21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and shook her head. Her head moved very slowly.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “At least, I don’t remember being surprised. Of course, I may have wondered a little, I suppose. Because—well, because we weren’t going any place. At any special time, I mean. But I don’t know why I remembered anything so—so unimportant as Jim’s looking at his watch.” She shook her head again, slowly against the pillow.

  Then, abruptly, she sat up in bed.

  “What do they tell you about Jim?” she said, and her voice was high. “Only I suppose you won’t tell me, will you? Nobody will tell me, will they?” There was shrillness in the voice which had been so soft, so almost hesitant.

  “They’ve finished surgery, Mrs. Tennant. Your husband is in the—what they call the recovery room, I think. He’s still unconscious, of course. Still under the anesthetic. There’s no reason not to—not to be hopeful, Mrs. Tennant. And there’s another doctor coming up from—”

  “I know,” she said. “I told them about Frank. Frank Wenning. He’s a very famous doctor. He and Jim interned together. They’re old friends, you see. Frank went in for surgery. He’s really coming?”

  “Yes. They say he’s on his way.”

  “If anybody—” she said, and moved her head again, but this time nodded it, as if she were affirming something to herself. Then she said, “How did Jim come to fall, Inspector? What made him fall?”

  “We don’t know,” Heimrich said. “He may have put too much weight on the railing that goes down beside the stairs and it gave way and he lost his balance. One section of the railing does seem to have given away. Rusted away, apparently.”

  “It’s been there a long time, that railing,” Estelle said. “Since I was a little girl. I wasn’t supposed to go down those stairs when I was a little girl. Aunt Ursula always said they were dangerous. I-”

  Suddenly she covered her eyes with her hands again and now she began to sob.

  “All right, Inspector,” the nurse said. This time there was command in her voice. And this time Estelle Tennant did not say, “No, nurse!”

  Heimrich went out of the room and down in the elevator and out to the parked Buick. He thought about a watch, and that people most often look at their watches when they have appointments to keep.

  8

  “On the rail,” Lieutenant Forniss said, “plenty of prints. Mostly smeared. People slide their hands down a rail like that. A few clear ones here and there. Yours and mine, at a guess. They’ll check when they get back to the barracks. Dr. Tennant’s on the first section. Seem to match prints from the room he and his wife have here. Quite clear, his prints. Almost as if he had held onto the rail by his fingertips. Farther down, Rankin’s. Again matching prints in his room. But we know he went down there. A few which probably are the troopers’. And a lot of smudges.”

  Merton Heimrich has known Charles Forniss for a good many years. He can make guesses about him. Now he guessed that Forniss was leading up to something.

  “The thing is,” Forniss said, “there’s nothing at all on the section of the rail that pulled loose. Oh, a smudge where somebody pushed it back out of the way before they brought the doctor up on the stretcher. But on the other side—the outboard side if you know what I mean—nothing at all. Not even a smudge.”

  “As if somebody had wiped it off, Charlie? After somebody had pulled it loose? Or loosened it enough so it would come loose when weight was put on it?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Could be like that, M. L. I’ve got a couple of men coming up to drag the lake. For what good it will do. Simpler if they use Jameson’s boat. On account of it’s the only boat on the lake. O.K.?”

  “Yes, Charlie. I don’t think the boat’s going to tell us anything. They got Mr. Jameson’s fish out of it, I suppose?”

  “Yep. This man Frankel got them out. The gardener. Handyman. Whatever.” Heimrich nodded his head. “Says he buried them. Thought at first he’d have his wife cook them and decided not to. He says, ‘It wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow. Way things are.’”

  “I can see his point,” Heimrich said. “The others? After I left?”

  “Miss Jameson went back upstairs,” Forniss said. “Said she thought she’d lie down. Jameson and this man Rankin each had another drink. Then Jameson went upstairs. Rankin just—oh, sort of walked around. Looked out of windows. Restless, sort of. He wants to know why the hell he can’t get on back to New York.”

  “He asked you that?”

  “He sure as hell did. Said we didn’t have any legal right to make him stay here. I said we weren’t making him. That we’d just rather he did. He wanted to know why. Why the hell?”

  “What did you tell him, Charlie?”

  “That it was up to you, M. L. That you had your reasons. Incidentally, what are your reasons? He just happened to be here, way I get it. Invited to this party last night. Had a few too many, maybe, and Jameson asked him to stay over. So with him I sort of played it dumb.” He paused and looked at Heimrich and raised his eyebrows. “Of course,” Forniss said, “could be I am.”

  “He came up with Dorothy Selby,” Heimrich said. “At least, he stopped by the Selby house and she guided him up. In the Volks, I suppose. He’s got a car here?”

  “Chrysler,” Forniss said. “Chrysler Imperial. This Miss Selby? She’s quite a looker, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is,” Heimrich said. “I think Rankin thinks she’s quite a looker, too. And she was going to marry Jameson.”

  Forniss said, “Yep.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Susan and I saw them together last night at the party. Rankin and Miss Selby. They seemed—well, they seemed to enjoy being together, Charlie. And Rankin himself suggested that perhaps I thought he’d killed Jameson. You heard him, Charlie.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “And he used to shoot arrows when he was a kid. Also, he says he didn’t know about last night’s being an engagement party. Could be he’s lying, of course. Thing is, did he bring a bow and arrow along on the off chance? Conspicuous thing to carry around, a bow. No luggage in his room, since he didn’t plan to stay over. Of course, the Imperial’s a big car. Plenty of trunk space. Still—you think he and Miss Selby were that way about each other, MX.?”

  “I thought so last night,” Heimrich said. “He about her, anyway. Sometimes you can tell. Or think you can tell, naturally. Could have been a bit of a shock when Jameson announced Dorothy was going to marry him.”

  “So he went around looking for a bow and arrow, M. L.? Doing it the hard way, I’d think. Why not just use his hands? He’s a husky type. Jameson wasn’t.”

  Heimrich shrugged his shoulders. He thought he had perhaps picked up a habit from watching the resident surgeon at the Cold Harbor Hospital.

  “O.K,” Forniss said, “you’re the doctor.”

  It was a routine cliche. But it stuck oddly in Merton Heimrich’s mind. He’d been thinking of a doctor who shrugged his shoulders a lot. He thought of another doctor—a doctor who was a psychiatrist.

  “A few years ago,” Heimrich said, and spoke as much to himself as to Charles Forniss, “I was watching some men playing tennis at the club. Sitting on the grass beside a doctor who’s a member. A psychiatrist, like Dr. Tennant. And, apropos of nothing I could get, this doctor said, ‘He’s an epileptic. The one who’s serving now.’ Like that, out of a clear sky. Nothing I could see about his movements that showed anything. The guy who was serving was just a kid, and far’s I could see, an active, healthy kid.”

  He stopped speaking and, after a moment or two, Forniss said, “So, M. L.?”

  “The kid came up for induction a few months later,” Heimrich said. “He was rejected because of epilepsy. Oh, minor. What they call petit mal. Fully controlled, as long as he took his medication. But not for the Army.”

  “You mean,” Forniss said, “just from watching him play tennis?”

  “The doctor was a new member,” Heim
rich said. “Didn’t know the kid or his family. Doesn’t practice in Van Brunt. Yes, Charlie, just from looking at him, far as I know. I asked him, later. The doctor, I mean. He said that any trained man could tell.”

  Forniss waited.

  “Dr. Tennant is a trained man,” Heimrich said. “A psychiatrist and, as it turns out, a neurologist too. Perhaps things you and I wouldn’t notice are giveaways to him.”

  “And got half killed because of something he noticed? It’s a damn uncertain way of killing anybody, MX. Loosening a handrail so he’ll fall downstairs.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And it’s turned out that way. So far, at any rate. But shooting an arrow at somebody isn’t a very certain way either, Charlie.”

  “Armies used to use them.”

  “A long time ago,” Heimrich said. “Methods have—improved, I suppose they call it. Enough so you can wipe out a planet, not a single man. Probably just what we’ll do eventually, Charlie. Wipe out everything. The world is run by idiots, Charlie.”

  Charlie let it rest there for more than a minute. Then he said, “Meanwhile, M. L.?”

  Heimrich came back from wherever, gloomily, he had been.

  “Yes,” he said. “Meanwhile you and I are in the retail business, Charlie. Before he went out for his walk, Dr. Tennant looked at his watch, his wife says. It doesn’t seem to have made any particular impression on her, at the moment. She just happened to remember it when I was talking to her.”

  Forniss said, “Mmmm.”

  “Perhaps,” Heimrich said, “to check on an appointment he had? To meet somebody at the bottom of a flight of stairs, Charlie? Who, do you suppose?”

  Forniss shook his head. Then he said, “Let’s see. Miss Jameson had gone up to her room to lie down when the doctor went out for his walk. Anyway, she says she did and nobody says she didn’t. Mrs. Tennant went up, she says, about the time her husband went out. Jameson went into Cold Harbor to buy cigarettes. Had trouble finding a place open. I had one of the boys check that. Only place open Sunday afternoons is one of the drugstores. Two of them in the town, and they alternate at being open on Sunday afternoons. The one open—called Browne’s Pharmacy—sold quite a few cigarettes this afternoon. Mostly, the way the clerk remembers it, a pack or two at a time. One or two cartons, he thinks. One of them was maybe Kents King Size. Man insisted on the soft pack. Jameson smokes Kents. Clerk doesn’t remember what time. Had to be before three, because they close at three. Sure a man bought the carton of Kents. Hasn’t any idea what he looked like. Not a regular customer, he thinks. Says they get sort of busy just before they close up on Sundays.”

  “And Rankin, a while after the doctor went out, Went up to his own room,” Heimrich said. “To go over some papers, he says. Why bring papers along when you’re going to a party, do you suppose?”

  Forniss didn’t know. He said that lawyers, from what he knew of them, tended to be funny guys.

  If they were all telling the truth, Heimrich thought, none of the people in The Tor had made an appointment with Dr. James Tennant. There was no special reason to think that all of them were telling the truth. Probably Ronald Jameson had driven into Cold Harbor and bought cigarettes. On the other hand, a lot of people smoke Kents, whatever the Surgeon General has to say. Reminded, Merton Heimrich lighted a cigarette.

  “No telephone calls we’ve heard about. Nobody calling from outside and getting Dr. Tennant on the line and saying, ‘Meet me at the foot of the stairs down to the lake. Be sure to hold onto the handrail going down.’”

  “Not that we’ve been able to pin down,” Forniss said. “Earlier, yes. People calling up to say they’d just heard the terrible news. Phones all over the place. Mr. Jameson had a line of his own. Not listed. Extensions in his room and his office. Four or five extensions on the listed line. There’s also a private line—one of these do-it-yourself sort of things—from the kitchen to the Frankels’ apartment over the garage. Damn!”

  The “damn” was rueful. Heimrich said, “Yes, Charlie? Think of something?”

  “Nothing important, I guess,” Forniss said. “Frankel seems to have seen Dr. Tennant standing at the head of those damn stairs. Thinks it was maybe about two-thirty. Sometime around then. Happened to look out a window in their apartment and saw somebody, he’s pretty sure the doctor, standing there. Looking down.”

  “Just the doctor, Charlie? Nobody with him? Getting set to push, maybe?”

  “Just the doctor. Just happened to see him. Didn’t think anything about it. He’d been looking at TV, Frankel had. Got up to go to the head and happened to look out the window. Retired Navy man, Frankel says he is. Chief bos’n, he says. More likely bos’n first, I’d guess. Not that it matters.”

  Heimrich agreed that Frankel’s rating when he had been in the Navy didn’t matter.

  “He didn’t see anybody at the foot of the stairs?”

  “Says not.”

  “Could he have?”

  Charles Forniss didn’t know. He had seen Frankel in the kitchen when he was asking all the servants if they had seen anything that afternoon. Frankel was the only one who had seen anything.

  “All right,” Forniss said. “Maybe I slipped up. Maybe I should have gone over to the apartment and looked out the window.”

  Heimrich said it didn’t matter and that, anyway, it was not too late.

  Forniss had come out of The Tor when Heimrich had come back from the hospital. They had met in the big paved parking area in front of the gray stone house. They were still standing there. There were three police cruisers in the turnaround, and a trooper was in one of them, listening to the radio. The other two were empty. A gray Chrysler Imperial was also in the parking area. It, too, was empty.

  “Far end of the house, the garage is,” Forniss said. “Want me to go have a look, M. L.?” He gestured toward the end of the house.

  “We’ll both go,” Heimrich said, and they walked along an extension of the driveway from the turnaround. The drive curved away from the house, and away from the stairs down to the lake.

  The garage was large and built, like the house, of stone. It was large enough, Heimrich thought, for half a dozen cars. There was an outside staircase at one end of it, and they went up the staircase. At the top of it they pressed a button and a bell rang, rather loudly, inside.

  A wide-faced, sturdy woman opened the door. She had gray hair coiled on top of her head, and her broad face was red. She had blue eyes which were not particularly large. Heimrich said, “Mrs. Frankel?” and she said, “Who did you expect?” Then she looked at Lieutenant Forniss and said, “Oh, it’s you again. What do you want this time?”

  A tall man with broad shoulders showed up behind Mrs. Frankel. He said, “It’s their job, Gretchen,” and looked at Heimrich and Forniss. He said, “Noon again, Lieutenant,” and, to Heimrich, “You’d be the inspector, yes? Told the lieutenant everything I know about it, but come on in.”

  They went in. The room held a matching set of sofa and two chairs, all three done in a flowered pattern. There was a heavy table in front of the sofa and, in a corner of the room, a smaller table. The smaller table’s top was covered with little porcelain objects, most of them in the shapes of various animals. The gray carpet stretched from wall to wall. Everything in the room was almost excessively neat. “It was all very tidy.” Something like that, anyway. Something Susan had quoted.

  There was no television in the tidy room.

  “This window you looked out when you saw Dr. Tennant, Mr. Frankel,” Heimrich said. “In this room?”

  “In the den,” Mrs. Frankel said. “Where the TV is. He’s always looking at ball games and things like that. All Sunday afternoons he looks at ball games. All kinds of ball games.”

  “All right, Gretchen,” Frankel said. “I’ll show you, yes?”

  They followed him through the living room and into a corridor and into a smaller room which opened off the corridor.

  There was a big television set in this room, which evident
ly was the “den.” There was a black leather chair, which had been much sat on, in front of the set. There were newspapers on the floor beside the black chair. Mrs. Frankel, who had followed them out of the living room, brushed past them. She said, “Mess. All the time a mess,” and picked the newspapers up and carried them out of the den.

  There was one wide window in the room, and Heimrich went to it. He could look down at the beginning of the brick staircase; the top of the stairs was perhaps fifty yards away. He could not see the bottom of the staircase. He moved to one side and looked diagonally through the windowpane. He could see more of the stairs, but not to the bottom of them.

  Heimrich turned back.

  “It was from here you saw Dr. Tennant, Mr. Frankel?”

  “Yes, Inspector. From where you are. Like I told the lieutenant, he was just standing there.”

  “Looking down the stairs?”

  “Like I told the lieutenant. Yes.”

  “The window was closed?”

  “Yes. There is a wind. It blows things around.”

  Heimrich said, “If you don’t mind, Mr. Frankel,” and opened the window. By leaning out of it, he could just see the bottom of the staircase. A trooper was sitting on a rock outcrop at the bottom of the stairs. He was, as Heimrich had supposed he would be, smoking a cigarette. He did not seem to be doing anything else. Presumably Asa Purvis had detailed him there. The young are diligent. Heimrich turned from the window.

  “By the way, Mr. Frankel,” Heimrich said, “you knew the condition of the railing, I understand. That it was rusting loose? And told Miss Jameson about it?”

  “Been that way the last couple of years,” Frankel said. “My business to know about things like that, yes? I told her, sure.”

  “Her? Not Mr. Jameson?”

  “Didn’t use to bother him much,” Frankel said. “Didn’t like to be bothered. Left things mostly to his sister, way it was. Mind closing the window, Inspector? Blows things around.”