Foggy, Foggy Death

by Frances Lockridge

  Heimrich opened his eyes, looked at her, and closed them again.

  “Mrs. Bromwell,” he said, “I am committed only to finding out who killed your daughter-in-law. And this man Higgins.” He stood up, opening his eyes. “Naturally,” he said, “I want all the information I can get. About—everyone.” He paused. “Naturally,” he repeated.

  Mrs. Bromwell went then, and Karen went with her. Left alone with Forniss, Heimrich walked to one of the two windows. He looked out of it for a moment.

  “Well,” he said, “thick as ever, isn’t it, Charlie? Or, would you say it had thinned a bit? With everybody being so helpful?”

  The children, Mrs. Bromwell told Karen as they went back up the stairs, became a problem. Clearly, it was undesirable—it was flatly impossible—that they should remain in the care of a person such as Miss James had proved herself to be. A new nurse-govemess would have to be found. But immediately— There was, Mrs. Bromwell said, turning down the hall, always one of the maids, Flora by preference. “Such a well-meaning little thing,” Mrs. Bromwell said, in parenthesis. But for care on a different level …

  “I’ll see that they’re all right,” Karen said. “But—you realize I can’t stay here indefinitely. Not now.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Mrs. Bromwell said, but Karen shook her head. It wasn’t fiddlesticks, and Mrs. Bromwell herself did not, after her instinctive characterization, insist that it was.

  “In any case,” Mrs. Bromwell said, “nobody can leave now. Not even Miss James. That man was right about that. The drive’s always impossible when there’s glaze.”

  With chains, Karen thought—with chains and great caution—the drive would not be impossible, or the roads. But they were, certainly, uninviting. The turn at the foot of the drive, especially, would be difficult, even dangerous.

  “I,” Mrs. Bromwell said, “shall speak to Miss James. And if you could just look in on the children?”

  Mrs. Bromwell knocked on Miss James’s door and opened it; Karen looked in on Lorry and Pethy. They were standing side by side at a window, looking fixedly at the fog and rain.

  “It’s all icy!” Pethy Bromwell said, turning at the sound of Karen’s entrance. “All over everything. Look Karen!”

  Karen joined the children and looked. It was certainly icy. The big ash outside the window drooped with ice. “We can slide,” Pethy said. They certainly could, Karen agreed.

  “Karen,” Lorry said, “we had the funniest dream last night. Before grandma came. We both had it.”

  “Lorry,” Pethy said, “you’re so funny! We couldn’t ‘bofe’ have it.”

  Lorry had not quite said “bofe.” He had almost said “both.” He said it again, leaving no doubt about it.

  “We could too,” he said. “About a little man. He’d been to the bathroom.”

  Karen had been only half listening. But now she said, “A little man?”

  “Two people can’t have one dream,” Pethy said. “Can they, Karen?”

  “They can too,” Lorry said. “Because you had it and I had had it. You know you did. Daddy sent him.”

  “The little man, he means,” Pethy explained. “He’s so funny, isn’t he, Karen? As if daddy had sent the dream.”

  “What kind of a little man?” Karen asked them. “A very little man? Like—like a doll?”

  “Karen!” Pethy said. “He was a little man. He was lots bigger than Lorry.” She paused, considering. “Bigger than me, even,” she said.

  “He came to see how we were,” Lorry said. “We were all right. That was the dream.”

  “Lorry,” Karen said, “listen dear. Pethy’s right. Two people don’t have one dream.” She hesitated; not that land of dream, anyway, she thought. “Maybe you were both awake. Then you went back to sleep and this morning, when you woke up again, it seemed like a dream. It can be that way.”

  “Well,” Lorry said.

  “But if we were awake,” Pethy said, abandoning a position she had begun to find baffling, “he was real. But he wasn’t real, because why would he be here? He was like a—oh, a gardener or something. They don’t go in people’s bedrooms.”

  “Daddy sent him,” Lorry said. He was triumphant. “He said daddy sent him. That’s why he was here.” He paused. “Except,” he said, “I faw—thought it was a dream.”

  “Children,” Karen said. “Listen Pethy. Lorry. It wasn’t a dream. There was a little man. He—he got hurt. Tell me about his being here.”

  “He just came,” Pethy said. “He’d been in the bathroom and he came out. He had on a brown coat. A—”

  “Windbreaker,” Lorry said. “He came to see if we were all right. Daddy sent him.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Pethy said. “Maybe he was going to steal something. And we woke up and he couldn’t. What happened to him, Karen?”

  “He hurt himself,” Karen said. “The—everybody’s trying to find out how it happened. When did he come here?”

  “Oh,” Lorry said, “it was awfully late. Ten o’clock.”

  “Oh,” Pethy said, “lots later. It was maybe—oh, midnight!” There was awe in Pethy’s voice at the unexampled lateness of midnight. There was a kind of maturity in being able even to think of midnight.

  “Where did he go?” Karen asked.

  “To the bathroom again,” Lorry said. “But then I had to go and he wasn’t there.”

  “Anyway,” Pethy said, “he was lost. You could tell he was lost.”

  “How could you tell, Pethy?” Heimrich asked, from the door. His voice was low for the children, gentle for them.

  Karen turned sharply. “Captain,” she said, “you can’t—”

  “Now Miss Mason,” Captain Heimrich said. “The children don’t mind. Do you?” This last was to Pethy, who looked at him wide-eyed.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “We don’t know you, do we?”

  “My name’s Heimrich,” he told them, in gentle, grave tones. “I’m trying to help find out what happened to—” He paused, and looked at Karen, who shook her head quickly. She formed “They don’t know,” with her lips. “To the little man,” Heimrich finished. “Why did you think he was lost, Pethy?” He smiled at her, at Lorry. “Lorry?” he said.

  “He was trying to find people,” Pethy said. “Any way, I think he was. Daddy sent him, only he didn’t know about daddy’s room. That’s funny. He thought daddy was in grandma’s room. I mean, he thought her room was daddy’s room.”

  “But you told him where your father’s room was, didn’t you?” Heimrich asked.

  “Course,” Lorry said.

  “He wanted to find daddy,” Pethy said. “To tell him we were all right. But why did daddy send him?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I suppose he got worried about you, Pethy. The way your grandmother did.”

  “Grandma?” Pethy said. “Oh, when she came in too? But that was lots later, Mr. Heimrich. And she does lots of times.”

  The children, although Heimrich continued for several minutes to probe gently, could do no more than make childlike guesses as to the time Higgins had appeared in their room and the time, later, of Mrs. Bromwell’s visit. Both had been “awfully late.” The term meant anything; it did not, as Karen had discovered, mean the same thing to Pethy as to Lorry. After Higgins had left, both the children had gone to sleep again; when Mrs. Bromwell came in, they had awakened but, from the vagueness of their memories of the incident, it seemed probable that both had gone back to sleep before she left. (Lorry thought their grandmother had stayed only about ten minutes; Pethy was sure it was longer. But neither could remember anything about her going out.)

  But both children were, taken over it again, sure that the little man in the windbreaker had been going from their room to their father’s so that “he could tell daddy we were all right.” It was less certain, but even to Karen’s unwilling ears it seemed probable, that Higgins had sought to find out from the children the location of Scott Bromwell’s room and, apparently, had succeede
d.

  Flora came at length, so that when Heimrich left the children’s room Karen went with him.

  “It doesn’t mean—” she began, when they were outside in the hall, with the door closed behind them.

  “Now, Miss Mason,” Heimrich said. “Now, Miss Mason. Higgins was looking for Mr. Bromwell. And—apparently he found him.”

  “No,” she said. “You can’t—you don’t know that.”

  He nodded slowly, definitely.

  “Come along, Miss Mason,” he said. “We may as well get this cleared up. Get it over.”

  He took her back to the library. (Always, she thought—if I am in this room a hundred times again, a thousand times—he will be sitting there, at the table, now with his eyes open and now with them closed; always.)

  “Ask Mr. Bromwell to come in,” Heimrich said to Forniss.

  XI

  Karen had gone to the chair she had sat in while Lucretia Bromwell told her story incriminating Pauline James. She went to it almost automatically and Heimrich had nodded; it was as if there had been no interruption, as if this—this sitting and answering questions; this attempting to understand what went on in the mind of the solid man across the table—as if all of this had become the only reality. Karen had sat there for several minutes while Heimrich read to himself from a notebook (it was again like a doctor’s office; the doctor was refreshing his memory from the records before proceeding to a new examination) before Forniss brought Scott Bromwell in. Scott’s face was drawn and the tic was more than ever noticeable. He looked at Karen and then, with unexpected quickness, looked away again.

  There were, Heimrich told him, one or two points; points about which they were not quite clear; points having to do with the previous night. Heimrich wanted Scott to think once more of the period before Higgins was found dead; the period of, say, two hours before.

  “Go ahead,” Scott said, and sat down in a chair facing Heimrich. “I’m thinking of it.”

  “I asked you a few questions,” Heimrich said. “As I did everybody. Getting a general outline, you might say. Then you left. You told me later you had gone upstairs to your room and remained there. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Scott said. “That’s right.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “you weren’t able to sleep. Some time later—you think several hours later—you thought a drink might help and you went down to the pantry to make one. Is that right?”

  “That’s still the way it was,” Scott told him. Scott’s voice was tired, almost indifferent.

  “How long did it take you—this going down for a drink? From the time you left your room until Miss Mason and Mr. Nickel came out of this back hall?”

  Scott shrugged. Perhaps five minutes. Certainly not much longer.

  “That was the only time you were out of your room? Your part of the suite you and Mrs. Bromwell shared?”

  “Yes.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes and nodded his head. That, he said, was the way he remembered it. He put his right hand in his jacket pocket, took it out again, held it briefly over the table.

  But he did that before, Karen thought. Why is he doing it again? The earrings—

  And, as before, Heimrich opened his hand and let drop from it two small objects which glinted momentarily in lamplight and tinkled metallically on the table top. But these were not the earrings. Now a pair of gold cuff links lay on the table top, in the light from the lamp.

  “Yours, aren’t they, Mr. Bromwell?” Heimrich asked.

  The two golden objects on the table seemed to fascinate Scott Bromwell. He looked at them for what seemed a long time. Then he looked up at Heimrich.

  “Where did you get them?” he asked.

  “Now Mr. Bromwell,” Heimrich said. “I asked you something. Aren’t they yours? You can see them. You can see there’s an initial on them. A ‘B,’ isn’t it?”

  There was a kind of wariness in Scott Bromwell’s attitude; he seemed to circle the question; to sniff at it suspiciously, as an animal might puzzle around a trap. And Karen Mason, feeling this, felt also a kind of coldness creeping over her.

  But then Scott did answer.

  “Yes,” he said, “they’re mine. Where did you get them?”

  “Mr. Nickel found them,” Heimrich said. “On the floor of the storeroom, Mr. Bromwell. They’d fallen out of Higgins’s pocket, you see. They were—”

  “Wait,” Karen said. “My earrings—you said they were in one of his pockets. Why wouldn’t these be, too? If—if he had them?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “The earrings were light; he had them in a trouser pocket. They happened to stay there. These”—he indicated the links—“are heavier; don’t catch on things. Also, they may have been in the pocket of his windbreaker. He had them, all right. The point is—how did he get them. How, Mr. Bromwell?”

  Scott hesitated; again he seemed wary. Then he said he didn’t know.

  “Where would they have been?” Heimrich asked.

  “Oh,” Scott said. “On my bedroom chest, I suppose. Or in a box inside the top drawer.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “In your room. The room you you were in all the time Higgins was on the loose upstairs.”

  “Part of the time,” Scott Bromwell said, and this time he spoke quickly, “I was in here with you.”

  But Heimrich shook his head. Fifteen minutes or so after Scott had been questioned and released, Higgins had still been in the third floor room. A trooper had taken sandwiches up to him. At that time, the lock had not been forced.

  “And,” Heimrich said, “you say you went directly to your room? At least, that’s my impression.”

  Scott hesitated again. Then he nodded.

  “So,” Heimrich said, “how did he get the cuff links, Mr. Bromwell? If he wasn’t in the room when you were there?”

  Scott Bromwell shook his head.

  “You see,” Heimrich said, and now he closed his eyes, “the little man was a magpie, in a way. He picked up any small object lying within reach. He might well have taken the links while your back was turned. He took a pair of earrings from Miss Mason’s room, but she says it must have been while she was asleep.” He turned to her, quickly. “You still say that, Miss Mason?” he asked, and his eyes were open now, and sharp.

  “Yes,” she said. “But captain, how—”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “The earrings from your room. A half-filled package of cigarettes from Miss James’s room, with her fingerprints on them as well as his. The links from Mr. Bromwell’s room. You were asleep, you say. Miss James may have been down here—at least, Higgins may have been on the loose while she was here. But Mr. Bromwell—you were in your room. You were awake. You—”

  “No,” Karen said. “You’re not proving it. Because Mr. Nickel may have been lying. I was down there longer than he was. I didn’t see the links on the floor. He could—he can be trying to involve Scott. Don’t you see? Perhaps he and Miss James together. You say Higgins was in her room. Why couldn’t it have been Miss James, or Miss James and Mr. Nickel, he was trying to blackmail? If they were on the floor, why didn’t I see them?”

  That was simple enough, Heimrich told her. Nickel had a flashlight; she, by her own account, only a cigarette lighter which gave out while she was using it. However—

  “Get Mr. Nickel in,” Heimrich told Forniss.

  The wait was brief. During it, Scott Bromwell rested an elbow on the arm of his chair, rubbed his forehead with long fingers. Then Nickel was in the doorway with Forniss behind him.

  “Mr. Nickel,” Heimrich said, “Miss Mason raises a point. Quite a natural point. She suggests you didn’t find the cuff links where you say you did. That you are telling this story to involve Mr. Bromwell. I suppose that you got the cuff links somehow from his room and—made use of them.”

  Nickel nodded in a reasonable manner.

  “Now that’s quite ingenious,” he said. “An intelligent person, Miss Mason. Only—it isn’t true, of course.”

/>   “Yet,” Heimrich said, “you did wait overnight before you brought them to me.”

  “I told you why,” Nickel said. “I’ve got no grudge against Bromwell. I don’t care particularly what he gets away with—so long as I’m not hurt. Or Paulie. If you’d left us alone, I’d probably have left this alone. Given those things”—he indicated the links—“back to Bromwell and told him not to leave them lying around. But—you didn’t leave us alone.” He turned to Bromwell. “Sorry, pal,” he said.

  In spite of herself, Karen believed him. She tried not to believe him. When she spoke, she tried to speak as if she did not believe him. She spoke to Nickel.

  “The same thing you say made you turn the links over to the captain,” she said “—that same thing, your being involved, could have made you make the whole thing up.” She turned to Heimrich. “Don’t you see that?” she asked him.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “So many things are—possible, Miss Mason. They always are, you see. Just as it’s possible you were in this with Mr. Bromwell—in all of it with him—that you saw Higgins too, last night—that perhaps both you and Mr. Bromwell saw him and—” He stopped, and looked at Scott Bromwell. After a moment, Scott looked at him.

  There was a moment during which Karen knew what he was about to say; during which she wanted to scream to stop him, to do anything to stop him. In that moment it was not the truth she wanted; in that instant she accepted this. Whatever happened, whatever he had done—no, Scott! No. Don’t!

  “All right, captain,” Scott Bromwell said, in his tired, dead voice. “All right, I saw Higgins. He came to my room. I suppose, as you say, he picked up the cuff links when I wasn’t looking.”

  With this said, Scott stopped, as if there were nothing more to say.

  “All right, Mr. Nickel,” Heimrich said. “That’s all for now.” Nickel nodded and went out.

  Karen looked at Scott, but could not see his face. She looked at Heimrich. Heimrich’s eyes were wide open and he was looking at Scott with an expression Karen could not interpret. But she had an instant of thinking that Captain Heimrich looked surprised, as if this admission were unexpected, unplanned-on. Then Heimrich closed his eyes. After a moment he said, “Go on, Mr. Bromwell.”