Risky Way to Kill

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Sometimes, when the refuse men collect, things fall out,” Lyle said. “Lose things. Pieces of paper and things like that.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and picked the envelope up. He stretched it between his hands to flatten it. He read, typed on the face of the envelope, “Advertising Department, The Van Brunt Citizen, Van Brunt, New York.”

  There was no return address on the envelope. It was postmarked “New York, N.Y. Grand Central Station. P.M.” The date was blurred.

  “Mrs. Allsmith is almost sure it’s one of the envelopes the ads came in,” Lyle said. “She remembers because it says ‘Advertising Department’ instead of the usual way, which is ‘Want Ads.’ And Bob—that is, Mr. Wallis—says if there’s a sample of the typing, the typewriter can be identified.”

  “Usually,” Heimrich said. “Particularly if the typewriter has been used for some time. If letters get a little out of line.” He turned on his desk light and put the envelope under it and moved it this way and that; lifted it so the light was brightest on it. “The ‘n’ is a little out of line,” he said. “I’m not a technician, but probably the lab boys could identify the typewriter that was used.”

  “Not all the letters,” Lyle said. “‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ would be better, wouldn’t it?”

  Heimrich, who also had learned typing in a high-school class —probably, he thought morosely, before this pretty child was born—agreed that “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” would provide a better sample, make things easier for the technicians. Supposing they found a typewriter that was suspect.

  “Whatever this Mr. Pointer says,” Lyle said, “Mr. Wallis thinks he—”

  Heimrich smiled at her. He said, “Yes, Miss Mercer, I gathered he does.”

  Color came up into the young face across his desk. The young are easily embarrassed; many of the young blush quickly when they feel they have been gauche.

  “I’m sorry, Inspector,” Lyle Mercer said. She was told there was nothing to be sorry for. “We thought you’d want to see it,” Lyle said. “Because he’s so very proud of the newspaper and thinks it’s been made party to a trick. To an unpleasant trick.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “I understand how he feels, Miss Mercer.”

  She stood up then. She said, “I’ll be late.”

  Heimrich stood behind his desk. He said, “I imagine he’ll wait for you, Miss Mercer.”

  “Yes,” Lyle said. “Maybe he’ll be cross. A good many writers are cross. But he’ll wait.” She went to the door and turned, with her hand on the knob. She smiled suddenly. “I wish I liked German food,” she said and opened the door and went. Heimrich lighted another cigarette and poured more coffee into his cup from the glass jug it had come in. A trooper came and took papers from the OUT basket. He did not bring papers for the IN basket. Heimrich flattened the somewhat crumpled, rather dirty envelope on his desk and looked at it. It had not changed. The letter “n” was still a little out of line. Each of the six times it appeared it was out of line. It wasn’t, probably, so because the key to which it responded had been pressed in a peculiar, perhaps halfhearted, fashion. And if whoever had typed the address was a touch typist, he had pressed the “n” key with his right index finger, which for most people is strong and sure.

  A wisp, Heimrich thought. A wisp of the intangible, almost certainly leading to nothing. Brush away the wisp, which has no place in the mind of an inspector, who should direct and delegate and not get notions. I’ve wasted enough time on this, Heimrich thought. Paid out my own money to hire horses. Susan rides a horse as if she had ridden every day since she was a little girl. And it’s been years since she was on a horse. If I were still a captain I’d have gone myself to check out this suicide, with no contact wound and a bullet in the head. And his car missing from where it should have been. Not that Ray Crowley isn’t a bright young man; won’t find out what there is to find out.

  If there were a big one in the works, I wouldn’t sit here frittering mind and time away, Heimrich thought. I wouldn’t be chasing wisps of nothing. A girl died in an accident a year ago and somebody played a cruel practical joke and a middle-aged woman is upset and drinks too much. The troopers didn’t find anything out of the way a year ago. And the county coroner didn’t find anything out of the way. There isn’t anything out of the way.

  Heimrich got up and flicked a Manhattan telephone directory. “Pointer Andrew” with a number and an address in the East Thirties. He went back to his desk and got an outside line and dialed the number. After four rings he got, “’Lo?” in what amounted to a growl.

  “Mr. Pointer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Inspector Heimrich, State Police. I’d like to see you for a few minutes this afternoon.”

  “Look,” Pointer said, “I’m working. And I’ve got a deadline. And what the hell do you want to see me about? I can’t take an afternoon traipsing up to wherever you are. What’s it about, anyway?”

  “Want ads in the Van Brunt Citizen.”

  “God damn it to hell,” Pointer said. “Somebody said he was a newspaper man called in the middle of the night about those damn things. I don’t know a damn thing about them. I told this guy I didn’t. One of you people pretending to be a newspaper editor?”

  “No, Mr. Pointer. A newspaper editor who thinks his paper has been involved in a nasty trick. Upset about it, he is. And I’m not asking you to come to the barracks. I’ll come around and see you.” Heimrich looked at his watch. “About two-thirty,” he said.

  “How many times do I have to tell you I work for a living? And’ve got a deadline.”

  “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes,” Heimrich said. “After all, I work for a living, too. Two-thirty?”

  “I’m damned if I see—”

  “Two-thirty,” Heimrich said, in a tone suitable to an inspector, New York State Police. He put the receiver back in its cradle.

  It would, he thought, be interesting to see whether Andrew Pointer let him in or, however busy he was, however immediate his deadline, went out at about two-thirty and had a drink. Or didn’t answer his doorbell. If he had not sent the want ads in, he might well do either. If he had sent them in, he’d probably let a police inspector in at two-thirty to insist he hadn’t.

  Heimrich walked down a corridor to Charles Forniss’s smaller office. Forniss was saying, “Yep,” into his telephone. He said it several times. He said, “All right, go ask him, then,” and put the receiver back and looked up at Heimrich.

  “I’m going into town for a couple of hours, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Like you to sort of sit in for me.”

  Forniss said, “O.K., M.L.”

  “I’ll tell them at the desk,” Heimrich said. “If all hell breaks loose, you can probably reach me at—” and gave Forniss Pointer’s telephone number. Forniss wrote it down.

  If he lets me in, Heimrich thought, backing his car out of its marked slot. He probably knows he doesn’t have to.

  He drove his own car—his wisp-chasing had already cost the State of New York enough in telephone tolls—around Hawthorne Circle and down the Saw Mill River Parkway. Traffic thickened on the Henry Hudson and thickened more on the West Side Highway, and it was slow going crosstown. He had to park a block away from the street number he wanted and walk back. But it was a fine, crisp day; a northwest wind was making the city hard-edged and bright. October can be the best of the city’s months.

  The house he wanted was a four-story “brownstone.” It was built of brick, as “brownstones” so often were. In the entry hall Heimrich found a button and pushed on it. Floor-through apartments, he gathered from the spacing of the buttons. Andrew Pointer on the top floor. He waited and pushed the button in again. He held it there, his hope diminishing. But then the inner door lock clattered at him. He climbed three flights of stairs and pressed another button.

  The man who opened the door was slight. He wore a yellow sports shirt and blue slacks and canvas shoes. He h
ad thick brown hair and he wore it rather long. He did not, however, wear a beard. He had a clean-lined face; a broad forehead and widely spaced brown eyes. Heimrich guessed he was in his mid-twenties. Heimrich said, “Mr. Pointer? Heimrich.”

  “You’ve sure as hell loused up my afternoon,” Pointer said. “I don’t know a damn thing about these want ads you people are making so much over. But come on in.”

  Heimrich followed Pointer down a short corridor and into a long room with floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of it. Between the tall windows, set on a stand so that the light would fall on the keyboard, was a portable typewriter. There was paper in the typewriter and loose sheets on the stand beside it.

  After he had gone halfway down the room, Pointer turned suddenly and faced Heimrich. He said, abruptly, “What’s all this fuss about a couple of want ads?”

  “Apparently,” Heimrich said, “they were meant to stir up a fuss. Mr. Wallis—he was the one who called you last night—told you about the ads?”

  “I guess so,” Pointer said. “It wasn’t very clear. Something about a wedding dress for sale. And a horse and a gun.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Signed by Paul Wainright. On the typewriter. He says he didn’t mail them in.” He paused for a moment. “Whoever sent them in stipulated that they be printed on the anniversary of Miss Gant’s death.”

  For a moment, Andrew Pointer’s face worked. He said, “God damn it to hell. Oh, God damn it.”

  There was strain in his voice. It was, Heimrich thought, strain of memory—of bitter memory.

  Pointer turned away from Heimrich abruptly and walked over to a chair and sat down in it. He dropped in it. He put his hands up to his face, covering his eyes. Without taking his hands down he said, “Oh, sit down somewhere.”

  Heimrich sat in a chair, facing Pointer. After a few seconds, Pointer took his hands down.

  “All right,” Pointer said. “Is that what you want? To break me up? So, all right, I loved Ginnie and she loved me and we were going to get married. Anything you understand, Inspector whatever-it-is?”

  “Heimrich. Yes, I understand, Mr. Pointer. It was a shock, naturally. A bad shock. To you. To her mother and stepfather. To a good many people.”

  “Shock, hell,” Pointer said. “It was horrible. She was gay and young and—” He broke off. “To hell with it,” he said. “Maybe you’re used to people getting killed.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I’m not used to it, Mr. Pointer.”

  Pointer looked at him as if he were waiting.

  “That’s all,” Heimrich said. “It’s nothing one gets used to, Mr. Pointer. In the sense that violent death gets to be acceptable. You didn’t send those want ads in?”

  “I told this editor who was so worked up about it.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Suppose you tell me. Just, flatly, that you didn’t send in the want ads. Because Mr. Wallis, after he’d talked to you, felt you hadn’t been definite. He called back to check with you and you didn’t answer. Way you remember it, Mr. Pointer?”

  “I guess so. All right, I’d been to a party and maybe I was a little fuzzy. Why the hell should I send in want ads like those? What would be the point?”

  “To hurt Mr. and Mrs. Wainright. To—say, take your own bitterness about what happened out on them. Conceivably—” Heimrich closed his eyes and for some seconds did not go on. Then he said, “You weren’t satisfied that Miss Gant’s death was an accident? Wanted the questions in your own mind raised in other people’s minds? Specifically, of course, in the minds of the Wainrights? And—went roundabout to it?”

  Pointer merely shook his head, as if he did not understand. But then he said, “Is it a crime to send want ads to a newspaper? Weren’t they paid for, or something? You say the instructions sent along with the ads were signed on a typewriter. Is that forgery or something?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Misrepresentation, of course. A rather unpleasant kind of practical joke. Speaking of typewriters, Mr. Pointer. Mind if I use yours for a moment?”

  “What the hell?” Pointer said. “Now what the hell? Forget your notebook?”

  Heimrich merely shook his head. But he got up out of his chair.

  “Go ahead,” Pointer said. “Play your games.”

  Heimrich went to the typewriter and sat in front of it. He reeled out the paper already in it. A television script, he guessed it to be. The last line stopped in midsentence. He wound fresh sheets in and typed “Advertising Department, Van Brunt Citizen, Van Brunt, N.Y.” He pulled the sheet out of the typewriter and took the envelope out of his pocket and leaned back in the typist’s chair and held paper and envelope up so that the light fell strongly on them. Pointer watched him.

  Heimrich put the paper back into the typewriter. He typed, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” He took the paper out of the typewriter and looked at it, holding it up to the light as he had before.

  “The letter ‘n’ on your typewriter is a little out of line, Mr. Pointer,” Heimrich said down the room. “So are several other letters.”

  “So what?”

  “So this morning somebody found an envelope which had fallen on the ground when they were collecting refuse at the Citizen last Friday. And a woman who opens letters addressed to the advertising department is sure it’s one of the envelopes the want ad came in. Typed address on the envelope. And, the ‘n’s are out of line, Mr. Pointer. Want to look?”

  He left the typewriter and walked to Pointer and held out to him the envelope and the sheet on which he had copied the address. Pointer looked at them, but Heimrich thought he did not look at them intently. Then he looked up at Heimrich.

  “O.K.,” he said. “So O.K., Inspector. What are you going to do about it?”

  Heimrich went back to his chair and sat in it and closed his eyes.

  “What made you suspect your fiancée’s death wasn’t an accident, Mr. Pointer?” Heimrich said. His voice was low, not insistent. “Because that was what these ads were about, wasn’t it? To open it up again. Make a case of it. Because you thought it wasn’t really an accident.”

  “All right, Inspector. It didn’t feel right. It still doesn’t feel right.”

  “Why?”

  “She’d ridden all her life. Since she was a little girl. Jumped hundreds of fences on a lot of horses. I didn’t like that. Tried to talk her out of it. Riding, I mean. But she just laughed at me. So did her mother. People said this stallion she was riding was a nervous beast and I argued with her about riding him and she laughed again.” He stopped and raised his hands part way to his face, but this time he did not cover his face. “Her laughter rippled,” he said. “Like water over rocks. And what the hell difference does it make now?”

  “About the horse,” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes again. “She thought he was safe?”

  “As a rocking horse, she said. She said if I knew anything about horses I wouldn’t worry. So, I don’t know anything about horses. So I thought maybe she was right. Only, she wasn’t right, was she? This rocking horse killed her, didn’t he?” He paused and his young face became intent and his eyes demanding, “Or,” he said, “did he, Inspector?”

  “Refused a jump,” Heimrich said. “She went over his head. Into a stone wall. What makes you think it wasn’t that way, Mr. Pointer? You see something which made it look another way?”

  “I didn’t see anything. Oh, I was at the house. I suppose you know that? There were quite a few people there. Mrs. Wainright’s brother-in-law. A cousin of hers. Some kid from down their way who’d gone to school with Ginnie. Most of them were out riding horses. Following the hounds, for God’s sake.”

  “You?”

  “I’ve never been on a horse in my life. A burro once when I was a small kid. My parents took me out to Arizona or somewhere and I rode a burro. I think I rode a burro.”

  “When Miss Gant was killed?” Heimrich said.

  “In my room. Working. The room I was in was on the other side of the h
ouse, so I couldn’t have seen it happen.”

  “So there wasn’t any definite basis for this suspicion of yours? Just that it didn’t feel right?”

  “I guess that’s it.”

  “So that you had nothing to take to anybody. To us. But you just—say you just wanted to stir it up. After a year.”

  “Yes. I suppose so. Listen, Inspector—” But he paused and for some seconds gave Heimrich nothing to listen to. Then he said, “Suppose I had come to somebody like you. With this vague talk about a ‘feeling.’ You’d have found out that I make up stories for a living. Soap operas that go on and on and on, with bad things happening to people five afternoons a week. That I make my living by make-believe. Wouldn’t you have thought, here’s a nut who doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not?”

  “Possibly. With nothing concrete to back up this feeling of yours. This hunch of yours. You thought that if you made Mr. and Mrs. Wainright suspicious—brought it back into their minds and made them think about it—they might do something? And if they asked us to dig back into it their request would have more weight than yours?”

  “I guess that was it. Did they come to you about it?”

  “No. Nobody’s officially come to us about it. It was Mr. Wallis who came to me. Because the ads were in his paper and he seems to be a stickler about what goes into his paper.”

  “All right,” Pointer said. “There’s still nothing tangible. Except that I put the ads in. Or is there?”

  “No, Mr. Pointer.”

  “Then why are you, as you say, digging back into it?”

  “On the outside chance that we did miss something. On a hunch, if you want to put it that way. You advertised a horse for sale, knowing the horse was dead. And a wedding dress. Did you think there really was a wedding dress?”

  “No. Oh, I didn’t know, actually. But we—” He stopped and took a deep breath. “We weren’t to have been married for months. I don’t know how far ahead girls—but no, I didn’t think there was actually a wedding dress. I just dramatized it, I guess. It—well, it gets to be sort of automatic in my trade.”