16-Murder Can't Wait

by Lockridge, Richard

  Jewel theft at a detached house in upper Westchester, not within any corporate limits. Sergeant Finney, with Trooper Antonelli, investigating. Initials; passed on. Request for a special traffic detail to supervise parking during a party the following evening in Cold Harbor. No concern of Heimrich’s; initialed and into the OUT basket. Discovery of the bodies of three schoolteachers in a cabin. Probably asphyxiation; faulty heater. Troopers Weldon and Forsyte assigned.

  “Memo: Lieut. N. Shapiro, city force, enroute to Hangerford. Says probably wasted trip.”

  Heimrich put that aside and went on with the rest. It would, he thought, be pleasant if, for once, he could put his mind to one case at a time. It never had been since he had made captain. When he made inspector, which was about due, it would, naturally, be even worse. The telephone rang. Heimrich said his name and then, “Yes, Charlie” and listened and said, “Mm-m-m. Come on in and we’ll talk about it. Know any reason why Shapiro would go up to Hangerford?” and listened and said, “Neither do I.”

  Mm-m-m. Stuart Fleming had, the previous summer, sublet an apartment in the Gramercy Park area. Apparently occupied it alone. Two rooms; rent one fifty. Quiet tenant. Usually away weekends.

  Mm-m-m. Luigi Pagoni co-operative in Florida. Sure he knew Bernie Stahlman. Known him for years. Sure he knew Stahlman was now calling himself Steele. A man’s own business what he called himself. Sure, he had recommended him for the golf pro’s job at the hotel. Known him off and on for years. Nothing wrong in doing an old acquaintance a favor. No, he had not heard anything from Stahlman since he left Florida a couple of weeks ago. What would he hear?

  Mm-m-m.

  Heimrich leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He thought of Mrs. Isabel Bryce, widowed; a woman who liked big men. A variable woman, Heimrich had eventually decided on the terrace of the Willow Pond Golf and Tennis Club.

  “Enid’s a dear,” Isabel Bryce told him, and sipped a gin and tonic, having offered to buy Heimrich its mate. “Finds everything too, too exciting. Except possibly—no, I’ve sworn off cattiness for April. Take it up again in May, probably. Yes, she told me her brother-in-law—and what a hell of a thing to happen to a man like that—had unearthed, or fallen over, some tremendous information. Going to blow the top off something or other, I gathered. Yes, it had to do with gambling. With a fix of some sort.”

  “Any idea why she would tell you this, Mrs. Bryce?”

  “On the top of her mind, I suppose. And—” She stopped and looked at Heimrich. “Just between us girls?” she said.

  Heimrich shook his head. He said he couldn’t promise anything of the kind. But anything which turned out not to be pertinent—

  “Is it important whether I have any idea what made her tell me? For all I know, tell half a dozen others?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. You said the same thing over and over, because there wasn’t anything else to say.

  “I thought perhaps to build him up,” Isabel Bryce said. “Build Stu up. Partly—well, partly because he was family. Partly—” She paused. “My non-catty month,” she said. “All right. A while back I thought she was getting rather fond of Stu, who was a good deal of man. In, possibly, more than a sister-in-law fashion. It was a feeling.” With that said, she produced an excellent, if low-pitched, vocalization of a cat’s miaou.

  “Not a thing,” she said. “I don’t mean a thing. At most a semithing.”

  “Did you tell others here at the club what she’d told you? No reason you shouldn’t have, naturally.”

  “Probably. ‘Have you heard Enid’s latest?’ That sort of thing.”

  “Specifically Mr. Steele?”

  She put her drink down firmly on the table. She said, “I gather somebody else didn’t swear off for April. Bobby’s giving me lessons. Golf lessons.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, and was looked at carefully. Then Isabel Bryce laughed briefly, and her laughter was unexpectedly infectious. Merton Heimrich smiled at her.

  “I go around the course with him now and then,” she said. “When we go around together—do you play golf, captain?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Walking between holes, people talk,” she said. “Bob Steele—he’s not particularly happy here, captain. He—he seems to need somebody to talk to. Oh, I know he’s married. But, somebody outside. So, for one reason and another, I talk to him. Yes, I think I told him about Stu’s potential blast-off. What little I knew about it.”

  “Which was?”

  “Come down to it, nothing very specific. With the froth off—with Enid’s big-deal atmosphere off—it wasn’t a lot. That Stu had the goods on somebody who’d bribed—or tried to bribe—football players. Dyckman University players.”

  “Did Mr. Steele seem interested?”

  “He listened, as I remember it. He didn’t jump up and down and shout. Look, captain—it was the most trivial thing possible. About on a par with a snappy remark about the weather.”

  Heimrich said, “Now, Mrs. Bryce. Something, possibly this trivial thing, cost Stuart Fleming his life.”

  She shook her head, not in contradiction, Heimrich thought, but in doubt.

  “When she told you about this information her brother-in-law had, did she say anything about his having evidence to prove it? Or what kind of evidence it was?”

  “Oh, she said he could prove it. She didn’t say how. And frankly, captain, I thought she was—oh, the hell with waiting until May. I thought she was making a good story out of nothing much. I’ve known her to.” She paused and sipped her drink. “Not,” she said, “that Enid isn’t a dear.”

  “About Mrs. Angus Fleming and her brother-in-law,” Heimrich said. “About the ’unsister-in-lawish‘ attitude. You spoke of that as if you thought it was a thing of the past.”

  “It’s nothing to make anything of,” she said. “I said it was only a feeling I had. I said it was—” Again she made the sound a cat makes.

  “The rest of your feeling?”

  “That if there was ever anything, it was over with. Had been for—oh, months at a guess. Poor Stu was laid up for weeks, you know. Not available as a playmate. As—well, as poor dear Angus isn’t.” She finished her drink and looked at the empty glass. Then, with a kind of abruptness, she looked full at Merton Heimrich. “Angus Fleming,” she said, “is worth all of us put together. And what’s happened to him is a goddamn shame.”

  And Heimrich saw that there were tears in her eyes. She stood up, and her movement, too, was abrupt. Heimrich stood and looked down at her. It was odd, it was sometimes disturbing, how much you found out about people by inadvertence—how much you found out which had nothing to do with what you wanted to find out. We seek one thing, Heimrich thought, and we intrude on many.

  “Is—” Heimrich began, and paused for a phrasing, and came up with an obvious one. “Is Mrs. Fleming seeing a good deal of another—playmate?”

  Isabel Bryce stepped back into the sunlight and the light brightened her reddish hair. And she shook her head.

  “Finally,” she said, “that damned cat’s got my tongue, captain.”

  She turned and walked away, but Heimrich thought himself answered. A tall young man with a boyish face—a tall man with whom Enid Fleming, half an hour or so before, had walked away from the first tee of the golf course, walking lithely with him on smooth grass.

  Heimrich had, after he watched Mrs. Bryce go across the terrace and into the clubhouse, walked down to the golf house. Robert Steele was sitting on a chair which was canted back against the wall, and he was smoking a cigarette. He said, “You again,” reading the words heavily.

  “Mrs. Angus Fleming is playing golf with a tall man,” Heimrich said. “Blond. Blue golf shirt. Khaki walking shorts. Hits a long ball at a guess.”

  “Looking for a round?” Steele said, and was mocking in a surly fashion. “Members only, captain.”

  “All right, Steele,” Heimrich said. “You’ve had your game. Who is he?”

  �
�Name of Patchen,” Steele said. “J. Henry Patchen. Shoots in the low eighties. Slaps people’s backs, give him a chance. He and Mrs. Fleming are signed up as a team in the mixed pairs tournament in June.”

  “Did Angus Fleming play golf before he got sick?”

  “What the hell?” Steele said.

  Merton Heimrich waited.

  “Was playing early last spring,” Steele said. “Gave it up—oh, middle of the summer. Good enough duffer. And keen on it. So what the hell?”

  Heimrich didn’t know quite what the hell. He said, “Happen to know Mr. Patchen’s occupation?”

  “Sells cars,” Steele told him.

  I’ve got me quite a lady, Merton Heimrich thought, sitting at his desk in the hot office, thinking of the relative coolness of a not too distant terrace, where there would be a breeze. Along with everything else, she’s clairvoyant. Too bad we haven’t got her on the force. All she’d have to do would be to take a quick glance and—

  The telephone rang. Captain M. L. Heimrich reached for it.

  Hangerford was in a region of gentle hills. They were pale green hills and looked a little fuzzy. Here and there the green gave way to a kind of pink. Pretty if you liked that sort of thing, Nathan Shapiro thought. Hangerford was a few white houses on either side of a widening in the highway, and they were set back deep in lawns. There were three stores and an unexpectedly large Colonial post office. There was a sign which said TRAFFIC SIGNAL AHEAD, but when Shapiro reached it the signal was only a blinker, yellow for the main road. Beyond the intersection there was a gas station, and Shapiro pulled into it.

  For a minute or more, nothing happened. Shapiro had seldom seen a community in which so little seemed to be happening. There had been a dog sleeping precariously on the edge of the highway; a man had come out of the post office and got into a sports car and driven away, surrounded by a throbbing sound. A man came, in no hurry, out of the gas station and said, “Yep?”

  “May as well fill it,” Shapiro said. “And give me a receipt. Place called the Cavalier Motor Lodge around here someplace?”

  The man said, “Yep” and stuck the hose nozzle into the tank. “Want I should look under?”

  Nathan Shapiro told him there was no need. He said, “Tell me how to get to this motel?”

  “Resort motel,” the man said. “Charge way out of line, the Spiroses do. In the season, that is. Course, this ain’t the season. Season don’t start until Memorial Day. Three dollars and sixty-five cents.”

  Shapiro gave him a five dollar bill and he went back into the station and was gone for some little time. He came back and counted change into Shapiro’s extended hand. Shapiro said, “Receipt?” and the man went back again into the station and was, again, gone longer than Shapiro expected. After a time, the man returned, and gave Shapiro a rather dirty slip of paper, with “Ed’s Mobil” printed on it, and “$3.65” written on it, and “pd” written under the amount. “This resort motel?” Shapiro said, and put the receipt in his pocket.

  “Half a mile on up,” the man said. “There’s a sign. Off to the right, up a hill.”

  “It’s open?”

  “Yep. Sort of.”

  The Cavalier Motor Lodge looked very like its picture, except that it was not festooned with a “Merry Christmas” streamer. A shirtless young man in tight blue jeans was guiding a lawn mower, with outriggers, around an expansive lawn. There was a big swimming pool with no water in it. There were trees around with lacy, pale leaves. In beds around the building there were red and white tulips. There was a sign which read: PARKING AREA IN THE REAR, and pointed toward the rear. Shapiro parked near a sign which read, in discreet, almost apologetic, lettering, OFFICE. He went into a large cool room, with many deep chairs, with a very large TV set toward which some of the chairs faced, with a small counter. Shapiro went to the counter and, after a few seconds, a lean, dark man came out of a room beyond the counter and smiled pleasantly and said, “What can I do for you, sir? One? Although I should warn you: The lounge and the dining room aren’t open at this time of year.”

  “Not a room,” Shapiro said. “Information, if you don’t mind.”

  The dark man continued to look at him, and continued to smile pleasantly. Shapiro took his badge from a pocket and the man took it and looked at it carefully and handed it back and said, “How can I help you, lieutenant? My name’s Spiros. John Spiros.”

  With that, somewhat unexpectedly, he held out his hand and Shapiro took it. Cordial clasp, John Spiros had. Good firm hand.

  Shapiro took the Christmas card from its envelope and put it on the counter. Spiros opened it and looked at it and said, “We send out hundreds. To former guests. Makes them feel wanted. We hope. Why the question mark?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Shapiro said. “Part of the information I want. You didn’t put it there, I suppose?”

  “No,” Spiros said. “Why would I? The idea isn’t precisely to raise doubts.”

  Shapiro put the envelope addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming” on the counter. Spiros looked at it and, after a second or two, shook his head. Then he looked at Shapio and looked without a smile.

  “According to your badge,” John Spiros said, “you’re a police detective. Not a—snoop.”

  “Not a snoop,” Shapiro said. “The name mean anything?”

  “We do quite a business here in season,” Spiros said. “All summer and late into the fall. Again for a while in the winter, if there happens to be snow. We’ve got a nice easy beginners’ slope. Lot of weekend business. Summers some people stay two-three weeks. We get to know them, my wife and I. The rest—people who sign the register. Not even blurs. These—” he looked at the envelope again—“these Flemings. Sorry, lieutenant.”

  “No idea when they stayed here? For how long?”

  John Spiros sighed slightly. He said they kept an alphabetical list and if it was really necessary—

  “I’d appreciate it,” Shapiro said. He spoke sadly, regretting the trouble he was putting Spiros to. Spiros went back into the room he had come out of. He was gone some time, and when he came back a woman was with him—a woman slender and dark as he but, Shapiro guessed, some years younger.

  “Last October,” Spiros said. “Two days. Probably to look at the leaves. We get a good many leaf lookers.”

  “Nobody around would be likely to remember them?”

  “No,” Spiros said. “Oh, if they tipped a lot. Or didn’t tip enough. Nursed their drinks along a lot. Only, most of the staff isn’t here yet, lieutenant. People who worked here in October. Most of them—the key ones—will be drifting back pretty soon. But-”

  He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said, “This is Mrs. Spiros, lieutenant. She can’t tell you anything about these Flemings either, but—go ahead, dear.”

  “In January there was a man here,” the dark, pretty woman said. “He was asking about these people the way you are, lieutenant. If anybody remembered them. I didn’t. He asked some of our people. Sat at the bar for a while and talked to Frank, who’s the bartender. I don’t know whether Frank could tell him anything. We were fairly busy then. We had some snow.”

  “This man who was asking?”

  “I think he was a big man,” she said. “Good-looking. Young. He had skis on his car.”

  “Stay here?”

  She shook her head. The man, who had not given his name, or been asked his name, had had a couple of drinks, had lunch, driven on. “Our slope’s for beginners,” she said. “We don’t claim any more than that. This man—well, I had a feeling he had a good deal of experience. Wanted an expert’s run.”

  “He wanted to know what Mr. and Mrs. Fleming looked like?”

  That had seemed to be it. And—

  “He asked to see their register card. Jean—he’s what we call assistant manager—was on the desk. He may have dug out the card. I rather think he did. Probably this man paid him to. But—”

  She lifted her shoulders slightly.

  “When we’re bus
y,” she said, “there are a thousand things to do here, lieutenant. It was—I remember now—it was a Friday. People with long weekends begin to come in fast on Fridays. I said I didn’t remember Mr. and Mrs. Fleming and turned the man over to Jean and—did some of the thousand things.”

  Shapiro sighed and said he understood. He said, to either who wished to answer, “You have a safe here? For the use of guests?”

  They had. At the moment, there was nothing in the safe. “Why? You’re looking for something? Think somebody—these Flemings I suppose—may have stowed it here?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Sorry,” Spiros said. “The safe’s empty. You want to look in it?”

  As long as he was here, Nathan Shapiro supposed he might as well. Not that he doubted anybody’s word but—“Sort of thing we’re supposed to do.”

  Spiros took him behind the counter, into a room furnished as an office. He opened a safe and let Shapiro look in it, and there was nothing in it.

  Which, Nathan Shapiro thought with resignation, was almost always the case with anything he looked into. He went back to the lobby of the Cavalier Motor Lodge and found a telephone booth.

  He got Heimrich, identified himself and found himself listening. After he had listened for some seconds he said, “All right, I’ll try.” He sighed. “Probably I’ll get lost,” Nathan Shapiro said, with great gloom.

  IX

  Nathan Shapiro drove west from Hangerford, doubting that any good would come of it. But, in due course, Route 11F did come of it, as he had been promised. He turned south, then, which was better—which was, at any rate, in the general direction of the city. But Brooklyn seemed still a long way off. He passed a sign which read TOWN OF VAN BRUNT and looked for a sign, which would surely be smaller and which he probably would miss, which would read HIGH ROAD.

  “Co-operate with the local authorities.” All right, he was co-operating with the local authorities. If the local authorities decided to take their problems home with them, on the excuse that the office was stifling, and that even a policeman may be comfortable when he can, it was all right with Nathan Shapiro. Not the way one did things in the city, but he wasn’t in the city.