18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Do you believe that?” Ann asked him. “Really believe that?”

  “That it was outsiders, yes,” Bennington said. “Most certainly I believe that. Why, I don’t know. That’s a matter for the police, isn’t it? That it had anything to do with the Sentinel’s support of the proposed club I doubt very much. We’re not violent people around here, Mrs. Martin. Quiet people who want to live quietly.”

  “Mr. Bennington,” Ann said, “my husband and I moved in yesterday to spend the summer in a quiet place. I met a charming, gentle woman and she was shot to death. Somebody dumped garbage at the foot of our driveway. Somebody let the air out of the tires of my husband’s car. Roy Strothers and I are talking to the publisher of the local newspaper and the newspaper blows up. Living quietly?”

  “Matter for the local police,” Bennington said, and again spoke soothingly. “Or for this Inspector Heimrich. I gather you’ve met him. Very competent man, from what I hear. Just why did you come to me, Mrs. Martin? I’m an elderly small-town lawyer.”

  “And,” Ann said, “chairman of this zoning review board. Which will decide whether to give the club a permit.”

  “So?”

  “Mr. Bennington, just how widespread is the opposition to the club? And just how violent is it? You’ve read this letter against it. Signed by something called the North Wellwood Preservation Association. Exclamatory, the letter is. And not really about what it pretends to be about.”

  Bennington made loose fists of long, strong hands, and put them under his chin.

  “I’ve read the letter,” he said, and spoke slowly. “The broadside. I can guess, in general, who circulated it. I won’t give you any names. But, for the most part, people who have moved in around here in the last year or so. Very aggressive, new people tend to be. Want to change things. Shake things up.”

  “You’ve got letters about this club? From these new people? Had pressure put on you?”

  “Letters,” Bennington said. “Telephone calls. Oh, I said there was opposition to the club, Mrs. Martin. There was opposition to Jay Noble’s starting a riding school for kids. Too near a main road. Horses might get loose and do damage.”

  “Black horses?” Ann said, a good deal to her own surprise. And, also to her surprise, Bennington laughed. His laughter was brief. He said, when he had finished with it, that he doubted whether the color of the horses had much to do with it.

  “You equate this riding school and the interracial club, Mr. Bennington? Expect me to believe you do?”

  He seemed to consider that. But finally he shook his head.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “this is rather more extreme.”

  “The letters you got. They were unpleasant?”

  “Some of them. The ones not signed.”

  “Did other members of the board get similar letters?”

  He considered again.

  “Roy Strothers is going around and asking them,” Ann said. “I’m going to one of the others myself.”

  “Residents,” Bennington said, “are entitled to make their views known to their elected representatives. Yes, I think all five of us have got letters. And telephone calls.”

  “All against the club?”

  “Not all. Most, yes.”

  “Mr. Bennington, will the club get its permit?”

  Bennington shook his head but not as an answer; as a deprecation of so ill-advised a question.

  “The matter is under consideration,” he said. “We—”

  Then he interrupted himself and looked at Ann with sudden interest.

  “If the application is denied,” he said, “it will make a better story, won’t it, Mrs. Martin? Backlash reaches into a Northern rural community. Impartial survey, of course. Like the one you worked on about conditions in the deep South. Impartial with a tut-tut?”

  “Impartial. If it’s done at all.”

  “Make us look like bigots,” Bennington said. “Prejudiced small-towners. No better, really, than what in the South, I understand, they call red-necks. Not a pleasant prospect for those of us who live here. Who are fond of our little, quiet backwater. To be made, come down to it, objects of ridicule. Even of contempt.”

  “Not by intention,” Ann said. “We don’t sensationalize.”

  “At best,” Bennington said, “it would be a disruptive thing. I hope it isn’t done. I very much hope it isn’t.”

  “At UBN,” Ann said, “I’m low woman on the totem pole. A man named Leffing will make the final decision. After, I suppose, a good many conferences. It will cost the network money, if they decide to go ahead with it. It won’t, at a guess, pick up a sponsor. But—”

  This time she did manage to lean a little forward in the engulfing chair.

  “If they do decide to go ahead with it,” she said, “will you be interviewed? In front of a camera? Saying whatever you want to say, of course. Not to me. To a correspondent. Saying, if that’s the way you feel, that it’s much ado about nothing?”

  He did not immediately answer. He looked intently at her across the desk.

  “You are a key figure,” Ann said.

  “There are more important figures,” he said. “Men better able to speak for the community. Larry Finch, for one.”

  “There’s only one chairman of the zoning board,” Ann said. “Oh, we’ll interview others, if we interview anyone. Mr. Finch among them, I should think. I met him for a moment yesterday with Mrs. Powers. She said—”

  She had hardly known Faith Powers. It’s odd, she thought, that my voice should break when I speak of her.

  “That he owned half the town,” Ann said, her voice steady again. “He laughed. Said it was not more than three eighths.”

  “Larry’s a very influential man,” Bennington said. “As to whether I’d be interviewed if, unfortunately, it comes to that. Yes, I suppose so. And say, probably, that it is a trivial disagreement among neighbors.”

  “Whatever you want to say.”

  She pulled herself up out of the deep chair and it was a little like pulling herself out of quicksand. She stood in front of the desk and Samuel Bennington, very long and lean, stood up behind it. Ann said it was good of him to have given her so much of his time and he said the meaningless words, “Not at all, Mrs. Martin.”

  “Speaking of Mrs. Powers,” Ann said. “This is not for the network. At least, I don’t think it is. You were her lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ever say anything to you about investing in the club?”

  “No.”

  “Say anything about the club at all?”

  “Oh, she was in favor of it. She said that at a hearing we had about it. It was….” And he hesitated. “The sort of cause Faith believed in. She may, I suppose, have thought of investing in it. They’ll need a lot of money to get started.”

  “She didn’t, though, say anything to you about investing?”

  “I told you that. No. But….” Again he hesitated. “She did, a few weeks ago, ask me what I knew about Thomas Peters. He’ll head up the club corporation, if the permit goes through. He’s a Negro, as probably you know.”

  “You told her?”

  “What everybody knows about him. That he is a very able lawyer, as well as being a celebrated one. That I believe—that everybody believes, I think—that he is a man of complete integrity.”

  XI

  M. L. Heimrich had advanced in rank, but rank did not carry the privilege of a larger office. INSPECTOR HEIMRICH was on the same door which had been lettered CAPTAIN HEIMRICH. The door opened to the same small office, and on this latish afternoon in latish May it was a very hot office. “Unseasonably warm,” the forecast had been. “Chance of late afternoon or evening thundershowers.” It was almost always unseasonably warm in the office, whatever the season.

  There were more papers in the IN basket on the desk of Inspector Heimrich than Captain Heimrich had had to cope with. Heimrich took off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves and began to cope. He also began to answe
r the telephone. The District Attorney of Westchester County had been trying to get him all day. There was not enough for a first degree indictment in the case of the State of New York vs. Alexander Broskin. Maybe not even second degree, unless Heimrich could come up with more. And as for the case of …

  It took time. It all took time. He could well, Heimrich thought, have spent the day at his desk. Another time, he would delegate, as an inspector should. There was no lack of competent men to handle cases. Charlie Forniss, for example, was a highly competent detective. He also knew somebody almost everywhere. He had got rather more about a man named Aaron Nagle and the murder of a clergyman in a small Missouri town than had come through channels. The Missouri State Police were inclined to be cryptic.

  A technician came into the office with four registration cards, from which prints had been lifted. There were far too many prints. “Pawed over,” the technician said, with disapproval. Some, because they recurred on all the cards, probably were those of the inn’s staff. “Some are yours, Inspector,” the technician said. Prints which were clear enough to read had been coded through to Washington. Also to the headquarters, in Jefferson City, of the Missouri State Police.

  “File them,” Heimrich told the technician. “Hope for the best, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy sighed. Heimrich’s telephone rang.

  Ray Crowley had not been able to talk to Donald Powers, nephew of Faith Powers, chief beneficiary under her will. Donald Powers was, according to Mrs. Powers, on a business trip for his firm. He had been gone for a week and was not expected back for another. Of course Mrs. Powers knew where he was. He was in Chicago. He had telephoned her from there last night. “Donny’s an angel about calling me. He never forgets.”

  “Lady’s pregnant,” Crowley said. “Probably he’s worried about her. She says it was about eleven when he called last night. Also that he did not dial through direct, but made a person to person. Operator said, ‘Long distance. Mrs. Donald Powers? Chicago calling.’ So I guess that’s where he was, all right.”

  “Sounds all right,” Heimrich said. “We can check it out if it seems worth while, naturally. Mrs. Powers pleased that money’s coming?”

  “Don’t seem to live as if they needed it,” Crowley said. “Hadn’t heard about her husband’s aunt. I’m pretty sure she hadn’t. Seemed broken up. Quite a bit broken up. Said she’d try right away to get her husband on the telephone, although she hated to tell him, because he and Aunt Faith had always been so close. About the appraisal of Arthur Powers …”

  Crowley had gone from the Donald Powers apartment on North Main Street to the county courthouse and the estate tax office. Appraisal of the estate of Arthur Powers, deceased, two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars. House appraised for tax purposes at fifty thousand.

  “Do I go back and join up with the lieutenant?”

  “Try to get hold of him and see if he wants you,” Heimrich said. “If he doesn’t at the moment, come in. I can give you a nice long telephone job, Ray. And maybe a trip into town. Car rental agencies. Names of—but I’ll give you those if Charlie doesn’t need you and you come in. Then—”

  A trooper came into the office. Lieutenant Forniss was calling. Heimrich told him to connect Detective Crowley and Lieutenant Forniss through the switchboard, then to put the lieutenant through. The trooper said, “Sir,” which was a tribute to advanced rank. A week or so ago he would have said, “O.K., M. L.” Heimrich told Crowley he wouldn’t have to try to get hold of Lieutenant Forniss and told him why; waited, then, until clicking told him the connection had been made. He hung up.

  Almost at once the telephone on his desk rang and he said, “Go ahead, Charlie.” Charles Forniss went ahead.

  The boys from the bomb squad had got to North Wellwood. Two sticks of dynamite, wired into the press so that starting the press detonated the dynamite. Common form of booby trap very competently installed by, at a guess, people who had done the same thing before. Probably in automobiles; it was the same kind of job. The press was pretty much a wreck; Clayton Foster hoped his insurance would cover it. That week’s Sentinel would be printed partly on the undamaged press, partly on the presses of a friend of Foster’s who published the Glenville Record, across the state line in Connecticut. Foster had, at the insistence of the local police—“sergeant named Hunter; seems he and Foster are friends”—gone to his doctor about his head. Only scalp wounds, but one of them needed a couple of stitches.

  Fingerprint men had come with the bomb squad. They had found nothing worth their trouble at the Sentinel plant. Smudges around the switch; more smudges at the back door, which had been jimmied. The jimmying of the door had also been a competent job. Nobody had found anything to indicate when the booby trap had been set. The night before seemed most likely. Hunter had not been able to find anybody who had seen or heard anything around the newspaper plant during the night.

  “At the end of the street,” Forniss said. “Nothing behind it but a field.”

  “Yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I noticed that.”

  The fingerprint men had gone from the Sentinel to the Maples Inn and given the treatment to the rooms occupied by Harry Pederson and by the three fishermen with whom, and it seemed only with whom, Pederson had struck up an acquaintance. They had got prints in the expected places in all three rooms. They had, as always, got too many prints.

  “Lady who runs the inn, this Mrs. Lambert,” Forniss said. “She’s annoyed as all hell, M. L. Antagonistic. Think we were getting ready to tear the place down.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “Wants to rent the rooms. Says if she doesn’t make money this time of year when is she going to make it? I told her when the boys had finished she could go ahead and clean the rooms up and rent them. O.K.?”

  “Now, Charlie. Naturally.”

  Forniss had gone to three of the five members of the zoning appeals board. The other two were commuters, still in New York or on their way out of it toward Brewster, via the New York Central. He had asked the three, Samuel Bennington being one of them, whether they had got protests against the club, and whether any of them had been violent.

  “Because,” Forniss said, “this blowing up of Foster’s newspaper makes it look like there might be a tie-in. Mrs. Powers did, they all say, make a pitch for the club at this open meeting the board held. Must have been quite a meeting, from what they say.”

  All three had received letters and telephone calls in opposition to the club. Some of the letters and calls were similar, in tone, to the call to arms issued by the North Wellwood Preservation Association. A few of the letters, those anonymous, and one or two postmarked from out of town, were more violent. One or two of the telephone calls, those apparently local—“only you can’t tell any more”—were threatening. One of the board members, a man named Notson, had been told he’d better watch his step if he didn’t want anything to happen to his wife and kids.

  “Notson’s in real estate. Thinks he knows who made that call. A caretaker he fired. Says the man’s a crackpot, which is what he fired him for being. Doesn’t think it really ties in with anything, and could be he’s right.”

  Both Bennington and Notson had been asked the same questions about the pressure being put on them before Forniss got to them—Bennington by Mrs. Martin, Notson by “this side-kick of hers,” Roy Strothers. And when Forniss had left the house of the last man he had found at home, a car marked UNITED BROADCASTING NETWORK had drawn up in front of it and Strothers had got out of the car. He had flipped the approximation of a salute toward Forniss.

  “One thing,” Forniss said. “More a feeling than anything else, M. L. If this network moves in on the town it’s not going to be any too popular. And it’s not going to make Mr. Peters any more popular than he already is, which isn’t very much.”

  “Tell the substation troopers to keep an eye on Peters’s house, you think, Charlie?”

  “Have,” Forniss said. “They would have anyway, probably. Arthur seems to know
his job. And the area.”

  And Forniss knows his, Heimrich thought. It is hard to delegate.

  Forniss had “poked around” the village of North Wellwood, feeling the village out. At the local drugstore, he had bought aspirin he didn’t need, and had said to the clerk, who turned out to be the store’s owner, that he’d heard somebody had tried to blow up the local newspaper. The man had said he’d been afraid something like that might happen. And that it was a hell of a thing.

  Forniss had talked to the postmaster, who also thought the attempt to blow up the Sentinel was a hell of a thing. Forniss had had a drink at the only bar in the town, except for the inn’s bar. The bartender, who was also the owner, had thought it was a hell of a thing about the Sentinel and also about Mrs. Powers. Although he hadn’t held with things Mrs. Powers and that professor had tried to put through when they were on the school board. Newfangled stuff, and he didn’t want his kids subjected to it.

  Forniss had gone to see a local general contractor. There he had asked about the club, which was, he gathered, going to need a lot of work done on it. The contractor had doubted if the club project would go through; had said the town didn’t want it and said other, rougher things. He had also said that if it did, they’d sure as hell get somebody from out of town to do the work. He had also said that it was a hell of a thing about Clay Foster’s press but that maybe Foster had asked for it.

  Forniss had identified himself to the contractor, but not to the others—and there were a good many others—he had talked to as he poked around, getting the feel of things. One of the feelings he had finished with was that he had not needed to say that he was a lieutenant of the state police because that would not have been news to anyone. “Strangers stick out in a place like this.”

  The three fishermen had not stuck out. At the local hardware store Forniss had looked at fishing tackle and talked about—guardedly, since he knew very little of fishing—what luck people had been having along the Croton and in nearby reservoirs. He said three friends of his had been trying their luck around there over the weekend.