Risky Way to Kill

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Needling,” Heimrich said. “It was rather cruel of you, wasn’t it?”

  “It didn’t feel cruel,” Pointer said. “I suppose I didn’t think about it that way. My girl died in a cruel way, Inspector.”

  “Mr. Pointer,” Heimrich said, “in the ad about the gun you said ‘telescopic sight.’ Why? Had you seen a gun like that?”

  “I knew Wainright had a rifle. He had a shotgun, too. And another rifle. And heavier guns. He kept them in a closet off what he called the game room.”

  “Telescopic sight, Mr. Pointer. Was there such a sight on one of the rifles? The twenty-five.”

  “Not on it. He had one. He showed me the guns a few times. And the sight. It wasn’t on the gun, but he showed me how it went on. What difference does it make?”

  “The twenty-five. Was that the gun he used to kill the horse?”

  “I think so. I think he went out carrying it after—” He stopped again and put his hands over his face. Heimrich waited. Pointer took his hands down. “After they brought Ginnie home,” he said. “With her head—”

  He did not finish that. He shook his own head.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Pointer,” Heimrich said. “Sorry to bring up such bad memories. But—you wanted it brought up again. Was the telescopic sight on the rifle when he took it out to kill the horse?”

  “For God’s sake, man. You think I was looking at the rifle then? I was—I don’t know what I was doing. Except, they told me afterward, I was shouting at her. Shouting her name at her. Over and over, they say. And she was dead. She was dead.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You wouldn’t have been looking at the gun. I realize that, naturally. But—you did specify a telescopic sight in the ad. Why, Mr. Pointer? Try to think why.”

  “Just because I knew there was one, I guess,” Pointer said. “I—” Again he paused, but this time he looked intently at Heimrich and nodded his head as if he were agreeing to something Heimrich had said. “All right,” Pointer said, “I was a little fuzzy, maybe, when I got the idea of sending the ads in. I’d been—I’ve been going through a bad year, Inspector. Sometimes—oh, sometimes I see a girl who looks a little like Ginnie looked. Hear a girl laughing the way she used to laugh. So I have a few drinks. Just makes it worse, actually, but I always think it won’t. I’d had a few when I got the idea of sending in the ads. When I typed them out, I guess.” He paused again. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “What’s so important about a telescopic sight?”

  “You don’t need one if you’re going to walk up to a hurt horse and put a bullet in its head,” Heimrich said. “I want you to think back, Mr. Pointer. To the day Miss Gant was killed. You were working in your room, you say, and it was on the far side of the house and you couldn’t see anything.”

  “It was that way. I—I said it was just a feeling. A feeling things weren’t right.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I’m trying to find out what caused that feeling. Just shock and grief? It would have been that way, naturally. Things eat into the mind and the mind gets distorted ideas. And you’re an imaginative man, Mr. Pointer. Have to be, I’d think, in what you call your ‘trade.’”

  “I suppose so. All right. Probably I wrote it up in my mind to something more than it was. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  “Now, Mr. Pointer. Just wondering about it. You didn’t see anything. Couldn’t have. Did you hear anything, Mr. Pointer? Like a shot, say. Like somebody firing a gun nearby?”

  “I don’t—” Pointer said, and broke off and looked hard at Heimrich. “Up around there,” he said, “most people have guns. Put targets up on trees and shoot at them. Shoot at rats. Woodchucks, I guess. Every now and then you hear guns going off.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I live up that way. Same kind of country. You do hear people firing guns. That morning? Think back, Mr. Pointer. I know it was a year ago. Try to think back. You’re in your room working. Concentrating, I’d guess. Shutting out everything but what you were doing?”

  “Trying to. Usually I’m pretty good at that. Have to be if I’m going to get any work done. I suppose I was that morning. I-”

  Again he interrupted himself and put his hands over his face. But this time, Heimrich thought, it was not to hide from memory. It was to concentrate on memory. When he spoke he did not take his hands down and his voice was a little muffled.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I remember somebody firing a gun. It sounded rather close. It was—I think it was—ten minutes or so before somebody came running into the house and began to talk on the telephone. Almost shout into the telephone. I learned later that it was Bruce Gant, trying to get hold of a doctor. It was before that. Before I went out into the hall to find out what had happened.”

  “The shot? Rifle? Shotgun?”

  “I don’t know much about guns. Not much more than I do about horses. It—I think it cracked. Like a rifle. A shotgun makes a sort of hollow sound, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “The sound’s different, Mr. Pointer. You felt it was nearby?”

  “That’s the way I remember it felt. But listen, Inspector. It couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened to Ginnie. She wasn’t shot. She—she was thrown into a stone wall. Unless—there’d have been an autopsy, wouldn’t there?”

  “There was,” Heimrich said. “No, she wasn’t shot, Mr. Pointer. She died of head injuries, consonant with her having been thrown against a stone wall. Did you go down and look at the place it happened, Mr. Pointer? It’s only a five-minute or so walk from the house.”

  “My God no! You think—you think I’d want to go and stare at the place she was killed?”

  “No. This shot you heard that morning, Mr. Pointer. Any idea which direction the sound came from?”

  “I had a window open. It came—seemed to come—from that direction. But it’s all pretty vague. I’d forgotten it entirely—I guess I had—until you asked me about it.”

  “This window you had open. It was on the far side of the house. I mean, the side farthest from the field the accident happened in?”

  “Yes. At the front of the house.”

  “And the sound of the shot, which you think was a rifle shot, came, as you remembered it, from that direction? From somewhere in front of the house?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re quite sure you didn’t walk down and look at the area Miss Gant was killed in?”

  “I didn’t go out of the house until the next day. Then I—I drove into New York. Drove here. To—to get a dark suit, Inspector. I didn’t have anything there but slacks and a couple of sports jackets. You have to have a dark suit for—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Times you have to have a dark suit.”

  “I still don’t see what a shot could have had to do with it, Inspector. Ginnie wasn’t shot. The autopsy proved that. You say so yourself.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Miss Gant wasn’t shot. The autopsy showed that. But—there wasn’t any autopsy on her horse, Mr. Pointer.”

  He stood up. Andrew Pointer stood too. Pointer said, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.”

  “Now, Mr. Pointer,” Heimrich said. “I’m not sure I do, really. Just a wisp of an idea. Might have come to you, too, if you’d seen the place where it happened. But you didn’t, did you?”

  Pointer shook his head, slowly, in resignation.

  “Under certain circumstances,” Heimrich said, “a telescopic sight might have been useful. But I’ve no idea those circumstances ever existed. I’ll let you get back to work now, Mr. Pointer.”

  “Hell,” Pointer said, “you think I can now?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I suppose you’ll try.” He turned and walked up the long room and Pointer walked after him. As he was opening the door, Heimrich turned to face the slender, handsome younger man.

  “If I were you,” Heimrich said, “I wouldn’t send any more want ads, Mr. Pointer. I wouldn’t do anything mor
e to try to stir things up.”

  He walked down three flights of stairs and a little over a block to his car, his theory getting wispier with each step. A rifle report. Yes. But sounding, if Pointer’s memory was at all accurate, from the wrong direction. Somebody on the other side of the road, the Wainright house fronted, probably. Somebody shooting at a target or a woodchuck or, of course, a rat.

  His car was wedged in against the curb. Somebody had, since he put it there, parked in front of it and backed until his rear bumper was against Heimrich’s front bumper. Behind, Heimrich had a little more than two feet of clearance. He could, with time enough and wrenching enough, get the Buick out. He got out of the Buick and went to the car ahead. If it wasn’t locked, he could release the brake and push it up for clearance. Most people do not lock car doors when they leave cars at curbs. Whoever had backed his car into the Buick had been cautious. He had locked up his car.

  A cab came through the narrow channel parked cars had left open. Its roof light was on and Heimrich held a hand up to it. It stopped for him, and he got into it and gave an address in the East Forties. It took a time to reach it. It was the address of a tall office building. He looked at the directory until he found, “Wainright Associates, Architects. 1810.” He found an elevator in the bank marked “12 to 20” and pressed a button marked “18.” The button stayed in and turned green. The elevator, after waiting some seconds, presumably for other passengers to make the trip worthwhile, closed its door and went up.

  Heimrich found a door with “1810, Wainright Associates,” lettered on it and went into a largish room with several leather sofas along its walls and nobody sitting on them. There was a desk with a telephone on it and a typewriter beside it. Nobody was at the desk. There was a nameplate on the desk—“Miss Ruth Calvert.” Heimrich sat on one of the sofas and lighted a cigarette. There was an ashtray on a stand in front of the sofa. The ashtray was empty.

  He had smoked half a cigarette when a door in the far wall opened and a very pretty girl in a white dress came through it, heels clicking sharply on tile flooring. She stopped after a few steps into the room and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was anybody here.” She had a low voice with a kind of pun in it, a carefully planned purr. She went over and sat at the desk. She said, “Can I help you?”

  Heimrich snubbed his cigarette out in the clean ashtray and went over to the desk. He said, “I’d like to see Mr. Wainright, if he’s free.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Wainright isn’t in today. He often isn’t on Mondays.”

  Did she have any idea where Mr. Wainright might be reached?

  “Is it about a house or something like that?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “It’s not a professional matter. Not important at all, really.”

  “He might be at home,” the girl said. “He lives up in Putnam County.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I know where Mr. Wainright lives.”

  “I’m so sorry,” the girl said. “He’ll probably be in tomorrow. If you care to call and fix a time?”

  “Perhaps I’ll do that,” Heimrich said. The girl said she was so sorry.

  Heimrich went back to the elevator bank and pushed a “down” button. There were six elevators in the bank and all of them seemed to be going up. He waited for what seemed a considerable time, thinking numbly, Whatever goes up. After another minute or so he was proved right. He wedged himself into a car already wedged with people. It stopped at the seventeenth and sixteenth and fifteenth floors. By that time there was no more room in it. It nevertheless stopped at the fourteenth floor and at the twelfth. There was, apparently, no thirteenth. Then it dropped.

  On Fifth Avenue cars streaked south. There was plenty of cabs with top lights on. And all the top lights spelled “Off Duty.” Heimrich looked at his watch and found it was three-thirty. The day cabs were homing. Heimrich walked. It was a good day for walking. It hadn’t been, so far as he could see, a good day for anything else. Not, certainly, for wisp-chasing.

  He came to a sidewalk telephone booth and went into it and laid change out on a ledge. He put his dime in and gave a number to the operator and put more coins in. He said, “Heimrich. Lieutenant Forniss, please,” to the operator at Hawthorne Barracks. He got Forniss.

  “Nope,” Forniss said. “Nothing hot, M.L. Latham called in. You had him and Jenkins out raking for something?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “A cartridge case.”

  “Well,” Forniss said, “they haven’t found a cartridge case. They found a lot of oyster shells a couple of layers down. Latham says it’s matted maybe a foot and that they went maybe a hundred feet along the wall and maybe fifteen feet back from it. Nothing but matted hay and oyster shells. And Latham’s pretty sure they didn’t miss anything.”

  “They’re still at it?”

  “Yep. I told them to be.”

  “Can you reach them?”

  “Got their car parked close enough,” Forniss said. “Got the radio on.”

  “Tell them to knock it off,” Heimrich said. “I’m in town, Charlie. And I’m going home. Be there in maybe a couple of hours.”

  He had a dime left for the bridge across the Harlem River. But at the Parkway toll booth he had to change a five to get a quarter. The man in the booth counted the change out slowly, to show he didn’t like fives.

  It was somewhat more than two hours before he turned the Buick between boulders and drove it up a steep drive.

  Susan was on the terrace with Michael and Colonel. Mite was not present. Michael was dressed for going somewhere. He even had a necktie on. And Susan wore a gray wool dress, with red accents.

  “We’ve got low voltage,” Susan said, after she had stood tiptoe to kiss her tall man. “They say men working on a highway knocked the top off a pole. The light company was very polite about it. The man said the highway men had knocked the top off the pole ‘unintentionally.’ And that it would be about an hour.”

  She looked up at him.

  “Not so good?” she said.

  “Low voltage all day,” Heimrich said and pulled her to him and then released her. He said, “Hi, Michael,” who said, “Good evening, Dad.” He said, “Where’s your cat, Colonel?” Colonel moved his inadequate tail a quarter of an inch. Heimrich said, “Suppose we’ve got any ice?” and Susan said, “The thing doesn’t like low voltage but it’s still got ice.”

  It was cool on the terrace. But not too cool. They sat side by side on chaises and Michael went to get them ice and bottles on a tray.

  11

  October is not summer, however much on sunny days it may pretend to be. They were halfway through their drinks on the terrace when the sun went down behind the hills beyond the Hudson. The temperature went down with it and went down abruptly. Susan shivered and Colonel stood up, part of a dog at a time, and Mite came out of nowhere to show them the way. The way was to the house.

  Heimrich flipped light switches and not much came of it—dim yellowish light came of it. “It’s been more than an hour,” Susan said. “A good deal more than an hour. I turned things off.”

  The things one turns off when voltage drops are the things with big motors—in the Heimrich house the oil burner, which heats water for faucets as well as for radiators; the pump which pulls water up from a deep well. Big motors can burn themselves out when the voltage is low.

  Heimrich went into the kitchen and turned a faucet on. Water came out of it, but with little enthusiasm. There was not much water left in the pressure tank, and there would not be more until power came back to normal. Heimrich went to a telephone and dialed a familiar number. The telephone numbers of local electric companies become second nature to people who live in the country. He got a busy signal. Half the town, probably, was calling to find out what the hell gave and how long it was going to. He hung up, waited thirty seconds, and dialed again. He got, “Light Company,” in a male voice which sounded tired.

  “Crew�
�s working on it,” the man said. “Seems like they’ve maybe run into a little trouble.”

  “How long?” Heimrich asked the tired voice.

  “Now that’s hard to say,” the man said. “Maybe an hour or two. Hard to say. You turn off your motors, mister?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “We turned off the motors.” He put the telephone back in its cradle.

  “We’ve got some cold meat loaf,” Susan said.

  Electric ranges like low voltage even less than refrigerators. A country house dangles at the end of copper wires.

  A car’s horn sounded outside.

  “That’s them now,” Michael said, and went to the door and opened it and said, “Right along,” into the gathering darkness. He turned and said, “I won’t be late, Mother. Dad.” He went out into the darkness.

  “Something at the high school,” Susan said. “Meeting of the student council, I gather. Hamburgers and hot dogs to follow. The cafeteria has gas stoves. Cold meat loaf? And I’ll try to find a Sterno for coffee.”

  “The Inn has its own generator,” Heimrich said. “It’s open Mondays. I’ll change my shirt.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “There won’t be enough water for your shower, dear.”

  “I’ll put a dash of after-shave lotion behind my ears,” Heimrich said, and went to change his shirt.

  There were more people in the taproom of the Old Stone Inn than there usually were on Monday evenings. Most of the people were locals. Many Van Brunt families rely on electric ranges. Gas comes in tanks, not by pipes.

  It was bright in the taproom. There was a slight thudding sound from somewhere below it, which meant that the gasoline motor of the generator was doing its work. “I don’t know whether,” Mrs. Oliphant said, worry in her voice. “We don’t open the main dining room on Mondays, you know. And—”

  But a couple got up from a corner table. “I’ll get it cleaned off right away,” Mrs. Oliphant told them. “If you want to sit at the bar a—Mary!”

  The bar at the end of the taproom was a busy bar. In front of it there was a group of men throwing darts at a dart board. Darts thudded into the board and thudding sounds came out of the group. Susan and Merton went to the corner table and sat at it while Mary took coffee cups and used silver from it and whisked a checkered tablecloth off and whisked another on. She said, “A cocktail, Mrs. Heimrich? Inspector? Seems like we’re sort of busy tonight. They say there’s a power failure or something.”