23-The Tenth Life

by Lockridge, Richard

  That thing could, at any rate, be put in place. Heimrich was not at all sure it belonged there. He might be surer, one way or another, after he had talked to Lieutenant Charles Forniss.

  Heimrich drove north. It was almost noon, and traffic was thickening a little. He did not hurry. He was not at all sure where he was going or whether, once he had got there, he would know where he was.

  So. Carol Arnold a possibility, largely because of apparent flight. A young man named Connors almost equally possible, although no evidence he was in any way in the picture.

  Louise Barton also stood to profit, although she did not, apparently, need to profit. Not, that was, financially. Emotionally? To take vengeance on a straying husband? Always possible. Straying with whom? The pretty girl who was a kind of intern at his hospital? Or, conceivably, a sprightly and handsome attorney-at-law named Angela Goldman? Who had admitted, or asserted, friendship going beyond that of lawyer and client; who had spoken of “Adrian,” not of “Dr. Barton”?

  Nothing really fitted into any place in any pattern.

  He turned off the highway toward the barracks.

  Mrs. Barton was sometimes at the animal hospital, although, presumably, not as frequently as she once had been. But often enough to know her way around it; probably to know that curare was kept in a wall refrigerator. And certainly she would have known that her husband was diabetic and taking insulin.

  The Pontiac? A second string to her bow? A faulty string, which had been tensed, in the end, against the wrong person? (Or perhaps, from Louise Barton’s point of view, not so wrong a person.)

  Heimrich parked the Buick in the slot marked with his name. He did not immediately get out of the car.

  Things could, of course, be turned inside out. Barton might have tampered with his own car, with accident to his wife desired. For money, which he would almost certainly get. And for freedom. Freedom to marry again, more satisfactorily. But it was said that Mrs. Barton no longer drove. Said truthfully? People do not always tell the truth to police officers.

  Heimrich got out of the Buick and walked toward his office.

  There was still that cat—that damned cat. The small Siamese. If, of course, that was the same cat. A cat with very dark brown ears and tail.

  A cat who, jarred into activity when a car hit a tree, had got out of her carrying case and walked away, carrying the case with her. Mite has taught Merton Heimrich to respect the ingenuity of cats, but that was taking it rather far.

  Crimes do not occur one at a time. Heimrich’s In basket was as crowded as usual. He had a sandwich sent in from the canteen and tackled the In basket.

  He had cleared the basket and put his initials on a good many papers, and it was almost two thirty, when his telephone rang. Charley, almost certainly.

  It was not Charles Forniss. It was the duty sergeant passing on a report. A red Volkswagen of the vintage wanted, bearing the license plates listed, had been found in White Plains. It was in a parking lot not too far from the New York Central station—all right, the Penn Central station. There was nobody in the Volks. So?

  “Have it printed,” Heimrich said. “Then have it brought up here.”

  There was really no reason it had to be impounded. When it arrived and was checked out, Mr. and Mrs. Evans could come and get it. He could bring her in the Cadillac.

  White Plains and near the railway station. Handy for a train trip to New York on one of the commuter expresses. They were numerous in the mornings. Three cars came from Cold Harbor, with a stop at Van Brunt—with stops almost everywhere, come to that, including, as commuters complained, several crossroads—to be hooked onto one of the expresses at White Plains. The 8:04, Heimrich thought it was. Due at Grand Central a little before nine, as he remembered. (Getting back was even more difficult, except after five. One train, he thought, limped toward Van Brunt at midday.)

  But Carol Arnold would not have caught the midday train. Miss Arnold had, as it nowadays was put, split. Or, in the argot of another day, taken it on the lam. Only—why had she not driven the Volks into the city and ditched it there? It would have saved her time and been only slightly more risky. Well, one could only guess about the motives, the actions, of one running from the law. As she, almost certainly—

  No, Heimrich told himself, I’m jumping at conclusions. Latham Rorke is in White Plains, interning there. Flight to join Rorke? Had they been in it together, it being the murder of Dr. Adrian Barton? Not too likely, as far as he could see. But he couldn’t, when it came to that, see very far. Still, worthwhile checking on Dr. Rorke, discovering his present whereabouts.

  He had the duty sergeant put him through to Rorke’s hospital. Dr. Rorke? Oh, Dr. Latham Rorke. One moment, please. It was considerably more than a moment.

  “Dr. Rorke is on duty. Not in his room. Which means he may be almost anywhere in the hospital, sir. Probably he’s making the rounds with a surgeon. Or with an internist, of course. Would you like to leave a message, sir?”

  Heimrich left a message, not thinking anything would come of it. If Rorke had nothing to hide, there would be nothing he could tell. If he had something to hide, he would not be likely to telephone to disclose it. And if he and his girl—almost certainly his girl—were in flight, he would not get the message. So—it was getting on for three o’clock and nothing from Charley Forniss.

  Heimrich lighted a cigarette. As if on signal, the telephone rang. At last, Charley.

  It was not Charley. It was, surprisingly, Dr. Latham Rorke.

  “So you got my message, Doctor?”

  “Message? You mean you’ve found her?”

  “No, I’m afraid we haven’t, Doctor. I’ve been trying to get you—I left word. No, we haven’t found Miss Arnold. We have found the car she may have—borrowed. In White Plains it was, Doctor. Near the railroad station. I—well, I thought she might have got in touch with you.”

  There was a considerable pause.

  “No,” Rorke said, and his voice dragged. “She hasn’t got in touch with me. I wish to God she would. The car is here in White Plains, you say? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I wish I did. But we’ll find her eventually.”

  Rorke said, “Yeah.” His voice was resigned. It was also unbelieving.

  They would find her. Probably to lock her up. Rorke hung up and so did Heimrich.

  Ithaca is a good distance from the barracks of Troop K. But Charles Forniss was a good driver, and he wouldn’t stay at fifty-five. Probably not able to find anybody at the summer campus of Cornell University.

  Heimrich’s cigarette had gone out. He lighted another. The telephone rang.

  9

  This time it was Lieutenant Charles Forniss, in Ithaca. He was, but so far as he had been able to determine, Carol Arnold was not. He couldn’t be certain of that. It might take days to find out.

  “I don’t think she is, Charley. Probably in New York by now.” Heimrich told Forniss about the red Volks. Charley said, “Mmm.”

  “Well,” Forniss said. “A few odds and ends. Probably nothing that will help us much. I did run into a guy I used to know. Way back in high school, believe it or not. He’s an associate professor now. Teaching some summer classes. Not in the vet school. English department. Magazine article writing. But he could help me some. Give me Miss Arnold’s address, for one thing.”

  During the school year, Carol Arnold lived in a small apartment near the Cornell campus. She shared it with two other students. “Both female.” The records showed that. They also showed that Carol was an A student. The closest relative was an aunt who lived in California. No parents listed.

  Forniss had driven to the address listed for Carol Arnold. The building, an apartment house by conversion, was in a rather run-down part of town. Her shared apartment was on the ground floor; her name was one of three listed in the lobby. “If you could call it a lobby.” There was no answer to the doorbell.

  Forniss had found a window he could look into. It was, apparentl
y, a bedroom window—the window of a sparsely furnished bedroom, with a narrow bed and a straight chair and a table which, at a guess, served as a desk. There was nothing he could see to indicate recent occupancy.

  His inspection had been interrupted. A “stringy old dame” had come out of the house and said, “You! What are you doing, skulking around here?”

  He had explained that he was not skulking; was merely trying to see whether there was anybody in the apartment. That had got a “Huh!” Showing his credentials didn’t get much more. Didn’t he know this was vacation time at the university? “Those three” had gone home. Or gone somewhere, anyway. And she had not been able to sublet. The girls? They were all right, she guessed. Didn’t cause too much trouble. No wild parties she knew of, and she would know, because she lived upstairs. Come back in September, if he wanted to do some more peeping.

  Forniss’s professorial friend had, as one of his summer students, a boy who was in the School of Veterinary Medicine. A boy named Connors. He had been due at a class which was about to meet. Forniss had met him. “A Ralph Connors, M. L.”

  Heimrich had said “Oh” to that. He said, “Tell you he was working for Barton last summer, Charley?”

  Connors had. Forniss had told him that Dr. Barton was dead and the circumstances of his death, and Connors had said, “Jeez,” and that Dr. Barton had seemed like a great guy, and that it was too God-damn bad. Also, “Going to blow the dean’s mind—Dean Smedley’s. He and Dr. Barton were classmates here, you know.” Forniss hadn’t known; he was interested to hear.

  When Connors had told Dr. Smedley two springs before that he had been asked to spend the summer working for, and with, Dr. Adrian Barton, Smedley had been enthusiastic. “Couldn’t work with a better man,” Smedley had assured young Connors, and had called Barton one of the best small animal men in the country. “Could be he’s the best cat man,” Connors remembered Dr. Smedley as saying.

  And at least once a year, Smedley had got Dr. Barton in for a guest lecture. Connors had heard two of the Barton lectures. The one that spring had been about the use of curare—“the stuff Indians put on arrow tips, you know”—to immobilize small animals without robbing them of consciousness. “To put tubes down their throats—things like that.”

  Barton had said, as Connors remembered it, that curare was damn tricky stuff to use because among the muscles it relaxed were those animals breathed with.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Including human animals. Barton say anything about using the stuff himself, does Connors remember?”

  Forniss had asked that. Connors could not remember that Dr. Barton had or, for that matter, had not. He felt that Dr. Barton had spoken as if he had, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Barton, the summer before, had seemed like “a great guy.” Meaning?

  Oh, a good man to work for. Considerate. Yeah, he did keep you busy. But he kept busy himself. “I felt I was learning a lot last summer,” Connors had told Forniss. “For a while, I thought maybe, after I graduate and get my license, he might let me move in with him, as a kind of partner. Pretty junior one, but it might have been a way to start.” No, he hadn’t said anything about this idea to the doctor. Probably wouldn’t have come to anything.

  A good animal doctor. A good man to work for. As a person? “Like I said, he seemed like a really great guy.” During his—call it apprenticeship, he had lived with the Bartons? Slept in the house? Had his meals there? He’d got along with Mrs. Barton all right? And Dr. and Mrs. Barton had seemed to get along all right? (Forniss had, obviously, been turning over every stone he came across.)

  Ralph Connors had got along all right with Mrs. Barton, he guessed. “Didn’t seem too sure about that, M. L.” He had seen nothing, or remembered nothing, which would indicate that the Bartons weren’t getting along all right. He hadn’t thought much about it, one way or another. Part of the time, Mrs. Barton hadn’t seemed to be feeling very well. Some of the time, she had had a woman come in to do the cooking. Mrs. Barton had been the better cook.

  No, he hadn’t noticed anything that would make him think Mrs. Barton was jealous of her husband, or anything like that. He had seen nothing to indicate that Dr. Barton was, well, playing around, if that was what the lieutenant was wondering about. After all, the doc was pretty old for that sort of thing, wasn’t he? Up in his forties, he must have been. “That’s pretty old to a kid like Connors, I guess.”

  Whenever he could get away, Barton had gone over to the club to play tennis. “Only, he was a lot too good for me, Lieutenant. Old as he was.”

  Yes, Connors knew Carol Arnold. In a couple of classes with her. Didn’t know her at all well. Hadn’t tried to, although she was quite a chick. Only, Connors had a chick; a pretty regular chick. He had no idea whether Carol had been going steady with anybody. He was pretty sure she hadn’t been shacking up with anybody. That was the sort of thing that got around, and it hadn’t.

  Should Forniss stick around in Ithaca and see what else he could turn up?

  “No, Charley. Call it a day.”

  Charles Forniss was ready to call it a day. After all, he had had the night shift. As senior officer present, and getting what snatches of sleep he could.

  Heimrich hung up. A messenger put papers in the In basket. One of the documents was the autopsy report on Adrian Barton.

  Barton had been a male Caucasian, five feet eleven inches tall and weighing a hundred and sixty-five pounds. He had been a diabetic in, apparently, a controlled condition. No other organic ailments. Immediate cause of death, suffocation. Consistent with curare poisoning. Minute traces of curare found in tissues. Physiological samples sent to White Plains for further analysis, which might take several days. “Curare rapidly eliminated from tissues.” There was a handwritten addendum from the pathologist. “Might have missed curare if you hadn’t suggested we look for it. Evasive sort of stuff.”

  So, a probability still; nothing conclusive. Act as if there were. Act how?

  For one thing, modify the APB. Red Volkswagen no longer sought. Recovered. Young woman named Carol Arnold to be picked up for questioning. Age, early twenties; blond hair and blue eyes, estimated weight, one-five; height approximately five feet four. (Or three.) Last seen wearing—wearing what?

  Last seen by Dr. Latham Rorke and Roger King; by King last. King might be still at the animal hospital, waiting for owners to retrieve pets now lacking medical attention. Worth trying. And likely to remember; Carol was pretty and young. King was male.

  Heimrich dialed for an outside line, then dialed the number of Dr. Adrian Barton’s animal hospital. He remembered the number by now. And, after two rings, he got Roger King.

  Roger did remember. A blue dress, sleeveless. Short skirt, but not mini. Heimrich remembered Carol Arnold’s legs, remembered them pleasantly. So, clearly, did Roger King. No, no hat. King didn’t remember ever seeing Miss Arnold wear a hat. No, no wrap of any kind when Dr. Rorke had brought her back from the Cold Harbor Hospital. In weather like this? A sort of dark blue dress, what they called V-necked. And Roger King sure hoped nothing had happened to Miss Arnold, because she was an all-right person.

  “Pretty deep V, come to that. They don’t wear very much nowadays, Inspector. Not much modesty anymore.” This was not from Roger King. Heimrich recognized the voice even before Roger said, “I’ll hang up, Mrs. Barton.” Heimrich said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Barton. You’re at the hospital?”

  “Somebody’s got to be,” Louise Barton said. “And who else is there, with that girl gone off some place? And people calling up about their pets, and coming to get them. Where else would I be?”

  Sudden death leaves a clutter behind it—a clutter of things unfinished, things unresolved. The clutter is left to those who have not died.

  Heimrich said, “Mmm,” acknowledging Mrs. Barton’s problems. He said, “By the way, we’ve found your sister’s car. We’ll see she gets it this afternoon.”

  “But not that girl, I take it. Since you want to know what sh
e was wearing. Probably you’ll never find her. Like her to dump everything on me and just —well, take off. With everything here to straighten up.”

  “We’ll probably find her, Mrs. Barton. Wearing this blue dress. Unless—last night could she have gone up to the house, to her room, and changed? Perhaps packed things up? Without you and your sister hearing her?”

  “She’d have to have been awfully quiet about it, Inspector. I was awake most of the night. Remembering things, you know. About Adrian and me. About —oh, about everything. I suppose she could have, well, have sneaked in. But she didn’t pack up her things. They’re still hanging in her closet. Or lying on her bed.”

  “She hasn’t slept in her bed?”

  “No, it was all made up. I’ll say that for her, she did make her bed.”

  So, it had not been a planned departure. Spur-of-the-moment, apparently. With intention to return? Anybody’s guess. Her handbag?

  “Was her handbag in her room, Mrs. Barton?”

  “I didn’t see it. But I didn’t go rummaging around. Just glanced in. I’d better get back to the office, Inspector. Try to make some sense of things. A lot of people seem to be owing him money. Dear Adrian was never very good at that sort of thing. And all of the records of the animals he’s treated. How old they were and what had been the matter with them. Or if they’d just been boarded, how long they’d been here. I used to take care of all that for him, you know. He’s left it in, well, a jumble.”

  It must be very difficult for her. Heimrich realized that, and said so. “We’ll want to go over the doctor’s records,” he added.

  “Whatever for?” Louise Barton said.