21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  He got “Huh!” and an abruptly closed door and went back down the stairs.

  Not more than a hundred pounds, Forniss thought. Not too heavy a burden for a strong man. Or, for that matter, a strong woman. He looked at his watch. It was a little after eleven. Too early to meet M. L. at the Old Stone Inn in Van Brunt. He hoped M. L. was getting more than he was and walked back toward the house.

  Geoffrey Rankin was still sitting in the sun on the terrace. He wasn’t reading a newspaper, and there was a glass instead of a coffee cup on the table beside his chaise. Forniss walked up onto the terrace and said, “Good morning, Mr. Rankin.”

  “You,” Rankin said. “How long are you guys going to keep me here?”

  “We’re not keeping you,” Forniss said. “The inspector told you that.” He pulled a chair up and sat on it.

  “The hell you’re not,” Rankin said. “I can’t stir without one of your men on my tail. I went over to see Miss Selby because I couldn’t get her on the phone. Damn line was busy for hours, then the operator said it was out of order. So I got in my car and took off. But what if I hadn’t come back here?”

  “You wouldn’t have been stopped, wherever you went. Those were the inspector’s orders.”

  “Just followed,” Rankin said. “Got a cigarette on you?”

  Forniss held out a pack toward Rankin. After Rankin had shaken a cigarette out of it, Forniss pulled one out for himself. They both lighted cigarettes.

  “So,” Rankin said, “are you getting anywhere? Finding out who killed the old boy?”

  “We will,” Forniss said. “By the way, way I get it you’d not been here before. Not until the party Saturday night, when Miss Selby showed you the way up. That’s right?”

  “That’s right. And I’d never seen Arthur Jameson until he put on that god-awful show. Just heard about him.”

  “From Miss Selby, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Distinguished old gentleman, she called him. Distinguished old—”

  He stopped himself. Forniss gave him time, which he did not use.

  “So you couldn’t have been here—here at The Tor—on the Friday before Memorial Day a couple of years ago?”

  “I sure as hell wasn’t. Wait a minute. That was the day Mrs. Jameson fell off her horse, wasn’t it? Don’t tell me you’re prying into that, Forniss. Why the hell would you?”

  “No special reason I know of,” Forniss said. “Inspector Heimrich gets curious about things. I suppose Miss Selby told you about Mrs. Jameson’s accident?”

  “Do you? Maybe she did. Also, it was in the papers. Read the Times this morning?”

  “Glanced at it,” Forniss said.

  “Front page,” Rankin said. “Mysterious death of member of a distinguished Hudson River family. State police are investigating—”

  “Yes,” Forniss said, and drew on his cigarette.

  “Mrs. Arthur Jameson dies in riding accident,” Rankin said. “Wife of a member of long-established Hudson Valley family. Something like that two years ago.”

  “You seem to have kept up with the Jameson family,” Forniss said. He paused to draw again on his cigarette and let smoke drift from his mouth. The wind caught the smoke and the smoke vanished. “Why is that, Mr. Rankin? Because Miss Selby worked for Mr. Jameson? As a matter of fact, she was here in the house the day Mrs. Jameson was killed.”

  The cigarette had burned down. He stubbed it out. I smoke too fast, Forniss thought. Rankin has had only a couple of drags from his. In fact, Rankin has let his cigarette go out.

  “Did she tell you that, Mr. Rankin?” Forniss asked.

  “Any reason she should have?”

  Forniss shrugged his shoulders.

  “Just thought she might have mentioned it,” Forniss said. “Sort of thing people’d talk about, I’d think. ‘Dreadful thing about poor Mrs. Jameson. And I was right there in their house when it happened.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Maybe she did. Dot and I haven’t seen much of each other the last couple of years. As I told the inspector.”

  “Sure you did,” Forniss said. “I forget things, I guess. Before that—before she went to work as Mr. Jameson’s secretary—you saw quite a bit of each other. Or don’t I remember that right, either?”

  “We saw a bit of each other, yes. There was no secret about it.”

  “No reason there should have been, I’d think,” Forniss said. “You and she being related and all. Distantly related, that is. Not—how was it you put it, Mr. Rankin? Within the bounds of con-something?”

  “Consanguinity,” Rankin said. “Kinship. In our case not anywhere near close enough to—” He stopped. Then he said, “Getting at something, Lieutenant?”

  “I think you’re getting at it, Mr. Rankin. A pretty young woman, as you pointed out. Only a few years younger than you. A great many years younger than the man she was engaged to. A girl you seem to have stopped seeing about the time she came here to work with Mr. Jameson. Any objection to telling me why you and she stopped seeing each other?”

  “Yes,” Rankin said. “And it’s none of your damn business, is it?”

  Forniss lighted another cigarette before he answered. This sort of thing was causing him to step up his smoking when he was trying to step it down. When he spoke, he spoke very slowly.

  “Mr. Rankin,” Forniss said, “I’m a detective working on a murder case. Anything related to that case, even remotely, is my business. Miss Selby was engaged to Arthur Jameson. A couple of years back you and Miss Selby saw a good deal of each other. Rather suddenly, I gather, you pretty much stopped seeing each other. All I asked you was why.”

  “What you’re hinting at,” Rankin said, and he, too, spoke slowly, “is that I’m in love with Dot and killed the old boy so he couldn’t marry her. That we stopped seeing each other because she was going to work for Jameson. Which, Forniss, is a lot of bull.”

  Forniss said, “All right, Mr. Rankin.” But he did not make any move to get up from his chair. He merely looked at Rankin and Waited, as if he expected Rankin to go on with something, to finish something. Sometimes it works.

  “So you’re way off base,” Rankin said.

  “All right.”

  “It was that mother of hers,” Rankin said. “She—all right. She wanted to break it up. Not that there was anything to break up. Said it wouldn’t be seemly. That Flo—well, she gets ideas into that head of hers. Crazy ideas. About genes. About which she doesn’t know a damn thing, actually.”

  “About genes, Mr. Rankin?”

  “Old wives’ tales. Men and women who are related even as distantly as Dot and I are shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Never heard of the royal families of Europe, apparently. Trouble with Dot, she believes what Mama tells her. Believes—well, believes all the taboos. Even makes them up herself. Flo, I mean.”

  “That was the—” Forniss began and stopped because Rankin was not listening; was ready to go on. You never stop a witness who wants to talk.

  “Having short little fingers on the left hand runs in a family,” Rankin said. “If even distant blood relations in that family marry and have children, the children won’t have left arms. See anything the matter with my hands, Forniss?”

  He held his hands up, the fingers spread apart. There wasn’t anything the matter with his hands.

  “All right,” Forniss said. “And I’ve seen Miss Selby’s hands. When she was shooting arrows at a target, incidentally. Very good-looking hands, hers are. You’re going a long way around something, aren’t you?”

  “Ever hear about the wharf cats in New York, Forniss? Kill the wharf rats for a living. And inbreed like crazy. And keep on getting bigger and tougher and killing more rats.”

  “I’ve heard about them,” Forniss said. “Apparently you’ve given this thing about inbreeding a good deal of thought, Mr. Rankin. Because of this very distant relationship between you and Miss Selby. Which makes it pretty obvious, doesn’t it?”

  As he had talked on, Rankin had
been looking not at Forniss but across the closely mowed lawn—had been, in fact, looking in the direction of the top of the brick staircase which plunged down toward the lake. Now he looked at Forniss, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Makes what obvious?” Rankin said.

  “Oh,” Forniss said, “that you and Miss Selby were, at one time anyway, a good deal more than the casual acquaintances you’ve been telling us. That you wanted to marry her and that her mother scared her off. Made her believe you were too close kin to marry.”

  “Which we damn well aren’t.”

  “All right.”

  “Hell, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had the same great, great—I don’t know how many greats to put in—grandfather. So what?”

  “So nothing,” Forniss said. “I’m not agreeing with Florence Selby, Mr. Rankin. The point is, apparently, that she persuaded her daughter. You did want to marry Dorothy Selby. Isn’t that right? Do now, at a guess.”

  “What you guess isn’t—”

  “I know,” Forniss said. “Isn’t evidence. You told us Miss Selby asked you, relaying a message from the Jamesons, of course, to come up to this party Saturday night. That you accepted, thinking it was just a birthday party for a man she worked with. That nobody told you it was also a celebration of her engagement to Jameson. Must have come as something of a shock to you, Mr. Rankin.”

  Again, Geoffrey Rankin looked away across the lawn. He said nothing for several seconds. Then he said, “Got another cigarette? I seem to have let this one go out.”

  Forniss had another cigarette to give to Rankin. Rankin lighted the cigarette.

  “All right,” he said. “It was a bitchy thing for her to do. There’s a little bitchiness in all of them, isn’t there? Even in the best of them.”

  “There’s a little bitchiness in all of us,” Forniss said. “It isn’t limited to women.”

  He stood up.

  “And,” Rankin said, “I didn’t kill the old boy to keep him from marrying Dot.”

  “All right, Mr. Rankin,” Forniss said, and walked off the terrace toward the turnaround, in which the police cruiser was standing, its motor dead but its radio chattering. As he walked, he looked at his watch. Eleven-forty. Still too early to meet M. L. at the Old Stone Inn at Van Brunt. Still—

  “Your sidekick in the house?” Forniss asked the trooper.

  The trooper returned, with a visible start, from wherever he had been. He said, “Yes, sir, Lieutenant. We were told to stick around. Just to see nobody—”

  “Yes,” Forniss said, and went around the car and got in beside the trooper. “You can run me in to the Inn in Van Brunt. Your sidekick can see that nobody gets away.”

  The trooper said, “Sir,” and started the motor.

  Of course, Charles Forniss thought as they went south on NY 11F, Rankin merely confirmed what we’d already guessed.

  It was still too early for the lunch customers to have showed up at the Old Stone Inn. Not that there would be many on Monday. On the other hand, on Mondays the bar didn’t have to wait until one in the afternoon to open.

  Heimrich was not in the taproom. Neither was anybody else, except the new man behind the bar. He was reading the New York Daily News. He put the News under the bar when Forniss walked up to it and said, “Good morning, sir.”

  “Mother isn’t here,” Dorothy Selby had said when she opened the door of the house on Vine Street. “Is it Mother you want to see? Because she’s out with prospects, I think. Did you try the office, Inspector?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps you can spare me a few minutes yourself, Miss Selby? Help me get one or two points straight in my head?”

  She said, “Of course, Inspector,” and he followed her into the big living room.

  She was much more composed today than she had been the day before, Heimrich thought. The shock of her fiancé’s death appeared to have worn off. Rather quickly, Heimrich thought, and thought that the young are resilient. She looked very young in a short skirt and a sleeveless blouse. She had very pretty legs. She had applied lipstick expertly. She did not look as if she had planned to spend the day alone in the house. Expecting a visitor? The same visitor she had had the day before?

  “Just trying to clear up a couple of points,” Heimrich said. “Think maybe you can help. Not about Mr. Jameson’s death, directly.”

  Momentarily, she closed her eyes. They were large blue eyes. Her blond hair curved softly down to her shoulders. She opened her eyes.

  “I want to help in any way I can,” she said.

  “I’d like you to remember back,” Heimrich said. “Back more than two years. You were working with Mr. Jameson then?”

  “For him. Yes.”

  “The Friday before Memorial Day two years ago,” Heimrich said.

  “The day Janet was killed. In that awful accident. No, Inspector, I’ll never forget that day.”

  “From what we hear, you were at the Jameson house that afternoon. In Mr. Jameson’s study, working.”

  “His office. Arthur always called it his office. Yes, I was there, Inspector. Making a clean copy of what we’d done during the week. On the book, I mean.”

  “About when did you leave that afternoon?”

  “Somewhere around four, I think.”

  “Had Miss Jameson and her sister-in-law driven over to the meadow when you left, do you remember?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head.

  “I don’t think I saw either of them at all that day,” she said. “I think I got there—oh, around ten that morning. Went directly to the office without seeing anyone. I had my own house key. Miss Jameson gave one to me when I first went there to help Arthur. But I don’t think the door was locked that morning. Anyway, I went to the office and began to type. Around one o’clock the man they had then—it wasn’t Barnes then: I don’t remember the man’s name—anyway, he brought me in sandwiches and coffee. Then I went back to work.”

  “Until around four,” Heimrich said. “Did the others in the house know you were there, do you think? Aside from the man who brought you your lunch, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Oh, probably they heard the typewriter going.”

  “You went out of the house about four,” Heimrich said. “Was the Jeep in front of the house, do you remember? The one they drove in to the meadow. After Frankel had saddled up their horses.”

  She closed her eyes again, as if she were trying to remember. Then, slowly, she nodded her head.

  “I think so,” she said. “I think I remember its being there. Headed toward the drive, I think.”

  “The motor running?”

  She didn’t remember about that. Anyway, she didn’t remember that it was. Then she said, “Wait a minute.” She opened her eyes again.

  “I said I didn’t see Miss Jameson or Janet that day,” she said. “I just remembered. I was in my car and starting toward the driveway when they came out of the house. Dressed for riding. I saw them in the rearview mirror.” She paused. She said, “Why all this, Inspector? I don’t understand.”

  It had taken her, Heimrich thought, some time to get around to the obvious question. He told her he was just trying to get things straight in his mind.

  “When they came out,” Heimrich said. “Dressed for riding. Did they go over and get in the Jeep?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” Dorothy Selby said. “I just saw them come out of the house. Then I’d gone around the curve at the top of the driveway and couldn’t see them any more.”

  Heimrich said he saw.

  “Just the Jeep in the turnaround?” he said. “No other car?”

  “I don’t remember any other car.”

  “Mr. Jameson—Mr. Ronald Jameson, I mean—hadn’t got there yet? Apparently he did come up a little later. Was there, anyway, when Miss Jameson drove back to tell what had happened.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “His car wasn’t in front of the house. But then, if he was going
to be there overnight, he always put the car in the garage. He’s sort of—oh, old-maidish—about that car of his. It’s a Mercedes, you know. Like Mother’s. Not an old rattletrap like mine.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes,” which didn’t mean much of anything. He said, “Speaking of cars, Miss Selby. Mr. Rankin drove over here to see you yesterday.”

  “And you had him followed,” she said. “He knew it. Did you know he knew it?”

  “Yes. He told us he saw the police car. What did he come to see you about, Miss Selby?”

  She said, “About?” Then she said, “Oh, to see if I was all right. To—to tell me how sorry he was.”

  “Considerate of him.”

  “Of course. That’s the way he is. And after all we’re—we’re relations. Cousins. Didn’t we tell you that?”

  “Very distant cousins,” Heimrich said. “Yes, you’ve told us that. Not at all a close degree of relationship. He drove over to—call it make a sympathy call—because you and he are distant relatives?”

  “Of course. Oh, we were friends, too. Some time ago he used to take me places. In the city, mostly.”

  “Because you were what you call cousins?”

  “Of course. What else could it have been?”

  He merely looked at her, and let her see that he was looking at her. He thought she was intelligent enough not to need words for it.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all. How could it have been? We are cousins. And Mother made me see—” She stopped abruptly. Heimrich waited.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  Heimrich nodded his head acceptingly.

  “When Mr. Rankin came up here from town Saturday night,” he said. “When you guided him over to the Jameson place, having passed along their invitation—he thought the party was just a birthday celebration?”

  “Yes. I guess so, anyway. I hadn’t—” Again she stopped without finishing the sentence.

  “So when Mr. Jameson announced that you and he were going to get married, it must have come as a surprise to Mr. Rankin?”

  “I hadn’t told him about it, if that’s what you mean. He was a little late in getting here that night, and I went right off in the Volks and he followed me. We didn’t—didn’t stand around talking. He didn’t even get out of his car.”