21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  “That’s the verbatim,” Forniss said. “According to what Frankel told the trooper, she came up the drive damn fast in the Jeep and stopped it and jumped out, and then, Frankel says, she began to scream. Jameson’s son had just got to the house, and she told them what had happened. Frankel and the son started telephoning for help. Called the local police in Cold Harbor, and they got onto us. Called the hospital for an ambulance. Called the sheriff’s office too, come to that. When they all got there, it was the way Miss Jameson had said. Her horse was still saddled and loose. So was the stallion. Stallion wasn’t hurt. Both the horses were eating grass, one near the stable, the other near the stone fence. Mrs. Jameson was dead. Head all bashed in. They got hold of Jameson, but it took them quite a while. His son did that. The Tennants showed up a little later, according to what the troopers got. Jameson had gone in by train. He hired a car to come back. Didn’t get there until around ten. About the size of it, M. L.”

  Heimrich said, “Mmmm.” For some seconds he said nothing more. Then he said, “Frankel rowed across and saddled the horses. Then he rowed back and tied up the boat. Did he see the two women take off in the Jeep?”

  “Nothing about that in the report, M. L. Like I said, obvious accident. They—well, they just went through the routine. You think that wasn’t enough?”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know, naturally. Probably seemed like enough at the time, anyway. We’ll maybe try to check more tomorrow. You may as well knock it off. Get yourself some sleep.”

  Forniss said, “O.K., M. L.,” and hung up. Heimrich stood, looking down at the telephone.

  “Do you have to go out again tonight?” Susan asked him from across the room.

  For some seconds, Merton continued merely to look at the telephone. Then he said, “No. Not tonight,” but he still stood by the telephone. Then he dialed a number with which the day had made him familiar. After three rings he got, “The Tor.” He knew the voice. He said, “Heimrich, Barnes. I’d like to speak to Mr. Rankin.”

  “They’re having dinner, sir. Miss Jameson and Mr. Jameson and Mr. Rankin.”

  “Tell Mr. Rankin I won’t keep him long,” Heimrich said and got an agreeing “Sir.” He waited. After several minutes, he got, “Evening, Inspector. You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Just to ask you how you found Miss Selby this afternoon. When you drove over to see her.”

  “And you had me followed,” Rankin said. “Rather obviously. You might tell that trooper of yours that the lilac bush isn’t all that good a cover.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “I’ll tell him. How did you find Miss Selby on your—call it sympathy call?”

  “Doing as well as can be expected.”

  Heimrich sighed. He made his sigh highly audible.

  “All right,” Rankin said. “She’s shaken up, of course. She’ll survive it.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Heimrich said. “You consoled her?”

  “Tried to, I suppose. You’re reading things in, aren’t you, Inspector? Things I told you weren’t there? She’s a cousin of mine, after all. Family, you could call it.”

  “A distant cousin, you said,” Heimrich told him. “Let’s see. It was you yourself who said—what was it?—not within the bounds of consanguinity. Something like that, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t remember, Inspector. Perhaps something like that. Mrs. Selby and my mother were second cousins, I think. Something like that. Which makes Dot and me—well, you figure it out, Inspector. No closer than—oh, than Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, at a guess.”

  Heimrich said he saw. He said, “But you did drive over to see her. Felt a duty to a distant relative, Mr. Rankin?”

  “We are friends,” Rankin said. “I told you that, too. A few years ago we saw a bit of each other. When she was—oh, about twenty. I took her around a little. She was a damn pretty kid.”

  “She still is,” Heimrich said. “A very attractive young woman.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing in particular,” Heimrich said. “You haven’t seen so much of her recently, I gather. For about how long, would say? That you haven’t seen so much of each other, I mean?”

  “A few years,” Rankin said. “Three maybe. Maybe four.”

  “Since she started working for Mr. Jameson? As his secretary?”

  “Nothing to do with it,” Rankin said. His voice had sharpened. “Nothing to do with anything.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t say it had, Mr. Rankin. Happen to know how long she’s been acting as Mr. Jameson’s secretary?”

  “About three—” He. stopped speaking. “Why don’t you ask her that, Inspector?”

  “Because, as you say, she’s shaken up. Naturally. We try not to bother people who are—are grieving for somebody. If we can avoid it, of course. Went to work with Mr. Jameson before his second wife had her riding accident, would you say? Her fatal accident?”

  “Listen,” Rankin said, “I don’t know anything about the Jamesons. Oh, that Jameson’s previous wife was killed in an accident. Dot told me about that, I think. Just—oh, just in passing. All that I know about the Jamesons is that you’re forcing me to be a guest of theirs. Making me impose on Miss Jameson.”

  “Not forcing,” Heimrich said. “Just asking, Mr. Rankin. Asking you to stay around until things get cleared up a little.”

  “And how long’s that going to be?”

  “Not too long, I hope. Perhaps not long at all. Good night, Mr. Rankin.”

  He hung up and went back to his chair by the fire.

  “There’s an old movie on at nine-thirty,” Susan said. “One we’ve only seen twice. Well, maybe three times actually. It might be relaxing. Nobody gets killed in it, far’s I can remember.”

  “I think small brandies would be even more relaxing,” Heimrich said. “There’s a poem you’ve said to me. I thought of it today. I’ve forgotten why. Something about something’s being tidy?”

  “‘It was all very tidy,’” Susan said. “Death’s house, Merton. Robert Graves.”

  Merton Heimrich nodded his head and said that, of course, he remembered now. He went off to get them small brandies.

  The wind had died down Monday morning and the sun was shining. There had not been a frost overnight. The flowers in Susan’s garden were still alive, although, Merton Heimrich thought as he backed the Buick out of the garage, they looked a little daunted. He got to the headquarters of Troop K in Washington Hollow at about nine-thirty. Charles Forniss was already there; he had got the necessary routine started.

  Geoffrey Rankin was listed in the Manhattan telephone directory as “lwyr.” His office address was in the East Fifties. His “Res” was farther east, in the Sixties. A “good” address, by which was meant the address of somebody reasonably prosperous. Only his name was listed at the office address, so presumably he was not a member of a law firm. The New York City police were checking.

  Forniss, who knows somebody almost everywhere, knew a man connected with the advertising business in New York. He had waked up the man he knew in his apartment—waked up the man and his wife—and the man had said, “What the hell at this hour, Charlie.” It had not, however, been all that early.

  He didn’t know Ronald Jameson. Not personally. Oh, maybe he’d run into him once or twice. At the Advertising Club, it could be. Sure, he knew the firm of Jameson and Perkins by reputation. Not one of the biggest, but one that was getting along all right. “Hell, Charlie, they’ve got the Froth Soap account. Had it for a couple of years, anyway. And Froth Soap isn’t hay, Charles my friend.”

  James Tennant, M.D., was a psychiatrist and neurologist. He belonged to several of the appropriate psychiatric and neurological societies. He had graduated in Medicine at Duke University’s medical school and interned at the Duke University Hospital. He had interned in neurology at Johns Hopkins and in psychiatry at Harvard. “Highly qualified man.”

  The assurance of his qualification had com
e from Isadore Werkes, M.D., also a psychiatrist and neurologist, sometime consultant to the Office of the District Attorney, County of New York, and himself also highly qualified. Dr. Werkes knew Dr. Tennant only slightly; he knew of him very well, as did all physicians in their joint field. Dr. Werkes had declined to speculate on Dr. Tennant’s probable income but assumed that it was adequate. Dr. Tennant was accredited to New York Hospital, Doctors Hospital and St. Vincent’s.

  Dr. Frank Wenning, who at present was presumably trying to determine the extent of Dr. Tennant’s head injuries, was a neural surgeon. “One of the top men in the field,” Dr. Werkes had said. He belonged to several surgical societies, including the one Dr. Werkes thought the most important among the Eastern societies.

  Forniss did not know anybody in Cold Harbor, but the chief of Cold Harbor’s small police force knew Mrs. Florence Selby. And Mrs. Selby was quite a girl. She had taken over her husband’s realestate business when he died. “Probably been running it all along, come to that.”

  She made “damn near half” of the real-estate sales in that part of Putnam County. She was on the school board. She was a member of the Republican county committee. “Solid citizen, Lieutenant. They don’t come much solider.”

  As far as the chief of police of Cold Harbor, New York, knew, Dorothy Selby was a damn nice girl. Near the top of her graduating class at the Cold Harbor High School. Seemed to remember she’d been editor, or maybe just one of the editors, of the school annual. Gone to college for a while anyway. He didn’t remember where, if he’d ever known. Went later to a secretarial school. Something like that. “Hey!”

  Forniss had waited out the “Hey.”

  “Seems to me I heard she’s been working for Arthur Jameson. Secretary or something like that. The guy who got killed yesterday. I’ll be damned!”

  “Yes,” Charles Forniss said, “Mr. Jameson did get killed yesterday, Chief. We’re just checking around on everybody connected with him. You know how it is, Chief.”

  The chief of police said he sure as hell knew how it was. Charles Forniss felt, but did not express, disbelief and thanked the chief of police and hung up.

  He told Heimrich this in Heimrich’s office, which was as large as the office he had had at Hawthorne, where, Susan had vainly hoped, he would spend more time during more regular hours.

  “All right, Charlie,” Heimrich said, “we’d better go down and have a look at this meadow of the Jamesons’, don’t you think?”

  Forniss said, “Maybe so, M. L.,” and they drove southwest on US 44 in Heimrich’s Buick, and on down NY 11F past The Tor’s gateposts.

  “This ought to be it,” Forniss said, when they came to a blacktop road that branched to the left from the highway a mile or so below The Tor. They turned left onto the blacktop. For about half a mile the blacktop ran straight. Then it veered to the left and ran along a ridge—must, Heimrich thought, be running more or less parallel to the numbered highway they had quitted.

  “Ought to be along here somewhere,” Forniss said. “There’s the house, anyway.”

  The Tor jutted across the valley on its high hill. The lake glittered in the morning sun. Now, as they crept along the blacktop, there was a steel mesh fence on their left. For some distance there was no break in the fence. Then there was a gap in it, with stone pillars on either side and a gate of the same steel mesh between them. The gate was closed.

  “Pretty much got to be it,” Forniss said, as Heimrich turned the car and headed it toward the gate, following tracks in grass. He stopped the car and Forniss got out of it. He said, “Let’s hope it isn’t locked,” and went up to the gate. It was not locked, and Forniss pushed it open. Heimrich drove the Buick beyond the gate and stopped it, and Forniss closed the gate, which held on a catch, and got back into the car.

  Ahead of them were only tracks through the stubble of a mowed field. But the tracks were clear enough. They led down steeply and then up again on a hill. Bisecting the tracks were traces of pine bark, leading away to the north and to the south, lying in the hollow between hills.

  “Haying road, looks like,” Heimrich said. “Seem to have hayed twice this year. The pine bark—what’s left of a bridle path, wouldn’t you think, Charlie?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Looks like, M. L.”

  The Buick followed the tracks, down the slope, up the rise. It stopped at the top of the rise.

  They looked down on the lake. It was, from this angle, long and quite narrow. Where the spit of land jutted from the opposite side to this, the meadow side, the distance was not more than a hundred and fifty yards, Heimrich thought. The boat was tied up to the pier on the far side. It bobbed innocently in the moving water. Directly across from it, below them on the meadow side, there was a similar pier of planks.

  They got out of the car and followed the tracks down toward the lake. After about fifty feet, Heimrich stopped and pointed to his right. “That’s the fence the horse balked, probably,” he said.

  The fence was of dry stone and about three feet high. There was a gap in it off to the road side. The gap was fairly wide. “For the mower and baler and trucks,” Heimrich said. Beyond the fence there was a second field, also standing in stubble. It seemed to be rougher than the field they stood in. The steel fence which ran along the blacktop continued beyond the fence, cutting off the second field from trespass. It ran up a rise and disappeared over it.

  “Had the stable pulled down after his wife was killed, after he sold the horses,” Heimrich said. “Don’t see any sign of it, do you, Charlie?”

  Neither of them did. Then Forniss said, “Could have been over there,” and pointed to an area near the lake where the grass still grew high and still was green; where it formed a kind of oasis in the stubble. They walked downhill toward it. They went through the tall grass and stopped.

  There was a large, rectangular excavation in the grass. It had once been walled with stone; some of the stone had fallen away from the sides and lay in the bottom of the excavation. There were daisies blooming in the excavation. They didn’t, Heimrich thought, know how close winter was coming.

  “Sizable stable,” Heimrich said. “Did a thorough job of tearing it down, didn’t they?”

  The grass grew high around the excavation because the mowers had carefully avoided falling into it.

  Beyond the excavation the land sloped down to the lake, which was only a hundred feet or so from it.

  “Think they’d have had a drainage problem,” Heimrich said. “Probably ditched it away. Handy to the boat dock, though. Thought they were going to be dragging the lake again this morning, Charlie.”

  Forniss said, “Yep. So did I. Could be they’ve finished, I suppose.”

  They walked down to the plank pier and out on it. Like the pier on the opposite side, this one was made of two heavy planks, supported on piles. Heimrich mentioned his guess at the distance between this pier and the other one—the one at the foot of the precipitous flight of brick stairs—to Forniss, who said, “A hundred and fifty at the most, I’d say. Take only a few minutes to row across it.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Wonder why they didn’t just row across instead of going the long way round in the Jeep? Taking the chance of getting mired on this haying road. If you call it a road.”

  “Jeeps don’t get mired much,” Forniss said. “Maybe the old girls didn’t like those damned stairs.”

  “Mrs. Jameson wasn’t all that old,” Heimrich said. “Late forties, I take it. And athletic. Liked to ride and jump her horse. Probably her sister-in-law’s decision.”

  They walked back up the rise toward the Buick. They drove back toward the gate, and Forniss got out to open it. Heimrich got out, too, and looked back the way they had driven.

  The rise in the land cut off his view of the lake and of the meadow beyond the rise. Even on a horse, he thought, Ursula Jameson could not have seen over it. Beyond the rise, Janet Jameson, even on her own horse, would have been invisible. As, of course, Ursula Jameson had
said.

  With the wind in the right direction, as it probably had been since the day was nice that spring of two and a half years ago, Ursula probably could have heard a horse whinny—“scream, almost. The way they sound when they’re frightened.” West winds bring pleasant days in the spring.

  They drove the roundabout way back to The Tor.

  11

  On the second curve of the winding driveway up to the big house on its hill Heimrich, by stepping hard on the brake pedal, just managed not to run into the truck of Denny & Co., General Contractors. The truck stopped, too. It backed toward the side of the drive, making way—barely way—for the Buick. Heimrich drew the Buick alongside. The thin, weathered man was behind the wheel of the truck.

  “Nope,” he said, before Heimrich could say anything. “Not a damn thing. Not even tin cans.”

  “You dragged the whole lake?”

  “Yeah. Like the lieutenant said to do. Who pays us?”

  “The State of New York,” Heimrich told him. “Send your bill to the barracks at Washington Hollow. Mark it for my attention. Heimrich. O.K.?”

  The thin man said, “Yeah, I guess so,” and the truck moved on down the drive. The Buick moved on up it. There was a police cruiser in the turnaround, its radio talking loud. A trooper got out of it and, when he saw Heimrich, ground his cigarette out on the gravel. He said, “Sir.” He said, “These men been dragging the—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “we ran into them. Almost, anyway. Mr. Rankin’s still here, I see.”

  What he saw was the big Chrysler. The trooper said, “Yes, sir. He’s still here.”

  They walked up to the house and pressed the button and heard the chimes. After a minute or two, Barnes opened the door. He wore an apron to protect his dark suit. Barnes said, “Good morning, sir,” with a notable lack of enthusiasm.