A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  “So he told Townsend,” Heimrich said. “He told me that that wasn’t all of it—that something had come up he wanted to. think about.”

  “Ann,” the Pooh said.

  Heimrich did not comment on that. While Craig was gone, Townsend had sat on the terrace and cooled off there. Craig had come back and joined him. They had only been there for ten or fifteen minutes—Jovial George had at first guessed half an hour, but Craig didn’t agree and George didn’t insist—when we came and told them about Uncle Tarzan.

  Since Heimrich was so talkative, I asked him about Francis Eldredge. He said Eldredge had gone home after the cocktail party, had dinner, sat around and read for some time and then gone for a walk. The walk had ended at the pool. Eldredge had told Heimrich he often walked that way and sat down in one of the deck chairs by the pool and rested before he walked home again.

  I said I wondered if the business conference had been so damned amicable. As soon as I had said that, I wished I hadn’t, because Heimrich opened his eyes very fully and looked at me, and said, “Why, Mr. Otis?” It occurred to me that he had been waiting for me, or one of us, to say that—or something like that; to make some sort of move, as a cat, who has lost his mouse in thick grass, waits for the mouse to betray itself by movement. I never met anyone who less resembled a cat than Captain Heimrich, but I still thought of a cat—a very large one, who probably had caught a lot of mice. I felt a little like squeaking.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I had a feeling—” I stopped. There was no use doing any more moving—or squeaking, for that matter.

  “Uncle Paul was abrupt with the others—with Mr. Craig and Mr. Townsend,” the Pooh said. “Of course, he was rather an abrupt person. But I know what Oh-Oh felt. It was in the air. Nobody liked Uncle Paul yesterday afternoon.”

  “Except Faye,” I said. It is very difficult not to squeak, when it is so obviously expected of you.

  “Perhaps,” the Pooh said. “I—”

  Then the telephone rang and I went in and answered it. It was a man who wanted Heimrich, and Heimrich went in and talked with him. When he came back, Heimrich didn’t sit down. He stood and looked down at us. I got up, more or less by instinct.

  “That was Sergeant Forniss,” Heimrich said. “Your uncle left you fifty thousand dollars, Mrs. Otis.” He regarded both of us.

  We must have been worth regarding. Fifty thousand dollars is something you work ten years for; five if you’re lucky. You don’t just have fifty thousand dollars—not in one piece.

  “Gee!” the Pooh said, and I thought that summed it up very nicely. It was respectful of fifty thousand dollars, without being worshipful. It might, of course, have been wiser to say “Tut-tut,” but I don’t think it would have convinced Heimrich.

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “thanks for the coffee. It was very good coffee.”

  He made it sound, it seemed to me, a little like an epitaph.

  “Well,” he said then, “it’s too bad about the automatic, naturally. But—” He started off. Then he paused.

  “By the way,” he said, “your hair, Mrs. Otis. You did say it was hereditary, didn't you?”

  The Pooh nodded.

  “Of course,” Heimrich said, “that sort of thing skips around, I suppose. In a family, I mean, naturally.”

  “Not very much in ours,” the Pooh said.

  “No?” Heimrich said. “But it did skip your cousin, didn’t it?”

  Then he went. He didn’t say anything about seeing us again, or about our staying within reach. He didn’t need to.

  5

  Captain Heimrich had left us with a good deal to think about, so we thought about the fifty thousand dollars first. We thought it had been very nice of Uncle Tarzan and that there must have been something about him we hadn’t appreciated while we had the chance. We thought that, when the bright leaves and warm afternoons of October had passed, we’d take the fifty thousand dollars and go some place south where it was warm, and stay there the winter. We agreed that one nice thing about my occupation was that it could be carried on anywhere, which was what people were always telling us. This isn’t particularly true, but it’s truer when you have fifty thousand dollars than when you don’t. Most things are.

  But even the fifty thousand dollars, pleasant as it was to think about, couldn’t keep us thinking forever—an hour or so took care of it, more or less, and left us with nothing better to think about than who had killed Uncle Tarzan, and whether Heimrich would find out. “Or,” I pointed out, “just settle for us, as the handiest.” I said that it was something we had been together all evening, and with other people—who might remember—and looked at the Pooh, who was looking at nothing in particular.

  “The trouble is,” the Pooh said, “we weren’t, were we? For half an hour—longer than that, perhaps—I was sitting out in It by myself. I could have gone off and killed Uncle Paul and nobody would have known.” Then she looked at me. “I suppose you didn’t even notice I was gone,” she said.

  I had noticed it; I remembered now I had. I said she had come back and written part of a poem on the back of an old envelope. I said I always noticed when she wasn’t around, which was true, but that when she was around again I forgot she had been away, because it was so pleasant that she wasn’t. She said I had got out of that pretty well, on the whole, and added that she hadn’t killed her uncle, in case I was wondering. That was pretty ridiculous, so I went over and took hold of her white hair and tilted her face back and kissed her. I said it was all right with me whatever she wanted to do.

  “You don’t suspect me, then?” she said. “If you don’t, I won’t suspect that you went off and killed him while I was sitting in It.”

  This was fair enough, and we agreed to it; we agreed that neither of us had killed Uncle Tarzan for fifty thousand dollars. We hoped Captain Heimrich would agree too, since that would make things a good deal more chummy. She asked whether all detectives were like Captain Heimrich, and I said I doubted it; certainly the ones I’d met, when I was doing a “true crime” series, hadn’t been.

  “He seems so confiding, somehow,” the Pooh said. “But I suppose he isn’t.”

  I supposed he wasn’t, too. There was a kind of open forum atmosphere about his investigation, certainly; he seemed to tell you anything you wanted to know, along with some things you didn’t. But I wasn’t at all sure he was really particularly confiding. I said it was probably really a case of enough rope.

  “I wish,” the Pooh said, “that the revolver would turn up. Would you recognize it if it did?”

  “For one thing,” I said, “it isn’t a revolver. It’s a pistol.”

  “Gun,” the Pooh said. “I’ll call it a gun.”

  As for recognizing it, I said, I didn’t know how. It was not a trusted companion of my goings out and comings in; it didn’t have any notches on the butt. Then I remembered it probably did have a serial number and went in and rummaged around in my army papers. I found the serial number of the forty-five which had been issued me, and since I’d only had one, it was probably the same automatic, which I had forgotten to issue back. It was hard to remember why—whether it was merely getting away with something: a kind of childish getting back of my own; or whether I did really, at bottom, like the idea of owning a gun. The last, the Pooh said, would be very like a man, and that in most respects I was. I thanked her, and said that she ought to know if anybody did. We got back to the automatic.

  “As for its turning up,” I said, “it probably will. I can’t think of any other reason for its having been taken in the first place. The idea must have been to hand us to the police on a platter. With apples in our mouths.”

  “I think we’d look rather sweet,” the Pooh said. “Why hasn’t it, then?”

  I had, I discovered, been thinking about that. I suppose I’d been thinking about it while we were thinking about the fifty thousand dollars—ambivalence again. There were two reasons: first, whoever had taken the gun, thought he might want to use
it again; second, he was waiting to see whether we really fitted the platter. He would, I pointed out, look pretty silly if he turned the gun up and tests proved it had been the one used to kill Uncle Tarzan, and we had spent the significant period with a couple of bishops and a Boy Scout leader.

  “Actually,” the Pooh said, “we were swimming. I mean, we were there. He must know that by now, unless Captain Heimrich confides only in us. Apparently, Uncle Paul was killed during the hour before we found him—or the half hour. The captain wasn’t very specific.”

  Whoever had used the gun knew that by now, I agreed. He might not have known it earlier. Unless he figured on having further use for it, the gun probably would turn up any time—if it was the gun used. If it wasn’t, I couldn’t see any point to any of it. What had obviously happened, I said, was that somebody had decided to shoot Uncle Tarzan—which was certainly the best way; there wasn’t anybody around I could think of husky enough to go at Uncle Tarzan with his bare hands, or a club, or even with a knife—and hadn’t had a gun. He’d remembered I had one, found out that we weren’t at home, come over and borrowed the forty-five and gone back and used it. Now he would arrange for the gun to be found and proved the gun they wanted, and ours to boot. Then the fifty thousand dollars would come in. I offered to get the Pooh an apple, so she could try it for size.

  “You’re always very logical,” the Pooh said.

  I admitted that; I said that Heimrich no doubt was, too. Putting myself in his place, I said, I would settle for the Otises, at least as soon as the automatic reappeared.

  “Mr. Craig knew we weren’t at home,” the Pooh said.

  I pointed out that Ann Dean did, too.

  “She didn’t even know Uncle Paul,” the Pooh said. “I can see how somebody who knew him—” She stopped, then. We both could, of course. That was the trouble—so many people knew Uncle Tarzan, and it was hard to leave out anybody who did. Craig and Townsend obviously; Faye Townsend; even Uncle Tarzan’s daughter, although one always prefers not to think of daughters killing their fathers. The fact remained that she did know her father very well, and might have found that troublesome. Also, whether one liked to think about it or not, children did kill their parents from time to time. There was also Francis Eldredge, who apparently had a feud with Barlow about the tobacco business.

  “It is a little odd about her hair,” the Pooh said. “Since she doesn’t dye it.”

  I agreed she didn’t dye it and the Pooh said she’d noticed I noticed. I said that, so far as I was concerned, there was no substitute for girls with white hair and that I didn’t suppose there would be. She said I had got out of that one very nicely; that this was one of my better days. I sometimes think that the Pooh and I distract each other. I asked the Pooh whether she meant that all the women in her family had white hair in their early twenties.

  “Not all of them,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t come until the late twenties. Sometimes there’s a gray period. I had a gray period myself, for about a year. My hair was quite dark, at first.” She looked at nothing in particular. “Pauline is very blond, isn’t she?” the Pooh said. “I wonder why the captain was especially interested?”

  I agreed Pauline was blond. I didn’t know why Heimrich thought the color of her hair was important, unless Uncle Tarzan had been discovered to be clutching strands of straw-gold hair when he died, as I didn’t think he had. He had been clutching water, so nearly his native element.

  “Unless—” the Pooh said, and didn’t finish or, apparently, plan to. I waited but after a moment she shook her head.

  “As for Eldredge,” I said, “he didn’t know we weren’t at home. Craig might have told the others; Eldredge wasn’t there during the evening.”

  “Mr. Eldredge wouldn’t really have to know,” the Pooh said. “He could look down and see.”

  That was, I realized, perfectly true. As I’ve said, his house commands Mean Abode; from his terrace, one can see our place clearly. The lights show up and so, of course, would the absence of light.

  “We might have been sitting in the dark,” I said, and the Pooh agreed. But, she said, Mr. Eldredge, guessing that we probably weren’t, could have come down on the chance. If we had been, he could have merely been taking a walk; if we weren’t there, he could have taken the gun. I said the more I thought of it, the better I liked Eldredge. But then I came back to it—Heimrich wouldn’t. Heimrich would like us. I wished we could do something about it.

  “Well,” the Pooh said, “why don’t we find out who did do it? It would be a little like writing a poem, I’d think.”

  I couldn’t, I said, think of two things less alike, but as soon as I’d said it, I realized what she meant. If you’re writing verse, you keep picking up words and phrases and—well, trying them for the way they sound and the way they feel, and in the end some of them are right and some aren’t. I used to do that before I found out that the ones I kept were the wrong ones, while the ones the Pooh kept made you laugh or, sometimes, feel a strange little tingle in your mind.… I supposed, now, that the Pooh meant a man working to find out who killed somebody would try first one piece and then another (knowing what the rhythm was, of course) until there was only one set of words for it. The words wouldn’t be pretty, or gay or tingling, as they can be in verse; they would merely be right.

  “Yes,” the Pooh said, although I hadn’t said anything, and she had only been watching my face, “that’s how I meant it, Oh-Oh.”

  This left us in perfect agreement with each other, a pleasant and not unusual condition, but with no very specific idea as to how a writer of pulp fiction and a composer of light verse go about solving a murder of which, at almost any moment, they are likely to be accused. There was no use in going about asking the people concerned whether they had shot Uncle Tarzan, since at least one of them could hardly be expected to answer truthfully and, in any case, Captain Heimrich was more or less doing that. We finally decided that we had better concentrate on my automatic, and who stole it, which was part of the same thing, of course, but a part small enough to get one’s hands on. So, since it was then about one-thirty, and hotter than ever, we had tom collinses and the Pooh opened a can of crabmeat and made a salad. This occupied us pleasantly for rather more than an hour, after which I drove into Mount Kisco and got the Sunday papers. Neither of them—I mean the Times and Herald Tribune, of course—had anything about Uncle Tarzan’s taking off; we get the early editions, but I suppose only the very latest had time to make anything of it. We read the book sections quickly and I—while the Pooh wasn’t looking—took a hurried glance at the Times crossword. The Pooh, for reasons I have never entirely fathomed, considers crosswords degrading. It was then after three, and—unless Heimrich had been more diligent than we had been—the murderer of Uncle Tarzan was still at large. So, unless things were being kept from us, was my automatic.

  It was the Pooh who thought that the marble-topped table might be a place to start, so she called the Hibbards’ and got Ann Dean. The Pooh said we had been talking about the table, and could we come over and look at it, if we could get It to start? Apparently Ann said we could, although, the Pooh said afterward, Ann seemed to have difficulty at first in remembering anything about a marble-topped table. We went out and kicked It, as punishment for sins to come, and got in and, in only about ten minutes, were lurching along toward the Hibbard place, making our customary racket and being stared at indignantly by other motorists. We almost ran into George Townsend, coming out of their drive in his new Buick—a car of which he was quite foolishly fond and careful; he had once flatly refused to push It, I suppose fearing contamination—and he honked at us excitedly, and then waved. I waved back. There was one of them who hadn’t been arrested yet, anyway.

  The temperature was over ninety again and in five minutes I was soaked, and the Pooh wasn’t—there was only a faint dampness at her hair line. The air tasted of heat, and of dust—and, of course, of carbon monoxide from It’s leaky muffler. I wished Uncle Tarza
n had arranged to get murdered at some other season; early October is usually delightful in our part of the country except, of course, if a belated hurricane happens to come up too near the coast. As it was, he was not only causing us to be dressed and about on a very hot Sunday afternoon but he had pretty much ruined the most available relief—the Townsends’ swimming pool. I doubted whether either the Pooh or I would ever want to swim there again; that crystal was broken for good and all.

  Ann was alone at the Hibbards’, sitting in the yard in a deck chair, in what shade an elderly apple tree gave, looking very long, very attractive and very, very worried. We drove It in, turned so that it backed up to the garage, and got out and kicked it. Then we went over to Ann, who said it was dreadful about the Pooh’s uncle. We agreed it was. She said it must have been dreadful to find him, and we agreed to that, too. She asked whether Captain Heimrich had been around to see us, and we said he certainly had.

  He had been around to see her, too; he had left only about an hour ago. He seemed, she said, to be very sleepy.

  “I doubt whether he is,” the Pooh said. “What did he ask you?”

  We walked across to the house as we talked, and went in as the Pooh asked her question. It was incredibly cluttered inside the house—drop-leaf tables were lined up at attention to be inspected, and there was the usual miscellany of brass objects. There was also a grandfather’s clock, in the hall, which said it was a quarter of nine. It was later than grandfather thought.

  It was hard, Ann said, to say exactly what Heimrich had asked her. He had got her talking about the cocktail party, and how people had behaved at it, and she had told him they behaved much as people commonly behave at cocktail parties. She had told him, and now she told us, that she had noticed no particular animus toward Uncle Tarzan, or felt any particular strain. Then she smiled a little—she didn’t manage the grin.

  “I had to admit I wasn’t very observant,” she said. “I—I was a little upset about meeting Dwight. The captain already knew about that, I guess. He said, ‘Naturally.’”