The Distant Clue

by Frances

  They had not heard of him until he died on the driveway. Not even Susan had heard of him, and she had lived for some years in the house that looked like a barn—lived there as Susan Faye long before she lived there, quite differently, as Susan Heimrich; lived alone there with growing boy and (which was a sobering thought) aging dog and memories, changing slowly from pain to something locked away in a secret compartment of the mind, of a man named Michael who had been killed in war.

  ‘No,’ she said, and looked at her husband, who shook his head. State troopers are likely to know almost everyone in the area of their assignment; Heimrich’s assignment, and that not constabulary, had only recently centered in the town of Van Brunt.

  ‘You know where he lived?’ Forniss said, and then it was Perrin’s turn to shake his head.

  ‘Back land around here nobody ever goes into,’ Perrin pointed out. ‘Including the people who own it. Hard to adjust to when you first come up here from town, but there it is.’

  There, of course, it was, as neither the Heimrichs nor Forniss needed telling. The developers were, God knew, on their way. But the environs of Van Brunt are at a considerable distance from New York and railroad service by no means improves. It was, however, to be assumed that if Old Tom were somewhere squatting on land he didn’t own, it was with the at least tacit consent of the owner. Forniss made a mental note.

  ‘About the shot,’ Heimrich said. ‘Probably from a rifle. You didn’t hear it?’

  Perrin shook his head.

  ‘Using your own shooting gallery?’ Heimrich asked, and Perrin laughed, and again shook his head.

  ‘Down in the darkroom,’ Perrin said. ‘Puttering.’

  Heimrich nodded his head. He knew the darkroom in the basement of the Perrin house. The Heimrichs and the Perrins were on the larger cocktail party basis, except that the Heimrichs do not commonly give large cocktail parties. The Perrins were pleased with their house; liked to show it to guests.

  ‘Do a lot of puttering as a bachelor,’ Perrin added. ‘Time hangs heavy.’

  ‘You’ve heard from Marian?’ Susan asked, reminded.

  ‘Safe and sound in London,’ Perrin said. ‘Having a wonderful time. Wishes I were there. And so do I. Got a cable yesterday.’ He sighed. ‘May be a week more before I can get things squared away at the office. To get back to the shot—no, I didn’t hear anything. Pretty isolated in the darkroom. Can’t even hear the telephone, most of the time.’

  ‘You did hear the sirens,’ Heimrich said. ‘Anyway, I suppose you did?’

  He had come up for air by then, Oliver Perrin said. And sirens were another matter. Shots in the country—well, you could say they went in one ear and out the other. Sirens were a different matter, particularly when they stopped next door.

  ‘So,’ Perrin said, ‘I stuck my head over the fence, in a manner of speaking. Full of the curiosity so fatal to cats. Didn’t anybody hear the shot?’

  ‘Now Mr Perrin,’ Heimrich said, ‘I don’t know about anybody. Susan didn’t. I wasn’t here. From the looks of things, it would have come from over your way.’

  Perrin raised his eyebrows. This imparted an appearance of almost naïve innocence to his face.

  ‘From the way he was facing,’ Heimrich said. ‘From the way he was hit.’

  ‘Well,’ Perrin said, ‘There’s plenty of cover. You mean, somebody was roaming around our place with a rifle. Taking pot-shots?’

  It looked like that.

  ‘Just as well I wasn’t shooting,’ Perrin said. ‘I’m not that wild, and there’s a bunker of sorts but—’ He paused. ‘But I’m just as glad I wasn’t banging away,’ he said.

  ‘Your target’s two hundred yards from there,’ Heimrich said, and gestured again toward the dark place on the white gravel. ‘You use—what? Twenty-two target, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever hit him hit him hard,’ Heimrich said. ‘It wasn’t a spent bullet.’

  ‘For the record,’ Perrin said, ‘I don’t own a rifle.’

  The remark was not intended to be a remark of importance.

  ‘Noted on the record,’ Heimrich said, gravely. And Perrin, rather suddenly, looked at his watch. Then he said he had almost forgotten. Then he said he was expecting a telephone call.

  ‘Sorry I can’t help,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t hear the shot. Or, see the guy who fired it.’ He looked again at the driveway. ‘Who’d want to shoot poor old Tom?’ he asked. ‘Poor, harmless old guy. What would anybody have against him?’

  The questions were clearly rhetorical. Heimrich shrugged his shoulders. They watched Perrin walk, lithely, across grass, go easily over the stone fence, disappear in the wooded area beyond.

  ‘He’s got something there,’ Forniss said. ‘Wouldn’t think the old codger was worth killing, would you? Meant for somebody else, d’you suppose?’

  That was rhetorical, too.

  ‘This is Friday,’ Forniss said. ‘This office he has to get things squared away in. Keep it at home?’

  ‘You are a very suspicious man, sergeant,’ Susan told him. ‘No. His office is in New York. It’s a brokerage office and he’s—what, Merton?’ (There had proved to be no reasonable substitute for Merton. Heimrich was getting used to it. Susan was not one to commit a ‘Mert.’)

  ‘Customer’s man,’ Heimrich said. ‘I doubt if he slaves at it, Charlie. His wife’s well heeled.’

  ‘And,’ Heimrich said, ‘having a wonderful time in London. I wonder why the old man didn’t come here?’

  ‘Perhaps Ollie was right,’ Susan said. ‘Perhaps it was because of Colonel.’

  ‘He came today,’ Heimrich said. ‘As you said yourself. What was special about today?’

  She said, ‘Now, darling,’ in a reasonable imitation, and he grinned down at her. She said, ‘I don’t know, naturally.’

  ‘Noted on the record,’ Heimrich told her. ‘Because this was a place a policeman lived?’

  ‘He came today,’ Susan said, and he nodded his head.

  ‘Stay away from policemen,’ he said. ‘A matter of natural caution. Unless you need a policeman. He was often a trespasser, probably. Perhaps he worked when he found people at home and—pilfered when he didn’t. Little things nobody would bother about. Perhaps a little harvesting in vegetable gardens. A few eggs from henhouses. No use making himself conspicuous to the police.’

  She said, ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Until he needed them,’ Heimrich said. ‘For what?’

  (I’m a sounding board, Susan thought. Or a backboard to bounce questions against. Damn the man. I’m Susan.)

  ‘I don’t know, captain,’ Susan Heimrich said, using an appellation kept in reserve.

  ‘A harmless old eccentric,’ Heimrich said. ‘Not worth killing, as Charlie says. By mistake for somebody else?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Susan said, ‘look like anybody else. Can we get somebody to—to scrape that up? Or—or put more gravel on to cover it? Before Michael gets home from school?’

  ‘No,’ Heimrich said, ‘he didn’t, did he? Not like anybody around here, or likely to be around here. Yes, I’ll get hold of somebody.’ They took a sample of the bloodstained gravel before they left. Not that there was any doubt as to whose blood it was, but that courtrooms can be places filled with doubt, real and simulated. Long before the school bus stopped and Colonel, who had been waiting fifteen minutes with his ears reasonably up, rushed to meet it, men had brought a yard of white gravel and spread it on the space. No one could see that anything had happened there.

  There was a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the house. It hung crooked from a pole and nobody had bothered to straighten it, and that was a tip-off, if one needed a tip-off. Once Trooper Ackerman had got so far, had got the name of the place, neither Heimrich nor Sergeant Forniss had been in need of one. The old Waltham place; everybody knew the old Waltham place. And for years nobody had lived in it.

  The house, which not even the real estate man thought anybody was going to buy
, was a big house—a big frame house, set far back from a side road in an unkempt field; a field of tall weeds. It was an unpainted house; it was a falling-down house. As Ackerman’s cruise car went slowly up what had been a driveway, and then around the house on what had been a circle to the barns, Heimrich, in the sedan which followed it, could see that the floor boards of the porch which stretched the length of the house were falling in. Termites, among other things. The windows on the front were, for the most part, broken. Youthful vandals, among other things. Beyond the house, Ackerman stopped the cruise car and got out of it and waited for the others to join him. ‘Ought to be back there somewhere, captain,’ Ackerman said, and looked back there.

  ‘Back there’ was a tangle—a tangle of bushes and weeds, of young trees seeking to restore a forest; of fallen trees, symbols of a forest’s dying.

  ‘They tell me it was like a park once,’ Ackerman said. ‘Before my time. Kept up like a park, they say it was. Two hundred acres or so, they say it is.’

  There had been no Walthams, not to call Walthams, for many years. If anybody owned the place now—and it was, of course, owned—many people owned it. Some of them might be Walthams, but not to be called Walthams—not really Walthams. Most of them had kinship, but not the name; most of them had never heard of one another. One might own a seventh of the Waltham place; the most distant heir a seventieth. Some time a developer would come. Two children of a man who owned a seventieth might sometime get a hundred and fortieth each of what the developer paid.

  ‘Looks like a path through here,’ Ackerman said, and tried it, and Heimrich and Forniss, as became senior officers, let the younger man make the pace. It was a slow pace, but there was a path—the trace of a path. ‘Must be an easier way if we’re right,’ Ackerman said over his shoulder, making slow going of this harder way. ‘Old man couldn’t have got through here I shouldn’t think.’

  They did get through there. They came, after a time—a hot time, even in the shade; a breathless time where no breeze reached—to a bridge across a stream. Part of the bridge had fallen into the stream. A pretty little bridge, a rustic bridge, it had been once, long ago; a bridge across a bright small brook. They crossed what time had left of the little bridge. Beyond it the ground rose slightly. Then it dipped again. Then what remained of the path curved, and curved back to the brook—or to another brook. And there the little house was. Perhaps, Heimrich thought, looking at it, they had called it a lodge. Perhaps it had been merely ‘the cabin.’ Children might have played in it once; once older boys might have said to older girls, or girls to boys, ‘Let’s go down to the lodge. It’s away from things, the lodge is.’ These might have walked side by side, and hand in hand, along a well-kept path, across a pretty rustic bridge, and come to the little cabin in the woods. It would have been painted then, or stained brown. The steps leading up to the door would have been whole then, not broken.

  The old man had lived in it. There was little doubt of that, once they had climbed the broken stairs and gone into the house. It smelled of occupancy. It smelled of an oil stove, and of an old man and of food fried. ‘Didn’t open windows much,’ Forniss said, and pulled at a window, which stuck.

  There was a main room—a room of reasonable size, containing a wooden table and several wooden chairs; an oil heating stove and another oil stove for cooking. There were shelves on one wall, and a few cans on the shelves. There was a battered breadbox, with half a loaf of bread in it—dried-out bread. There was a plate on one of the shelves, and a heavy cup beside it, and a knife and fork. There was a bread knife with rust on it.

  There was a second room, with a cot in it, and two blankets on the cot. A frayed leather jacket hung on one nail driven into the wall, and on another nail a pair of black trousers hung. Heimrich looked at the trousers. A strip of satin ran down the outside of each trouser leg. Dress trousers, by all that was incongruous. Part of a dinner suit. A handout to the old man, to Old Tom? Heimrich felt the fabric—the thick, heavy fabric. A very old pair of dress trousers, he thought. Fabrics were lighter now, especially in dinner clothes.

  ‘Somebody’s been living here,’ Ackerman said, needlessly, but indirectly brought up a point. Somebody very evidently had, in squalor. But—the man people called Old Tom?

  Forniss had brought what he needed. He was dusting in the more likely places, and prints were showing. He used a small camera and flashlight bulbs, and got enough. They could, then, really get at it.

  And getting at it got them nowhere. They found a can of coffee, half full. Outside they found a bucket, with a length of heavy cord tied to its bail. At a little distance from the house they found an old dug well, covered with boards. Heimrich’s interest rose. Tom, dying, might have said something about a well. Something about this well?

  They took the boards off, and used a flashlight to pierce the blackness of the well. The light reflected from black water. Ackerman brought the bucket and they lowered it into the well and tilted it, and brought it up half full. Cautiously, Heimrich smelled the water. Then he tasted it. It seemed to be clean, cold water, but Heimrich spat it out. He circled the light in the well. There was only water, and the water tasted only of water. They covered the well up again.

  ‘Old wells sort of last forever,’ Forniss said. ‘Friends of mine bought a place with one and never could fill it up. Kept washing out.’

  A well they found, and a bucket, and half a can of coffee. Behind the cabin, they found a five-gallon can almost full of kerosene. But about the man himself they found out nothing, or as good as nothing. Everybody has papers of one sort or another. The man who had lived here—squatted here—had had no papers, or had left none here. They found a small tin box with nails and screws in it, and several rubber bands and a quantity of string, tangling everything.

  They found another path, more clearly marked, obviously more frequently used. This path the man who had lived in the cabin must have taken when he left it. It was an easy path, ran quickly to what had once been a wagon track and, almost at once, to an unimproved road. They followed the road to a blacktop, turned to the right, and were back at the big house again.

  And that, Heimrich decided, did this part of it for the moment. Technical men to go over the cabin to find what they could find. (Which, Heimrich thought, probably would be no more than the three of them had found.) The big house itself to be gone over, which would take longer and probably produce less. But one never knew until one asked, until one looked. Criminal investigation is wasteful of time and energy.

  Trooper Ackerman clocked the distance from juncture of unimproved road and blacktop to the foot of the Heimrich drive, added a hundred yards for the walk from cabin to intersection, and came up with two and three-tenths miles. It was hard to believe, he thought, that the abandonment, the desolation, of the old Waltham place could lie so close to busy highways and clustered houses. He relayed information to headquarters and went back to the substation.

  Heimrich received the information at his desk at the barracks and made a note of it. An easy enough walk even for an elderly man. Judging by the time Old Tom arrived—just after the school bus had passed—he had gone to his rendezvous with death directly from the cabin.

  Judging by that, but not counting on that. Start with a radius of three miles from the cabin, search the circle with that radius. Ask all to be found what they knew of an old man known merely as Tom, and when they had seen him last, and if he had ever said anything to any of them which would, now, make them suspect he might have walked in fear. And find out, of course, whether any of them knew anyone for whom Tom might have been mistaken. Cover everything, with as many men—detectives and troopers alike—as one could lay hands on.

  No marks on the clothing the man had worn. (No helpful name, for example, on a tailor’s label.) In the pockets of the blood-soaked trousers the man had died in, a knife with one blade broken off, a billfold broken at the edges and containing nothing—finally and precisely nothing. In one trouser’s pocket, a nickel. (Not eno
ugh for a telephone call.) Cuffs of trousers cleaned out, residue being examined. Shoes had holes in the soles, tops were broken. But they had been good shoes once. Maker’s name once printed on insoles; long since rubbed away. Technicians working on the shoes.

  Heimrich spread what web he could and sat in what he hoped would prove to be the middle of it. Meanwhile, there were other chores.

  It was after noon when Forniss called with part of it. The man had been killed by a .30-calibre rifle bullet, and the bullet had been recovered. It was in a condition for comparison, when the occasion arose. Major pulmonary branch perforated; death probably within two minutes, almost certainly less than five. Almost as certainly, the man could not have moved after he had been shot—could have fallen, only. That he had managed any sound, even a sound almost inaudible, was surprising.

  He had been the man who had lived in the cabin. The prints matched. Copies of the prints from dead fingers were being sent out to discover what else they matched, if they matched anything.

  Heimrich had lunch. He had a lengthy, and not too conclusive, conference with an assistant district attorney from White Plains, and this had nothing to do with the man who had died in the Heimrich driveway. Little that Heimrich did until after four o’clock in the afternoon had anything to do with the death of the man named Tom. Then the telephone on his desk rang and Heimrich picked it up. Forniss said, ‘Hold on to something, M. L.,’ which meant that Sergeant Charles Forniss was as near excitement as he allowed himself to get.

  ‘T. Lyman Mitchell,’ Forniss said. ‘That’s who we’ve got. T. Lyman Mitchell. After all these years.’

  Captain M. L. Heimrich was responsive. Speaking slowly, Captain Heimrich said that he would be damned.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Having T. Lyman Mitchell, deceased, identified by fingerprints, they had something—something quite different from the thing they had had before. A dead man is a dead man, and murder, particularly to Captain Heimrich, who has a special hatred for it, is murder. It is murder when the victim is nobody, somebody ‘not worth killing’—an elderly eccentric in dirty clothing, living as a squatter in a tumbling-down cabin. It is no more murder when the man killed is T. Lyman Mitchell.