21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  A fire was laid in the living room, but they did not light it. It was warm in the low house, and Heimrich turned down the thermostat. He said, “Nightcap?” but there was no enthusiasm in his voice.

  “Another word could be ‘exhausting,’” Susan said. “And—perhaps ‘upsetting’ is still another. I think the really pertinent word is ‘bed.’ And tomorrow’s Sunday, and we can sleep late.”

  They went to their beds. Merton waited until he heard Susan’s soft sleep-breathing before he accepted sleep. Sometimes when Susan has found an evening upsetting she lies awake. She did not that night.

  Merton Heimrich dreamed, which he does not often do. The dreams were confused and meaningless. Arthur Jameson was briefly in one of the dreams. He was wearing a crown. Jameson, under his crown, said something. At first Heimrich, in his dream, could not hear the words. Then they came to him. “Droit du seigneur” was what the dream king said. Which was as absurd as all the rest of the dream. Then the dream Jameson began to bang a sword against a metal shield. The banging was very loud.

  It became the telephone clattering between their beds.

  “No. Oh—no!” Susan said, her voice misty.

  Heimrich grabbed the telephone before it rang again. He said, “Heimrich,” in a hostile voice at the same time he looked at the watch on his wrist. It was a quarter of nine. So much for their sleeping late on a Sunday morning. Heimrich said, “Yes, Charlie? I know you are. Go ahead.”

  He listened while Charles Forniss went ahead. He said, “With a what?” and went on listening. He said, “As soon as I can make it, yes,” and put the receiver back in its cradle. Susan was sitting up in bed and looking at him and shaking her head slowly. There was a kind of hopelessness in the movement of her head.

  When Heimrich spoke he realized that his fuzzy voice came from the memory of a dream.

  “The king is dead,” Merton told his wife, who opened her eyes widely and then, involuntarily, her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Merton said. “Somebody’s killed Arthur Jameson. By shooting an arrow into his throat.”

  “An-a what?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich told her, as he swung long legs out of bed. “I did say ‘arrow.’ Charlie’s there. At the house. He says Jameson was in a boat.”

  “A barge,” Susan said. “To go with everything else, it would have to be a barge. I’ll get the coffee going. And—” Standing beside her bed in a nightgown Heimrich could—pleasantly—see through, she shivered. “And light the fire,” Susan said.

  Heimrich ran an electric razor over his face. He decided to forego a shower. He dressed quickly. Flames were leaping in the fireplace when he got to the living room, and the Chemex was on a table in front of the fire, with cups and a cream pitcher beside it.

  “I’m scrambling eggs,” Susan said from the kitchen. “And making toast.”

  “I don’t—” Heimrich said.

  “You certainly do,” Susan told him, and he did not argue. He had half finished a cup of coffee when Susan, in a quilted robe by now, brought in a tray. There was only one plate of scrambled eggs on the tray—that and toast cut into triangles. Heimrich said, “Yours?”

  “Later,” Susan said, and put the tray down and sat on the other side of the table and poured coffee into the other cup. “You really did say ‘arrow’? As in ‘bow and arrow’?”

  “What Charlie told me,” Heimrich said, and began to eat scambled eggs and toast. “He just got there. I suppose a bow entered into it. Or, naturally, he could just have been stabbed with an arrow, I suppose.”

  “In a boat,” Susan said. She lighted a cigarette. She shook her head. “What was he doing in a boat at—at the crack of dawn?”

  “From what Forniss has picked up, he was fishing,” Heimrich said.

  Susan looked across the table at him. She shook her head again. She said, “In the moat, I suppose.”

  Heimrich choked slightly as he finished his coffee.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Susan said. “It just—well, it just seemed fitting somehow.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said and stood up. “No. It seems The Tor comes complete with private lake.”

  Susan stood up too. He kissed her. She said, “Wear a coat, dear. It’s got much colder.”

  Heimrich put a coat on before he went out of the house. Susan was right. It had got much colder. It wasn’t at all like summer any more.

  It was still colder on The Tor’s high hill when he got there, which he did in about forty minutes.

  There were three State Police cruisers in the parking area. A trooper in uniform stood by one of them and came to Heimrich’s Buick as Heimrich got out of it. He saluted. He said, “They’re around back, Inspector.” He pointed. He said, “That way, sir. Want I should show you? Only the doctor hasn’t showed up yet, and the lieutenant said I should wait for him.”

  “I’ll find the way,” Heimrich said.

  The big fieldstone house, from which light had streamed the night before, seemed sullen now. It cast a heavy black shadow across the turnaround. Heimrich walked through the shadow around the house, following a brick pathway which led across a flagstone terrace. He came into sunlight and to a flight of brick stairs leading down. Some distance below, the early sunlight glinted on water.

  The brick staircase was steep. There was a handrail and, going down the stairs cautiously, Heimrich used it for guidance. It was a long way down; finally the glint of sunlight on water shaped itself into a lake.

  It was a larger lake than one would have expected so high in hills. It was irregular in shape. A spring-fed brook dammed into a lake? Heimrich wondered. Or a lake entirely artificial, fed from deep wells? Perhaps four hundred yards long by two hundred wide, but kidney-shaped because a promontory jutted into it—a tongue of wooded land reaching well out into the water. Four men stood at the end of the tongue of land. Two of them wore waders up almost to their hips, and one of the booted men was Lieutenant Charles Forniss, New York State Police. Two of the others were uniformed troopers. The fourth man, in boots and wearing a windbreaker, was as tall as Forniss. The four stood near the end of the spit, and all looked toward the lake.

  The staircase ended at the promontory, and until he had walked fifty feet out on it, still on a well-kept path, Heimrich could not see what the four men were looking at. Forniss heard his footfalls on the paved pathway and turned and said, “Morning, M. L. We’ve been waiting.”

  Heimrich went on and joined the four; The fourth man, the one in the boots and windbreaker, was Geoffrey Rankin, the “distant” cousin of the pretty girl who had been going to marry Arthur Jameson. Rankin said, “Morning, Inspector. It’s a hell of a thing.”

  Heimrich went on until he saw the hell of a thing. It was a rowboat. It was a light rowboat, the oars still in the locks. A man had fallen from the rower’s seat and lay sprawled in the bottom of the boat, his head against the stern thwart. There was blood on the thwart. A narrow shaft was sticking out of the man’s neck, and there were feathers on the end of the shaft. The sprawled man had on a turtleneck sweater and what appeared to be corduroy trousers.

  “Jameson,” Forniss said. “Been out fishing. There are four bass in the creel. It’s shallow there and we could wade out—Mr. Rankin here and I. The boat’s where it was when Mr. Rankin found it. Apparently he was rowing in when it hit him. Planning to tie the boat up, at a guess. There.”

  He pointed to planks which reached out into the water from the end of the spit of land. The planks were supported by heavy piles driven into the lake bed.

  “The boat hasn’t drifted?” Heimrich asked.

  “Swung a little,” Forniss said. “Mr. Rankin and I tied a line to it and a chunk of rock at the other end. I thought you’d want to see it where we—where Mr. Rankin here—says it was when he first saw it. It’s about fifteen feet from the dock. The arrow’s gone in near the back of the neck, a little to the left of the spinal column. Where it would hit if he was rowing in and the person who shot the arrow was standing about�
�oh, about where we are. On the path, at a guess. Anyway, we haven’t found any footprints beside the path. Of course, the ground’s pretty dry.”

  “It’s a steel arrow,” Rankin said. “The kind some of them are nowadays. It’s short. Not over two feet. Probably came from a light bow. I’m just guessing, of course. Maybe not more than thirty pounds weight.”

  “The bow weighed thirty pounds?” Heimrich said. “Sounds pretty heavy to me.”

  “Not the bow itself,” Rankin said. “Thirty-pound pull to draw the arrow. No good for distance, of course. Not the kind a man’d use for hunting. The way they do in Westchester.”

  Heimrich knew that, for part of the deer season in Westchester County, only bows and arrows were permitted weapons for deer hunters. He did not approve. Deer frequently live a long time with arrows in them; live long enough for wild dogs to get them.

  “You’ve got pictures?” Heimrich said, and Forniss pointed to one of the troopers, who said, “Yes, we have, Inspector. From here.”

  “All right, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I’ve seen it. You can haul it in. Since you’re the one with boots on.”

  Forniss waded out. The water came up only to his calves. He reached down and, through the clear water, Heimrich could see him freeing a stone which had been tied to the rope. With the stone off, Forniss used the rope to drag the boat to the dock. He looped the rope around one of the piles and made a hitch in it.

  Heimrich walked out on the planking and looked down into the boat. Jameson’s head was twisted on the aft thwart so that Heimrich could see the face in profile. It was Jameson’s face, all right. Jameson hadn’t shaved before he went fishing.

  “Go ahead,” Heimrich told the trooper who had taken the pictures, and got out of the way. The trooper took a camera out of his tunic pocket and began shooting down into the boat.

  “The doctor’ll want to see him the way he is,” Forniss said, needlessly. “Yes,” Heimrich said, also needlessly.

  “All right, Mr. Rankin,” Heimrich said. “Suppose you tell us about it? About finding Mr. Jameson in the boat. When did you find him, by the way?”

  “At a little before eight, probably.”

  “You came down to join him? To go fishing with him?”

  “No. I couldn’t sleep. I—I was just out for a walk. I woke up at five and couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “You’d spent the night here, I gather,” Heimrich said. “Here at Mr. Jameson’s house?”

  It had worked out that way, Rankin said. He had planned to stay at an inn outside Cold Harbor where he had a reservation for the weekend. “Had my overnight bag in the car. But it had got sort of late. And I’d had quite a bit to drink. And Jameson made rather a point of my staying on. Said there was all the room in the world. That sort of thing. So—I said all right. But then I woke up early and—well, got up and went out for a walk. And I thought I might as well go down and look at this lake Dot—Miss Selby, that is—had told me about. He’d talked about it a lot to her, apparently. Was damn proud of it, I gathered from what she said.”

  “Did Miss Selby say Mr. Jameson was in the habit of going fishing in the early mornings?”

  “No. Only that he’d had the lake stocked. Every spring, she said. Ever since he had the dam put in. Something his ancestors hadn’t gotten around to, apparently.”

  Heimrich said he saw. He said, “Were there other overnight guests last night, Mr. Rankin?”

  “I don’t know you’d call them guests, exactly,” Rankin said. “Ronnie stayed over. And the Tennants. They were here for the weekend. Family, rather than guests. Although Ronnie and the Tennants live in the city.”

  Heimrich repeated, “Family?”

  “Ronald Jameson,” Rankin said. “The old man’s—I mean Arthur Jameson’s—son by his first marriage. And Estelle Tennant is his daughter by the second. Second marriage, that is. Her husband’s James Tennant. He’s a psychiatrist. Dr. James Tennant.”

  Heimrich said he saw. He said, “And Miss Jameson, naturally.”

  Rankin said, “Sure. She lives here.”

  “Miss Selby?”

  “No. Actually, Dot has a room here. Sometimes she stayed overnight when Jameson wanted to work late. On this book about the family. Last night she didn’t. Her mother came and got her. Very vigorous woman, Mrs. Selby. About eleven she drove up. Party’d pretty much broken up by then. There were a few people still around and Miss Jameson. The old man was in what he calls—called—his office with this lawyer of his. I don’t know the fella’s name.”

  “Jackson,” Heimrich said. “The others were just—sitting around?”

  “Getting their coats, mostly. Half a dozen or so. People who live nearby, I’d guess. And Mrs. Selby stalked in. Said something like, ‘Come on, Dorothy. It’s time to go home.’ Something like that. I don’t know why I said, ‘stalked.’ She’s a little, round sort of woman. She just walked in, of course. But she—well she wasn’t wasting any time. She was sort of abrupt about it.”

  Merton Heimrich said, “Abrupt?”

  “The way it felt to me. But you don’t care how things felt to me, I suppose.”

  “I’m interested. in anything you can tell me,” Heimrich said. “As if she objected to her daughter’s staying in Mr. Jameson’s house? But you say she had before:”

  “I don’t know,” Rankin said. “Of course, after the old boy announced the engagement—pretty theatrical about it, wasn’t he?—Flo may have figured that the situation had changed. Staying over as Jameson’s secretary was one thing. As his fiancee another. You’ll have to ask Flo herself, Inspector. She—”

  He broke off. A short, firm man was coming down the steep brick staircase. He was coming carefully. He carried a black bag. “Dr. Fleming,” Forniss said.

  Dr. Curtis Fleming is, when called upon, a police surgeon. He represents the coroner, an official which Putnam County still prefers to a medical examiner. They watched Dr. Fleming come down the stairs and along the brick path. When he was close enough, Fleming said, “Hell of a time on a Sunday morning. Where is it?”

  They showed him where it was.

  “All right,” Fleming said. “Somebody get it out. I’m not going down into that damn boat. Morning, M. L. I suppose you’ve taken all the pretty pictures you want.” Dr. Fleming looked down into the boat. He Said, “An arrow, for God’s sake! Indians around?”

  “We don’t know who was around, Doctor,” Heimrich said.

  The troopers got the body of Arthur Jameson out of the boat and laid it on the dock planking. Fleming crouched down beside the body. He moved the body’s arms; he looked into the blank eyes. He said, “All right to take this damn thing out? Because he won’t be bleeding any more.”

  Heimrich said it was all right to take the damn thing out, and Dr. Fleming pulled the arrow from the dead man’s neck. It came out easily; it came out bloody.

  “Not very deep,” Dr. Fleming said, and got a probe out of his bag and inserted it into the round hole the arrow had made in Jameson’s neck. “Deep enough,” Fleming said. “Pierced one of the carotids, apparently. We’ll know better when we take it apart.”

  “How long, Doctor?” Heimrich asked.

  “Two, three hours, at a guess. No rigor yet. We’ll have to get it down to the hospital at Cold Harbor.” He stood up; he looked at the steep brick staircase. “Somebody will,” Dr. Fleming said. He walked away and started up the stairs.

  “We’ve already called for an ambulance,” Forniss said. “They’ll have a stretcher.”

  “We may as well go up to the house,” Heimrich said. “Warmer inside. After you found the body, Mr. Rankin. Did you tell the others? His sister and daughter and son?”

  “I just went back up to the house and found a telephone,” Rankin said: “I don’t know whether anybody else was up. Oh, one of the maids was dusting things. She may have heard me call the police.”

  “Called them and then came back down here?” Heimrich said.

  “Got a pair of boots and cam
e back,” Rankin said. “Waded out and—well, looked at him. I was pretty sure he was dead but—hell, he might not have been.”

  “Did you touch Mr. Jameson’s body, Mr. Rankin? Move it in any way?”

  “No. Looking was enough. At him and—and at all that blood.”

  “We’ll go on up,” Heimrich said. “Tell the family. You, Trooper—” He looked at the trooper who had taken the photographs. “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Carnes, Inspector. Robert Carnes, sir.”

  “Any relation to Teddy Carnes? The Van Brunt Teddy Carnes?”

  “He’s sort of a cousin, sir.”

  “All right. Get the shots printed up. Put them in my—no, bring them back here. We’ll be here quite a while, probably.”

  Trooper Carnes said, “Sir,” and that he’d have to go up to Troop K to do the developing.

  Rankin and Heimrich and Forniss and the two troopers climbed the brick staircase and went to the front door of The Tor. It was closed and locked. “I went out the back,” Rankin said. “Quickest way. We can—”

  But then the door opened. Ursula Jameson opened it. She was lean and tall in black slacks and a black sweater. Her white hair looked as if she had combed it with her fingers. Her long, tanned and wrinkled face looked older than it. had the night before. Her eyes were wide and staring.

  Geoffrey Rankin was nearest her, but she looked at Heimrich, not at Rankin.

  “You’re that inspector,” she said. “You were here last night. Something’s happened. Hasn’t something happened?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Something’s happened, Miss Jameson. Perhaps we’d better go in and sit down.”

  She stood motionless in the doorway. Her hands began to move, as if they were clutching at something.

  “I heard somebody coming,” she said. “I thought it was Arthur, at first, but he wouldn’t bring his fish in this way. He never does. He takes them—” She stopped speaking and began to move her head from side to side.