“Aren’t they obvious?” Kirkwood asked him and waited a moment, and was regarded by Heimrich through bright blue eyes.
“After she left me, Vee didn’t go home,” Kirkwood said. “It was a beautiful night. Perhaps she was a little keyed up, as I was. By—by everything. She drove around; drove down the lane. I suppose she must have stopped the car, got out. Perhaps she walked into the fields. There was a moon, you know. And—somebody was hiding in the shadows. Waiting. Someone abnormal.” He waited again, but Heimrich waited. “Isn’t it obvious?” Kirkwood asked him. “Isn’t it—horrible enough for you?” His voice rose at the end.
“Now Mr. Kirkwood,” Heimrich said, after a moment. “It may have been that way, naturally. Quite probably it was. But there are certain discrepancies.” He paused a moment. “As Miss Monroe probably has told you,” he added. “Shall I tell you again?”
“Because of the nature of the wounds,” Kirkwood said. “Yes, Liz told me. And the clothes are missing. And Vee wasn’t—” he hesitated. “Molested,” he said.
Heimrich closed his eyes, then, as if to shut out the grotesque irony of the euphemism. But he nodded.
“You’re making something out of nothing,” Kirkwood told him. “Why? To give yourself a famous case, Captain? For the newspapers? Regardless of what you drag people into? Is that—”
Heimrich opened his eyes abruptly. They were, for the moment, very cold eyes. But his voice was mild.
“Now Mr. Kirkwood,” he said. “Now Mr. Kirkwood. You’re upset, aren’t you? Naturally—I realize that. It would be easier for everybody to—stop with the obvious. I realize that. But I can’t do that, you know.” He closed his eyes. “No, I can’t do that,” he repeated.
There was a momentary silence. Kirkwood broke it. He spoke with what seemed reluctance. But he said he was sorry. He agreed he was upset.
He was told that his position was quite understandable. He was told this in a voice so uninflected, so evidently uninflected by intention, that he leaned forward again and stared at Heimrich. But Heimrich’s eyes remained closed. When he spoke, Heimrich’s voice remained mild.
“You would like to avoid involvement,” Heimrich told Howard Kirkwood. “Avoid, as you say, being dragged into something. Well, I hope you may, Mr. Kirkwood. I hope—”
“It isn’t that,” Kirkwood said, and his voice was again raised. “Don’t sit there and—”
“Now Mr. Kirkwood,” Heimrich said. “Of course it’s that. If your fiancée was killed by an abnormal person it’s rather as if she had been killed in a plane crash, naturally. Tragic, of course. For her, for people who loved her. But merely something which has happened, which is finished. Something which doesn’t involve any of you; which didn’t, in a sense, involve her herself. Tragic, but final.”
“You talk a good deal, don’t you?” Liz Monroe said. Her voice was tight.
“I may,” Heimrich said. “It’s been suggested before.”
He did not open his eyes. One might have thought he had finished the interview. But he did not move to end the interview.
“Everyone loved Vee,” Kirkwood said, after the silence had stretched for almost a minute. “Nobody would have killed her except—”
Heimrich opened his eyes, and Kirkwood stopped speaking.
“In a good many years,” Heimrich said, “I have failed to meet anyone everybody loved.” He paused for a moment. “Particularly,” he said, “anyone who was murdered.”
“She was one,” Kirkwood told him, and Heimrich shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. Then he looked, and looked very obviously, at Liz Monroe.
“You think I didn’t?” the girl said. Her widely set eyes narrowed for a second, as if she thought this over. “I suppose I didn’t,” she said. “Perhaps she had too many things I—wanted.”
Howard Kirkwood looked at her, his eyes widening.
Liz Monroe’s face did not change.
“No,” she said, “not you, Howdy. Not including you.”
Howard Kirkwood reddened, then.
“Liz!” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
Then, faintly, momentarily, Liz Monroe smiled.
“I know you didn’t,” she told Howard Kirkwood. She turned back to Heimrich, then, and found his eyes were closed.
“I didn’t love her,” Liz said. “Perhaps I didn’t even like her very much. I suppose I’m a fool to admit it.”
“No,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps you are wise to admit it, Miss Monroe.”
“Because I’d already given it away?”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “Because you feel guilty, naturally.” He was looking at her, now.
“And I’m not?” she said.
Heimrich waited a moment before replying. “There’s no guilt in not loving,” he said, then. “Why didn’t you like your sister, Miss Monroe?”
“I told you,” she said. “Say I envied her. Is that simple enough?”
Heimrich closed his eyes. He said he didn’t know, naturally. He said he was trying to find out.
“Nothing tied her,” Liz Monroe said. “Do you know what I mean? She always did what she wanted to do. Perhaps people ought to.” She stopped. “Now I’m talking too much,” she said. “Is that what you’re after, Captain Heimrich?”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “I’m after facts. As I said.”
“I don’t know what you mean about Vee,” Kirkwood said, and turned toward Liz Monroe. “Why shouldn’t she have done what she wanted to do? What are you hinting at?”
“No reason,” Liz said. “Nothing. Just say I was jealous.”
He looked at her intently.
“That’s the simplest way,” she told him. He continued to look at her. “We can’t all see people the same way,” she said.
Kirkwood seemed about to say something further to Liz. But instead he turned back to Heimrich.
“After Vee was killed,” he said, “whoever killed her went off in the car, didn’t he? The MG? It’s gone, you know. Liz told me.”
Heimrich looked at Liz Monroe.
“I saw you go out to the garage,” she said. “I went to find out why. Miggy was gone.”
Heimrich nodded. He said they had an alarm out for—he caught himself short of saying “Miggy.” He said, “The sports car.”
“It was used to get away in,” Kirkwood said. “By the man who killed Vee.”
Heimrich closed his eyes to that. He nodded, slowly. He said, “It looks like that, naturally.” But then he opened his eyes.
“Of course,” he said, “it had to be disposed of somehow, didn’t it? It was heard leaving the garage. There was always a chance it might be. The assumption would be that Miss Monroe drove it. Obviously—well, obviously she didn’t drive it back, couldn’t drive it back. If it wasn’t used to get away in—if the killer didn’t want, physically, to get away—that impression would still be left, naturally. If possible. So, the car would be disposed of.”
Kirkwood shook his head, expressing doubt. He said that it would, to him, seem difficult to “dispose” of a car. He said if he were the police, he would be looking for the MG on the road. “With a man in it,” he added.
“Now Mr. Kirkwood,” Heimrich said. “We are, naturally. Of course, we’ll look in the reservoirs, too. This is reservoir country.”
“I—” Kirkwood began, and stopped. He looked beyond Heimrich, his round face faintly puzzled. Then, tentatively, he nodded toward someone beyond and behind Heimrich.
Heimrich, who had sat back to the door, turned. Timothy Gates was standing tall in the door. The muscle in his cheek was jumping. Until Heimrich turned, his face seemed blank and he was making no response to Kirkwood’s greeting, if Kirkwood was, indeed, greeting him. When Heimrich looked up at him, across the room, he nodded briefly.
“See you’re busy,” Gates said. “Thought you might be looking for me. I’ve been trying to dodge reporters.”
“Did you, Mr. Gates?” Heimrich said. “No,
I wasn’t looking for you, particularly. But come in, Mr. Gates.”
Gates hesitated. Then he walked into the room. He was not dressed as he had been; he wore gray slacks, a white shirt, a gray tweed jacket too tight across the shoulders. Heimrich stood up as Gates came to the table; he looked at Gates, then at Kirkwood. Kirkwood’s face was still puzzled; there was a puzzled line between his eyes.
“This is Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said to Liz Monroe. “Mr. Gates found your sister. This is Miss Monroe, Mr. Gates. This is Mr. Kirkwood.”
Liz Monroe seemed to grow a little paler. She seemed, without moving, to draw back in her seat. The quivering muscle under Gate’s left eye became more noticeable.
“I’m sorry,” Gates said, and looked down at the girl with a wide forehead, wide-set eyes. “It’s a pretty bad thing.”
She looked up at him. She said, “Yes, a bad thing.”
Gates turned toward Heimrich, then. Gates waited. He waited as if he had waited often, had had much time for waiting. Heimrich half turned toward Kirkwood, and seemed to be waiting too. Kirkwood was studying Timothy Gates’s face. The tall youth was immobile, except for the continued twitching of the facial muscle.
“I think I’ve met you somewhere,” Kirkwood said, then. “I don’t remember where, exactly.”
Gates looked carefully at the older, the almost pudgy man. He shook his head.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Seen you, anyway,” Kirkwood said. “I’m pretty sure.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Gates said again. “I’ve never been around here before.” He turned to Heimrich. “As I told you, sir,” he said.
“Not around here,” Kirkwood said. “Wasn’t it in town?”
He did not ask the question of Gates. He asked it of himself. It appeared he did not find an answer. He looked at Heimrich, perhaps for a suggestion. Heimrich had one.
“Perhaps Mr. Gates was in uniform,” Heimrich said. “He was until recently.”
Kirkwood started to shake his head again. Then he leaned forward, looking up even more intently at the man who stood very erect, very formidable. Kirkwood said, “Wait a minute.” Everyone waited; everyone looked at him.
“About three weeks ago,” Kirkwood said. “At some kind of a party.” He paused. Gates’s expression did not change.
“It was some kind of party for service men,” Kirkwood said. “I remember, now. A man named Chapman gave it in his apartment. A dancing party. Isn’t that right?”
Gates hesitated a moment.
“I went to Mr. Chapman’s party,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing you, sir.”
“I got there late,” Kirkwood said. “Almost midnight. I went to pick up Vee and—” He broke off. He stood up. “You were dancing with Vee when I went in,” he said.
“Vee?” Gates said. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Virginia Monroe,” Heimrich said. “You found her body, Mr. Gates. You didn’t say anything about having known her. Having danced with her.”
Timothy Gates looked from one of them to another.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t say anything about that, Captain.”
Chapter IV
Timothy Gates, ex-sergeant, United States Marine Corps, sat erect on a wooden bench in the small office of the East Belford Substation of the State police. He sat with his arms folded across his chest. He sat near the still open window, and soft June air came through the window. It moved, without displacing, papers on the desk behind which Captain Heimrich sat. It did not find its way across the room to Sergeant Forniss, who sat at a small table, a notebook open in front of him. He had not been taking notes for some minutes. He had the story down.
“I’ll go over it once more,” Heimrich said. “This is what you say. When you saw Virginia Monroe’s body you realized you had seen her before. But that was all. You didn’t remember where you had seen her, or connect her name when you heard it. It wasn’t until Mr. Kirkwood reminded you that you remembered. You hadn’t seen her from the evening of the party, late last month, until you saw her body. You didn’t know she lived here. Is that right?”
“Yes sir,” Gates said. “That’s the way it was.”
His voice was flat, as if he said something he did not expect to be believed.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“I see that,” Gates said. “That’s why I didn’t say I’d seen her before, or thought I had. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I had. I’ve told you that.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “You’ve told me that.”
“I met her once,” Timothy said. “At this party. This let’s-do-something-for-the-boys party. I danced with her, maybe a couple of times. I’ve danced with a lot of girls—a lot of nice girls, doing something for the boys. I didn’t pay much attention to their names. I don’t remember Mr. Kirkwood at all. Don’t remember seeing him.”
“You’d had a couple of drinks, naturally?”
“Sure,” Gates said. “Maybe three drinks. Don’t get the party wrong, Captain. It was just a party. Just nice people doing something nice for the boys. This friend of mine wanted to go, so I went along.”
Heimrich closed his eyes. He spoke with his eyes closed. He wanted to be exact as to what Mr. Gates had said: That he had never seen Virginia Monroe before that evening. That she had made no particular impression on him then, except that she was pretty and pleasant and danced well. That he did not know she lived in East Belford. That his finding her body was entirely a coincidence.
“About a year ago,” Gates said. “Maybe a little more, I met a chap I’d gone to school with. Met him in Korea. Behind a big rock. A guy I hadn’t seen in ten years. Hadn’t heard of. We turn up behind the same big rock on what we call Bunker Hill. There are a hell of a lot of big rocks in the world, sir.”
Heimrich nodded, but did not open his eyes.
“All right,” Timothy Gates said, “I can’t make you believe it, Captain. All right, it sounds thin.”
“About this other thing, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Why did you pick Chicago? Did you think we wouldn’t check?”
“I didn’t think very long,” Gates said. “I realize it was a damn fool thing to say, sir. I told you why.” He uncrossed his arms, put a hand on the bench on either side of his body. “I got sort of mixed up. I realize that now. I suppose you don’t believe that?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps I do.”
Gates turned a little, so that he looked out the window into the night.
“It was damn cold that night,” Gates said.
Captain Heimrich did not open his eyes. But he nodded across the little room to Forniss, and Forniss began taking notes again.
“These guys had us pinned down,” Gates said. “We were lying there freezing and we couldn’t move much. So we had to get them, didn’t we? Didn’t we?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Go on, Mr. Gates.”
“The lieutenant had stopped one,” Gates said. “I was the sergeant. So I tapped this guy, and this guy and this guy, and we started off on our bellies. Somebody had to decide what guys went. I had to do the picking. Didn’t I?”
“Naturally,” Heimrich said.
“One of the guys was a hell of a good friend of mine,” Timothy Gates said. “He’d told me about his girl and where they were going to live. All that sort of thing. I could have put the tap on someone else.”
“Everybody wants to live,” Heimrich said. “Most young men have girls.”
“He was a damned good Marine,” Timothy Gates said. “That’s what I had to go on.” He stopped speaking for a moment. He looked through the window into the June night. He seemed to be listening for something beyond the rustle of the leaves, the occasional soft bumbling of an insect against the screen. “He was a long time dying,” Gates said. “The other two had it easy, or as easy as it ever is. This guy had it tough. After we got back, he kept screaming. And in between, he’d
talk about this girl.” He stopped speaking. He did not look at Heimrich, or at Sergeant Forniss. He looked through the window into darkness.
“You got him out,” Heimrich said. “With both your legs shot up, you got him out. You—”
“For God’s sake, skip it,” Gates said. “That’s all I ask, sir. Just skip it.”
He turned back, now.
“You got the medal,” Heimrich said. “The Medal of Honor.”
“For getting three guys killed,” Gates said. “So they reach down and say, ‘That one’ll do’ and pull him out and pat him on the back, and give him a bangle to wear around his neck. To—” He broke off. He said he was sorry. He said, “Can’t we just skip all this, sir?”
Heimrich’s eyes were open now. Heimrich shook his head.
“I have to find out what I can, naturally,” he said. “All I can. That’s part of the job, Mr. Gates.”
“All right,” Gates said. “You’ve found out. So I’m mixed up. Maybe I’m nuts. Maybe I killed this girl.”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Let’s take one thing at a time. Getting the Medal of Honor mixed you up?” Gates made a quick gesture at that. “Oh,” Heimrich said, “I realize it was more than that. I’m trying to understand your mental attitude, Mr. Gates.”
He was asked why he bothered. He closed his eyes and sighed. He said, “Now Mr. Gates,” and then, after a moment, opened his eyes. “Character is important,” he said. “We have to try to find out about people.”
“A psychoanalyst,” Gates said.
“A psychiatrist,” Heimrich corrected. “Like your father.” Gates seemed about to speak. “No,” Heimrich said, “we can’t leave him out. We can’t leave anybody out, naturally. Your father’s Dr. Timothy Gates, of Baltimore. So you’re Timothy Gates, Jr. He’s a professor at the university. You were a pre-medical student. You could have got out of service. You decided you wanted in.” Gates started to speak again, and shrugged instead. The muscle under his eye no longer jumped. “Yes,” Heimrich said, “we try to be thorough. You didn’t want to be identified. You said your parents were dead.” He stopped. He waited. Gates shrugged again.
Stand Up and Die Page 5
