They all looked at him, then. On one face there was the slow beginning of comprehension, on another—the beginning of something else? But that was not proof, either. Heimrich did not hurry. He looked from one of them to another.
“Surely,” he said, “you must see it? It is a very simple sum—a very obvious sum, when you add it rightly. Because—the figures add to murder, don’t they? To the murder of an old woman, the murder of a young woman.” He looked at Crowell. “I’m surprised you missed it, Doctor,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d have seen that. Because, the figures are all within a certain range, aren’t they? Look at the figures again, Doctor.”
Crowell’s eyes met Heimrich’s, held them. “Look at them again, Doctor,” Heimrich said, and his voice was mild. “Or—don’t, if you don’t need to. They’re all within the range of the systolic pressure of the blood, aren’t they? From high—quite high—to dangerously low.”
Crowell looked at the figures, then. He looked up from them.
“Why yes,” he said. “They are. That is, one could read that into them, I suppose. From—” He looked again. “From one ninety down to eighty. Yes, they could be. Not the extreme range, of course. Penina’s pressure was well above two hundred, at one time. Two hundred thirty over one-fifty, approximately. It did get down to one-twenty a few weeks ago, and I reduced the dosage for a day or two, and it came back.” He looked up. “But if you think this is a record of Mrs. Saunders’s pressure, you’re quite wrong, Captain.” He looked again. “And nothing explains this other figure,” he said. “This thirteen-thirty at the top. That could have nothing to do with blood pressure, obviously.”
They had all turned toward Dr. Crowell as he spoke. He sat in a deep chair; as he examined the paper, talked of it, he moved forward in the chair and now, having finished, stayed so, a hand on either chair arm. Tensity was growing in Crowell—in all of them. In the uneven light from shaded lamps, their faces seemed unnaturally white. The muscle jumped in Gates’s cheek.
“No,” Heimrich said, “not obviously.”
The tightening of nerves did not appear to have reached Heimrich. His voice was almost casual.
“Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “You were with Mrs. Saunders most of the time? I mean, in her room most of the time during the day?”
“Whenever she wanted me,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Whenever I could do anything. And at night she had her little bell. If she wanted a drink of water, or anything.”
She, too, sat forward in her chair.
“If anything happened to her I blame myself,” she said. “But I did try to—”
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said, “I’m sure you did. Tell me about an average day.”
“Average?” Mrs. Jackson said.
“Take a day last week,” he said. “Before anything happened. Just an ordinary day.”
“Well,” Mrs. Jackson said, “there was last Friday. It was an ordinary day. Except that the lights went out, but that was in the evening after the storm. Not that that isn’t ordinary, really. Every time there’s a big storm, or almost. Water gets into the electricity.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Go on.”
She was not direct. She could be led. The maid had brought breakfast up about eight; that was as usual. They had eaten at a table by a window in Mrs. Saunders’s room. Mrs. Saunders had sat up for a time; she had done crocheting; she had gone back to bed to rest. Mrs. Jackson had been in and out, but never far. They had lunched a little after noon and then Mrs. Jackson had gone out for a little walk, a little sun.
“Virginia was home,” Mrs. Jackson said. “She almost always was in the middle of the day. Not in the evenings—Liz is usually home in the evenings. Dear Liz doesn’t—” Mrs. Jackson stopped suddenly.
“No,” Liz Monroe said. “Dear Liz doesn’t. She doesn’t—” But then she, too, stopped, and looked up at Timothy Gates beside her and said, very low, “All right.”
“Virginia sat with her grandmother while you went out after lunch?”
“Well,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Sat? She was there. She usually went in and visited. As for the rest of the day—”
She went on, but as she talked Heimrich looked, not at her but at the others, one by one, and slowly, one by one, they gave over listening and waited—merely waited, “—about nine o’clock,” Mrs. Jackson said. “You’re not listening, Captain.”
“Now Mrs. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “To sleep about nine o’clock. Yes. As a general thing, Virginia was—or had an opportunity to be—with her grandmother from, say, about twelve-thirty until two?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Jackson said. “When she was living here, of course. In the winter—”
“Yes, I know,” Heimrich said. “Dr. Crowell. You took Mrs. Saunders off laxatives. When?”
“About—” Crowell began and stopped. “Why, Captain? Why do you ask that?”
“Now Doctor. About—say three weeks ago?”
“Probably. She was becoming dependent on—”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Timothy Gates said. “I will be damned. So that was it! And Liz’s sister was taking—”
“Yes, Mr. Gates,” Heimrich said. “That was the way it was, wasn’t it, Doctor? Virginia was taking her grandmother’s blood pressure every day, wasn’t she? At one-thirty in the afternoon, or thereabouts. Keeping a record—noting down the time of day as the twenty-four hour clock shows it. She did that, part of the time—noted an appointment for ten hundred, not ten a.m. The time she noted the pressure at thirteen-thirty, not one-thirty p.m. And—the pressure kept getting lower, didn’t it, Doctor? Up and down a little from day to day, naturally. But dipping a little farther, not rising quite so high. For two weeks and two days, wasn’t it? Before she had proof enough and took it to you and—Sergeant!”
The two tall men moved almost simultaneously, Paul Crowell up from the chair, Forniss toward him out of the shadows. But then, in the shadows, Forniss seemed to stumble and, at that instant, two of the shaded lamps went out. Forniss swore, Heimrich and Timothy Gates moved almost at once and Crowell, who had thrown himself over the low back of his chair, pushed the chair toward them. Gates stumbled against it, reached out involuntarily and clutched the nearest support, and the support was Heimrich.
And Crowell ran—ran crouching—toward the door. And, when she came back from washing her hands, little Mrs. Jackson had not closed the door.
It opened outward. As he passed through the door, Crowell slammed it behind him.
“Damn lamp cord,” Forniss said, running.
The front door had slammed, too. Forniss and Gates reached it first; Heimrich just behind them. Outside there was the sound of running feet on gravel, and they ran toward the sound, around the house, toward the garage.
They were still running when the Packard’s starter ground, the Packard’s motor caught. They had only time to jump aside, Forniss tugging at his gun, when the heavy car, a dowager empress gone mad, lurched, lightless, toward them.
“No,” Heimrich said, sharply, and Forniss lowered the gun.
“The station wagon!” Liz called, and was running toward them. Behind her the door of the house was open, light streamed from it. Mrs. Jackson, both hands raised as if to ward off peril, stood in the light. Kirkwood stood behind her.
Timothy Gates reached the station wagon first, was into it first. He backed it out, sweeping wide, and Heimrich was in beside him. Forniss grabbed a rear door as the car started forward and Liz cried out, “Wait!” and clutched at the door, and Forniss hauled her in.
“You’re a crazy girl!” Gates yelled at her, without turning, and the station wagon jumped down the drive. At the street, Forniss said, “Right!” and the Ford wagon skid-turned, tires squealing.
Main Street was almost deserted. The traffic light blinked at the crossing now, blinked yellow for Main Street, red for West Avenue. The Packard was a single red taillight, receding, the light wavering from side to side. Crowell was over-steering, and the stately, ancient car lurc
hed as if the dowager were drunkenly mad. From the first, the station wagon gained.
At the end of Main Street, the Packard turned right and the station wagon jumped after it. They were out of East Belford in minutes, the widely spaced street lights behind them. They could, by then, see the Packard outlined against the yellowish fan of its headlights on the road. The black-surfaced road wound, entwining a reservoir.
“This is the road—” Forniss said, and Heimrich said, without turning, “The same road, Charlie.”
Gates took the inside of turns, and the tires squealed. Liz clutched the back of the seat in front of her as the car swayed.
“Get him on the next straight stretch,” Gates said. “But how’re you going to stop him when—my God, look at the fool!”
The Packard had veered suddenly to the left of the road. Momentarily, a single stop light showed red. Then, turning across the road, the heavy car, careening but holding upright, swerved to the right, left the road and plunged, swaying horribly, down a steep slope toward dark water.
The station wagon, brakes full on, skidded frantically on the crowned black road; stopped, with a lurch, half across the road, its lights pointing high over the reservoir.
For a second there were other lights on the water, as the Packard hurtled down. Then the big car was in the water, throwing water high around it, throwing sound high. It was under the water, and the water surged.
For seconds the red taillight showed in the tumult of the water. Then it vanished.
Gates was running down the embankment by then, wrenching at his jacket as he ran, and Forniss was only feet behind him. Heimrich and Liz Monroe were not quite so quick, but they were quick enough. At the edge of the water they stopped.
“I can—” Liz began, and was reaching toward the zipper on her dress.
“No,” Heimrich said. “We’d just get in the way.”
Gates came to the surface twenty feet from the shore. “Door jammed,” he said, arched out of the water, and back into it. Forniss came up seconds later, said nothing, dived back.
It was after each had come up often, dived again, that they came up together, with Crowell between them. It had taken time to force open the jammed door, to get Crowell from behind the wheel, where he had slumped. It had taken them, they had to admit twenty minutes later, too long.
Gates, having tried last, sat back on his heels. He looked up at Heimrich.
“Well,” he said, “there’s your proof, sir.”
“That damned light cord,” Forniss said.
It had taken half the day, more than half the day, to pick up the pieces, although there were not really too many pieces. There never had been; that had been one of the difficulties. The file of The Lancet had been found, in a box of rubbish, in the basement of Crowell’s house; Crowell had not got around to destroying it, perhaps had not thought it necessary. It was confirmation of what they already knew. They had found the record cards of Mrs. Penina Saunders in Crowell’s office. They were neatly kept; they were of negative value, being false, showing a systolic blood pressure during several recent weeks in a safe range, with little variance. Mrs. Jackson had denied that, “a few weeks ago,” Dr. Crowell had reduced the dosage of hexamethonium. They had found that Crowell had two sphygmomanometers in his office, although one usually suffices a general practitioner.
With Crowell dead, the bank had become less reticent. The doctor’s checking account had been depleted to a few hundred dollars within a year; the doctor, seeking to hold place in the community of big white houses, had turned to the stock market. He had lost what he had—faced losing what three generations of Crowells had had in East Belford.
Captain Heimrich, walking along Main Street toward the Inn, toward, in all probability, the last lunch he would eat there, was not noticeably happy about any of it. Higher echelons were not going to be happy about any of it. It was all very well, with circumstances what they were, to start their man running. It was by no means well to let him run away, and Dr. Paul Crowell had run away. The State of New York was saved considerable expense and effort, which might in the end have been fruitless, but the circumstances were untidy. It had been very unlike Sergeant Charles Forniss to trip over a lamp cord. Heimrich decided that that aspect of the not too satisfactory situation might as well go unreported. But they could hardly fail to mention that Dr. Paul Crowell had been permitted to rifle a desk in the East Belford Substation of the New York State Police. Of that, the view taken could hardly fail to be extremely dim. Heimrich sighed, and turned into the Inn. He found his feet led him to the cocktail lounge.
It was not deserted. Heimrich smiled faintly. It would ornament his report to include in it the fact that Miss Liz Monroe and Mr. Timothy Gates, Medal of Honor winner, made a very handsome couple; that, sitting side by side on a banquette, the right hand of Mr. Gates and the left hand of Miss Monroe were alike invisible, being hidden by the table. But higher echelons would consider that irrelevant. Heimrich looked at the two for a moment, his smile lingering. They were talking, their voices low, their faces—well, bright was probably the word for it. They were not, he decided, talking about murder or about a man who, fleeing hopelessly—unreasonably—through the night had turned toward death through the same gap in a guard rail which he, not too many hours before, had found useful for quite another purpose.
They seemed to become conscious of his presence at much the same time. Gates stood up, without releasing Liz’s hand, so that their clasped hands came into view as he rose.
“Have a drink with us, sir,” Gates said, and looked at the joined hands and said, “Oh,” and the hands parted.
Heimrich pulled up a chair, and sat opposite them.
“Things happen very fast, sometimes,” Liz Monroe said. “You wanted to see us?”
“Now Miss Monroe,” Heimrich said. “It’s very pleasant, naturally. We’ll be leaving after lunch. Won’t bother you any longer.”
“But nothing else?” she asked.
“Nothing else,” Heimrich told her. “It’s finished, Miss Monroe. Not very satisfactorily, I’m afraid but—finished.”
There was a brief pause.
“Look, sir,” Gates said. “Why did he run? He must have known it wouldn’t help. Or, did he plan from the start to do what he did?”
“I don’t know about that, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps he didn’t. But—it was in his character to run. To try to find a way out—the first way that came to his mind. That’s one of the things that make a murderer, Mr. Gates.”
“You thought he’d run?” Gates said. “Or—?”
“Do something,” Heimrich said. “Yes. I thought he would, naturally.”
“You put on pressure and something goes pop,” the girl said.
That was a way of putting it, Heimrich agreed. Naturally, they had expected to catch him.
“I got in your way, I guess,” Gates said. “I’m sorry about that, sir.”
Several things had got in their way, Heimrich said. From the start. But, in the end, Gates had helped.
“You already knew,” Gates said.
“Guessed,” Heimrich told him. “After all, I had Virginia’s record of Mrs. Saunders’s blood pressure. But you had a memory of this article in The Lancet. I knew he had a file of The Lancet. At any rate—”
“How?” Liz asked. “How did you know. When I went to look yesterday it was as he said—just a pile of magazines, with a recent Lancet on top. All sorts and shapes of magazines.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “But—when I was there earlier, Miss Monroe, the pile was very neat. I noticed it at the time, although it didn’t mean anything, naturally. Did you ever try to make a neat pile of magazines of all shapes and sizes? You can’t, of course. We found the rest of the Lancets, incidentally. He hadn’t got ’round to destroying them. The issue we wanted was there.”
“You know,” Gates said, after a moment, “it ought to have been foolproof. His plan, I mean. Even after Liz’s sister—” He stopped, because He
imrich was shaking his head.
Not after Virginia Monroe suspected, bought a sphygmomanometer, took the pressures, which was not difficult for a woman trained as a nurse. No doubt she said she was going to call in another physician, to which he could not have objected. Another physician would find the blood pressure dangerously low; would inevitably find that Crowell’s pressure records were falsified. If that happened, Crowell was through as a physician, even if it went no further.
“Why did she suspect?” Liz asked.
Heimrich closed his eyes. They would never know, he said. They could guess. Probably the symptoms were wrong to a quondam nurse. They did know she had suspected, and checked her suspicions.
But Liz Monroe shook her head. She said she still didn’t understand. That Crowell had given Mrs. Saunders an excessive dosage of hexamethonium, yes. But, Mrs. Jackson said—
“She wasn’t in it,” Liz said. “I’ll never believe she helped.”
Heimrich opened his eyes. He seemed surprised.
“Oh,” he said. “I supposed Mr. Gates here had explained how—”
“No,” Gates said. “We—well, we were talking about—” He hesitated. “Other things,” he said.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “No, Miss Monroe, I’m sure Mrs. Jackson was very careful. I’m sure, indeed, that she gave only the number of tablets prescribed. The shortage was—let’s call it one of the doctor’s precautions. He took some from the bottle—at the same time he took Virginia’s pressure-testing apparatus. If, as he didn’t expect, we got interested in hexamethonium, thought of it as a means of inducing death, he could discover a shortage. Suggest someone had given an overdose. As he did, when Dr. Kramer’s call tipped him off.” Heimrich had closed his eyes again. “He did too many things,” he said. “If he had merely sat tight, done nothing—but, fortunately, they almost never do sit tight. It would be out of character. A man who will kill for money—as Crowell did for the legacy Mrs. Saunders obviously had told him about—can’t be very intelligent, underneath. However—devious he may be.”
Stand Up and Die Page 18
