21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  “No. I just thought it was going to be a birthday party. Oh, I wondered a little when it turned out to be such a fancy one. I didn’t know he was going to announce his engagement in that damned flossy way. To that kid. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Janet was damn near twenty-five years younger than he. She was younger than I, come to that. He married her a little over a year after Mother died.”

  “She has died, too, Mr. Jameson? You said she ‘was.’”

  “Killed a couple of years ago. Nothing you’d be interested in, Inspector. Her horse fell on a jump. Threw her into a stone fence and it broke her neck. She was Estelle’s mother. Estelle and her husband are here in the house. Did you know that, Inspector?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has anybody told her about this?”

  “Your aunt may have,” Heimrich said. “When did you wake up this morning, Mr. Jameson?”

  “When Aunt Ursula banged on the door and told me about Father.”

  “You hadn’t heard anything before that? Anybody moving around? Your father went out early to go fishing. Mr. Rankin went out somewhat later because he couldn’t sleep. The servants were probably up and around earlier, clearing up after the party. You didn’t hear anything? Nothing waked you up. Until your aunt knocked on the door.”

  “No. If there was anything going on I slept through it.”

  “Then I guess, for now anyway—” Heimrich said, and let it hang. He said, “By the way, Mr. Jameson. You said you work in New York. Mind telling me what kind of work?”

  “Why should I? I’m a partner in an advertising agency. Jameson and Perkins. And, if you’re wondering, I don’t need any of the old man’s money. Not that I’ll get any, at a guess. The thing is, I don’t need it.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. That’s all for now, Mr. Jameson. Only—you weren’t planning to go back to the city right away, were you?”

  “Am I free to?”

  “Naturally, Mr. Jameson. I’d a little rather you didn’t. But you won’t be stopped.”

  “I’ll be around,” Jameson said, and stood up. He said, “Go easy with Sis, will you? This—well, this will shake her up pretty bad. And she’s a nice kid.”

  “I go as easy as I can with everybody,” Heimrich said. “I’ll probably see you later, Mr. Jameson. As things come up.”

  They watched Jameson walk down the room, toward the door in the far wall. He seemed rather to be shouldering his way down the room.

  “Seems he didn’t like his old man much,” Forniss said.

  “And doesn’t try much to hide it,” Heimrich said. “I suppose we’d better talk to the daughter, Charlie. Mrs.—what did Rankin say her name was?”

  “Tennant,” Forniss said. “Her husband’s some kind of a headshrinker. Psychiatrist, Rankin said.”

  “An M.D., then,” Heimrich said. “Might see if you can find them, Charlie.”

  Forniss went to find Dr. and Mrs. Tennant. He didn’t have far to go. He met a couple entering the room through the double doors and came back with them.

  Estelle Tennant had black hair which lay smoothly on her head; she had large dark brown eyes. She was, Heimrich thought, in her middle twenties—about the age of the girl her father had planned to marry. Estelle Tennant had also, Heimrich thought, been cry. ing. She was not crying as she walked down the room with her husband beside her and Forniss a step or two behind. But as she walked nearer, Heimrich could see that she was still catching her breath in sobs.

  Her husband appeared to be some years older. He was taller than his slim wife, but not a great deal taller. He was, Heimrich guessed, in his late thirties or early forties. He was not dressed for the country. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt and a nonassertive dark blue necktie. He was clean-shaven, and his blond hair was short. But Heimrich is not among those who expect psychiatrists to be bearded.

  Heimrich stood up as they drew near. He said, “Mrs. Tennant. Doctor.”

  Estelle Tennant merely nodded her head uncertainly. Dr. Tennant said, “All right, dear. Sit down.” He put an arm around her shoulders and guided her to the sofa in front of the fire. He himself remained standing. He said, “You’ll be Inspector Heimrich? From the police.”

  His voice was unexpectedly soft, almost soothing. It did not go with the outward crispness of the man. Heimrich said he was a police inspector.

  “Miss Jameson felt you would want to talk to us,” Dr. Tennant said. “Although I’m afraid there is nothing we can tell you. She—she is very much shaken. I suggested sedation, but she refused it. Of course, I’m not her physician. But I suppose what she told us is correct? It seems—well, it seems improbable.”

  “I assume she told you her brother had been killed,” Heimrich said. “Shot in the neck with an arrow. It pierced a carotid artery, the police doctor says. Yes, it is an improbable way to die.”

  “Probably lost consciousness almost at once,” Tennant said. “Bled to death.”

  “Don’t,” Estelle said, and covered her face with her hands. “Please don’t, Jim. Please!”

  Her voice shook. Tennant sat down beside her on the sofa and held her to him. She took her hands down from her face and pressed her face against his shoulder. He said, “There, dear. There, Estelle,” and his arm tightened around her. He looked across at Heimrich and said, “My wife’s in shock. I hope you can make this brief. I don’t know how we can help you, anyway.”

  “Only if you heard anything this morning,” Heimrich said. “People moving about. Or, of course, saw anything that may help us.”

  “You think whoever did this was in the house? I mean, followed Mr. Jameson from the house? Carrying a bow and arrow? It—it sounds preposterous, Inspector. Somebody from outside? You’d thought of that?”

  “Of course,” Heimrich said. “It was somebody who knew Mr. Jameson was in the habit of going fishing early on Sunday mornings.”

  “Which hundreds of people may have known,” the doctor pointed out. “Men like Jameson—well, they are celebrities in neighborhoods. People pick up things about them. The lake probably is visible for miles around. Anybody may have seen him out in this boat of his. Come to that, I’ve seen him myself. Not this morning. Other times Stel and I’ve been up here.”

  “Do you come here often, Doctor?”

  “Every few weeks,” Tennant said. “It’s coming home, to my wife.”

  “He was my father,” Estelle said, suddenly freeing herself from her husband’s arm. Her voice shook. It was a light, shaking voice. “He was my father. You’re—you’re all talking about him as if—as if he were just an object. An object!”

  Tennant drew her close to him again. She said, “Oh Jim. Jim!” He said, “There, dear. I know,” and tightened his arm around her. Her face was against his shoulder again. He looked over her at Heimrich and shook his head slowly.

  “Mrs. Tennant,” Heimrich said, “I hate to put you through this. We don’t think of your father as—as an object. We think of him as a man who has been killed. We’re trying to find out who killed him. You want that, don’t you?”

  “He’s dead,” Estelle said, not moving her head from her husband’s shoulder, her voice muffled. “Don’t you understand he’s dead?”

  “She can’t stand too much of this,” Tennant said. “If you’ve got questions to ask, ask them, will you? I don’t know how we can help, but we want to help.”

  “If you heard anything this morning. Saw anything. As I said, people moving about.”

  “No.”

  “Where is your room, Doctor? The room you and Mrs. Tennant were in last night?”

  “Whenever we come up here,” Tennant said, “it’s always the same room. It was Stel’s room before we were married. They had another bed put in it when we first started to come up. Otherwise, it’s much the same as it was when she lived here, I think. She says it is.”

  “I’m all right now,” Estelle Tennant said, and sat erect again. Her husband still kept his arm around her. “They thought I would like it that
way. Would feel I was coming home. It—it meant a lot to me.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said.

  “Father—” she said, and again her voice broke. She waited a moment. “Father thought we ought to have one of the larger rooms,” she said, her voice steady again. “But Aunt Ursula said it would be more like coming home if I had the room I used to have. Grew up having.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Where is the room, Mrs. Tennant?”

  Tennant answered him. It was a corner room toward the rear of the house. “Above the terrace.” In the winter, with the leaves off, one could see the lake from one of the windows. But now the leaves were only beginning to turn; now the leaves cut off the view of the lake.

  “Above the terrace,” Heimrich said. “The terrace runs the full depth of the house, doesn’t it? Toward the rear of the house, your room is, Doctor?”

  “At the far corner,” Tennant said. “Above what is—what was—Jameson’s study. The room he worked in on this book of his. Back there.”

  He turned on the sofa, his arm still about his wife’s shoulders. With his free hand he pointed down the long room, toward the door through which Ronald Jameson had recently come and gone. “Back there,” he said.

  “No,” Estelle said. “There’s another room beyond it. A kind—oh, a kind of breakfast room. It opens off the kitchen. It’s where we Used to have breakfast when I was a little girl. Dad and Mother and Aunt Ursula and I.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes, Mrs. Tennant.”

  “It’s that room ours is really over, Jim,” Estelle Said. Her voice was quite steady now. “You’d forgotten that room. It wasn’t used much when we had guests. And—and you and I’ve been guests, Jim.”

  “I’d forgotten,” Dr. Tennant said. “She’s right, of course.”

  “The other rooms on this side of the house,” Heimrich said. “Do they all have French doors opening on the terrace, as this one has? Mr. Jameson’s study? The breakfast room?”

  “I think so,” Tennant said.

  “Of course. All of them,” Estelle said. “It’s—he must have been on the terrace when—when I—”

  Her voice broke again, and again Tennant’s arm tightened around her shoulders. Again he said, “There, dear.”

  A psychiatrist ought to be able to think of more soothing words, Heimrich thought. He just makes the same sounds I make when Susan’s upset about something. After some seconds, Heimrich said, “When you what, Mrs. Tennant?”

  “Heard his voice,” Estelle said. “I know it was his voice. We had the windows open, of course, and he must have been down on the terrace.”

  “When was this, Mrs. Tennant? This morning?”

  “It was just beginning to get light,” Estelle Tennant said. “I suppose the light woke me. I don’t know what time. About seven?”

  “Possibly,” Heimrich said. “You heard your father speaking? From the terrace?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Inspector.”

  “Yes. What did he say?”

  “Just, ‘Good morning.’”

  “Loudly? As if he knew you were awake and was saying good morning to you through the window?”

  “No. As if he were speaking to somebody who was on the terrace with him.”

  “As if he were surprised to find somebody on the terrace? At such an early hour?”

  “I don’t know,” Estelle said. “No, it didn’t sound like that. He—he sounded gay. I don’t know. Happy. He loved to go out fishing by himself early in the morning.”

  “You didn’t get up and look down to the terrace? To see who your father was speaking to?”

  “No. No! I just went back to sleep.”

  “You didn’t hear Mr. Jameson say good morning to somebody, Doctor?”

  “No. Stel’s bed is nearer the window. I didn’t hear anything. The light doesn’t strike my bed as early as it does hers. Probably wouldn’t wake me if it did. I was in general practice for some years. I learned to sleep hard when I got a chance.”

  Heimrich himself sleeps hard when he has a chance. He nodded his. head.

  “He didn’t sound surprised when he said, ‘Good morning,’ Mrs. Tennant? Just—just cheerful?”

  “Yes. The way he was in the mornings. I—I should have looked out. I should have. I—I just went back to sleep. If I’d looked out I’d—I’d have seen him. I could have said, ‘Hi, Dad. Catch lots of fish, Dad.’ I could have—” She stopped speaking and moved her head slowly from side to side. There was, Heimrich thought, a kind of desolation in the way she moved her head.

  “There, dear,” Dr. Tennant said. “There, child.”

  5

  It was unfortunate, Heimrich thought, that Estelle Tennant had not looked down from the bedroom window; had not seen her father or the person he had been speaking to. It was unfortunate, but it had been entirely natural for her merely to go back to sleep. Also, the person to whom Jameson had said good morning was not necessarily, was not even probably, the person who had killed him. After the encounter on the terrace, Jameson had gone down the long brick staircase to the jut of land into the lake; he had got in a rowboat and fished long enough to catch four bass.

  “After a party like the one last night, Mrs. Tennant,” Heimrich said, “there would have been a lot of cleaning up to do. The staff would have been up early, probably. Your father might have come across one of the servants on the terrace.”

  She supposed so.

  “Did he sound as if he were speaking to one of the servants?”

  She did not know what he meant. Her father spoke to servants as he spoke to anyone else.

  “He was a gentle man,” she said. “A considerate man. Did you think he—he was rude to the people who worked here?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I just asked a question. With some people there is a difference in—in intonation. How many people work here in the house, do you know, Mrs. Tennant?”

  She began to count, tapping the fingers of her right hand on the sofa cushion beside her. There was Myrtle, the cook. There was Barnes. “He takes—took—care of father’s clothes and things like that. He answered the door, most of the time. Sometimes, when Aunt Ursula and Dad had dinner parties, he helped serve.” There were two maids. One of them, she thought, was named Gladys. The other was new. “They sort of come and go.” There was Frans Frankel. He was the outdoors man; the yardman. “He takes care of the boats. Things like that.” There was his wife, Gretchen. “They live over the garage. Sometimes, I think, she helps out with the heavy cleaning.”

  It came to six, if one counted Mrs. Frankel, who only helped out sometimes.

  “Last night,” Estelle said, “Aunt Ursula must have got in extra people. From Cold Harbor, I guess. You’ll have to ask her about that sort of thing, Inspector. She—well, she ran The Tor for Dad. Always has, I think.”

  “When your mother was alive? And your father’s first wife?”

  “I don’t know, really. It—I guess it felt like that when I was a little girl. Mother was always active in the hunt club. I don’t know how things were when Ron’s mother was alive. Because, of course, I wasn’t born then.”

  “We’ll want to talk to the servants,” Heimrich said. “See if any of them saw or heard anything this morning. Also, we’ll want to go over the house. See if we can find the weapon.”

  “The bow somebody used,” Estelle said. “That’s what you want to find, isn’t it?”

  Heimrich said it was. He said they would need permission to search the house.

  Estelle supposed it would be all right. It would be for Aunt Ursula to decide.

  “If Miss Jameson paid any attention to my advice,” Dr. Tennant said, “she’s resting. I gave her a couple of tranquilizers. I don’t know whether—” He stopped and turned so that he faced up the long room. He said, “Apparently she didn’t.”

  Ursula Jameson, dressed in black slacks and sweater as she had been before, was walking down the room toward them. Her scanty white hair no longer looked as if she ha
d combed it with her fingers. She walked toward them with long strides. As if, Heimrich thought, she were walking a golf course. They all watched her walking toward them. Heimrich stood up as she came near. Dr. Tennant did not; he sat beside his wife with a protective arm around her.

  “Are you badgering my niece about this awful thing?” Ursula Jameson said. She stood facing Heimrich. She looked at him intently and waited intently for an answer.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Do you feel I’ve been badgering you, Mrs. Tennant?”

  Estelle said, “No, Aunt Ursula. He hasn’t been.”

  “We have to ask questions,” Heimrich said. “We have to find out what happened this morning. Whether anybody heard or saw anything that might help us. We’ll want to talk to the servants, Miss Jameson. We’ll want to search the house for the bow somebody used.”

  “You’ll have men tramping all over,” Ursula said. Her voice was stiff.

  “Looking in likely places,” Heimrich said. “By the way, can you tell me where your brother kept his fishing gear? Golf clubs, perhaps?”

  “There’s a closet off his office,” Ursula Jameson said. “And another off the breakfast room behind the office. In one of them. Perhaps in both of them. The servants won’t have heard or seen anything. What would there have been to see? My brother went early to fish. You say somebody killed him. Do you think the servants saw somebody kill him?”

  “Sit down, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. She hesitated. Heimrich indicated the chair he had been sitting in. She looked at her niece. She said, “Are you all right, child?” and the stiffness went partly out of her voice.

  “She’s in shock, Miss Jameson,” Dr. Tennant said. “So are you, for that matter. You should have taken the medicine I gave you. You should be lying down.”

  Ursula Jameson said, “Nonsense.” She sat down on the chair Heimrich had indicated. But then, almost at once, she stood up again. “I’ll ring for Barnes,” she said. “He’ll get the others. I’ll—”

  “There’s no hurry,” Heimrich said. “We’ll get to them later.”

  She sat down again.

  “Mrs. Tennant heard your brother saying good morning to somebody on the terrace,” Heimrich said. “She thinks probably about seven this morning. He wasn’t speaking to you, I take it?”