21-Not I, Said the Sparrow

by Lockridge, Richard

  Not really a non sequitur, Heimrich thought, and he said Old Forrester would be fine. The waitress said, “Right away, Inspector,” and went toward the bar. Cold, wet air flowed briefly into the room, blowing Michael in front of it. Michael kicked the door closed, but it didn’t stay closed. He had to put down the larger of the cases he was carrying and make the door secure. He carried the cases to the table but did not put them down.

  “May as well see about the rooms while I’m about it,” he said. “Want to come along, Joanie?”

  Joan looked at Susan, who said, “Of course, dear. You’ll want to freshen up after that long drive.” The Heimrichs watched the two go across the taproom and under the arch into the small lobby of the Old Stone Inn.

  “Well,” Merton Heimrich said.

  Susan said she couldn’t agree more.

  “Been a bit of a problem if it hadn’t been for the storm,” Merton said. “With only Michael’s room for a guest room and the only bed in it a double.”

  “Problem for us, dear,” Susan said. “Not for them, I think, don’t you?”

  Heimrich said, “Mmm.”

  “You’ve only to watch them,” Susan told him.

  He said “Mmm” again. Then he said, “I thought mothers were supposed to feel upset about it. All—I don’t know. Bothered. A feeling of desertion.”

  Susan said, “Did you, dear?” She looked at him.

  “No, I guess not,” Heimrich said. “Not you, Susan.” He paused and looked at her across the table. “No,” he said. “Not you.” He offered her a cigarette and lighted it for her and lighted one of his own.

  “Of course,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for the storm, she’d have dropped him and driven on to New York. That was the plan, wasn’t it?”

  “What Michael told me, dear. But of course, he just said a ‘friend.’ She seems a very nice girl, don’t you think? A little I’ll at ease, maybe, but under the circumstances—”

  “If the power hadn’t gone off,” Heimrich said, “and she’d have decided to stay over—it would have raised a problem? For us. Perhaps for them, too.”

  “The proprieties, you mean? We’re not much for the proprieties, are we? Is Dartmouth coeducational, do you know? Because I’ve always thought of it as—well, rather rugged. Football, and that sort of thing.”

  “I believe it is, nowadays,” Heimrich told her. “Coed, I mean. The climate’s rugged enough, from what Michael’s told us. It’s Ivy, of course. All Ivy seems to be going coed. I wonder if—”

  “Here we are, Inspector,” the bar waitress said. “The martinis for you two, is that right?”

  Heimrich told her that that was right.

  “And the others?”

  The others would be right along, he told her. She could put their drinks down. And, as long as she had brought them, she could leave the menus. She left the drinks and the menus. She obeyed a beckoning finger from another table.

  Michael came through the passage into the taproom. He said, “All set. Very nice rooms over the parking lot. Did I say how good it is to see you both?”

  “I don’t remember you did,” Susan said, and smiled at her son. “We took it for granted. She seems like a very nice girl, Michael. She’s going to Dartmouth, too?”

  “Sophomore,” Michael said. “And her father’s an English professor. Her stepfather, that is. Professor Faneworth. Her real father is named Collins—James Collins, I think it is. She spends the Christmas holidays with him. Court order, or something. Yes, Mother, Joan’s quite a girl.” He looked over his shoulder toward the archway.

  “She said she’d be right along,” he said. “I hope she—well, doesn’t get lost, or anything.”

  “She’s a girl, son,” Heimrich said. “Probably wants to change her clothes. It takes girls longer, Michael.” He paused. “Anyway,” he said, “welcome home.”

  The three of them clicked glasses. But Michael put his down without drinking from it. He looked again toward the archway.

  Joan Collins was not coming through it. A tall, lean man—lean in spite of a bulky, fleece-lined coat—was coming into the taproom. He looked at the Heimrichs and raised a hand to his bare head in salute.

  Heimrich said, “Hi, Sam.”

  The lean man came to their table and looked down at them, smiling. He said, “Hi, Susan dear. Hi, M. L. Hello, Michael. Thought you weren’t going to be able to make it.”

  Michael said, “Good evening, Mr. Jackson. I got a ride down at the last minute.”

  “Just the three of you?” Sam Jackson said, and looked briefly at the empty chair.

  Susan shook her head.

  “Michael’s friend who brought him down’s going to join us,” she said. “But have a drink with us, Sam. You’re stuck in the village?”

  “Staying overnight in the office,” Jackson said. “No use skidding up and down hills in this kind of weather. Also, got some odds and ends to go over.”

  The office of Samuel Jackson, attorney-at-law, was across Van Brunt Avenue from the inn. The house he lived alone in was up even steeper grades from Van Brunt Center than the Heimrichs’.

  “Also, Friday’s decided he’s got lumbago.” Jackson’s “man Friday” was named Friday, which was a coincidence which his friends in Van Brunt no longer made much of. “Well—” He reached toward the vacant chair. But he stopped reaching when Joan Collins came out of the lobby and into the taproom, and headed toward the table. Joan had changed to a gray woolen dress, which did a good deal for her figure. She had also, Susan noticed, redone her face.

  My son has good judgment, Susan thought. She said, “This is Samuel Jackson, Joan. An old friend of ours. Miss Collins, Sam. She drove Michael down from Hanover.”

  Jackson pulled the chair out for the girl and said, “Miss Collins.” Joan sat on it, and said, “Mr. Jackson.” Then she said, “We didn’t pick a very good day for it, did we?”

  “Icebound,” Jackson said. “But you made it. Hanover must be even worse. Spent six weeks there during the war. Naval indoctrination. Teaching youngish officers not to salute CPOs. Got down to fifty below one morning when we were forming up to march to. breakfast. Breath froze on our bridge coats.”

  “It gets cold, all right,” Joan said. “I live there, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Probably nice in the summer,” Jackson said. “Well—” He added, “Pleasant to meet you, Miss Collins,” and went to a table on the other side of the room. The bar waitress carried a drink to the table, not waiting for it to be ordered.

  “Sam looks tired,” Susan said.

  Heimrich agreed. “Also,” he said, “Sam’s getting along.”

  They drank, Joan Collins very slowly, somewhat tentatively. The others had finished before she had drunk more than half her watered whiskey. After a few moments, during which Joan took an evidently experimental sip from her glass, Heimrich raised a hand for the waitress. They studied menus; they ordered. When the waitress had written on her order pad, Heimrich looked at Susan, who nodded her head. “And two martinis.” He looked at Joan, who shook her head. Heimrich said, “Michael?” Michael Faye shook his head.

  “I really mean rare on my steak,” Heimrich told the waitress, who said, “I know, Inspector,” and went away.

  Merton and Susan did not hurry with their drinks. They, had each a sip left when a busboy brought a heavy tray in, and lowered it, a little precariously, Susan thought, to a service table. He was a local boy. One of the Purvis boys, Heimrich thought. Jacob? Perhaps Jeremiah, Junior?

  They ate. Heimrich’s steak was medium rare. Susan’s was medium. Both Michael and Joan ordered roast lamb. It wasn’t pink, but they hadn’t specified pink. Probably, Heimrich thought, wouldn’t have got it if they had. The cuisine of the Old Stone Inn is Middle America. No “raw” meat.

  Chapter 3

  The weather had not improved. If anything, it had worsened. The rain still fell in sheets; it still froze where it hit. Ice thickened on the roads; trees knelt under their burdens of ice. Even with the
Buick’s windows closed, they could hear trees crashing down. The defroster kept the windshield clear of ice. On the rear window, ice formed; the rearview mirror disclosed only the vaguest of blurs. The Buick floundered on the steep curves of High Road. The studs bit in enough—just barely enough. When Heimrich turned from the road into the drive, the car skidded, not quite into one of the boulders.

  It was no night to be out. Most of those who had come to the Old Stone Inn to huddle from the storm were still huddled there when Heimrich said, “Well?” to Susan, and added, “You can still change your mind. Mary can fix you up.”

  “No,” Susan said, and stood up. “Whither thou goest.”

  Merton Heimrich had not had much hope. He had been listened to, tolerantly. When he pointed out that he, by himself, could keep the fire going so the house wouldn’t freeze up, Susan had said, “Of course, dear.” When he had said it would be smelly in the house with the oil stove going in the kitchen and that she hated the smell even more than he did, she had said that she’d try to stay out of the kitchen. And when he had given her a last chance, she had stood up from the table and begun to put her storm coat on.

  “I’ll pick you up in the morning,” Heimrich had told Michael and his pretty friend. “Supposed to clear up tomorrow. Sun will thaw the roads.”

  “Except where evergreens shade them,” Michael had said to that.

  Neither of them mentioned that sunshine wouldn’t bring the power back; that only men could do that, and it wouldn’t be by tomorrow.

  They signaled good night to Sam Jackson, finishing his coffee at his small table by the wall. Sam was lucky—only a couple of hundred yards to walk across Van Brunt Avenue.

  “And he’s had sense enough to hold onto a couple of Aladdin lamps, he told me once,” Heimrich said, as they got into the Buick.

  And now, a moderately perilous few miles accomplished, they were ready to get out of it. There was room to open the car door partway, beside Joan’s still ice-sheathed Volks. They squeezed out. Mite’s cat litter was frozen over in the breezeway, but the cement was still faintly gritty underfoot. And the lock of the kitchen door still hadn’t frozen—not completely, anyway.

  The fire had burned down, but no logs had rolled out of it. Colonel and Mite were lying in front of the fire, Mite protectively encircled by Colonel’s right foreleg. Mite is Colonel’s cat; has been Colonel’s cat since, when he was a mite of a kitten, Colonel found him and brought him home in his mouth. Deposited on sunny flagstones of the terrace, Mite had been a very wet small cat. He had also been a very indignant one.

  Heimrich put more logs on the fire, somewhat impeded by the livestock. He lugged the emergency oil heater in from the garage and lighted it in the kitchen. It began to stink, as always.

  Susan found candles and lighted them. It wasn’t really cold in the house. Not if you stayed close to the fire. She set water trickling from faucets in both bathrooms. The oil heater would keep water from freezing in the kitchen pipes. Anyway, it always had before.

  Between them, they hauled the mattress from Michael’s double bed and stretched it in front of the fire. Mite got to it first, and curled himself in the middle. They had nightcaps in front of the fire before they dislodged Mite and, fully dressed except for their storm coats, lay down on the mattress.

  Heimrich put an arm around his wife. She was shivering a little, but the shivering lessened as he held her closer. Of course, it was a cold, dank night. And the car heater hadn’t really got going on the trip from the inn to the house above the Hudson. And, probably, it had been an evening trying on her nerves. Not that Joan Collins didn’t seem to be a nice girl, in addition to being a very pretty one.

  When she had stopped shivering, Susan went to sleep. Merton Heimrich was not so lucky. He lay very still beside his wife, quiet so as not to waken her. He kept his arm around her, realizing that it probably would go to sleep before the rest of him did. He listened to the slash of rain against windows and to the rush of the wind. Now and then he heard, distantly, the crashing fall of still another tree. Some of the trees would merely lose boughs. It would be a bad night for ancient apple trees—particularly for them. Old apple trees are brittle. And, doggedly, sometimes a little wistfully, they go on producing apples. An example to—to what? Heimrich couldn’t quite remember.

  The fire was burning all right. It would be an hour, maybe, before he had to put another log on. It was hot in front of the fire. Hot enough to singe Susan’s pantsuit? He didn’t think—

  He didn’t think at all. He slept.

  The alarm clock wakened him. It couldn’t be morning yet. He couldn’t have slept that long. It was still dark. Of course, it stayed dark late just before Christmas. The alarm clock kept on ringing.

  It took Heimrich only thirty seconds or so to remember that they didn’t have an alarm clock. Susan stirred in the circle of his arm. She said, “Who at this hour?” her voice muffled by sleep. And then, “Don’t answer the damn—” and did not finish, but went back to sleep instead.

  Heimrich switched on the flashlight he had taken to bed with him and went to answer the telephone. He was wide awake by the time he answered it. So was Susan. Heimrich spoke his name into the telephone.

  “Dad?” Michael’s word was hurried; the pitch of his voice high.

  Heimrich said, “Yes, Michael?”

  “Dad, a man’s been killed. Here at the inn. In the parking lot. And, Dad, it was Mr. Jackson. And Joan thinks somebody meant to kill him. Dad, Joan saw it happen. From the window of her room. She says whoever it was couldn’t have helped seeing him, because the lot was all lighted up. And—”

  “Sam Jackson,” Heimrich said. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “Dad,” Michael said, “They brought him into the inn. The bartender and that Purvis kid. He—well, the car ran over his head. It must’ve been one of the wheels with chains on it. It’s awful to look at, Dad. And Joanie saw it happen. Saw it. Mrs. Cushing’s phoned for an ambulance. But—well, an ambulance won’t do any good. If it ever gets here. And—”

  “Listen, Michael. Ask Mrs. Cushing to ring the substation in Cold Harbor. Ask whoever’s on there to call the barracks and have them try to get hold of Forniss. Tell him to try to get down. I’ll be down myself. Get Miss Collins to have a drink, son. And have one yourself.”

  “I already got her one, Dad. She’s up by the fire with it. She’s— well, she’s pretty shaky. Terribly shaky, actually. Mrs. Cushing’s doing what she can, but—”

  “Try to help Mrs. Cushing, son. I’ll be along. Right?”

  “Yes, Dad. She—she just keeps crying. And sort of shaking all over. I’m afraid—”

  “Yes, Michael. She’s had quite a shock. Try to calm her down. I’ll be along.”

  He put the receiver back in its cradle.

  Susan wasn’t asleep anymore. She was sitting up on the matress, hugging her knees. She was staring at him. She said, “Something’s happened to Sam? That’s it, isn’t it? To Sam!”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Sam’s been killed, dear. A car hit him in the parking lot Michael’s girl saw it happen, Michael says. And thinks the driver meant to hit him. The boy’s very excited. Words sort of tumble out of him. I’ll have—”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “I know. Wouldn’t it be better if I-?”

  “No, Susan,” Heimrich said. “No use both of us. Keep the fire going, and watch that damn stove. Flares up sometimes. And try to get some sleep. All right?”

  “It’ll have to be, I guess,” Susan Heimrich said. “Be careful, dear. Hadn’t you better put the chains on?”

  Heimrich had got heavy boots out of the hall closet—boots with ridged soles. He was lacing them up. He said, “Mmm.” Which meant, Susan knew, that he wasn’t going to put the chains on, because putting on tire chains takes time and is also a grubby, mildly hazardous job.

  When Heimrich finished with his boots and stood up, Susan, too, stood, and went to him. She held his storm coat, which was wet on the outside. She pu
t a hand on each of his arms, and pressed them. She said, “Be careful, darling. It’s an awful night.”

  He said, “Yes, dear, I’ll be careful,” and kissed her.

  She went with him to the kitchen door. She held the flashlight, its guiding beam on the glazed cement of the breezeway.

  It wasn’t, Heimrich thought, raining quite as hard. And he thought the wind was shifting a little, from northeast to, it was to be hoped, northwest. Which would, in some hours, make a difference. Not, of course, while he was driving on ice to Van Brunt Center and the Old Stone Inn. Or while Lieutenant Charles Forniss was driving the much longer, and equally iced, way from the barracks of Troop K, New York State Police. If, of course, they had managed to get hold of Forniss.

  He backed the Buick out of the garage. For once, it didn’t stall. He headed it down the steep drive. It tried to skid, and he wouldn’t let it. He went down High Road at about ten miles an hour. The sand which had been spread on Van Brunt Avenue helped a little—made fifteen miles an hour reasonably safe.

  The inn’s parking lot was a sheet of ice, but at least it was lighted ice. There were still cars in it. Heimrich parked as close as he could to the taproom entrance. As he got out he saw a blurred red stain nearer the center of the lot. Blood, probably; frozen blood, by now. Sam Jackson’s blood.

  It was only about ten thirty when Heimrich went into the taproom. It had been a few minutes before nine when he and Susan had gone out of it, and flicked good-bye to Sam Jackson, who was having a brandy with his coffee at a table against the wall, and who had seemed abstracted when he gave his familiar loose-armed salute to them.

  There were still people in the taproom now, and the fire was still blazing. Most of the people were locals; most of them Heimrich knew. They were lingering over coffee and, in most cases, drinks. It was a night to linger, to postpone. Sometime, they would have to leave light and warmth and venture into an inhospitable night of ice. But not yet. Have another cup of coffee; another sip from a glass. Things were not going to get any better, but things could be put off.