17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Things I don’t have to answer.”

  “No,” Heimrich said, “you don’t have to answer anything. If that’s the way you want it. If there are answers you don’t—”

  Brennan interrupted. He interrupted with a single word. Heimrich closed his eyes and waited. James Brennan would reconsider. He would say he had nothing to hide. Brennan said he had nothing to hide and Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “What train did you take last night, Mr. Brennan?”

  “The five-oh-four. It was late, the way it usually is. Pulled in around six-thirty. Walked across to the lot and got the car and drove home. Got here—oh, about ten of seven.”

  “Usual coach?”

  Brennan said he didn’t get it.

  “On the five-oh-four,” Heimrich said.

  Commuters are creatures of habit. They have their usual coaches on their usual trains.

  “Ran into Billy Hotchkiss at the gate,” Brennan said. “Man who usually makes a fourth’s on vacation. Asked me to sit in. I did. Rear-end smoker. Usually take the one up front. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  He went back to a window and stood looking out.

  “Your wife here when you got home?”

  Brennan shook his head, as if he had only half heard. He looked out at the empty road, looked down it, toward Van Brunt Center.

  “Left a note,” Brennan said. “Showing a house. Home as soon as she could.” He turned from the window. “I’m away a good deal,” he said. “She’s here alone. It’s something for her to do.”

  Selling real estate was, Heimrich thought, nothing to be defensive about. And that Brennan was defensive about it.

  “Made myself a drink,” Brennan said. “Washed up. Waited for her to come home. Didn’t drive over to the Weaver place and kill Nettie, which I suppose is what you’re getting at. Why the hell should I want to kill her?”

  “Now, Mr. Brennan. I haven’t said you wanted to kill her, have I? Useful to know where people were, naturally. Your wife got home about when?”

  “Seven-thirty. Quarter of eight. And she put stroganoff she’d fixed earlier on to heat and we had a drink while it heated. And I didn’t ask her whose house she had been showing or who she showed it to. No concern of mine.”

  He kept pushing his wife’s avocation away with his finger tips. He also anticipated a question Heimrich had thought of asking—had Mrs. Brennan, the night before, said anything about a J. K. Knight or the Weaver house?

  “Does Mrs. Brennan drive the Porsche?” he asked, instead.

  “Now and then. When the Volks is cranky. It isn’t, very often. If you mean can she, sure she can. She’s good with cars. Hasn’t even scratched a fender that I know—” He stopped. He said, “Where is she, for Christ’s sake?”

  “We’ll find her,” Heimrich said, and thought what he said meaningless. Oh, they’d find her; almost certainly they’d find her. It might take a while. If, for example, she was running. “Hundred to one she’s all right,” he said. It wasn’t a hundred to one, or near it.

  “Mr. Brennan,” Heimrich said, “your wife knew about these lunches—business lunches—with Mrs. Weaver?”

  “I suppose so. No reason she shouldn’t. We weren’t hiding out.”

  “You mention these meetings to her? Say, ‘Had lunch with Nettie Weaver today’?”

  “I may have.” He turned from the window and looked intently at Heimrich. Then he said, “They weren’t really important enough to mention. You trying to make something out of nothing? Is that the way you work it?”

  “Now, Mr. Brennan. No. Find out what is something and what isn’t. You’re saying Leslie wasn’t upset about your meetings with Annette Weaver. Wasn’t—call it jealous?”

  “My God,” Brennan said. “You’ve got a mind. You’ve really got a mind, haven’t you?”

  Heimrich closed his very blue eyes.

  “My wife was not jealous of Nettie,” Brennan said. His voice was level; it was almost, Merton Heimrich thought, as if he read the words from a printed line. “She had no possible reason to be,” Brennan said, in the same flat tone. “She’s not the—call it the hysterical type.” He paused. Then he said, “My God, man. You know her. You and Susan know her. She’s fonder of your wife than of anybody else around here. She—”

  He stopped again and shook his head.

  “You are a cop, aren’t you?” Brennan said. “Not a thing matters but being a cop, does it?”

  There was bitterness in his voice. A worried man can turn bitter suddenly, for little reason. James Brennan was worried. Because his wife was late in getting home? Enough to worry anyone. No real need to speculate about another cause he might have for worry.

  “You got here about ten of seven. Didn’t go out again?”

  “A deaf cop, moreover. Yes. That’s the way it was.”

  “So it couldn’t have been your car the Drakes heard on their drive last night. About, say, a quarter of eight.”

  “They say it was?”

  “Stephen Drake thought it might have been. Isn’t sure it was. Your wife came back home in her own car last night? Hadn’t borrowed the Porsche? From the parking lot, perhaps?”

  Brennan stepped again toward Heimrich, and there was a kind of threat in the big man’s movement. Forniss, who had been standing near the doorway to the hall, moved into the room. But Brennan stopped some feet from Heimrich and said, again flatly, again as if he read the words, “She came home in the Volks. The Porsche was in the station lot. I drove it here.”

  He crossed to a table with an ash tray on it and crushed out another half-smoked cigarette.

  “And,” he said, and now his voice was very hard, “I’ve about had it, Heimrich.”

  “Things we have to get straight,” Merton Heimrich said. “Better all around, Mr. Brennan. There’s one other thing and we’ll get along. Happen to own a handgun, Mr. Brennan?”

  “License for it,” Brennan said. “Smith and Wesson—” He stopped.

  “Revolver or automatic? Caliber?”

  “Revolver. Thirty-two.”

  “Woman alone a good deal,” Heimrich said. “At nights too, probably. When you have to go out of town. Gun’s a handy thing to have around, some people think. I don’t, myself, but that’s neither here nor there. Leslie knows how to use the Smith and Wesson, I suppose?”

  Brennan’s eyes showed anger again. Which was, of course, enough of an answer.

  IX

  Her father had said that she must go to her husband; must tell him about the half-remembered voice. And of her suspicion.

  “You should have told him last night,” Cunningham said, and spoke softly to his daughter. “Jim is an intelligent man, Leslie. He is also a lawyer. A good one, I suspect. Not in criminal practice, no. But he can come nearer than a layman to saying whether you have anything to go on.”

  “I am sure,” she said. “Almost sure, anyway.”

  “A voice you thought familiar yesterday,” he said. “Now think you can identify. Partly because I mimicked it.”

  “Do it again,” she said. “The way you did before.”

  Cunningham leaned back in his chair again and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Is Mrs. Brennan there yet?” he asked the ceiling. “This is Mr. Knight. She’ll know the name…. She isn’t? But you do expect her? Then I’ll call back a little later, if I may.”

  Cunningham did not speak in his own voice, but in quite a different voice.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure that is the voice I heard—yesterday and again this afternoon. And, more than ever, I’m sure I’m right.”

  “Telephones distort voices,” he said. “Your Aunt Martha’s voice sounded very like your mother’s on the telephone, Leslie. When they were both young. But their voices were not really much alike. My guess is, the police will listen to you. That they will think you cannot give them anything substantial to go on. But—ask Jim, child. Tell him about the voice you think, now, you can identify. Although nothing will really be proved if
you can.”

  She had gone a little time after that, at about four, in time to avoid the worst of the homeward-bound traffic on the Henry Hudson and the Saw Mill River.

  She had walked east to the corner, and north a block and then east again to where, in the westbound street, she had finally found space to park the car. Now, cars were parked, illegally, on the other side of the street. Some of them had MD tags, but most did not.

  She was about to get into the Volks when, at the corner beyond, she saw a telephone booth. She made a sudden decision and walked on to the booth, fishing a dime from her coin purse as she walked. She dialed a familiar number and it was repeated back to her by the operator at the offices of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan. The operator was sorry; she thought Mr. Brennan was not in. Would Mrs. Brennan like to speak to his secretary? To Miss Kirby?

  Miss Kirby was sorry. Mr. Brennan had gone out early to lunch and then on to court. She did not expect him back. If there was anything—

  “I happen to be in town,” Leslie said. “I thought I might pick him up and drive him home.”

  Miss Kirby was very sorry. But she did not know any way she could get in touch with Mr. Brennan. Of course, she might try—

  “It doesn’t matter,” Leslie said. “Nothing important at all, Miss Kirby.”

  She walked back to the Volks, which had been standing, closed, in the sun and, inside, was rather like an oven. She opened windows and pulled out from the curb when the rear-view mirror showed her she safely could.

  She drove west and the low sun was bright in her eyes. She pulled down the sun shield. As she drove west toward Madison a car pulled out from the side of the street where parking was illegal, but habitual. It was a big car—a big dark green car. The sun visor on the driver’s side of the big car was pulled down, as hers was. She could not see the face of the driver of the big green car. The car was about the size and color of the car which had been behind her when she drove down from Van Brunt. I’m getting jittery, Leslie thought. There’s not really enough to it to call it coincidence. There are big green cars everywhere, and they all look alike.

  She reached the Henry Hudson, after a good many adverse lights, after transit of Central Park. She turned north and kept going north—up to the Saw Mill, on the Saw Mill to the circle. As she slowed for the circle she thought, The Hawthorne Barracks is only a mile or so toward White Plains. Probably Father’s right that I haven’t anything real to take to the police. But if Susan’s husband is there …

  She did not turn toward the barracks, but went around the circle and on toward the Taconic.

  And the big green car, now three cars behind her, turned as she turned. The two intervening cars peeled off in the circle and went north on the Saw Mill. Now the green car was next behind her, but a good distance behind her.

  The sun visor of the following car still was down, cutting off her view of the driver’s face. It still wasn’t enough even to call coincidence.

  It was a little before eleven when Merton Heimrich turned his car between the two boulders which marked the entrance to his drive and thought, absently, that he ought to have something done about them. Would mean blasting. And the drive entrance blocked for a couple of days, anyway. And the drive was washing again. Needed to be re-graveled. Or to be hard-surfaced. The trouble with hard-surfacing on a drive so steep was that hard surface iced. And that snow tires were no good for ice.

  He had, at a little before eleven, decided to call it a day, and not much of one. He had, he supposed, been lied to several times, which was par for this early in the course. Certainly the murderer, if he had been in contact with the murderer, had lied. That was inevitable. But it was entirely likely that others, too, had lied—to him, to Forniss, probably to Ray Crowley.

  Murder investigations open many things, change many lives, including the lives of those not really involved in murder. Defenses go up, walls are built around trivial secrets. Which is a waste of a policeman’s time.

  He ran the car into the garage and Susan, watching through a window, was pleased by that. If he had thought he would have to go out again he would have circled the car and pointed it down the drive in readiness. He needs sleep, Susan thought. Almost always he needs sleep. If they would make him an inspector, as they should have years ago, he could keep reasonable hours; could sit at a desk and tell others where to go and what questions to ask. Except that he wouldn’t, the big oaf. The darling oaf. Milk with rum in it for you tonight, my oaf. Sleep for you tonight.

  She went to the door and watched him walk from garage toward terrace. He is very big in this light, she thought—oh, big in all lights, but bigger in this half-light from stars, from moonsliver. He walks with the grace, the assurance, of a big cat.

  When he was at the door and the light from the hall fell on his face she looked up at him intently, measuring his face. The tightness was in it. It always tightens, changes, when his mind is scratching at a surface and his mind’s grasping slides from the surface.

  He smiled down at her and shook his head, as if she had asked him something and the shaken head were an answer. He reached down and pulled her to him. Released, she said, “It’ll all come straight.”

  “Bits and pieces now,” he said. “Odds and ends.”

  It was, then. A .32-caliber Smith & Wesson was in a locked drawer at the barracks, with a tag on it. Forniss had taken it there and locked it there. If it had been fired recently, it had been cleaned after firing. Which was to be expected. A bullet would be fired from it and tagged and locked in a drawer. If they ever found a .32-caliber slug which had ended a life, they would have an identified slug for comparison microscopes. Which would be neat and, within reason, conclusive. Only they did not have the slug which had ended life. It had passed through a throat’s softness and nicked a spine’s hardness and continued through an exit wound. And, quite possibly, rattled on a polished floor and been picked up and disposed of. People, including murderers, know about a bullet’s rifling marks and about comparison microscopes.

  Ray Crowley had called many men named Knight, and got some of them—and wakened some of them to indignation. Several of his calls had gone unanswered, which also was par for the course. None of the Knights whose first names began with the letter “J” admitted ever having heard of a Mrs. James Brennan.

  Unlisted numbers in the name of J. K. Knight? No, address unknown. The telephone company had sighed heavily; promised co-operation in the morning. “Everything’s locked up for the night,” the telephone company had said, plaintively.

  It was unlikely, Heimrich thought as he sipped milk with rum in it, that J. K. Knight had any real relevance to anything. A policeman’s lot is a mass of irrelevances. Mr. Knight was a small, slightly irritating, burr in a policeman’s mind.

  The Porsche which had made a racket and had now been cured, or partly cured, of that regrettable habit was another burr. What had been the point of the repair job, if it had had point beyond the obvious one that James Brennan had decided the car might fall apart without one? What had been done today did not erase what had been heard yesterday. Oh, Brennan could run the Porsche’s motor now and it would not remind anyone of the sound heard from a lane off the Drake driveway. “Is that the motor sound you heard?”

  “No, doesn’t sound at all like it.”

  Ralph Weaver’s enterprises were possibly—according to gossip—scraping bottom. Weaver still wore monogrammed silk shirts. He took a young actress named Cynthia Williams to expensive places. Quite possibly, he had been cheating on a wife no longer, to him, glamorous. But cheaters are more likely to be killed than to kill. Of course, Weaver was now free to marry his young actress, if that was what he wanted. But divorce is by no means so messy as murder, and Annette Weaver had not, certainly, been adamant against divorce. Not in the past, anyway. Unless—

  “Drink your milk,” Susan said. “Don’t just sit there staring at it. Drink your milk and come to bed.”

  Merton Heimrich swallowed milk and rum, which he
did not especially like and which did not seem to be making him especially sleepy, although that was its excuse for being. “Leslie Brennan’s turned up missing,” he told Susan.

  Susan had started toward the bedroom, to show the way. She turned back and looked down at her husband. Then she sat in a chair opposite him. Then she said, “Not Leslie.”

  “Went in to town this afternoon,” Heimrich said. “To see her father. Left there some time around four. Hasn’t showed up since—hadn’t three quarters of an hour ago, anyway. Could be she’s decided—”

  People who live close do not need to finish sentences.

  “No!” Susan said. “She’s a child, Merton. A sweet, uncertain child. No!”

  Perhaps, Heimrich told her, a hurt child, thrown off balance. A child, conceivably, obsessed by a certainty of what is right and what is wrong; a child ruthless against evil. “Spelled,” he said, “with a capital E. A child nurtured to intolerance.”

  He stopped, because Susan was shaking her head in dissent. He closed his eyes and waited.

  “I’ve met her father,” she said. “He is a compassionate man. A priest, not a zealot. A tolerant man. He would not have taught her to be a fanatic. Anyway, she isn’t. Just—just a nice kid, young for her years. I keep on telling you that, don’t I? This evil—what evil?”

  “Conceivably, a breaking of marriage vows. By a husband you say she loves. Unfaithful husbands do, now and then, get themselves killed. And their mistresses get killed.”

  “Keep that in mind,” she told him, and spoke lightly. But it was only a flash of lightness. “Jim’s been playing around?” she said. “I suppose with Annette Weaver?”

  “He says not. I’d have thought not. He’s very worried about Leslie—damn near frantic, at a guess. But that’s only a guess. It could be an act, I suppose. Or, partly an act. Has there been talk about Brennan and Annette?”

  “About Annette and damn near everybody,” Susan told him. “The old wives buzz. The young ones do too. Annette and Ollie Drake. Annette and Sam Jackson. No better than she should be. That’s the consensus. Was the consensus. Now, no evil of the dead, of course.”