A few. A chance for the Town of Wellwood to take a stand for decency and tolerance. Faith Powers, the poor dear, said something like that.”

  “The board itself?”

  “Took it under advisement, of course. Thanked everybody for their interest, Sam Bennington did. He’s the board’s chairman. Said that he knew that if a few rather extreme statements had been made, they were made in the heat of controversy and represented only the deep concern of the speakers for the town’s welfare. Very soothing man, Sam can be when he wants to.”

  “Will the club get its permit, do you think?”

  Clayton Foster shrugged his thin shoulders, a little elaborately. He said he didn’t know, couldn’t make any informed guess.

  “Five men on the board,” he said. “All Republicans, of course, or they wouldn’t be there. All conservative in outlook. Probably all five of them voted for Goldwater. Would again if they had a chance. This Election District went for him, incidentally. A bit lonely, even in Westchester.”

  “That will determine the board’s attitude? This conservatism. Desire to keep things the way they’ve always been?”

  “That,” Foster said, “is what I don’t know. They’re all, I think, damned honest men. Of course, it’s true that none of them, as far as I know, owns property near the Craig estate, where the club will be. They’re all interested in the town, or they wouldn’t be on the board, which has these meetings at eight o’clock in the evening. Sam himself likes a late dinner.”

  “Somebody,” Ann said, “dumped garbage on our driveway last night. And let the air out of our car’s tires. Some people in North Wellwood play rough, don’t they?”

  “Some in every town,” Foster said. “Our share of riffraff. See the Sentinel’s police log. You tell the police?”

  “Inspector Heimrich,” Ann said, and was told it was a job for the locals. Not that they could be expected to do much, except perhaps to talk to a few of the resident hoodlums. Foster asked Ann for details, and was given them, and made notes. She told him about the two telephone calls, apparently intended for different people.

  “Don’t get that,” Foster said. He looked thoughtfully at the ceiling.

  It fell on him.

  The ceiling fell on Clayton Foster, sitting at his desk. It fell to its own crackle and brittle bang and to the crash of an explosion. The low brick building shook violently. Glass clattered to the floor from the two windows in the office. The floor itself swayed under them; Foster’s typewriter stand shook itself violently and crashed over, the typewriter thudding heavily on the heaving floor. A second section of plaster fell from the ceiling, crumbling as it fell. A solid piece of it banged, for a moment numbingly, on Ann’s right shoulder.

  Foster slumped on his desk, and blood began to run from his bald head.

  Strothers went toward him, but before he could take the two steps across the room, Foster sat up. He said, “All right.” He didn’t sound it.

  The door to the office had sprung open with the blast. Beyond it there was the sound of feet pounding on floor boards, and a woman screamed, her scream high and shaking.

  Foster started to pull himself up from the desk and a heavy-set man with blood on his hands ran into the office. He wore a square c
ap, folded from newspaper. He said, “Jesus Christ, Clay. Jesus Christ! I switched on Number Two and Jesus Christ!”

  “The others in the pressroom?”

  “O.K., I guess. Blast knocked Billy down, but he got up again. Got up and got an extinguisher because some paper caught. But he got it out. Only, Clay, the press is sure as hell a mess. You’re bleeding, Clay.”

  Clayton Foster looked down at the top of his desk and blood was dripping on it—dripping on broken plaster, into plaster dust.

  “Well damned if I’m not,” Foster said, and got a handkerchief out of a pocket and began dabbing his head with it. Then he said, “You two?” to Ann and Strothers. Ann had her left hand clasped on her right shoulder.

  “All right,” she said, and Strothers said, “Not a scratch. Looks like being a booby trap, doesn’t it?”

  Foster began to spin the dial on his telephone. After a moment he said, “Teddy? Clay Foster. Somebody’s just blown us up.”

  Forniss was in the booth for more than fifteen minutes, and Heimrich waited at the table and said, when asked, that yes, he could do with some hot coffee. The waiter looked gloomily surprised but said, “Right away, Inspector,” and went to get hot coffee.

  Forniss came out of the telephone booth and, when he was in Heimrich’s line of vision, began to nod his head. He came to the table and sat at it. He picked up the coffeepot and shook it and put it down again.

  “More’s coming,” Heimrich told him. “I take it your friend was still on the paper?”

  “City editor, now,” Forniss said. “And knows quite a bit about our client, if he is our client. Nagle. Seems …”

  It seemed that Aaron Nagle was, along with two other men, under indictment for a murder—a fatal beating which the Missouri State Police were calling murder—committed in a small town in extreme southern Missouri. The victim had been the minister of the Methodist Church. He had been active in the civil rights movement. He had preached about it. He had also joined a “freedom march” in the deeper South.

  “Deeper?” Heimrich said. “Missouri’s a border state, isn’t it?”

  “Asked about that,” Forniss said. “Seems there’s this panhandle. Stretches down the Mississippi for a hell of a long ways, Langdon tells me. Langdon’s the guy I know. Runs farther south than Kentucky. Southern state line, he says, is about the latitude of Nashville, Tennessee. Langdon says they call the panhandle ‘Little Dixie.’ Missouri, he says, was one of the first former slave states to desegregate its schools. Proud of that, most of the state is. But this Little Dixie section is sore as hell. The man who was killed lived in a town about as far south as you can get and stay in the state.”

  The clergyman who had been killed had been a native of the panhandle, but had been educated outside it. He had asked for assignment to the church in his home town. He was married and the father of a small son. He had been killed in the parsonage, where he had been baby-sitting and working on his next Sunday’s sermon. His wife had been at choir practice. He had been beaten to death, apparently at about nine o’clock of an early spring evening. His name had been Lester Brown. He—

  Forniss was interrupted by a harsh hooting which seemed to fill the room. It was a rasping, mechanical sound, blasting at fixed intervals.

  “Local fire department summoning its volunteers,” Heimrich said. “Go ahead, Charlie.”

  Brown had reported to the sheriff’s office the receipt of several threatening letters, telling him to get out of town or else. They were anonymous. They contained, in addition to threats against Brown, threats against his wife. There had also been a number of telephone calls. Brown had not thought they came from local people; thought the accent different. “They talk Southern down there, Langdon says. Whoever called Brown didn’t.”

  “Nagle? How did they tie him in?”

  That was not very clear, according to Forniss’s city editor. The state police had taken over; they were clamming up. They had, evidently, got enough for an indictment against Nagle and two other men. One of the men had been a local farm worker. The other had been from Arkansas and had been a house painter, not then working at it. Both were in jail. Where Nagle was nobody knew.

  How they tied Nagle into it was, again, a little vague. Langdon had had two reporters working on it. As nearly as they could find out, three men had turned up in the town the day Brown was killed and put up at a motel. They were, or seemed to be, just driving through.

  “Only, Langdon says, through to where? Because this town isn’t on the way to anywhere much.”

  They had been driving a car with Illinois plates. They had stopped at the motel in early afternoon.

  “Apparently,” Forniss said, “somebody recognized Nagle. State police aren’t saying who, maybe because it wouldn’t be healthy for whoever it was to be named. Or the state boys think it wouldn’t. Langdon thinks, from what his reporters found out, it was the man who runs the motel. It was he, all right, who had noted down the license number of the car. He told the reporters he always did.”

  The car had been picked up the next day. It was heading north, toward St. Louis. There were only two men in it. There were two shotguns in the car and a .22 repeating rifle. The men said they had been shooting ducks. There were no ducks in the car.

  They did not deny they had been at the motel the night before. They had checked in early in the afternoon because they had been up before dawn waiting—unsuccessfully, it appeared—for a flight of ducks. Subsequently, it had been established that the unemployed house painter from Arkansas was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

  “They must,” Heimrich said, “have had a good deal more than they’re telling to get an indictment, wouldn’t you think, Charlie?”

  Charles Forniss said, “Yep.” Then he said, “One thing Langdon’s reporters found out, the letters the Reverend Brown got were typewritten. Could be the type matched up with something. And could be one of the men they caught did some talking. Anyway, they want Mr. Nagle.”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said, “so do we, I think. Or Mr. Pederson. Who—it could be, couldn’t it?—didn’t want Mrs. Powers to put the finger on him. Ask him where he was last night at about eleven.”

  There was a small telephone switchboard in the lobby and Mrs. Sally Lambert was sitting at it. Certainly, there was a telephone in Mr. Pederson’s room. There were telephones in all the rooms. But Mr. Pederson did not like to be disturbed when he was working.

  “Afraid we’ll have to bother him all the same,” Heimrich said.

  “He won’t like it,” Mrs. Lambert said. “Came here to get away from telephones.”

  But she put a plug into its hole in the switchboard and moved a lever and, faintly, they could hear a telephone bell ringing above. It rang twice. Mrs. Lambert said, “Looks as if he’s gone out.” She was asked to ring the room again and shrugged at the absurdity of the request and rang the room again. Again there was no answer.

  “Happen to know whether he came down to lunch today?” Heimrich asked her.

  “Come to think of it,” Mrs. Lambert said, “I guess he didn’t. Not when I was in the lobby, anyway. And, of course, I’m there mostly at this time of day.”

  “He lunches here most days? Has since he’s been staying here?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Lambert said. “Meals go with the room.” She looked at Heimrich and intentness settled on her spare face. “I do hope he’s all right,” she said.

  They might, Heimrich told her, go up to his room and see. She didn’t know, really. It was probably just that he didn’t want to be disturbed. “He came here to work. For privacy. He—”

  “Now, Mrs. Lambert,” Heimrich said, “I think we’d better have a look. Another key to his room? Or your passkey?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Lambert said, “I’ll go with you if you really have to make an issue of it.”

  She went ahead of them up the staircase which led from the lobby. She knocked at a door on the second floor and, when there was no response to that, said, “Mr. Peder
son?” in a raised voice. Then she opened the door to a low-ceilinged room.

  There was nobody in the room. There was the odor of cigarette smoke in the room. There was nobody in the small, somewhat antique, bathroom which opened from the room. There was a typewriter table in the room and a chair at it, but there was no typewriter.

  The closet was as empty as the room. Using a handkerchief to cover his hand—not that that really did much good—Heimrich opened the three drawers of a clothes chest. There was nothing in any of the drawers.

  “I hope,” Heimrich said, “that Mr. Pederson didn’t owe you rent, Mrs. Lambert?”

  She was standing in the middle of the room, looking around it as if she expected her missing guest to materialize. She shook her head in answer to Heimrich’s question. She said that Mr. Pederson was paid to the end of the week.

  “Is it usual for guests to pay in advance?” Heimrich asked her. “Guests with luggage? I assume he had luggage?”

  “A suitcase. And a portable typewriter. He wanted to pay in advance. I don’t ask it.”

  Heimrich went to one of the corner room’s two windows and looked out of it. He looked across Main Street. He went to the other and looked down into the inn’s parking lot.

  The police cars he and Forniss had come in were in the lot. There were four other cars.

  If Roy Strothers of the United Broadcasting Network had come in a company car, Heimrich thought, the car probably would have had the network’s name on it. If Henry Pederson—or, naturally, Aaron Nagle—had happened to be looking out the window when Strothers and Ann Martin parked their car and got out of it …

  “I take it,” he said to Mrs. Lambert, “there are back stairs? A way out which wouldn’t take him through the lobby?”

  “I just don’t understand it,” Mrs. Lambert said, speaking to the empty room. “Oh—yes, there are back stairs. And a fire escape, of course. But why ever—”

  Footfalls were heavy on the wooden stairs up from the lobby. A large policeman in uniform appeared in the doorway. He was a young policeman. What seemed to Heimrich a somewhat outsize revolver slapped at his right leg.