20-Inspector's Holiday

by Lockridge, Richard

  “That’s right,” Heimrich said and reached across the table to take Hunt’s reticently extended hand. “Evening, Inspector.”

  “After malefactors, Bert?” Grimes said. “Or just—”

  He left it hang.

  “Man in New York we wanted a word with,” Hunt said. “Nothing important, Sir Ronald.”

  “Join us?” Grimes said.

  Hunt shook his head. “Just time for a quick one, sir,” he said. “Working on a report. Better get on with it. Pleasure to meet you, Inspector.” He half bowed to Susan. He went on to the table by which Mario waited.

  “Good chap, from all I hear,” Grimes said. “Ran into him in London last time I was there. Little matter came up. Trivial, really. Hunt straightened it out in no time.”

  The dinner chimes sounded. Ronald Grimes turned to his wife. He said, “What say, m’dear?”

  Lady Grimes’s glass was still half full. She emptied it and said, “Of course, Ronald.” Her voice was as light and clear as her laughter had been. Grimes stood up and pushed back the little sofa, and the two of them stood for a moment looking down at the Heimrichs.

  “Been a pleasure, y’know,” Grimes said. “See you about, probably.”

  Heimrich stood up. He made agreeing sounds. Sir Ronald Grimes, Bart., followed Lady Grimes out of the veranda belvedere. Heimrich sat down again to his barely touched martini.

  “Supposed to be stand-offish,” Susan said. “Reserved and all that sort of thing. She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Very,” Heimrich said.

  “And,” Susan said, “about twenty years younger than he is, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That would be putting her at forty, since he’s probably sixty. She’s more like thirty-five, I’d say.”

  “And he’s retired, I gather. Going home to grow roses. Or perhaps cabbages. On the ancestral acres.”

  “It any.”

  “He’s a baronet,” Susan said. “Baronets always have ancestral acres. They just missed their friends.”

  Heimrich raised his eyebrows.

  “The couple they were with last night,” Susan said. “A big man with a mustache. A girl with black hair. He looked like—”

  “I remember,” Heimrich said. “Missed them?”

  “They just came in,” Susan said. “Through the other entrance. I mean, the one the Grimeses didn’t go out through. If one can go out through an entrance.”

  “Quite possible, I’d think,” Heimrich said, and looked the way Susan was looking. The girl’s hair still fitted like a black cap. Mario met them. He took them to a small sofa on the other side of the dance floor.

  “Lady Grimes hadn’t finished her drink,” Susan said. “Hadn’t nearly finished. He—did he hurry them off, Merton?”

  “Possibly,” Merton Heimrich said. “Probably he was just hungry.”

  Mario paused in front of them.

  “Please,” Heimrich said and circled a finger over empty glasses.

  Mario said, “Sir-madam,” and took the empty glasses away.

  “Isn’t he small to be a policeman?” Susan said.

  “Hunt? A little, perhaps. I don’t know the English standards. You’re very observant tonight, Susan.”

  “Oh,” she said, “new people. I make up stories about new people. You know that. As you—as you find out old stories about them. The Grimses go away rather suddenly. To avoid the people they were with last night and—”

  “And Hunt is small to be a policeman,” Heimrich said. “And we’re on holiday, my darling.”

  She looked at him, smiling. She said, “I think you ought to wear a dinner jacket all the time.”

  At dinner that night they ordered another bottle of Soave Bolla. This night they drank more of it. After dinner they did not go to deck chairs or to the salone delle feste. They went to Cabin 82. This night they were not so sleepy …

  The ship’s newspaper was under the cabin door the next morning. On the front page was a picture of last night’s cocktail party in the main lounge. It was a picture of a lot of people dressed for the evening. Under the door was also a square white envelope, addressed to Inspector and Mrs. M. L. Heimrich.

  “Not again,” Susan said, when Merton gave it to her to open. “I thought it was one of a—oh.”

  She handed the stiff white paper enclosure to Merton. It was “again,” but different. This time Comandante Antonio di Scarlotti requested the pleasure of their company for cocktails in his “sitting room.” The time was seven.

  It was sunny again that third day out; the ship had, it appeared, altered course slightly. By ten in the morning sunlight slanted across their deck chairs. The glass panel near them had been slid a little farther open. The air which came in was a little warmer. They stretched in the sun and talked and sat silent. Susan hoped Michael was all right. Merton was sure Michael was all right. And that Colonel and Mite were all right. “Colonel will be morose. He will be very sad.”

  But most of the time Colonel is very sad. He is a mournful dog.

  Consommé and small sandwiches came at eleven. This time they both ate sandwiches. “We’re eating a lot more than we do at home,” Susan said. “Drinking more, if it comes to that. Wine, too.” Merton said, “Holiday,” in a sleepy voice but then turned in his chair so that he could look at his wife.

  It was being good for her, he thought. Already it was being good for her. There was color in her face which had not been there for weeks. The line of tiredness was disappearing from around her eyes.

  “Yes,” Susan said, “it’s being good for me, dear. It’s being very good for me. I’m beginning to feel like a different person.”

  “The one you were was fine.”

  “That one again, then,” Susan said. “Do you want to go up—I mean above—to the boat deck and walk in the air?”

  The answer to that was simple. “No,” Heimrich said. “Tomorrow, perhaps. Day after tomorrow. It will be warmer day after tomorrow.”

  Susan supposed so. But after five minutes, during which they both looked lazily at the Atlantic Ocean—which did not seem itself as lazy this day as it had the day before—Susan swung around on her chair and swung to her feet. She moves better than she’s been moving, Heimrich thought. The spring is back in her. Dr. Forbes knew what—

  “I,” Susan said, “am going above and walk around the deck. Breathe the ocean air. Walk twice around the ship. Have—what do they call it?—a constitutional. Are you coming?”

  The answer was simple again. It was the same answer. He added to it, “On Italian ships you don’t take constitutionals. That’s on British ships. On British ships, also, you take cold showers.”

  He was sitting inboard. He got up and moved his chair out of her way and, when she had passed, sat down again.

  “Lazy,” Susan Heimrich said.

  “It was a long hard winter,” Merton told her. “The ship’s moving more today. Don’t fall off.”

  “There’s a railing,” she said. “I’ll hold onto the railing.”

  He watched her walk away along the deck to a door. The ship was moving more; it was rolling a little. She moved surely, balancing with the ship. She went in through the door, and Heimrich turned in his chair and watched the Atlantic. He sat too low to see the froth of the bow wave, but the ship vibrated comfortingly. Everything was fine. Most of all, Susan was fine.

  She was gone almost half an hour, and it was only during the last five minutes or so that he began to worry. But she came back through the door and down the ship to him, and her crisp brown hair had been blown, and there was color in her face and a new brightness in her eyes.

  “Wonderful,” she said, and pulled a blanket around her as she sat in the deck chair. “Sea air is all it’s supposed to be. Only a little cooler than I’d thought. And the rail is quite high, so nobody could possibly fall off. But you didn’t really think I’d fall off, did you?”

  “No. Oh, I consider all possibilities. Part of the trade. But, on the whole, no.”
/>   He looked at his watch.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “It’s open. I walked past and looked in the windows. Up there the ship seems to go up and down more than it does here.”

  “Habit they have. We’re pretty much amidships. Forward, we’ll notice the motion more. Shall we go see Mario?”

  It was only noon. Susan looked at her watch and mentioned that it was only noon.

  “Over the yardarm,” Heimrich said. “Whatever a yardarm may be. But there’s no hurry. There’s no hurry about anything.”

  “Not about anything,” Susan said. “Remember the woman whose party didn’t come?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “Last night,” Susan said. “Tall. Slim. In dinner pajamas from a good place. Bergdorf’s, at a guess. Blue, mostly, with yellow accents. Flared out at the ankles. All dressed up for a party, really. But no party. Of course you remember.”

  “No.”

  “At a table by herself,” Susan said. “A little too much make-up, I thought. Kept looking as if she were expecting somebody. Black hair with a white streak through it. Art, not nature. You must remember, dear. And there’s no use saying you don’t look at people, because you do look at people.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “I remember somebody like that. In the Belvedere. Went out early. Why, Susan?”

  “I bumped into her,” Susan said. “Literally. Rather, she bumped into me. Going around a bend, and the ship swayed. The way it’s doing now.”

  S.S. Italia was rolling a little. Not inconveniently, but a little.

  “And?”

  “Nothing, really. A very small bumping together. She was very sorry. So very, very sorry. And it was all her fault. Which was true enough, but not important. Only, she made a great deal of it. And she told me her name and wanted to know what mine was as if—oh, almost as if our cars had bumped into each other and she was showing her driver’s license and wanted to see mine. Information-for-the-insurance-company sort of thing. But she’d hardly bumped into me at all, and I kept telling her that.”

  Heimrich said that people were that way sometimes.

  “I thought last night that she was lonely,” Susan said. “That the party had gone away and left her. I think she’s very lonely, Merton. Wants somebody to talk to. Do you suppose?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “No lame dogs over stiles.”

  “She’s a Mrs. Powers,” Susan said. “Mrs. Raymond Powers. Her husband died about a year ago. Ought the name to mean something special?”

  “Not to me it doesn’t.”

  “She made it sound as if it should,” Susan said. “As if I were supposed to say, ‘Not the Raymond Powers.’ I think I disappointed her.”

  “She seems to have been outgoing,” Heimrich said. “She didn’t say, ‘Not the Mrs. Heimrich,’ I hope.”

  Susan shook her head, laughing a little.

  “We walked around part of the ship together,” she said. “She’s from Chicago, originally. Recently, until her husband’s death, they’d been living in Washington. Was he a senator or something, do you suppose? Somebody we really ought to know about.”

  “I doubt it,” Heimrich said. “From what you say of her, she’d have made a point of it if he’d been a senator.”

  He looked at his watch again.

  “All right,” Susan said. “We don’t want to keep Mario waiting.”

  They climbed to the boat deck and the open promenade. There the breeze was brisk and cool, but it felt like a breeze of spring. The ship seemed to be moving faster, and her prow rose and sank more rapidly than it had the day before.

  “We can walk right around in front of the observation lounge,” Susan said. “The Belvedere. It’s where Mrs. Powers and I bumped into each other. We can go in on the other side.”

  Heimrich had stopped at the nearest door and reached out to pull it open. But Susan went on, and he followed her; caught up with her. The deck rail was high enough; substantial enough. But he had not really worried. Forward of the lounge, the wind was stronger. As they rounded the lounge’s curving windows, the wind blew them back along the port side. It ruffled Susan’s hair and, suddenly, about nothing, Susan was laughing. He was laughing with her as he tugged the door open, and they went into the windless quiet of the lounge’s lobby. Susan smoothed her blown hair down with thin hands. But her hands were not as thin as they had been weeks before.

  They went along a short corridor. On one side of it the door to the ship’s library stood open. There were bookshelves with books on them, and nobody was in the room. Opposite that door there was another, opening to an even smaller compartment. A sign above it said, “Sala Scrittura. Writing Room.” There was a man in it with a briefcase open in front of him on a desk. He was consulting documents from the briefcase and making notes. He was also smoking a cigar. Like, Merton Heimrich thought, a man on the 8:04 from Cold Harbor who has taken his work home with him.

  They went on into the observation lounge, and there were very few in the lounge—a couple at the starboard side, intent on each other and on their drinks; the four men with cigars, still talking French rather loudly; drinking pink liquid from small glasses. Mario said, “Signor Inspector! Signora!” with enthusiasm, with what appeared to be surprised delight. He took them to the sofa for two they had occupied the noon before. He said, “As before, madam, sir?”

  “I—” Susan said, but by then Mario had gone to the bar.

  “I had,” Susan said, “been thinking of a very dry sherry.”

  Heimrich turned and looked toward the bar and started to raise a summoning hand, but Susan said, “Not really too seriously, dear. And we don’t want to hurt Mario’s feelings.”

  Behind them there was the faint clatter of ice against glass.

  “Anyway,” Susan said, “it’s too late now, isn’t it?” She sounded pleased, as one does when succumbing to temptation.

  Mario brought their drinks, and they clicked glasses. When they had sipped from them, Susan looked again around the room. She said, “He’s the easiest man to miss, isn’t he? The lowest visibility possible.”

  Heimrich looked in the direction she was looking in.

  Detective Inspector Albert Hunt was sitting by himself at a small table. He had a tall glass in front of him and was looking across the dance floor at the Heimrichs. Merton Heimrich flicked a hand toward a colleague and returned it to his glass.

  Hunt flicked a hand in answer and smiled. It was not an emphatic smile. He looked at his glass as if he were consulting it and took a sip from it and put it down again. Then he pushed his chair back a little, as if he were about to stand up. Susan looked at her husband and raised her eyebrows and said, her voice just audible, “Coming over to say hello?”

  It was possible. It was difficult to tell. But then Hunt looked across the lounge, toward the doorway the Heimrichs had come through, and sat down again and raised his glass, holding it in front of his face and drinking from it.

  Mrs. Raymond Powers came into the room, alone. She was wearing a suit, and the streak of white was immaculate in her black hair. As she followed Mario across the room, she saw the Heimrichs and nodded her head and smiled. The smile was a formality, and a faint one. She was led to a table for four and sat alone at it; sat where she could look around the room. She is still waiting for the party which doesn’t come, Susan thought. Waiting for—

  She suddenly put her hand on Merton’s. He smiled at her and raised inquiring eyebrows.

  “Because you’re here,” she said. “It would be bad if you weren’t. It would be very lonely, dear. I’d—I’d wait for a party which didn’t come.”

  The tall, handsome, youngish man with the crisp mustache whom they had first seen with the Grimeses came into the room. The girl with the smooth cap of black hair was not with him. Mario leaned over his table and said, “Sì, signor,” and went away.

  “Where did he go?” Susan said, and Heimrich said, “Did who—?” and looked across the dance floor. Hunt had disappeared from the t
able, and Heimrich said, “Oh. To work on that report of his, probably.”

  “I thought,” Susan said, “he was going to come over and say something to us. To you, really. He was looking at you.”

  “If so,” Merton Heimrich said, “he changed his mind.”

  “When Mrs. Powers came in,” Susan said. “And the friend of the Grimeses came right after her.”

  “You’re making up stories,” he told her.

  “My weakened condition,” Susan said, and finished her drink. They were good martinis, but rather small ones. Because they were such small drinks, they had another round and went down, by elevator, to the foyer deck and the dining room and their steward, Lorenzo, who beamed at them and pulled out chairs for them and gave them menus which were as varied and large as usual.

  They were reading menus when the maître d’ stopped at their table. He was in a dinner jacket, and he wore a starched shirt, which set him apart from the mere captains, who wore soft shirts with their dinner jackets. He said, “Inspector? Signora?” They looked up at him and waited.

  “You are having cocktails with the comandante this evening,” the maître d’ said. “It is not so?”

  “He was good enough to ask us,” Susan said, using phrasing suitable to a starched dress shirt.

  The maître d’ said, “Ah.” Then he said, “In the main lounge? At seven? I will meet you there? You and the others, sì? I will escort you to the comandante’s quarters?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said to all the questions. He decided that saying it once would be adequate.

  4

  To Susan it had the feel of a special party. “A V.I.P. party,” she said. She was told that if it were a V.I.P. party they wouldn’t be going, would not have been invited. “After all,” Heimrich told her, putting on a white shirt, considering the intricacies of tying a black bow tie, “I’m a cop. Not even a city cop.” He was told not to be ridiculous; he was told that he was an inspector of police, which was V.I.P. enough for anyone. He was told Susan thought that, under the circumstances, she would wear her “new” dress.

  The “new” dress was rather a special dress. Susan’s designs are for decorator’s fabrics—for curtains, for slip covers. Standing before her easel in early fall, Susan had had in mind something very special in slip-cover material—something gay and swirling with color. But as poster paint went on drawing board, slip-cover fabric had not come of it. The colors swirled; the colors danced. But nobody was going to use it to slip-cover a sofa. What it comes to, Susan thought, is that I’ve designed a dress fabric—a fabric for someone very young and gay who can carry it off. I wish—