Heimrich shook his head.
“So that was the coincidence,” Gates said. “The one you would allow?”
“Now Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said.
“The doctor—the pathologist—was pretty sure, I gather,” Gates said.
“Yes.”
“Hypertension’s hard to handle,” Gates said. “At least, I’ve gathered that. Doctors talk a lot when they’re together, you know. Talk shop. I’ve heard my father and a good many others talking. I listened because I planned—well, I told you what I planned, sir.”
“And don’t now?”
Gates seemed to grow older between seconds.
“It’s a bad time to plan,” he said. “For me, particularly. You agree?” For the first time in hours, Heimrich saw the muscle jump in Gates’s face.
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “People always have to plan, Mr. Gates.”
Gates said he supposed so. Then he said, “Did Dr. Crowell try hexamethonium, d’y’ know?” He flushed again. “Not that it’s any of my business,” he added. “There’s no doctor like a premed, Dad says.”
“I believe he did,” Heimrich said. “I—” But he stopped because Timothy Gates had stopped listening to him. Liz had come out of the house and walked toward them across sunny grass. She was, naturally, enough for one young man to think about.
She brought a firm name, an address on Madison Avenue. She had written it down, she handed it over. She waited, some challenge in her attitude. She was merely thanked, and by that seemed a little taken aback. Heimrich walked back across the lawn to the street and his car. At the car he looked back. The two were standing and had, he thought, been looking after him. But now Gates was talking to the girl, and as he talked she shook her head. Gates continued to talk and Heimrich, in the car and looking out of it, thought he was trying to persuade her of something.
It might, Heimrich thought, be interesting to know of what. No doubt he would find out in time. Heimrich drove toward New York. It was still not eleven of Friday morning when he drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway, but already out-bound traffic was thickening, the week-end flight from the city already begun. He hoped someone at the Roper Modeling Agency would have tarried in his flight.
Several had, and Heimrich poked there, getting chaff, getting also an impression. He knew a good deal more about supply of and demand for photographers’ models when he left after half an hour than he had when he went in. He knew something of the fees, which were by the hour and varied from girl to girl, from job to job. He learned that Virginia Monroe’s record included the entry, “will do lingerie.” He learned that she lived, when in town, on Bank Street in the Village. He learned that, in her profession, she was considered reliable and competent. He derived the impression Virginia Monroe had not, for all that, been particularly popular.
He poked, after that, through a small, neat, deserted apartment on Bank Street, and found a few winter clothes there in moth bags—out of one of which a moth flew indignantly—and, on a dressing table, a framed photograph of a man who was almost certainly an actor, or wanted to be. He took the photograph out of its frame and put it in his briefcase, and drove up town to a photographer’s studio and learned that the man was Henry Wadsworth, which he rather doubted, and that he was supposed to be in Hollywood. (When Heimrich learned, some days later, that Henry Wadsworth was indeed in Hollywood he had trouble, for some seconds, in remembering why he had wanted to know.)
Heimrich poked then at several other photographic studios, finding three of them closed, one of them staffed by an office girl who had at first never heard of Virginia Monroe, who on being prompted said, “Oh. That one. A girl’s never safe in the country, is she?” In the fourth a man behind a large camera, in a room strangely lighted, was saying to a beautiful girl in what Heimrich took to be a Bikini bathing suit, “Damn it, darling. Damn it. Chin, darling. Chin!” It struck Heimrich that the photographer’s interest was somewhat tangental.
Heimrich left with the knowledge that Virginia Monroe had often been photographed there and that her legs had been perfect but her arms inclined to turn out thin if you weren’t careful. He closed the door on, “Now darling. Chin, for God’s sake. Chin!”
It was after one. Heimrich telephoned the West Twentieth Street police station and got Acting Captain William Weigand, Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, and found Weigand in a mood for lunch, and with time for it. Weigand commiserated, if with the detachment natural in a policeman whose baby it wasn’t, when he was told of the autopsy findings.
Heimrich talked, thereafter, to two men and a girl who had known Virginia Monroe. He talked to a bartender in a restaurant she had frequented, sometimes with one companion, more often with several, during the fall and winter months. He drove up Park Avenue to One Hundred and Third Street and parked in front of No. 2, East. It was a large building. Heimrich climbed broad stairs to the second floor and found himself in a library. He went to a desk and an efficient woman in her middle years said, “Yes, Doctor?” Heimrich explained. He was told it was not much to go on. That it was, in fact, nothing to go on.
“I realize that, naturally,” Heimrich said.
“Probably,” the attendant said, “she came here to look something up. The library’s open to the public. About when would it have been?”
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Probably in the past month or so. But that’s only a guess.”
“My dear man,” he heard. “My dear man. Have you any idea what you’re asking?”
Heimrich supposed it would be difficult. Raised hands, the expression of a face, assured him his understatement was flagrant. A voice said it would take weeks. Call slips were filed, of course. They were filed by date; the active file ran back for six months.
“And,” she said, “you don’t even know what she wanted to look up. You don’t even know if she actually came. She could have jotted the address down and—”
“Now miss,” Heimrich said. “I realize all that, naturally. That it will take time. That we may find nothing.”
“It’ll take somebody full time, for days,” the attendant said. “Days.”
“I might—” Heimrich said, and asked to use the telephone. He got Bill Weigand on it, told him what was needed. “Ouch!” Acting Captain Weigand said. “Right, Merton. I’ll get somebody on it.”
So that was arranged. Heimrich drove back through the late afternoon, through traffic which now crept near the approach to George Washington Bridge, which inched at intersections and stopped for minutes when somewhere ahead bumpers locked. Heimrich had plenty of time to think.
It was one thing, he found, to say, when a theory becomes untenable, very well, I abandon the theory. It was more difficult actually to abandon it. This was particularly true when one’s hatred of coincidence was implacable.
The difficulty was, naturally, that facts could be implacable, also.
Chapter XI
Heimrich stopped for food along the way, and ate without tasting, which under the circumstances was as well. He decided he had wasted the day, but about that he was philosophical. In his business, one wasted more time than one employed usefully. This was in the nature of things; the needle was always in a haystack. Unless it had glinted, briefly, at the New York Academy of Medicine, Heimrich could not see that he had had any new glimpse of it.
Virginia Monroe herself was somewhat clearer. She had been beautiful—if one discounted the fact that her arms were inclined to turn out thin; she had been competent and quick and punctual; at bars she had sat straight on bar stools and drank less than most; walking down Madison Avenue, as she must often have done, she had walked crisply, chic and confident and of Manhattan. She had not, nevertheless, been well liked. One of her acquaintances with whom Heimrich had talked had called her hard and another, no doubt meaning the same thing, had said that one never felt, with her, that one got beneath the surface. “Even,” this acquaintance had said, “that there was any beneath to the surface.” And a third, a man, after paying tribute to those
things about Virginia Monroe which had most appealed to men, had said, “You never thought of her as vulnerable” and then had added, “As a matter of fact, I’d have thought even a knife would bounce off Ginnie.” (She had been “Ginnie” to those who knew her in New York, as she had been “Vee” to Howard Kirkwood, “Virginia” to Dr. Crowell.)
She had been considered a girl who looked out for herself, who had been adept at looking out for herself. (But not finally, when it counted most, counted everything, Heimrich thought.) She had gone about a good deal, as decorative young women almost inevitably do; it had not been too often, Heimrich supposed, that she had needed to buy her own meals, or to eat alone. But if any of her associations went deeper than that, if any of the men she went to dinner with, to the theater with, got more than an opportunity to appreciate the decorative, it did not appear. “Not a girl to make mistakes, Ginnie wasn’t,” the man who had thought her invulnerable, had said. (Heimrich had slowly shaken his head over that; had pointed out, mildly, that somewhere she had, in the end, made no small mistake.)
Nothing he had discovered—Heimrich thought, leaving his coffee, his sense of taste having reappeared—nothing contradicted the sketch of her sister Liz Monroe had given him. At the same time, nothing essentially deepened the values of the sketch. Perhaps this was inevitable; perhaps Virginia Monroe had existed in outline.
Well, one had to waste a day to find out it was wasted. Heimrich drove on to East Belford, through thinning traffic. He drove to the police substation. Perhaps Forniss had been luckier.
Forniss was not there. He had been there half an hour earlier; he had left after getting a telephone call. He—the telephone rang. “You come most carefully upon your hour,” Heimrich told Forniss.
“Miss Monroe has gone off somewhere,” Forniss said. “So has young Gates.”
“Well?” Heimrich said.
“Is it? I wouldn’t know, Captain. I’m at the Saunders house. You want to come around?”
“Probably,” Heimrich said, “they’ve gone to dinner somewhere.”
“Nobody’s seen the girl since around noon,” Forniss said. “Or Gates either. Mrs. Jackson says it isn’t like the girl.”
“All right,” Heimrich said. “You get anything else, Charlie?”
“Nothing that won’t keep.”
“I’ll come around,” Heimrich said, and got in the car and went around. Forniss and Mrs. Jackson were in the library. Mrs. Jackson’s round pink face showed alarm. A little more, Heimrich thought, and her nose would quiver.
“I just can’t think,” she said to Heimrich. “It’s so unlike her. She’s always so considerate. To just go off with never a word to anybody. She didn’t even call the grocer.”
She looked up at Captain Heimrich. She had been crying, he thought. She now held out to him, in both small and shapely and somewhat trembling hands, a problem—a dreadful problem—which was his by rights. Already, Heimrich suspected, she had begun to feel better. She had given it to a man; a man would take care of it. In how many emergencies, Heimrich thought, Mrs. Jackson must have stood so, offering catastrophe to a husband, to a son, to lawyer, doctor—the world has crashed. Do something a man does. The plumbing isn’t working right. Do something.
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “She’ll be all right, naturally.”
“She went with that Mr. Gates,” Mrs. Jackson said. “I know she did.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Probably she did.”
“The man who found—who says he found—poor, dear Virginia! Nobody knows this Mr. Gates.”
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “We know quite a bit about him, really.” He decided it was time for facts, if possible. “You know they went together?”
“He came around before lunch,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Only there wasn’t any lunch, because Liz didn’t—”
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “He was here—oh, before ten. I saw him. He and Miss Monroe were in the garden. She was weeding the peonies.”
“Aren’t they beautiful this year?” Mrs. Jackson said. “Poor dear Penina was so fond—” She began to cry. Heimrich had had an aunt who was rather like Mrs. Jackson. He had been very fond of Aunt Elizabeth, in a puzzled fashion. Mrs. Jackson said, “There. I mustn’t, must I?” and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief which had lace around the edges.
“He was here and he went away,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Liz came in and changed and then he came back and they went away in the Packard. I was glad of that, because I don’t trust that little car she and Vir—oh, dear. Everything’s so dreadful, isn’t it? And everything was so nice.”
“They went away in the Packard,” Heimrich said. “Miss Monroe didn’t say where they were going?”
“Not a word. Not a single word. And she always did. Always.”
Probably she had, Heimrich thought. Probably Liz Monroe, who was alive and young, who was intense with life, had always gone to an ancient woman on a bed and said, “I’m going out for a little while, Grandmother. I’m going to—I’ll be back at—” Or, if Penina Saunders was not, at a certain time, to be disturbed, she had gone to Mrs. Jackson. “Tell grandmother that—” Penina Saunders was dead, now. Duty was dead, now.
“Do you think he forced her to go, Captain?” Mrs. Jackson’s blue eyes widened at the thought; her red-lipped little mouth stayed open after she had spoken.
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “You saw them leave, you say?”
She nodded.
“He didn’t drag her into the car?”
“Captain! Of course not! Where anybody on Main Street could see?”
“They went for a drive,” Heimrich said. “Stopped somewhere for dinner. You’re worrying about nothing, Mrs. Jackson.”
“Oh,” she said, “I hope so. There’s been so much. Poor Penina—poor dear Penina. But I suppose it’s the best way to go, isn’t it?”
“It was a quick way,” Heimrich said.
“Oh, yes! She just got out of bed and stood for a minute—not a minute, really, one just says that—and then—then just fell. Before I could even reach her. But I told you about that.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “She didn’t say anything, you told me?”
“She didn’t have time,” Mrs. Jackson said. “I don’t suppose she even knew. Doctor says it can often be that way. With what she had.”
“I suppose so,” Heimrich said.
“She’d had dizzy spells for the last few days,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Doctor says that was to be expected, too, but I think—there, doctor knows, of course.”
“What were you going to say, Mrs. Jackson?”
“Well,” Mrs. Jackson said. “I think she ought to have had her medicine. Poor thing, she’d always needed to take something. She—”
“Wait,” Heimrich said. “She wasn’t getting her medicine? I thought she was taking tablets—a special drug to bring her blood pressure down?”
“Oh,” Mrs. Jackson said. “That. Of course she got that. Two tablets three times a day, as doctor said. I mean the—the—” She paused. “The other medicine,” she said. “For—” She hesitated again. She brightened. “Faulty elimination,” she said.
If radio and television could carry the word into millions of homes, Heimrich decided he might venture it.
“A laxative, you mean?” he said.
“Of course,” Mrs. Jackson said. “When one gets older, particularly—nature forgets. But doctor said they were bad for her. But I think she was dizzy because of auto-intoxication. You know?”
Aunt Elizabeth had mentioned auto-intoxication, often. As a boy, this had puzzled him. Intoxication came from a glass of beer—the first, fatal glass of beer. This other kind—
“You may be right, Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “But Dr. Crowell probably knew what he was doing.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sure. Such an up-to-date physician. All those things from molds.”
“About the other medicine,” Heimrich said, and deman
ded of himself, why don’t you give it up? told himself, you’ll never get anywhere. “About the other medicine. You gave it to her, Mrs. Jackson?”
She had or almost always had. Sometimes—if Mrs. Jackson went to tea with friends, as an example—Liz Monroe shook the two tablets from the little bottle, brought water, waited while Penina Saunders washed the tablets down.
“Doctor told us to be careful,” she said. “To be sure she didn’t miss a dose or get more than she should, of course. I had to remember that, because poor dear Penina—well, she didn’t always remember things.”
Dr. Crowell had visited Mrs. Saunders daily, taken her blood pressure whenever he called, noted it in a little book. He had spent time chatting with his patient, joking with her. “She was so fond of doctor,” Mrs. Jackson said. “So grateful to him.”
And, Heimrich thought, she had shown gratitude.
The medicine, to which Heimrich found himself returning, had a long name. He suggested it; it sounded right. He wondered whether any of it remained, whether he might see it.
“We’d just started a new bottle,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Oh dear.” She dabbed again at her eyes with the little handkerchief. She went upstairs to get the bottle. Forniss raised his eyebrows.
“I know, Sergeant,” Heimrich said.
“You keep hoping,” Forniss said. “Kramer knows his job.”
“Now Sergeant. I know that, naturally.”
“Even if she got too much,” Forniss said. “Or too little. Where does it get us? With Kramer saying she died of natural causes?”
Heimrich didn’t know either. He shook his head.
Mrs. Jackson trotted down the stairs with a little bottle. It had a typed label: “Hexamethonium Bromide. 250 mg.” It was about half full of tablets. Heimrich shook a few into his hand, looked at them. They looked like tablets. He poured them back, gave the bottle back to Mrs. Jackson, performed mental arithmetic. Five hundred milligrams, three times daily—a gram and a half.
“Nobody else ever gave her these?” he asked Mrs. Jackson, whose eyes were round and blue, were full of enquiry. “She didn’t take them by herself. I mean, she did get up and around?”
Stand Up and Die Page 14
