With One Stone

by Frances Lockridge

  He had told them, briefly, what had happened. He had been working in Young’s office—typing. He had heard a sound and had not, for a moment, identified it. “I suppose,” he said, “because of the sound-proofing.”

  He had spoken slowly, as if he felt his way.

  Then he had thought, “My God. That sounded like a shot!” and realized that the sound had seemed to have come from “the boss’s” office. He had tried, first, the connecting door and found it locked. He had gone out into the corridor, and found the door from it to Bedlow’s office unlocked—and found Bedlow. Slumped on his desk, right arm dangling, a gun under the dead hand.

  “And—it’s my gun,” he said. “A gun I held on to—God knows why—after I got out and—”

  He had got no further, then. The younger man who had been with Sergeant Forniss had come in and said, “Couple of things the sergeant would like to ask you, Mr. Curtis.”

  Norman Curtis had gone with him, and Dinah had thought—now it’s starting over; now it will all have to be gone through again, and felt great resentment surge in her mind. They can’t now, she thought. Not—not yet. Not so soon.

  Almost at once after Curtis had gone with the younger man, the telephone in the foyer rang. Parsons started toward it, but the guarding trooper shook his head, and picked the telephone up. He said, “Trooper Haines,” and then, “I’ll have him pick it up.” He had gone past them, not looking at them especially, to the door to the office wing and through it. He had come back almost at once, and hung up the receiver of the foyer extension.

  Within a few minutes, Sergeant Forniss had come out, with Curtis, and said that he wouldn’t bother them any more “right now” and that the others would be finished in half an hour or so.

  It had been about nine-thirty, then.

  “We’ll want to talk to all of you in the morning,” Forniss had said as he left, turned in the doorway to say.

  The other three looked at Norman Curtis after the sergeant had left, after they had heard his car start.

  “I don’t know,” Curtis said. “I thought we were starting a long session and the trooper came out and said the barracks was calling. The sergeant picked it up and said, ‘Good. Then I’ll put it on ice until he gets here.’”

  It was not half an hour, it was almost an hour, before the last of “the others” left the house. During that time they had sat in the living room, under the eyes of the trooper in the foyer. Russel Parsons had said that he could do with a drink, and mixed himself one, and another for Mary. He said, “You, Curtis?” and raised enquiring eyebrows toward Dinah. She had shaken her head; it had been almost an effort to make so simple a movement. Norman Curtis had said, rather curtly, “No thanks.”

  There was, Dinah thought, edginess between the two men. There had been for some time. Perhaps the edginess—once or twice it had seemed close to animosity—stemmed from something which had happened while Parsons was still on the Chronicle. It didn’t matter now; nothing mattered much now.

  Parsons and Mary had sat on a sofa while they waited for the others—technical men, apparently—to leave the house. He kept an arm around her; he finished his drink quickly, but Mary merely sipped hers. One noticed little things, made a kind of list of them, as if one could fill a mind with a list of little things. (I must have been about ten when the pony came; when he lifted me on to the pony for the first time. He was so strong, my father. He was the strongest man in the world, my father.)

  Norman Curtis had been the most restless—outwardly the most restless—of the four. He had smoked constantly, grinding a half-smoked cigarette out in an ash tray and almost at once lighting another. He had walked around the room—walked to the far end of the room, and walked back, and done this several times. He had stood at the windows and looked out. The floodlight was on outside.

  When, finally, the last police car had pulled out of the lighted turnaround, it had been Curtis who had gone to the switch at the front door and snapped the floodlight off. It was instantly darker in the living room; harsh light had been pouring in the windows.

  As if that had been a signal, Parsons stood up and Mary stood with him. “Well—good night,” Parsons had said, slowly, and then he and Mary had gone up the wide staircase. Curtis came, then, to where Dinah was sitting and stood in front of her, and looked down at her. For some seconds he had merely looked at her.

  “There isn’t much to say, is there?” he had said, finally. “I’m sorry as hell, kid.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She had felt that he was about to say something else, tell her something else. But, after standing there for some seconds longer, he had merely shaken his head and said, “Good night, kid. Try not—” He had not finished, but had, again, shaken his head slowly. Then he, too, had gone up the stairs and, for some time—perhaps half an hour—she had sat alone in the dimly lighted room. It was as if she waited for something, but there was not really anything to wait for. There was no use looking at the door which led to the office wing. He would not come through the door again, not ever.

  She had, finally, seen that the front door was locked and turned the lights off and gone up to her room. She had not thought she would sleep, but in the end she did—a sleep full of dreams. The pony was in the dreams and once, in the dreams, she was a little girl and sick in bed and her father was sitting by the bed and saying, “You’ll be all right, kitten. You’re going to be fine,” and then there was swirling darkness and she pulled herself up through the darkness, as if she clung to a voice—her father’s voice. When she reached the surface of the darkness she was awake, and no longer a little girl. And Father was dead.

  She woke finally at dawn and could not go back to sleep again and, after it became clear that she would not, turned on a light and found a book to read. It was a little after seven when she got up, and found a dark dress to wear—how bright, now how useless, most of the things in the closet were!—and went down through an empty house and into the big, still empty, kitchen and made herself coffee. She sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and smoked a cigarette.

  At seven-thirty Mrs. Fleming came into the kitchen and said, “Why, miss” and then began to cry. She said, “It’s awful, miss. Just awful. Can’t I make you something, miss? You ought to have something solid.”

  “Not now,” Dinah said. “Maybe later, Mrs. Fleming,” and finished her coffee and went into the living room. It was going to be a sunny day; sunny and probably warm—probably the warmest day yet. There were two robins on the grass beyond the turnaround. As she watched, one of them pulled a worm out of the ground. The grass was just beginning to turn green.

  The waiting began then—the same waiting for it to be got over with. After a time the same tension began to build again; the same impatience. The others felt it too, Dinah thought. Norman Curtis came down first of the others, and his face was drawn. He looked at her and seemed to try to smile, and not to make much of it. He said, “You get to sleep?” and she said, “For a while. Norm—”

  But when she had said that and he was waiting for her to go on, she found that she had nothing to go on with, nothing now to say.

  She was standing by the windows when he came into the room, and had turned toward him. He put both hands on her shoulders and for an instant she thought that he was about to kiss her, but instead he shook his head and let his hands fall. He went down the living room and through the open doors to the dining room, where Simpkins was putting dishes on warming trays. Mary and Russ came down together and, briefly, the sisters clung to each other, and Mary began to cry. Russ turned away and went to the door and opened it and stood, looking out. After some seconds, he turned back. “It’s going to be a fine day,” he said, and then, to both of them, “Come on. You’ve got to eat something.”

  Curtis went into the office wing at a little after nine and, after he had left, Parsons said, “The show must go on.” They both looked at him and he said, “Sorry. Wrong way to put it. Of course, he’s got his job to do.”

&nb
sp; They had expected, as they had expected before, that the police would come early. The morning crept.

  It was after noon when an unmarked sedan stopped in the turnaround. They heard its engine stop and, by common consent, went to windows to look out. They were, Dinah thought, like children, uneasy in an unknown world.

  Sergeant Forniss had been driving and got out on the driver’s side. But the man with him was not, this time, the good-looking young man. This man was about Forniss’s age, and as solid. They came to the door and Parsons let them in.

  “This is Captain Heimrich,” Forniss said. “He’ll be in charge now.”

  Heimrich, Dinah thought, had the bluest eyes she had ever seen in a man’s face. He had a low, pleasant voice. He said he was sorry to have to bother them. He said, “It’s something we have to do, I’m afraid. Is Mr. Curtis around?”

  “He’s in the office wing,” Parsons said. “I can dial the office line.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “we’ll go along and talk to him there. The sergeant knows the way, naturally.”

  Heimrich told the thin-faced man, with a slight dent in what would have been a straight nose, that there were one or two points they thought he might help them in clearing up.

  “I don’t doubt there are,” Norman Curtis said, dryly. Then a telephone rang. There were two telephones on Curtis’s desk—one red, the other black. Curtis did not hesitate; he picked up the black telephone. He said “Curtis” and listened. He said, “Put Morrison on it. With all the help he needs. And all the space he needs. And, Larry, tell him to stick to facts.” He listened briefly. “All right, Larry. More than usual, then. And I’ll be in—” He stopped. “I don’t,” he said, “actually know when I’ll be in. I’ve got visitors at the moment.” He listened once more. “O.K.,” he said. “Mr. Curtis does not deny that it was his gun. One he kept after his discharge end quote. He has no idea how it got into Mr. Bedlow’s hands, or anybody else’s hands. O.K.?”

  It was, apparently. Curtis replaced the receiver.

  “The office,” he said. “I suppose the gun is one of the things you want to clear up?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It was an issue automatic, I suppose. One you didn’t turn in?”

  “Right,” Curtis said. “Me and a few thousand others. You know that, captain.”

  “Now Mr. Curtis,” Heimrich said. “I do know that. You didn’t get a license for it? Register it?”

  “You know it’s tricky,” Curtis said. “Hell, you go to turn in an unregistered gun in this state and they can arrest you for carrying it to the police station.”

  Which was true. Heimrich closed his eyes and nodded his head. He opened his eyes.

  “One thing I did do,” Curtis said, “was to throw away what ammunition I had. That must have been—hell, ten years ago. And not buy any more.”

  “You kept the gun?”

  “Mostly, in the glove compartment of the car. So that if anybody tried to stick me up, I could wave it—not shoot it, wave it. Nobody ever did, and if anybody had—well, I hope I’d have had more sense.”

  “You saw it last?”

  Curtis said he didn’t know. He didn’t remember looking into the glove compartment for weeks. Didn’t remember when he had last looked into it.

  “Captain,” Curtis said, “the car’s been standing around a lot of places. And the compartment hasn’t been locked. Anybody—anybody in the garage, here, anywhere—in a parking lot—anywhere—could have taken the gun. And—bought ammunition for it.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Including Mr. Bedlow, naturally.”

  “Including anybody, damn near. Captain—did the boss kill himself?”

  “Now Mr. Curtis,” Heimrich said. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Captain,” Curtis said. “I’ve heard of you. You don’t work on suicides too much. The sergeant here got a telephone call last night, while he was—asking the usual routine questions. Said he’d ‘put it on ice’ until ‘he gets here.’ You, wasn’t it?”

  Curtis had a very alert face, a very intelligent face. It is, Heimrich thinks, usually easier to talk to the intelligent.

  “Also,” Curtis said, and there was now a faint smile on the alert face, “I’ve covered police stories. A lot of them. Murder investigation and—and so forth.”

  “Very well,” Heimrich said. “There are a few things that don’t jibe with suicide. Let’s go over what happened last night, Mr. Curtis. If you don’t mind. You were here—in this office. I understand it’s usually used by Mr. Young, the secretary? And that he’s abroad?”

  “London,” Curtis said. “He’ll be back later today. Yes, I was here. Typing.” Again he smiled faintly. “Putting the boss’s ideas into words,” he said. “Concentrating on it. I heard this noise—”

  The noise, in the hushed room, might have been a backfire. In town, Curtis would have, he thought, accepted it as such and, possibly, dismissed it from his mind. But—not there; not in the country.

  “I was slow on the uptake,” he said. “At first, it seemed to come from a long way off. Then I realized it hadn’t. Then I thought, ‘Hell, that sounded like a shot.’ I was very slow on the uptake.”

  “How slow? How long, at a guess?”

  At a guess, a minute or more. Then Curtis had “come out of it,” thought the sound might have come from the next office, Bedlow’s office. He had gone to the communicating door, knocked first and called Bedlow’s name; then, getting no answer, tried the door and found it locked on the other side.

  “Was that unusual?”

  It was not, especially. Bedlow had not liked to be “barged in on.” So, quite often, he locked the doors leading to the other offices—to Miss Winters’s, to Young’s. If he wanted either, he would let the wanted person in. If either wanted to see him, he could use the “squawk box.”

  “You didn’t try that last night?”

  Curtis had not. He did not know exactly why he hadn’t. By the time he had knocked and called, and found the door locked, he was worried. He had gone at once to the door from his office into the anteroom and through it to the door to Bedlow’s office. He had knocked again and, getting no answer, tried the door. It was not locked.

  “He was dead. Anybody could tell.”

  “From the time you heard the shot, how long?”

  A couple of minutes. Possibly three minutes.

  “The door to the other office. Miss Winters’s. Did you happen to notice whether it was locked. The knob button pushed in?”

  “After I saw the boss,” Curtis said, “I didn’t notice anything, captain.”

  He had gone out, told the others what had happened, called the police. Afterward when he had gone back with Forniss he looked at the gun on the floor under James Bedlow’s lifeless right hand. He had recognized it as his gun.

  “How?”

  There was a scratch on the barrel. There always had been. He didn’t know how it got there. It had been there when the automatic was issued to him.

  “Obviously,” Curtis said, “if he didn’t kill himself, I’m next in line. I see that as well as you do.”

  “Now Mr. Curtis. You didn’t, I suppose?”

  “No. Had no reason to, among other things. For one thing, he was a great guy. For another, I don’t go around killing people even if they aren’t.”

  It was about time for the first of them, Heimrich thought. He used the first of them.

  “Mr. Curtis, did you think Mr. Bedlow killed his wife?”

  Norman Curtis leaned back in his desk chair. He blinked his eyes—blinked them to be seen blinking.

  “Now,” he said, “what the hell, captain? What the hell gives you an idea that crazy?”

  If it was to be acted out, Heimrich was willing. He closed his own eyes. He sighed, with noticeable patience. He said, “Now Mr. Curtis,” like a man wearied.

  “Friday,” Heimrich said, “you did a little detective work of your own. Questioned the gardener—Mr. Sarles. Very carefully, I gather. Very precisely. Wh
ether, from where he was working, he could see the path—anybody on the path. Particularly at the point Mrs. Bedlow was attacked. Also—had he seen Mr. Bedlow at any time before Mr. Bedlow shouted for him and he ran? Was Mr. Bedlow in the pool, trying to lift his wife, when Sarles got there? Could he tell, from the sound, about where Mr. Bedlow was when he called his wife for the last time, which was perhaps five minutes before he found her? I gather you were quite persistent. And—that your questions formed a pattern of sorts.”

  “Sarles told you this?”

  “When asked. This morning. We’ve asked quite a few questions this morning, Mr. Curtis.”

  “I don’t doubt,” Curtis said. “Sarles gave you the idea I suspected Bedlow? From what you call the ‘pattern’ of the questions?”

  “It was,” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes, “one interpretation. Did you find out what you wanted?”

  “I found out Sarles hadn’t seen the boss. I didn’t particularly ‘want’ anything. I was just—call it trying to get it straight in my mind. What had happened. As for thinking the boss—” He shrugged his shoulders; shrugged away an absurdity. How crazy can a man get, the shrugged shoulders asked.

  “When he was younger,” Heimrich said. “Much younger, of course—Mr. Bedlow was rather a violent man. Did you know that? Found a man molesting—I think that was the word they used then. It was twenty-five years ago or so. In Oklahoma. Molesting Mrs. Bedlow. The first Mrs. Bedlow, naturally. Killed him, Mr. Bedlow did. With his fists.”

  “And,” Curtis said. “Not intentionally. Involuntary manslaughter. Oil men aren’t—mild men, captain. Yes, I knew about it. And another time—earlier on, when he was coming up—the boss beat hell out of another man he thought was trying to cheat him out of some rights. But—always men, captain. What point are you trying to make?”

  “Only,” Heimrich said, “that Mr. Bedlow was capable of violence. When, for example, somebody tried to take what he figured was his. Or—to cheat on him. A man likely to lose his temper.”