First Come, First Kill

by Frances Lockridge

  She had told him that if keeping the lawns cut was what was worrying him, that wasn’t a problem. There were a couple of men who did that sort of thing on contract, sent a gang and equipment in once a week. If he meant flowers and vegetables—

  ‘He stressed that a good deal?’ Crowley said.

  It had seemed to her he did. On the other hand, it was the sort of thing anybody thinking of moving into a new area was wise to find out about in advance. ‘Lots of city folks come to the country,’ she said, ‘and think grass cuts itself, and that gardens grow themselves. Don’t realize it’s hard to get outside help if you don’t want a full-time man.’

  Mr Peters had clearly not been one of those innocent ones. Anyway—

  She had taken him up on High Road, to the place next door to Captain Heimrich’s place. ‘Only,’ she said, ‘I keep thinking of it as the Faye place.’

  Mention of High Road, of the ‘Faye place’ brought memories to Raymond Crowley—embarrassing memories. It was the scene of his greatest defeat. Assigned to guard duty, he had been overpowered by a dog. Admittedly a large dog, but still—

  ‘Next door?’ he said.

  ‘The Perrin place,’ she told him. ‘Just on the market. Seems they’re going abroad for a couple of years. Don’t want to rent because it’s a nuisance, which I don’t say it isn’t. Still, you can’t always tell what people will do, and anyway he’d said he’d buy if he had to.’

  Crowley sorted pronouns quickly, and nodded his head.

  ‘Know the Perrins?’ Mrs Seeley said. ‘Nice people.’

  Crowley didn’t know the Perrins. She had taken Mr Peters to look at the house?

  She had. Oliver Perrin had been at home and had showed them around, and for the first time Peters had seemed really interested. The Perrin place was, he said, pretty much what he and his wife were looking for—house the right size, not too much land and much of it tree-shaded, but with a sizable area of level, sunny ground for a garden. They had spent some time there, and Perrin had taken the prospective buyer over much of the land. ‘I sat that part out,’ Mrs Seeley admitted.

  ‘He ask Mr Perrin about this help problem?’ Crowley asked.

  He had.

  ‘Seems he was sort of hipped on it,’ Crowley said.

  Mrs Seeley wouldn’t go that far. Anybody who knew his way around would want to find things out. It was like finding out what flow a well had; whether a septic tank ever backed up, a roof ever leaked. People with savvy found things out in advance.

  ‘And I hope, young man,’ Mrs Seeley said, ‘that Mr Peters isn’t in any real trouble. Because he’s a prospect. Going to bring his wife out to look at the Perrin place.’

  ‘Just maybe a witness,’ Crowley told her. ‘That was all you showed him?’

  It had not been. After he had told Perrin he would think things over, and they had left, Peters had said they might as well look at this Waltham place she had mentioned. She had said, of course if he wanted to, but that after the Perrin place—

  But a real estate agent must accommodate. She had driven him to the Waltham place. ‘Looked worse than I remembered it,’ she said. ‘Which was something.’

  Peters had got out of the car and looked at the old house and shaken his head over it. He had gone up on the porch, cautiously, and looked in through a window and shaken his head again. He had even gone around the house, through the weeds, and had come back shaking his head. Mrs Seeley herself had remained in the car, more or less stressing her detachment. The Waltham place, despite its considerable acreage, had an asking price of twelve thousand. Five percent of twelve isn’t by a long way five percent of forty-five, which was Perrin’s asking. ‘And worth every penny of it,’ Mrs Seeley pointed out.

  That was the last place she had shown William Peters, and she had taken him back to the Old Stone Inn, where he was staying during his search, and been hopeful that she might have a sale coming up. She still was.

  Crowley started to ask her other questions, and thought better of it. Driving back to the barracks to report, he asked himself instead.

  Suppose, Crowley asked himself, I was looking for a man who had been a gardener—I don’t know Justice Mitchell was, but suppose he was—and suppose I had reason to think he was somewhere in a given area, and maybe broke. Wouldn’t I, maybe, cruise around the area asking about outdoor workers? Wouldn’t one way of doing that be to look at houses in the area? If, in the course of asking around, I was told about a peculiar codger called simply Old Tom who sometimes wandered in and did odd jobs and wandered away again, wouldn’t I go have a look at the place this Old Tom was supposed to be holing up in? Mr Perrin probably knew where Old Tom was squatting; a good many people did. (Crowley had been one of those who had gone around asking people.) He might have mentioned the Waltham place to Peters. No reason he shouldn’t have.

  Crowley was reasonably pleased with the questions he asked himself. When he outlined them to Captain Heimrich at the barracks, Heimrich nodded his head from time to time, and closed his eyes. Then he added another question:

  If Peters was actually Wade Thompson, and if he was looking for T. Lyman Mitchell with a view to killing him, and if he found that Mitchell was living in the shack on the Waltham place, why not kill him quietly in the shack?

  Heimrich opened his eyes.

  ‘Why, Ray,’ he said, ‘kill him in the open? On my driveway?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The man Forniss knew, the assistant city editor of the Tonaganda Republican, had given him a name, and not vouched for it. Forniss should understand that he was passing on gossip, and seven- or eight-year-old gossip. Nothing had ever been proved about it, and nothing had been printed. Oh, that the police, in the first days after Justice Mitchell’s disappearance, had questioned most of his friends and associates, including his former secretary, a Miss Edith Curtiss—that had been printed, without implication. None of them could help the police. That had been printed too.

  The rest was gossip, not for the news columns of the Tonaganda Republican. ‘We’re not a tabloid,’ Forniss’s friend told him. He did not speak with any special pride; it occurred to Forniss that he spoke somewhat wistfully.

  ‘Mrs Mitchell thought there was someone,’ Forniss said. ‘Thought he might have gone away with her.’

  Forniss’s friend shook his head at that; said there was one trouble with that. Edith Curtiss hadn’t gone away with anyone. Edith Curtiss was in town. She was running a secretarial school. If Mitchell had gone away with another woman, if it was as simple as that, it clearly wasn’t with Edith Curtiss.

  ‘For my money,’ Forniss’s friend said, ‘the mob ran him out of town. That’s always where my money was.’

  ‘A man named Pirancello?’

  The assistant city editor shrugged; said it could be.

  ‘Only,’ he said, ‘Piery himself was on the skids about then. Or so I heard.’

  ‘Silvo?’

  Silvo hadn’t showed then. Of course, Silvo wouldn’t have had to show.

  In one respect, at least, the citizens of Tonaganda were conveniently open and above board. One could look them up in the telephone directory and find them there. For Edith Curtiss there were two listings, b. and r. Forniss tried b. and got no answer. Apparently the school was closed on summer Saturdays. He did not try the other number; he drove to the address.

  Edith Curtiss did not live in a house with lawns around it. She lived in an apartment building—an old apartment building which was keeping its head above its neighborhood proudly but, Forniss thought, with some difficulty. Forniss went up to the third floor to ask a woman if she had, years ago, been the mistress of a man now murdered. When she opened the door and stood looking up at him, he didn’t have to ask.

  She was a woman in her early forties and she had never, Forniss thought, been beautiful or even especially pretty. She had soft brown hair and soft brown eyes, and her eyes were swollen from crying.

  Forniss said, ‘Miss Curtiss,’ and, when she nodded her head
without speaking, said, ‘I’m from the police, Miss Curtiss. About—’

  ‘About Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting—Before it was a man named Walenski.’

  ‘State Police,’ Forniss said. ‘Not city.’

  ‘It’s true?’ she said. ‘He’s—he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sergeant Forniss said. ‘Justice Mitchell’s dead, Miss Curtiss.’

  She turned into the apartment without saying anything, leaving the door open, and he went after her. It was a pleasant living room, with bright-colored slip covers on chairs and sofa; with gay curtains at the windows. But it was not a gay room.

  ‘It’s all over, then,’ she said and suddenly sat down on the sofa and covered her eyes. Forniss stood for a moment looking down at her; when she did not look up he sat in a chair facing her and waited. After some time she took her hands from her face and said she was sorry. She said, ‘That was a foolish thing to say. Long ago it was all over.’

  He waited.

  ‘What do you want of me now?’ she said.

  Her voice was soft, a gentle voice. There was warmth in it, Forniss thought—had been warmth in it.

  ‘We have to go back into the past,’ Forniss said, and what he said didn’t, somehow, seem good enough.

  ‘And so,’ she said, ‘you come to me. Why? Long ago I told them there was nothing between us. Why do you come now?’

  ‘Because he’s dead,’ Forniss said. ‘Nothing you say can hurt him now. It may help us.’

  She said, ‘How?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, Miss Curtiss. Do you know why he went away? Ran away?’

  ‘Would it help now? I mean, it was years ago.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Forniss said. ‘It might.’

  ‘Help you catch whoever killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might.’

  ‘Why do you think I would know?’

  ‘I understand,’ Forniss said, ‘that you were a friend of his.’

  She looked at him steadily for a moment. She said, ‘Friend?’

  He said, ‘Friend.’

  ‘You’re more considerate than the others were,’ she said. ‘They used other words.’

  ‘Whatever words you like,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to find out who killed Mitchell. The man you’ve been crying over.’ He paused for an instant. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Curtiss,’ Sergeant Forniss, who is seldom sorry about what he has to do, heard himself say.

  ‘The word is an old one,’ she said. ‘He came to me for—for all the things a man, a lonely man, comes to a woman for. The word is mistress. I was Tom Mitchell’s mistress. He came to me when he could, and spent the night with me when he could. Is that what you want to know?’

  ‘What you can tell me,’ Forniss said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that before,’ she said. ‘Not—not really because I was ashamed. I wasn’t ashamed. Not inside.’

  He hadn’t asked for this; for this sad defiance in a voice.

  ‘He can’t be hurt any more, can he?’ she said, and Forniss said, ‘No, Miss Curtiss.’

  ‘He wanted comfort,’ she said. ‘A—a something he didn’t get from his wife.’

  Forniss looked at the soft-eyed woman, and thought that in a way she was, after all, beautiful. He thought of the poised, slim woman who now was Mrs Wade Thompson. He thought it likely that the something Mitchell had got with one, not with the other, was warmth. For an instant Forniss, who is sometimes a lonely man himself, envied a man now dead. The hell with this, Forniss told himself. I’m a cop.

  ‘He talked to you,’ Forniss said. ‘Told you things. Do you know why he disappeared?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t tell me things that—that might somehow hurt me. He said, “They don’t care who they hurt. I don’t want it to be you.”’

  ‘They?’

  ‘He’d got mixed up with people,’ she said. ‘I don’t know their names, or not many of their names. Gamblers. Racketeers.’

  ‘Through gambling himself?’

  ‘At first, I think it was that,’ she said. ‘A long time ago. I was his secretary once. Did you know that? But of course you knew that.’

  Forniss nodded his head.

  ‘Will you find the one who killed him? Will this help?’

  ‘We usually do,’ Forniss said. ‘I don’t know, Miss Curtiss. I hope it will help.’ He could see hesitation, uncertainty, in her eyes. ‘He’s dead now,’ Forniss said. ‘He can’t be hurt by anything you tell me.’

  ‘There were telephone calls,’ she said. ‘From—from people I shouldn’t have thought he’d know. And—I would cash checks for him. Sometimes quite large checks. I think it was gambling at first. Afterward—’

  She stopped and he waited.

  ‘Afterward,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. I—I didn’t try to guess. What did you say your name was?’

  He told her again.

  ‘By then,’ she said, ‘he was coming here, Sergeant Forniss. By then—’

  Again she paused.

  ‘By then I didn’t want to know,’ she said. ‘Didn’t want to guess—to pry. But—people like that have a lot of operations, don’t they? All kinds of operations?’

  ‘Yes. All kinds. All kinds of things there are laws against.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Of course I know. And it would help to have a Supreme Court justice—mixed up with them. In a position where he’d have to do what they wanted done.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll think, she doesn’t face things because she loved him,’ Edith Curtiss said. ‘That—that I was blind. I did love him. But, whatever you think, he was a man of—’ She paused and seemed to seek a word. ‘Rectitude,’ she said. ‘It’s the only word that fits. That was the trouble, really. If it hadn’t been for that—’ Again she hesitated. ‘He was caught,’ she said. ‘Finally he couldn’t accept what he was caught in. That’s why he went away.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘Not in words,’ she said. ‘Not in so many words. But that was it. Somehow—somehow he kept getting sucked in, deeper and deeper. As they say people are in quicksand. Only he put it differently. In—oh, everyday words. He said, “They’ve got me over a barrel, Edith.” It’s something people say all the time, isn’t it? About nothing that’s really important.’

  ‘Yes,’ Forniss said. ‘When was this, Miss Curtiss?’

  ‘The week before he went away,’ she said.

  ‘He had told you he was going?’

  She shook her head. ‘Only,’ she said, ‘I knew he was going. Knew he wasn’t coming back.’ She covered her eyes again. ‘I always hoped he would come back,’ she said. ‘Knowing he wouldn’t didn’t—’ She was silent for some seconds. Then she said she was sorry.

  ‘Did you know what he meant?’ Forniss said. ‘About being over a barrel?’

  ‘It was one of the things he didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘It was then he said, they didn’t care who they hurt. I think—’ Again she paused, seemed to consider. This pause was the longest of many.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think—there was a case on his docket. A taxpayer’s suit to enjoin the issuance of a race track license—a trotting track. I do know that. I think they had some hold on him to make him—make him decide not to grant the injunction.’

  ‘You don’t know what? Or, can’t guess what?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only—there was a man named Pirancello. The paper called him a gambler. He was one of the ones who wanted the license. That is, the suit charged he was. With another name as a front.’

  He waited.

  ‘It was in the paper,’ she said. ‘Pirancello disappeared. Oh, a week or so before Tom went away. There was a lot about it for a few days, but then it turned out Pirancello had merely gone to Mexico. Only, it said “hiding out in Mexico” and if he was hiding—’ She spread her hands, suddenly.

  ‘Afterward,’ she said. ‘After Tom went away I wondered—I hadn’t anything to go on—perhaps something had—had happened
to Pirancello. And that Tom knew what it was—somehow had been forced to know. And that that was too much. He was in too deep to—to tell what he knew. But, he couldn’t go on being a judge. So he just went away. He’d—he’d had all he could take. All of everything.’

  She had not heard from him after he went away. For a long time she had thought she would, then hoped she would; then given up hoping. She thought he had started over again somewhere else.

  Thomas Lyman Mitchell had left a good deal behind when he decided that, in Tonaganda, he had all he could take. A career, a marriage, a daughter, respect—all these. And a tender, gentle woman named Edith Curtiss. Forniss, having said he was sorry to have troubled Edith Curtiss, left her sitting on the sofa—left her and thought that, of all Mitchell had left behind, he might well have missed this woman most. But they would, Forniss thought, never really know much about Mitchell, except that he had convinced one woman of his ‘rectitude.’ It was an odd word, Forniss thought, to use of a judge who had, clearly enough, been in with racketeers. But she had known him.

  Forniss went back to police headquarters. Inspector Richard Norson had gone for the day. A quiet Saturday in Tonaganda, apparently. He enquired, got information. Patrolman Patrick Callahan, who had worked on the Mitchell case, had resigned from the force five years before, and was supposed to have gone to California. Where in California nobody knew. Detective Jon Walenski had retired from the force when he had had thirty years in—and when he was in his early fifties. He now owned a flower shop.

  Forniss found the flower shop, which was quite large and appeared quite prosperous, and was heavy with the scent of flowers. Walenski was a shortish, squarish man with heavy neck and shoulders and a weathered, reddened face. He did not, Forniss thought, particularly look like a man of flowers. But florists, for some reason, frequently do not. Walenski, found in his office, turned out to be a ‘nope’ man.

  Nope, he had never heard that Pirancello had maybe been rubbed out. It was all news to him; for his money, Piery was in Mexico, like they said. People didn’t get bumped off much any more. Not around here, anyway. Nope.