18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  They had lugged the half-filled can into the garage. Then Eric Martin had started a charcoal fire in the grill. “That’s at the rear of the house,” Ann said. “By the terrace.” Then he had gone upstairs to shower and shave. Ann herself had spent that time in the kitchen, making a list of things she had put into the freezer; reading directions for the preparation of frozen French fries and of broccoli spears, also frozen. When Eric had changed he had made them drinks and they had sat on the terrace. After drinks, he had broiled the steak and she had put the potatoes in the oven, according to directions, and the frozen broccoli in what seemed to her an insufficient quantity of water, although the instructions were firm. The broccoli charred a little.

  They had eaten on the terrace. They had put dishes in the dishwasher and taken coffee and cognac to the terrace and sat there again as it grew dark and then, as the moon rose, light again. They had talked. “I had a great deal to tell him. He had been upset about the telephone calls and at first excited and enraged. He’s often keyed up at the end of the day, even of an ordinary day.” But as they sat and sipped in moonlight they had both grown relaxed. “He said that we’re no part of whatever is going on here in the village and that people will understand that in time. He said we’d probably inherited harassment from the Barneses and if it got too bad we’d do something about it. We both came to think that it wouldn’t.”

  They had gone up to bed at, she thought, about eleven. They had not at any time gone to the front of the house and looked out at the sports car sitting in the moonlight.

  “You’d have heard a car drive up?”

  She thought so, but could not be sure. “Would somebody have taken the chance of driving up openly?”

  “Probably not,” Heimrich said. “Probably left a car at the foot of the drive and walked up, staying in the shadows of trees where he could. Mr. Martin didn’t plan to put his car in the garage?”

  “It’s supposed to be a two-car garage,” she said. “It isn’t, really. At least, I think it isn’t. We planned to find out this morning.”

  They had not been able to, with the sports car squashed on the drive, all resilience flattened out of it. Eric Martin, who had an early consultation at the Hurst plant, had taken the station wagon. “After a good deal of swearing. He doesn’t like it at best and we hadn’t got around to unpacking it entirely.”

  “This refuse from the driveway. It’s in one of the cans in—I suppose in the garage?”

  “All but the rat. Eric buried the rat. It apparently had been dead for some time. Why? It’s just old wrapping papers, garbage. One or two bottles. Would it possibly tell you anything?”

  “Now, Mrs. Martin,” Heimrich said. “We’ll look, naturally.” He thought with sympathy of Ray Crowley, who would sort, if sorting was to be done. “Conceivably,” Heimrich said, “there might be a mailing address on the wrapping paper.”

  “Is it really worth the trouble? The messy trouble?”

  “Probably not. A good many things turn out not to be, in my trade. But we never know until we look.”

  “I’ll show you where it is,” Ann Martin said, and got up and went toward the rear of the living room before Merton Heimrich had a chance to assure her that he could find trash cans by himself. He followed her to a garage, which was certainly going to be a tight squeeze for two cars, and she indicated three covered trash cans. Heimrich took the covers off.

  All three cans were empty.

  She looked into them blankly, and then up at Heimrich.

  “I don’t—” she said, and stopped, and then said, “I thought it was some sort of dream. I went right back to sleep, if it wasn’t a dream.” She looked again at the empty cans. “Which,” she said, “it clearly wasn’t, was it? Our bedroom is on the other side of the house.”

  He waited for clarification.

  Sometime in the early morning she had dreamed or awakened and thought the sound of a car had wakened her. It was light, she thought. “But when I’ve been driving for any distance I often dream afterward of cars—of trucks.” She had listened, awake or in a dream, and not heard the car, or truck, again. In the other bed, Eric had slept quietly. “He sleeps much more lightly than I do. I thought that if there had really been a noise it would have waked him up. So I decided it was just a dream, and went back to sleep. If I had been awake at all.”

  “Apparently it wasn’t a dream. Had you arranged to have refuse collected? One has to, in the country.”

  She had not. She did not think her husband had.

  “But perhaps Ralph Barnes arranged it for us. He did arrange to have a man cut the grass. Should I call and ask him?”

  Heimrich thought it would be interesting to know. They went back to the house and she dialed. Lucile Barnes was in the apartment. Her husband was not. Lucile said, “Are you all right, dear?” and it took a little time—conversations often took time with Lucile Barnes—to explain that they were all right. They were, but something terrible had happened.

  Lucile Barnes couldn’t believe it. Not Faith. It took a good deal of time. Ann circled to the point.

  So far as Lucile knew, there had been no arrangement made to collect refuse. Of course, Ralph might have arranged it. When he came back—but that might not be until evening. The place to call was the Bennington Refuse Service. They would come around once a week with their truck and they had always been reliable. Well, reasonably reliable. “The last few months there we couldn’t really rely on anybody.”

  The telephone listed for the Bennington Refuse Service was answered by, from the voice, a rather small girl. Papa wasn’t there. He was out on the truck. Yes, she would tell papa when he came back that Mrs. Martin had called. Good-bye, now.

  “Why would anybody,” Ann asked, “dump garbage and then come back and pick it up?”

  “If somebody did,” Heimrich said. “That’s still only a guess, Mrs. Martin. Perhaps second thought—the thought that the source of the garbage might be identified. Perhaps because circumstances had changed. We’ll—”

  They were in the living room of the square white house, the front door open. There was no doubt this time that what they heard was a truck. It was a tow truck and the name of Michael Reagan was on it. A man with REAGAN SERVICE lettered on the back of his coveralls hauled an air hose out of the back of the truck and began to inflate tires.

  “If I were you,” Heimrich said, “I’d run it into the garage when they’ve finished. And lock the garage, if it’s got a lock.”

  Ann stood on the porch and watched the police car circle the truck and reviving MG. She watched Reagan Service wind air hose back into the truck. She went into the house to get her purse. But when she returned, the truck had gone. Apparently she had, involuntarily, opened a charge account with Reagan’s Service.

  She put the MG in the garage and found that the garage had no discernible lock. She pulled the overhead door down and went back to the house and called Hurst Electronics and, after no more than reasonable delay, got Eric and told him that the car was on its feet again and that the nice Mrs. Powers she had told him about was dead. To which Eric Martin said, “My God! What kind of place have we got ourselves into?”

  There was no ready answer to that.

  “I don’t like the idea of your being there alone.”

  There was an answer to that. It was, “Nonsense, darling. I’ll be fine.” But Ann detected a lack of conviction in her own voice.

  She sat for several minutes by the telephone and looked at nothing in particular, which was the wall opposite. Then she spun the dial again; spun it for eleven digits.

  “United Broadcasting Network. Good morning. May I help you?”

  “Mr. Leffing, please,” Ann told the institutional ear which was associated with the institutional voice.

  VII

  The First National Bank of Wellwood could not, without a court order so instructing, divulge details of a depositor’s account, whether the depositor were alive or dead. The lieutenant should be aware of that.

>   “She had an account here?” Forniss asked the somewhat portly vice-president to whose desk enquiry had led him.

  The vice-president made a steeple of his hands and looked over it for some seconds. Then he said, “May I see your credentials again, Lieutenant Forniss?” He saw them again and looked at them carefully again. He handed them back.

  “Yes,” he said. “Mrs. Powers had a checking account with us. A sub—” He stopped himself abruptly.

  “Substantial,” Forniss finished for him. “Thank you. A safe deposit box?”

  “Not with us. Possibly with Wellwood Savings.”

  “Do you happen to know the name of her lawyer?”

  The vice-president considered that, over tented finger tips. He was, Forniss thought, wary even for a vice-president.

  “Probably,” the vice-president said, “Sam Bennington.”

  Forniss looked at the nameplate on the desk and said, “Thank you, Mr. Bennington,” to “R. A. Bennington, Vice-President.”

  There was a telephone booth in the bank lobby. Lieutenant Forniss dialed and got, “State police, Trooper Arthur.”

  Inspector Heimrich had called in. He was on his way to see Thomas Peters, on Long Hill Road. He didn’t know how long he would be. Probably not long. He was going to the Maples Inn after that. Lieutenant Forniss might meet him there. If it was around lunchtime, they might have lunch there. OK.?

  “Yep. Did you round up the horse?”

  “Gone to roll in somebody else’s garden, I guess. It’s sure a pesky beast.”

  “Somebody else will call for help,” Forniss said.

  “You’re too damned right,” Trooper Arthur said, with marked, if nonregulation, resignation in his voice. The New York State Police have many and varied chores.

  Heimrich drove the long way round to reach Thomas Peters’s house, taking the route suggested by Trooper Arthur. After about a quarter of a mile on Long Hill Road he was stopped by a tow truck which was lumbering onto it. The tow truck dragged after it what remained of a bright blue sports car. Not much remained of it. Blackened and battered, it dangled behind the truck. The truck and its salvage ground down toward Main Street.

  A little beyond where he had been stopped, Heimrich slowed again and looked at the jagged gap a blue sports car, almost certainly with a dead woman at the wheel, had made in an inadequate wooden guard rail. He went on up Long Hill, reading the names on mailboxes. Trowbridge just above the gravel pit. Lawrence Finch somewhat farther along the road. Big houses, both of them. Bennington. Another Bennington, this one “R. A.” Neither, Heimrich supposed, proprietor of the Bennington Refuse Service. In old communities names recur, branch from an ancient stem.

  The road wound up. Then it began to wind down. The houses were on the left as Heimrich drove toward the south. People who lived in them could look down across Long Hill Road into a pleasant valley with, almost certainly, a stream trickling through it. Except, of course, for the Trowbridges, who could look down into a gravel pit.

  A Negro with close-cut gray hair, wearing shorts and a white sports shirt, was riding a three-reel lawn mower over a large spread of lawn as Heimrich drove up a smooth drive toward a big white house. The grass looked in fine shape, Heimrich thought. His own, although revived by the recent rains, still showed brown spots. This one did not. Fertilizer. Probably lime. This was acid soil. Certainly water. Probably from more than one well.

  The mower swerved his machine—a new one, Heimrich thought—toward the drive and cut the motor.

  The man had a thin face and deep-set eyes. He sat tall on the mower’s seat—tall and square-shouldered; even sitting on the mower he looked like a lithe man.

  Heimrich stopped his car opposite the mower. Heimrich took a chance. He said, “Mr. Peters?” A good many countrymen mow their own lawns.

  The man said Yes, and slid off the seat. He was even taller, standing, than he had looked on the mower. He walked a few long steps toward Heimrich. He was medium brown. For an instant he reminded Heimrich of somebody whose picture he had seen in, he thought, the New York Times. A young man who, tennis racquet high, body perfect in symmetry, had looked like a statue. Of course. Arthur Ashe. This man was years older; perhaps thirty years older.

  “State police,” Heimrich said. “Your grass is in fine shape, Mr. Peters. Lime it this spring?”

  Thomas Peters had a wide, rather thin-lipped mouth. It widened further into a grin.

  “Yes,” Peters said. “Nice of the state police to take an interest.”

  Then the grin disappeared, but a faint smile remained.

  “However,” Peters said, “I assume there is something else?”

  “One or two things,” Heimrich said. “Ride you up to your house, Mr. Peters? My name is Heimrich, by the way. Cap—Inspector Heimrich.”

  “Brass,” Peters said pleasantly, and got into the car. “Flattered, Inspector. A little puzzled, of course. Since I didn’t make a complaint. I’m assuming it is about somebody’s nicking me?”

  “Among other things,” Heimrich said, and stopped the car in front of the large white house and followed Peters into it. They walked into a square entrance hall, white-paneled, with, unexpectedly, a fireplace at the far end. There were doorways on either side, and a slim young woman came through one of them. Her skin was, by several shades, lighter than Peters’s. Her brown eyes were very large. At a guess, she was younger than Peters by at least twenty years. She was also beautiful.

  “Inspector Heimrich of the state police, dear,” Peters said to her. “This is my wife Marian, Inspector. Her parents named her after a great singer of our race.”

  “A very great singer,” Heimrich said. “Good morning, Mrs. Peters.”

  “We should have reported it, Tom,” Marian Peters said. “I told you we should have. A gunshot wound, however trivial.”

  “That applies to the medical profession, my dear,” Peters told her. “Right, Inspector?”

  “We like to be told,” Heimrich said. “But, yes. Reports required from doctors. I gather you didn’t go to one, Mr. Peters?”

  “It’s a scratch,” Peters said, and tapped his right shoulder. “My wife used to be a nurse, Inspector. She put an adhesive bandage on it.”

  It was interesting, Heimrich thought, that both of them assumed that the “nicking” was the reason for his visit. By now news of Faith Powers’s murder must be all over. Such news soaks through a small community within hours. Mrs. Powers had died only a little way down the road Thomas and Marian Peters lived on. Peters was a lawyer. It was odd, perhaps, that he should attribute the visit of a police inspector to so trivial a matter.

  “Come in here,” Peters said, and moved toward the doorway on the right of the entrance hall. Standing in it he turned and again a grin widened his wide, thin-lipped mouth. “And you, Marian,” he said, “stay off that mower. It’s too big for you.”

  Marian Peters said, “Yah to you.” She went back through the other doorway. “Loves the thing,” Peters said, and walked toward two chairs near an open window. “Have a time keeping her off it, now that Mike O’Connor has had to curtail his operations.”

  There was, Heimrich thought, an inflection of quotation marks around the word “curtail.”

  “Mike O’Connor?” Heimrich said. There was no special reason to hurry to the point, whatever the point might turn out to be. Air fragrant of lilacs came through the open window—of lilacs and of grass new-cut.

  “O’Connor Landscaping Corp.,” Peters said. “Sends gangs around to cut grass. Did until a couple of weeks ago, anyway. Plows driveways in the winter. Seems he’s taken on more than he can handle. Inconvenient. On the other hand, I rather enjoy riding the mower. How did you happen to hear about somebody’s accidental shooting at me, Inspector?”

  “Mr. Brinkley told me,” Heimrich said. “Got it from his houseman, apparently.”

  “Professor Brinkley,” Peters said, not by way of correction. “Friend of yours?”

  “Yes. I’ve known him several year
s.”

  “Since the Wilkins murder, isn’t it?” Peters said.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I remembered your name from somewhere. Isn’t an accidental shooting a little out of your line, Inspector? Somebody gives a kid a new rifle for his birthday. He goes out and shoots it.”

  Peters shrugged his square shoulders. But then he touched his right shoulder tenderly.

  “You really think that’s the way it was, Mr. Peters?”

  “Simplest explanation.”

  “The most likely?”

  With that, Heimrich closed his blue eyes, and waited. He has a theory, which he does not himself try to defend, that he can hear more clearly with his eyes closed; hear the inflections of a voice free from the expressions on a face. Now, for some seconds, he heard nothing at all. He could feel that he was being looked at intently. He opened his eyes. He was being looked at intently.

  “If not,” Peters said, and spoke slowly. “If not, noticeably bad shooting. Or careful shooting. You can take your choice.”

  “Careful?”

  “With intent to warn,” Peters said. “Not to injure or kill. It’s that you’re after, isn’t it, Inspector?”

  “Part of it,” Heimrich said. “Tell me what happened.” He paused for a moment. “Both times,” he said.

  “I gather,” Peters said, “that Harry’s been a thorough reporter. Harry Washington’s a friend of mine, Inspector. And he’s upset. He and Brinkley are oddly close, I think. In spite of the difference in their status.” He paused again. “And the color of their skins,” he added. “Yes, there were two shootings. It was this way …”

  The first shooting had been ten days or so before. Peters had driven up from his office in the city, and got home rather late. It was already beginning to get dark. He had run his car into the garage and, from it, turned on the light which illuminated the driveway. He had stepped out and heard the sound of a shot and then, almost at the same instant, the sound of something hitting a tree.

  “Half a dozen feet from where I was,” Peters said. “I recognized the plunk. The next day I found a hole in the tree and dug the bullet out of it. A twenty-two.”