The Distant Clue

by Frances

  “Now, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “They sometimes do, naturally. Your stepfather left a sizable estate, Mr. Lenox. I don’t know exactly how much, but several hundred thousand dollars. It goes to you, Mr. Lenox. Except for a specific legacy of five thousand dollars to Miss Vance.”

  They both looked at him then. Scott Lenox’s mouth did, quite literally, open—fall open. And the girl’s eyes widened.

  “My God,” Scott Lenox said. His widely set eyes blinked, twice. “My God,” Scott Lenox added. He regarded Merton Heimrich for some seconds, as if he expected Heimrich to say something further, perhaps that what he had said before was his idea of a joke. Heimrich closed his eyes.

  “And,” Scott said to the girl beside him, “we were wondering how we’d heat the old barn!”

  They might, Heimrich thought, be acting. If Scott Lenox had known before how much he gained by his stepfather’s, his adoptive father’s, death, this would be a time to act—to portray the astonished man.

  “You were thinking you’d have to sell the place?” Heimrich said.

  Scott looked at him again; and, again, there was astonishment in his expression—or, of course, the mimicry of astonishment. He has a face made for acting, Heimrich thought.

  “Sell it?” Scott Lenox repeated. “Out—” He paused for a moment, clearly seeking a phrase. “Out from under the old boy’s memory?” he said, clearly having found one. “After the trouble he went to to have a Lenox here?”

  And, Heimrich thought, he has an actor’s voice. Which, of course, proves nothing.

  “I thought you might,” Heimrich said. “Somebody burned papers here sometime last night,” he said. He pointed toward the blackened area on the drive. “Burned all the papers we had left in your father’s study. Workroom. Somebody broke into the library last night. Ransacked Professor Wingate’s office. Looking for something.”

  They both looked at him.

  “But then,” the girl said, and paused and went on. “It wasn’t the way it looked. They didn’t … just kill each other?”

  “It may not have been the way it was made to look,” Heimrich said.

  “Or,” Scott said, “it’s possible my father had made another will, isn’t it, Captain? Later than the one in Simpson’s office. Leaving his money to somebody else. And that somebody tried to find this later will to destroy it. Burned everything he could lay hands on here to—to obscure the issue. Thought my father might have given the will to Wingate to lock up in the library safe. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  Again, Heimrich thought, the desire, the near compulsion, to anticipate. To start a backfire?

  “Now, Mr. Lenox—” Heimrich began, and was interrupted.

  “For what it’s worth,” Lenox said, “we didn’t come here last night, singly or together, and make a bonfire of the contents of the workroom. We didn’t, singly or together, break into the library, looking for a will.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said.

  “We drove down to Garrison,” Scott Lenox said. “We had dinner at the Bird and Bottle, which is too rich for our blood, but I’d got an advance on a book. We got back to the Center about ten o’clock, and went up to Enid’s apartment and had a nightcap. Because, after hemming and hawing about it, we’d decided we would both like to get married. To each other.”

  “Scott,” Enid said, softly. And she shook her head in resignation. It wasn’t precisely, Heimrich thought, the way a girl likes her engagement to be announced. Scott gave no sign he had heard her.

  “At about a quarter of twelve,” Scott said, “I went downstairs and got into Little Squeaky and drove home. It’s—oh, about half a mile. I got home about midnight and there’s nobody to bear me out because I don’t exactly keep a staff. And—”

  “All right, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes. And, a little to Heimrich’s surprise, Scott Lenox stopped talking.

  Heimrich scanned the map of the area which, as a resident of the area, he carried in his mind. The little stone cottage Scott Lenox rented was to the east of Route 11-F, some half a mile from it on NY 109, which is also Elm Street. It had once been the caretaker’s house, an adjunct of a big house, which had burned down fifty years ago. It was on a slight rise.

  “From your place, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said, “can you see this house?”

  “Before the trees leaf out,” Scott said. “The roof, anyway.” He pointed upward, apparently to show what roof he meant.

  “You could have seen a fire here? At night? Even a small fire shows up at night.”

  Scott Lenox supposed he could have. He had not, if that was what Heimrich was getting at. He had not looked toward Far Top. “I had other things on my mind.” When he said that, his hand tightened on the girl’s shoulder, as he drew her closer against him.

  “When you drove past the library last night,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t notice anything suspicious?”

  “Like a man wearing a mask breaking down the front door? No. And I didn’t stop and do the breaking-in myself.”

  Heimrich said, “All right, Mr. Lenox,” and let his voice indicate weariness.

  “He’s finished with us,” Scott Lenox told his girl. “We’re a waste of time. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

  “For now,” Heimrich said. “I’ll hold onto the binoculars, Mr. Lenox.”

  Scott Lenox said, “Why not?” and slipped the leather case from his shoulder and held it out. Heimrich put the strap over his own shoulder. He wondered why Lenox had not said “Why?” instead of “Why not?” He watched while the slim, tall girl and the much taller, rangy man walked to the Jeep and got into it, and he watched Lenox drive the Jeep away. It did squeak a good deal.

  Heimrich climbed to the roof platform and trained the binoculars toward the south, toward Van Brunt Center. The girl had been looking that way; Scott Lenox had been pointing something out to her.

  When he got the binoculars focused, Heimrich could see a good deal of Van Brunt Center—could see cars parked as people finished their week-end shopping, could see Asa Purvis directing traffic at The Corners. It was amazing how close the glasses brought the village. He swung the glasses so that, over treetops, he could see Route 11-F, this side the Center, and the cars on it. After a minute or two he saw the Jeep. The girl seemed to be doing the talking now. Probably, Heimrich thought, she was telling her man he talked too much; probably, he thought, they would be very different people, alone together.

  He could, Heimrich found, see quite clearly the little stone cottage Scott Lenox lived in. He could bring it close, and the May leafage on the trees around it did not hide the small, square house. Of course, looking down over trees is a quite different thing from looking up through them.

  From this vantage point, with these glasses, Homer Lenox could have watched the comings and goings of his adopted son. If, of course, he had had reason to. He could have seen, probably identified, any visitors Scott Lenox had, at least during daylight. There was a good deal of daylight, now in May.

  Heimrich put the glasses down and considered this, and found that consideration got him nowhere in particular. He put the glasses up again, and swept them around—over the river, on which another tug was methodically pushing barges, but this time downstream; across the river toward West Point to the south; north again to sweep across the Mitchie estate. The swimming pool was full of Mitchies, splashing. Not the older John Mitchie. It wasn’t time yet for the older John Mitchie.

  Homer Lenox could have seen a good many things from the top of his house, Heimrich thought—a good many things in addition to the birds he might have been watching. There did not, in fact, seem to be very many birds to watch. Probably this was not a good time for them; probably, like sensible birds, they were taking afternoon naps.

  I’m wasting time, Heimrich thought; I’m finding an excuse not to get on with it—get on with the reading of Homer Lenox’s interminable manuscript, the spidery notations in the ledgers of old Dr. Van Brunt (1865-1935). He lifted the gl
asses again and took another look at Van Brunt Center. The Jeep was standing at The Corners, where Elm Street crossed Van Brunt Avenue. It was waiting to make a left turn. As Heimrich watched, Asa Purvis stopped northbound traffic to let it turn, and it went east in Elm Street. It turned off at the little stone cottage and stopped, and Lenox and his girl got out of it, and went into the cottage. If Homer Lenox had had an inclination to spy on his adopted son—

  Even that which is entirely improbable cannot be entirely ignored. Men in their sixties are not necessarily immune to temptation, and Enid Vance was unquestionably tempting. Tempted men are not immune to jealousy. Violence can grow out of jealousy. Even that which is entirely improbable—

  Heimrich left Homer Lenox’s observation point and, downstairs, put Homer Lenox’s spyglasses on a table in the entrance hall. He went out and closed the door, and locked it and put the key in his pocket. He drove to Van Brunt Center and u-turned—illegally—in Van Brunt Avenue and parked in front of the shop which had the words “susan faye, fabrics” lettered in the lower left-hand corner of its show window. He parked behind a Rolls Royce, with a uniformed chauffeur sitting at its wheel. (And smoking a cigarette, with quick drags; snatching a cigarette in the manner of a man who is, or hopes he is, getting away with something.)

  Mrs. Timothy Cunningham, of the Cunninghams, was inside the shop. Heimrich could see her through the window, and see Susan. Susan was putting fabric samples into a large envelope. She handed it to Mrs. Cunningham, and Mrs. Cunningham started toward the door. The chauffeur took a final, almost desperate, drag, and snapped out of the car, threw the cigarette away and stepped on it, and was around the car—still exhaling vestiges of smoke—in time to open the door of the Rolls for Mrs. Timothy Cunningham, who was bearing what Merton Heimrich had learned to recognize as “swatches.”

  The front room of Susan’s shop was empty, except for Colonel, who was lying in the middle of it, enjoying air conditioning. Merton Heimrich pushed aside a length of gay print which hung as a curtain and went into the rear room. Susan, in a smock with splotches of paint on it, was standing in front of a sheet of drawing paper tacked to cardboard, set in an easel. She was looking at it, and said, “ ’Lo, darling,” without turning. There were splotches of color on the drawing paper, as well as on Susan’s smock.

  Michael was sitting in a corner of the room, where the light was good. He wore the uniform of the Van Brunt Vikings. He was reading C. S. Forester’s Beat to Quarters. He was also drinking Coca-Cola from a bottle.

  “I don’t think it jells,” Susan said, and put a drop sheet over the painted paper. “And I can’t see the repeat, either.” She turned, then, and looked up at Merton Heimrich. She looked at him for some seconds. “For you, either?” she said.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Doesn’t jell for me either, Susan. Did you know that John Mitchie—the older John Mitchie—is a painter?”

  She did not ask him why he asked that, which was, he thought fleetingly, probably as well. He supposed it was because, for the second time in a few hours, he had come on someone looking fixedly at color on a flat surface.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “Abstractions. He had a couple of canvases in the Center Show last fall. Very bright, hard colors.”

  “Good?”

  “My dear,” Susan said. “I do a few fabric designs. I’m in the rag business. I—”

  “Are they good? When you’re through being modest?”

  “Frankly,” Susan said, “I suppose not, Merton. But, one of the things in the show—well, there was a sort of excitement in it. And … a kind of turmoil. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Did you know Scott Lenox and Enid Vance are …” He paused, to select a wording.

  “My dear,” Susan said. “I told you. ‘Know’ is too strong a word, of course. Nobody knows about things like that, except the people themselves.” (And not always the people themselves, Susan thought. It had taken this big man of hers—)

  “They’re going to get married,” Heimrich said. “Hello, Michael.”

  Michael said, “ ’Lo, Dad,” but without removing his eyes from his book.

  “This Mrs. Anstruther of yours—” Heimrich said, and Susan said, “Not of mine, dear. Not at all of mine.”

  “—hinted there might be something between the girl and Homer Lenox?”

  “She’s a great one to hint,” Susan told him. “She spends her life hinting.”

  “Reliable hints?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Susan said. “Of course, if one hints in all directions one can’t always miss, I suppose. But old Homer and Enid—he could have been her grandfather.” She paused a moment “With proper application all along the line,” she added. “Homer had no reputation as a goat that I know of.” She looked up at Heimrich, and raised eyebrows in enquiry over widely spaced gray eyes.

  “Young Lenox inherits quite a bit from his stepfather,” Heimrich said. “The house and land, and more money than I’d supposed. Add, say, a quarrel over the girl. Young Lenox telling old Lenox to lay off the girl. Perhaps being threatening about it. He’s a nervous sort of person, or seems to be. The old man pulling a gun. . .”

  Heimrich stopped. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “It would be simple that way,” Susan said. “Nice and simple that way.”

  He couldn’t, Heimrich told her, reject a solution merely because it was a simple solution.

  “Of course not,” Susan said, not letting an inward smile emerge. Or accept the obvious, either, because it is always simple to accept the obvious. Not this large man of hers, who was so convinced he had a plodding mind. “Let’s shut up shop and go home,” Susan said. “Pretend we get Saturday afternoons off, like other people. Sit on our little hill and look at our big river.”

  VIII

  Michael, still clad as a Van Brunt Viking, practiced his pitching, threw a baseball at an oblong of crisscrossed plastic, set in a metal frame. From this the ball bounced, so that fielding practice also was provided. Colonel assisted in this last, putting himself in a position to be fallen over. Now and then, Colonel caught the ball himself, and took it off under a bush to growl over and chew on.

  Susan, changed to shirt and shorts, extended long and browning legs into the afternoon sunshine.

  Merton Heimrich, sitting in the shade, chewed on, and to some extent growled over, The Families of Putnam County, New York, by Homer Lenox. He was into the nineteenth century, and familiar names had begun to appear. He was, for example, finding out rather more than he wanted to about the early Van Brunts. The Jacksons had appeared some time before, as had the Mitchies. He had learned that the Mitchie males were John, up to three, and then James, also up to three. Obediah Mears had indeed been a general in the Revolutionary War, but did not seem to have been an especially important general. He had been born in New Hampshire; had moved to the Hudson Valley only in 1791. A newcomer, Mears. The Jacksons had been here since 1700; the Van Brunts went back to the middle seventeenth century. The Uptons had been present hereabouts since 1760.

  Lenox’s ordering of yellowed facts was chronological, so that the families appeared and disappeared. From time to time, Heimrich put the manuscript down and looked at the river. These people, he thought, had lived once—had farmed and fought and traded hereabouts; had eaten largely and drunk beyond ready belief and had loved, some of them rather widely. Life had swirled around them, and they had swirled with it—tumbled head over heels into graves, as into beds.

  “The general’s second son, Matthew, was killed in a duel in April of 1799 by Stuart Van Druyten, Esq., the fourth son of Friedrich Van Druyten. The cause of the duel has receded into the mists of time. Pistols were used.”

  The mists of time, Heimrich thought. I am plodding, fogged to my chin, through the mists of time.

  “The original Mitchie mansion, a frame structure of Southern Colonial design, was burned in 1778, presumably by elements loyal to the King. It was replaced some years later by a field stone structure whic
h still stands. The valley lands between it and Far Top, the Lenox mansion erected some years earlier, were acquired by John Mitchie, Esq., only son of James Mitchie III, much later in the nineteenth century. The area had been the property of the Lenox family for several generations.”

  One read and learned, but not much. Heimrich put the manuscript down again, and sighed loudly enough to be heard. Susan turned to look at him.

  “I know it’s early yet,” Heimrich said. “But—”

  “After all,” Susan said, “it is Saturday. I’ll go get—”

  But the telephone rang in the house. Susan said, “No!” with indignation. Merton Heimrich went toward the house, taking long strides—walking, he hoped, out of past centuries.

  He was gone some time, and returned carrying a tray—a tray with an ice bucket on it, and glasses, and bottles, including two of Coca-Cola. Susan Heimrich permitted herself a sigh of relief.

  “Nothing important,” Heimrich said, and began to put ice into glasses. Michael abandoned pitching practice and approached, looking thirsty. Colonel followed him, looking deserted. So much absorption of soft drinks probably is bad for him, Susan thought. Probably does lamentable things to his teeth. Or to his insides. He’s a healthy boy, all the same.

  “Forniss,” Heimrich said. “They haven’t found anybody at the New York library who remembers anything about young Lenox. Not a chance in a thousand they will. A man named Ned, who is the doorman at the older Mitchie’s club in New York, remembers that Mitchie arrived there Friday at a little after twelve and left his car to be parked. Chances are, of course, he remembers it because it was Friday, and on Fridays it always happens. The real estate agent who has offices on the third floor of the Van Brunt Annex, where Enid has a flat and an office on the fourth floor, doesn’t remember hearing anything above him Friday morning, or Friday afternoon, for that matter. On the other hand, he doesn’t hear much any more, since she got an electric typewriter. He used to be able to hear her standard typewriter thudding through the ceiling.”