The taproom was not nearly so empty as the dining room had been. Most of the tables around the wall were occupied, and most of the occupants were men. And at the end near the bar the dart game was still going on.
Florence Wainright stopped halfway across the room and looked down it at the men playing darts. She said, “Darts?” and then, on a note of pleased recognition, “Darts! I’ll have to tell Paul. I’m sure he doesn’t know.”
It was warm in the taproom. It was also smoky.
“Come on, dear,” Lyle said. “It will be better outside in the air. Better for your headache.”
Still with an arm around Florence Wainright’s waist, Lyle took part of a step toward the door. It was only part of a step because Florence took no step at all. She did sway somewhat. And then she moved forward, impelled by another arm—an arm on the other side from Lyle’s and around the blonde woman’s shoulders.
“Rather got your hands full, haven’t you, child?” Robert Wallis said, his voice grating down at her. “The lady’s stoned.”
“Head—” Lyle started to say and gave that up. “Mrs. Paul Wainright,” she said. “And she sure as hell is. Five bourbons. On top of what she had earlier in the afternoon.”
“Well,” Wallis said. “Well, well. Mrs. Wainright. What had you planned to do with her, child? She’s in no shape to drive.”
“Drive her home, I suppose,” Lyle said.
“And walk back?”
“Well. I—I don’t really know, Mr. Wallis. There’ll—I’m sure there’ll be somebody at the house. Although she says her husband’s in town. That’s why—”
“Later,” Wallis said. “Know which is her car?”
They were across the taproom, at the door which opened to the parking lot. There were two stone steps down to the ground, and they took her carefully down them.
“Your car, Mrs. Wainright?” Wallis said. “Which is your car?”
“Over there,” Florence Wainright said, making no gesture to indicate where “over there” might be. “It’s white with a black top. It’s—”
She seemed to run out of information about the car. She said, “Awful headache.”
“Yes, Mrs. Wainright,” Wallis said, his voice grating at her. “What kind of car? What make?”
“It’s a Buick,” Florence said. “Gran-something. It’s white and it has a black top and—”
There were not too many cars left in the parking lot, and one of them was a black and white Buick Skylark, with the letters “GS” on its tail. They walked to it and Wallis said, “This the one you mean, Mrs. Wainright? And have you got your key?”
She swayed a black handbag toward him.
“Have a look, will you, child?” Wallis said. “I get lost in the damn things.”
Lyle took the bag from Mrs. Wainright and had a look. She found a leather folder with two keys in it. She gave it to Wallis. He said, “Looks like the ones. Hold her up a minute.”
Lyle held Mrs. Wainright while Wallis opened the driver’s door of the black and white Buick and slid into it. He said, “Yeah,” and the car’s starter ground, and then the motor caught with a roar. The roar died a little but not a great deal. Wallis came back and put his arm again around Florence Wainright’s shoulders. “Lot of motor for a small car,” he said. “Idling rate’s up. Let’s get her into it.”
They got her into it.
“Know how to get there?” Wallis said.
Lyle said she knew how to get there.
“O.K., I’ll follow you,” Wallis said. He got behind the Buick’s wheel and the Buick’s lights went on.
It was three miles or so from Van Brunt Center to the house above the Hudson on Long Hill Road. It seemed farther to Lyle, as she steered the Volks up the steep hills of the narrow blacktop, around its many curves. When her lights caught the house they glittered back from windows which, she thought, had no lights behind them. Then she saw lights behind windows on the second floor. And the lights of the Buick behind her were sharp, immediate, in her mirror. She swung the Volks in the graveled turnaround, so that it headed back the way it had come.
The Buick did not swing. It pulled up straight to the steps of the porch, and its lights dimmed. Lyle dimmed her own lights and swung out of her little car and crossed to the Buick, going around it to the side where they had put Florence Wainright. Robert Wallis came out of the Buick and went around it with her, and suddenly there was all the light in the world. A powerful, flooding light had come on in the porch roof. A tall, square-shouldered man came out onto the porch.
“About time,” the tall man said and then looked at them and said, “Oh. Wainrights are out some place.”
He came down the steps from the porch.
“Mrs. Wainright is out right here,” Wallis said, his voice grating harshly. “You’re not Wainright, I gather?”
The tall man looked into the Buick at Florence Wainright, who did not look at anybody; who appeared to be deeply asleep. The tall man said, “Damn!” and then, “No, of course I’m not Wainright. Bruce Gant. The lady’s brother-in-law. Ex-brother-in-law, anyway. What’s the matter with her?” He leaned into the Buick and said, “Flo” raising his voice. He got no answer.
“Mrs. Wainright’s had a couple too many,” Wallis said. “Lend a hand, will you?”
“Hell of a note,” Gant said and lent a hand. The two men got Florence Wainright out of the car and onto her feet beside it. She walked a little, mostly was carried, to the porch steps and up them and inside the door Gant raised his voice and called, “Lucy! You, girl!” Lucy, still in uniform, came through a doorway at the rear of the entrance hall and said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Gant,” and then, “Oh, the poor dear lady.”
Lyle had followed Wallis and Bruce Gant and their burden up the porch steps and across the porch and into the house. She was not quite sure why. All in all, it was an entirely numbing evening. She stood just inside the door.
“We’d better get her upstairs, whoever you are,” Gant said, his voice still loud, as if Robert Wallis were some distance from him. “You, girl, show us where to take her.”
Lucy said, “Yes sir, Mr. Gant. She’s been getting these headaches recently.”
She went, quickly, up a staircase at the end of the foyer. The men lifted Florence Wainright off the chair they had put her on.
“I’m all right,” Florence said. “Headache.”
They got her up the stairs and turned out of Lyle’s sight. Lyle waited. After several minutes they came down the stairs.
“Where the hell’s Paul?” Gant said, at the foot of the staircase.
“In town,” Lyle said. “At least, Mrs. Wainright said he had a business appointment in town.”
“I know that, Miss—” Gant said and paused for a name and was given one. He turned to the man beside him and said, “You say your name’s Wallis.”
“Yes,” Wallis said, “I do say that. Come on, child. Our good deed’s-”
“Ought to have been here an hour ago,” Gant said. “Got him at their apartment in town and he said he was just leaving and for me to come on up here. What happened to Flo, you two?”
“She took Miss Mercer to dinner,” Wallis said. “As you see, she got drunk. She was lucky Miss Mercer was there to take care of her.”
“Look,” Gant said, “I’m sorry. She’ll be sorry tomorrow.”
“I,” Wallis said, “don’t doubt it at all, Mr. Gant. Come on, Miss Mercer.”
He moved toward the door. When he reached Lyle he put an arm around her shoulders. He said, again, “Come on.”
“Look,” Gant said, “get you both something. Way they’d want it.”
“Not for me,” Wallis said.
“Never saw Flo like this before,” Gant said, and crossed the foyer to them. “Never got like this at home.”
“She’s had a bit of a jolt,” Wallis said. “She’ll tell you about it. Or her husband will.” He paused a moment and looked at Gant, his head jutting at Gant. “Somebody brought her daughter’s death up. In a strange, devious
sort of way.”
“Brought it up?”
“They’ll tell you, probably,” Wallis said and, once more and with more emphasis, “Come on, Lyle.”
This time they went on. Halfway down the steep drive, Lyle had to pull almost off it as a car’s lights blazed at them. She stopped the Volks, and a much bigger car went past them.
“Husband, probably,” Wallis said.
Lyle drove the little Volks down the steep and winding and narrow road. She pulled it up in front of the two-story white building which housed the Citizen and, in an apartment on the second floor, the editor and publisher of the Citizen. She waited for Wallis to get out, but for some seconds he made no move to get out. Then he opened the door and put one foot out of it and stopped so and turned to her.
“Come on up for a minute,” he said. “Something I want to show you.” He laughed suddenly. “Not etchings, child,” he said. “Come on.”
She switched the Volks’ lights off.
7
Robert Wallis unlocked and opened a door and reached inside. He flipped up a light switch. Two lamps responded, and Wallis stepped back and said, “Go along in.” Lyle went into a square room which seemed to have more space than furniture —two low chairs and a sofa which did not match them, and, in front of the sofa, a large round low table on which books were strewn haphazardly. There were more books in shelves along two of the walls and, at an end of the room, a fireplace with logs symmetrically in it.
The lamps which had lighted when the switch was flipped were large, rather squatty, on small tables at either end of the sofa. There were tall, narrow windows, one with an air conditioner set into it, on either side of the fireplace.
“Sit down, child,” Wallis said, and gestured toward the sofa and Lyle sat where she was told to sit. “Be with you in a minute,” Wallis said and went through a doorway at the end of the room opposite the fireplace. He left the door open behind him, and Lyle, looking around the square room she had never seen before, heard the sound of what she took to be cupboard doors opening and closing again. Then Wallis came back with a tray with a bottle of cognac and two small glasses on it. He put the tray down on the round table, pushing books out of the way. He poured brandy into small green glasses.
“I don’t—” Lyle said, and stopped because he was shaking his head at her. He also jutted his head toward her.
“Must have had quite an evening,” he said. “Brandy’ll be good for you.”
He lifted his own glass and waited until she had lifted hers and sipped from it. Then he sipped from his own.
“Quite an evening,” he repeated. “Tell me about it, Lyle.”
“She called me up,” Lyle said. “Wanted to take me to dinner. Wanted to talk to somebody, she said. She was all right when she came in. But afterward—”
She told him of sitting across the table from Florence Wainright and of what she could remember of what Florence had said, while she still was speaking instead of crying.
“She was—oh, shaken up. Almost shaken apart. Because of having her daughter’s death brought up again the way it was. Because her husband had had to go to New York on business and had left her alone. After a time—after several drinks—she didn’t make too much sense.”
“Any idea why she picked on you? They’ve lived here a year or so. Must know people. You’d not met her before?”
“Not until I went to ask about the advertisement. No. I don’t know why, Mr. Wallis. Sometimes, my father says, it’s easier to talk to people you don’t really know than to friends. But I don’t know whether that’s true.”
“About her daughter’s death? That’s what she talked about?”
“A little. And about her husband and—oh, I don’t know. It all got fuzzy. And touching. And—all right, embarrassing. One thing she said, she thought whoever put the ads in the paper was hinting her daughter’s death wasn’t really an accident. But the ads didn’t hint at anything, did they? Just offered a wedding dress and a gun for sale.”
“And a bay horse,” Wallis said. “Wainright used a rifle to kill a bay horse. Here.”
He took a brown envelope out of a jacket pocket.
The envelope had, “Gant, Virginia,” typed on it and, in parentheses, “Wainright.”
“Brewster Sentinel morgue,” Wallis said. “Drove over this afternoon and borrowed it.”
He took newspaper clippings out of the envelope. One of the clippings was long; attached to it, at right angles, was a long strip. On the strip, in large type, she read: “HEIRESS DIES IN HUNT ACCIDENT.”
“Read it,” Wallis said. “Not too much about the accident that Heimrich didn’t tell us. But read it.”
She read:
A hunting accident, unique in the annals of the Brewster Hunt Club, cost the life of one of its members early Tuesday morning. For years the hunt has ridden to the hounds, jumping the low stone fences, crossing the green fields of the open land around our community without mishap. The hunt has become a tradition, carrying on the sport pursued by the ancestors of many of our leading citizens, and reaffirming the rural character of the town.
She looked up and Wallis’s smile seemed to slit his face into another face. He nodded his head.
“Goes on that way for several paragraphs,” Wallis said. “Carrying on a tradition himself, Ed Wiley is. Years ago the same paper—another publisher but the same paper—ran a story which used half a column to explain the safety of a gas heater before it got around to reporting that one of them had blown up on Main Street and killed two people and set a building on fire. Quite a curio in the trade. Only takes Ed four paragraphs to get to the accident.”
Lyle read:
The victim of the tragic accident Tuesday morning was Miss Virginia Gant, 20. She was the daughter of the late Robert Lee Gant, of Virginia, and the former Mrs. Gant, now the wife of the distinguished architect, Paul Bryson Wainright. According to Mr. Wainright, who was riding with his stepdaughter, her bay hunter, Rex, refused a jump. Miss Gant, although an accomplished rider, was thrown into a stone wall and suffered head injuries from which, according to Dr. William Benson, who was riding with the hunt, she died almost at once.
Lyle looked up again.
“No,” Wallis said, “nothing about the accident we hadn’t heard. Skim down. About the bottom of the first column.”
He leaned toward her and ran a finger down the clipping. He said, “There,” and stopped the finger’s movement. Lyle read:
Miss Gant was engaged to be married to Andrew Pointer, a writer, and the wedding had been tentatively set for next June, a few weeks after Miss Gant would have attained her twenty-first birthday, at which time she would have inherited a trust fund set up in her behalf by her late father, a wealthy retired corporation head. The exact amount of the trust fund has not been revealed, but is reported to be in excess of one million dollars.
Mr. Pointer was a house guest of the Wainrights at the time of the fatal accident, as was Bruce Gant, younger brother of the late Robert Lee Gant. He ...
Lyle came to the end of the column. Another strip of newsprint was clipped to it.
... was riding with the hunt, but was several fields in advance of Miss Gant and her mother and stepfather. Mr. Pointer, who is the author of several television shows and at present of an afternoon TV serial entitled “In Dead of Night,” was not with the hunt, but was working in a guest room in the Wainright house.
Mrs. Wainright is prostrated by her daughter’s death, according to Dr. Benson, and is under sedation. Mr. Wainright, who rode back to the scene after helping to return his stepdaughter’s body to the house she had left so gaily an hour or so before and destroyed the injured horse, the unwitting cause of his mistress’s death, was likewise not available to the Sentinel reporter.
Lyle looked up again and found that Wallis was sitting very close, reading with her.
“Yes,” Wallis said. “Good example of how not to write, isn’t it? And everybody comes out well, including the horse named ‘Rex.’ Go
ahead.”
She went ahead:
Mr. Bruce Gant acted as spokesman from the bereaved family. It was from him the Sentinel learned of Miss Gant’s prospective inheritance. Mr. Gant, together with Mrs. Wainright and a Warrenton, Virginia, bank, had served as trustee for the fund set up in Miss Gant’s behalf. According to Mr. Gant, his niece would have received the principal sum, which he declined to estimate, on her twenty-first birthday. It is his understanding that the principal now reverts to Virginia’s mother and, in smaller part, to himself.
“Not that I want it,” Mr. Gant told the Sentinel. “Not this way —not through dear Ginnie’s death, God knows.”
From other sources, the Sentinel learned that Bruce Gant inherited the several hundred acres of the Gant estate at the time of his brother’s death. The estate, in the rolling country of Virginia, has been in the Gant family since before the Civil War. Mr. Bruce Gant is a well-known breeder of hunters and operates the hereditary estate as a highly successful horse farm. He also breeds thoroughbreds, one of which finished third in the Kentucky Derby three years ago. One of his hunters, ridden by Mr. Gant himself, was the winner of a recent jumping contest held in northern Connecticut.
Funeral services for Miss Gant were to have been held today (Thursday) at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. The body will be taken to Virginia for burial in the Gant private cemetery.
Lyle put the clip down in her lap and Wallis looked at her and waited. When she did not speak for several seconds he said, “Make you think of something?”
She still was silent for several seconds.
“While she was still making some sort of sense,” Lyle said, “Mrs. Wainright said something about her husband’s not having to work so hard. She said, ‘Particularly now, the way things are now.’ And she said the same thing—pretty much the same thing—a moment later. Something like, ‘There’s so much money now.’”
Wallis jutted his aggressive head again, this time away from Lyle Mercer. Then he nodded.
Risky Way to Kill Page 7
