The Distant Clue

by Frances

  “Blackmail?”

  It seemed possible.

  “Lots of people cut things out of newspapers,” Susan said. “Recipes. Things about people they know. But there’s usually some sort of a pattern to it, isn’t there? You couldn’t find the pattern?”

  “No pattern,” Heimrich said. “Oh, about people who live hereabouts. But local papers live by what happens to people in their areas.” He paused and looked reflectively over Susan’s head. “By and large,” he said, “I suppose most of the clippings concern people he used to work for.”

  “Which,” Susan said, “is half the town. What people?”

  “The Vances. The Mitchies and the Lenoxes and Van Brunts and poor Miss Shively. Did you know that Leo Armstrong once accused her of slandering him, and threatened legal action? Did you know that Lenox skidded a car off a road years ago and that two people were killed?”

  “The last, yes,” Susan said. “I was a little girl with big ears. Scott Lenox’s mother and Enid’s father and—there was whispering. There’s always whispering. I was a little girl with great big ears. Mrs. Vance had gone to Reno and got a divorce and now Vance and that pretty Mrs. Lenox get killed in an accident and her husband was driving and wasn’t hurt and—Susan! Don’t you know it isn’t polite to listen to what doesn’t concern you?”

  He laughed. He said he wished he had known her when she was a little girl with big ears.

  “Probably a dreadful little girl,” Susan said. “Merton! You don’t think—It would be so incredibly farfetched.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh, bitterness stores well, in some people. Scott Lenox—well, I suspect he’s a rather involved man.”

  The dear, Susan thought. The dear uninvolved, “aging hippopotamus.” What Susan said was, “But—” and that in a tone of great doubt.

  “There’s this,” Heimrich said. “People—sane people—have to overcome a resistance to kill. With some it’s harder to overcome. Some seem not to have much trouble. But if you want to kill somebody for some simple reason—say for money—it’s easier if you can make yourself believe he’s the sort of person who ought to be killed, anyway. If, say, you can convince yourself he was a murderer himself, and has it coming to him.”

  “You did get something then? You said you hadn’t.”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “Because I don’t think I did, really. I think I’m telling myself little stories because I’m too dull-witted to see the real story. Oh, I’ll ask young Lenox about it. Ask the girl. But—” He spread his hands. “I don’t think,” he said, and spoke slowly, “that Scott Lenox gives much of a damn about money. If he did he’d be in another business.”

  “Everybody would rather have money than not have money,” Susan said. “It’s a law of nature. But you’re probably right. There wasn’t anything else?”

  “Dozens of other things,” Heimrich said. “An account of a bottled gas explosion, prefaced by half a column explaining how that particular kind of gas couldn’t explode. A picture of young Johnny Three very muscular on the edge of a swimming pool. A long anguished story about the effects of a drought throughout the county. In 1910, that was. One of the few he bothered to date.” He lighted another cigarette. Unquestionably, he was smoking too much.

  Susan repeated the date and there was in her inflection that incredulity which comes into the voices of those who speak of a time remote and yet, unbelievably, within the memory of those still living. Heimrich smiled tenderly, thinking how young she really was.

  “He was a gardener,” Susan said. “Dry spells are important to gardeners. He lived through that one. Watched things drying up. He was very old, wasn’t he?”

  “In his middle eighties apparently,” Heimrich said.

  “He would have known Homer Lenox when Homer was quite a little boy,” Susan said. “And John Mitchie the second. Worked for their fathers. Saw the boys grow up. And Johnny Three grow up. And now Johnny Three’s children—Michael?”

  She raised her voice, on that. They had breakfasted on the terrace, and she called toward the house. Colonel thumped the tail which always seemed inadequate to Merton Heimrich and, he suspected, to Colonel himself, on the terrace flagging.

  From the house, Michael Faye said, “Yes, mother?” in his high, clear voice.

  “Are you getting ready for Sunday school?”

  “Yes, mother,” Michael said, patience in his voice.

  Heimrich drove up to a little stone house, near the highway, and parked his car and got out of his car. He faced an open door and heard the sound of a typewriter and looked into a room. Scott Lenox, wearing shorts, was sitting at the typewriter and pounding keys, and if he had heard a car stop, heard its door open and clunk closed, he gave no sign of it. Heimrich waited a moment and said, “Good morning, Mr. Lenox,” and the tall, lean man—a better muscled man than Heimrich had thought him—gave no sign of hearing that. Heimrich went up to the open door and reached inside and knocked on it.

  Heimrich drove up to a little stone house, near the highway, and parked his car and got out of his car. He faced an open door and heard the sound of a typewriter and looked into a room. Scott Lenox, wearing shorts, was sitting at the typewriter and pounding keys, and if he had heard a car stop, heard its door open and clunk closed, he gave no sign of it. Heimrich waited a moment and said, “Good morning, Mr. Lenox,” and the tall, lean man—a better muscled man than Heimrich had thought him—gave no sign of hearing that. Heimrich went up to the open door and reached inside and knocked on it.

  Lenox turned then and looked at Heimrich, not as if he had ever seen him before—not as if he really believed he was seeing him now. But then, as if his mind focused, he said, “Oh, it’s you.” Then he looked back at the paper in his typewriter, and his hands moved up as if about to start their keyboard work again. It was oddly as if Lenox, having acknowledged Heimrich’s presence, identified Heimrich, regarded the incident as closed.

  The hands did not actually settle on the keyboard. They dropped resignedly, and Lenox turned, with a last look at the sheet in the typewriter, and stood up.

  “I was working,” he said, as if Heimrich might not have noticed. “You want something?”

  Heimrich said he was sorry he had interrupted, and that what he wanted wasn’t a great deal, wouldn’t take much time.

  “Doesn’t matter a damn now,” Scott Lenox said, with some bitterness. “What do you want?”

  “Last night at the inn,” Heimrich said, “I asked you and Miss Vance where you had spent the afternoon. You said you had been at a movie.”

  Lenox said, “So?” and walked across the little room—it was, apparently, the only room in the little house—to the door. He came through the doorway and unfolded two light chairs and pushed one toward Heimrich, and sat on the other, and said, again, “So?”

  “You didn’t wonder why I asked you that, Mr. Lenox?”

  Scott moved wide, flat-muscled shoulders. He said, “Mine not to reason why, Captain.” But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, his wide smile flickered on his thin face. “It seemed to me,” he said, “that the less we said, the sooner you would go away, my friend. Nothing personal, but the girl and I had things to talk about. And since how we had spent our afternoon could have nothing whatever to do with anything …”

  He left it hanging there.

  “An old man named Jasper Mears was murdered yesterday afternoon,” Heimrich said. He watched Scott Lenox’s face, and saw astonishment in mouth and eyes—astonishment very evident. So evident that it might have been mimed.

  “What a hell of a thing,” Scott Lenox said, and there was astonishment in his voice. “The poor, harmless old—” He broke off and looked fixedly at Heimrich. “So that’s why you wanted to know where the girl and I were,” he said, and spoke without inflection.

  “Where everybody was,” Heimrich said. “Part of the job.”

  “I’ll be Goddamned,” Lenox said. “You think I’d kill old Jasper.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I
don’t know who killed him. Which means, naturally, that I don’t know who didn’t. You knew him?”

  “Sure,” Lenox said. “He and that no-good son of his used to come around to Far Top in a ramshackle truck and cut the grass. When I was a kid. I used to trail around after him and he used to let me. He was an old man even then. Once he told me there were still mountain lions around here when he was a kid my age. I don’t know whether it was true. Maybe he was just telling a kid something exciting because—because the kid was lonely.”

  He stands off and looks at everything from outside, Heimrich thought. Looks back, from outside, at a lonely kid.

  “So he’s dead,” Lenox said, after a little pause—a pause during which, the man listening to him thought, he looked back through years and saw, quite clearly, a lonely kid trailing an old man around, listening to stories about mountain lions. “Why was he killed?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “Perhaps because he knew something,” Heimrich said. “Conceivably because he had been blackmailing somebody.”

  “The somebody who killed my stepfather and the professor?”

  “Now, Mr. Lenox. We haven’t got that far. But if he was blackmailing somebody it had been going on for some time. Some time before your father and Professor Wingate were killed. But what I wanted to ask you—” He stopped, because Lenox had gone away again; was again standing outside something and looking at it.

  “He might have,” Lenox said. “The old guy needed money bad enough. I don’t know what the hell he lived on. That son of his would just as soon let him starve as not, I suspect. But I don’t think the old man would have covered up murder.”

  “That,” Heimrich said, “may have been the trouble, Mr. Lenox. It may have been that scruple that got him killed. You speak as if you’d known him recently. Since the time you were a boy and followed him around at Far Top.”

  “A few years ago,” Lenox said. “Eight or nine years ago, I got a notion. A kid’s notion. An amateur’s notion. I was going to write one of these family novels—maybe a whole series of novels about a family. I thought, maybe a family like the Mitchies. Like the Lenoxes, for that matter, but in a house like the Mitchie house. I was going to call it The Mansion. That was before Faulkner’d used the title. Only, you see, I didn’t really know how people like that lived. The Branes were city people, office people. If he were living now my father—my real father—probably would have a house in Westchester or on Long Island, and catch the same train every morning to the city and—”

  He broke off. He shook his head, as if impatient with himself. He said, “As Enid says, I talk a lot.”

  “Now, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “Anything you can tell me about the old man.”

  “I wasn’t old enough when I lived at Far Top to get the feel of that life,” Scott said. “A kid. I was sent away to school. Old man Mears had worked for the Mitchies off and on for a long, long time. Worked for them when Johnny Three’s grandfather was alive. I thought he might give me—well, call it the texture of lives like theirs. I saw quite a bit of the old man for a few months. Listened to him a lot. Paid him a little for his time. Took him a bottle now and then, as a lubricant.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “No. Oh, I got bits and pieces. But I decided that I didn’t want what I’d thought I wanted—didn’t, specifically, want to write that kind of book. The idea began to bore me. Also, it would have meant a lot of work going out and no assurance of anything coming in, with the chances very high that nothing would.”

  “About the old man?”

  “Observant. Not always believable. He had a certain—cunning. A good many people like him have that—a craftiness. No harm in it, for the most part. Makes them feel they are getting the better of other people, and so getting the better of life, which is a consolation when you bloody well aren’t. Old Jazz never had, of course—had never really got the better of anything. Except in his imagination—in stories he made up and told himself about his own shrewdness. He felt, I think, that he was getting the better of me, that every time I gave him a few dollars, or brought along a bottle, he had out-traded me.” Lenox stopped and, again, flickered his sudden smile. “Perhaps he had at that,” Lenox said.

  They had gone a long way from the question Heimrich had come to ask. But when one thing leads to another, it is sometimes well to let things take their course.

  “You lived more or less next door to the Mitchies when you were a boy,” Heimrich said. “You’ve lived around here most of your life.”

  “Since college.”

  “Since college. Why didn’t you get your background—the background for this novel you thought of doing—from the family itself?”

  “Never got to know them,” Scott said. “Oh, Johnny Three and I’re contemporaries, more or less. But different breeds of cats.” Again he shook his head, chiding himself. “I use more clichés,” he said. “My stepfather and Johnny’s father weren’t—well, weren’t precisely chummy. Not in my time, at least. I don’t know that there was anything special. Apparently John Mitchie Second—that’s a hell of a way to name people, isn’t it? John the Second—wasn’t very chummy with anybody after he came back from France in the twenties.”

  He stopped again and looked away again.

  “That must have been a place,” Scott said. “Must have been a time. From what one reads about it, it’s hard to imagine old Mitchie part of it, isn’t it? That was one of the things bogged me down, I suppose.”

  Heimrich said, “Bogged you down, Mr. Lenox?”

  “What you can’t imagine, you can’t write,” Scott said. “I’m talking about this book I won’t be writing—a book about a family like the Mitchie family. John the Second—a man like him, a man breaking away from—oh, the hell with it.”

  “He would have been a character in this book? And you found you couldn’t understand him well enough?”

  Scott Lenox looked at the big man in the other chair as if the big man surprised him.

  “Near enough,” Scott said. “Oh, you don’t just transplant real people into fiction. You have to shape them. You use all sorts of bits and pieces—fragments of everything you’ve touched, looked at. But with some kind of a general form in mind. Sometimes an actual person suggests the form.”

  He looked at Heimrich and, although Heimrich had closed his eyes, he could feel himself being looked at—looked at, he thought, and measured and weighed, and some time a character in something Scott Lenox wrote might have rather the shape of Captain M. L. Heimrich. Which was fair enough, since Heimrich was, for other purposes, doing his own measuring, his own weighing. If you let a talker talk—

  “I thought,” Scott Lenox said, “that policemen were interested in facts.”

  “Now, Mr. Lenox, there are all kinds of facts. You say your stepfather and Mr. Mitchie weren’t ‘chummy.’ Was there more to it than that? Had they quarreled?”

  “My God,” Scott Lenox said, “you’re not thinking John the Second—”

  “Just,” Heimrich said, “trying to get what you call the feel of things, the texture of things. Had they?”

  “You’re an odd sort of cop, aren’t you?” Scott Lenox said. “Or isn’t ‘cop’ a word you like?”

  ‘I’m a cop,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t say an odd sort of cop. Had they quarreled? They grew up in the same place, at about the same time. They were of the same social group.”

  “Class,” Scott said. “I don’t particularly like the word either. But—it’s the word.”

  “Class,” Heimrich said. “Their fathers, grandfathers perhaps, had been business associates. You said, not ‘precisely chummy.’ Which is—” He paused.

  “All right,” Scott said. “Emphasis by understatement. No, I don’t know that they quarreled. There was a coolness, I think. I don’t know why. I could feel it in my stepfather’s—oh, tone, attitude—when he talked about Mitchie. But it may have been mostly on Mitchie’s part. When he came back from France, came back
with that pretty wife of his, he apparently—well, shut himself up. Shut the two of them up. The Mitchies had never been much for joining in, according to my stepfather. John the Second, after he came back, apparently carried not-joining-in to extremes. Especially after his wife died. Although—I can remember old Homer’s words—‘the Mitchies have no conceivable claim to primacy among the older families of the county.’ The old boy talked that way, sometimes.”

  “He wrote that way, too,” Heimrich said, rather absently, and Scott said, “My God, you’re not plowing through that, are you? Over and above the call of duty, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You talked to your stepfather about the Mitchies, apparently. When you were thinking of writing this book, I suppose? As you talked to Jasper Mears?”

  “Yes.”

  He did not amplify. If he had quit amplifying, Heimrich decided, it was time to ask.

  “Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said, and his very blue eyes were open now, “did you feel bitterly toward your stepfather? Because of what happened to your mother?”

  Scott Lenox looked at him for some seconds, and his widely spaced eyes narrowed, and his wide mouth set hard.

  “You drag things up, don’t you?” Scott Lenox said, and his low-pitched voice had hardened, too. “Go far afield.”

  Heimrich said, “Now, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Or,” Lenox said, “do you by any chance think it isn’t so far afield? Something that happened more than twenty years ago?”

  Heimrich merely waited.

  “I was a boy,” Lenox said. “My real father was dead—I never knew my real father, actually. Before mother married Homer Lenox—well, I suppose she and I absorbed each other, were more dependent on each other than we would have been if my father had lived. Do you set yourself up as a psychiatrist, Captain?”

  “You named it a bit back,” Heimrich said. “As a cop, Mr. Lenox.”