Risky Way to Kill

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Why would they say that, Lucy?”

  “They blame us for things,” Lucy said. “Because we’re black they blame us for things.”

  You’re not black, Lyle thought. You’re a very warm fine brown. But “black” is the word you want now. Are, anyway, being taught that.

  “The bottle,” Lyle said, “was in a drawer. Could she reach it? Without getting out of bed?”

  “No, miss. Anyway, she went to sleep right away.”

  “After taking one of the yellow pills?”

  “That’s all I saw her take, Miss Mercer. There was another she could reach if she wanted to. And I guess she did, because later she woke up. She was talking in her sleep, maybe, and woke herself up. Woke me up too. It was like she was talking to somebody. Kind of loud like.”

  “Did you hear anybody else? Anybody else talking?”

  “Miss Mercer, I was still muzzy like. I thought maybe I—well, I did hear somebody else talking. Talking low, not the way she was. As if he didn’t want really to wake her up.”

  “He, Lucy?”

  “I was muzzy,” Lucy said. “I thought it was Mr. Wainright maybe, come up to see if she was all right. But I was mostly still asleep.”

  “You heard her,” Lyle said. “What did she say, Lucy? When you thought she was talking in her sleep. You remember what she said?”

  “Something about having it in your hand,” Lucy said. “Wait a minute. ‘You had it in your hand.’ That’s what she said. ‘I saw you. You had it in your hand.’ I’m almost sure that’s what she said, miss.”

  There needs to be a little of the detective in reporters. Lyle was learning to be a reporter.

  “Lucy,” Lyle said, “when you put this bottle back in the drawer. There were still these yellow pills in it?”

  “Yes’m. Quite a lot of them.”

  Lyle had lighted another cigarette. She put it out. She went to her chest of drawers and got panties and a bra out of it. “We’re pretty much the same size,” she said, and took the underthings to Lucy, who took them and did nothing about them. She looked up at Lyle and her dark eyes widened.

  Lyle went to her closet. She got a skirt out of it and a sweater and a heavy cloth coat.

  “Get dressed, Lucy,” Lyle said. “We’re going somewhere. I’m going to take you somewhere.”

  “No,” Lucy said. “No, Miss Mercer. They’ll catch me. I don’t want to go anywhere. Please, Miss Mercer. Please.”

  “Get dressed,” Lyle said. “Nobody’ll hurt you. I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

  She watched the girl begin, slowly, unwillingly, to dress. She went to her telephone and spun the dial.

  The fire in the Heimrichs’ living room was not, this violent night, solely for the gaiety of fire. It was gay and leaping; it also provided warmth. Old houses, however remodeled, however tightened up, are not as resistant to raging wind as young houses. In old houses windows rattle in a storm and wind comes in through cracks.

  The Heimrichs had finished dinner by eight. They sat in front of their fire and listened to records—heard songs from “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” They had heard the songs a good many times since Susan had bought the album as a present for the house.

  “Sometime,” Susan said in front of the fire, “I’m going to get all the lyrics. Even in the marathon one.”

  Merton Heimrich said, “Mmm.”

  Colonel was lying in front of the fire. It had been necessary for him to go out into the rain an hour or so before, and he smelled of drying dog. Mite, as a very young cat, had made several attempts to wash Colonel when Colonel smelled like wet dog, but had learned that Colonel was too much wet dog for a single cat. Nowadays, Mite merely stayed away from a wet dog. This night he was in his rainy-day corner of the sofa, which, since he had first looked out a window in the morning, he had left only for food and other needs.

  It was a good night to be home in front of a fire.

  The telephone rang. It was Susan who answered it after saying “Oh, damn,” and turning down the volume of the record player. (The song was the one about the boredom of bulls on Sunday afternoons, and it was one she liked especially.) She stopped the telephone’s ringing with a slightly resentful “Hello?” Then she said, “Oh, hello, Lyle.” Then she listened for almost a minute. Then she said, “Of course, dear. It’s an awful night. Be careful,” and came back to the fire.

  Merton Heimrich had opened his eyes.

  “Lyle Mercer,” Susan said. “She’s found this Lucy Fowler. Mrs. Wainright’s—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Found her?”

  “Apparently,” Susan said, “it was more the other way around. Anyway, Lyle’s bringing the girl here. She thinks you’ll want to talk to her.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “I’d very much like to talk to Miss Fowler.” He closed his eyes. “Naturally,” he said.

  The heater only slightly warmed the little Volks as it crept down blacktop roads—“Slippery When Wet”—and along Van Brunt Avenue and then up twisting blacktop roads which seemed to have narrowed in the rain, as if the rain had shrunk them, and which also were slippery when wet, although here no signs warned of that. Once Lyle slowed the car almost to a stop, as its lights groped at a fork in the road. Then she remembered and took the fork to the right and was on High Road, which immediately justified its name by going almost straight up.

  She was, at a guess, a hundred yards from the Heimrich driveway—in a night of slashing rain one goes by guess on country roads—when she pushed down hard on the brake pedal. The Volks skidded slightly but stopped in time. It stopped behind a big car with no lights on. The big car was in the middle of the narrow road.

  The girl beside her said, “Oh. Oh!” in a shaking voice.

  Lyle put up her hand to touch the arm of the girl beside her. Under the thick coat she could feel the arm shaking.

  “It’s all right,” Lyle said. “It’s got nothing to do with us, Lucy. It’s just—just broken down or something. The points got wet or something, probably.”

  It looked in the Volks’ lights like a new and noticeably solid car, not like a car which would stall in a rainstorm.

  There was not room on either side of the blocking car for the Volks to pass. Lyle was certain of that; the road was very narrow and almost without shoulders. But she got out of the Volks, pulling her raincoat tight around her and braced herself against the wind and sloshed to make certain.

  There was no room on either side; the car, which was as big a car as it had first looked in the Volks’ yellowish lights, was precisely on the crown of the blacktop. It was a wall across the road. And there was nobody in it.

  The grade was steep there. All that the driver of the car would have had to do—would have had to do in the most rudimentary decency—would have been to release the brake and let the car roll back and to the side to give passage to other cars. He wouldn’t have needed his engine to do that small thing.

  Lyle found that she was shivering. That was because of the raging wind and the beating rain. Enough to make anyone shiver.

  She went back to the Volks, this time on Lucy Fowler’s side of the little car. She opened the door.

  “We can’t get by,” she told Lucy. “Somebody’s blocked the road entirely. We’ll have to run for it. It’s—it’s not far up the hill.”

  She hoped she was right; that the Heimrich house was not far up the hill.

  Lucy shrank away when Lyle reached a hand toward her. She said, “No. No. I can’t, Miss Mercer.” There was a wailing note in her thin, small voice. “Somebody did it on purpose. Can’t you see somebody did it on purpose? To—to catch me. Can’t you see?”

  “Lucy,” Lyle said, “it’s just a stalled car. Stalled in a bad place. It hasn’t anything to do with us.”

  With the door open there was a little light in the car. Lyle could see the frightened girl pulling away, and shaking her head. She could hear her, again, saying, “No. No. I can’t. I can’t.”

 
“You have to,” Lyle said, and tried to make her voice firm, commanding, for the flinching girl—for a girl who had, all day, fled in the rain with fear fleeing beside her; had walked seven or eight miles in the storm; who, probably, had lost herself many times and climbed stone fences into tangled fields to hide when cars came along the roads she walked. “You have to,” Lyle said. “It’s—this stalled car—it’s just bad luck. Nobody knew we were coming here.”

  “The one you called,” Lucy said. “The one you called Susan. She knew we were coming.”

  Lyle had not told the frightened girl that they were going to see an inspector of the New York State Police. She had not wanted to see tenor mount again in the dark eyes. She had, more prosaically, not wanted to try to use force on a lithe and frantic girl. She had doubted she had the force to use.

  “She’s a friend,” Lyle said. “She’ll help us. Come on.”

  She had, now, to use force. She had to pull the girl from the little car. But Lucy Fowler did not try to run away. She merely stood and trembled and again Lyle put an arm firmly around slim, shaking shoulders.

  “I’ll leave the lights on so we can see,” Lyle said. “It’s only a little way.”

  Lucy did not say anything. She let herself be guided the few steps of darkness along the car. They came out into the beams of the headlights.

  There was the sharp crack of a rifle and, it seemed at the same moment, a metallic clang against the Volks. The rifle cracked again and this time there was the whining sound of a bullet and something tugged at the sleeve of Lyle’s coat.

  She pulled them down into the ditch at the side of the road. Water was coursing through the ditch.

  14

  The fourth side of the “Jacques Brel” album reached the end of its track and turned itself off with a click. Mite removed the paw which he had clamped tight over his exposed left ear. Colonel sighed deeply and slightly moved his tail. The noise of the wind and the rain seemed to increase with the music stilled. The fire had passed the crackling stage. It had subsided into a warm glow.

  “It will take them a while to get here from the Mercer house,” Susan said. “It’s such a bad night. I hate to think of them on these roads this kind of—”

  A sharp crack interrupted her. It snapped through the sound of wind and beating rain. Almost at once there was a second crack.

  Heimrich was on his feet by then. Mite was on a windowsill with the second crack, staring out into the night, head and ears pointing to the left. The rifle cracks had come from that way.

  Heimrich was across the room in three long strides; he yanked the coat-closet door open and grabbed a suede windbreaker from a hanger. He grabbed a .32-caliber revolver from the shelf it lived on and jammed it into a windbreaker pocket. Susan was at the door an instant before him. As he had opened the door the floodlight over the garage blazed on the driveway.

  He ran down the steep drive in the lashing rain, the revolver in his pocket banging against his hip. He was halfway to the road when the rifle cracked again—cracked twice again.

  On the road he turned left and ran down the hill. The sounds of shots had come from that way. And nobody on a night like this was shooting at a target or at a Woodchuck.

  He had run down the hill, in the center of the road, for perhaps twenty yards when a car’s lights glared up in front of him. Then a car’s motor roared, racing. The lights charged up the hill at him, and Heimrich, yanking the gun out of his pocket, leaped to his left.

  The car missed him by inches, and he slipped and almost fell in a muddy, water-swept ditch which was all the storm had left of a narrow earth and gravel shoulder. He grabbed bushes to catch himself.

  He turned when his feet were under him. The car had crested the hill. As he looked, its taillights vanished.

  It had seemed a big car. Any car which charges at you through the rain seems like a big car.

  Heimrich, jamming the revolver back into its pocket, ran on down the hill—ran toward the yellowish headlights of a stationary car which had been behind the one which had started up so savagely.

  As he ran on, a slight figure came up out of the ditch in front of the stopped car. For a moment the figure—a girl from its movements—swayed in the car lights. Then the girl began to run away from him down the hill.

  He yelled, then. He yelled, “Stop!” He took a chance on which of them was running. He yelled, “Miss Fowler. Lucy! I tell you stop!”

  The girl, uncertain in what appeared to be a heavy coat, ran on, stumbled on, beside the stopped car. Again he called to her to stop and used the name which was the more likely. Lyle Mercer wouldn’t run away from him. She would run uphill toward him. If she could run.

  Heimrich yanked the revolver from his pocket and fired a shot into the air.

  The girl was out of the lights, now. She was a moving shadow behind the car. Heimrich called again, and he thought the dim shadow beyond the car moved more slowly. He fired once more, straight up. The shadow stopped moving.

  Another figure came up out of the ditch and now he was close enough to see that it was another slight girl. This one was in a raincoat, belted around her. By the car, clutching its fender, the girl stood, her back to him.

  She called out too, and the wind seemed to sweep her voice back to him. But now he was only a few feet away.

  “Lucy!” Lyle Mercer called into the rain and darkness.

  For a moment, the shadow beyond the car did not move. Then, very slowly, it moved toward them. It moved into the light and became a small girl in a heavy coat. Then Lucy Fowler put her hands up.

  He had reached them, then. He said, “Is either of you hurt?” and Lyle said, “We’re all right, Inspector.”

  “Then for God’s sake,” Heimrich said, “put your hands down, Lucy Fowler.”

  She said something he couldn’t hear. He saw Lyle put an arm around the other girl. Lucy spoke again. Her voice was high and shaking.

  “You’re a policeman,” Lucy said. “I didn’t do anything bad.”

  He got them into the Volks, Lucy Fowler first into the cramped seat in the back. She did not resist; did not try to run. She did not say anything at all.

  It had been some time since Heimrich had driven a gearshift car. It came back to him on the second try. (The first try stalled the engine.) The Volks pushed itself up the steep road and up the steeper drive and into the floodlight above the garage. Lyle ran to the open door, with Susan waiting in the doorway.

  The dark girl sat huddled in the back of the Volks and did not move. “Come on, Lucy,” Heimrich said, and kept his voice low and gentle. She still did not move. He reached toward her and she shrank away. She said, “I didn’t do anything bad. Don’t hurt me.”

  “You didn’t do anything bad,” Heimrich said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  She came out of the car, then. She walked very slowly toward the house and Heimrich walked beside her, not trying to help her walk against the wind and rain; ready only to reach out if she stumbled. She did not stumble.

  Susan had built up the fire. Lyle was standing in front of it, still with her raincoat belted about her. When Lucy Fowler went into the room, with Heimrich tall behind her, Mite leaped from the sofa and went under it and looked out from under it, light reflected in his eyes so that he seemed to glare at them.

  “Get over by the fire,” Heimrich told Lucy. “Don’t fall over the dog.”

  Colonel jointed his way to his feet and went across the room and tried to get under the sofa with his cat. He was too big to.

  “Take that coat off, Miss Fowler,” Heimrich said. “Get over by the fire. And—”

  He stopped and looked at Lyle Mercer.

  “Your coat sleeve’s torn,” he said to her. “Did he hit you?”

  She looked down at the left sleeve of her raincoat. It had been ripped open. “I didn’t feel anything,” Lyle said. “Except a sort of tugging. I’m all right.”

  “By a few inches,” Heimrich said. “Did you tell anybody you were coming
here, Miss Mercer?”

  “No,” she said. “Not anybody.”

  “A good guesser, somebody was,” Heimrich said. “Was afraid she’d come here. Because you have something to tell me, Miss Fowler?”

  Lucy Fowler had come just inside the door. She did not go to stand in front of the fire.

  “Merton,” Susan Heimrich said in a pointedly reasonable voice. “They’re both soaking wet. Before anything else, we’ll have to get them dry. Come on, Lyle.”

  She went the length of the room toward the bedroom door. Lyle followed her. Lucy still stood where she had been standing near the door. The heavy wet coat seemed to pull her down. She stood a little stooped under its weight.

  “Go with them, Miss Fowler,” Heimrich said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  She went after the others, walking very slowly, dragged down by the wet coat and by fear. Heimrich sat in front of the fire and Colonel came back and put a heavy head on the most available knee. After a few minutes, Susan came out of the bedroom carrying a raincoat and a cloth coat and other garments. She carried them into the kitchen, toward the furnace room. She came back. “They’re getting dry,” she said. “One of them’s going to have to wear your bathrobe.” She sat down beside Merton in front of the fire. Then she got up and put two more logs on the fire, which welcomed them, licked around them.

  Lucy came through the doorway first, lost in a bathrobe which seemed to drag at her as the wet coat had dragged. It dragged on the floor around her feet. Lyle followed, a hand on each of the dark girl’s enveloped shoulders. She wore a yellow robe of Susan’s which was also too long on her, but not by a good many inches as much too long. Heimrich pulled up chairs for them in front of the fire. Lyle stretched slim legs out toward it. Lucy Fowler huddled in the robe.

  “Last night,” Lyle said, “Lucy was sleeping in Mrs. Wainright’s dressing room. Something waked her up. Tell him, Lucy. Tell Inspector Heimrich.”

  “I didn’t do anything bad,” Lucy said, her voice small, as if the thick bathrobe smothered it. “Nobody ought to say I did anything bad.”