18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “You kept the bullet?”

  “Yes,” Peters said. “I’m afraid I gouged it getting it out. It was in deep. You want it anyway?”

  Heimrich did. Peters got up and went to a desk and pulled a drawer open and came back with a twenty-two slug. It was gouged. It was still possible that a comparison microscope might do something with it, if they got that far. Heimrich put the bullet in his pocket.

  “You say it was deep in the tree,” Heimrich said. “Fired from close by, then?”

  “I’d think so.”

  “The second time? When you were hit?”

  The circumstances had been almost identical, but this time the marksmanship had been better. Again, Peters had heard a shot. But this time, again in almost the same instant, he had felt stinging pain in his shoulder. And this time he had dropped to the ground and lain for a moment on the harsh gravel. There had been no second shot.

  “Whoever it was may have thought he’d finished you.”

  “I didn’t lie there long,” Peters said. “If he’d waited he would have seen me get up. Taken another potshot, if he meant to kill me. No, I think that both times he meant to warn.”

  “Warn of what, Mr. Peters?”

  “That we’re not welcome here. We never have been, I suppose. But we’ve not really been bothered.”

  “Happen to know,” Heimrich said, “whether this man O’Connor is still mowing other lawns around here?”

  “I thought you wouldn’t miss that,” Peters said, and again he grinned at Heimrich. Then he nodded his head.

  “I’ve seen his crew at the Benningtons’. At both Benningtons’. And Finch’s place seems well mowed when I drive by it on my way to Brewster.”

  “This sort of thing has happened only recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since your group applied for the club permit? For nonconforming use of a residentially zoned area?”

  “Yes. Oh—there’s racial prejudice here, as there is everywhere. Not overt, for the most part. Marian isn’t invited to join the garden club. Didn’t expect to be, or want to be. I’m not one of the local Lions. Don’t want to be. But a good many people have been pleasant, Inspector. Gone out of their way to be, which is a kind of thing Negroes have to get used to. Faith Powers, last winter, gave a cocktail party. More or less for us. A good many came. And were cordial as all hell.”

  For the first time there was an edge of bitterness in Peters’s voice.

  “Your friend Brinkley was at the party,” Peters said. “And the Congregational minister and his wife. Quite a few of the best people.”

  “Brinkley,” Heimrich said, “was he one of the overcordial ones?”

  Once again Peters’s mouth widened and this time he shook his head.

  “Not the professor,” Peters said. “I suspect he’s color-blind. He did say I was born in New York City and went to school there. Said that was the way I sounded. Quite right, too. Harlem. New York University. Dyckman University Law School.”

  “Mrs. Powers,” Heimrich said. “She wasn’t, I gather, one of those who, as you say, went out of their way to be cordial.”

  “Not Faith,” Peters said, and spoke with emphasis. “She’s as color-blind as your professor. She’s—”

  He stopped because Merton Heimrich was slowly moving his head from side to side. An expression of concentration and then concern came over Thomas Peters’s lean, dark face.

  “I’m sorry,” Heimrich said. “I had supposed it would be all over town, Mr. Peters. Faith Powers was killed last night. Shot to death in her car. Just down the road a ways. You hadn’t heard?”

  Peters shook his head slowly. He said, “My God,” and then, in an unbelieving voice, “Faith Powers!” and then, again, “My God, Inspector. She was such a shining woman.”

  For an instant he pressed the palms of his dark hands against his dark forehead. He took them down.

  “No,” he said, “we hadn’t heard. The grapevine stops short of the Peters house, Inspector. Down the road, you say? When, Inspector?”

  “Her car ended up in the gravel pit,” Heimrich told him. “About eleven-thirty.”

  And he told the tall lean man the rest of it.

  “Not on her direct route home from the inn,” Peters said. “And a considerable lapse of time. She did drive around a good deal. Just to drive around. She was very fond of that bright car of hers. And last night was a pleasant night.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Bright moonlight, Mr. Peters. She wasn’t coming here, by any chance?”

  “Here? Why should she? The answer is No. At least—I can’t be categorical about that, can I? She wasn’t expected here. I know of no reason why she should be coming here. She’d have found us asleep if she had. We went to bed about eleven.”

  I get answers to questions I haven’t asked, Heimrich thought. An alert man. And, of course, a lawyer.

  “I understand,” Heimrich said, “that Mrs. Powers planned to purchase stock in this club you’re organizing.”

  “Do you? What gave you this understanding, Inspector? Not that there’s any secret about it, of course.”

  “Brinkley said he had that impression. I assume he got it from her.”

  “It’s a corporation,” Peters said. “Issues stock under New York State law. We’ve sold a good deal of stock, Inspector. To whites and Negroes. To get the Craig house in condition to serve as a clubhouse. To turn a hundred and fifty or so acres into a golf course. This will cost a good deal of money. The architect estimates a hundred thousand, but I suspect it will run to more. The land itself isn’t cheap. No land around here is.”

  “Mrs. Powers had invested?”

  “Taken an option on twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stock. The actual sale hadn’t been made. She had to convert some securities before she gave us a check, I understand. Most people would, of course. Even people as well off as I assume she was. If what you’re getting at is, was she coming here in connection with her investment, I doubt it very much.”

  “There’s opposition to this club, I take it.”

  “A great deal. We’d expected that.”

  “Mr. Peters, is the establishment of this country club a—call it a test case?”

  “That isn’t the intention, Inspector. The intention is to build a pleasant club where people of your race and mine can play golf and tennis, and have drinks and eat. A good many of us like to play golf. Does that surprise you? Some of us have enough money to belong to clubs. And, for a good many of us, objection to segregation cuts both ways. But, if it’s what you call a test case, that’s not of our making.”

  His voice had hardened somewhat, Heimrich—who had listened with closed eyes—thought. He clipped his words. Possibly, Heimrich thought, he is trying to convince himself as he convinces me.

  “All right,” Peters said, although Heimrich had said nothing. “To some of us there may be in it an element of crusade. I don’t deny that, and you wouldn’t believe me if I did, would you? If it is a crusade, it is one of peace. We need peace just now. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “How did you happen to pick this community, Mr. Peters?”

  “Suitable land with a suitable big house on it. A landowner who is anxious to sell what to him’s a white elephant. There’s a limited market for white elephants, Inspector. The Craig house—it was built for another way of life.”

  “I know the house,” Heimrich said. “The bullet that grazed you. You haven’t got it?”

  “It kept on going,” Peters said. “I didn’t look for it. It would, I think, have landed in tall grass—meadow grass O’Connor rough-mows twice a year. Or used to. Worse than a needle in a haystack.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Do you know, or know of, a man named Nagle, Mr. Peters? Aaron Nagle?”

  “What the …” Peters said, and his eyebrows wrinkled up into his forehead. For once, Heimrich thought, this astute man isn’t ahead of me.

  “I know of Nagle,” Peters said. “He’s one of th
e leaders of, perhaps the leader of, something called Patriots United. An organization of right-wing hoodlums. Out west somewhere they drill, with real guns, getting ready to defend the country against Communists. A lunatic fringe.”

  Unexpectedly, he grinned again.

  “Lunacy,” he said, “is not a racial characteristic. Neither is hoodlumism. Why on earth do you ask about Nagle, Inspector? He’s somewhere out in the West organizing red-necks. And, at a safe guess, getting dues from them. Selling them uniforms and rifles, for all I know.”

  “Probably he is,” Heimrich said. “You’re in the civil rights movement, I understand. I thought you might have heard of him.”

  “An unresponsive answer if I ever heard one,” Peters said. “However—Yes, I’m in the civil rights movement. As a lawyer. Yes, I’ve told you what I’ve heard of Nagle and his little gang of hoodlums. And if you mean, would he consider the North Wellwood Country Club, as proposed, part of a Communist front—yes, I suppose he would. But I doubt if he’s got a rifle which would shoot from—oh, Arkansas, I think it is—to my garage. Or to this place down the road where Faith was shot. Because she was going to invest in an interracial country club?”

  “Now, Mr. Peters,” Heimrich said. “So do I, naturally. Do you expect the club’s permit to go through?”

  “I hope it does.”

  Heimrich stood up and, rather obviously, waited for that answer to be amplified. It was not.

  Peters stood up. He said, “I haven’t helped you much, have I? Not because I don’t want to, Inspector.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Heimrich said. “Sorry I had to interrupt your mowing, Mr. Peters. You’ve got a fine stand of grass.”

  They walked together, two tall men, out of the living room and through the entrance hall and out of the house.

  The power mower was not where Peters had left it. It was far down the wide lawn, nearly at the road. It was being ridden by Marian Peters and it seemed to be moving rapidly. Peters said, “Damn!” and began to run across the grass toward the mower. The mower made a jaunty turn.

  VIII

  Heimrich drove from Peters’s big white house toward the center of the village of North Wellwood. He did not hurry. When he passed the gravel pit he slowed again and looked down into it. It told him nothing, except that today it was not being worked. As a mark of respect for the dead? Or because there were, at the moment, no orders for gravel? It did not matter.

  It was, of course, hard to decide what did matter. There was as yet no pattern. Heimrich, as he drove, tried to make a pattern in his mind; tried to bring some shape to things, although he knew it was too early for a shape to form. Still—It’s lumpy, Heimrich thought; lumpier even than usual at this stage. There is no coherence. It is as if, in this small and outwardly peaceful place, a number of things were going on at once, obscurely related and similarly hostile.

  He turned into Main Street.

  But not, he thought, hostile to the same degree. That was the major “lump.” Hostile, presumably, to the interracial country club. Hostile, but that for a long time, to the ownership by Thomas Peters of a large white house in a “good” part of town. This last flaring up now because the club project had brought things to a head? That was probable. But a discrepancy, and a glaring one, remained. As he turned from Main Street toward the North Wellwood substation of the New York State Police, Heimrich had become sharply conscious of the shape of the discrepancy. That was something, if not much.

  Somebody had dumped garbage at the foot of the Martins’ driveway and had left the air out of the Martins’ tires. Small, annoying things. The kind of small annoying things which had happened to the Barneses when they lived in the square white house on Hayride Lane. Such things had the feel of adolescent hoodlumism; of a childish activation of what was perhaps a community’s mood. But it had been hoodlumism within limits. Air had been let out of tires by pressing down valve plungers. Not by slashing through rubber. The difference between what was not much more than an unpleasant Halloween prank and vandalism.

  But a woman had been shot in the head, almost certainly by an expert marksman, as she drove an open car in the moonlight along a quiet road. And a man had been shot at twice and missed once—by intention?—and very slightly injured the second time. By an inexpert marksman? Or by one very expert indeed?

  In neither case, Heimrich was strongly inclined to think as he turned in at the substation, by the same person, or of course persons, who would dump garbage on a drive. Even garbage containing a dead rat.

  There was also, he thought as he walked into the substation and tossed up a hand in answer to Trooper Arthur’s correct salute—there was also the question of the two telephone calls received by Ann Martin. They had not, evidently, been made by the same person, since one caller thought that Ann was Lucile Barnes returned, and the other knew she was not—knew not only that she was Ann Martin but also that she was Ann Langley, an interviewer for UBN. The second caller had, at a guess, assumed that, as Ann Langley, Mrs. Martin was scouting a story for the network. As Ann Martin said she was not.

  Two individuals, or two groups, with similar aims but no cohesion in their methods? Perhaps that was the lump.

  Heimrich sat at Trooper Arthur’s desk and called the Barracks. He wanted all Barracks could find out about a man named Aaron Nagle, who might sometimes use the name of Henry Pederson. Anything Barracks could find in files or get from the New York City police or, for that matter, from the FBI. Wanted anywhere for anything? Fingerprints on file anywhere? Barracks would know what to find out, or try to find out. Also, anything known to anybody—the FBI might help there—about a vigilante group somewhere in the West, perhaps Missouri or Arkansas, which called itself “Patriots United.” A Klan-like sort of thing, as nearly as Heimrich could make out. Yes, Heimrich realized that all this would take time and might lead nowhere. Yes, he realized that there were papers which needed his signature. He would try to get in later in the afternoon. Lieutenant Rayburn had his doubts about a suicide in Harrison? Lieutenant Rayburn should continue his efforts to confirm or dispel them. Heimrich put the telephone in its cradle.

  Lieutenant Forniss had checked in, Arthur told him. Forniss would meet the inspector at the Maples Inn. He had sent Crowley to the Powers house to find out what he could there.

  “Pick up Mr. Olmstead’s stallion?” Heimrich asked Arthur.

  The pesky beast was still on the loose. He had last been sighted trotting south on Hayride Lane, dragging his tether.

  Forniss was in the taproom of the Maples Inn. He was at a table which would, at a pinch, seat three. He was in a position from which he could see both the entrance to the taproom and into the corridor bar, where there were three tables along the wall. Forniss had a glass in front of him.

  Heimrich sat at the table and gestured and in due course had a glass in front of him. He listened.

  “Man named Samuel Bennington was her lawyer,” Forniss said. “Forthcoming about her will, as lawyers go. Whatever she left …”

  Whatever she left was to be divided, but not equally, among six nephews and nieces. Forniss had a list of their names. Only one lived in the vicinity—a man named Donald Powers, who lived in White Plains. And, for what it was worth, Donald Powers got half of the real and personal property of Faith Powers, deceased.

  Bennington had no idea, he had told Forniss, what Mrs. Powers’s estate might come to. Her broker would know that, or the banks would know.

  “Banks aren’t forthcoming,” Forniss said. “Tried the First National. Talked to another Bennington. A V.P. Noises about a court order, like always. Seem to be a lot of Benningtons around here.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “One of them apparently collects garbage.”

  Mrs. Powers had owned her house and its ten or so acres free and clear. Samuel Bennington knew that because he had advised her as to where to file her mortgage discharge from a savings and loan association. At a guess, the asking price on the house would be in the neighborhood of fift
y thousand dollars. Whether it would bring that was, in Bennington’s opinion, a considerable question.

  “Thing is,” Bennington told Lieutenant Forniss, “this damn club is going to bring property values down. If it goes through.”

  “Say anything about Thomas Peters? Who’s active in organizing this club?”

  “That Peters is a notably able lawyer. That he can’t really understand why a man of Mr. Peters’s calibre would want to live in a remote rural area such as North Wellwood.”

  Forniss had gone from Samuel Bennington’s office, on the second floor of a building on Main Street, to the offices of the North Wellwood Savings Bank, where Bennington told him he might find Lawrence Finch, who was not only Mrs. Powers’s broker but the executor of her will.

  “Probably be there today,” Bennington said. “Since it’s Tuesday. It’s Monday and Wednesday Larry goes to New York. Has a brokerage office there.”

  Forniss found Lawrence Finch at the savings bank, behind a desk plate lettered LAWRENCE FINCH, VICE-PRESIDENT.

  Lawrence Finch was a big man. Standing behind his desk and reaching a hand across it to Forniss, he was a portly one. He had a ruddy face and now it drooped. He shook his head sadly and said it was terrible, terrible about dear Faith. He said it was, frankly, hard to believe. That anyone would want to harm so charming a woman …

  He said, in short, most of the things Charles Forniss had heard from other lips on similar occasions. Finch said that anything he could do to help. Anything …

  “We’re trying to find out where Mrs. Powers was going when she was shot,” Forniss told him. “That among other things.”

  “She drove around a good deal,” Finch told him. “Just to drive around. She loved that car of hers. It was—it was a toy as much as it was transportation, I thought sometimes. She drove it too fast. When I first heard I assumed she had driven off the road. It’s a little tricky just there. I’ve been trying for years to get the town to put a decent guard rail. Perhaps now it will.”