Risky Way to Kill

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

When they went in from the terrace to the big living room of the house which once had been a barn, Merton Heimrich lighted the fire. They did not really need a fire, although the temperature had gone down with the sun’s going. But a fire is a pleasant thing to sit in front of and have dinner in front of. After dinner, Michael said, “Mother. Dad. There’s a folk-song program I’d rather—”

  “Channel Thirteen?” Susan said.

  He looked at her through grave gray eyes and said, “Well—yes, Mother.” Then he said, “I beat Tom Wilson today, Dad. The first time I ever have. Seven-five.”

  “That’s fine,” Merton Heimrich said.

  “Only,” Michael said, “we played another and he won it. Six-three.” He paused again. “The leaves are getting all over the courts,” he said. “You get funny bounces. It’s the ash trees, mostly.”

  “Ash leaves fall early,” Heimrich said.

  “I guess they do,” Michael said. He pushed his chair back from the table and looked at the watch on his wrist.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “Don’t miss it, Michael.”

  Michael stood up and Colonel, with evidently more difficulty, heaved up from in front of the fire. Michael said, “No, Colonel. You know you don’t like folk songs.”

  Colonel looked at god from reproachful brown eyes.

  “No,” Michael said, “all you do is whimper at them. Why don’t you go find your cat?”

  Colonel gave a very small woof and thumped down again. He put his head on his outstretched forepaws and looked up sadly, a rejected dog.

  “Quit acting,” Michael Faye told the dog. He said, “Good night, Mother. Good night, Dad,” and went down the big room toward the room of his own, and the portable TV, also of his own. After a minute or two they could hear, muted and distant, music from the television set. It was folk music, all right. It sounded as if the folk were very sad.

  “Can you ride a horse?” Merton Heimrich asked his wife, who said, reasonably enough, “What on earth, Merton?”

  “Just, can you ride a horse?”

  “If you mean jump one over a stone wall—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Look at a stone wall, maybe. Can you?”

  “Not since I was quite a little girl,” Susan said. “My father sent me to riding school. It was a long time ago. Merton. We had one horse. And a stable with six stalls. I don’t know whether I still could.”

  “Probably,” Merton said, “it’s like riding a bicycle. Or skating. They say—”

  “I know what they say, dear. Probably they’re wrong. Anyway, I haven’t got the right clothes and we haven’t got a horse.”

  “We can rent horses,” Heimrich said. “And slacks will be all right.”

  “Probably I’ll fall off,” Susan said. “When? And, I suppose, over near Brewster?”

  “You can hold on tight,” Heimrich said. “Tomorrow morning, I think. Yes, over near Brewster.”

  “You said,” Susan told him, “that there wasn’t anything you could do. That it wasn’t a matter for police action. You’ve changed your mind?”

  “It began to bother me a little after they’d gone,” Heimrich said. “That is, something began to puzzle me. Why a telescopic sight?”

  She raised eyebrows above gray eyes so like her son’s. She shook her head.

  “In the want ad,” Merton said. “A gun with a telescopic sight.”

  “And,” Susan said, “in the other one a wedding dress they say never existed. And a bay stallion.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And a bay stallion. Who’s dead, I think. Dead and long buried. Who was shot in the head a little more than a year ago because he had a broken leg.”

  Susan said, “I was listening too, darling. I still don’t—”

  “If you’re going to kill an injured horse,” Heimrich said, “you walk up to him and put a gun against his head and pull the trigger. You don’t need a telescopic sight for that. You don’t need any sight at all.”

  “I don’t know anything about guns,” Susan said. “I don’t want ever to know anything about guns. I don’t think there ought to be any.”

  “They come into your husband’s trade, dear,” Heimrich told her. “As long as we let other people have them.”

  “What they could do,” Susan said, “is to make it illegal to sell ammunition. Except to policemen and, I suppose, armies. Then they could keep their guns. Or they could fight wars, if they insist on fighting wars, with bows and arrows.”

  “Yes, dear. And people die of arrow wounds. And it’s not too difficult to make gunpowder. You’d go some place and knock on some door and say, ‘Nick sent me.’ They’d run ammunition in from Canada.”

  “You make it sound hopeless.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “it would probably be very inferior gunpowder, dear. Half the time it wouldn’t go off. Will you ride horseback with, me tomorrow?”

  “I could just—oh, go to church or something.”

  “A canter in the cool of the morning,” Heimrich said. “And if your horse bolts, I’ll gallop after you and pluck you from the saddle.”

  “All right,” Susan said. “Maybe it will rain. Can you ride, darling?”

  “When I was a very young trooper,” Heimrich said. “In the western part of the state. They made us learn. Maintain a tradition.”

  “You!” Susan said. “Before the invention of the internal-combustion motor, I suppose.”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “there were a few cars wheezing around the roads. And we rode motorcycles a bit. Yes, I think I can still ride a horse. If they can find one big enough.”

  She laughed at that. Then, gravely, she said, “Yes, m’lord, I will ride with you tomorrow.”

  They had left the front door open to moderate the heat from the fire they didn’t need but liked to look at. The screen of the door rattled loudly. The big black cat named Mite banged halfway up and clung and yowled. Colonel got up and went to the door and looked up at the cat and woofed at him. Then Colonel turned and woofed at Merton and Susan Heimrich. There was reproach in his woof, and a little urgency.

  “Yes, Colonel,” Susan said. “I know he’s stuck. He’ll never learn.” Then she said, “All right, Mite. I’m coming.”

  Mite said, “Wow-ow!” He shook the screen.

  When cats jump against a screen door, to indicate that they have come home and would like to get in at once, their claws get stuck in the screening. It is quite true that they are slow to learn this and are disconcerted by it.

  Susan opened the screen door, with Mite on it, and Mite made sounds indicating agony. Slowly, a claw at a time, Susan disengaged the big black cat. He wriggled for a moment in her arms and then began to purr. She carried him into the big room and put him down beside Colonel, who put his tongue in a licking position for his cat who had been in peril. Mite, who prefers to lick himself, said, “Yah,” and went off at a trot toward the kitchen to see if he had left himself any dinner. There was a distant crunching sound as he ate his “bullets,” which, after finishing his junior beef, he left for emergencies.

  Susan closed the front door and went back to the fire and said, “I suppose at the crack of dawn?”

  “In the cool of the morning,” Merton told her.

  “I ought to have jodhpurs,” Susan said. “When I was a little girl, when I was the Upton brat, I had jodhpurs. My father thought they went with horses. But some of the girls wore overalls.”

  Heimrich said, “Yes, dear. You’re fine in slacks. The horses won’t mind.”

  “Be disdainful, probably,” Susan said. “When does dawn crack?”

  “An hour or so to Brewster,” Heimrich said. “Say leave about eight?”

  “It’ll be Sunday,” Susan said. “But all right.”

  “Set it up,” Merton said, and crossed the room to the telephone. He dialed. He said, “Heimrich. Put me on to the Brewster substation, will you?” He was put on to the Brewster substation, New York State Police, and got, “State Police, Trooper Henderson,” and, when Heimri
ch identified himself, “Sir!” An inspector, Heimrich was learning, gets a more intense “Sirl” than a captain.

  “Some place around there my wife and I can rent horses tomorrow morning?” Heimrich said.

  “Jeff Brent’s,” Trooper Henderson said. “Shall I set it up, Inspector?”

  “Appreciate it,” Heimrich said. “Nine-thirty or thereabouts. Tell them to make mine a big one.”

  Henderson said, “Sir.” Then he said, “You come by the station, Inspector, and I’ll guide you over. It’s a little complicated. Up toward Carmel, but there are a couple of turnoffs.”

  “A little after nine,” Heimrich said, and put the telephone in its cradle.

  Susan wasn’t in the room. She had pulled the screen in front of the dying fire and her heels were clicking from the bedroom.

  Heimrich turned off the lights and went toward their bedroom, hoping that Jeff Brent would have a big horse—a horse big enough for a hippopotamus. He also hoped that he had not forgotten how to ride a horse....

  Trooper Henderson, who was tall and in his twenties and immaculate in his uniform, stood at attention in the stationhouse and said, “Ma’am. Sir. Trooper Henderson.” He looked as if he were about to salute the big man in a turtle-neck sweater and gray slacks and the slender, gray-eyed woman in a yellow pull-over and dark green slacks. He did not salute, but his eyes flickered briefly when he looked at Susan. Most men’s eyes flicker slightly when they look at Susan Heimrich, who is built for the wearing of slacks.

  Henderson went ahead of them on a motorcycle—went along the Brewster Main Street, which ended in a railroad station, turned right there and, after a few blocks, left where a sign pointed to Carmel, New York. The Buick followed the motorcycle around several turns and on roads which grew more and more narrow. They stopped at a long building with a sign, “Brent’s Boarding Stable,” beside it, and a horse neighed inside the stable and a thick-set, gray-haired man came out of it and said, “Hiyah, Frank boy. All set.”

  The Heimrichs, with the car pulled into parking space, got out of it. Henderson said, “Inspector Heimrich, Jeff. Mrs. Heimrich.” Brent said, “Hiyah, folks. I’ll bring ’em out.”

  “I hope they’re gentle,” Susan said, and Jeff Brent said, “Like lambs, lady,” and went into the stable. He was gone several minutes. He came out leading a big black horse with a white blaze on his forehead. Behind him, a boy of about fifteen led a brown mare. Both horses were saddled.

  Susan stroked the mare’s nose and the mare made a small gurgling sound, evidently of approval. The big black gelding looked at Heimrich, Heimrich thought with reproach.

  Brent looked at the mare and at Susan and said, “Shorten the stirrups for you a little, Mrs. Heimrich. We call her Lady.”

  Susan said, “Good morning, Lady.” Brent shortened stirrups. The gelding continued to look thoughtfully at Merton Heimrich. “We call him Achilles,” Brent said, over his shoulder, shortening a stirrup. “Man I bought him of called him that.” He straightened up. He said, “Don’t make any difference to him, I’ve noticed. How long will you be wanting them, Inspector?”

  “A few hours,” Heimrich said, and watched Susan swing up on the mare. She leaned down and stroked the mare’s neck. The mare went part way up on her hind legs and came down again and turned her head and looked at Susan, who sat lightly and with assurance as the horse moved. “Good girl, Lady,” Susan said to the horse.

  I ought to have brought a stepladder, Merton thought and said, “Good boy, Achilles,” and put a foot in a stirrup, and it all came back to him and he swung up lithely. Achilles, Heimrich thought, shrugged his shoulders—probably as part of a sigh —but made no other comment.

  “All I say is, don’t get them lathered up too much,” Brent said up to Heimrich.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You board horses for people around here, Mr. Brent.”

  “What it says,” Brent said and pointed to his sign.

  “Man named Wainright ever board a horse here?” Heimrich asked. “Bay stallion? Named Alex, I think.”

  “Nope. Not that I don’t know the horse you’re talking about. One who balked a jump and threw that Miss Gant into a stone wall. That the one you mean?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “House Wainright had has got its own stable,” Brent said. “People named Stirling own the place now. Don’t ride as I know of, the Stirlings don’t.”

  “So you don’t know anything about the stallion Miss Gant was riding.”

  “Nope. Sure, after it happened, people said he was a bad actor. Bad-tempered. Nervous sort of horse. Could be he was. Can’t say there was any talk about him before it happened.”

  “Did you know Miss Gant at all?”

  “Met her. Pretty kid. Damn shame about it.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Could she ride well, do you know?”

  “Like she was part of the horse,” Brent said. “Like she was glued to the horse.”

  “Where the accident happened,” Heimrich said. “Far from here?”

  “Two-three miles,” Brent said. He looked up at Heimrich and his eyes narrowed slightly. He said, “Frank calls you ‘Inspector.’ What kind? Police?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Brent said. “I’ll sure as hell be damned.”

  Heimrich didn’t say anything to that, not knowing Brent well enough to predict his future.

  “Up the road half a mile or so,” Brent said, “there’s a gap. On your right. You turn in there and it was two-three fields on across.”

  Trooper Henderson, who had been sitting on his motorcycle with one foot on the ground, said, “Four fields, more like it, Jeff. I’ll show them. Probably get the bike through most of the way. Did before when we were checking things out.”

  He started his motor. Achilles twitched slightly, disapproving the noise. He was, Heimrich thought, a rather disapproving horse.

  Henderson went up the road slowly, keeping just off the narrow shoulder. They hacked after him, Susan ahead on the brown mare. Damn it, Heimrich thought, she rides beautifully. Glad she’s not watching me.

  She did, then turning in the saddle. He rides as if he were part of the horse, Susan thought. And probably goes on thinking of himself as a hippopotamus.

  After what Heimrich guessed to be a little less than half a mile, Henderson gestured and turned his motorcycle into a path which led to a gap in the stone wall. The path showed the marks of horses’ hooves. Susan’s mare followed the motorcycle, not needing to be guided. The mare had, Susan thought, been this way many times before. The big gelding followed the mare through the gap in the dry stone wall and into a wide, almost level, field which had once, Heimrich thought, been a pasture.

  The field had not, he thought, been plowed for a century or so. The undulations a plow makes in soil remain long after the last furrow has been made. This stretching field was level—level enough for a motorcycle to cross it without jouncing much.

  Henderson went ahead across the field, toward a distant low stone wall. On either side of the field, which was almost square, stone fences marked its boundaries.

  In the field, the mare named Lady began to trot, with softness under her hooves. The gelding trotted; caught up and trotted beside Lady. The sun was bright on them as they rode side by side across the field, and Susan turned in her saddle and said, “I’d forgotten how good it can be. Let’s join the hunt, Merton.”

  “I’d have to get a pink coat,” Merton Heimrich said. “I’d look like hell in a pink coat.”

  And they both laughed, about nothing in particular.

  Fifty yards from the boundary fence, Henderson signaled and veered toward the right—veered, Heimrich could see, toward a gap. Heimrich pulled lightly on the right rein, and the black gelding slowed to a walk and then turned his head and looked back at Heimrich. Heimrich said, “Get along, Achilles. The way I tell you.”

  The mare saw the fence and changed from trot to gallop. Heimrich yelled, “Hey!” to Susan and not
hing came of it—nothing except that the gelding went into a trot after the mare and then, like her, into a gallop. He moved like a horse who was going to take no nonsense from anybody. Fences, Achilles thought—too evidently thought—are to jump. Gaps are for motorcycles.

  Heimrich thought for an instant of reining the big horse in and realized, in the same instant, that it was too late for that. It was no time to change the big gelding’s mind, assuming the big gelding had a mind to change. It was a time to tighten human knees.

  The mare soared up, clearing the fence by several feet. She sits the horse as if the horse were a rocking chair, Heimrich thought, and felt the gelding rise under him. Then he and horse, still together, were galloping in another level field, Susan on her mare a hundred feet or so ahead.

  Susan reined her horse down to a trot, and, beside Lady, Achilles, also was content to trot.

  “It’s like flying,” Susan said and Heimrich said, “Hmmm,” and then, “There was a gap.”

  “Gaps are for motorcycles,” Susan said and he had never, Heimrich thought, seen her more gay. He also saw that across the field, two hundred yards or so away, there was another stone wall. This field, Heimrich thought, had been hayed, as had the other. Probably, since there had been enough rainfall during the summer, hayed twice.

  Henderson came across the field diagonally on his motorcycle, bouncing a little.

  “There was a gap,” Henderson called to them, his voice raised above the racket of his motor, strangely loud in the open field—strangely alien to the open field.

  “Our horses don’t like gaps,” Susan called to him and patted the mare’s neck. “They think gaps are dull.”

  They went on across the field. Ahead of them Henderson swerved off again, this time to the left. It had been a little like flying, Heimrich thought, and let the big gelding have his head. Presumably, the horses had been this way before; been this way many times before. Presumably they knew that there was safe landing beyond the stone fences. Presumably—

  Again it was rather like flying—flying on a resolute and assured horse after his suddenly so gay wife, so erect in her saddle, so light in it.

  This field was like the first two, but not as level. They slowed their horses to a walk in it and waited for Henderson to snort up to them. The motorcycle bounced a good deal this time, and he gestured to them and they slowed their horses and then reined them in. Henderson braced his motorcycle and walked over to them.