Risky Way to Kill

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “The next wall is pretty high,” he said. “And there’s a ditch beyond it. Most of them jump it, they tell me. Some use the gap. And the field beyond—it happened at the far end of it—is pretty rough. You’ll have to take it easy and, I guess, wait for me to catch up.” He looked at Heimrich. He said, “O.K., sir?”

  “You came up this way a year ago?” Heimrich asked him.

  “Me and Ned Bates,” Henderson said. “We made it, taking it easy. They brought the Jeep out the other way. Show you when we get there.”

  He went back to his motorcycle and rode ahead of them, much more slowly. This time the horses were content to trot; this time they were content, also, to go as reins told them, through the gap the snorting motorcycle used.

  The field they went into rose rather steeply and boulders heaved out of it, and there were some trees. In this field the meadow grass stood high. Mowed once, Heimrich thought. Probably early in July. Not raked for hay. There was mat under the tall grass. Mowed only, he thought, to reduce fire hazard.

  They picked their way across the field, the horses willing now to walk and inclined to look where they were going.

  At the top of the rise, the field leveled again, fifty yards or so from another stone fence. They stopped there and waited for Henderson, whose route was circuitous. He chugged up to them and braced his motorcycle.

  “About over there,” he said, and pointed ahead. He cut his motor. Heimrich swung down from the gelding and led him to a tree and looped the reins around the tree. He turned back and said, to Susan, “You can—” and stopped, because she was already off the mare and walking the horse toward the tree to which the gelding was tethered. The mare neighed, not loudly, and, tied, nuzzled Susan. The gelding merely snorted at Heimrich.

  “No,” Heimrich told him. “You can jump going back.”

  Henderson walked ahead of them through the tall grass. They walked side by side.

  “About here, I think,” Henderson said, and stopped in front of a stone wall and pointed.

  The wall here had fallen to some extent, as dry stone walls will. Stones had rolled off the top of it into the fields on either side. At places little was left of the wall except the foundation boulders—boulders which, a century ago—perhaps two hundred years ago—had been prised out of the earth and dragged into place on ox sleds.

  “Along here some place,” Henderson said, and waved a hand back and forth. “They can get a run after it levels off back there and it’s all right on the other side. But a good many of them go around.” He waved the hand to his right, where the wall was hardly more than the remnants of a wall.

  Heimrich walked up to the wall and looked at it, and there wasn’t anything to look at except an ancient wall that was tumbling down. He hadn’t supposed there would be. Where the wall stood as it had been built it was some three feet high. He looked over it. The field beyond was level; was pasture land again. There, just beyond the wall, the fallen stones had been gathered up and piled, loosely, against the wall. And on the other side there were scars where horses had come down.

  Normally, Heimrich thought, riders jumped only from the side he stood on. On this side the horses might land on loose stones and fall. If, as they said, the Wainrights had jumped back after their daughter had been thrown, they had taken a chance.

  Heimrich looked to his right. About a hundred yards away there was a fence at right angles to this one. It had been kept up. Stones which had fallen from it had been put back, flat stones on top. He walked toward this wall and Susan walked with him. Henderson came behind them.

  This wall, when they reached it, stood higher than the others had; there was a kind of formality about this wall. Beyond it, a field which sloped up had been mowed, although again not for the hay.

  The rough-mowed area reached for some two hundred yards up the slope. Then it became lawn, stretching up to a big house, fieldstone with clapboard above it.

  “Whose house?” Heimrich asked Trooper Henderson.

  “The Stirlings’,” Henderson said. “Used to be the Wainrights’. They sold it last winter. Too close to where it happened, people say.”

  “It is quite close,” Heimrich said. “A few minutes’ walk down from the house to this wall.”

  He leaned over the wall and looked down at the ground beyond it. He looked down at it for several minutes.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ve seen about all there is to see.”

  A stone wall against which a girl had been thrown, Susan thought. Stones against which a girl had died. Another wall at right angles to it, and, beyond, a house of fieldstone and white painted wood.

  Perhaps, she thought as they walked back to their horses, he’s seen more.

  8

  They rode back the way they had come, jumped the fences they had jumped before. But it is different going back, Susan thought. It isn’t so much like flying. He’s gone away; he’s gone back into his mind, the way he does. But it was merely old stone fences and fields and, beyond one of the fences, a big house.

  They hacked back to Jeff Brent’s stable. (Boarding. Horses for hire.) They slid down from their horses. Achilles turned and looked at Heimrich, and there was something familiar in the reproach Heimrich thought he saw in the horse’s sad brown eyes. He placed it. Achilles reminded him of Colonel. What, he wondered vaguely, had disappointed the big horse? Not enough fences jumped?

  Jeff Brent came out of the stable and gathered reins into his hands and led the horses into the stable. He came back and said, “Didn’t want them long, did you?” and told Heimrich what it would be. Heimrich paid him. He said, “We didn’t lather them up.” Brent said, “I didn’t think you would,” and started back toward the stable. Heimrich said, “Got a minute?” and Brent came back. He said, “Something wrong about the horses?” with challenge in his voice.

  “Fine horses,” Heimrich said. “Good jumpers, both of them.”

  “Wouldn’t win any prizes,” Brent said. “Jump all right. Hunters, both of them. What’s wanted around here.”

  “I wondered,” Heimrich said. “I haven’t ridden for a long time. Jumped a horse for years. What would make a horse refuse a jump?”

  “God knows,” Brent said. “They get notions, maybe. I sort of like horses, but nobody can say they’re very bright. Worked at Aqueduct when I was a kid. Exercise boy. Jockey told me there’s nothing so damned dumb as a horse. Said a horse would run smack into a stone wall if you didn’t guide him.”

  “I tried to guide Achilles toward a gap,” Heimrich said. “He didn’t guide. He wanted to jump.”

  “Trained for it,” Brent said. “Probably thought you didn’t mean it. Supposing he thought at all.”

  “About a horse refusing,” Heimrich said. “Suppose—oh, suppose just as a horse was gathering for a jump something stung him. Throw him off stride? Make him refuse?”

  “Shouldn’t think so,” Brent said. “Depends on the horse.” He looked intently at Heimrich. “Getting at something, Inspector?” he said. “About this horse threw the girl, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Say somebody shot a horse just as the horse was set to jump.”

  “Depends on where you shot him,” Brent said. “Kill him and he sure as hell wouldn’t jump.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I wasn’t thinking of a horse’s being killed, Mr. Brent. Just, say, stung. In the flank, maybe. With a small-caliber bullet. From, say, a rifle a hundred yards or so away.”

  “Never thought about it,” Brent said. “Depend on the horse, wouldn’t it? Horse like Achilles. Steady-going horse. Probably just think a fly bit him. Get a nervous horse, I wouldn’t know. Bad-tempered one, I wouldn’t know.” He paused for some seconds. “Stallions are mostly more jumpy than geldings. Or mares even. Get excited, sort of. What are you getting at, Inspector?”

  “I don’t know precisely what I’m getting at,” Merton Heimrich told Brent. “Just poking around, I suppose.”

  He walked over to the Buick, in which Susan was sitting. He beckon
ed Trooper Henderson, and Henderson walked over to the car.

  “I think we’ll stop by the substation for a minute,” Heimrich said. “Maybe you can rustle us up a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure thing,” Henderson said. “Sure thing, sir.”

  They followed him back through the village to the Brewster substation, Troop K, New York State Police. There was a uniformed trooper behind the desk there.

  “Trooper Bates,” Henderson said. “Inspector Heimrich, Ned.”

  Ned Bates stood up and stood stiffly and said, “Sir.” The telephone on the desk rang, and he sat down and said, “State Police, Trooper Bates.”

  “Get the coffee,” Henderson said and started toward a back room.

  “Fine,” Heimrich said. “Got a copy of the report you and Bates made on the Gant accident?”

  “Sure, Inspector,” Henderson said. “Want I should—”

  “Coffee first,” Heimrich said. “We’re not in any hurry.”

  Not, he thought, after a year. A year and three days. They sat on wooden chairs at a wooden table and after a few minutes Henderson came back with two cups steaming on a tin tray. He put the tray down on the table. He said, “It’s instant, sir. Get the report for you.”

  He went back into the rear room and Susan and Merton Heimrich sipped coffee. It was very hot and very strong. It was also very instant. Henderson came back carrying papers and put them down on the table and stood, erect, beside it. Heimrich said, “Sit down, Henderson,” and Trooper Henderson, rather stiffly, sat down. Heimrich read an accident report. “In response to a call from the residence of Paul Wainright, Wildwood Road, Brewster, proceeded—”

  It was official; it was reasonably terse. It reported that a girl named Virginia Gant, twenty years old, had been thrown from a horse into a stone wall and had died of head injuries; that she had been riding with her stepfather and her mother; that the horse, a stallion named Alex, had refused a jump and fallen and had broken a leg and had been destroyed.

  “All correct,” Heimrich said. “All right, Henderson, tell me what you remember. Who you talked to. Who was around.”

  “The doctor,” Henderson said. “Dr. William Benson. Wainright, a few minutes. He was shaken up. Kept saying something about ‘That damn horse. I kept telling her.’ Did tell us how it happened.”

  “Mrs. Wainright?”

  “Went to pieces,” Henderson said. “They took her upstairs —a colored maid they had and Dr. Benson.” He paused for a moment and said, “For a while we could hear her screaming. It—it was pretty bad, Inspector. Remember the way it was, Ned?”

  He asked that across the room to Trooper Bates at the desk.

  “I sure do,” Bates said. “I sure do, Inspector.”

  “Inspector,” Henderson said, “you think we slipped up on this? Ned and I? Hearing before a J.P., like always. Accidental death. You think we slipped up? It all looked simple enough.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Probably it was, Henderson. When you and Bates went to check it. Look at the place it happened?”

  “Sure, Inspector.”

  “Horse still there?”

  “There,” Henderson said. “Dead. Two bullet wounds in its head.”

  “Nothing else you saw?”

  “Broken right foreleg. We weren’t thinking much about the horse, sir.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “You went up to the house then?”

  “Yes. We’d left the car there. Came down across the field and over the wall. Went back up to the house and talked to the doctor and Mr. Wainright.”

  “The girl’s body was still there?”

  “Yes. They’d—they’d put a sheet or something over it. Ambulance came while we were there, and they took her to the hospital morgue.”

  “Other people around?”

  “Seemed like a lot,” Henderson said. “Couple of young men. One rather skinny and they called him Andy, way I remember it. He was shaky, almost crying. He kept saying, ‘I told her. I begged her.’ Something like that. And—they had her lying on a sofa and he knelt down by it and put his arms around her and—and his head down on her. It was—well, it was sort of tough, sir. And mixed up. The way things are when things like that happen.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Two young men. One of them named Andy. Broken up. The other?”

  “Kenneth something,” Henderson said. “Inspector, we asked them if they’d seen it happen and none of them had, except Mr. Wainright, who was riding beside her. And Mrs. Wainright according to her husband. She was in the next field, he said. The doctor wouldn’t let us talk to her. But anyway—”

  He shrugged his square shoulders.

  “No reason then to think it was different from the way Wainright said it was,” Heimrich said. “No real reason now, Henderson. Others there?”

  “The girl’s uncle,” Henderson said. “Man named Bruce Gant. Brother of the girl’s father, way I understood it. He was a ways ahead with the hunt and didn’t see anything. Says he heard the shots when Wainright killed the horse and came back to find out what had happened.”

  “Perceptive of him,” Heimrich said. “Lots of people shoot off guns around here. All around here. Shoot at woodchucks. At targets. At God knows what.”

  “I don’t know,” Henderson said. “Only that’s what he said.”

  “Good ears, probably,” Heimrich said. “Knew the shots came from near the house. Anyone else?”

  “A good-looking woman,” Henderson said. “Maybe in her thirties. Blonde. In riding clothes. Turned out she and this uncle—Bruce Gant, that’s his name—had been riding together and she came back when he did. They were both maybe two-three fields away when they turned back. Came back by a dirt road they use when they hay the fields.”

  “This other young man,” Heimrich said. “The one who wasn’t skinny. He’d been riding with the hunt?”

  “Not as far as where it happened,” Henderson said. “His horse pulled up lame and he walked him back to the stable.”

  “Brent’s?”

  “No. Stable at the Wainright house. Wainrights used to keep several horses. This Alex and maybe four others. Empty now, the stable there is. Wainrights sold off the horses when they sold the house. The Stirlings aren’t horsy people. Do a lot of traveling, they do. In Europe now. Told us the house would be empty, except for a man who drops in couple of times a week to check on it. So one of us stops around now and then and has a look.”

  “Then we won’t have to set it up with them,” Heimrich said, and Henderson said, “Sir?”

  “Tomorrow,” Heimrich said, “I’m going to send up a couple of men with rakes. Rake on the other side of that high wall. On the Stirling property.”

  “Rake?”

  “Just to see if they can find anything,” Heimrich said. “Been a year and the field’s been mowed a couple of times. Not likely they’ll find anything.”

  Henderson shook his head.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “like a cartridge case, naturally.” He raised his voice slightly and spoke across the room. He said, “Anything to add to it, Bates?”

  Bates stood up, stiffly. He said, “No, Inspector. It was like he says.”

  “Probably just the way it looked,” Heimrich said. “An accident.”

  He stood up and Susan stood, and Susan said, “Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Henderson.”

  At the door, Heimrich stopped and turned back. He said, “The local newspaper make a lot of this?”

  “Long story,” Henderson said. “Ed Wiley let himself go.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I supposed that. Man named Wiley edits the paper?”

  “Editor and publisher,” Henderson said.

  Heimrich closed his eyes for a moment. Then he walked back and said, “Got a telephone book handy?”

  They had a telephone book handy. Edwin Francis Wiley answered his telephone. Sure he’d be glad to drive in and meet them at the Sentinel office. About what, Inspector? Heimrich told him about what.

&
nbsp; “Lot of interest in that all at once,” Wiley said. “I could look up back issues, I guess. Thing is, I lent the morgue envelope to Bob Wallis, who gets out the Citizen over in Van Brunt. And last year’s file copies are down in the basement and—”

  “No need to bother,” Heimrich told him. “I know Mr. Wallis. Happens I live in Van Brunt, Mr. Wiley.”

  They drove back to Van Brunt. There was nobody at the office of the Citizen. They drove home. There was nobody there, either, except Colonel, disconsolate on the terrace. He made disconsolate sounds.

  “Michael was going to be picked up and taken to the club,” Susan said. “For tennis. And Mite’s gone off somewhere and poor Colonel’s deserted.”

  Colonel whimpered at being named in tones of sympathy.

  “Waffles all right for lunch?” Susan said. “The frozen ones you pop in a toaster? And sausage?”

  “You’ve had a hard morning with strange horses,” Heimrich said. “We can have lunch at the club.”

  “It’ll mean changing,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” Merton Heimrich said, “I guess it’ll mean changing, dear.”

  They changed to clothes suitable for a terrace lunch at the Van Brunt Country Club. They drove the winding, downhill, way to The Corners and turned right and drove, again on a winding road, uphill to the club. The club’s golf course, in the opinion of elder members, had been laid out by a mountaineer. Most of the shady tables on the terrace were occupied, and some people sat in the sun. The Heimrichs walked the path from parking lot to terrace, walking around carts for golf bags and carts (electrical) for people.

  Most of the people on the terrace looked as if they had stopped off for sustenance between the first nine and the second. The sustenance seemed to be largely liquid. At the edge of the terrace the Heimrichs stopped and looked for a shady table. “Summer’s staying late this year,” Susan said up to her tall husband. And Robert Wallis stood up from a table—a shady table—on the far side of the terrace and motioned to two shaded, empty chairs. He beckoned and they went between tables, exchanging “Hiyahs?” as they went.