21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  “We’d better go inside,” Heimrich said.

  “It’s Arthur, isn’t it? Something’s happened to Arthur. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Something’s happened to your brother, Miss Jameson. I’m afraid—”

  And then he moved quickly and caught her as she swayed. He had thought she would be frail in his hands, but the old body was firm, muscled.

  Ursula Jameson’s body tightened. “I’m all right,” she said. “All right. He’s dead, isn’t he? That’s what you’re trying to tell me, isn’t it? That Arthur’s dead.”

  “Yes, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. “I’m afraid it is.”

  “But he was a good swimmer,” Ursula Jameson said. “When we were young he used to win all the prizes.”

  She turned then, and they followed her into the square entrance hall and then into the long drawing room where the party had started. There were no signs left of the party. The bar from which Harold had served drinks was gone from the end of the long room. A fire was burning in the big fireplace. It was a beginning fire, with flames still leaping up from kindling under four big logs.

  Ursula Jameson sat on a sofa in front of the fire. She gestured toward chairs, and Heimrich and Forniss pulled chairs toward the sofa, at opposite ends. Rankin continued to stand. He said, “Maybe I’d better—” and let it hang.

  “No, Mr. Rankin,” Heimrich said. “There’re one or two more things you can tell me.”

  Rankin pulled up a chair and sat between Heimrich and the fire.

  “Of course,” Ursula Jameson said, “the water would have been cold. Perhaps he got a cramp. That must have been the way—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Your brother didn’t drown, Miss Jameson. He—somebody shot him. With an arrow. From the bank, apparently. As he was bringing the boat in.”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment. Then she said, “An arrow? You said an arrow? You mean, somebody killed him?”

  “Yes, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. “I’m afraid that’s the way it was. Somebody who knew he’d gone out fishing. Who would have known that?”

  She said, “Known what?” and her voice, which had been strong before, was vague. For a moment she covered her long face with thin, mottled hands. Then she said, “Everybody, I guess. Everybody who knows us. Every Sunday morning he went out early to catch fish for breakfast. Unless the weather was very bad, of course. It was—it was a kind of ritual with my brother. For years he’s caught us fish for Sunday breakfast. He cooked them himself, because he could never find anybody else who could do them the right way. Myrtle does everything else very well but she’s never got the knack of doing fish the way he likes them. And Ellen couldn’t either. She was the one before Myrtle. Not even Reynolds, and he’d been a chef in the city before he came here.”

  “Always at about the same time, Miss Jameson?”

  “Oh, even earlier in the summer, of course. Because it gets light so much earlier. He’s always thought fish bite better early in the morning. And of course he keeps the lake well stocked. You’re sure it was an arrow?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “A metal arrow. Was Mr. Jameson interested in archery?”

  “A long time ago,” she said. “He used to shoot at targets. He tried to teach me, but I could never hit anything. But that was a long time ago. He got tired of it, after a while. Then he took up golf. He’s always been like that, you see. Active. Even as he gets older, he’s always doing things.”

  Tenses are tricky when a man is dead, Heimrich thought. The past tense comes slowly and comes hard.

  Ursula Jameson seemed to hear her own words.

  “I talk as if he were still alive,” she said. “And you say he’s dead.

  You say somebody killed him. Who would do that, Inspector? Who would do a thing like that?”

  Then she got up from the sofa and walked away. She walked stiffly. Forniss looked at Heimrich and Heimrich shook his head. When Ursula Jameson had gone between the big double doors at the upper end of the room and out into the entrance hall, Heimrich said, “Later, Charlie.”

  Heimrich turned to Rankin.

  “Down by the lake,” he said, “you talked as if you knew something about archery, Mr. Rankin. Do you go in for it yourself?”

  4

  Geoffrey Rankin did not answer the question directly. Instead he said, “Has either of you got a cigarette?” Heimrich produced a pack of cigarettes and held it out to Rankin. Rankin took a cigarette from the pack and said, “And a match?” Heimrich flicked flame into his lighter and held it out, and Rankin drew fire into his cigarette and breathed smoke in and let it out.

  “There’s an old saying,” Rankin said. “Something like ‘A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.’ I’m a lawyer, Inspector. This morning I couldn’t sleep, and it looked from the window like being a nice day, so I went down the back stairs and out onto the terrace. Through there.” He pointed to French doors at the far end of the room. “I decided to go down and look at this lake of the old boy’s. I found his body. I called the police. A lawyer would advise me to say ‘period’ at that point.”

  “It’s up to you,” Heimrich said. “You don’t have to answer any questions that bother you.”

  “When I was in my late teens,” Rankin said, “my people had a place on Long Island. My father had an archery range. He was quite good at it, in an amateur sort of way. We shot at targets, not at people. I gave it up when I was—oh, about eighteen. It bored me. Tennis didn’t.” Again he drew deeply on his cigarette. “I wasn’t too good at tennis, either, but I liked to play it.”

  Heimrich nodded his head to show he was listening. He closed his eyes so that he could listen better. Rankin said, “Am I putting you to sleep, Inspector?” and Heimrich said, “No, Mr. Rankin. You do know something about archery, then?”

  “Very little,” Rankin said. “As I said, it bored me. That the ‘weight’ of a bow is the poundage it takes to pull the arrow to the tip. I didn’t bring a bow and arrow up here in my pocket, Inspector. Awkward thing to carry around, a bow. Noticeable. Also, I didn’t know about Jameson’s habit of catching fish on Sunday mornings for breakfast. Or about his having some special way of cooking them.”

  “Some modem bows are jointed,” Forniss said. “They can be put together through a metal sleeve, like a fishing pole.”

  “That so?” Rankin said. “My father’s weren’t. They were about five feet long and made of yew. The arrows were made of wood, metal-tipped. The bows weighed thirty pounds, my father told me. After he died, my mother gave them away to somebody. Perhaps to the local thrift shop. Again, I didn’t bring one with me. I didn’t kill the old boy, either.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t bring a bow and arrows with you. Did you bring Miss Selby?”

  “As a matter of fact—” Rankin said and then stopped and looked at Heimrich. His eyes were, Heimrich thought, a little narrowed. He said, after the pause, “Getting at something, Inspector?”

  “Just trying to get the picture,” Heimrich said.

  “There isn’t any picture,” Rankin said. “None I’m in, anyway. I got an invitation to this party by mail at my apartment in New York. Surprised hell out of me. I didn’t know the Jamesons. Oh, I knew Dot had been working for the old boy on this damn-fool book of his. So I called her up and asked her what the hell. She said Jameson had asked her if there was anyone she’d like to have invited to the birthday party and that she had suggested me. I said I didn’t even know where Jameson’s place was and she suggested I pick her up and that she’d guide me. So I did. I followed her car up here.”

  “To a birthday party,” Heimrich said. “Miss Selby didn’t tell you it was to be—well, more than that?”

  “No.”

  The word came in a flat voice. Rankin drew on his cigarette again and then crushed it out in an ashtray. Heimrich held his pack out again, and Rankin shook his head. Merton Heimrich looked at the cigarette pack as if
he had never seen one before. Then he took a cigarette out of the pack and lighted it for himself.

  “I gathered last night that you and Miss Selby are cousins,” Heimrich said. “Distant cousins, I think you said.”

  “Yes.” In the same flat voice.

  “And friends, I gather?”

  “We saw each other now and then. Not much the last year or two.”

  “This relationship between the two of you,” Heimrich said. “How distant is it, Mr. Rankin?”

  “Miles,” Rankin said. “Her mother and mine were—oh, second cousins. I think that was it. I don’t know what that makes Dot and me. Not consanguineous within any reasonable—or legal—meaning. Is that what you’re getting at, Inspector? Or—all right, I see. You don’t need to tell me. Dot’s a damn pretty kid. A damn sweet kid. Did I kill Jameson because she was going to marry him? Is that what’s on your mind?”

  “Just trying to get the picture,” Heimrich said again. “Last night you and Miss Selby seemed to be—oh, getting along pleasantly enough together. Rather enjoyed being together, it seemed to me.”

  “What seems to you isn’t evidence, is it?”

  “No.”

  “So, you’re not getting any picture. Not the kind you seem to want.”

  “Mr. Rankin, I don’t want anything. Except to find out who killed Mr. Jameson.”

  Rankin didn’t say anything for some seconds. Then he said, “Can I bum another cigarette?”

  He got another cigarette and a light for it. He drew on it.

  “If I had a lawyer,” Rankin said, “he’d probably tell me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “You can if you want to.”

  “If I’ve got something to hide,” Rankin said. “Am I still beating my wife.”

  “If you want to put it that way,” Heimrich said. “I take it you haven’t got a wife to beat, Mr. Rankin.”

  “No.”

  “There are a couple more things I’d like to ask you,” Heimrich said. “You can answer or not as you like.”

  “Ask and you’ll find out,” Rankin told him. But his voice was no longer hard. He seemed more relaxed.

  “You said Miss Selby’s mother ‘stalked’ in last night,” Heimrich said. “That she was ‘abrupt.’ With her daughter, I gathered.”

  “Did I say that? Use those words?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I did, they were much too strong. Flo’s—well, Flo’s very businesslike. She’s a sweet person, actually, but sometimes—well, sometimes she puts people off a bit.”

  “You speak as if you know her rather well, Mr. Rankin.”

  “Moderately. She used to come out to my parents’ place when I was a kid. When Dot was just toddling around. Before Selby died. She’s had—well, it was tough going for her for a while, I think. And she wouldn’t take any help from anybody. At least, I think that. I was just a kid, as I said. Maybe I just imagined things, the way kids do.”

  “Miss Selby was just toddling around when you were a kid,” Heimrich said. “About how old is Miss Selby now?”

  “Around twenty-four. Twenty-five.”

  “And you?”

  “Thirty my last birthday. And, yes, I know, Inspector. Jameson was in his seventies. But it was up to them, wasn’t it?”

  “Obviously. But did Mrs. Selby think so, do you know? That it was up to them?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Did you, Mr. Rankin?”

  Rankin had only half finished his cigarette. He crushed it out abruptly.

  “I think,” Geoffrey Rankin said, “that I’ll take my attorney’s advice, Inspector.”

  Heimrich told Rankin it was up to him. And thought himself adequately answered.

  “Then,” Rankin said, “it will be all right if I get myself a cup of coffee? I could do with one.”

  “Yes. I’d like you to stick around, though. There may be other questions.”

  Geoffrey Rankin said he was damn sure there would be. He rose and walked up the long room and into the entrance hall.

  “On the make for this girl he calls Dot?” Forniss said. “The girl who was going to marry Jameson?”

  “She’s a very pretty girl,” Heimrich said. “If he’s telling the truth, they’re not too closely related.”

  “Hell,” Forniss said, “first cousins get together.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It’s not recommended, but yes. I suppose we’d better—”

  He stopped. A man in a sports shirt and a tweed jacket and gray slacks came into the room through the doorway at the far end, where the bar had been the night before. He had bristling black hair and was heavy and walked heavily. He also walked with vigor. He was, Heimrich guessed, about fifty. He spoke when he was halfway up the room. His voice was as heavy as his movements. He said, “What’s this Aunt Ursula tells me, huh? She got things mixed up somehow, didn’t she? I’m Ronald Jameson. Who are you two?”

  He walked between Forniss and Heimrich and sat, heavily, on the sofa his aunt had sat on. He said, “Well?”

  “Police,” Heimrich said.

  “Wait a minute,” Ronald Jameson said. “Just wait a minute. Weren’t you here last night at the party? Inspector somebody or other?”

  Heimrich supplied his name. He supplied Charles Forniss’s name. He said, “No, your aunt didn’t get things mixed up, Mr. Jameson. If she told you your father’s been killed she didn’t mix anything up.”

  “She says with an arrow,” Jameson said. “That’s crazy.”

  He was truculent. Shock, Heimrich thought, affects different people in different ways. Ronald Jameson did not have the somewhat elaborate grace his father had had. On the other hand, he did not have his aunt’s nose.

  “Your father was shot in the neck with an arrow,” Heimrich said. “He was in a boat on the lake. He’d been fishing. The arrow was made of steel. Do you know whether there are bows and arrows around here, Mr. Jameson? Around The Tor?”

  “God knows what’s around here,” Jameson said. “All the junk in the world, for all I know. Jamesons have been accumulating stuff for generations. The attics are full of stuff. There’s a storeroom in the cellar stacked with boxes. In what, I guess, used to be a wine cellar. There could be bows and arrows. There could be damn near anything.”

  “Do you live here, Mr. Jameson?”

  “Good God, no. I live in the city. Work in the city. You think I’d stay cooped up here?”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “it’s a pretty large coop, Mr. Jameson. You did live here at one time? Grew up here, I suppose?”

  “Until they sent me away to prep school,” Jameson said. “Groton, it was. Supposed to be like father, like son. Only they threw me out of Groton. Decided I wasn’t the right kind of Jameson. So I went to Dartmouth instead of Harvard. Upset the old man. He used to rag me about it. So when I got out of college I didn’t come back here. My mother was dead by then. There wasn’t any point in living here. Trying to be the kind of Jameson my father wanted. See what I mean?”

  “Your mother was Mr. Jameson’s first wife, I take it?” Heimrich said.

  “Rebecca Jameson,” Ronald Jameson said. “She died when I was at college. She’d—well, she’d been sick a long time.”

  There was a change in Jameson’s voice. Much of the harshness went out of it. There was a kind of sadness in the heavy voice.

  “If she’d had the right kind of—” he said, in the softened voice. He did not finish the sentence. “Thing was, I guess, she wasn’t the right kind of Jameson either.”

  He turned suddenly on the sofa and looked toward the outside wall of the room, where curtained French doors opened onto a terrace. He said, “There she is. Want to see her?” and got up from the sofa and went around it and across the room. Heimrich went after him. “There,” Ronald Jameson said, and pointed.

  He pointed at a portrait on the wall between the French doors. He reached out and touched a switch, and a light came on under the portrait.

  It was a portrait of a woman. She
had been painted in evening dress, her shoulders bare. Dark hair, cut short in the manner of the late twenties, curled softly around her face.

  “Beautiful, wasn’t she?” Jameson said. “Painted when I—oh, I suppose I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I remember her like that when I was older. Before she got sick. The old man got a good man to paint her, didn’t he? She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “He was proud of her then, I guess,” Jameson said. “A fine possession, worthy of a Jameson. And he let her die.”

  “People die,” Heimrich said. “People don’t let them die.”

  “Have it your own way,” Jameson said, and, abruptly, turned off the light under the portrait. He walked back toward the sofa in front of the fire, which now was burning steadily. He sat down on the sofa and looked into the fire.

  “It’s your father’s death we’re interested in,” Heimrich said.

  “Just as he was about to become a happy bridegroom again,” Jameson said. “To a girl who, from the looks of her, could be his granddaughter. My stepmother—Janet—was about that age when he married her. And he—hell, he must have been damn near as old as I am now. He likes them young.” He paused. “Liked them young,” he said. “I keep forgetting. I’m not talking—not acting—the way a bereaved son ought to. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  It was, but there was not much point in saying so.

  “I’m trying to find out who killed your father,” Heimrich said.

  “And thinking maybe I did? That won’t get you anywhere, Inspector. We weren’t close, as I suppose you think all fathers and sons ought to be. There’s no law requiring that, is there? I came out here for his birthday party. He invited me. I was filial enough to come. I didn’t come out here to kill him. Also, I never used a bow and arrow in my life. Wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it,”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You say your father liked them young. Since he was a good deal older than your stepmother. A lot older than Miss Selby. Did you know he planned to marry Miss Selby?”