It was none of Heimrich’s goddamn business. Heimrich closed his eyes. He said, “Now, Mr. Steele, it is, naturally. How did it happen you didn’t know Mr. Fleming had been killed? Probably the whole township knows by now. You live around here?”
“At the club. A couple of lousy little rooms go with the job. We can even eat with the white folks.”
“We?”
“I’ve got a wife,” Steele said. “Like the white folks. And a damn sight better look—” He stopped abruptly. “What the hell business is that of yours?” he asked Heimrich. Heimrich sighed and thought, momentarily, that he might be catching the habit from this sad New York lieutenant.
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I heard you have a wife, Steele. A pretty wife. You spend the winters around here, Mr. Steele?”
He opened his eyes with that and was in time to see Robert Steele blink slightly. They get set for one thing and you try something else. Sometimes it is unbalancing enough to help.
“What the hell bus—” Steele began and Heimrich cut him off. Heimrich said, “Answer me, Steele.”
“Florida this last winter,” Steele said. “What the hell’s a golf pro supposed to do around here in the winter?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Heimrich said. “This pretty wife of yours go along with you?”
“Leave her the hell out of this,” Steele said, proving that he knew the clichés. But he did not, Heimrich thought, use this one with much confidence.
“No,” Heimrich said. “What’s your wife’s name, Steele?”
“None of your—” Steele began, but then he looked full at Heimrich, who was looking full at him. “Catherine,” he said.
“She go south with you this winter? And—let’s drop this none of my business, shall we? Because it could be you’re in something of a spot, Steele. Did she?”
“All right,” Steele said, “she didn’t. So what the hell?”
“Stay on at the club?”
“Rented a room from some people we know.”
“Why didn’t she go to Florida with you? Because you two weren’t getting along very well?”
“We got along fine. She got this job and —” He stopped.
Got along, Heimrich thought. Not get along. Heimrich said, “What job?”
“She was a secretary before we got married,” Steele said. “What the hell kind of a job’d you think?”
A man opens a new law office in a village; he needs a secretary, an answerer of telephones. (If telephones ring.) He looks for a local girl—
“Stuart Fleming’s secretary?” Heimrich said.
“Dead or alive,” Steele said, “he’s a no-good bastard.”
“Now, Steele,” Heimrich said. “Beside the point, isn’t it? Your wife got a job with Mr. Fleming. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“So what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Heimrich said. “What would there be? What do people call your wife, Steele. Nickname. Short name. Cathy, isn’t it?”
“Sure it’s Cathy.”
“When did you get back from Florida?”
“What the hell bus—” Steele began, and then shrugged his wide, powerful shoulders. “Monday,” he said. “Last Monday.”
“And moved into these rooms at the club.”
“So all right. So why not?”
“No reason,” Heimrich said. “Your wife move in with you?”
“Getting the rooms squared away first,” Steele said. He did not, now, sound in the least intoxicated.
“You expect her to move in with you?”
“Listen,” Steele said, and started to stand up. Crowley moved to stand back of his chair. Steele did not get up. He said, “She’s my wife, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “She’s your wife. Funny, though, after you’ve been gone for—what is it, several months?—she wouldn’t want to be with you as soon as she could manage it. You got back Monday. It’s Friday. You’ve seen her?”
“You’re damn right I’ve seen her.”
“Been staying with her in this room she’s rented?”
“I told you I went back to the club. What the hell’re you trying-”
“When did you see her last? Yesterday?”
“So I saw her yesterday.”
“Where?”
“At the bas— At Fleming’s office.”
“Any chance, Steele, she told you she wasn’t coming back? That she’d found somebody else? Told you the somebody else was Fleming? Or—let you guess it was Fleming?”
Steele stood up then, and when Ray Crowley started to move his hands, Heimrich shook his head. Then Heimrich stood up. He was as tall as Robert Steele and somewhat heavier. The additional weight was the weight of muscle.
“I’ve got a notion,” Steele said, “to knock your goddamn block off.”
“Now, Steele,” Heimrich said. “We all get notions. I don’t think yours is so hot.”
They faced each other for a moment, and then Steele said, “The hell with it,” and sat down again. And then he spread his strong hands apart, in a gesture of resignation.
“All right,” Steele said. “You’ll find out sooner or later anyhow. Cathy and I—hell, something began to go wrong last summer. Maybe she got tired of being married to a pro at a fifth-rate club. Maybe—I don’t know what the hell happened. So, when the club closed down for the winter, we thought maybe if I took off for a few months we’d—well, think it over. Find out things were all right. And—we would have. If it hadn’t been for this bastard Fleming. Guy with money. Member of this goddamn club, not just a guy working there. Moving in on—the hell with it.”
“She told you yesterday that, definitely, she wasn’t coming back to you? Because of Fleming?”
“Part of it,” Steele said. “That she wasn’t coming back. Not now, anyway. She said Fleming hadn’t anything to do with it but —hell, I knew better. And she damn well knew I—”
He stopped. When he started again he seemed to be talking to his hands, clenched tightly together.
“I went back to the club and did some drinking,” he told his hands. “One hell of a lot of drinking. Woke up maybe a couple of hours ago—I don’t know when the hell I went to sleep—and had another shot. Maybe a couple more shots. Then it seemed like an idea to come over here and kick Fleming’s teeth in. Because maybe without teeth he wouldn’t look so good to other men’s wives. Because—O.K., because I was still drunk, I guess.”
“You don’t own an automatic?”
“I told you I don’t.”
“Didn’t get this idea about doing something to Fleming a lot earlier? Didn’t come over and do it? With a gun, not with your hands or your feet? Didn’t—figuring we’d find out about your wife and Fleming anyway—get the bright idea of coming over here to put on a little show for us?”
“No,” Steele said. “No to all of it—all this crap. Start with I haven’t got a gun. Go on with—”
He stopped and looked at the state police car which was stopping in the drive. He watched while Sergeant Charles Forniss got out on one side and Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro got lankily, disconsolately, out on the other.
When he saw them, Robert Steele stood up and stared at them. It seemed to Heimrich, watching, that his major stare was for the sad detective lieutenant from Manhattan. And Steele said, “Jeez,” in a low, faraway voice.
“As I live and breathe,” Shapiro said, in a tone which suggested he found neither desirable. “If it isn’t Bernie—good old Bernie Stahlman. The missing link.”
Steele once more demonstrated the limitations of his vocabulary. But there was no force behind the word.
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About the Authors
Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the New Yorker
turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances’s death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.
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Copyright © 1994 by Frances and Richard Lockridge
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ISBN: 978-1-5040-5056-2
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First Come, First Kill Page 22
