“I take it,” Heimrich said, “that you’re familiar with A. Schmidt Gesellschaft. Have had dealings with them, perhaps? Forwarded things to them?”
Parsons laughed, as if Heimrich had said something funny. Heimrich waited.
“Dealings,” Parsons said. “No, I shouldn’t call it that, precisely, Inspector. Say—” He paused again, as a man does who wants to pick his words with care. “You might say we’re competing firms, Inspector. Yes, I think it might be put that way.”
“In this forwarding business? Whatever that may be.”
“Way of putting it. Yes.”
“As a front for what, Mr. Parsons? As a cover for what?”
“Afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Parsons said. And he spoke, Heimrich thought, in the tone of one who understands perfectly well what is meant.
“You’re not being helpful,” Heimrich said. “A man in the British diplomatic service has fallen overboard. Or been pushed overboard. A detective inspector of the London police has been strangled. You’re not being helpful, Mr. Parsons. I take it you don’t want to be.”
“I’m sorry, Inspector. I’ve told you all I can. All I’m allowed—” He did not finish.
“Which is nothing.”
“We do know about this A. Schmidt concern. Have for a considerable time. All I can tell you, I’m afraid.”
“Which is no help.”
“Sorry about that. Rules, you know. Lady Grimes? She’s making do?”
“Barely. With difficulty.”
“Plans to leave the ship at Lisbon, I understand,” Parsons said. “Right?”
“I believe so. You want to get in touch with her about this—furniture you’re shipping for her? For her husband at first. Now for her?”
“A way of putting it.”
“How did you learn she plans to leave the ship at Lisbon?”
There was, again, a pause.
“Say we’re just guessing,” Parsons said. “Likely thing for her to do, wouldn’t you say? Want to be with your own people at such a time, I’d think. Just—call it a supposition on our part.”
“She hasn’t called you from the ship? Called Continental Forwarding, Limited? There’ll be a record if she has, you know.”
“No. Why would she do that?”
“To tell you she’s leaving the ship at Lisbon,” Heimrich said. “Not going to Trieste, as they originally planned to do.”
“No. Lady Grimes did not call us. Anything else?”
“Nothing you will give me,” Heimrich said, and put the receiver back on its hook.
Stone walls everywhere, Heimrich thought. He wondered if Sir Robert Mason at the British Embassy in Washington would be more enlightening about A. Schmidt Gesellschaft and thought briefly about calling to find out. He looked at his watch. Eleven in the morning. Much earlier in the morning in Washington. Hardly light there yet.
And not much here, Merton Heimrich thought, and went back to Cabin 82. Susan was not there. He used the telephone. Louis Cataldi was still unconscious. The security men had not found any fellow steward to whom Louis had mentioned any experience of his during his Wednesday-Thursday tour of duty.
He might, Heimrich thought, go up to the promenade deck and have a cup of consommé with Susan. He might—
The telephone rang.
He picked it up quickly. Louis might have recovered consciousness. He might—
“Heimrich.”
“Ellen Grimes here. That match folder you asked about, Inspector. I’ve—I’ve been trying to remember. There was something about a match folder I remember. Think I remember. It’s probably nothing that will help. But—but I want to help, Inspector.”
Heimrich said, “Yes, Lady Grimes?”
“Do you want to come to my cabin and—no, they’re just coming to make it up. On the promenade deck? Our—” Her voice faded for a moment. One uses the plural when it isn’t right any more, as one uses the present tense, the mind rebelling against the past tense. “My deck chair is on the starboard side. About amidships, I think. If you?”
“Yes, Lady Grimes. I’ll be along.”
He climbed stairs to the promenade deck. He went through one of the forward doors and walked aft. Susan was in her chair, with a cup of consommé in her hand. But she was not alone. Mrs. Lucinda Powers was sitting beside her, in Merton Heimrich’s chair. She was leaning toward Susan, and she was talking—talking in what was apparently a monologue. Susan saw Heimrich and lifted her cup slightly to show she saw him. But she just perceptibly shook her head. Lucinda Powers was, apparently, being worth listening to. Heimrich went on along the deck; went half a dozen deck-chair lengths along it. Ellen Grimes was tucking a folded blanket back of her head in an outboard chair. He sat down in the chair beside hers. He held a pack of cigarettes out to her, and she took one. He was reaching for his lighter when she took a lighter out of a handbag on the deck beside her and flicked it. No fire appeared. She flicked it again, and there was a spark, but again no fire. She said, “Damn the thing. Half the time—” and leaned toward Merton Heimrich, who had his lighter out. It worked. She said, “Kew.” Then she said, “Ronald kept it working for me. Flints and things. Whatever they need. But still it’s only a part-time lighter. Which is what made me begin to remember.”
He waited.
“It was at the club in Washington,” she said. “About the match folder. That’s what I’m getting around to. Trying to remember.”
He said, “Yes, Lady Grimes.”
“We were having dinner at the club,” she said. “We did sometimes. About two weeks ago. Oh, perhaps ten days ago. Two or three days before we sailed. Only then we were going to fly BOAC. Going by ship was—oh, a last-minute decision. If—if we’d only flown as we planned. If only—”
He waited. Then, after rather a long pause, during which she turned away from him and looked out at the ocean, she said, “Where was I, Inspector? Things—things keep coming in.”
“Yes,” he said. “You were having dinner at the club. The Field and Tennis Club, that would have been?”
“Yes. We were having cocktails in the lounge before we went in to have dinner. There were a good many people in the lounge. A good many people go to the club for dinner on Fridays. That’s it. It was the Friday before we sailed. They have seafood on Fridays. Prawns. Lobsters. Things like that. I’m wandering, aren’t I? Things—things don’t seem to come straight just now. We were having drinks. The two of us—the, the two of us. At a table meant for four. There was a table we liked better, but we were too late to get it. This one was off at a side, near the telephone booths. There are three booths in the lounge. People are all the time getting calls there. Important people getting important calls, I expect. Inspector, I’m sorry. I can’t seem to go in a straight line.”
He said, “You’re doing fine, Lady Grimes,” although she certainly was not. “You were at this table for four. Having cocktails before dinner.”
“Ian Whitney came in,” she said. “He was wearing a dinner jacket, so I thought he must be going on somewhere, because people don’t dress at the club much. It’s an informal sort of place most nights. Which was one of the reasons Ronald liked—” Again she broke off and looked at the ocean. She said, “I’m sorry, Inspector. I can’t help it.”
She was still in shock, Heimrich thought. She was coming out of it. Her face was not as dragged down as it had been. But she was still in shock.
“Major Whitney came in,” he said. “You’re doing fine, Lady Grimes.”
“I’ll try to be clearer,” she said, and turned in her chair to face him. “Ian Whitney came in and—”
Whitney had stopped just inside the door of the lounge and looked around it, as one does seeking a vacant table. Then he had seen the Grimeses and saluted them across the room, and then walked across it to their table. He had said, “Mind?” and when neither minded, had pulled out a chair and sat at the table. He had waved his hand toward a waiter.
“They’re colored waiters at the club,” Ellen Grimes sa
id. “Ian called them all ‘Joe.’ I don’t know that they liked that too much. Or, sometimes, just ‘Boy.’ Ronald never did that. They’re all nice people. Ronald knew all their names.”
Again she paused. This time the pause was more brief.
The waiter had come, and Major Ian Whitney had said, “Whisky and water, boy. No ice,” and the man had said, “Yes, sir, Major,” and gone off. Ian Whitney had hoped they didn’t mind his barging in; had said he had only time for a quick one because he was “due at a do.” The “quick one” came quickly. Whitney drank quickly from the glass. Then he looked around the room.
“As if he were looking for someone,” Ellen Grimes said. “But I don’t know whether I thought that at the time. It’s the way it seems to me now. That he was—oh, expectant. He said, ‘Been a fine day,’ or something like that. He asked whether we had got in any tennis. We hadn’t. We’d spent most of the day packing to—to go home. We had reservations for a Sunday morning flight. Then—”
Whitney kept looking around the room. He saw a few people he knew and nodded to them. “Or saluted them. He is likely to salute people. Of course, he’s army.” He still, to Ellen Grimes, seemed to be waiting for somebody. Or for something.
“I feel now that I felt that way. I’m not sure I did then.”
Whitney was halfway through his drink; Ronald Grimes had signaled a waiter for another round. “He was drinking sherry. He did, mostly. Sometimes whisky but mostly, before dinner, a glass or two of sherry.”
The waiter came, and Sir Ronald said, “Same again, William,” and the waiter said, “Sir Ronald,” and went away. But then another waiter came. He said, “Major Whitney, sir. A telephone call for you, sir. In the Number Two booth.”
Whitney pushed back his chair. He said, “Probably wonder where I’ve got to,” and went to the booth. He went into it and closed the door.
“We could see him through the glass,” Ellen Grimes said. “The way we were sitting, Ronald could see him better than I could. I could just make out that he seemed to be writing something down. It was only for a minute, anyway.”
Whitney came back from the telephone booth and said, “Supposed to be at this do, y’know.” But he sat down and lifted his glass again.
“Probably want a cigarette, don’t you, Ellen?” Ronald Grimes said.
(“I hadn’t been thinking about a cigarette particularly. But there was something in the way he said it.”)
There had been more than that. Grimes had taken a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and held it out.
(“He carried them for me sometimes. Particularly in the evening, when I had an evening purse.”)
She took a cigarette and got her lighter out of the purse on her lap. “This lighter.” She flicked it, and it did not light. Ronald Grimes fingered in his pocket for matches. “Sometimes he carried them for me, too. But not always. Not this time. It’s coming back clearly now.”
“You’re doing fine, Lady Grimes,” Heimrich said.
“You asked me about a match folder,” she said. “The one you have with something written in it. Then I remembered about this. But I’m probably just taking up your time, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Go on, Lady Grimes.”
Ronald Grimes had taken the lighter from his wife’s fingers, but it had not worked for him either. “Almost always he could make it work.”
“Happen to have a match on you, Whitney?” Ronald Grimes asked and, after a second of hesitation—“The way I remember it now, Inspector”—Whitney had taken a folder of club matches from a pocket of his dinner jacket. He started to open it. But Grimes held out a hand for the matches and Whitney gave the folder to him.
Ronald Grimes broke a match out of the folder and lighted his wife’s cigarette. Then he put the folder in his pocket.
“Sorry, old man,” Ian Whitney said and held his hand out. “Need them at this do. Never have any around, y’know.”
Sir Ronald Grimes said, “Sorry,” in his turn, and took a match folder out of his pocket and held it out to Whitney. Whitney put it in his pocket and finished his drink and said, “Got to trot along to this do.” He beckoned a waiter and signed his drink check. He went along, not exactly trotting but not strolling either.
“And that’s all,” Ellen Grimes said. “I thought it might mean something to you. Now it just seems—entirely trivial.”
“When he wanted to light your cigarette,” Heimrich said. “After the lighter wouldn’t work, Sir Ronald reached in a pocket. You thought for matches. And didn’t find any?”
“I thought that.”
“The jacket pocket? Right hand? He was right-handed?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. He always carries—he always carried things in the right-hand pocket. Little things, I mean. The cigarettes he was carrying for me. Matches, when he remembered.”
“Dropped Whitney’s matches into that pocket?”
“I expect so. I don’t really remember.”
“Gave Whitney back the same folder of matches?”
“Club matches,” Ellen Grimes said. “With the name of the club on the folder and a little squiggle. Meant to look like a coat of arms, or something. Yes. I suppose it was the same folder. They’re all alike.”
“When your husband lighted your cigarette,” Heimrich said. “Happen to notice whether there were many matches left in it?”
“No, Inspector.”
“Or whether anything was written on the inside of the flap?”
She shook her head.
“You think now this—” He took the folder out of his pocket and held it open for her—“this isn’t your husband’s writing?”
She took the folder from him and looked at it for some seconds. She handed it back. She said, “I’m almost sure it isn’t. Of course, there’s not much to go on, is there?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “You happen to know how Major Whitney writes? What his writing looks like?”
She did not. She did not think she had ever seen anything Whitney had written. She was quite sure she had not. “We don’t—we didn’t, I mean—know Ian at all well. He wouldn’t have written to us.”
“But your husband might have? Known Major Whitney’s handwriting, I mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“At the office,” Heimrich said. “Handwritten memos. That sort of thing?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know, Inspector. Does what I’ve been telling you mean anything?”
“I don’t know, Lady Grimes. When did you and Sir Ronald decide to go home by ship? Instead of by air? After this incident at the club?”
“The next day, I think. Ronald said something like, ‘Let’s take it easy. Go round by Venice.’ Something like that. I was glad. I don’t really like to fly. You’re—oh, so sealed in. You think, Suppose something happened and we had to get out. And think you couldn’t ever get out.”
“Your husband didn’t have trouble getting cabins in the ship so late on?”
“I don’t know. Probably he had to pull strings. He could when he had to.”
13
Heimrich thanked Ellen Grimes and left her sitting in her chair, looking out at the quiet ocean. He walked forward slowly toward his own chair, and toward Susan.
It had taken Lady Grimes some hours to remember about the match folder. It might not, of course, have been an incident of any special significance to her—might have been an entirely trivial matter which would slip from the memory until a match folder with writing in it brought it back to memory. The same match folder? There was no assurance of that. He was supposed to think so. He was supposed to think that Major Ian Whitney, not Sir Ronald Grimes, had noted down an address in a match folder; had noted it down on what was convenient when he was given it on the telephone.
Taken her hours to remember. Or, of course, to invent. If invented, then because “A. Schmidt Gesellschaft” was an address with some special meaning. An address, knowledge of which would be incriminating? A cover address? An address,
apparently, known to a man named Parsons, managing director of a firm called Continental Forwarding, Limited. Another cover outfit, Heimrich thought. And one to which Sir Ronald Grimes had talked on the evening before his disappearance. Almost certainly, now, before his death. Engaged in the same operations, Continental Forwarding, Limited, and A. Schmidt Gesellschaft? Parsons had said “competing” firms. On the opposite sides of a fence, then? Or, of a curtain? Parsons had made, or had somebody make, a transatlantic call to check the bona fides of a man who said he was Inspector M. L. Heimrich, New York State Police.
He had got the confirmation he wanted. There is nothing especially secret about the badge numbers of policemen. Still, some reason would have to have been given. There would have had to be more than, “This is Continental Forwarding, Limited. What is the badge number of an Inspector M. L. Heimrich?” The answer to so bare a question would have been, “Why do you want to know?” or “What business is it of yours, Continental Forwarding, Limited?” Somebody in the New York State Police must have been told what business it was of Continental Forwarding. And must have been convinced.
Heimrich’s deck chair was empty now. He sat down in it and felt he sat heavily. Like a—
Susan smiled and shook her head. In addition to everything else, Merton thought, she reads minds.
“Mrs. Powers seemed to be talking a blue streak,” he said.
She nodded her head. “Very blue,” she said. “Very streaky. About her late husband, and how Sir Ronald did him in. In some fashion she still doesn’t make clear. And what a dreadful man Sir Ronald was, although he fooled some people. And about that wife of his, who makes people think she’s so innocent. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’ She actually said that, Merton. I didn’t know people ever did. And that the British government should have kept an eye on Sir Ronald.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t say. She—she just talks. On and on. Never very clearly. Hints and half hints. But she really hated Ronald Grimes, Merton. That’s clear enough.”
“Why tell all this to you?”
“I’d think because I’m Mrs. M. L. Heimrich, dear. Wouldn’t you? And might pass on the word that Sir Ronald was a no-good so-and-so and better over the rail than not.”
20-Inspector's Holiday Page 16
