A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  “You expected something,” the Pooh said. “Some action. That somebody, if you built up strain sufficiently, let enough be known but not everything be known, would try to—to clarify things? You expected something to be done?”

  “Not this,” Heimrich said. “You don’t suppose I meant this, Mrs. Otis?”

  He looked at her, now.

  “I don’t know what you expected,” the Pooh said. “What you meant. I suppose not this. But you took the chance, didn’t you?”

  He looked at her for several seconds and then he closed his eyes.

  “Apparently,” he said. He did not open his eyes.

  “Of course you know what it looks like, don’t you?” he said. “You’re intelligent people, naturally. You can see what it looks like.”

  7

  It was pleasant to know that our intelligence wasn’t in question. What was in question was merely whether we had killed Uncle Tarzan and afterward Francis Eldredge. That was what it looked like. Captain Heimrich made it clear as we sat on the terrace, with the shadow of a big tree creeping toward us—creeping across the lawn to the edge of the terrace, climbing the step the terrace was above the lawn, feeling its way along the terrace. He spoke without emphasis, explaining an interesting point to persons not especially concerned. That was the way it sounded but not, of course, the way it was. Captain Heimrich held his audience—his captive audience.

  We had killed Uncle Tarzan for the fifty thousand dollars, using my automatic. He supposed I had fired the shot, naturally, but Mrs. Otis could hardly fail to have been involved. We had thought we had got away with it; that nobody could prove things hadn’t happened as we said. But—Eldredge had been there. Perhaps he had actually seen me shoot Uncle Tarzan; whatever he had seen, it had been enough. We had found out that he had seen enough. Perhaps he had told us, for reasons of his own. Perhaps he had let it slip without meaning to. So we had killed him. We had made up the story of being shot at. To support it, we had gone to the trouble of killing a cow.

  “A light tan cow in a pale green mead,” he quoted unexpectedly. He opened his eyes, apparently surprised at himself. He looked at the Pooh.

  “That is very beautiful, beautiful indeed,” she said. “Neither of us would kill a cow.”

  For a moment what the Pooh said sounded absurd, and for a moment I wished she hadn’t said it. But then I realized that it was inevitable that she should say it, and that it was perfectly true. It would have been absurd to say that neither of us would kill a man. I had killed men; for quite a while that had been my occupation. And the Pooh would have killed a man if she had had to; if circumstances had given her, or seemed at the moment to give her, no alternative. We’ll all kill, for one thing, to save our own lives, and maybe there are one or two other good reasons. But there is no good reason for killing a cow—not a tan cow grazing peacefully in the late afternoon (had they been milked and turned back to pasture, I wondered, and was as surprised as Heimrich apparently had been when he quoted verse) in a pale green mead, in slanting sunlight.

  Captain Heimrich didn’t say anything for a moment after the Pooh had finished the quotation and entered her denial. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and closed them almost at once. I had an odd feeling that he had been impressed by what she said, rather as I had been; that it was hard for him to visualize either of us killing a cow. It wasn’t, I thought, hard to visualize anyone killing Uncle Tarzan, but a cow was different.

  “The case against you two is the best case there is,” he said, and the cow died for a second time that afternoon. “For that matter, it is the only case. You see that, naturally. Because of the gun.” He waited for one of us to answer.

  “Some of the others have better motives,” I said. “Take Pauline, for example. She gets—”

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Now Mr. Otis.” His voice was slightly weary, like that of an instructor after a backward student has inadequately appreciated a point. “I’ve noticed the other motives, naturally.” He opened his eyes. “This is my business, Mr. Otis,” he said. “As writing stories is your business.”

  I felt like saying, “Sorry, sir,” and didn’t.

  “To find a murderer,” he said. “To get evidence the district attorney can take to court. I have to do both, naturally. Often the task is more difficult. In court you have to eliminate so much.”

  He went to the trouble of looking at me briefly.

  “You still insist you lost the gun, I suppose?” he said. He sounded, it seemed to me, a little wistful.

  I said we’d lost the gun. He nodded.

  There were, he said then, three possibilities: The gun would never be found. It would be found and proved to be the gun used to kill Uncle Tarzan and Francis Eldredge. “And the cow, of course,” he added. “We’ll have to get that slug.” Third, it would be found and proved not to be the gun that had been used.

  The last alternative didn’t seem very probable to me. You don’t steal a gun just to throw it away; you steal a gun to use it. Either of the other alternatives was entirely possible, and neither was consoling. Heimrich underlined that.

  “Without the gun,” he said, “with enough other evidence—perhaps with the evidence we’ve got—we can convict you, Mr. Otis, and Mrs. Otis. You see that, naturally. If we find the gun, and it’s the right gun—” He didn’t finish, and didn’t have to. If they found the gun and it was the right one, Winifred and Orson Otis had had it. If they didn’t find the gun, the Otises probably had had it. The police wouldn’t find it and discover it wasn’t the right gun—that was merely an academic alternative, and a silly one.

  “Well,” I said, “what do you do, Captain? Arrest us?”

  He waited several seconds, as if he were thinking that one over. But then he said, “Now Mr. Otis. There’s no hurry, is there? You’re not going any place, are you?”

  He didn’t need to ask the last. We weren’t going any place.

  “You see, Oh-Oh,” the Pooh said, “actually he doesn’t think we killed anybody. That is the dilemma the captain’s in.” She actually smiled at him, as if she were sorry he was in such an uncomfortable spot; it was an encouraging smile.

  “Am I, Mrs. Otis?” Heimrich said. I thought he was going on, but then we heard sirens on the road, and Forniss opened the door at the far end of the terrace and came out, and stood there looking down the drive. He turned to us.

  “The boys are coming,” he said. “I told the others.” Then he went back in.

  The “boys” were the same ones, in the same truck, who had showed up at the Townsend swimming pool to take care of Uncle Tarzan. There was only one motorcycle trooper this time. The trooper stayed on the drive, sitting on his propped-up motorcycle, waiting for something. The “boys” lugged cameras and cases and boxes inside. After about ten minutes a man came alone in a sedan, with a black bag, parked where the trooper indicated, and walked across to the terrace. He told Heimrich they were keeping Heimrich busy.

  “That’s right, Doc,” Captain Heimrich said. “Inside, it is.”

  The doctor went inside.

  Then, with the last rays of the sun glinting on metal and windshields, a procession of cars arrived. Jovial George’s new Buick headed it, with George driving and Faye and Pauline in the front seat with him. George parked, very carefully and not, I thought, very expertly. He got out of the car and looked and decided he had parked too close to a hedge and got back in and moved the car out a foot or two, I supposed so it wouldn’t get scratched. By that time the drive was, or seemed to be, full of cars. There were, it turned out, actually five. Men and one girl got out of them. Some of them had cameras. They seemed to run about two to a car. They moved in on Captain Heimrich.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” Captain Heimrich said and then he stood up. “Miss Finney. I thought you’d all tag along, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” one of the men said and grinned. He looked around at the police truck and at the trooper on his motorcycle. He looked toward the living room. Flashe
s had begun to go off inside. “What could be more natural?” he inquired.

  “Look,” another of the men said, “it’s getting late. I’ve got an edition coming up. What do you say, Captain?”

  “Francis Eldredge has been shot,” Captain Heimrich said. “He’s dead. He was—”

  He told them the facts, not adding much to them, not telling all of them. He said we’d found the body. They all looked at us. Then they began to take pictures of us.

  “Tell them what you want to, Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said, when I looked at him. I told them what I wanted to, which was most of it—about starting up to see Eldredge (I didn’t go into details as to why) and being shot at and hiding behind the wall; about the cow—

  “Go down and get some shots of the cow,” the girl, apparently Miss Finney, told the man with her, who had a camera. He looked doubtful; he gestured toward the living room. “You’ll have time,” she told him. “You know that, Barney. Get the cow.”

  Barney went off to take pictures of the cow. A couple of other photographers went along.

  I told them about finding Eldredge dying. I said he had tried to say something, and I hadn’t been able to get it. I didn’t go into details there, either, although they wanted me to guess what Eldredge had meant to say. I said I couldn’t guess. I went over the same things a good many times for reporters who missed what I said the first time or couldn’t make notes very rapidly. The photographers who weren’t shooting the cow kept on shooting the Pooh and me.

  When the reporters finally finished with me they tried to start on the Pooh, but the Pooh shook her head and smiled at them, and said there wasn’t anything she could add.

  They let up on us, finally, and went after the Townsends and Pauline Barlow, although with not quite the same zest. They went, too, after Heimrich, who was sitting and waiting—and dozing, apparently—and he told them they had all of it. Then Forniss came to the door and said, “It’s O.K. now if you want to let them in, Captain,” and Heimrich nodded. All the photographers and most of the reporters went into the living room. There were more flashes, then—it was beginning to be dusky in the living room. Miss Finney came out, looking rather white, and closed the screen door very carefully behind her. I doubted whether it was going to do much good, considering the traffic there had been in and out, but I knew how she felt. The other reporters came out pretty quickly, too, and even the photographers finished quickly—for photographers.

  One of the reporters—the one who had an edition coming up—tried to get Heimrich to let him use the telephone in the living room and Heimrich said he was afraid not. Then all of them—there were eleven; I counted this time—got back in cars and untangled themselves from the traffic in the drive and went off.

  “Now,” Heimrich said. “Now that that’s over.” His tone invited the Townsends and Pauline to join us. George, who didn’t look jovial any longer, who looked worried and rather annoyed, came over and got himself a chair and, after a moment, Faye and Pauline moved closer. Heimrich said that they knew, now, what had happened.

  “You certainly don’t keep it secret,” George Townsend said. “You’re very chatty with the press, aren’t you, Captain? Very sincere?”

  George used the word “sincere” rather often and not always, to me at any rate, very aptly. Possibly it is a word advertising men like to use, for contrast. Now he sounded annoyed with Heimrich.

  “You let them involve all of us,” he told Heimrich.

  “Now Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said, “it’s that kind of a country, isn’t it? What would you suggest?”

  “You buy a good deal of space, George,” Faye told him. “Perhaps the captain doesn’t—” She let it trail off. George evidently considered it, and then shook his head. I didn’t think it would do any good either, however much advertising space he bought; I thought it was very sincere of George to realize this.

  Pauline Barlow merely sat there, looking young and pretty and only a little tired. She was, I thought, bearing up well. She was also letting somebody else do the talking. Maybe Uncle Tarzan had taught her that children should be seen and not heard; it would have been one of the courses of behavior he approved. I wondered whether Pauline had really liked it.

  Nobody did the talking for the few moments George spent considering whether to put pressure on somebody, and decided he didn’t have that kind of pressure—not on anything as interesting as this. Somebody suing the Blends Company because smoking Blends had paralyzed his vocal cords—that, yes, maybe. Somebody killing the advertising and sales manager of the Blends Company—nope. No could do. When somebody did speak, it was George to tell Captain Heimrich it was a terrible thing, and couldn’t he stop it? He meant, I decided, killing people, not printing accounts of killing.

  “It is difficult to prevent murder, Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said. “If one person is determined to kill another, he is very likely to succeed.” He closed his eyes. “For the moment,” he added. “His success won’t be final, naturally.”

  “Final enough for—” George began, and Heimrich reopened his eyes and said, “Now Mr. Townsend. This doesn’t get us anywhere, does it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Townsend said. “I liked Eldredge. He’s—he was a neighbor. He was shot? Like P. J.?”

  “Pretty much,” Heimrich said. “Not in the back. But, probably with a heavy calibre pistol or revolver.”

  George and Faye and Pauline too looked at me.

  “The weapon hadn’t been found,” Heimrich said. “I’d like each of you to tell me—”

  “Captain,” Faye said, interrupting him. “Do you know where Dwight Craig has gone? Did you tell him he could go?”

  He hadn’t, Heimrich said, formally detained anyone, if that was what Faye meant. He hadn’t known Craig was “gone.” What did Faye mean by “gone”?

  What she meant, and what George confirmed, was that Craig had left Pinewood early in the afternoon, saying he was driving in to Mount Kisco on an errand. He had not returned, or been heard from.

  “And,” George said, “we’d arranged to have a talk this afternoon. Go over things. Try to figure out where we stood. It was important.”

  I could see it would have been. When your most important client is shot in your own swimming pool the moment for consultation has arrived; the moment for strategic planning.

  “That’s very interesting, Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said and added, “naturally. Mr. Craig understood about the—consultation?”

  “He damn well did,” George said.

  Heimrich closed his eyes, briefly, and opened them and said, “Oh, Sergeant.” Forniss had come out onto the terrace and I, for one, hadn’t noticed him. Now he said, “Yep?”

  “You know anything about Mr. Craig?” Heimrich asked.

  “He went off in that car of his,” Forniss said. “Around three—four o’clock. We didn’t bother him.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I know that, of course. However—” He paused. “Perhaps—” he said.

  “O.K.,” Forniss said. “I’ll pass the word.” He went off to pass it.

  “Oh, Sergeant,” Heimrich said, and Forniss stopped at the french doors. “You might find out about Miss Dean, while you’re at it.”

  “O.K.,” Forniss said, and went into the living room. Then the doctor came out and said, “About what you thought,” to Heimrich.

  “Half an hour?” Heimrich said, and the doctor said, “At the outside. He probably had a good deal of resistance.” Then the doctor waved his hand and went out to his car. George watched him as he backed out, and once leaned forward, as if about to do something or say something, when the doctor’s car came close to the Buick. But the doctor didn’t graze the Buick and George leaned back. He was certainly fussy about his car.

  “To get back,” Heimrich said. “Mr. Eldredge died, Mr. Otis tells me, about seven-thirty. He didn’t live long after he was shot; as the doctor said, probably not more than half an hour. So I have to ask each of you—”

  “I was in my room,”
Pauline said. “Alone. I—I didn’t want to see anybody. Not even Faye and George.” She smiled at them, weakly. “I—I was just thinking about father.” Her lips trembled and her eyes filled—a little, not much. “I’m afraid I’m not very clear about times, but I’d just come down when—when somebody called about poor Mr. Eldredge. I think I’d been there a long time.”

  “You had, dear,” Faye said. “You went up—oh, before Dwight left. I wanted to—to help you, but I thought probably you’d rather—”

  Faye left that hanging in air, probably as a point too obvious to make.

  “I know, Faye,” Pauline said. “You’ve been so—”

  Then she let that hang. The air was full of the tails of sentences, wagging wistfully to be lifted down.

  Faye herself had gone up to her room a little after Dwight Craig had left and had lain down. She thought she had slept for an hour or so.

  “I felt drained,” she told Heimrich, who opened his eyes, nodded, and said, “Naturally, Mrs. Townsend.”

  She had gone down about five and sat with George on the terrace, where he was waiting for Dwight Craig to come back and consult. They had had a drink and had talked about poor P. J. and poor Pauline, and how sad everything was.

  “He was—such a wonderful man,” Faye Townsend said.

  About six forty-five, George and Faye agreed, she had gone into the house to “fix them up a little supper.” Heimrich opened his eyes at that, and I did too. I’d assumed that Pinewood was filled at all hours by people employed to toss off any little suppers which might be needed.

  “The cook is off Sunday afternoons,” Faye said. “Usually we go over to the inn. But today we felt—” She sighed and another sentence died of posterior truncation.

  One of the maids had helped Faye get things started, but the maid had been so nervous and upset—“poor thing, she’s only a child, really”—that she had not actually been of much help. So Faye had carried on, bravely, by herself. (One really never knows what’s in a person until there’s an emergency.) She had made sandwiches and a salad, and was fixing a nice tray to take up to Pauline when Pauline came down. A few minutes later, the call came from Forniss. They had choked down a sandwich or two and come to Eldredge’s terrace.