18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Inspector,” he said, “I’m Patrolman Bennington. Local police. Somebody’s blown up the Sentinel.”

  X

  The plant of the North Wellwood Sentinel was, Heimrich thought, more shaken up than blown up. Its brick walls still stood. There was a fire truck in front of it and a car marked NORTH WELLWOOD POLICE. There was broken glass on the sidewalk in front of the building and glass dust. There was no glass in the front door and only shards in the two windows which faced the street.

  Forniss pulled the state police car in behind the North Wellwood police car, which was behind the fire truck. As he and Heimrich walked to the door of the building, which was sprung open, glass grated under their shoes.

  The outer office did not seem to be much damaged. The drawers of a filing cabinet gaped open. A door to an inner office was open and a policeman with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve was on one side of a desk and a man in shirt sleeves with adhesive bandages crisscrossing a bald head was on the other. There was a good deal of broken plaster on the floor.

  A woman who looked pale but undamaged was behind a counter in the outer office. She said, “Can I help you?” and her voice was as pale as her face. “There’s been a little accident,” she added.

  “State police,” Forniss said. “We heard there was a little accident. Inspector Heimrich. I’m Ser—Lieutenant Forniss, Miss?”

  “Mrs. Foster,” the pale-faced youngish woman said. “You want to see my husband? His forehead—his forehead is all cut. Sergeant Hunter is talking to him. Of our own police force. But if you want—”

  “Matter for the sergeant,” Heimrich said. “At the moment, anyway. Mind if we look around a little? We happen to be here on another—”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Foster said. “About poor dear Faith. Of course, Inspector. It happened in the pressroom.”

  She pointed to a door, which also was partly open.

  They went into the pressroom. There were two rotary presses in it and, unexpectedly, one of them was running. The already shaken building shook further as the press pounded, spewed cut-and-folded newspaper sheets methodically onto a slowly moving belt.

  There were four men who wore fireman’s hats in the room. They had a hose with them, which they had evidently brought in from the rear of the building. They had, as evidently, used the hose, although now it was limp on the wet floor. They were looking at a second press, which wasn’t running and did not, to Heimrich’s eyes, look as if it soon would run again.

  A man who wore a fireman’s hat, although a civilian blue suit, turned to them. He had the word CHIEF prominently on his hat. He said, “Want something?”

  “State police,” Heimrich said. “Having a look around. The press took quite a beating, didn’t it?”

  “You people taking over?”

  “Now, Chief,” Heimrich said. “Not on this. Unless it ties in with murder. Mrs. Powers’s murder.”

  “Hell of a thing, that,” the fire chief said. “Nice woman. Hell of a nice woman. Nothing to do with this, I’d think. Thing is, Clay Foster made somebody mad. He made a good many people mad, come to that. Coming out for this damn club, for one thing. On the other hand, couple weeks ago he put a blast on this black power thing. Niggers who want to kill all the white people. Could be somebody decided to start with Clay.”

  “With his plant, apparently,” Heimrich said. “Some sort of booby trap?”

  “Way it looks. Wired into the switch that starts the press. Way it looks. To us and to Ted Hunter. Dynamite, way it looks. Still smell it when we got here. You people got something like a bomb squad?”

  “Something very like it,” Heimrich told the fire chief. “We’ll bring it in if the local authorities ask us to, Chief.”

  He wasn’t, he thought, going to like the chief of the North Wellwood Fire Department. Which wasn’t going to matter.

  “Anything to show how they got in?” Forniss asked the fire chief. “And when?”

  “Jimmied the back door, looks like,” the chief said. “Listen. Whyn’t you go talk to Ted Hunter? He’s in charge of that side of it, isn’t he? What we do is put out fires.”

  “Was there one?” Forniss asked him, in a tone which indicated that he didn’t like the fire chief particularly, either.

  “Could have been,” the fire chief said. “Meaning to say we don’t know our business?”

  We’re outsiders, Heimrich thought. Therefore, we merit hostility.

  “No,” Forniss said. “Nothing like that, Chief.”

  The fire chief did not answer him. He turned away and said to the other firemen, “All right, boys. Let’s get her rolling.”

  Two of the firemen began to lug the limp hose out through the back door of the pressroom. Mrs. Foster appeared at the other door. She said, “You’re wanted on the telephone, Inspector. It’s Bobby Arthur.”

  Trooper Arthur told the inspector, in official language, that Barracks was fit to be tied; that things were piling up that an inspector was needed to unpile; that the District Attorney of Westchester County was one of the things, by way of three telephone calls. (Susan was not the only one, Heimrich thought, who felt that an inspector’s job was a desk job. In the end, Heimrich thought, I’ll have to get used to it.) He told Arthur to call Barracks and promise them an inspector within an hour or a little more.

  Forniss had come out of the pressroom and was talking to the policeman with chevrons on his sleeve. The man with the bandaged head was fingering jammed keys of a typewriter. Heimrich silently wished him luck with it and told Forniss that he was going along to the Barracks and would leave the car at the Maples Inn. “So,” Heimrich said, “it’s all yours for now, Charlie.” He thought that over for a second. An inspector was supposed to delegate. “I mean it’s all yours,” Heimrich said, and went out to the car.

  At the inn, Sally Lambert was no longer behind the switchboard. Nobody was. Beyond it there was a door marked OFFICE and Heimrich knocked on the door. Mrs. Lambert said, “What is it now?”

  Heimrich said, through the door, that it was Inspector Heimrich and that there were a couple of points. There was the sound of movement in the office and the door opened, a little violently. Sally Lambert’s face, which was austere by conformation, was now, Heimrich thought, austere also by intention. She said, “I’ve got things to do. When am I going to get to do them?” But then she said, “Oh, come in I suppose.”

  Heimrich went in to a small office. A few points—

  Harry—Harry, not Henry—Pederson had been at the inn since three weeks ago the previous Sunday. As she had kept telling Heimrich, Mr. Pederson said he was a writer and wanted a quiet place to work for a month or so. Perhaps for longer. He had a suitcase and a portable typewriter and he had come in a Chevrolet, which looked new and which, she guessed, was rented. The car had New York license plates. No, she had not taken down the number on the plates. Why should she? Pederson had registered as from New York City, given no street address. He had made, during the three weeks, perhaps half a dozen long-distance telephone calls. All but one of them had been to New York City numbers. One had been to St. Louis. She had not made any record of the numbers called. Why should she? Of course she had asked the operator for charges. Mr. Pederson had paid them. Mr. Pederson had not made any local calls through the switchboard. If he had made any he had made them from the booth in the lobby. Yes, she thought he had used the booth from time to time.

  “Did you hear his typewriter clattering a good deal?” Heimrich asked her. “I remember we could hear the bell ringing from here when you tried to call him.”

  “Mornings a lot,” Sally Lambert said. “Not so much in the afternoons.”

  “Go out much in his car?”

  Did he think all she had to do was to watch whether guests used their cars?

  “He ate most of his meals here?”

  “All of them, pretty much. We sent his breakfast up, because the dining room doesn’t open until noon. He had lunch and dinner in the taproom, at the same table when it was a
vailable.”

  “Get acquainted with other people who eat here regularly? Local people? Probably a good many of the same people come in for lunch pretty regularly. Did Mr. Pederson seem to know any of them, or get to know them?”

  “Am I supposed to be the FBI? Why are you so interested in Mr. Pederson, anyway?”

  “Now, Mrs. Lambert. Partly because he seems to have been interested in not talking to me.”

  “You don’t know that was it,” Mrs. Lambert said. “Writers act funny, from what I hear. Do things on impulse. How would he know you wanted to talk to him?”

  There was hostility in her voice, Heimrich thought. Merely the exasperation of someone interrupted when she had things to do? There were probably a good many things to do when one ran an inn. But was the hostility of another kind—did it match, say, the evident hostility of the fire chief? A hostility against intruders?

  “I don’t know that he did,” Heimrich told the long-faced woman. “He could have seen our cars from his room if he had happened to look out the window. They aren’t marked as police cars. But they have whip radio antennas. A man who didn’t want to talk to policemen might recognize them. So Mr. Pederson didn’t make any—call them bar acquaintances? Among local people—local men?”

  “I told you—”

  “Now, Mrs. Lambert,” Heimrich said. “I remember what you told me.

  “He came here to get away from people,” Mrs. Lambert said. “So he could work. Maybe he made what they call nodding acquaintances. I wouldn’t know. Except with those fishermen, of course. I suppose just because they weren’t going to be here except over the weekend. He did have drinks with them. Just happened to meet them at the bar, probably. And he had lunch with the blond one.”

  “Fishermen?”

  Three men had asked for and got rooms at the Maples Inn the previous Friday evening. They had come in two cars, but they had seemed to be together. They had fishing gear in their cars. There was nothing unusual about it. A good many men checked in over weekends, using the inn as a place to stay while they fished “up towards Brewster.” The three who had arrived Friday evening had got up early Saturday, having arranged for early breakfasts, and gone in one car.

  “Bring any fish back with them? To be cooked here? I suppose your chef could have arranged that?”

  They had not brought fish back, either Saturday or Sunday or Monday. Monday, only two of them had gone fishing. The other—the blond one—had stayed in North Wellwood. Come to think of it, he had pre-lunch drinks at the bar and Mr. Pederson joined him there. Afterward they had lunch together.

  “These three. They’re still here?”

  They had checked out the night before.

  Heimrich would like to see their registration cards. And also Pederson’s card.

  Mrs. Lambert got up from her desk, moving with indignation. She yanked open a filing cabinet drawer, using more force than she needed to. She slapped four cards down in front of Heimrich.

  The names were printed on all four cards. Pederson had registered as from “NYC.” A man named Robert Wilson and another named John Brown had been equally indefinite. William Snyder had put down Newark, N. J. The three fishermen, Heimrich thought, had notably usual names. Of course, what makes a name usual is its frequent use by those to whom it belongs. The name “John Brown,” for example, belonged authentically to thousands—for all Heimrich could guess, to millions.

  “I’ll take these along,” Heimrich said.

  “I’m not sure you’ve got the—”

  “I am,” Heimrich said, and put the registration cards in his pocket, handling them by their edges. He stood up and said he was sorry to have taken up Mrs. Lambert’s time.

  To this Mrs. Lambert made a sound which was a good deal like “yah.”

  Police Sergeant Theodore Hunter was sure the chief would want all the co-operation he could get from the state police. Experts from the bomb squad would be able to help a lot. It looked like having been dynamite—maybe two sticks and maybe three—wired into the press switch. Clay Foster had not been able to tell more than that the place had been blown up and plaster had fallen on him and that his typewriter was done for. There had been two people with him in the office—people from a TV network. A Mrs. Eric Martin, who had taken a house in North Wellwood, with her husband, for the summer. A man named Roy Strothers, who had come up, at Mrs. Martin’s suggestion, to look things over. Neither had been hurt; neither had awaited the arrival of the police.

  There was nothing more he could do there, Lieutenant Forniss decided—at least nothing more which was germane to his purpose, which was the apprehension of a murderer.

  The telephone call Faith Powers had made after she and Professor Brinkley had finished dinner—made on a sudden decision after she had got into her car to leave. That might well be the crux of things; was a point for concentration. Only it was almost certainly an entirely blunted point.

  If her call was local, that would be that. She would have put a dime in a slot and spun a dial with a finger. Nor, Forniss thought but was not certain, would there be a record of a call made outside the area from a public telephone. It would be made through an operator. When the proper number of coins had been pushed into a slot, that, Forniss supposed, would end matters. If Mrs. Powers had gone home and made a toll call from her own telephone, the number called would have been recorded for billing purposes.

  Had she called someone to make an appointment? That was the most likely thing. Not Lawrence Finch, her broker, according to what he said. Not Thomas Peters, on the same evidence. Her lawyer, Samuel Bennington? (The village was certainly full of Benningtons.) He lived on Long Hill Road, not too far from where she was killed. For legal advice in more or less the middle of the night? Advice about some action she contemplated?

  If she had called Bennington, and he—for some reason impossible to guess—had decided it would be more to his advantage to kill than to advise he would, of course, deny having received her call. He would be given the chance. If she had called and Bennington had taken the call in the presence of a visitor and made a late appointment in the visitor’s hearing? Bennington could be asked about that, too. There were a lot of people to be asked about a lot of things. The telephone company would be among them, on an outside chance.

  Sergeant Hunter drove Forniss back to the Maples Inn. Heimrich’s car was no longer in the parking lot. Forniss went to the booth in the inn lobby and dialed the business office of the New York Telephone Company.

  The office of Mr. Samuel Bennington, attorney and counselor at law and also chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals of the Town of Wellwood, was above a drugstore in a somewhat Colonial building on Main Street. It was nevertheless sedate. The desk in the outer office was firmly occupied by a middle-aged woman with her graying hair drawn back into a knot.

  If Mrs. Martin didn’t have an appointment, the receptionist—who deserved, Ann thought, a designation more formidable—didn’t know. She very much doubted it. If Mrs. Martin cared to make an appointment for—tomorrow, perhaps? She thought tomorrow might be possible.

  “I wouldn’t take much time,” Ann said. “If there isn’t somebody with Mr. Bennington, perhaps …”

  The middle-aged woman shrugged her shoulders firmly. But then she got up from her desk and went to a door behind it and knocked. A man beyond it said, “Yes, Grace?” She opened the door and went in. In less than a minute she came out again and a tall, gray-haired man in a dark gray suit came out after her. He said, “You wanted to see me, Mrs. Martin? Or should I say Miss Langley?”

  He had a soothing voice and there seemed to be amusement underlying it. Everybody in this place knows everything about everybody, Ann thought. Information travels by some kind of osmosis. She said, “Either one, Mr. Bennington. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

  He did not say anything to that, but turned to the door and opened it and held it open. Inside, Samuel Bennington went behind his desk and said, “Sit down, Miss Langley,” and A
nn sat in a deep, leather-covered chair which seemed to engulf her. She felt as if she were sinking into it and peering up at Bennington out of some sort of cave. He smiled down at her pleasantly; he had, on the whole, a pleasant face.

  “I assume,” he said, “it’s about this club?”

  She thought of asking whether he read minds on the side.

  “Your friend’s car is quite plainly marked,” Bennington said. “Faith’s death, shocking as it is, is hardly, I’d think, an event to be covered by the United Broadcasting Network. For which you, Mrs. Martin are—what? An investigator? What would you title it, Mrs. Martin? ‘Interracial club prospect shakes rural community’?”

  “Interviewer,” Ann said. “A shorter title, I’d imagine. But, yes, something like that. If Mr. Strothers and others higher up, of course, decide it’s worth that kind of treatment.”

  “I,” Bennington said, “would think it entirely too trivial for a network. I suppose as—what would you say, Mrs. Martin? An aspect of a larger problem? A part of the Negro revolution reaching into an unexpected place?”

  He was tolerant; pleasant but tolerant.

  “Mr. Bennington,” Ann said, and tried to lean forward in the deep chair and decided that she would have to squirm unbecomingly to do that. She went on, from the chair’s depth. “A white and Negro country club is revolutionary,” she said. “In Westchester County. Actually, anywhere. Perhaps it is unique. I understand there is a great deal of opposition to it.”

  “In small places,” Bennington said, “there is always opposition to any change. Matters which would seem entirely trivial to city people are magnified out of proportion. People hold meetings. Write letters to Clay Foster’s newspaper.”

  “Which,” Ann said, “has just been blown up. Because he supported the club, Mr. Bennington?”

  “Senseless vandalism, I imagine,” Bennington said. “Destruction for destruction’s sake. By outsiders, probably. Some young hoodlums somehow laid hands on dynamite. I understand it was dynamite. Drove around the countryside looking for some place to blow up. Perhaps from Harlem.”