The Distant Clue

by Frances

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “He stayed here?”

  “No. We went over to his place and sat on the terrace and had a drink. It was—there’s a breeze on the terrace. And the inn’s air conditioned, isn’t it? We’d have been cooler there. I suppose you wonder—”

  He smiled at her and, unexpectedly, she flushed. She said, “All right” and then, for the first time, smiled faintly.

  “About when did you get back here?” Heimrich said. “From Peekskill?”

  She thought about five-twenty. No, Scott had not come upstairs with her. He had left her at the curb. Her face changed, tightened, so that she looked, suddenly, much older than she was.

  “I suppose Mr. Mears was killed after we got back, wasn’t he?” Enid Vance said, her voice steady. “After Scott left me here?”

  “We think about five-thirty,” Heimrich said. “Nobody can be exact about that sort of thing. About then.”

  “So where we were, that we went to a movie, doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “It doesn’t matter much.”

  What did matter, he thought and did not say, was that the two of them had not planned a story. It would have been easy enough to invent a better story. A much better story would have been that they had not been apart at all; had been together far from the oddly furnished shack in The Flats.

  “I could have lied about it,” Enid said, as if she had been following his thought. “Perhaps I should have lied about it.”

  “No,” Heimrich said, “it would have been foolish to lie about it. Miss Vance, during the time you knew Homer Lenox, did he do anything that seemed odd to you? Out of the way?”

  She didn’t know what he meant by ‘odd.’ What did he mean by ‘odd’?

  He didn’t know, either. Anything that surprised her; seemed out of character. Anything, say, which would have indicated that he was apprehensive about anything. Anything he might have said, to her, about somebody else—about his foster son, for example. He couldn’t express it more clearly. Anything out of the way; anything which made her wonder, “What did he mean? Why did he do that?”

  “You see,” he said, “we want to find out what we can about him, what kind of man he was. From as many people as we can. We’re asking people in New York about him. Anything they can tell us about him. People around here. But there don’t seem to be many people here who knew him at all well. Wingate probably did, but Wingate’s dead too.”

  “That sort of thing helps?”

  “Now and then. More often than not, it’s a waste of time. But we always waste a good deal of time. Find out a lot of things that turn out not to have any bearing.”

  She nodded her head. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and opened them and said she couldn’t, offhand, think of anything. Oh—she had been mildly surprised the first time Homer Lenox had come down from upstairs with binoculars swinging from his shoulder. But she had told him about that. Now and then Lenox had asked how Scott was making out. Once he had said that he thought Scott’s way was a pretty chancy way of making a living.

  “I never stayed long when I went there,” Enid said. “There wasn’t any reason to. I’d deliver what I’d brought, and he’d give me a check. At fifty cents a page. Sometimes, not often, there’d be something he’d written I hadn’t been sure about—a left-out word, a sentence that wasn’t a sentence. Sometimes I’d guess at a left-out word and ask him if I’d guessed right. Sometimes he’d write one word when he obviously meant another word. Writers do that sometimes. Scott—”

  Her thoughts run back to him, Heimrich thought, as he waited for her to go on. As mine run—She must have taken Michael home from Sunday school by now. By now she has changed from take-my-son-to-Sunday-school clothes. By now—

  “—does sometimes,” Enid said, finishing her sentence.

  Heimrich said “Mm-m-m.”

  “So,” Enid said, “it isn’t really odd, out of the way. Mr. Lenox wrote the wrong names, sometimes. ‘Mears,’ when he meant ‘Mitchie.’ Was writing about the Mitchie family. A slip of the mind. But that’s not the sort of thing you mean, is it?”

  Heimrich said, again, that he had not meant anything in special, had anything special in mind.

  “Then I’m afraid—” she said, but stopped and, momentarily, looked over Merton Heimrich’s head.

  “A week or so ago,” Enid said. “A week ago Friday. It was a warm day. I drove up and got out of the car, and he was talking on the telephone, with the front door open. The telephone’s in the front hall, you know.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes.”

  “He spoke rather loudly. He said, That’ll make him toe the line.’ And then he laughed as if he had said something funny. Or, as if he were very pleased about something. I don’t suppose it’s anything out of the way. Just the tag end of a conversation. Odd because I hadn’t heard the rest of it. But—”

  She paused, and again she looked over Heimrich’s head.

  “It’s only,” she said, “that he seemed excited. I’d never seen him before when he seemed excited.”

  XIII

  Captain Heimrich walked up Van Brunt Avenue, his mind digesting. Digesting rather sluggishly, Heimrich thought. Scott Lenox had blamed his foster father for his mother’s death and had been bitter. Scott Lenox had no alibi for the time of Jasper Mears’s death, and none, really, for the time his foster father and Loudon Wingate were murdered. Scott Lenox stood to gain. Enid Vance had no alibis either. She also stood to gain, directly and indirectly. Homer Lenox had talked about somebody’s having to “toe the line.” To start a race? Or to line up in obedience, waiting orders? He had also written ‘Mears’ when he had meant to write ‘Mitchie.’

  At the First National Bank and Trust Company, Heimrich walked up three steps and looked through the glass of the door. Henry Mears, the cashier, was standing inside, looking very like a banker and smoking a cigar. Heimrich tapped on the glass and Mears looked at him distantly and shook his head. But then he looked again and came to the door and opened it, and said, “Didn’t recognize you at first, Captain. They’re in the back.” He pointed.

  Heimrich opened a gate, went into a room of tables and bookkeeping machinery. A man was operating one of the machines and another man was sitting at a table with papers in front of him, and Sergeant Charles Forniss was sitting in a wooden chair, smoking a cigarette, looking on. He looked at Heimrich and raised his eyebrows and Heimrich shook his head.

  “Here either, so far,” Forniss said. “Nothing suspicious about the accident, far as the records show. Skid. Loss of control. Sometimes people get thrown out and killed, and sometimes thrown out and land on something soft. Mrs. Vance got a divorce in Reno. Mental cruelty and desertion. Got custody of the child, but seems there was some sort of deal. Anyway, Vance kept the little girl. Mrs. Vance married again a few weeks after the decree.”

  “You’ve worked fast,” Heimrich told him.

  “Happen to know a man in Reno,” Forniss said.

  The man who had been at the table came over to them, carrying papers. Heimrich said,” ’Morning, Ozzie.”

  “Nothing hot,” Sergeant Wilfred Osborne said. “Not in the H. L. account. No big withdrawals last few months. These. This month’s and some slow clearers.”

  He handed Heimrich a sheaf of checks and went back to his table.

  The checks, drawn by Homer Lenox, stamped “Paid,” were for the most part dated earlier that month, and were for routine payments. One was to the Van Brunt Hardware Store, and was for a considerable amount. The binoculars, probably. Two were drawn to “Cash,” and each was for fifty dollars. There was a check to a liquor store; one to a grocer. Near the bottom of the sheaf was a check dated the month before—one of the “slow clearers,” apparently.

  It was drawn to “Hood’s Enquiries, Ltd.” It was for two hundred and eighty dollars. It was stamped “Paid.”

  Heimrich turned the check over. The endorsement was by rubber stamp:

  “Hood’s Enquirie
s, Ltd.

  J. C. Hood

  The Hood Agency.”

  There was an address, in Mayfair, London W.I.

  There were several bank stamps on the back of the check, crisscrossing one another, each destroying the legibility of the one beneath.

  Heimrich showed the check to Forniss, who said, “Hm-m-m.” He looked at both sides of the check and then at Heimrich, his eyebrows raised.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said; “we’ll have to ask, naturally.”

  He found a telephone, got the barracks, dictated a cable to Hood Enquiries, Ltd.:

  “Appreciate you cable collect soonest nature enquiries behalf Homer Lenox deceased.”

  It would be evening in London, and Sunday evening. The chances were a hundred to one—at least a hundred to one—that Hood Enquiries would be at home, tending its garden. Or in a pub, tending its thirst. It was also probable that Hood Enquiries, when it did receive the cable, would turn stuffy about it; would contend that a client’s business is confidential, even after a client’s decease.

  Heimrich dictated another cable, this one to Chief Inspector Robert Drake, C.I.D., New Scotland Yard.

  “Appreciate your jogging Hood Enquiries regard my cable.” Heimrich considered briefly. “Add, ‘How’re roses?’” he said.

  Drake probably wouldn’t be at New Scotland Yard. He’d probably be home, worrying about flowers. He wouldn’t appreciate being interrupted. He’d jog Hood Enquiries, Ltd. Private investigators like to keep in with the police.

  “I’ll be at home,” Heimrich told Forniss, and drove home to resume slow pawing at Homer Lenox’s heavy words.

  Susan was on the terrace, in shirt and shorts. Colonel was on the terrace, in obvious despondency. Susan came to meet Heimrich. A few feet from him she stopped and looked up into his face. “I’m sorry,” Susan said. “Nothing at all?”

  “Not much,” Heimrich said, and she moved the few feet forward. After that, he told her what little there was to tell.

  “You’re not happy about it,” she told him. “Because they don’t fit?”

  “Among other things,” he said and, a little to the surprise of both of them, picked her up and carried her to a chaise and sat her on it and sat beside her. “Well!” Susan Heimrich said, pleased. He said, “Michael not around?” and at that she laughed and said, “No. Johnny Three took him home with James for a swim. But they’ll bring him back for lunch, because this afternoon he has a tennis lesson.”

  To this, Heimrich said, “Oh,” and kissed her and went to a chair from which, at a little distance, he could look at her. Which was, she supposed, as well. Of course it was as well.

  “I hope,” Susan said, “you’ll be able to stay for lunch?”

  “That would be very pleasant,” Heimrich said, and looked at the sky. “The sun,” Merton Heimrich said, “would be over the yardarm. If we had a yardarm.”

  “The very next time we’re in the village,” Susan said. “I’ll put it on the list.”

  Heimrich went into the house, and came out with a tray. The tray rested on the second section of Homer Lenox’s imposing manuscript.

  “You really have to?” Susan said, when she saw the manuscript.

  Heimrich mixed their before lunch drinks and took Susan hers and put his own on a table—and put the manuscript beside it. He said, “Yes, I have to.” He sipped from a tall glass and went back to the bar table and quartered a lime and gave a quarter to Susan, who squeezed it into gin and tonic. Heimrich squeezed his quarter. Heimrich said, “It’s a place to look.”

  Colonel got up and galumphed to the drive and sat in the middle of it. “Hears a car,” Susan said, and then they heard it, too. It was a Mercedes when it turned into the drive, turned in rather too rapidly. John Mitchie III waved at them and stopped short of Colonel, and young Michael got out of the car and said very politely, “Thank you, sir. It was a fine swim.”

  “Come and have a drink,” Susan said, but Johnny Three shook his head, making the movement doleful. “People for lunch,” he said. He swung the car around and stopped it. He leaned out again and said, “Arrests imminent, M. L.?”

  “Arrests,” Heimrich said, “are always imminent, Johnny.”

  John Mitchie III waved and drove away. Colonel accompanied god into the house and accompanied him back. Michael was carrying a Coke. He joined them. Colonel got his leather loop, and put it in front of Michael and lay down with his nose on it. A small car churned up the drive and the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune thudded heavily on the gravel. The arm which had dropped them waved, and the small car skittered away again. Michael said, “I’ll get them, sir” and went to get them and Susan smiled after him, and looked at Merton Heimrich, still smiling, and shook her head.

  It was any summerish Sunday on the terrace above the Hudson. After he had finished his Coke, Michael threw the loop, and Colonel turned puppy, pounded after it. After lunch, Heimrich abandoned the present, as portrayed in the New York Times (which had a column or so about the “Van Brunt murders,” beginning below the fold on the first page), for the past, as more ponderously recapitulated in the typed pages of The Families of Putnam County, New York. He was curious to see what Homer Lenox had written of his own accident, if he had written anything. Heimrich riffled pages until he found it.

  “Homer Lenox, last of the direct line of the Valley Lenoxes, was twice married,” Homer Lenox had written, with third person detachment. “A son born to his first wife died in infancy. His second wife, Mary-Anne Morton, of a long-established Virginia family, died tragically in a motor accident a few years after their marriage. She left a son by a previous marriage, and the son, Scott, was adopted by Lenox, so that the name, if not the blood line, might be perpetuated in the county.”

  It sounded, Heimrich thought, a little like an extract from a studbook.

  “Homer Lenox retired from the practice of law in 1959 and devoted himself to historical research. He sought to repurchase that valley land between Far Top and the Mitchie manor house which was for so many years part of the Lenox estate, but John Mitchie II, the then owner, declined to sell.”

  Bits and pieces, Heimrich thought—bits and pieces of nothing relevant. He put the manuscript down and looked around the empty terrace. Susan had driven Michael to the club for his lesson. Colonel had been permitted to go along, on the condition that he be a good dog and stay in the car. The telephone rang in the house and Heimrich, glad to be diverted from Homer Lenox’s studbook, went to answer it.

  The barracks was calling to relay the contents of two cablegrams. Heimrich said, “Quick work. Go ahead.” The barracks said, “Priorities worked for a change,” and read. The first cablegram was brief:

  “‘Hood nudged. Is former inspector C.I.D. Roses infested. Drake.’”

  The second was longer:

  “‘Conducted Lenox’s direction enquiry in re Malcolm Hutton, British subject, second son Ian Hutton, Hampfordshire. Confirmed death two July 1924 France. Report airmailed Lenox twenty-first ult. Should be in effects. Hood Enquiries.’”

  Heimrich had the barracks sergeant repeat the last at dictation speed and wrote it down. He carried it back to the terrace, and mixed himself a small drink, and read it several times. It became no clearer with rereading.

  Malcolm Hutton. And who might he be, beyond the second son of Ian Hutton? What was he to Homer Lenox that was worth a hundred pounds?

  There was, certainly, nothing to answer this question in the cabled report of Hood Enquiries. The fuller report, airmailed twenty-first ult., for which read April, had, it was to be assumed, gone up in smoke, together with other of Homer Lenox’s effects. Probably it contained merely amplification. Still …

  Heimrich went back to the house and called the barracks and dictated another cablegram to Hood Enquiries:

  “Appreciate your mailing copy Lenox report. Lenox murdered.”

  He was opening the door to go out again to the terrace when rattles, accented by squeaks, came from the drive. An ancient Jee
p came up the drive, too rapidly for its health. It stopped convulsively and Scott Lenox got out of it and thrust a pair of glasses into the breast pocket of his jacket with a kind of violence. He took long strides to the terrace, as if Heimrich were in flight and to be intercepted.

  “You’ve been badgering the kid,” Scott told Heimrich, his voice very deep and very hard. “Why the hell don’t you leave her alone?” He stood in front of Heimrich, rather as if he were thinking of hitting him.

  “Now, Mr. Lenox,” Heimrich said. “I asked her a few questions. Part of my—”

  “The hell with that,” Scott said. “Tricking her into—”

  He stopped because Heimrich turned away, and took two steps across the terrace and sat down in a chair. Scott Lenox stood and watched him, and glared at him.

  “Don’t get so excited,” Heimrich told him. “Tricked her into what, Mr. Lenox?”

  “She’s a kid,” Scott said. “You want to pick on somebody, how about me? Badger somebody, badger me.”

  “About what, Mr. Lenox?”

  “Crying when she called me up,” Scott Lenox said. “Hardly able to talk from crying. Kept saying she’d let me down. What did she mean by that? What did you badger out of her?”

  He walked across the terrace and stood in front of Merton Heimrich and glared down at him.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “sit down, Mr. Lenox.” Lenox continued to look at him for a second or two. But then he sat down, on the edge of a chaise, facing Heimrich. His eyes remained narrowed.

  “How did she think she’d let you down?” Heimrich asked him.

  He was told that he knew damn well.

  Merton Heimrich sighed audibly and closed his eyes.

  “Miss Vance seemed calm enough when I left her,” Heimrich said.

  ‘The hell she was. She was flying apart.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “But there’s no use arguing it, is there? Perhaps when she got to thinking things over she—well, thought of something that worried her. Why did she feel she’d, as you put it, let you down? You must have asked her.”