17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  “I think Leslie was at the Weaver house last night,” Heimrich said. “A hunch, so far. She denied it to—”

  The telephone rang.

  “Damn,” Susan said, and moved to answer it. She said, “Yes, he is, Jim.” She covered the mouthpiece and said, “Jim Brennan,” and Heimrich crossed the room and took the telephone from her. He said, “No, we haven’t. Not yet. Somebody’ll call you—” He stopped and listened. Then he said, “All right, come along,” and hung up.

  “Damn,” Susan said. “Won’t people ever let you—oh, damn it, darling.”

  “Got something he wants to tell me,” Heimrich said. “My job is to listen.”

  “In the middle of the night,” Susan Heimrich said. “Always in the middle of the night.”

  It took James Brennan a little less than ten minutes to drive from Brickhouse Road to the Heimrich house. The lights from his car glared at the house. “Don’t be any longer than you can help,” Susan said, with no confidence, and went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  With the screen door between them, James Brennan asked a question with his eyes, with the anxiety etched on his face. “Nothing yet,” Heimrich said, and opened the door. Brennan took long strides into the living room, brushing past Heimrich. In the middle of the room he stopped and turned abruptly and faced Heimrich.

  “You sit here,” he said. “You’re the police and something’s happened to my wife. You sit here.”

  He was bitter. Worried people do not always make a great deal of sense.

  “Now, Mr. Brennan,” Heimrich said. “Every state patrol cruiser’s got the license number of your wife’s car and a description of your wife. The parkway police have got both. So have the city police. We’re doing everything we can. We don’t know anything’s happened to your wife. May have had a minor accident on a back road somewhere. She ever take back roads between here and the city?”

  “Too damn often,” Brennan said. “Hates the main roads. Especially when they get jammed in the evenings. Listen. A while back a couple skidded off the Saw Mill. The Saw Mill, for God’s sake. Went over an embankment and cracked up. But—just hurt. Both of them. Tangled up in the wreckage of the car, but they’d have been all right if they could have got help. Maybe a hundred cars—maybe two hundred—went by within fifty yards of them. And they were dead when somebody finally found them.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Only, it was winter. They died of the cold. We’ll find your wife, Mr. Brennan.”

  Brennan sat down abruptly.

  “There’s nothing you can do to hurry it,” Heimrich told him. “Nothing I can do that’s not being done. Do you think you have to prod us? Is that why you’ve come?”

  James Brennan took a package of cigarettes from his pocket and looked at the cigarettes in it, as if he were selecting one, as if there were a difference between one and the one next to it in the pack. Finally he took one out and lighted it.

  “You said things at the house,” he said, finally. “Crazy things. As if—as if you thought Les had something to do with Annette’s murder. That’s crazy, Captain. If you think anything like that, you’re crazy.” He stared up at Heimrich, who stood in front of him. “What you think is,” Brennan said, “she’s run. That there wasn’t any accident or anything. That she’s trying to hide. Is that what you think?”

  “I think it’s possible,” Heimrich said. “That she suspected you and Mrs. Weaver. And—went off her rocker. I think that’s possible, yes.”

  “You’ve nothing to go on. Not a goddam thing to go on.”

  Heimrich pulled a chair so that, sitting in it, he faced James Brennan.

  “I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “We think that whoever murdered Mrs. Weaver had a key to the lockbox real-estate agents around here install, hang a door key in, so that they can show houses when the occupants aren’t there. The boxes have keys of their own. Your wife has one of the keys, Mr. Brennan. She could have got into the Weaver house last night. Could have taken the gun you kept in your house. Matter of fact, she could have got your car from the lot. Driven it to the Weaver house.”

  “I told you—”

  “I remember what you told me. If she was jealous enough, bitter enough, she might have wanted to involve you. Make it appear that you, not she, drove a noisy car up to a place near—”

  Brennan stood up as abruptly as, before, he had sat down. He stood over Heimrich and his eyes narrowed as he looked at Heimrich. Heimrich did not move, but he was ready to move. He was reasonably certain he would not have to move.

  Brennan stood so for a moment. Then he sat down again.

  “You don’t believe a word of that, do you?” he said, and his voice was quiet. “Not a goddam word of it. You’re not that much of a fool.”

  “No? I think it’s possible that you were having an affair with Annette Weaver. That your wife found out about it and—as I just said—went off her rocker. And—you don’t know that isn’t true, do you? Because you didn’t go near the Weaver house last night and can’t be sure your wife didn’t. She wasn’t at your house when you got there. Came in quite a bit later. You don’t—”

  “All right,” Brennan said. “All right, for God’s sake. I lied to you about that. I was there. And—Les wasn’t. Somebody else was there. Anyway, a big car was there. Standing in front of—”

  There are all sorts of ways of breaking down a lie. Of course a policeman may get only a revised lie.

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You were there. Your wife wasn’t there. Let’s have the new version, Mr. Brennan.”

  “God damn it to hell, it’s not a version.”

  “Whatever it is. What you came here to tell me. Because you thought I suspected your wife. That you could clear her. Go ahead, Mr. Brennan.”

  “All right,” Brennan said. “Sure I wanted to keep out of it. Anyway, it’s the damnedest thing to tell anybody. The woman’s dead and—”

  He stopped. Heimrich closed his eyes and waited. Brennan said, “All right,” again and stopped again, and put out a cigarette and lighted another. Getting ordered in his mind something he found difficult to tell? Or writing fiction in his mind, assaying its believability in advance?

  “I didn’t take the five-oh-four last night,” Brennan said. “Caught the four-thirty-six. No real reason for that, I guess. Except that there are a lot of regulars on the five-oh-four and—” He shrugged. “Anyway—”

  It had started, he told Heimrich, who opened his eyes again and looked at Brennan, several weeks before. “That lunch you asked about.” At least, he could say it started then. And, so far as he was concerned, it ended then. Only—

  “All right. Nettie didn’t want it that way. Ended, I mean. She—damn it all, she’s dead.”

  He stopped again. Heimrich waited for some seconds before he said, “Yes, she’s dead. She can’t hear what’s said about her. Or deny what’s said about her.”

  “She wouldn’t deny it,” Brennan said. “One thing about her, she didn’t give a damn. Didn’t when we were married. She’d say things like—oh, like, ‘You think you’d married a school girl, Jimmy boy?’ Fact is, she was a bit of a nympho. One of the reasons we broke up. Anyway—”

  Anyway, after the lunch Heimrich had heard so damn much about, they had driven from the Inn to the Weaver house, in Annette’s car. Neither of them was drunk, but neither was entirely sober.

  “I got into the Porsche,” Brennan said. “She stood at the door and watched me. Then she began to laugh. Then she said, ‘Scaredy-pants.’ And then, ‘One more won’t hurt us, Jimmy boy. A toast to all the fun we used to have.’ So—well, I went back. She was a damn attractive woman, you know. And—anyway, I went back.”

  They had had another drink. “Which neither of us needed. And—you don’t have to guess, do you?”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You had your roll in the hay. So?”

  “Not a habit of mine,” Brennan said. “I’d rather you didn’t get that idea. A heel, maybe.
Feel like one now. But not that kind of a heel. Not a cheating heel. I suppose you don’t believe that?”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “Not a habit of yours. That one time only? With Annette, anyway.”

  “The only time with anybody. Since Leslie and I’ve been married, the only time. Believe it or not.”

  “All right. Go on. You did go to the Weaver house last night?”

  “What I’m getting to.”

  It was taking him time, Heimrich thought, and closed his eyes to listen.

  “Because she asked me to,” Brennan said. “Damn it, told me to. You see—”

  It came slowly; came, apparently, with difficulty. What Heimrich was supposed to see was that the one “roll in the hay” had not satisfied Annette Weaver. She wanted to go on with it, make a real affair of it. “All right, damn it, she had a yen for me. She was given to yens.”

  Brennan felt like a heel saying this; felt, hell, like a conceited jackass. But there it was. Whatever Heimrich thought about his telling it, there it was. “We went on with it or she told Leslie that—well, that we’d started it.”

  He did not, now, look at Heimrich as he told his story. He looked at the floor.

  “Les is—I don’t quite know how to put it. Tender. Vulnerable. It would have broken her up. Some women—oh, some women just tell themselves that men are men. You know how it is. Les isn’t tough like that. She’d just hide in herself. The way hurt animals are supposed to hide. I think she would have left me. And—Annette was a shrewd woman, M. L. She knew how I feel about Les. Les is the only thing that matters a damn. She—Annette I mean—could guess how it would hit Les. And—well, played on it.”

  Annette had called him at the office the afternoon before, Brennan told Heimrich. She had said, in effect, that she was getting tired of waiting for him to make up his mind. “She said, ‘You’d better come along, lover. Or maybe I’ll have to give that sweet little wife of yours an earful.’”

  “You believed she would have?”

  Brennan would not have put it past Annette Weaver to do just what she threatened.

  “So you went. To—call it satisfy this yen you say she had?”

  Brennan looked at Heimrich then, his gaze intent, his eyes seeming to demand belief.

  “No,” he said. “I was a damn fool one afternoon. Have hated myself since. Damn it all, man, I love Les. She’s the only thing that matters a damn to me. Didn’t you hear me tell you that?”

  “I heard you.”

  “I thought I could talk Annette out of it. Kid her out of it. Sometimes you could do that with her. She wasn’t—hell, there wasn’t anything vicious about her. She just wanted things her own way. She didn’t want to hurt people. Not really. Just to get what she wanted. Sometimes you could make her see things. I thought, yesterday, that maybe I could.”

  He had taken the early train. But it had been late, so he had not gained much time. “Five-oh-four had to stop behind us and wait for us to get out of the way.” He had got the Porsche out of the parking lot, just ahead of the rush which the five-oh-four always brought to the station. He had driven to the Weaver house. Well, not to it.

  He knew, he damn well knew, what a racket the Porsche made. He didn’t want to advertise his visit to Annette Weaver. “The Drakes flap their ears. The old lady particularly.” So, he told Heimrich, he had not driven up to the Weaver house. He had turned up the Drake fork of the driveway and backed the car into a seldom-used lane. The start of a farm—

  “I know the place,” Heimrich said. “The Drakes could have heard your car, Mr. Brennan. Or one they thought was yours. Then?”

  Brennan had, he said, cut across the field to the Weaver house—to the edge of the rough field, where it joined the mowed lawn around the house. But then he had seen the car and stopped.

  The car—a big car—was standing in front of the Weaver house. There was a light in the entrance hall of the house and the door was open, so that the light streamed out onto the terrace in front of the house. He had realized that Annette had someone there. So having a showdown with her was impossible.

  “Showdown?”

  “Talking to her. Kidding her out of it. Not any other kind of showdown.”

  “This car. You said a big car. What kind of a big car?”

  Brennan shook his head. It might have been any big car. There wasn’t much daylight left; it was beginning to drizzle. He wasn’t going to go up to the car and see what make it was. “Big as a Continental,” he said. “Or a big Caddy. Or an Imperial. Or, hell, an outsize Buick.” He had been looking at the floor again. He looked, again intently, at Merton Heimrich. “It wasn’t a Volks,” he said. “It would have made two of any Volks.”

  “People?”

  He had thought someone was sitting in the big car. He could not be sure, in the half light. No, he had not heard voices. He had seen nobody in the lighted entrance hall, or at the door. Yes, come to think of it, the big car had its parking lights on.

  “That,” Brennan said, “was the reason I waited around for quite a while. I thought maybe whoever was with Annette was about ready to leave and that I’d get a chance to talk to her.”

  He had waited, and the rain had begun to increase. And the car stayed there. Nobody came out of the house and got into it and drove it away. “Matter of fact, lights went on in the living room, and I decided that they’d moved in there for a drink.” He had finally given it up, and walked back through tall, wet grass to the waiting Porsche.

  “About when?”

  He had not looked at his watch. He thought around seven-fifteen. Maybe nearer seven-thirty.

  “It was nearer eight when people at the Drake house heard your car,” Heimrich told him and Brennan said, “Probably it was.” Heimrich waited.

  “Had trouble getting the baby started,” Brennan said. “Do sometimes when it’s damp. One of the reasons I took it in to Purvis this morning.”

  It had taken, he thought, perhaps fifteen minutes to get the Porsche’s motor going. It would start up, he said, and backfire and stall. Finally it got itself dried out, or whatever it did do to itself.

  At one time during his efforts to start the Porsche he had let it rest. “Thought maybe I’d flooded it.” During that short period he had realized he wasn’t the only one who was having motor trouble on a damp evening. The driver of the big car in front of the Weaver house was having trouble too. “Got a backfire,” Brennan said. “Heard it across the field. Don’t often get those any more from—”

  And he stopped. He looked at Heimrich.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “The sound of a shot can be rather like a backfire explosion, Mr. Brennan.”

  Brennan would be damned.

  The time?

  He shrugged his shoulders. He hadn’t looked at his watch; hadn’t during the whole of the time he had been near the Weaver house. At a guess, somewhere between seven-thirty and a quarter of eight. But perhaps earlier than that by a few minutes.

  A minute or two after he had heard what he had thought to be a backfire, he heard the motor of the car in front of the Weaver house start up. It had sounded all right. He had tried the Porsche again and this time it caught, and he had driven down the drive in it. At the fork, he had slowed down to let the big car go on ahead of him toward the road. No, he had not, with her guests gone, returned to the Weaver house for his “showdown” with Annette. It had been too late. Les would have begun to worry. He had told her he had missed his train.

  “The other way you told it,” Heimrich said, “she wasn’t there when you got home.”

  “She was,” he said. “I was—all right, lying to keep myself out of it. She’d got in, she said, about fifteen minutes before. Had been out showing a house.”

  “Did she believe you were late because you’d missed your train?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t she?”

  “No reason,” Heimrich said and added, “Then.”

  Brennan said he didn’t get it.

  “Then,” Heimrich sai
d, “she had no way of knowing Mrs. Weaver had been killed, had she? Since she wasn’t there. You talk any more about it this morning?”

  They had not. They had not talked about anything that morning. He had had an early appointment in town and caught an early train to keep it. He had made himself coffee and left his wife sleeping. He—

  He stopped speaking and looked at nothing, this time toward the ceiling.

  He said, “My God,” and spoke the words slowly. “You mean when she did hear about Annette—” He shook his head. “My God,” he said again, “she couldn’t have. She couldn’t have got it into her head that I—”

  X

  She wakened to darkness and bewilderment. She wakened to pain and for moments it seemed that the pain was everywhere. But then she knew that it was her head that hurt and she tried to move so that she could reach to her head and press where the pain was. She found it difficult to move; felt that she must be tied in the position to which she had awakened.

  He caught me, she thought dimly. Caught me and hit me and tied me here—here in the darkness. But it does not feel as if he took me somewhere, locked me up somewhere. I am not lying on the smoothness of a floor or on a bed. I am—

  She found that she could move. She felt around her and knew, from the touch of leaves and bushes, that she lay in the open. Then it came back; then she remembered running through underbrush, fighting bushes that tore at her, encountering and going around, climbing over, fallen trees. She remembered falling and trying to catch herself and the pain in her hands as she bruised them against whatever it was she had clung to. She remembered falling and putting out hands to catch herself and—

  She freed herself enough partly to sit up. She freed her hands. They were not bound; brush tangled them. She pressed one hand against her head, where the pain centered. Above her right eye the pain centered. There was a bump there. Her hand felt wet as she touched the pain, and the pain was suddenly sharp, where before it had been dull. I fell on something and cut myself, she thought. My hand feels wet because there is blood where the pain is. Where the bump is. I must have stumbled and fallen into this …