There was. The papers which Heimrich had taken from Virginia Monroe’s desk, which Sergeant Forniss had spent most of the day scrutinizing, had disappeared. They had, too evidently, been stolen. They had been stolen from the top of the desk of the small inner office of the East Belford Substation of the New York State Police.
“Well,” Captain Heimrich said. “Well. That’s unfortunate, isn’t it, Charlie? Go on, Charlie.”
It did not take long to tell. After talking to Heimrich on the telephone, Sergeant Forniss had sent a trooper to find out what he could about Guy Ober. That cut the men in the substation to two—the sergeant regularly assigned there and Forniss himself.
There were two only long enough for Forniss to stack the papers from Virginia Monroe’s desk, put a weight on them. Forniss had left word where he was going, which was to talk to Howard Kirkwood, as directed, and had gone.
“Saw him, all right,” Forniss said. “You want to—?”
“Not now, Charlie,” Heimrich said.
It had taken Forniss longer than he expected. Kirkwood had been at the country club, and Forniss had driven there. And there he had had to wait until Kirkwood had finished a lengthy conference on the legal aspects of a sale of property. Kirkwood had not wanted, then, to talk at the club, so they had driven back to his apartment and talked there.
“So,” Forniss said, “I got back to the station about—oh, maybe twenty minutes ago.”
Forniss had found the uniformed sergeant there and found him furious. Some—extensively described—character had been playing games. Some—even more extensively described—lunatic had telephoned to report the wreck of three cars on Route 22. Some jokester had reported the roadway strewn with bodies, slippery with blood.
To this carnage, Sergeant Townsend had gone with siren wailing, leaving the substation empty.
“Matter of fact,” Forniss said, “it is about half the time, anyway. You know how things are.”
Heimrich nodded. There were not enough men; there were never enough men. Enough for the main Troop K barracks at Hawthorne, enough to keep manned the larger stations, such as the one at Brewster, seldom enough left over to staff fully the smaller substations, like those at South Salem and East Belford.
“Well,” Forniss said. “There wasn’t any wreck. Wasn’t even anybody with locked bumpers. Wasn’t a damn thing. A guy who thinks it’s fun to chase around at seventy and hope to God some of these characters on the road will know enough to get out of the way when they hear the siren.”
Heimrich waited.
“Only it wasn’t, of course,” Forniss said. “It was somebody knew the trooper was gone, knew I was gone, wanted to get Towny out too. Towny didn’t realize that and I didn’t until I went to get the papers. So—there it is, Captain.” Forniss looked at his superior. “I should have locked the stuff up. But—there it is.”
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said, and his voice was mild. “You’d been over all of it?”
“A couple of times,” Forniss said.
“And found a couple of things?”
“I don’t know,” Forniss said. “Things I didn’t get, offhand. Nothing solid. I made some notes. Had them in my pocket.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “We’ll go over them and see, naturally. What did Mr. Kirkwood say, Charlie?”
Kirkwood had appeared to be shocked and surprised at the story Dr. Crowell had told. He had expressed disbelief; he had been unable to account for what he described as a fantasy. With that out of the way—
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said, “how did it strike you?”
“He hadn’t expected it,” Forniss said. “Or he’s a good actor. Of course, he’s a lawyer. Get some of those boys in front of a jury—” He shrugged.
“I don’t think Mr. Kirkwood is a trial lawyer, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Not in criminal practice. So he denied Miss Monroe had broken things off?”
Kirkwood had. He had denied it with emphasis, and with emotion. He stuck to his earlier story. They had seen a movie together, they had driven together in the MG and talked. They had parted in front of his house and Virginia Monroe had waved goodbye from the little open car.
“I don’t think we were ever closer,” Kirkwood had told Sergeant Forniss.
“He sort of broke up at that,” Forniss said. “Or seemed to.”
“Naturally,” Heimrich said. “You believed him, Charlie?”
Forniss thought over that, as they walked toward the substation. In the end he shook his head.
“I don’t know why,” he said, “but I didn’t think he was as surprised by the whole business as he let on. But, all the same, he was pretty convincing about what happened that night. Say, maybe, that he wouldn’t have been too surprised if she had broken off, but that that night she didn’t. See what I mean?”
“Yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “It could be that way, naturally.”
They reached the substation. Sergeant Townsend was there. He stood up. He said, “Listen, Captain, I’m sorry as hell but—”
“Now Sergeant,” Heimrich said. “You couldn’t know, could you?”
Heimrich and Forniss went into the little office, which was hot, for all that soft air drifted through the open window. Heimrich looked at the window.
“Nope,” Forniss said. “Just walked in.”
Heimrich nodded to that, and sat at the desk.
“Who knew about them?” Forniss asked, and indicated the desk top where “they” no longer were.
Heimrich shrugged to that. Anybody, naturally. Everybody, probably. Dr. Crowell had seen Heimrich take the contents of Virginia Monroe’s desk with him when he left the Saunders house. Probably he had mentioned this; almost certainly he had mentioned this—to Liz Monroe, who almost certainly by now had told Timothy Gates; to Kirkwood, who would have guessed in any case. There had been no secret.
“In a place this size,” Forniss said, “everybody knows where everybody is. You noticed that? I started looking for you when I found the stuff gone and about the first man I met—guy at the hardware store, actually—said, ‘Looking for the Captain, Sergeant? He’s in the savings bank. Went to the First National first.’ I mean, everybody probably knew I’d gone to find Kirkwood.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Naturally, Sergeant.” He closed his eyes. “Miss Monroe and Mr. Gates knew you were going,” he said. “At least, I imagine they did. Heard me on the telephone at the Inn, unless they’re deaf, which they aren’t. Why did somebody want the papers, Charlie? She didn’t say, ‘So-and-so is going to murder me’?”
Forniss reached in his pocket. He brought out a piece of paper. There were notations on it. One was an address: 2 E. 103. The other consisted of a column of figures. Heimrich looked and shook his head. He said, “Why? Charlie?”
“There were a lot of addresses,” Forniss said. “You know how people jot them down. This didn’t seem to fit, somehow. The others could be restaurants, places people live, shops. This one—I don’t know.”
Heimrich waited.
“At the corner of Fifth,” Forniss said. “I know the block—almost know it, anyway. In my precinct when I was on the city cops, way back, remember? I’ve been trying to get the picture. You know?”
“Yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “So?”
“Some sort of big building,” Forniss said. “That’s all I get. Something I ought to remember that doesn’t fit. Fit the girl, that is. It’s not much. I didn’t find much—some things I thought I had didn’t seem like anything when I went on. You know?”
Heimrich did.
“I can damn near see the building,” Forniss said. “Not near enough.”
“Now Charlie, we’ll find out, naturally,” Heimrich said. “The figures?”
He looked at them. He saw:
1330
185
160
165
190
145
175
185
120
130
155<
br />
110
115
90
85
90
80
Heimrich read the list of figures twice. He looked up at Forniss.
“On a separate sheet,” Forniss said. “Clipped into her check book. Looks like a list of payments, in or out. But it doesn’t show in the check book either way—I mean, on the stubs. She didn’t pay it out, at least from her account. There aren’t cash withdrawals to cover it. Also, she didn’t pay it in. It looks as if she’d carried the first amount—the thirteen thirty—forward from some other list.” He shrugged. “You wanted something that didn’t explain itself,” he said. “That didn’t, to me.” He waited while Heimrich looked at the column again. “Totals twenty-one eighty,” Forniss said. “Nice little sum. Thirty-five ten altogether.”
“Fees for modeling?” Heimrich suggested.
Forniss spread his hands, gesturing inability to comment. But then he added, “She didn’t bank it. Her last balance was around five hundred dollars.”
“She didn’t get as much, or pay as much—whichever it was—toward the end,” Heimrich said. “She hadn’t added it up?”
“Nope,” Forniss said. “It isn’t much, is it?”
Heimrich closed his eyes.
“Now Charlie,” he said, “we don’t know yet, do we? We—”
Someone knocked at the door, and Captain Heimrich said, “Yes?” A trooper came in.
“About this Guy Ober,” he said. “I managed to chase him down.”
Heimrich waited.
“He’s a pretty sore guy,” the trooper said. “Can’t blame him, if what he figures is so.”
The trooper explained, tersely. Ober had just lost his job, as he had lost four jobs before it, not counting the job with Mrs. Saunders he had lost some two years ago. “Says he doesn’t know why he lost that one,” the trooper said. “Says Mrs. Saunders didn’t explain. Just fired him. So he’s been working in garages around here. Mechanic.”
He had worked in four, with a good deal of time between jobs, since his discharge as the Saunders chauffeur. In each job, as he told it, he had got along well for periods ranging from six weeks to three months. Then, from each job, he was discharged—from three on the grounds that work was slack and he wasn’t needed; from the last because a previous employee had got out of the army and had returned to claim his job.
“Ober’s sore,” the trooper repeated. “He says there was plenty of work at the first three and too much at the last one. Says they needed another man, and that the boss had asked him if he knew anybody.”
“Maybe,” Forniss said, “he’s not so good.”
“Maybe,” the trooper agreed. “I don’t think so. I asked at this last place and the man who owns it said Ober knew his job and gave me the same story about this man coming back. I—well—”
“He didn’t convince you?” Heimrich said.
“No, he didn’t.”
“Ober says the old—Mrs. Saunders was getting him fired,” the trooper said. “Telling some lie about him. He’s pretty hot about it, Captain. Also—” He paused, considering.
“He got cagey pretty quick,” the trooper said. “But before that he said some things made me think he thought Miss Monroe had put Mrs. Saunders up to it.”
“Liz Monroe?” Heimrich asked, and the trooper shook his head.
“Virginia,” he said. “The one who was killed, Captain.” He paused again. “This guy’s got a temper, Captain,” he said. “I’d run into him before, come to find out. Fight at a tavern, and he knocked a hell of a big man halfway across the place about something the other guy said. He just flared up, apparently. But the guy he hit took it all right, when he came to. He said something about he should have had better sense with a fellow like Ober.”
“No charges?” Heimrich said.
“No,” the trooper said. “You want me to go on with it?”
Heimrich was silent a moment. Then he said, “Yes, I guess you’d better. Put a little pressure on where he used to work, naturally.”
The trooper said, “Yes sir,” and went.
“That would make things simple, wouldn’t it?” Forniss said.
Heimrich’s eyes were closed. He nodded.
“Dr. Crowell is rather short of money, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “He can use this money from Mrs. Saunders. He’s got quite a mortgage on his house, apparently, and the last couple of months he’s just paid the interest. He’s supposed to amortize. His current account—I didn’t get any figures—is pretty low. Nothing like it was a year ago, or even six months ago. But his practice is better.”
“So?”
“Very reticent, bankers,” Heimrich said. “The doctor could have been on the wrong side of the market, naturally.”
Forniss wrinkled his forehead.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “It’s interesting, isn’t it, Charlie? Liz Monroe got a very small allowance, I understand. Interesting how much bankers know about what goes on, isn’t it? Hardly enough to keep her in clothes, probably. Well, she’ll have plenty now. Can go any place she likes now—shut up the house and go anywhere. To Europe, maybe. A pretty girl with all the money in the world, on top of the world, as she says about her sister.”
Forniss was not, he decided, expected to answer. He merely listened.
“Makes her a very nice girl to marry, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Attractive girl with a lot of money, now her grandmother’s dead. Of course, she’s attractive anyway, to be fair. Young Gates is quite taken with her.”
Forniss continued to wait.
“Mr. Kirkwood banks in New York apparently,” Heimrich said. “That is—he keeps a small account here and checks into it from New York. The Corn Exchange. Uses this for small local bills and check cashing, mostly. The account here runs around a thousand or so.” Heimrich paused for a moment. “Of course,” he said, “that’s quite a common arrangement.”
He was silent for some time.
“Mr. Kirkwood more or less handled Mrs. Saunders’s finances, apparently,” he said then. “In association with some investment trust in New York. Or—through some investment trust in New York. So I’d imagine that alone would keep him solvent, wouldn’t you, Charlie?”
Charlie Forniss said, “Yep.” He waited. When Heimrich said nothing for a longish time, Forniss said, “You’re pretty sure the old lady was murdered?”
Heimrich opened his eyes at that.
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Of course she was. It all hangs on that, naturally.”
Chapter X
From the anteroom, one door opened to the morgue and one to the autopsy room. The third might have been said to open on life. There was an uncomfortable wooden bench in the anteroom and two uncomfortable wooden chairs. Captain Heimrich sat on one of the chairs, breathed mingled disinfectants and felt a little chilly, as if the refrigeration in the larger room on the other side of a thin wall was too effective to be stopped by walls. But in fact, the anteroom was rather warm; it was even stuffy. Heimrich lighted a cigarette and the smoke tasted of the air’s odors. Heimrich put the cigarette out.
He had come too early, which was as uncharacteristic as might be. Arriving at nine, which was absurd, he had waited more than two hours. That he had sat uncomfortably in a small room, putting out cigarettes which tasted of disinfectant, for so long a time was an indication of something which, looked at objectively, Heimrich did not approve. It indicated to Captain Heimrich that there was something in him which, for no conceivable reason, rejected what the whole logic of the case made certain. It was certain that Mrs. Penina Saunders had been murdered. It was almost certain, if one left Guy Ober out, that she had been murdered for her money. If this were not true, then nothing held together; if it were not true, he had both hands full of meaningless facts, as uncohering, as shapeless, as dry sand.
And since it is as certain as all that, one part of Heimrich’s mind enquired, a little ghoulishly, what are you doing here, sitting on the edge of a hard chair
? (Heimrich slid himself back into the chair, to prove something to his uneasy mind.) Why are you not up and about in the warm night, picking up those odds and ends you have left to Forniss? Why, if the odds and ends must wait on this—as perhaps they must—are you not taking your ease at the Inn, waiting the obvious with assurance?
A door opened, but it was the wrong door. It was the door from life. A breath of live air entered through the open door, and perished on the moment. Liz Monroe entered through the open door, with Howard Kirkwood behind her and, behind both of them, bending a little as he entered, with the very tall man’s instinctive obeisance to lintels, Timothy Gates. Kirkwood said, “Good evening, Captain,” apparently for all of them, since Liz merely looked at Heimrich and Gates merely nodded. Heimrich stood up.
“Miss Monroe felt she should hear the report,” Kirkwood said. “As an interested party. Mr. Gates—er—”
“Mr. Gates and I happened to be together,” Liz Monroe said.
She went to the bench and sat on it, not waiting for an answer. Gates sat beside her.
“What—” she began, but Gates put one large hand on her slender one, and she did not finish.
Heimrich sat down again. Kirkwood looked at the two on the bench and blinked. Then he sat in the other chair.
“Nothing yet, I gather?” Kirkwood said.
“No,” Heimrich said.
“Miss Monroe has a right to immediate information,” Kirkwood said. “And I, as her attorney.”
Heimrich closed his eyes.
“Naturally, Mr. Kirkwood,” he said.
There was a pause.
“All right to smoke in here?” Gates asked, and seemed to speak too loudly.
“Yes, it’s all right,” Heimrich said.
Gates offered a cigarette to Liz Monroe, who shook her head. She sat rigidly, now. Her eyes were on the door she faced. Gates lighted his cigarette, drew deeply, seemed surprised. He looked at Heimrich and said, “Not so good, is it?” Heimrich said it wasn’t. Gates tried again, dropped the cigarette to the wooden floor and stepped on it. But then he picked up the mangled cigarette and put it in an ash tray.
Stand Up and Die Page 12
