‘Well,’ Peters said. ‘I don’t know whether I ought—damn it all, six o’clock in the morning.’
‘Very inconvenient hour, sir,’ the sergeant agreed.
‘He didn’t come flat out with it,’ Peters said. ‘I gathered there was a woman involved. See what I mean? And that somebody was on to something and—O.K., maybe there was trouble coming. See what I mean?’
‘Quite, sir.’
‘What the hell,’ Peters said. ‘I’ve got my own wife. Thompson wants to play around, that’s up to him. Let him stick his own neck out. But to get you people into it—’
‘Quite, sir,’ the sergeant said, and went to telephone Chief Inspector Drake.
As for Mrs Oliver Perrin: Her registration at the Savoy had been verified. So far, no opportunity had arisen for unannounced scrutiny. If it was still the drill that Mrs Perrin was not to know she was being scrutinized?
‘Yes,’ Heimrich said. ‘Still the way we’d like it. Roses doing well, I hope?’
‘Insects,’ Chief Inspector Drake said. ‘Always insects.’ He considered briefly. ‘What you people call bugs,’ he added, with pride—the pride of a man well on his way to mastery of an alien tongue.
Heimrich cradled the telephone and looked at it. He picked it up and changed orders. Black Chevrolet sedan, rental plates No. WP—to be picked up. Driver, if identified as Wade Thompson, to be brought in for questioning. It was time for that now. It was time, also, for waiting—waiting in a stuffy office with the heat building up—in accordance, Heimrich remembered, with the weather forecast. Nice to know that somebody’s predictions were working out. The telephone rang.
‘Car twenty-three just checked in,’ the communications man told him. ‘Got the car we’re after.’
‘Fine,’ Heimrich said. ‘Where?’
‘Just turned into the driveway,’ communications reported. He paused for a moment. ‘Our driveway,’ he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Corporal Raymond Crowley parked his car on the shoulder of High Road and crossed the road. About here, if he had got it right from the captain, the wounded dog had come over a stone wall and down the bank to the road, limping home from the wars. Good old Colonel. The only dog who had ever knocked him out. All the same, good old Colonel. Like to lay hands on the bastard who shot him.
It took some time to find the now faint, now black, splatters of blood Colonel had left behind him as he trudged toward home. Crowley had to work back, toward the west, for some yards before he picked the trail up. Here—quite a good deal of blood here where the big dog had floundered down the bank. Crowley climbed the bank. Blood on top of the wall. Poor old boy. Crowley went over the wall.
He found what Heimrich had found before—underbrush to his left, a cleared field of unmowed grass to his right. He found traces of a stone fence dividing the two areas. The heavy foundation stones were about all that remained of the fence. How long ago, Crowley wondered mildly, had oxen, towing stone sleds, dragged these almost-boulders? And who, more recently, had carted away the smaller stones once laboriously piled up, and to what purpose? To build a fieldstone house, probably.
He did not much expect that he would find the blood trail here. It is one thing to follow such a trail along the hard surface of a road shoulder, or up a bank mowed and raked out by a road crew. It is another thing to find it in heavy growth, either of brush or grass. Crowley looked. He got down on hands and knees to look. He found nothing beyond the stone wall. He stood up and looked.
An animal as big as Colonel would leave other marks of passing. He would beat down a path through high grass and, while the grass would spring up again rather quickly, there might still be traces. Through the underbrush, he would be more difficult to follow.
Crowley saw nothing in the field; the grass stood high and even. Plowed and sown to grass, the field had been once, to grass for haying. Weeds in it, of course, but not too many; for a year or so after first sowing, probably almost none. If they didn’t hay it this year or next, Crowley thought, the big weeds would start again, the brush would begin to come back. Van Brunt land, up for sale. One day the bulldozers would be in, making roads through the field. One day the “ranch houses” would flower. Unless by then there had been a reform in domestic architecture.
He would have to go into the field and look more closely. But first, he moved off toward the left, bulling his way through underbrush, patiently freeing himself from thorn bushes. He went slowly, looking as he went. This would have been heavy going for an injured dog. There was nothing to show that Colonel had tried it—no broken brush; no leaves with blood on them. Funny to find no traces—
He came suddenly on a path—a trodden path which led down to the stone fence which paralleled the road. A deer trail, probably. Deer came down it to jump over the fence into the paths of startled motorists. It was exciting to watch deer moving, but they were damn fool animals.
Colonel might have come down this path to the wall, then walked along the wall until he found an easy jump to the ground. Crouching, eyes on the beaten surface, Crowley followed the path northward for perhaps a hundred feet. He did not find what he was looking for.
It was conceivable that Colonel’s wound had not, at first, bled freely; that the dog’s movements had really started the blood flowing. It was also possible that the big dog had bitten, resentfully, at the hurt place. Crowley had once known a cat who, having lost two inches of tail in a swinging door and having been properly bandaged, had angrily bitten the bandage off, and the second bandage off and the third, before he was put under constraint. Colonel might have bitten at his shoulder.
He had not bled on the path. Crowley went down to the wall and walked, teetering, along it. No traces on the wall. He was back where he had started from, where the traces were—where Colonel had surely crossed. Crowley stood on the wall and looked around.
Over the undergrowth—let grow, probably, as buffer; it was going to be handy when the development got going—Crowley could see a wide lawn and, beyond it, a two-story house. The Perrin place for the last few years. Before that, some people named Folsom. Perrin might have seen the dog from his house, if he had been in it, and had been looking. But if Perrin had seen anything, he would long since have told the captain.
Ray Crowley went across the remnants of the stone fence into the unmowed field. The grass was almost waist high; as he moved through it, diagonally across the field, he left a flattened trail behind him. But grass, in June, is resilient. As it was knocked down, it began to struggle to its feet again. Crowley went up a gentle slope, through the tall grass. There was a ridge in the field; from it he might be able to see more.
He had gone perhaps a hundred yards when he came to what was, almost certainly, the path something—a fairly large something—had followed. The grass was not down, but it was still bent low. No proof that Colonel had bent it. The animal might well have been a deer. Or, for that matter, a man. The trail led from east to west, just below the ridge. To the east, at some distance, was Van Brunt Avenue, NY 11F. To the west, the boundary line between Van Brunt and Perrin property.
Ten to one, a deer. Still—
Crowley followed the faint trail toward his right, which was toward the east; which, after a few feet, was again up the slope. At the top of the slope, the faint marking in the grass went down—went down toward what looked, from this distance, like a heap of lumber. Crowley hurried, then.
The heap of lumber was what remained of a shed. It had collapsed with the weight of years—of years and wind and rain. It had folded in on itself, and on its contents. The contents, to Crowley—peering in between boards—appeared to be junk. A wooden frame of some sort—for the love of God, the remains of an old loom? A pot-bellied stove. A chest of some sort, which, like the shed to which it had been relegated, had collapsed into itself.
Weathered wood. Was it here the big dog had scratched? Scratched to get in or, conceivably, to get out? Although how a big dog could get into this collapsed heap of lumb
er—
Crowley circled the remains of the shed, looking for traces of the dog, for the blood of the dog. He found nothing. He did not find any place where it seemed likely a dog as big as Colonel, however curious, could have forced entry. Drawn a blank, Crowley thought, and his enthusiasm trickled away. The technical boys might find more, if the captain thought it worth while to send them. Crowley doubted it. Crowley stepped into mud, and said, ‘Damn.’
The damp place was on the far side of the collapsed shed. It marked, Crowley decided, the June decadence of an earlier spring. Springs came and went in fields such as this. Even brooks came and went. Here the mud was a two-foot circle; beyond the circle there was a wider area of earth which was merely slightly damp.
And at the edge of that, there was the shoe-print of a man.
It was a single print of the right foot. It had been made by a narrow shoe—a narrow, pointed shoe with a flat heel. Damn it all—a dress shoe, meant to be worn with dinner clothes? The old man had been wearing dress shoes when he died.
Crowley looked for further prints, and found none. Again he looked for traces of blood and found none; he looked for the footprints of a dog, and there were no dog prints. All the same—
He wrenched a loose board from the ruin of boards and put it, carefully, over the print. He found stones and put one at either end of the board. There was no doubt now that the technical boys would be around—around with plaster to make a cast of what he had found.
Crowley stood up and looked around. Toward the east, where the ground sloped down toward the still distant highway, there was an excavation, rectangular, partly walled with stone. An old foundation, site of an old house. Burned down, almost certainly; burned down a long time ago.
Crowley went through the high grass and looked into it. Some of the walls, which had been foundation walls once, still showed traces of fire blackening. A Van Brunt house, probably—a house years, perhaps centuries, before his time. Nothing here; here no signs of dog or man.
Circling the foundation, Crowley almost fell into an abandoned well. It was covered by wire netting, but the netting was rusted through. It would keep nothing from falling into the well. The Van Brunt estate people should be told about it; warned about it. If somebody—and it might be a child—fell into the well, the owners would be responsible. Traps may not be set for trespassers.
Crowley looked through the netting into the well. Some feet down, he saw the blackness of water. Some dug wells never go dry. Somebody—a child or an animal or a man—might drown in such a well.
Crowley debated briefly whether it was his duty, single handed, to wrench enough boards from the fallen shed to cover the well opening. He decided he had better leave the well as it was, and the shed as it was. He’d better get back to the car radio.
He went back alongside the faint trail he had followed to the shed. It ran toward the boundary wall. There, a few feet short of the wall, it joined a deer path.
A deer all along, Crowley decided. That it had led him to the footprint of a dress shoe was entirely fortuitous. Inadvertently, a deer had made himself useful.
Crowley went back to his car and switched the radio on.
Wade Thompson had not seemed a large man on Friday evening, when he had sat in Heimrich’s office and offered help. He seemed now, this Sunday afternoon, to be appreciably smaller, to be a diminished man. He said that he had been a damn fool, a statement with which Captain Heimrich did not disagree. He said he had decided to make a clean breast of it.
Heimrich nodded his head and waited.
‘I told my wife,’ Thompson said. ‘She was—well, I’m afraid she was really shocked. I tried to explain that it’s foolish to get mixed up in something you’re not really mixed up in. If you see what I mean?’
Heimrich nodded his head again. It is also foolish to get mixed up in something you are mixed up in. This went without saying, and Heimrich did not say it. After a brief pause he said, ‘Go on, Mr Thompson.’ Thompson still hesitated.
‘Very well,’ Heimrich said. ‘You did stay at the Old Stone Inn from some time Thursday to Friday evening. You used Mr Peters’ name. You denied it to Sergeant Forniss.’
‘He didn’t really—’ Thompson said. ‘All right. That’s a quibble. There was nothing wrong in what I did. Nothing illegal, actually.’
A man may use any name he chooses, if he does not use it to defraud.
‘Now Mr Thompson,’ Heimrich said, and let weariness into his voice. ‘Go on. You posed as Peters. Go further back. Why?’
‘I was trying to find poor old Tom Mitchell,’ Thompson said. ‘I wanted to get him to come back.’
‘Altruistic of you,’ Heimrich said. ‘What made you think he’d be in Van Brunt, Mr Thompson? Did you—or you and your wife—open a letter addressed to Miss Mitchell before you—’
‘No,’ Thompson said, and his voice was more firm. ‘Certainly we did not, captain. My wife—you don’t know my wife, captain. She would no more dream—It was she who insisted that I admit I was at the inn.’
‘You had reason to believe Mitchell would be in Van Brunt,’ Heimrich said, with great, with audible, patience. ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ Thompson said and stopped. His long face seemed to grow longer. He smoothed his already smooth black hair with the palm of one hand. He said, ‘Well,’ again. He said, ‘We didn’t open the letter. I assure you of that. But—’
The letter, addressed to Enid Mitchell, misdirected to the Thompson house, had come a week or so before. Mrs Thompson had recognized, been sure she recognized, the handwriting as that of her former, her missing, husband. She had showed it to Thompson and he, although less familiar with Mitchell’s hand, had agreed. The postmark was not too clear, but they had made it out. ‘Van Brunt, New York.’ They had forwarded the letter—‘unopened, of course’—to Enid.
Heimrich made no comment, expressed no disbelief. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and said, ‘Go on, Mr Thompson.’
Thompson had had mid-week business appointments in New York City. One of them had been canceled, leaving him with a Thursday with nothing to do. He had looked up Van Brunt in a Putnam-Westchester counties map and rented a car and driven up. He had thought there was just a chance—
‘Why?’ Heimrich said. ‘Why did you want to find him, Mr Thompson?’
‘My wife is—after all, he was her husband,’ Thompson said. ‘She—this has all been very difficult for her. The uncertainty—the—’
He seemed to run down. Heimrich opened very blue eyes and looked at him.
‘When a man disappears like that,’ Thompson said, and there was resentment in his voice, ‘it leaves things in a tangle. All sorts of things. Part of the property—my wife had money of her own and it—somehow it—well, was in the tangle. And—’ He was silent for some seconds. ‘All right,’ he said.
Heimrich nodded his head and said, ‘Go on, Mr Thompson. You decided to look for him. When there was occasion to use a name, you used Peters’ name. Why?’
He had not, Thompson said, planned to do that. But when he had reached Van Brunt he had found it very small—very small indeed. The kind of a place where everybody knows everything that happens. If he used his own name it might ‘get around’ to Mitchell, if Mitchell was in the neighborhood. It might—‘Well, I thought it might scare him off.’
‘Scare?’
‘Captain,’ Thompson said, ‘something scared him out of Tonaganda. I don’t know what. I don’t know what he was scared of. I didn’t know what would scare him now.’
‘All right,’ Heimrich said. ‘You registered as William Peters. You pretended to be looking for a house. You made special enquiries as to the availability of outdoor workers. Why?’
‘He was always a great one for gardening,’ Thompson said. ‘For working out of doors. I—it just seemed a likely lead.’
‘It wasn’t, I gather. Or did you find some trace of him? Thursday, say?’
Thompson had not. It had all been fruitless. By Thu
rsday evening he had more or less given it up. By Friday morning he was quite convinced he was wasting time—trying to do something he was not equipped to do. So—
‘I looked up detective agencies in the Westchester-Putnam directory,’ Thompson said. ‘There was one in Peekskill. I thought a more or less local man might—well, might know his way around. So—’
So, Friday morning, after breakfast, he had driven the few miles to Peekskill and to the offices of Inquiries, Inc. Talked to a man named—Wegman?
‘Wayman,’ Heimrich said. ‘Bernard Wayman.’
‘You know him?’
Heimrich knew him. Of his kind, Bernie Wayman was by no means the worst. He said he knew Wayman; that Thompson might have done worse. He had engaged Wayman—who was Inquiries, Inc.—to hunt for former Supreme Court Justice T. Lyman Mitchell?
Thompson had. Then, since he still had time on his hands, he had made one or two calls in Peekskill—business calls, on people who might want boxes. He had had lunch with a customer. He had driven around for some time, looking at the country. ‘It’s pretty around here,’ Thompson said. Heimrich agreed it was pretty around there. He had, late in the afternoon, driven back to Van Brunt. He had decided to check out at the inn and drive the rented car back to the city, and to return to Tonaganda by train either that night or the next morning. But in New York he had heard that Mitchell had been killed and—
‘I came back here. Saw you. That’s all of it.’
‘Now Mr Thompson,’ Heimrich said. ‘Not quite all, I think. You knew nothing of Judge Mitchell’s death until you were back in town? Heard nothing in Van Brunt?’
‘No.’
‘Mr Thompson,’ Heimrich said, ‘you saw your stepdaughter at the inn. Looked up and saw her at the window. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Thompson hesitated for some seconds. Then he nodded his head.
‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘know she’d recognized me. She—she didn’t do anything to show she had.’
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