17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Intuition,” Heimrich told her. “Yes. Quite a performance, Mrs. Drake says it was. And that you were there and could tell about it.”

  “The poor duchess,” Susan said. “Annette was a little drunk, Merton. More than a little drunk. You remember the loudspeaker?”

  Heimrich did. There was a sun deck on the lawn side of the Weaver house and that hot Fourth of July the sun beat down on it. While Heimrich was there—before he had been called to a policeman’s duty which turned out to be both unpleasant and, from his point of view, unrewarding—Bobby Duggle had been in the pouring sun on the deck. He had been playing an accordion into a microphone. Two loudspeakers picked up the music and flung it gratingly at perhaps a hundred people.

  “It had begun to get dark,” Susan told her husband. “They were turning on the lights. Little colored spotlights in the trees. A few were leaving. One of the spotlights was on Bobby Duggle. She came out onto the deck and into the light. She held onto the mike stand and Bobby looked at her for a moment and then went away. She said—”

  Susan stopped and looked beyond Heimrich, at nothing or at a scene from the past. She’ll remember the way it looked, Heimrich thought. It will come back to her as a picture. She will remember the color of each little light, and where the color was.

  “The light on her was white,” Susan said. “Not a good light, but she was still beautiful. But it seemed to me she swayed a little, and that it was to keep from swaying she held onto the mike stand. She started in an ordinary way. Said something about how good it had been for all of us to come to her last party. That she hoped everybody had found it a good party. It was—oh, only a little silly. Self-conscious and needless. A little embarrassing. At least that was what it was to me.”

  “Half the town,” Heimrich said, when Susan stopped, perhaps to go back to remembering. “Half the town didn’t like her because of that ‘performance.’ Mrs. Drake says that. Calls it that.”

  “It was strange as it went on,” Susan told him. “Unpleasant. After a time she was shrill, Merton. She was getting things out of her system. She said, ‘Oh, my friends and oh, my foes’ and—wait—‘all you dear dull people. Our darling duchess, right out of Alice in Wonderland.’”

  “Mrs. Drake,” Heimrich said, and Susan moved her head quickly, assenting. “People do call her that,” Heimrich said.

  “Not to her face. But yes. Only—you remember the Tenniel drawings? Particularly of the duchess?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “As well,” Susan said. “I think Mrs. Drake did.” She paused again. “Actually,” she said, “I think the whole thing—the valediction, if that’s what it was—was aimed at Mrs. Drake. Only—after the start it rambled. Perhaps she had had more drinks than she planned to have to get herself ready to tell off the town. You see, they thought they had the house sold. Leslie says they did. And would be out of it by the middle of July. Only, the deal fell through and Annette stayed on to show the house. I suppose that was it.”

  “She stayed too long,” Heimrich said. “Tell off the town, Susan? Specifically? So that the people she told off would recognize themselves? Be recognized?”

  “Part of the time. ‘That long pallid fish I married.’ Meaning Stephen Drake.” She considered. “Of course,” she said, “he is, rather. People don’t mention it. ‘And the other one, and his dear, trusting little wife.’ I’m quoting, Merton.”

  “I supposed so,” Merton Heimrich said. “That would be James Brennan.”

  It was not a question, but she nodded her head to agree to it.

  “And something about the Van Houtons. So Houtoner than the rest of us. Perhaps she thought she was punning. ‘Dear stuffy people.’ She kept saying that. Things like that. And there were references I didn’t get. It—all of it was hateful. Hateful and, I suppose, sick. What’s called sick nowadays. You were well out of it. People started to go away. Some of them did.”

  “The Drakes?”

  “The duchess just sat there. Seemed—I think she enjoyed it. That poor Annette was making a spectacle of herself. Florence walked away. Made rather a thing of walking away—the back way. There’s a path between—”

  “I know,” Heimrich said. “The sons?”

  Susan shook her head. She said she hadn’t watched Stephen and Oliver.

  “I was going away myself,” she said. “Only—there were a lot of us, Merton. A jumble of us and of our cars. More—a lot more—than when you left. And she—well, she saw me leave, Merton. She said—oh, something like, ‘There goes the one they call the Upton girl. Going to call the cops, probably.’ I don’t remember exactly the words she used. Toward the end, some of them were words most of us don’t use. Most of us in Van Brunt. She made rather a point of using them.”

  “Anything that somebody might have considered a threat? Or—call it a significant revelation?”

  She thought a moment and then shook her head. “Nothing I recognized as anything like that,” Susan said. “There may have been. Between lines I didn’t know. Mostly, it seemed to be just malicious, half-crazy, maundering. Of course, there must have been a hundred people there by the time she started. Some from the city. One man put his car in the gap to one of the fields we’d used for parking and locked it. A man from the city, I suppose.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes, Miss Upton.” He got an indignant “You!” for answer. But then she laughed a quick, light laugh and reached out both hands and took his for a moment, and said, “All right.” After a moment she released his hands and he let her hands go.

  “All right,” she said again. “There are certain little things one doesn’t do at country parties. You know that.”

  “Oh, I’m a gent.”

  “I could kill you. No, I guess I won’t. Young Michael loves you. He wouldn’t like you killed.” She looked up at him, and laughter went out of her face and consideration came into it. “I grew up here,” she said. “Things were—seemed to be—different. Homogeneous.”

  “People didn’t lock their cars on other people’s property.”

  “Yes, that. That, of course.” She paused again. “I wasn’t sheltered,” she said. “We didn’t have any money. And I married a man who came from The Flats.” She paused again. “You know,” she said, “that wouldn’t matter much nowadays. Oh, to Mrs. Drake. To the Van Houtons.”

  “Inversely to Annette Weaver? Born, maybe, Annette LeBaron?”

  Her wide gray eyes widened and her eyebrows went up a little.

  “Might feel that lines still were drawn. That she was—call it lined out?”

  “Perhaps there was that in it. Or she thought that was in it. Remembered back to the way things were when she was Stephen’s wife. The duchess might have seen to that, I suppose. But the Weavers have been here—how long? Three years?”

  “About that.”

  “Long enough to know how things have changed,” she said. “How different the community is from what it was when she first came here. You’ve seen the change yourself, Merton. Twice as many people. People coming in all the time. Ranch houses. Commuters. You used to be able to park at the station and catch the ten-twenty-four. There’s no place any more after the eightseven. There’s—oh, everything has changed. You’ve watched it change. Annette must have watched it change.” She paused. Then, quickly, briefly, she smiled at Merton Heimrich. “Good for the fabric business,” Susan said. “All those new curtains. Mostly department-store stuff, of course. But still …”

  He waited a moment, but she had finished with that.

  “There’s still stratification,” Heimrich said. “In places like this, however they grow, change, there’s that. And people who resent that. Being closed out, or thinking they are closed out, of the upper strata.”

  “Why should anybody care? Particularly people like the Weavers? Suppose the Van Houtons don’t ask them to dinner. The Van Houtons are stuffy. You know they’re stuffy. For Annette LeBaron it’s just—just—just a backwater. Must be.” She corrected that. “Must have been,
” she said. She looked up at him. “We don’t go to dinner with the Van Houtons,” she said. “Or the Drakes, come to that. Or—” She lifted her squarish shoulders in a shrug, carrying on them, tossing off them, the upper stratum of stratified Van Brunt.

  And Heimrich shook his head.

  “Not because we aren’t asked,” Heimrich said. “Or weren’t, until we turned out to be nonresponsive. Because you’re, after all, that Upton girl. Even if you did marry a policeman.”

  “It’s nonsense. Annette LeBaron glittered around the world. What possible difference could it make to her if—” She stopped.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s nonsense. Only—people live by nonsense, Susan. This outburst of hers. This telling-off of the town. Resentment because she wasn’t accepted? You know Van Brunt. Better, in some ways, than I ever will. They weren’t accepted? The Weavers?”

  “It’s a dead word. A dead concept.”

  He shook his head.

  “The world’s changed,” she said. “Don’t shake your head at me.”

  “Not all that much,” he said. “Upper upper. Upper. Upper middle—They weren’t accepted?”

  “All right,” she said. “Big parties. They were asked to big parties. The ones you always find some excuse not to go to. Little parties? No, I guess not. Only the parties everybody’s asked to. Except, of course, people who come from The Flats. The way poor Michael—”

  She stopped with that. It was long ago. It did not touch them now, if it had ever touched them. But it was a place to stop.

  “People don’t like Ralph Weaver,” she said. “It’s been that as much as anything, I suppose. He doesn’t fit in. He’s very city, Merton. ‘Broadway,’ Mrs. Drake calls him. Or would if she mentioned him, which I suppose she doesn’t. Has this anything to do with the fact that somebody killed Annette?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich told her. “I don’t know what has to do with that. Or hasn’t. This outburst of hers. Didn’t add to her popularity, I’d gather. Wouldn’t, naturally. But, offhand, no reason for anybody to kill her. Was Weaver there while she was making her speech?”

  “Toward the end. I didn’t see him early. Not until he went out onto the sun deck and stopped her. I told you that.”

  A policeman gets used to omissions, even on the part of a wife.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t tell me that, darling.”

  “Patient with me,” she said. “So very patient. Anyway, he did. Walked out onto the deck from the house and pulled her away from the mike. Gently, it looked to be. But—more or less in the middle of a sentence.”

  “He say anything? Into the mike? To the assembled multitude?”

  “Which was disassembling, at something like a dead run. No, he didn’t. He—he was all dressed up for the Fourth of July, Merton. In the damnedest getup.”

  “Not country, I gather?”

  “Red jacket,” she said. “Blue slacks. Not a very good blue. A shiny sort of blue. White shirt. City shirt. And necktie.”

  “Matching,” Heimrich said, “slacks or jacket?”

  “Slacks.” She nodded her head briefly. “Oh, yes, she said, ‘Broadway.’ If you want to call it that.”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “Not I, remember. Mrs. Drake. The duchess was there to the finish? Enjoying it?”

  “I think so. The Rolls was still there when I wriggled the wagon out. By the way, it’s beginning to talk back to me again. Wants to go see Purvis.”

  James Purvis operates a garage in Van Brunt; he admonishes station wagons which talk back to their owners. Susan Heimrich’s wagon, with “susan faye, fabrics,” lettered on it, had begun to be talkative a month or so before.

  “Maybe,” Heimrich said, “we’ll have to get you a fresh one. Who else lingered? At the party?”

  “Goodness, I don’t—does it matter?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Les and Jim Brennan still had drinks, I think. He’d got there late. Les and I’d been talking. Mrs. Drake had summoned us and excused us. Les said, ‘There he is, finally,’ and went—more or less ran—to him. She’s a sweet child. Very much in love with her husband.”

  He smiled down at her. He said, “More than most?”

  “You,” she said. “Not than all. If you must be told.”

  “At intervals,” Heimrich said. “ ‘Dear, trusting little wife,’ Mrs. Weaver said. Presumably referring to Leslie Brennan. She was there to hear it?”

  She said, “Yes, Merton.”

  “Brennan?”

  She did not know.

  “Trusting?”

  “No, I don’t know what she meant. Only…. No, I don’t know.”

  “Now, Susan.”

  “Jim Brennan is—was—Annette’s lawyer. That is, the firm was. But he was, apparently, the one who handled her affairs.”

  “Gossip?”

  “Now, Merton,” she said, getting her own back, “there always is. She was still very attractive. They’d been married once. Apparently they had lunch together a few times at the Inn. Nothing secret about it.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not precisely the place for an assignation. You know Leslie rather well, don’t you? Since Colonel and Lady introduced you?”

  Colonel heard his name and, unexpectedly, responded to it. He rambled into the front room of the shop and into a rack of fabrics. Heimrich, moving very quickly, caught the teetering rack. “You!” Susan said to her dog, who collapsed on the floor. “Reasonably well,” she said to her husband.

  “Trusting?”

  For a moment, Susan rearranged the fabrics which dangled from the rack into which Colonel had bumbled.

  “She’s young,” she said then. “Younger than she really is. She loves the man, Merton. Of course, she’s never said—”

  The telephone rang. Susan answered it; held it out to Heimrich, who said, “Yes, Ray,” and listened. He said, “All right, Ray,” and told him about the field which lay between the forks of the Drake-Weaver driveways and what he was to do about it. He said, “I’ll be at the Inn in a few minutes,” and hung up.

  “Happen to know what kind of car Leslie Brennan drives? On her rounds as a real-estate agent?”

  “Not many rounds,” Susan said. “A way to spend her time when a husband’s in the city. A Volks.”

  Few things are unknown to a shopkeeper on the main street of a township center. The town passes in review before a shop’s windows.

  “Her husband?”

  “One of those little foreign jobs. Wait—a Porsche, I think. A noisy little beast.”

  * As told in Burnt Offering.

  IV

  Ray Crowley’s inquiries among real-estate agents apparently had got him nowhere, which was pretty much where Heimrich had supposed they would get him. If one of the agents had used his Association key to open a box, extracted a house key from it and used that key to enter a house and kill its occupant, it was unlikely that the agent would mention it. Heimrich walked up the east side of Van Brunt Avenue toward The Corners, where he could cross with the lights. A policeman should set an example, when it is convenient.

  The chances were that the Association lockbox had nothing to do with any of it. It had been opened, certainly. It might well have been opened by Annette Weaver herself. A woman with five handbags may drop a house key in any of them; may go out carrying another bag and, returning, find herself locked out. May discover that the bag she is carrying has a lockbox key in it. May walk in and meet death, which has entered through the back door. Having a key to it? Or finding it conveniently left unlocked?

  Heimrich waited for the light to change at The Corners and, when it changed, crossed Van Brunt Avenue and walked down it toward the Old Stone Inn. Traffic was heavy on Van Brunt Avenue. Most of it, Heimrich thought, was local. Susan was right about the spurting growth of the town; about the change in the town. When Captain M. L. Heimrich had first visited in Van Brunt, and got himself involved in a murder, murder being his business, traffic along NY-11F had b
een a trickle.

  He walked into and across the parking lot of the Old Stone Inn. There were not many cars in the lot; in midweek the Old Stone Inn’s lunch business is light. One of the cars parked in the lot was a low, narrow black car, with an air of impertinence about it. Partly because he had time to kill—half an hour, at best, before Ralph Weaver could be expected—Heimrich walked over and looked at the impertinent little car. Narrow gauge, like the car which probably had been parked for a time in the farm lane off the Drake drive.

  A Porsche, the little car was, and very sleek. Stephen Drake had thought the car they heard from the Drake house had been a Porsche. Or was quoted as having thought that. A good ear or—Heimrich shrugged that off, because there was no answer to that. Maybe Porsche motors had a special sound of their own. Chances were, anyway, that the small and evidently noisy car which had turned in the lane the night before had nothing to do with anything. Murder does not, by intention, make a racket about it.

  Heimrich went into the taproom, which was low and long and dim, although outside the sun was high. He walked to the bar and Harold got up from his jump stool and stood ready. And James Purvis turned from the bar and said, “Howdy, Captain.” Purvis wore coveralls with “Purvis’s Garage” stenciled on the back of them. He had a half-empty glass of beer in front of him. Heimrich went up to the bar and stood beside him and said, “Gin and tonic” to Harold.

  “Warm for this time of year,” Purvis told him. “Think it’s ever gonna rain?”

  “Usually does,” Heimrich said. “Given time.”

  “Seeded yesterday,” Purvis said, and finished his beer. “Place half bare. Stand another, Harold.”

  Harold snapped the top from a bottle of Miller’s High Life and filled a cold, wet glass with it. Heimrich sipped a gin and tonic.