21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  “And you were crazy,” Mrs. Selby said to her daughter. “Arthur was old enough to be your grandfather.”

  “You’ve told me that, Mother,” Dorothy said, and a kind of resigned quiet had come back into her voice. “You’ve told me that rather often, in fact.”

  “For all the good it did me,” her mother said.

  Dorothy did not answer that. She sipped from her glass.

  “I take it,” Heimrich said, “that you did not approve of this marriage, Mrs. Selby? Did your daughter tell you about Mr. Jameson’s fishing habits?”

  “Yes. I guess so. The old boy didn’t have anything real to do. Never had had. People like that have to make up habits. Things they do regularly.”

  Heimrich said he supposed so. He said, “You went up to the Jameson house last night, Mrs. Selby. That’s what we’ve been told, anyway. Rather late in the party. When the party was pretty much ended. To bring her home, I take it?”

  “You can take it any way you like.”

  Mrs. Selby again drank deeply from her glass. She looked over it at Heimrich.

  “Why?”

  She shook her head as if the question had no meaning.

  “She had stayed overnight at The Tor before,” Heimrich said, and put obvious patience into his voice. “When they worked late on Mr. Jameson’s book. Last night you drove up there to bring her home. But I assume she had her own car. There are two cars in your garage. A Volks and—”

  “Circumstances had changed,” she said. “I’d think you’d understand that. Under the new—circumstances—it wouldn’t have been seemly for her to stay overnight there.”

  It had been years, Heimrich thought, since he had heard anyone use the word “seemly.” But he nodded his head. He said, “I see, Mrs. Selby.”

  “Because,” Mrs. Selby said, “if he felt that way about her, wanting to marry her, she shouldn’t stay there overnight. It wouldn’t look right. Anybody can see that, I’d think.”

  “You didn’t approve of your daughter’s marrying Mr. Jameson,” Heimrich said. “You’d told her that, I gather. Merely because you thought he was too old for her?”

  “Isn’t that enough? Look at her, Inspector. Just look at her! She’s young. She’s attractive. She’s got her life ahead of her. Arthur Jameson was an old man. A silly old man. In my time, we’d have called him a cradle snatcher.”

  Heimrich nodded his head. Jameson was also a rich old man, he thought. “Was that your only reason for opposing your daughter’s marriage, Mrs. Selby?”

  “I’d think that was enough. I’d seen what—” She stopped. Heimrich waited. “He was married twice before,” she said. “Janet was a lot younger than he was. So is my daughter. Only more so. Both wives are dead, aren’t they? Well?”

  It did not seem to add to anything, in Heimrich’s mind. Apparently it did add to something in Florence Selby’s. He merely shook his head.

  “Janet was a friend of mine,” Florence said. “A very dear friend. She was hardly past her middle forties when he let her take that no-good horse. Knowing it was a no-good horse.” She drank what remained in her glass. She got up and started toward the bar. She stopped midway. “Of course,” she said, “she was a great one for doing what she wanted to do. Like Dorothy there. Words just bounced off of her, the way they bounce off Dorothy.”

  Heimrich looked at Dorothy Selby. She did not seem to be looking at anything. She lifted her shoulders slightly. She sighed. It was a sigh of resignation.

  “Miss Selby,” Heimrich said, “did you know—”

  Mrs. Selby turned from the bar. She said, “Just wait until I come back, will you? Before you start to bully the girl?”

  The tone was one of command. Heimrich said, “Certainly, Mrs. Selby.” He lighted a cigarette, and made his waiting evident. Mrs. Selby came back, carrying a glass of bourbon on ice. She sat down where she had sat before. She said, “All right. Did she know what?”

  “That last night after the party,” Heimrich said, “Mr. Jameson drew up a new will—or signed a new will, anyway. In it, I understand, Miss Selby is his residual legatee. Which means—”

  “I know what it means,” Mrs. Selby said. “You think I’m illiterate? Not to Ursula?”

  “To Miss Selby,” Heimrich said. “Miss Jameson gets the house and land. From what I understand, Miss Jameson is already a rich woman. Miss Selby, did you know about this bequest? It’s not, as I get it, contingent on your marrying him. I mean, there are no strings attached.”

  Dorothy Selby looked at him. She lifted her glass and drank from it.

  “Well, girl?” Mrs. Selby said.

  Still the girl hesitated. Mrs. Selby said, “Well?” again, in a sharper tone. She said, “Wake up, Dorothy!”

  “He said something about it,” Dorothy said, her voice low and the words coming slowly. “I asked him not to. I asked him to wait, anyway, until we were married. I—I thought he had agreed to. You say he actually signed a will saying that?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “He’d signed a will saying that. Last night. After your mother had—had taken you home. You did take her home, Mrs. Selby?”

  “She’s got her own car. She drove back in it. I followed her in mine. She—”

  Dorothy interrupted her mother. She said, “You think I killed him, don’t you, Inspector? To get all that money. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “Now, Miss Selby,” Heimrich said, “I don’t think anything yet.”

  Which was truer than he liked to admit to himself.

  “Because,” the girl said, “I’m going to get a lot of money now that he’s dead. Because you saw me using a bow and arrow.”

  “That’s nonsense, girl,” her mother said, and spoke sharply. “The man’s not a fool. Anyway, you’re not very good at it. Not half as good as I am, for all you’re so much younger. And anyway, you were here all morning.” She turned to Heimrich. “I can tell you that, Inspector. That Volks of hers makes a lot of noise when it starts up. She’d have had to go right under my windows. And—I was awake at about six. At a few minutes after six, actually. The—I guess it was the wind woke me up. Or—”

  Heimrich waited.

  “All right,” she said. “I was worried about the girl. I couldn’t sleep. That was it.”

  Dorothy said, “Oh, Mother.”

  “I’d have heard you,” Mrs. Selby said. “You ought to do something about that car, Dorothy. It sounds as if it were falling apart.”

  “It’s just a little noisy,” Dorothy said. “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mrs. Selby said, “we’re going to buy you a new one. I won’t have you rattling around in that wreck any more.”

  Dorothy said, “Oh, Mother,” in a voice heavy with resignation.

  Heimrich stood up. He said, “We’ll be getting along now, Mrs. Selby.”

  “That’s all you’re going to ask us?”

  “For now,” Heimrich said, “that’s all we’re going to ask you, Mrs. Selby. You both say you didn’t drive up to Jameson’s place this morning and shoot an arrow into him.”

  “Did you expect us to say anything else, Inspector?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t have expected either of you to say anything else.”

  “I suppose you’re going to confiscate our bows and arrows?”

  Heimrich shook his head. He thought the expression on Florence Selby’s face was one of some disappointment. He walked up the room, and Lieutenant Forniss opened the door for him. He turned in the doorway. “You can tell if a gun has been used recently, Mrs. Selby,” he said. “I don’t see how you could tell about a bow.”

  When they were in the Buick, Charles Forniss said, “Phew.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “Mrs. Selby is quite somebody, Charlie. Probably bullies a lot of people into buying houses they don’t really want to buy.”

  He turned the radio on, tuned to the State Police frequency. It began to babble at them.

  “At a percentage,” Charle
s Forniss said. “She’s in a pretty good line of business, at a guess. The place looks like it.”

  Heimrich guided the Buick down the driveway. He said, “No, I don’t think they’re much in need of money, Charlie. But it’s hard to guess what people think they need, naturally. I wonder if the girl’s Volks does make all that racket.”

  “Some of them do,” Charlie said and reached out for the radio transmitter because, out of the jumble of cross talk the words, “Car Ten. Car One-oh. Acknowledge, please.”

  Charles Forniss said, “Car Ten.”

  “Inspector Heimrich to call in, please. Inspector Heimrich to—”

  “Message received,” Forniss said. “Over and out.”

  They went in search of a telephone which would not jangle with static. They went to the Cold Harbor police station, and Heimrich went into it. He was gone several minutes, and when he came out to the car he came shaking his head.

  “Apparently,” he said, when he was back under the wheel, “the bow you found wasn’t the one we want, Charlie. One of the lab boys—one who knows a little about archery, apparently—thought it looked pretty old. Pretty beat up was the way he put it. Tried pulling the bowstring. Pulled it, he says, only a couple of inches before it broke.”

  Forniss said, “Mmmm.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “according to the lab boy it belongs in a museum. If it belongs anywhere.”

  Forniss said, “Mmmm,” again. Then he said, “Seems to me I read somewhere that they sometimes make bows out of steel. Ever hear of that, M. L.?”

  “Until today,” Heimrich said, “I can’t remember hearing much of anything about bows. Steel, you say? The bottom of the lake, Charlie?”

  Charles Forniss said it could be.

  “You waded out to the boat,” Heimrich said. “You and Mr. Rankin. I gather it isn’t a very deep lake?”

  “Not as far as I went,” Forniss said. “Only, it was shelving down. Could be it’s a lot deeper twenty-thirty feet out.”

  “The bottom, Charlie?”

  “Felt soft,” Forniss said. “Squushy.” He paused and lighted a cigarette. “Yep,” he said. “A steel bow probably would sink into it, M. L. If somebody stood on the bank and threw it. You could hurl a steel bow quite a distance, I’d think. If you held onto one end of it and swung.” He paused again. “If you were strong enough,” he said. “This gardener guy, Frankel his name is, is pretty hefty. So is Rankin, come to that. But so’s this cook of theirs.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “it wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of strength. Just a good swing. I suppose we’ll have to drag.”

  “A steel-rod sort of thing,” Forniss said, and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “With a string tied to both ends of it. In the mud. Maybe under the mud, if it hit that way.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “we’ll need luck, Charlie. And if we get it, what’ll we get? A steel-rod sort of thing with a string tied to it. You saw that Mrs. Selby was wearing a glove. Maybe they all wear gloves when they’re shooting arrows at targets. Or at people, naturally.”

  “The girl wasn’t wearing a glove,” Forniss said. “Not when we saw her.” He shook his head. “If somebody had to kill the old boy,” he said, “why didn’t he use a gun? A bow and arrow, for God’s sake!”

  “Guns make a lot of noise,” Heimrich said. “And also maybe a gun wasn’t as handy—”

  “Car Ten,” came out of the radio’s mumble. “Car One-oh. Come in, Car Ten.”

  Forniss said, “Car Ten, go ahead,” into the transmitter. “Message for—”

  And then static took over, blared over words. Forniss turned the radio up. The static went into a roar. He said, “Damn the God-damn thing.”

  “Thunderstorm around probably,” Heimrich said. “We’ve had the wind shift.”

  They had been cruising up NY 11F, toward The Tor. Heimrich pulled the Buick to the side of the road. He got out of it and Forniss slid across into the driver’s seat. Heimrich went into the rear of the car and pulled the telephone out of the box it lived in. He got the operator, and static. He got the Washington Hollow Barracks. He said, “Inspector Heimrich. You have a message for me? The radio’s conked out.”

  He got a renewed blast of static for an answer. There were a few words mixed with the jagged rush of sound. He said, “I can’t read you. Try—”

  Suddenly, the static faded out. A voice came through, and the words came through. Heimrich listened to the words. He said, “All right, we’re on our way.” He hung up and went back to the front seat and sat beside Charles Forniss.

  “Dr. Tennant has fallen downstairs,” Heimrich said. “The stairs down to the lake. He seems to have landed on his head.”

  7

  There were two State Police cruisers in front of the big fieldstone house on top of the hill—on top of the tor. One of them was empty. There was a trooper in the other, and the radio was chattering in a monotone. The static seemed to have gone out of this radio. When Heimrich pulled the Buick alongside the talkative car, the trooper got out of it and saluted and said, “Sir.” Heimrich said, “Dr. Tennant?”

  “On the way to the hospital, Inspector,” the trooper said. “Pretty well banged up, the man in the ambulance said. Not conscious when they brought him up. Up those stairs he fell down. Had some trouble getting him up, sir.”

  Probably, Heimrich thought, it was the same ambulance which had taken the body of Arthur Jameson to the mortuary of the Cold Harbor hospital. Probably the attendants were getting used to carrying bodies up the steep staircase.

  “The others?” Heimrich said. “The family?”

  “Mrs. Tennant went with her husband in the ambulance. The rest of them are in the house, I guess. Corporal Purvis is with them. That’s Corporal Asa Purvis, Inspector. He—well, he thought you’d maybe want to talk to them about this accident. Coming on top of the other thing, the way it did. Want I should show you where it happened, sir?”

  “The stairs down to the lake, wasn’t it?” Heimrich said.

  “Yes, sir,” the trooper said. “Damn steep stairs. Only there’s a railing down them.”

  Heimrich told the trooper that they knew the stairs. He and Forniss went to the head of the steep flight of brick stairs. There was another trooper at the bottom of them. He was sitting on a stone outcropping and smoking a cigarette. When he saw Heimrich and Forniss he stood up and ground his cigarette out on the grass. Then he called up to them. He called, “Watch it, Inspector. They’re damn tricky.”

  Heimrich had been down and up the stairs. He knew they were steep and tricky and led a long way down. As he had earlier, he used the support of the iron railing which went down along the staircase, which had narrow treads. The bricks of the staircase were old, and some of them had crumbled a little with the years. On the third tread down, one of the bricks moved a little under Heimrich’s foot. Heimrich clutched the iron rail and went on, and Forniss, also sliding a hand down the rail, went after him. It occurred to Heimrich that the stairs were even trickier than they had been that morning. He thought that, he supposed, because a man had recently fallen down them.

  He was about a quarter of the way down the flight of stairs when he stopped. One section of the iron rail had been pulled loose from its stanchion and jutted inward for some inches over the stairs. Heimrich leaned down and looked at the broken rail. The end which had parted from the upright holding it was deeply rusted. It had, evidently, rusted almost through. It had seemed solid enough a few hours before. A few hours before, Heimrich did not remember that he had put much weight on it. He had merely used the rail for guidance.

  He said, “Watch it, Charlie,” over his shoulder and went on down the stairs. He still kept a hand on the rail, but he kept it there with little confidence. He got to the bottom of the stairs. There was dried blood on the bottom steps and on the path beyond them. There were footprints in the blood on the stairs.

  Heimrich managed to avoid stepping in the dried blood. He looked back up the fligh
t of stairs. It was a long way to fall. He turned to the trooper.

  “Asa told me to come down here, Inspector,” the trooper said. “Said to keep an eye on things. That’s Asa Purvis, sir. He’s a corporal. Said just to keep an eye on things.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Who found Dr. Tennant, you happen to know?”

  “His wife, seems like. Way I hear it, he’d gone out for a walk, and she thought he was gone a long time and went looking for him. Went to the top of the stairs and looked down and saw him. I was sitting in the car up there—” He gestured up there. “Along with Ben. He’s my sidekick. And she let out a yell and I ran over and there he was. Sort of crumpled up, like. So Ben sort of helped her get back in the house and called in for the ambulance, and I went—came—on down here. She was screaming a lot and tried to come down with me, but we thought—well, that maybe she’d better not. On account of from up there he looked pretty bashed up and maybe dead. Only when I got down, he was still breathing, and then Asa came down with first-aid stuff and we tied him up, sort of. He was still bleeding. That’s pretty much the way it was, Inspector. We did everything we could, I guess.”

  “I’d think so,” Heimrich said. “Ambulance long in getting here?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes, sir. Maybe half an hour. We’d pretty much got the bleeding stopped.”

  “When you came down,” Heimrich said. “That section of the rail up there. Pretty much as it is now?”

  “Out farther, Inspector. Stretched—oh, about halfway across the steps. They had to bend it back to get the stretcher up.”

  “Dr. Tennant was unconscious when you got down to him?”

  “He sure was. Out like—” The trooper hesitated momentarily and realized he had already trapped himself. “Like a light.” He seemed about to go on. Heimrich said, “Yes?”

  “Way I see it,” the trooper said, “he was holding onto the rail and it gave way and he lost his balance. Funny thing, place like this they’d let a rail rust out that way.”

  “Probably never noticed it,” Heimrich said. “Apparently rusted out where it went through the stanchion. Not in sight unless you looked carefully. Or, naturally, pulled on it hard.”