by Emma Lathen
“I promised Mrs. Hickey I’d drop by and sign the petition to the Air Force about these sonic booms.”
Her husband grimaced ruefully. “One way or the other, we seem to be spending all our time protesting.”
“Well, Mrs. Hickey has a problem with all those greenhouses, and I suppose it was decent of her to ask us. It’s only right to try and help her.”
“Does she have any concrete suggestions as to where the Air Force should take its jets?”
“Of course not. She just wants them to go away. It’s not only a question of the glass. She says the petunias have never recovered.”
Ed Parry was still laughing as he put on his hat and coat and went to the garage. But it was not just the thought of the Air Force’s elaborately polite response that lifted his spirits. It was the knowledge that Gloria, at first reluctant to accept the inevitable rupture of their privacy which his association with Schuyler & Schuyler portended, had at last decided that the game was worth the candle. Her slowness to come to this decision did not bother him. Gloria was one of those people who, unwilling to disown burdens, have learned in self-defense not to shoulder them lightly.
He was whistling as he came to a conscientious full stop at the end of his driveway before turning onto the county road. As he started to make this turn, all hell broke loose.
It was the grandfather of all sonic booms. It was as if the heavens, rent by some internal fury, had smashed down on him. He flinched against the seat, the windshield starred, and the car swerved. A triumphant reflex brought his foot heavily down on the brake.
The next thing he knew he was canted across the left lane, his bumper locked into that of a school bus. Hastily he scrambled out of the car. He called to the bus driver, asking shakily if the children were hurt.
“Nobody here but me,” was the satisfactory reply. “The kids are all at school. I’m taking the bus back to the depot.”
The driver climbed down to view the damage.
Looking at his trembling hand, Ed Parry felt a gust of fellow-feeling for Mrs. Hickey’s petunias. He was not at all sure that he would ever recover. He would sign any number of petitions to the Air Force, he decided, as he wanly agreed with the driver that that had been one hell of a boom.
“But we’re going to have to file a report, all the same,” grumbled the driver. “Your grill is all smashed and mine don’t look so hot. Probably thousands of reports. You know insurance companies.”
Parry joined him to see if they could manhandle the bumpers apart.
“I don’t see how they can say it’s anybody’s fault,” he said, bending over to get some purchase. “If the Air Force is going to go around smashing windshields while people are driving, they have to expect—”
“Smashing windshields?”
“Yes. What do you think sent me into that skid? Not only windshields . . .” He was about to detail the depredations committed upon Mrs. Hickey’s greenhouses but he was again interrupted.
“Mister! Have you looked at your windshield?”
Parry looked up. The driver had abandoned the bumpers. He was standing bolt upright pointing an accusing finger.
Following his gaze, Parry saw that all the cracks in his windshield radiated out in a circle.
In the exact center was a neat round hole.
For two hours he tried valiantly to fight the evidence of his senses. The state police, summoned to the scene by phone, listened, investigated, and quietly demolished his theories one by one.
First, he insisted that the windshield must be some freak breakage caused by the boom. Perhaps there had been a structural fault, some weakness in the glass at that particular point which had reacted to stress in this fashion.
The police dug a rifle bullet out of the upholstery in the passenger seat.
Then he suggested that possibly a passing hunter had made an ill-advised shot and, appalled by its consequences, had fled in panic.
“Look, Mr. Parry,” said the police lieutenant heavily, “we’ve got to be sensible about this. You know as well as I do that there are ‘No Hunting’ signs posted all over the township. And, anyway, what would a hunter be shooting at? You can’t tell me he was chasing a deer around here.”
He waved his hand at the surrounding landscape. Carefully manicured lawns and clipped hedges rolled back from the road on both sides, with groupings of shade trees dotted at strategic intervals. On the right, set on the breast of the sloping hillside, was the modern Parry house. On the left the Bollingers’ Colonial rambled over its level setting.
Ed Parry looked at the scene with discomfort. It was difficult to believe that a bona fide hunter could have fired a shot across this supremely domestic compound. The formal facade was broken only by the Bollinger swimming pool which, together with its surrounding terraces and Colonial cabanas, dominated the front aspect of their house. Parry’s own pool lurked modestly in the rear, out of deference to his neighbors’ sensibilities. Its placing had been the occasion of considerable discussion with Gloria. She had maintained that the respective wetness or dryness of their skins was irrelevant; the overwhelming fact was the presence. But he, raised in a Southern community which had been shocked to its back teeth by the first sight of colored legs in madras Bermuda shorts, had been anxious to avoid a possible proliferation of irritants.
Now, two years later, he bowed to Gloria’s higher realism. He had been guilty of the single eye, seeing only the problems centering on himself, and thereby had done his fellow townsmen—with the single exception of Owen Abercrombie—a considerable injustice. The looming menace of a housing development for thirty thousand dollar homes preoccupied them to the exclusion of all other anxieties. They were perfectly prepared to embrace any one-home builder, provided only that he was a multi-millionaire.
A minute later and he was wondering if the police lieutenant had been thinking along the same lines. It would be a help if the man let any expression appear on his face. “There was some trouble here when you people were building, wasn’t there?” the lieutenant asked in a tone suspiciously free from all inflection.
Parry wondered if he were becoming morbid. The man hadn’t used any inflection when he asked about the sonic boom.
“There were some minor incidents,” he said carefully.
He did not know it, but his voice was the very twin of the lieutenant’s.
“Garbage was thrown,” said the officer severely. “Paint drums were overturned.”
“Nothing more than you could expect,” Parry insisted dully. He wondered if he could make this man understand that no Black had the right to be indignant about garbage while Sunday schools were being bombed.
The lieutenant gazed unseeingly at the horizon. “We don’t tolerate that here.”
Useless, he supposed, to explain that the Westchester police were not the Birmingham police.
During the ensuing silence, in which both men canvassed and rejected the possibility of further communication, a trooper came running up and drew his superior over to a lane running up the side of the Bollinger property.
Parry was left to his own reflections. He had asked Gloria to stay inside and, on the principle that activity would keep her from worrying, asked her to call the Oldsmobile people about getting the car fixed and sending an estimate to the insurance company. When she predicted that their quiet life was over, she had been right with a vengeance. Reluctantly his thoughts turned to Owen Abercrombie. The police would be asking about him soon. What a mess! This was not the kind of fight anticipated by old Nat Schuyler. Was it possible? Offhand, Parry would have thought not. Abercrombie was not the type to do his own dirty work. But, Parry gloomily admitted to himself, he did not understand the Owen Abercrombies of the world.
He squared his shoulders. The lieutenant was coming back. He would make one last-ditch attempt to have the whole thing passed off as one of those inexplicable freaks of life that occur in the best-regulated communities.
“Lieutenant!”
“Yes, Mr. Parry?
”
“I’ve been thinking. What about a teenager? You never can tell. He might have seen a rabbit or something and taken a pot-shot just for the hell of it. There are rabbits around now and these kids aren’t very responsible, particularly if they’ve got a new rifle.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “It’s time we got down out of the clouds. You’d better come and see what we’ve just found.”
Together they walked over to the lane. A clump of trees screened it from the Bollinger lawn, and the un-pruned shrubbery straggling along its side completed the cover. The area was larger than it seemed from a distance. When they arrived Parry was surprised to see that the little copse had four or five troopers carefully searching the ground. A patch had been cordoned off, and it was to this spot that he was led.
“See those three holes?” The lieutenant pointed to the clearly marked depressions.
Silently Ed Parry nodded. He knew what the explanation would be.
“Those are the marks of a tripod. And we’ve found some matches and cigarette ashes, not to mention the cartridge. It’s as clear as daylight. This sharpshooter”—and his voice was ironic—“set himself up here, took a bead on the end of your driveway, and settled down to wait. He must have had his car turned around, ready for a get-away up the lane. You say you came to a full stop before turning?”
“Yes. That’s right.” The words were like the tolling of a bell, evenly spaced, evenly accented.
“Well, that gave him his chance to line you up in his sights.”
“I guess so.”
“I tell you one thing, Mr. Parry. You owe a vote of thanks to the Air Force. You were a sitting duck. If it hadn’t been for that sonic boom, you wouldn’t be here now, talking about hunters and teenagers. That threw him off. But he may get his nerve back and try again. You understand that?”
Parry took a deep breath. In a way it was almost a relief to have it out in the open. This was not careful deliberations by a membership committee, or whispered mutterings in a locker room. This was something that there was a word for.
And the word was murder.
His voice was steady when he replied. “Believe me, I’d like to help, Lieutenant. After all, I’m the intended victim. But what can I do about future attacks?”
“It would be a start to find out if there have been any past attacks. Now, I know all about the garbage and paint and the building inspector. But you’ve been living here now for a couple of years. Has there been anything you tried to shrug off? Or anything you didn’t realize was important? Accidents to the car? Fires starting in the outbuildings? Or even,” he paused wryly, “even careless hunters?”
Soberly Ed Parry reviewed his life in Westchester. “No, I really don’t think so. For the life of me, I can’t remember anything.”
“It is for the life of you,” the lieutenant reminded him grimly. “Of course, this character may just be working himself up to shooting. What about your wife? Has she had any trouble?”
Parry bit back the automatic reply. Not any more than you would expect. No, that wasn’t what this policeman was after.
“I’ll ask her. But I don’t think so. Nothing that she’s mentioned, anyway.”
We’ll both ask her.” He held up a hand at Parry’s gesture of dissent. “I know. You don’t want to have her worried. Well, that won’t answer. If there’s some crackpot with a gun around, the more worried you both are, the better. What about your kids, anyway? Are they here?”
The children were away at school, Parry told him. Both men looked happier for the news.
“OK. We’d better go up to the house. I’m going to want you both to figure out what sort of individual grudges you might have started. Anything that might have happened in the last month or so to trigger this off. There’s usually something specific if people have been here for a couple of years already.”
The suggestion of previous experience with the problem heartened Parry. They were not alone then. After all, Westchester County was a big place. Here and there, scattered among its suburban amenities, were pinpoints of corruption discharging venom into the community. The police would know all about them, would have records, and files charting the outbreaks and subsidences. They would know what to do.
The first thing to do, apparently, was to ask endless questions. It seemed to Edward Parry that he and Gloria told the lieutenant every action and movement in their lives for the past three months. The restaurants they had eaten at, the parties they had gone to, the golf courses they had played at, the stores they had patronized.
At the end of two hours they were all exhausted, confronting each other with blank, defeated faces. So intent had the lieutenant been on their experiences in Westchester, that only then did he remember the contents of the morning paper.
“Say, weren’t you at some party in the city yesterday? Something to do with Wall Street. And there was an accident of some sort?”
“No, no.” Parry hastened to reassure him. “It wasn’t anything of that kind. Someone dropped dead, a broker. But it was just a heart attack. That’s all.”
Ed Parry was trying to tell the truth, but he lied.
The twelve o’clock news was the first broadcast in New York City to carry the item about the Westchester shooting. It received only second billing.
The leading bulletin was the announcement that Arthur Foote’s death had been caused by nicotine poisoning.
Chapter 5
Were You There . . . ?
WHATEVER SUCCESS John Thatcher’s nine o’clock meeting had in turning the minds of his subordinates from the problems of Edward Parry to the affairs of the Sloan Guaranty Trust was of so limited a duration as to rob it of any significance. The contents of the twelve o’clock news broadcast were disseminated the length and breadth of Wall Street by the time the last trust officer returned from lunch, and formed the sole topic of conversation.
Poison, eh? Well, that was a new wrinkle. And shootings in Westchester, too. You couldn’t say that Schuyler & Schuyler didn’t manage to grab the headlines—one way or the other.
Nor was Thatcher himself setting a very good example of austere devotion to duty. He was idly discussing these latest dramatics with Charlie Trinkam, when Miss Corsa entered to announce that a Detective Sergeant Frazier would appreciate a few moments of Mr. Thatcher’s time.
Charlie was the first to react.
“You know what, John?” he demanded, with every evidence of satisfaction. “You’re a witness. We may have the joy of seeing you testify at a trial.”
“You already have seen me testify.”
Trinkam waved away Thatcher’s appearance as expert witness on the question of the value a going business in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, would have had, if its contractual commitments had been such as were represented to the purchaser.
“I don’t mean that sort of thing,” he said loftily. “If this Foote business ends up in a trial, it will be for good, old-fashioned murder.”
“Yes, and I won’t be the only witness,” said Thatcher, carried away in spite of himself. “Every bank and brokerage house down here has someone involved.”
Charlie grinned. “And a pretty picture it makes, too. I’m beginning to be sorry I missed the fun. What kind of detective do you think the police department has come up with to grill you and Owen Abercrombie and Nat Schuyler?”
“You can see for yourself as you go out,” Thatcher suggested pointedly. “All right, Miss Corsa. You can bring in Sergeant Frazier.”
The appearance presented by Sergeant Frazier suggested that someone at Centre Street was thinking. He was a clean-cut, serious-looking young man, probably older than he looked. He wore civilian clothes and natural-shouldered charcoal gray at that. His mode of address was politely deferential, with a formality that for some reason immediately recalled the FBI in its unending round of security clearances. It developed, as time went on, that he was also a skilled interrogator.
He made no attempt to create a relaxed atmosphere. Instead he
opened the proceedings by asking gravely if Thatcher had heard the midday news.
“I didn’t hear it myself,” Thatcher replied accurately. “But everybody is talking about it. They say Arthur Foote was murdered with nicotine poison.”
Sergeant Frazier was even more scrupulously accurate.
“The autopsy makes it clear that Mr. Foote died from the ingestion of nicotine in toxic quantities. We have not yet ruled out the question of accident or suicide. But, as the poison was certainly taken while Mr. Foote was at the reception yesterday afternoon, we are naturally anxious to get as clear a picture as possible of his movements there.”
Thatcher appreciated the prudence of the police department in refusing to confirm informal announcements of murder. But still, he felt the sergeant’s statements were unduly circumlocutory. Probably there was no proof that the poison had been in Foote’s glass. After all, there had been that swift clearing up of the premises to remove the unseemly signs of festivity. On the other hand, there was no point in abandoning common sense out of an exaggerated instinct for caution. Lethal doses of poison do not appear at Wall Street gatherings by accident, and Arthur Foote would not have chosen such a locale for suicide. The police in their own good time would, no doubt, produce proof rising to the precision of mathematical logic that neither of these eventualities had occurred. In the meantime, Thatcher was quite content to take a short cut.
“Yes, I can see how you would be interested in Mr. Foote’s movements. But I’m afraid I won’t be of much help to you. We arrived rather late, and I had only intermittent contacts with Mr. Foote.”
“Of course,” agreed Frazier earnestly. “Nobody present will be able to give us a minute-by-minute account of the victim. We’ll have to arrive at that by making a composite of all the statements. Perhaps you could start by telling me about your own movements at the party, and then we can go into detail on the critical points.”
Accordingly, Thatcher cast his mind back to the fateful moment when he and Withers had entered the room and been accosted by Arthur Foote. It was surprisingly easy to conjure up the events of the previous afternoon. Things which he had not consciously noticed returned with startling clarity. The center-piece on the bar, Nat Schuyler’s jaunty posturing as he followed Ed Parry across the room, a little dribble down the side of a bottle of bitters, the tie that Tom Robichaux had been wearing. He spoke slowly, making a conscientious attempt to include the position of every person whom he had noticed at any time.
