First Come, First Kill

by Frances Lockridge

  First Come, First Kill

  A Captain Heimrich Mystery

  Frances and Richard Lockridge

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the terrace, Susan Heimrich could not see the bus, but she could hear the screech of brakes as it stopped—hear the brakes go on and, as always, know a moment of trepidation. Should brakes really sound like that? This was hilly country; buses needed good brakes. Were these—? She stopped this thought, as always. You’re not that kind of mother, she told herself, as always. She heard the voices of children and then the harsh grinding sound as the bus started on—on along High Road to the turn into Van Brunt Pass. When the bus slowed for the turn its brakes protested again. But that was all right, now. It was a bright morning in very early June, and everything was fine now.

  A very large Great Dane came up the steep drive, moving as if each step might be his last and as if he rather hoped it would be. When he came in sight of Susan Faye, standing on the terrace in the sunlight, he stopped and shook his head and Susan, as always, waited for him to lift a heavy paw and wipe his streaming eyes. He did not. He never had yet. He plodded on, a dog going nowhere of importance and, evidently, considering suicide.

  ‘He’ll be back, Colonel,’ Susan said, across bright grass. No dog should be so unhappy in so green a world. ‘You know he will.’

  Colonel stopped, his great head hanging low. Then he plodded toward her on heavy feet, all too obviously making the best of an impossible bargain. The boy was gone. The boy would never come back. There was no point in being a dog. It wasn’t worth it.

  He never learns, Susan thought. I wonder if he is really a very bright dog. Not that that matters. ‘Come here, Colonel. I’ll tell you again.’

  Colonel came to the terrace. He collapsed on it, and put his head on his paws and looked up, from the tops of his eyes, at Susan Heimrich. She could go ahead and tell him again, and he wouldn’t, again, believe a word of it.

  Five days a week he went down the drive with the boy, and waited with the boy. Five days a week the monster, with its terrible smell, came along and engulfed the boy and when Colonel moved forward, behind his small god, the boy said, ‘No. No, Colonel.’ Then Colonel sat down, his tail tucked under him, and wept. The monstrous, evil-smelling thing went off, the boy in it. And Colonel plodded back up the drive, although there was no point in that, or in anything.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Susan said, gravely, to the mourning dog. ‘A little after three. And you’ll go, ten minutes too early, and sit in the drive and when you hear the bus you’ll bark once and gambol—’ She stopped. Colonel was not a dog to gambol. What, then? Lurch? ‘You’ll gambol down the drive,’ Susan told her dog, although really Michael’s dog, ‘and the bus will stop and he’ll get out. Don’t you remember?’

  Colonel closed his eyes. The lies people tell to dogs! This one smelled all right, and scratched in the right places, but the lies she told.

  ‘Come and help me look for zinnias,’ Susan told the dog, and got up and went to look for zinnias among the weeds. Surely they must be coming up now, late as the spring had been. Some time there would be the kind of spring people wrote about—spring that was really spring, and not one with snow in the middle of May. She had lived almost all her life in the town of Van Brunt, county of Putnam, state of New York, and there never had been yet. And each year she had heard others say, and said herself, that spring was late this year, sharing the assumption that it was ever otherwise. Three weeks or so ago, snow, to fall if not to stay. And this bright morning, summer.

  She went to look for zinnias. It had been, at any rate, a fine spring for weeds. But there was one and there another and—for heaven’s sake!—a cluster of half a dozen, seedlings without room to turn around in. Plants are ridiculous, Susan thought, and got down on her knees and began to pull up weeds.

  She was rather tall, and slender and in her late twenties. She had widely separated gray eyes, and brown hair worn short and rather square shoulders. She wore a man’s white shirt, which was far too big for her, with the sleeves turned back at her wrists—and, at intervals as she plucked out weeds, falling down over her hands. She wore corduroy slacks and tennis socks and old tennis shoes, and smelled slightly of insect repellent. The shad flies were venomous this year. (As every year.)

  A boy off to school, a husband off to work, a country woman seeking timorous zinnia seedlings among aggressive weeds. Everything fine; everything placidly as it should be. Susan pushed aside a small tendril of guilt. Martha Collins would mind the store—the shop, but showroom really, on Van Brunt Avenue in Van Brunt Center; the little shop with the words ‘Susan Faye, Fabrics,’ lettered small and neat in the lower left-hand corner of the window. Tomorrow would be time enough for Susan Heimrich to assume that other identity, which now seemed so much less important than it once had. Tomorrow she would let weeds go (and wouldn’t they just!) and slap gouache on drawing paper. Today I am Mrs M. L. Heimrich, housewife and family weeder.

  Damn, she thought. That was a zinnia I just pulled up. She put it back in, but with no confidence. Transplant when they have four leaves. This one had only two, poor little thing. Far too young to be wrenched from its mother’s—

  The big dog, who had thought looking for zinnias beneath him, barked loudly. He barked once, which was to indicate that something or other was happening, and then barked several times more, which indicated that whatever it was he didn’t like it. Susan stood up.

  The cutting garden was beyond the house, which stood—which stretched like the low barn it once had been—on a rise, from which one could look down and see the Hudson River. When Colonel continued to bark, and now like a dog in a watchdog mood, Susan Heimrich walked around the house to the terrace.

  Colonel, with hair ridged along his back, stood beyond the terrace and looked at the drive. Then, stiff-legged, he began to move forward, and to mingle growls with his loud barking.

  ‘Colonel!’ Susan shouted at him. ‘Down, Colonel. Down, dog.’

  Colonel did not down. He did stop his threatening advance on the man who was walking up the drive. The man had climbed the steep slope from the intersection of drive and highway, and walked very slowly, as if the climb had tired him. He stopped when he saw Susan, but then began to walk on toward the house, toward her and the bristling dog.

  He was, seemed to be, a very old man. He was not a tall man, and he was very thin. Even from the distance, which was more than a hundred feet, Susan could see the gray, irregular stubble on his old face. He wore black trousers and there was a tear in the right leg; he wore broken-down black shoes which had once been dress shoes; he wore a dark shirt and a small cap—a cap which was a kind of parody of the little caps worn by sports car addicts. He trudged on up the gravel of the drive, and Colonel barked, but stood, and the little old man did not look at the dog. He looked down at the gravel, at his feet, as if he were counting the steps—the many, many steps—he took.

  A tramp, Susan thought—a tramp in a region where there were almost never tramps. A poor old man coming for a hand-out. And no wonder Colonel had barked. Dogs are snobs. This poor old man—this tired, harmless old man—was badly dressed. He looked unwashed and it was entirely possible that, to Colonel, and even at this distance, he smelled unwashed. And—and here lay the final thing, the final outrage—he was a stranger and on foot. Strangers come in motorcars, not on foot. Any country dog knows that.

  ‘Down, Colonel,’ Susan said again. ‘And quit that yapping.’

  ‘Yapping’ was hardly the right word. Colonel was an enormous dog, with an enormous bark. The bark echoed through the rolling countryside.

  ‘Down!’ Susan said, with all the firmness, the violence, she could put into her voice.

  And a
t that precise instant, as if in obedience, the little old man fell down. He fell and did not try to catch himself, and lay unmoving on the gravel. He was a huddle of darkness in the bright morning.

  Susan ran toward the fallen man, at first across grass, then along the drive, gravel crunching under her quick feet. When she was quite close she saw more clearly, and for an instant checked her movement; in that instant, involuntarily, put fingers up to her lips. Then she went on, toward the man who was bleeding on white gravel, in the sunshine. She got down beside him, on her knees. The blood was very bad. It came dark from his open mouth. His eyes, too, were open.

  At first she thought the eyes were sightless, but then she thought there was expression in them, and leaned closer. And then he tried to say something—something that was blurred; something that was almost as much gurgle as speech.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and leaned closer to the old man. The cap had fallen off as he fell, and his hair was long and gray and dirty. He tried to speak again, and again the sound was almost inaudible.

  It was like a word, or part of a word—a word with an ‘ell’ sound in it. A name? She could only guess. Perhaps merely an expletive—a hopeless, beaten, ‘Hell!’ Again she said that she did not understand, and started to say that she would get somebody—get help. But he tried once more.

  This time the single word he spoke was more, she thought, like ‘well,’ than anything. A ‘well’ of protest, or of resignation? The man’s eyes—they were pale blue eyes—seemed to demand that she understand, seemed desperately to plead. Once more he tried to speak, but this time more blood gushed and no word, or part of word, came from the lips. Then the eyes went blank.

  Susan knew that the old man was dead. It is not a thing of which a layman can be sure, but she was sure. He had hemorrhaged and died. The blood from his mouth was a trickle, now, and then that, too, stopped, as the heart had stopped.

  Susan Heimrich stood up and looked down at the dead man. Then, for the first time, she saw that the blood in which the thin body lay had not come only from the open mouth. One side of the dark shirt was soaked with blood, heavy with blood. The man had hemorrhaged, but not as she thought. The frail old man had been hurt—had been hurt to death.

  It was too late for any help she could give. She turned from the body and ran toward the house. The big dog still stood, rigid, the hair bristling along his back. ‘Come, Colonel,’ Susan said, and heard shrillness in her own voice. Colonel came. She held the screen door open for him, and he went with her into the house. Inside, he began to whimper.

  She spun the dial quickly, but it seemed a long time before she heard the words she waited for: ‘State Police, Sergeant Blake.’

  ‘Neil,’ she said. ‘Susan Heimrich. I—’

  ‘Why,’ Neil Blake said, ‘hello, Mrs—’

  ‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘Is the captain there? I’ve got—’

  ‘Right away,’ Sergeant Neil Blake said, and it was almost right away. A deep, familiar voice, said, ‘Heimrich,’ and she started to identify herself and needed only to start the name. He said, ‘What is it, dear?’ and spoke quickly, anxiously. Then he listened.He asked only one question—‘You’re sure he’s dead?’

  She said she was sure.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Susan, you’d better—’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and again her voice was strange in her own ears. ‘Only, you’ll—’

  ‘We’ll hurry,’ Heimrich—Captain M. L. Heimrich, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New York State Police—told his wife.

  Susan did what she had not needed to be told she had to do. She went out of the house, fastening a whimpering dog in it, and forced herself to walk down the drive to where the man lay dead. There had been no change. The eyes were open still. They were dead eyes. The flow of blood from the body had ended. The blood had not spread much. It had soaked into the gravel of the drive.

  Susan went back to the terrace and sat down and looked at the huddle of darkness on the white drive. When a man dies of violence, nothing must be changed—nothing moved, nothing touched, nothing permitted which will blur a picture. Susan sat and merely watched, and there was nothing to watch. Once the dark huddle seemed to waver, seemed almost to move. Sunlight on the gravel is blinding me, she thought, and for a moment closed her eyes. When she opened them the dead man was still again.

  It seemed a long time before, in the distance, she heard the sound of a siren.

  There were uniformed troopers in the first car—men from the substation, which was nearer. She knew neither of them, but one of them knew her and said, meaninglessly, ‘Sorry about this, Mrs Heimrich.’ There was really nothing to say to that. She said, as meaninglessly, ‘I know.’

  Then Heimrich came, and Sergeant Charles Forniss with him. They got out on either side of the unmarked sedan—a solid, square man, a tall man, on either side of the low car. The man who came quickly across the grass had very blue eyes. He held out both hands.

  Susan Heimrich stood up.

  ‘All right?’ he said and looked at her—looked with care, to be sure she was all right. She said, ‘Of course,’ and her voice was her own again. She spoke rather crisply.

  Merton Heimrich smiled faintly. He said, ‘All right, I won’t baby you.’ But he put an arm around her shoulders for a moment, and held her close to him. Even a policeman on duty might, he decided, be allowed as much as that.

  Sergeant Forniss sat on his heels by the body and looked at it. He did not touch it. He stood up and came toward the terrace and Heimrich removed his arm from his wife’s shoulders. Susan felt an instant of loving amusement, in spite of everything. Forniss said, ‘Morning, Mrs Heimrich,’ and then, to Captain Heimrich, ‘Yep. He is. Looks as if he was shot.’

  ‘Where he fell, then,’ Heimrich said, and Forniss said, ‘Yep. Right there, I guess.’

  Susan looked up at Heimrich.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘you say he walked up. Walked up for perhaps a hundred feet. Bleeding heavily. And no blood trail the way he came. You didn’t hear a shot?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is, I don’t remember hearing a shot. The dog was making a racket. I—’

  She was interrupted. Another sedan came, and men got out of it—men not in uniform; a man carrying a camera; men carrying cases which held the tools of the technician’s trade. The man with the camera began to take pictures. Then another car came up and a man with a black bag walked from it, to the body, and sat on his heels beside it and used a stethoscope. He went around the body and squatted on the other side of it, avoiding the blood as well as he could. He got up, looked around and saw Heimrich, and came to them.

  ‘As a mackerel,’ he told Heimrich. ‘Shot. Probably grazed the aorta—nicked it.’

  ‘From a distance?’

  ‘Now captain,’ the doctor from the coroner’s office said, ‘how’d I know that? If he was shot with an automatic pistol, no. If he was shot with a rifle, depends a lot on the rifle, doesn’t it? Know when we take it apart.’

  He didn’t, Heimrich knew—and after a second Susan knew—mean a rifle when he spoke of ‘it.’

  The man with a camera took more pictures of the huddle of darkness on the gravel. Then a technician squatted and took prints from dead fingers. A man with a sketch pad made a plot. An ambulance came up behind the coroner’s car and two men in white got out of it, followed by another man in white. The coroner’s man nodded and walked toward the last of the men in white and said, ‘DOA, doctor. Gunshot wound, apparently.’ The man in white said, ‘Thanks, doctor.’ Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss walked to the group around the dead man, and this time Heimrich sat on his heels and looked for some time at the body. He stood up and said, ‘All right, doctor. He’s yours,’ and started to walk back toward the terrace. One of the troopers said, ‘Captain,’ and Heimrich stopped, and the trooper said something to him that Susan could not hear. Heimrich turned back and, this time standing, looked again at the body. Then he made a motio
n with his head to Forniss and the two of them walked back toward the terrace. Men in white put the body of the frail old man on a stretcher and put it in the ambulance. The ambulance backed out into the road and after a moment they could hear it start up, and then hear its siren start.

  It was quick; to Susan it seemed somehow perfunctory. She thought this feeling irrational, but it persisted. They found a body and photographed it, and took fingerprints from it, and took it away to be ‘taken apart.’ There ought, she thought, to be something more. She could not think what more—only something. She realized that Heimrich was looking down at her, and that there was no hardness in his face.

  ‘There’s a routine, Susan,’ he said.

  ‘Only—’ she said.

  ‘When you see it happen,’ he said. ‘Alive, and then dead. A different thing, naturally.’

  He listens to my thoughts, Susan thought. I must mind my thoughts.

  ‘Very different,’ she said. ‘Who was he, do you suppose? Why coming here?’

  ‘Ackerman,’ he said. ‘Trooper Ackerman. He thinks he’s a man named Tom. He doesn’t know any more than that. Or not much more. Lives in a shack in the woods somewhere around here. Does odd jobs now and then. Ackerman thinks he knows one of the places he worked. We’ll see. Now—will you go over it again?’

  ‘Colonel barked,’ she said. ‘You know the way he barks. He went to the road with Michael and came back, the way he always comes back, and lay down to—lay down to die, you’d have thought. You know how he is. I was weeding and he started barking and—’ She looked down toward the driveway and interrupted herself. ‘When Michael comes home,’ she said. ‘That—place. He shouldn’t see all that—that—’

  ‘I know,’ Heimrich said. ‘We’ll do something before then. Colonel barked—’

  She told it all again, more slowly, more carefully, by far, than she had told it on the telephone. She had thought the old man a tramp, coming for a handout. She had been sure he was dead and had thought only of telephoning Heimrich. She had left the big dog locked in the house. ‘He was terrified,’ she said. ‘And—and angry, too.’