Murder Roundabout
A Captain Heimrich Mystery
Richard Lockridge
For Hildy
I
Leslie Brennan turned her car from the blacktop into the narrow road which served as driveway to the Drakes’ big house on the ridge and to the smaller house which was Annette Weaver’s. She slowed almost to a stop. Confident as Mr. J. K. Knight had sounded on the telephone, she did not really believe that he would find the turnoff. The sensible thing to do would be to wait here, making her little car a marker. The sensible thing to do would be to get out and stand where the drive branched from the blacktop and be herself a marker.
On the telephone Knight had been confident, had been a most decisive man. “You go right along,” he had said, in the tone of man who, tolerantly, issues an order. “Meet you at the house. Don’t you worry.”
His confidence, Leslie Brennan thought, probably had been misplaced. He was driving up from town; if he found Van Brunt at all he would be fortunate; if he found an unnumbered blacktop he would be somewhat extraordinary. “Off Eleven-F at the corners,” Leslie told the voice which had come out of nowhere. “Follow—”
“Don’t worry your head,” Knight said. “Know it like the back of my hand.”
Few strangers know the town of Van Brunt as they know the backs of their hands. Narrow roads twist from other narrow roads; the signs which name the roads are, by late September, well hidden in shrubbery. Mr. and Mrs. Knight might well end up in Poughkeepsie. They might well get lost in Peekskill. That they would find a fourth driveway on the right leading from a nameless blacktop and rising steeply from it toward a ridge seemed most unlikely to Leslie Brennan, real-estate agent summoned to a meeting with prospects.
She looked at her watch. Seven o’clock of a late September evening, and a cloudy evening. “Seven” it would be, at the Weaver house. There had been no suggestion of “about” in the confident voice. When J. K. Knight, whoever he might be, said “seven,” the “seven” had the sound of inflexibility. The Knights might well already have reached Annette Weaver’s house and be waiting there impatiently.
Leslie drove her little car up the narrow, winding—and rutted—drive toward the house which she, along with most of Van Brunt, thought of automatically as Annette’s house, although Annette was Mrs. Ralph Weaver. Possibly, Leslie thought, because the name “Annette” was a constant. Surnames had been variable. In the extreme, Leslie thought, and switched her lights from park to beam. It is, Leslie thought, driving very slowly, and sounding her horn at blind curves, a hell of a time to be showing a house. This house, more than most houses, depends on its setting—on the lawns around it, on glimpses of the Hudson River above the valley trees. Annette’s house, and the six manicured acres it sat among, was a house to see by daylight, with sun on the lawns. As, Leslie thought, it was the afternoon of the picnic—the Fourth of July picnic, to which everybody came, including Mrs. Drake herself. Mr. and Mrs. Knight should have been at Annette’s picnic. Here people do not buy a house and move into it. Here they move into a community. A community can be bewildering to city people. It is still, after more than two years, bewildering to me. It is a community of rules, but the rules are undefined, implicit. Will the Knights, whoever they may turn out to be, learn the rules? For the matter of that, shall I?
She came to the fork in the driveway and almost, but not quite, turned to the right, on a surfaced section which led to the Drake house. If the Knights got as far as this, they would almost certainly turn to the right, where the road surface was inviting. They would arrive, unexpected, at the old and haughty house occupied by Mrs. Drake, as it had been occupied by her ancestors. Descendants shared it with her, but it was Mrs. Drake’s house. Not “the Drake house.” “Mrs. Drake’s house.” Two sons and a daughter-in-law lived with Mrs. Drake, in her house. And Annette had lived there once when, briefly, her name had also been Drake, which was before it had been Brennan for a year or so and longer still before it became Weaver. As, Leslie thought, of now. Be civilized, Leslie told herself. As, at the picnic, we were all so civilized, under the observant eyes of Mrs. Drake herself.
What a blur that party was, she thought. As this evening is turning out to be. She switched on her windshield wipers, and turned drizzle on glass into blur on glass. The Knights, resolute or not, will not come in this. Probably they are trying to call me at home and tell me so. I may as well go home. Jim will be home by now, unless he missed the 5:08. He will have found my note by now, and be mixing himself a drink and be somewhat annoyed that I am not there. He will mention, but with tolerance, the absurdity of traipsing around in the rain trying to sell houses. Not, heaven knows, that he won’t be right.
It is numbing to drive along a narrow roadway in the rain. The eyes remain alert, and had better. But the mind is detached, as if in hypnosis. The mind wanders, listlessly and with no destination. I began thinking of the picnic merely because I thought it unfortunate that the Knights—whoever they may be—would see only empty lawns in dusk and not, through trees and over trees, the flickering glitter of afternoon sun on a wide river.
It was not, until almost the end, a special party. I was, perhaps, a little separated from it, and watched it with detachment, because Jim was not there at first, but playing golf at the club. (Which, heaven knows, I should by now be used to.) “If I’m not there fivish, you trot along,” Jim had said, on the morning of the Fourth of July. “Unless you want to come to the club for lunch?”
She had not wanted to go to the club for lunch. Lunch, she had thought, would be a drink on the terrace and Jim and the rest of the foursome steaming from the first nine holes, and impatient to steam on the next nine. And then, unless she chose to join other women at another table—including, almost certainly, Florence Drake—and listen to stroke by stroke recapitulation of the round just played, a hot four miles alone on crowded roads toward the small sanctuary of home.
She had left that sanctuary, rather reluctantly and still alone, at about five-thirty. She had driven the two miles or so to the turnoff from the blacktop and up the narrow, rutted drive the car now groped on. But the sun had been high then and, as she neared Annette’s house—as now she neared it—there had been the sound of voices, some of them raised. Little spurts of laughter broke through the voices. And over everything there had been the sound of an accordion, which was being played loudly. By Bobby Duggle, Leslie had supposed. He was the one who played for parties—really big parties. Except that the playing did not sound like Bobby’s, was harsher than Bobby’s. Of course, Leslie Brennan had thought that bright afternoon almost three months before, as she walked toward the party—of course, the music is coming through a loudspeaker. And she had thought, Annette is really making a thing of it; a thing disproportionate to Van Brunt, whatever things like it may have been to Hollywood.
It was about here I stopped, Leslie thought, and this time she sent the little car on through the drizzle. I pulled off the road about here, behind Mrs. Drake’s Rolls, with Plimpton sitting behind the wheel. I walked from here toward the party.
She drove on toward the house, which she was more than ever sure Mr. Knight—and presumably Mrs. Knight; prospects normally come in pairs—would never find. They would be, if they did find the house, the first prospects to whom she had shown it. Other prospects, if there had been other prospects, had applied to the big agencies—to Brock and Brock, Realtors; to the Putnam County Agency, Inc. Annette Weaver had put the house up through the Association; the listing had trickled down to Leslie Brennan, Real Estate, and new at it. Mrs. J. K. Knight probably had poked a random pin into an advertisement which listed the Association’s members.
Unless, she thought absently, Knight knew her—was somebody she h
ad met before and forgotten. I’m no good at names, Leslie thought. I don’t remember any J. K. Knight. But when I heard his voice on the telephone I had a vague feeling of familiarity. That lasted only until he told me his name and it was a name I did not know. Or had forgotten. But—he seemed to know my voice. He did not ask, as anyone might ask—because, if he merely stuck a pin into a list he would not know that mine is a onewoman office—if he could speak to Mrs. Brennan. He seemed to know at once to whom he was speaking.
This is nonsense. One begins to imagine things alone in a car with rain beating on the roof of the car. The effect of that is hypnotic. The mind becomes no longer entirely responsible.
There was no car waiting in the turnaround in front of the Weaver house, although now it was after seven. After seven and raining—not a drizzle any more. Leslie cut her motor and dimmed her lights to wait.
There was a light behind the glass of the front door—a single light. The Weavers—assuming there were the two of them around, which was a risky assumption—had left the light on when they went out to dinner, which was a custom of the countryside and designed to delude burglars. Annette and Ralph Weaver were not at home; they were, at any rate, not answering their telephone.
Leslie had dialed the Weaver house after Mr. Knight had called. She had listened to the ringing signal until it sounded a dozen times, which would have given somebody time to answer if somebody had been around to answer. The cleaning woman would long since have gone. Annette, like most people in Van Brunt—excepting, of course, the Drakes, the Van Houtons; the big families—relied on a cleaning woman, hiring Ray Parsons to tend bar for parties; trusting the Old Stone Inn for food; Belle Billings (if available) to serve.
So, nobody at home at the Weavers’ on this rainy evening in late September. Which did not matter, since Leslie had her key to the Association box in which the Weavers’ front door key was locked. When the Knights came, she could take them in. “Three bedrooms, three and a half baths,” Leslie could tell them, and show them. “A lovely living room, don’t you think? Oh, quite an old house, really, but almost entirely done over three years ago. Yes, sixty thousand is what the Weavers are asking. They want to move to the Coast, you know. Mr. Weaver has moved his main office there, I understand. I do wish you could see the land. It’s really very …”
Nobody at home at the Weavers’. No Knights to look at the Weaver house and be told about lawns which sloped to a stone fence; about the glimpses of the distant Hudson River beyond the trees which grew down toward the valley. A small car in the rain, with rain pinking on its roof and a slim—and increasingly chilly—woman of twenty-five sitting in it, and wanting to go home to her husband, who did not approve of coming from town to an empty house. He did not greatly approve of a wife’s filling in empty hours by showing other people’s houses to people who wanted houses, or thought they might want houses.
By seven-twenty Leslie was reasonably sure that Mr. Knight, who had made such an issue of punctuality, had got lost on the way. Or, with the weather threatening, had given the whole thing up. She waited another ten minutes and got out of the car and wrapped herself in a raincoat.
It was possible that the Knights had merely changed their minds; possible that, in the hour she had been away from home, they had been trying to call her and report the change of mind, make another—and more convenient—date. Perhaps they had caught Jim at the house and left a message with him.
She rang the doorbell and nothing came of it. She fished the key from her handbag and opened the Association’s box. The Weavers’ key hung where it was supposed to hang. She opened the Weavers’ front door and stepped into light.
Annette Weaver lay just inside the door. She lay on her back and there was a hole in her throat and all around her was blood.
Sickness surged in Leslie Brennan, and she fought it back; held a hand tight against her mouth to fight it back. The telephone she must use to tell somebody that Annette Weaver, the Annette LeBaron who had been once so lovely, lay dead on the floor of her entrance hall, was beyond the blood.
And then, from some distance, she heard the sound of a car’s motor. The sound seemed to come from behind the house. There must be a door open there or she could not—
The motor made the hurried, almost angry, sound of a sports car’s motor. It shook in Leslie Brennan’s mind, and she turned and ran out of the house—ran to her own car and started it and swirled it and sent it, far too fast, down the narrow roadway which led from the house which had been Annette Weaver’s. Where the Weaver drive forked from the Drakes’ main drive, she might catch up with the hurrying sports car—might prove to herself what, if the shaking of her mind was to be quieted, she would have to prove.
II
Captain M. L. Heimrich, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New York State Police, sat on a terrace and looked toward the Hudson River. But he did not see the Hudson River. He saw parched grass on a slope—grass brown when it should have been green, grass obviously dying in its tracks. Last night’s rain wasn’t going to help much. Today’s sun already was lapping at it. “Fair and unseasonably warm.” That had been the forecast on the nine o’clock news. “Precipitation probability near zero.”
Heimrich had listened to the nine o’clock news while dressing, which was unusual. By nine o’clock, and usually before nine o’clock, he was normally at his desk in the Hawthorne Barracks, taking papers out of the “In” basket and reading them and, for the most part, putting his initials on them and tossing them into the “Out” basket. But even a policeman must sometimes sleep and it had been almost four in the morning when Heimrich had driven up the steep drive to the low house which once had been a barn and gone into it as quietly as a big man could. He had not been quiet enough; Susan had wakened in the bed next his and smiled up at him and said, with sleep in her voice, “Justice done, darling?”
“Something done,” he told her and she turned in her bed to watch him. But when he came out of the bathroom she was asleep again. After a time, when the events of the night had finally blurred in his mind, Heimrich slept too. He slept late; awakened to hear Susan moving in the kitchen and did not hurry to his breakfast. “Terrace,” Susan said when she heard him moving and he went to the terrace and sat in the morning sun and looked toward the Hudson.
He heard the grating sound the screen door catch always made, and turned from the Hudson toward the house. Susan Heimrich said, “Go on, Colonel. For heaven’s sake, go on.” It was a familiar sight to Heimrich but still he wanted to laugh with pleasure.
A Great Dane of unlikely size blocked the half-opened doorway and looked back over his shoulder. Susan stood behind him, pushing against him, which apparently surprised and puzzled him. Most things appeared to surprise Colonel and almost everything to puzzle him. “What on earth does she want now?” Colonel was wondering, while Susan, carrying a tray, tried to knee him out of the way. “She must want something.”
“Go,” Susan Heimrich said. “Out, you oaf. You stupidest of all dogs. Merton!”
Merton Heimrich swung out of the chair he had been sitting on. He, like Colonel, was big for his breed. He moved quick, lithely, toward the house. Colonel recognized him, which was a trick for Colonel. Colonel bounded heavily toward Heimrich, too clearly intent on affectionate greeting. When affection really surged in Colonel he quite often knocked the loved one down. Heimrich sidestepped. Colonel briefly thundered on. Then he stopped and looked sadly at Heimrich, a dog betrayed. Then Colonel lay down, in sudden collapse, and put out a foot or so of red tongue.
Susan wore slacks and a light sweater and moved, tray in hands, with a deftness which still, after several years of watching, delighted Merton Heimrich. (And still, obscurely, abashed him. She deserved better than a hippopotamus for a husband, Heimrich thought recurrently.)
She put the tray on a table and poured coffee into two cups and added cream to one, not hers. She carried the creamed coffee to Heimrich, back in his chair again. “Four and a half hours,” Susan said. “At
the outside.” She chided him.
“A policeman’s lot,” he told her. “You would marry …”
She leaned down and kissed him, and got her own coffee and sat in a director’s chair on the other side of his small table. Colonel came heavily to join his family—what remained of it, with his small god already engulfed in the ill-smelling monster which was the school bus. All summer Colonel had thought that that, at least, was over; that finally a dog had got a break.
“He’ll knock the table over,” Susan said. “Probably he’ll knock us both over while he’s about it.”
“Down!” Heimrich said to Colonel, who looked at him from the saddest of brown eyes, and the least understanding. Heimrich repeated the word, more loudly. Colonel turned and lumbered away for twenty feet and collapsed with his back to them. He put his enormous head on his enormous paws.
“A bad one?” Susan said. “Last night’s?”
“A boy hurt a girl,” Heimrich said. “Badly. He was drunk. She was too, I suppose. He started to run for it, but then he came to us. Crying. His parents came, from Fairfield County. It—oh, it took time. The boy—somehow he made me think of our Michael. Although he’s years older. Your Michael.”
“Ours,” Susan said. “You married a son too, remember? Your eggs will be getting cold.” She was quick from the small table to the larger one which held the tray. She was always quick. (I lumber like Colonel, Heimrich thought. One day she’ll notice it.) She broke soft-cooked eggs into a cup and brought them to the little table. She brought a silver coffee pot and poured more coffee into his cup. (The silver pot is because I’m breakfasting late, he thought. It is an occasion. She hasn’t noticed yet.)
He had eaten, lighted a cigarette to go with coffee, when the telephone rang in the house. He said, “I’ll get it,” and she let him get it and watched while he crossed the terrace toward the house. (He moves so well, she thought. So surely. And thinks he’s a hippopotamus.)
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