Stand Up and Die

by Frances Lockridge

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “They’re dead. Is Timothy Gates your full name? No middle name?”

  “Timothy Gates is all.”

  Captain Heimrich stood up.

  “I’m not going to arrest you, Mr. Gates,” he said. “But, I’m going to ask you to stay around. For a day or so, probably. You’ll do that?”

  “Have I a choice?”

  “Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “There’s no need to go into that. There’s an inn here. A very pleasant little place, I’ve been told. As good a place as any for a few days since, as you say, you’re not going any place in particular. You have money, you say?”

  “Enough,” Gates said. He stood up, too. “O. K., Captain,” he said. “Aye, aye, sir.” He half smiled for an instant.

  “On Main Street,” Heimrich said. “We passed it coming in.”

  “I’ll find it,” Gates said.

  “Do that, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. Gates moved toward the door. “By the way, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Don’t be impetuous, will you?”

  Gates turned.

  “I didn’t go out the window, did I?” he said.

  “I noticed that,” Heimrich said. “Naturally.”

  He watched Gates go. After a few minutes, he went to the door and said, “Come in a minute, will you, Forniss?”

  The tall man who had driven the car came into the office and closed the door after him.

  “Marine Corps,” Heimrich said. “Recently discharged. It needs checking, Charlie. The place of enlistment, particularly. He says Chicago.”

  “O. K.,” Sergeant Forniss said.

  “I doubt it was,” Heimrich said.

  “All right,” Forniss said. “I’ll get on it. He’s a jumpy sort of guy, isn’t he? Does he fit?”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “How can we tell? Yet? We don’t know anything yet.”

  The room in which Captain Heimrich waited was large, but yet seemed to have little space available. Heimrich had moved into it with caution, he sat now in a fashion to diminish himself as much as he could manage. He held elbows to sides, sat erect in his chair and kept his knees together. He was nagged by the conviction that any considerable movement would almost inevitably result in disaster.

  The movement of his right hand, for example, could hardly fail to prove fatal to at least one of two lovely, but evidently fragile, vases which perched, all too ready for flight, on the smallish top of a fragile table. Any unconsidered gesticulation of his left hand would evidently demolish a china lamp which had paused, but surely could not intend to remain, on a piecrust table which teetered charmingly on tiny feet. If he crossed his legs, a glass peacock would surely lose its glittering tail. Captain Heimrich took shallow breaths, looked up and down the long room, and concluded that there was no safer place to sit. There were many places; the room did not lack chairs, nor small sofas, nor silk-clad ottomans. There was no dearth, either, of small tables, or of lamps, or delicately colored small boxes; there was a plenitude of candlesticks, from most of which glass ornaments dangled prettily. The walls were by no means bare of pictures.

  The interesting thing, Heimrich thought, clasping his hands in his lap, was that all of these objects had beauty; there was nothing he could see, including the glass peacock, which was not in itself pleasing. Nor was there, among these objects—objets, Heimrich substituted—any lack of harmony. It was really a very beautiful room. It did not, however, seem planned for the accommodation of people. The maid who had showed him into the room fifteen minutes before had, he remembered, seemed to hold her breath as she opened the door; she had looked at his solid bulk uneasily.

  Heimrich sat opposite a door in one of the long sides of the room, having, after one glance around, taken the chair nearest. He did not, now, quite understand how he had gone even so far without disaster. The door opened and he stood up, with slow caution.

  The girl who had pushed the door open, stopped in the doorway, wore a dark suit. She was slender, high-shouldered, for a woman rather tall. She had a broad forehead and dark brown hair, cut short, softly curling. Her brown eyes were wide apart, rather deeply set, and her mouth was wide. Her face was quiet as she stood for several seconds, looking at Heimrich.

  Then she said, “Captain Heimrich?” and, when he nodded, said, “I’m Liz Monroe. I’m afraid my grandmother isn’t well enough to see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Heimrich said.

  “She’s very old,” the girl said. “In her eighties, you know. This is a bad day for her. I thought perhaps I—” She ended the sentence there, but without hesitation. She did not, Heimrich decided, believe in useless words.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry, naturally, to have to bother anyone at such a time.”

  “Of course,” the girl said. The girl looked around the room. “I think the library will be better,” she said. “This room is—difficult. So many generations of things.” She looked at Heimrich, who nodded. She turned and went out into the hall, walking erect, moving with grace, slim of hips. Heimrich followed her across the hall to another room. It was better. He breathed more deeply.

  She walked to a table at one end of the room, turned to face him, leaning back on the table; putting both ringless hands on the table. Her hands were slender, too; long-fingered.

  “How can we help?” she asked him. She held her head back, looking up. The line of chin and throat was very clear, very young. He was dealing with youth that day, Heimrich thought. The boy; now with this girl. The other girl had been young too—young yesterday, today old as all death.

  “I don’t know, Miss Monroe,” he said. “Elizabeth Monroe?”

  “Liz,” she said. “Just Liz. Why don’t you know?”

  “Now Miss Monroe,” he said.

  “Sit down,” she told him. He looked at her. “I’m all right here,” she said. He sat down, facing her.

  “This man who found Virginia,” she said. “A tramp, was he? Didn’t he—” she hesitated for a moment—“isn’t he the one?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Not yet, Miss Monroe.”

  “It could have been anyone,” Liz Monroe said. “Isn’t that true? Any woman—any girl. A waitress from the Inn. Helen from the book shop. Any woman who was there, in the dark? It wasn’t Virginia because she was Virginia?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Heimrich said. “That’s the way it looks, of course.”

  “A sadist,” the girl said. “Someone—horrible. Paul told me. He—he saw her, you know.”

  “Paul?” Heimrich repeated.

  “Dr. Crowell,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “Dr. Crowell did see her, I believe.”

  “Then—” she said, and moved one hand abruptly, with a kind of impatience. She was, Heimrich thought, under great strain, which was natural; almost in shock, which was natural, too. She was trying to hide it from him, from herself. The young did that. She should not be undergoing this. Unfortunately, there was no alternative.

  “Probably it was as you think,” he told her. “This might have happened, as you say, to anyone who was there. But, we have to try to be certain, Miss Monroe. You see that, naturally.”

  “I suppose it’s your job,” she said. Her voice was deep. Strain edged it.

  “Yes,” he said. “My job. Tell me about your sister, Miss Monroe.”

  “She was twenty-six,” Liz Monroe said. “She was beautiful. She was—” Liz hesitated. “She was on top of the world,” Liz Monroe said. “She was always on top of the world.”

  She looked at Heimrich intensely. Her face was pale under tan. Her hands, holding the edge of the table against which she leaned, had tightened on the wood, so that the knuckles showed white.

  “She would have fought to stay alive,” Liz Monroe said. “I suppose she did?”

  “We can’t tell about that,” Heimrich said. “Not yet. Perhaps we’ll never know, naturally. Tell me more about her, Miss Monroe.”

  Virginia had been the older of
the sisters by almost four years. She had always been the beautiful one, the favored one, the one on top of the world. Liz did not phrase it so. The implication was there, in tone, in the expressions of a mobile face.

  Their mother had died when Liz was two; their father two years later. It had been between the wars; they had been living in Europe, then. “My father was Herbert Monroe,” Liz said. “An ambassador. You know?”

  Heimrich nodded. That he had known.

  “We grew up here,” Liz said. “With grandmother. Mother’s mother, of course.”

  Their father had left very little. That had not greatly mattered, since Mrs. Saunders had much, would have much to leave. The girls had gone first to the district school, later to boarding school. When she was eighteen, Virginia had started training as a nurse.

  “Why?” Heimrich asked. He looked around the big room. His look said, “With all this?”

  “She wanted to be on her own,” Liz said. “Take hold of her own life. She always did. Perhaps she wanted to do some—service. I’m afraid I don’t know, Captain.”

  He waited.

  “We were not particularly close,” she said. “Not as I suppose sisters usually are. We’ve never been much alike. She was always—always ahead of me.” She paused for a moment. Now she seemed to be looking beyond Captain Heimrich. “In everything, I suppose,” she said. Then for several moments she said nothing more. Heimrich merely waited. She said, then, “I’m sorry. Where was I?”

  But she remembered without help where she had been, and went on. Virginia Monroe had completed her training, been graduated as a nurse. She had not, however, practiced as a nurse. “Oh,” Liz said, “she may have had a case. Perhaps two.”

  She had found something she liked better. Through a friend, Liz thought; through someone she had met. She had become a photographer’s model, and then she had gone to live in New York. That had been, Liz thought, about five years before.

  “Grandmother considered it scandalous,” Liz Monroe said, and she smiled faintly. “Not ladylike. And what would people think? I don’t know that they thought anything, particularly. Perhaps grandmother’s friends, but no one else. Grandmother’s friends are very old ladies.”

  When photographers went on holiday in the summers, when advertising agencies enjoyed modified siestas during New York’s heat, Virginia Monroe had spent much time in East Belford, in the big white house behind maple trees on Main Street. Penina Saunders’ disapproval of her granddaughter’s profession had not changed that. “It’s our home, of course,” Liz said. “And grandmother is very sweet.”

  She paused after that. She said, “Do you want all this?” and, when Heimrich nodded, “Why?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes.

  “I don’t know, naturally,” he said. “Not a precise reason, that is. People are killed because of who they are, what they are. We have to find out a great deal.” He opened his eyes. “We waste a good deal of time, of course,” he said. “We have to expect that.”

  “But my sister wasn’t,” Liz Monroe said. “Killed because of who she was, I mean. We agreed on that.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes again.

  “Now Miss Monroe,” he said. “Did we? That it could have been that way, naturally. But that it was? We don’t know that, yet, do we? Go on, anyway, please.”

  She didn’t, she said, know what more he wanted. This year, Virginia had come up late in May. She had not, of course, spent all her time in East Belford. She had been in and out of New York; she had gone to Long Island with friends for a week end. She had kept her New York apartment—she always kept that. But the white house in East Belford had been her center.

  “She has friends around?” Heimrich said.

  Of course, Liz Monroe told him, and seemed a little surprised at the question. They knew a great many people in East Belford, and around East Belford. They saw a good many people. They played tennis and swam at the club; they went to dances there, met friends there.

  Special friends?

  He meant men, Liz told him. He nodded. He meant among people in the country? Because about her sister’s life in New York she knew very little. He nodded again.

  “Perhaps Howard,” Liz said. “Howard Kirkwood. They’ve been seeing a good deal of each other. Beyond that—” She stopped. “Virginia did not confide in me,” she said, making the statement formal, letting formality provide emphasis.

  “Mr. Kirkwood lives here?” Heimrich said. “In the village?”

  From June through August, yes. He had had a wing of his parents’ house converted into an apartment, and lived there in the summers, going to New York three or four times a week. After Labor Day, he moved back to New York. He was with a law firm there. He—

  She broke off. She asked if they were not, at any rate now, going far afield.

  “Perhaps,” Heimrich said. “Do you know when your sister went out last night, Miss Monroe? Where? With whom?”

  “No,” Liz said. “I didn’t know she had gone out. We had dinner together. I was tired, a little. I’d played a long match yesterday. In the club tennis tournament—the early tournament. We’re always having—” She stopped again. “I went up to my room and read a while,” she said. “I looked in on grandmother for—oh, perhaps half an hour. Then I went back to my room and went to bed.”

  “Your sister didn’t say what she planned?”

  “No.”

  “Who else lives in the house, Miss Monroe?”

  “Only us,” she said. “Oh, you mean the servants?”

  He nodded and closed his eyes.

  There was a couple, the Swansons. He did the outdoor work; she was the cook. There were three maids, two of whom lived in. And there was Mrs. Jackson.

  “She takes care of grandmother,” Liz said. “Has for about a year now.”

  “A nurse?” Heimrich asked her.

  She shook her head. Not a registered nurse. Not, she thought, what is called a “practical” nurse.

  “She doesn’t need a trained nurse, Paul says,” Liz told him. “Anyway, she won’t have one. Mrs. Jackson is—well, she’s not a nurse at all, really. And not a servant. She’s just somebody to be around when grandmother needs somebody. I think her mother and grandmother were friends, years ago, and when Paul said there had to be somebody, grandmother thought of Mrs. Jackson.”

  “Is your grandmother confined to—” Heimrich began, and stopped because there was a knock on the library door.

  “Oh, that’s Paul, probably,” Liz Monroe said, and walked across the room to the door, her slender body erect, her wide, square shoulders steady. She opened the door and said, to a murmur in which Heimrich could not distinguish words, “Of course, Paul.” She went out and closed the door.

  She was gone only a few minutes. She went to a chair, this time, and sat in it, and said she was sorry.

  “Dr. Crowell’s leaving,” she said. “He’s been with grandmother. He doesn’t think we can tell her yet.”

  “She hasn’t been told about your sister?”

  Liz shook her head.

  “Paul’s afraid of the shock,” she said. “Of course, she’ll have to be told. Perhaps tomorrow, Paul thinks. He wants—” She stopped again, and did not speak for more than a minute, which can be very long.

  “What is it, Captain Heimrich?” she said then. “You must know something, or think you know something. Something that makes you think Virginia wasn’t—wasn’t just attacked by some horrible, crazy man because”—she hesitated. “Because she was a woman,” she said. “A woman alone in the dark.”

  He did not reply at once. She leaned forward in the chair.

  “Something doesn’t fit,” she said. “Is that it?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. She waited.

  “There is not anything certain about it, naturally,” Heimrich said, then, his eyes still closed. “There are one or two things which, as you put it, don’t fit. Or may not.”

  She continued to wait. Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “
Your sister was stabbed to death,” he said. “She was stabbed once, fatally, in the chest, Miss Monroe. She was stabbed repeatedly but, they tell me, very clumsily—except for that one wound. The other injuries might not have killed her if she had been found in time.”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” Heimrich said, “it doesn’t prove anything, naturally. Once the knife found a vital place, by chance. It could be that. Probably was, naturally. Still, it isn’t characteristic.”

  He paused.

  “And that’s all?” she asked.

  He seemed to hesitate. Then he shook his head.

  “Two other things,” he said. “Her coat was found. The man who found her—his name is Gates, incidentally—put it over her. Or says he did. But we haven’t found her other clothes. One would expect them to be—torn off her, of course. But not taken away. To prevent identification, say. Her face wasn’t marred. And the coat left.”

  “Why, then?” Liz asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I have no idea, yet,” he said.

  She waited.

  “The other thing,” he said, “is that your sister wasn’t raped. Of course—” He raised his heavy shoulders slightly.

  She shook her head.

  “I’ve read about things like that,” she said. “Everybody has. The—the man could have been—strange.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes then. He nodded.

  “I realize that, naturally,” he said. “Now, Miss Monroe, there are one or two other points.”

  Chapter III

  It was almost seven when Captain M. L. Heimrich, New York State Police, walked down the sunny, graveled drive from Mrs. Penina Saunders’s big white house. He reached the sidewalk and turned to his right, walking south on Main Street. He was a solid man, with a square and solid face that appeared to have been long left out in the weather. He walked solidly, without hurry. He wore a gray summer suit, not recently pressed, and a white shirt and a dark blue tie. He wore black shoes. He did not look particularly like a policeman. He might have been a man of reasonable substance and conservative habits engaged in any of half a dozen occupations. He thought of murder.