Dr. Crowell spread his hands.
“Naturally, Doctor,” Heimrich said. “Naturally.”
“I feel like—” Crowell began.
“Now Doctor,” Heimrich said. “Now Doctor. You shouldn’t, really. These things are always difficult, but you shouldn’t.” Heimrich stood up, then.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Crowell said, and stood too.
“Yes,” Heimrich said, and turned. “I’ll see you later, then,” he added, and was shown out through the side door. He walked, unhurriedly, toward the Inn. It was becoming very interesting, he thought. Confused, but interesting.
Naturally, Heimrich thought as he walked on the sunny side of Main Street, toward a telephone, toward lunch, the confusion was, at bottom, calculated. But to misdirection by intention, to confusion contrived, it was almost certain that further confusion was being added with no malice aforethought. The presence of Timothy Gates was confusing. The story Heimrich had just been told added further complication. It was, however, difficult to see how the two things could be part of a single plan. If they were not, then one was essentially irrelevant. It was further possible that both were irrelevant. Red-headed Guy Ober was quite probably an additional irrelevancy, but that had to be found out.
Amid the confusion, Heimrich supposed, he was not supposed to notice the obvious—that not one woman had died, but two. Someone, Heimrich thought, had been very naïve. His mind hesitated, then. Suppose, he thought, someone had not been naïve at all? He shook his mind firmly, bringing it into order. There was never room for two coincidences in a single case.
He walked more briskly, with that settled, as if briskness would keep it settled. He turned into the Inn, he turned into the telephone room. He told Forniss that a young man named Guy Ober needed looking into. He asked about progress on the contents of Virginia Monroe’s desk, and heard that Forniss was almost finished, that the one or two things which might have meaning had now reached the number of three or four, that Forniss was not, however, at all sure what meaning these things had, if any.
Heimrich said, “Hm-m-m” to that. Then he said, “Dr. Crowell just told me something interesting, Charlie,” and told Forniss what it was.
“Suppose you drop around and see Mr. Kirkwood, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Be a nice change from the paper work. Tell him what we’ve heard.” He waited. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I think he might know where we got it, Charlie. See how he takes it. Have one of the boys check up on Ober.”
He waited until Sergeant Forniss said, “Yep.” He started into the cocktail lounge, then, and needed to step aside to make way for Liz Monroe, who was coming out of it. But she stopped in the doorway. She said, “Are you going to be everywhere I go? All my life?”
She spoke abruptly. Although she did not raise her voice, there was violence in her voice, and challenge. She was, Heimrich thought, holding tight by an effort of will—an effort which almost literally shook her slender body—against inner turmoil. Again he thought that she was very young, and strung tightly against the world, as the very young can be.
“Now Miss Monroe,” he said. “I shouldn’t think so. I—”
But he was interrupted. Timothy Gates came from a table in the lounge to stand tall beside them, to look at Heimrich from hard eyes in a set face.
“Leave her alone, will you?” Gates said. “Will you leave her alone?”
“He can’t,” Liz said. “Don’t you see that? He can’t. I killed my sister and—”
“You’re a crazy girl,” Gates said. “Like I told you. You’re nuts.”
They talked through Heimrich. Momentarily, Captain M. L. Heimrich of the New York State Police felt himself disembodied, and found this slightly disconcerting.
“If—” he began.
“He goes around making people talk,” Liz said. “Listening to gossip. Making up theories. Crazy theories. He’s the crazy one.”
Then she turned suddenly to Heimrich.
“Paul’s such a fine gossip, isn’t he?” she said. “Tell me. Isn’t Paul Crowell a wonderful gossip?”
The three of them blocked the door. A kindly woman in a black dress, who was Mrs. Smathers, who operated the Inn, looked at them from the corridor. She looked with concern.
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said, finding himself returned to solidity. “Now Miss Monroe. Why Dr. Crowell?”
“I tell you, leave her alone,” Gates said. “She’s upset. Can’t you see that?” He paused for an instant. Then, unexpectedly, he added, “sir.”
Heimrich closed his eyes momentarily. He opened them, and regarded Gates.
“I came here to have a drink,” he said. “To have some lunch. But if Miss Monroe wants to—talk, I shan’t stop her, naturally. What about Dr. Crowell, Miss Monroe?”
“You’ve been talking to him,” Liz Monroe said. “Everybody in the village knows that.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said.
“About me,” Liz said. “Wasn’t it about me? What did he tell you about me? That I’m not stable? That I’m a neurotic, bottled up, little—”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said, and made a quick gesture as Gates seemed about to interrupt. “Why would he say that?”
“Because he thinks it,” Liz said. “Everybody thinks it. Virginia took care of that, you know. ‘Poor dear Liz. So terribly tense, isn’t she? So highly strung. We must be so careful with poor, dear Liz.’ I can hear her telling him. The way she told Howard and grandmother and people at the club and—” She stopped herself. “I talk too damn much,” she said.
“You sure do,” Timothy Gates said. “You sure as hell do. You’re a crazy girl.”
But his voice was not hard. His voice was oddly tender.
“Actually,” Heimrich said, “we talked about other things, for the most part. The doctor and I. He told me that your sister planned to break her engagement with Mr. Kirkwood. That she planned to tell him the night she died.”
“Dear Paul,” Liz said. “Isn’t he wonderful, Captain?”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “Do you know whether that was true?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know. She didn’t confide in me. She just confided in other people, about me. About her poor—”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “You’ve made that clear, haven’t you?”
“Not clear enough,” she said. “Never clear enough.”
Then she made the curiously abrupt, quick gesture Heimrich had seen her make before.
“I don’t want to know what else Paul said,” Liz said, and now, for the first time, her voice rose a little, although she still controlled it. “I don’t—”
She did not finish. Instead, she began to walk away from them. Timothy Gates said, “Wait a—” and she shook her head, but half turned toward him. “Not now,” she said. “Thanks, anyway.” She went on.
The two men looked after her.
“Phew!” Timothy Gates said, like a surprised boy. But then he turned to Heimrich and said, “You ought to leave her alone, sir. Can’t you see she’s all mixed up? Hasn’t she had enough to make her that way?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “I see what you mean, naturally.”
“Do you?”
“Now Mr. Gates.”
“Maybe,” Gates said. He paused. “Can I buy you a drink, sir?” But then he flushed. “I suppose you wouldn’t want—”
“I’d very much like a drink,” Heimrich said, and walked into the lounge.
(Mrs. Smathers, watching from the door of the dining room, was relieved. She hated to see people get excited. Poor, dear Liz. She did get excited so easily. It couldn’t be good for her.)
Heimrich and Timothy Gates ordered, and got, their drinks.
“The way it is,” Gates said, “you feel as if your nerves are crawling. You know you should do something, make yourself be quiet. But that only makes it worse. I don’t suppose you’d know about that, Captain?”
Heimrich closed his eyes. The youn
g so often doubted whether others wholly retained sentience.
“I’ve heard,” Heimrich said, and Timothy Gates flushed again, was suddenly again very young, and said he was sorry.
“She needs somebody to have confidence in her,” he said, after a moment. “Miss Monroe, I mean. Needs to have somebody think she’s all right. That sister of hers did something to her.”
Heimrich waited a moment, but the tall youth sipped his drink, looking over it at nothing.
“You met her here?” Heimrich said then. “Just now, I mean?”
Gates nodded.
“Maybe an hour or so ago,” he said. “I’d been out walking around. I’ve walked around a good deal since yesterday.”
Heimrich knew that. He did not mention that he knew it.
“Actually,” Gates said, “we met outside. On the sidewalk. She was walking along the way she does, shoulders back and everything, and all the same she damn near bumped into me before she saw me. Then she stopped and looked at me and said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about you.’ Just like that. You know what I said?”
Heimrich shook his head.
“I said, ‘Yes, I know,’ just like that,” Gates told him. “I hadn’t known, but all the same, when she said she’d been thinking about me, I knew she had been as if I’d known it before. I’d known it subconsciously, I guess Dad would say.”
Heimrich nodded, this time. Again Gates was silent for some seconds, again he sipped his drink.
“Look,” Gates said then, “you don’t really think she had anything to do with—with any of this. Her sister?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know yet.”
“She couldn’t have had,” Gates said. “She’s nervous, upset—that’s all. Underneath that she’s—” He paused for a longer time. “She’s all right,” he said. “Anybody ought to be able to see that.”
He looked at Heimrich.
“Don’t you see that?” Gates demanded.
“She didn’t like her sister,” Heimrich said. “Her sister—well, you heard her, Mr. Gates. Perhaps her sister—nibbled at her.”
“Nibbled?” Gates repeated.
Heimrich closed his eyes, then. He said it was not too easy to find words for; said that it might, of course, be in Liz Monroe’s imagination, and only there. But “nibbled” was as good a word as any other.
“Hinted to people that she was neurotic,” he said. “Perhaps even more than that. She may have done a good many things to lessen Miss Monroe in her own estimation, in other peoples’. Perhaps she hinted at things to Mrs. Saunders. Perhaps to a good many people. It would be—exasperating, naturally.”
“Exasperating,” Gates said. “You don’t argue that is enough?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said, “it’s hard to say what’s enough, as you put it. The constant dripping of water can be—upsetting. As upsetting as some—well, as some such violent experience as you went through. As upset you.”
Gates nodded, then waited for a time.
“You know,” he said, “it’s a funny thing. I haven’t been feeling that way for—for quite a while. About all the things that were so damned important just a couple of days ago.”
“No,” Heimrich said. “I did notice that, Mr. Gates.”
“About Miss Monroe,” Gates said. “If you really suspect her—and she thinks you do—there must be more. You’re wrong, whatever there is. But there must be more.”
“There appear to have been a few things which might have brought—exasperation to a head,” Heimrich said. “Also, there was money, naturally. A great deal of money.”
Gates’s eyebrows were straight, and heavy. He raised them now.
Heimrich said it was no secret. Heimrich told him enough of Penina Saunders’s will. He told Gates what he thought it would be appropriate for Gates to know.
Timothy Gates saw two flaws. He pointed to them. A person with no money at all may well kill for ten dollars. But a person with two million dollars would hardly kill to get two more.
Heimrich nodded.
“Of course,” he said, “there is inflation.” Gates laughed at that, even while he shook his head. Heimrich watched him laugh. He often found a person’s laughter revealing. “Oh, I agree, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Agree in the abstract.”
The second point, Gates pointed out, was that Virginia Monroe had not had two million dollars, or whatever it would come to. She would have got it when her grandmother died. But when Virginia died, Penina Saunders was alive.
He was told that, this time, he missed the point.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear,” Heimrich told Timothy Gates, watching Gates’s intent face. “After Mrs. Saunders died it would have been, or might have been, too late. For her sister.” He waited while rejection of this formed almost angrily in Gates’s face. “I’m not charging anything, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “I try to be detached, naturally. As soon as Mrs. Saunders died—a minute after she died—Virginia Monroe would have inherited, absolutely. Five minutes later she might have completed a will leaving her share to anyone. Only if she died before her grandmother did her sister get it all—automatically get it all. Once the money had actually passed to Virginia, she might have passed it on to anyone. So far as we know, Liz would have got the money if her sister died intestate, but that’s only as far as we know. If, for example, Virginia had been married—”
“She wasn’t, was she?” Gates asked.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “I haven’t heard she was. I assume she wasn’t. But I don’t know.”
Gates waited a moment, but Heimrich did not go on. Heimrich finished his drink and closed his eyes.
“You think Mrs. Saunders was killed, don’t you?” Gates said, then. “Liz—Miss Monroe—says you do.”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said, “I don’t know that, either. But yes, I think she was. If you just happened to be walking in the lane yesterday morning, then I think Mrs. Saunders was murdered.”
The boy looked at him.
“Because one coincidence is enough, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Too much, really, but we can’t have perfect order, naturally. But two coincidences—no, Mr. Gates. Not two.”
He was asked, with evident doubt, whether he was serious.
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “Why should you think I’m not?”
He got a shrug for an answer; a brief flicker of the boy’s usually unrelenting lips.
“You’ll want to eat lunch,” Gates said then, and Heimrich nodded. He watched the tall youth go, and guessed where he was going. The two were, he thought, going to make an odd pair if they got around to it—if they had a chance to get around to it. Perhaps, he thought, they would mollify each other, if circumstances happened to permit.
Heimrich pushed back the table and started to get up. He stopped because he heard his own name spoken. “Heimrich’s ordered an autopsy on the old lady,” the voice said, and Heimrich looked toward the small telephone room. The door was shut on a man from the Journal-American, who was telephoning in. By some accident of acoustics, this seemed to make no difference. The man from the Journal-American might almost as well have been speaking in the lounge.
It was also evident, Heimrich thought, crossing the lounge to the door which led into the central corridor, and hence to the dining room—it was also evident that the man from the Journal-American had not been paying very close attention. There was nothing to be done about that. There never was.
Chapter IX
It was very warm by mid-afternoon. Captain Heimrich walked the shady side of Main Street from the Inn. He walked past the drug store and the A. & P., past the hardware store, which had electric fans in the window, which offered a pyramid of garden insecticides. A man in his shirt sleeves, but with a necktie for formality, stood in the door of the hardware store, regarded Heimrich, ended by nodding to him, tentatively. In an odd fashion, Heimrich realized—in a temporary fashion—he was part of the town. He was authority in the tow
n.
He walked through the block to the First National Bank and the East Belford Savings Bank, which rubbed fraternal shoulders. He went into the former, where marble added coolness. He enquired for the bank’s president and found him in a corner at a wide desk. Mr. Samuel Waltham was, Heimrich noticed, type cast. He acknowledged Heimrich’s identification of himself noncommittally, almost with skepticism. Heimrich was investigating the murder of Miss Virginia Monroe.
“I know you are, Captain,” Mr. Waltham said, with the air of one from whom nothing was, could be, hidden. He waited, at the other side of a desk, at the other side of the world.
“I need information,” Heimrich said.
“Doubtless,” said Mr. Samuel Waltham.
It was not, thereafter, either quick or easy, but Heimrich had not supposed it would be. It was not precise, and Heimrich had not hoped it would be. It took, indeed, some time to persuade Mr. Waltham that he should go even so far as to retire from the exposed outpost of finance represented by his wide desk to an inner office, away from curious eyes.
But Heimrich was persistent, having before then dealt with bankers, seeking from them information which they were disinclined—which they always proclaimed themselves unauthorized—to disclose. Having enticed Mr. Waltham into an inner office, Heimrich considered his battle half won. But even then capitulation was slow and never final. Figures did not appear, records were not consulted. It was an hour or so of circumlocution, of indirection, of things half said and not to be attributed to a source.
It was almost four o’clock when Heimrich, having got what he could, thanked Mr. Samuel Waltham who, on being thanked, said, “Hm-m-m” with suspicion, evidently wondering whether he had not said more than he intended. Captain Heimrich was then let out by an underling, who had remained for the purpose.
Heimrich went next door to the East Belford Savings Bank, which was open until five. The East Belford Savings Bank had a manager available, and he was reticent, too, as became a custodian of reputation. But here, for all that, and because he was now better armed for the contest, Heimrich got as much as he could hope to get in half the time. He thanked the manager and went out into the afternoon, and the doors of the savings bank closed behind him with finality. He turned to his left, and Sergeant Forniss came toward him with long strides, as a man who had no time to waste. Forniss shook his head when he saw Captain Heimrich. When he was close enough he said, with uncharacteristic precipitance, that there was hell to pay.
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