21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Yes?”

  “I’m in a booth across the street. He’s just come out of the place—couldn’t have had. more than one drink—and he’s walking around to the car. Maybe I’d better—”

  “Yes, Trooper,” Heimrich said, “I think you’d better.”

  The receiver clicked in his ear. He hung up and walked back to the center of the room—to the leaping fire and Miss Ursula Jameson sitting erect on the sofa in front of it. She had nearly finished her drink. She had lighted another cigarette. Heimrich looked at the watch on his wrist. It was a little after seven o’clock. He looked toward the French doors. It was growing dark outside. Soon it would be too dark for Denny & Co. to go on dragging the lake, unless they’d brought a powerful light with them.

  “We’ll be going now, Miss Jameson,” Heimrich said. “The lieutenant and I. There’ll be a couple of troopers around to see that nothing else happens.”

  “If they can,” Ursula Jameson said. She looked away from the fire and up at Heimrich. “You’re not getting anywhere with it, are you?”

  “If they can,” Heimrich agreed. “We’ll probably be back tomorrow, Miss Jameson.”

  She looked back at the fire and moved her head slowly from side to side. She did not say anything; Heimrich doubted whether she had heard what he had said last. When he and Forniss had gone a little way up the long room, Ursula Jameson said, “Ring for Barnes, will you?”

  Forniss pulled on the padded cord.

  They went out into the gathering darkness. The wind which whipped at them was a cold wind. They got into the Buick. Heimrich put the ignition key in but did not turn it.

  “We’ll wait a bit,” Heimrich said.

  They waited for a little more than ten minutes. Then headlights came up the drive toward them, throwing a glare against trees on one side and then the other as the drive twisted.

  When the big gray Chrysler turned to park, the lights did not fall on the unlighted Buick.

  Geoffrey Rankin got out of his car and walked toward the house and into it. Heimrich waited another minute or two before he turned the ignition key and the Buick’s engine came alive. He switched on the lights. He did not, immediately, put the car in gear.

  “Rankin apparently just drove in to see Miss Selby,” Heimrich said. “Stopped for a drink afterward.”

  Forniss said, “Yeah?”

  “Went to the Vine Street house in Cold Harbor,” Heimrich said. “You think Miss Jameson just dreamed up something, Charlie?”

  “That Volks of Miss Selby’s is supposed to make quite a racket,” Forniss said. “Needs a tune-up, sounds like.”

  Heimrich said it did sound like that, from what they’d heard. What they’d heard did not, of course, include the Volks itself.

  The Buick’s engine purred. A flashlight came toward them, bobbing with a man’s walking movement. The thin weathered man and his bigger companion came into the Buick’s headlight beams. The big man wasn’t carrying anything.

  Forniss got out of the car and walked toward them. The thin older man said, “Getting too dark. Back tomorrow,” and the two walked on to their truck.

  “Didn’t find anything?” Forniss said, knowing the answer.

  The thin man said, “Nope,” and got into the truck. The truck’s starter ground. The motor caught, hesitated; caught again with a roar. Forniss walked back to the Buick. He did not get into it.

  “Drop you?” Heimrich said.

  Forniss shook his head.

  “Get one of the cruisers to take me up to the barracks,” Forniss said. “May as well get the report moving.”

  There are always reports to get moving.

  “All right,” Heimrich said. He ran up the window on the side Forniss stood on. Then he ran it down again.

  “Tell you what, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “While you’re at the barracks, you might check back in the records. See what we’ve got on this accident Janet Jameson had a couple of years ago. Horse threw her into a stone fence, way we get it.”

  Forniss looked in at him. Forniss’s eyebrows went up.

  “Jameson’s second wife,” Heimrich said. “She died of head, injuries. Apparently got thrown headfirst into this stone fence.”

  It was several seconds before Forniss spoke. Then all he said was, “O.K., M. L. I’ll check it out.”

  10

  Susan had flames jumping in the fireplace of the long, low house above the Hudson. She had been sitting in front of the fire reading, and delighting in, S. N. Behrman’s People in a Diary. When she heard the crunch of the Buick’s tires on gravel, she put the book down and went to the door and was there, looking up, when Merton Heimrich opened it. For a second or two she studied his face before he leaned down to kiss her.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said. “You need a drink.”

  “It has,” Merton said. “I do.” He walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of it and rubbed his hands together. He had had the heater on in the car and his hands were not really cold. The movement of his hands was a symbol; a symbol that summer was over; an acknowledgment that tonight they would not have drinks on the terrace. Tomorrow, if he had time tomorrow, he might as well stow the terrace furniture.

  “I’ll—” Merton said but Susan shook her head at him.

  “No, I will,” she said. “You’ve had a long Sunday. It would be a good evening for hot buttered rum. Only we haven’t any rum, and I’ve no idea how one butters it.”

  Merton sat down in one of the two deep chairs which faced the fire. “There’s something about a hot poker in it, I think,” he said.

  “Sounds rather gritty,” Susan said and went into the kitchen to make their martinis. She brought them back and put the tray on the table. She sat beside the big man, who had stretched his legs out, feet toward the fire. They clicked glasses.

  They sat for a moment in silence, sipping cold gin and a very little vermouth from chilled glasses with the faint tang of twisted lemon peel rubbed on their edges.

  “I can’t get over that bow-and-arrow bit,” Susan said. “It seems so—so archaic. But last night everything did, didn’t it? She’s very ugly, isn’t she?”

  When people have been long enough together, transitions become unnecessary.

  “Well,” Merton said, “she’s got rather a long nose. Also, she’s been out in the sun a lot. Did you and the Jacksons and Alden finish the last nine?”

  “Too blowy, we decided,” Susan told him. “So we had lunch and I came home and did some things around the house. And took a nap, it being Sunday. And, of course, waited.” She sipped from her glass. “I do one hell of a lot of waiting,” she told the glass and the fire. “A while back I hoped—”

  She did not finish, or need to. Merton Heimrich knew what she had hoped—that when he became an inspector he would work during set hours, staying at a desk. It had not turned out that way. Heimrich had never thought it would; nor, knowing him, had Susan.

  “A man fell down a flight of stairs,” Merton said. “Brick stairs down to a lake. He trusted to a handrail and it came loose in his hand.”

  He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and loosened two cigarettes and held the pack out to Susan. She took a cigarette and he took the other, and he lighted both. “We smoke too much,” Susan said, and drew deeply. She said, “An accident? And was he hurt?”

  “It looked like being an accident,” Merton told her. “Yes, he was hurt badly. Fractured skull; probable brain damage. He’s still unconscious. Was when I checked last anyway.”

  “So if he had something to remember he won’t remember it? Planned that way?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Merton Heimrich told his wife. “We’re just digging around, Charlie and I.”

  He finished his drink. Susan moved in her deep chair. “No,” Merton said, “my turn.”

  “I thought they were all right,” Susan said. “Almost no vermouth.”

  “They were fine,” Merton said, and got up out of the deep chair. “You’ve been playing
golf. Building a fire. I’ve been sitting, mostly. Asking questions.”

  “There are glasses in the freezing compartment,” Susan said. “You think another log?”

  Heimrich looked into the fire. He thought another log wouldn’t do it any harm. He carried the tray into the kitchen and mixed martinis and poured from the mixer into chilled glasses and twisted lemon peel over drinks and rubbed it, gently, around the rims of the glasses. He carried the tray back to the long living room of the house which once had been a barn and put it on the table between them. He put another log in the right place on the fire. He sat and, again, they clicked their glasses together.

  “The man who fell downstairs,” Heimrich said, “was a physician. A psychiatrist. He’s a few years older than his wife.”

  “You’re a few years older than I am,” Susan said. “It comes out right that way. Not that difference in age has to make a lot of difference, one way or the other. Except—”

  She paused and drank. She put her glass down on the table.

  “Of course,” she said, “fifty years is a lot of difference. It must have been almost that.”

  “Apparently Jameson liked it that way,” Heimrich said. “His second wife was a good deal younger than he was. Not as much, of course, as Dorothy Selby would have been.”

  Susan raised her eyebrows and shook her head slightly.

  “The girl he was going to marry,” Merton told her.

  “Of course,” Susan said. “That child. That poor child.” She sipped again. “I guess,” she said.

  “Not in the other sense,” Merton said. “She inherits what may be a great deal of money. From Jameson.”

  She said, “Oh.” She said, “Not his sister?”

  “The house and the land,” Merton said. “Apparently she’s what they call independently wealthy.”

  “It would be nice to be independently wealthy,” Susan told the glass in her hand. “Then I wouldn’t have to wait so much. We could go some place on a ship. One with no murders, I mean.” She looked at him. “You’re waiting for something, aren’t you?” Susan Heimrich said. “Dinner? It’s a casserole, and it’s in the oven.” She sipped again. “On ‘Warm,’” she said.

  “Charlie may call,” Merton said.

  “And you’ll go out again?”

  Heimrich said he shouldn’t think so. He said he thought they were through for the day.

  They finished their drinks. They decided against third rounds, Merton after a moment’s hesitation. “We can have it here,” Susan said. “It’s comfortable here. Fires are the one good thing about autumn.”

  They had the casserole, which turned out to be a ragout, in front of the fire. They had finished it and little rum cakes and were drinking coffee when the telephone rang. Susan moved in her chair, but Merton was out of his. Susan smiled at the fire and shook her head slightly at it and thought, It’s Charlie Forniss, or he thinks it is. Telephones ringing in their house are usually Susan’s to answer.

  Merton said, “Heimrich,” into the telephone and then, “Yes, Charlie?” He listened for a second and said, “No, I didn’t suppose there would be much. Just an accident. One of those things that happen to people who ride horses.”

  Heimrich had not been on a horse in several years, although when he was a very young State trooper in western New York horses still were ridden.

  “Thing is,” Forniss said, “seems the horse didn’t fall. Just balked a jump in this meadow of theirs. Mrs. Jameson—Janet Jameson, that is—went over its head into a stone wall. Way she tells it, the horse was all right when she rode up. Just munching grass. Mrs. Jameson, though, was dead.”

  “She, Charlie? Who was she? And when did this happen?”

  “Miss Jameson. Miss Ursula Jameson. Two years ago last spring. The first decent day in a long time, so they decided to go riding. In that meadow the other side of the lake. Part of the Jameson land, the meadow is. The stable was over there, then. Not there any more, M. L. Jameson seems to have had it torn down after his wife was killed. He sold off the horses, including the stallion who refused the jump. He hadn’t ridden much himself for a good many years, the way I get it.”

  “He wasn’t riding with his wife that day?”

  “Seems he was in New York. Banquet of some Anglo-American outfit. He went in that morning. They had to page him at the dinner to tell him about his wife. The way the trooper got it. The man who checked the accident out. Didn’t check very hard, apparently. Just got the outline. I can’t say I blame him, M. L.”

  “All right, Charlie. Tell me what he did get.”

  What the trooper had got, almost entirely from Miss Ursula Jameson, was this:

  The accident which had taken Janet Jameson’s life had occurred early in the long Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day had fallen on a Saturday that year: the following Monday, June first, had been the official day for commemoration. Jameson had gone into New York for the dinner a little before midday on Friday. Ursula Jameson and her sister-in-law had been alone in the big house Friday afternoon, except for the servants.

  “Not the ones they’ve got there now,” Forniss interjected. “Different set altogether, according to the trooper’s list. Except the Frankels. He’s not what you would call a servant. Caretaker’s more like it.”

  “Even Barnes?”

  “Yep. Man named Brooks they had then. Seem to run to B’s, don’t they? Of course, The Tor’s a pretty isolated place. Hard to keep a staff in a place like that, I guess. Anyway—”

  “So what the trooper got came from Miss Jameson?” Heimrich. said, and got “Yep” for an answer. The “Yep” was modified by “Pretty much, the way it looks.” Heimrich said, “Go ahead, Charlie.”

  In late afternoon of that Friday, Janet Jameson had said that, since it was the first nice day they’d had in a month, she thought she’d go riding and asked Ursula if she wanted to come along.

  “We’d felt cooped up,” Ursula Jameson had told the trooper who was conducting routine enquiries. She had told Frankel, who was working in the garden, to row across and saddle the horses—Alphonse for Janet, and her mare.

  “Alphonse?” Heimrich said.

  Forniss agreed it was a funny name for a stallion, but there it was. And the mare’s name was Ophelia.

  Frankel had rowed across the lake and saddled the two horses and tethered them. He had rowed back and returned to his gardening. Ursula and Janet had driven Over to the stable.

  Heimrich said, “Driven, Charlie? Across the lake?”

  There was another way to the stable, in which the Jamesons then had four horses, and the ten-acre meadow which surrounded them. A town road led off NY 11F about a mile south of The Tor. It passed the Jameson property on the far side. A private road led off it, to the stable and the big meadow; towards the lake. Since the private road was unpaved and it was still spring, they had gone in the Jeep. They had not planned to stay long because “the others were coming up.”

  “The others, Charlie?”

  “The Tennants. The old man’s son. They were due for dinner, the way the trooper got it. Up for the weekend. Anyway—”

  The two women had driven around to the stable and found their horses saddled and tethered. According to Ursula Jameson, they had mounted at about four-thirty.

  “The trooper got that verbatim,” Forniss said. “One of the few things he did. Want I should read it?”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “So she said, ‘It had been a wet April and the grass was already pretty high. There’s a bridle path which more or less circles the meadow, and Frankel keeps it fairly clean. Frankel exercises the horses, but he hadn’t got around to it for about a week, and they were frisky. Particularly Alphonse, of course. My brother never liked Janet’s riding him, but she had her own way. Mostly she did, actually. The mare was a little jumpy too, and I kept to the path. Janet—well, Janet liked to jump. So did her horse, come to that.

  “‘She rode off up the rise and then down on the other side, and I knew she was he
aded toward the stone fence. Yes, it runs between the main pasture and the second pasture beyond. It’s always been there, as far as I know. In our grandfather’s time they were still farming, I suppose, and the fence was to divide the fields. It’s an easy jump. A few years ago I used to take it often. Too old for it now.

  “‘Anyway, she went up the rise and down on the other side. The mare wanted to follow Alphonse, but I wouldn’t let her. I just jogged along on the path. Later I heard a loud whinny from beyond the rise—a scream, almost. The way they sound when they’re frightened. It worried me, so I rode over. Yes, up the rise, until I could look down toward the wall. And—do I have to tell about it, Trooper?’”

  Apparently the trooper had asked her to tell about it.

  “‘The horse was standing on the near side of the wall. Janet wasn’t on him. Then I saw where he had torn up the turf with his hooves. This side of the fence. And then—then I saw Janet. She was lying with her head against the stone fence and she wasn’t moving. I rode down and—and her head was crushed against the wall. I got down and ran to her but—but even before I got to her I knew it was no use. Knew she was dead. So—I don’t remember at all well. You can see I wouldn’t. I think I thought of rowing back across the lake, but then I remembered the boat would be on the other side. So I must have ridden back to the stable and driven around in the Jeep. I—I can’t tell you any more, Trooper. Don’t you see that?’