18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Thought I might get a nibble. Nope.”

  “This contractor,” Heimrich said. “Asked him for a guess on what the club’s going to cost?”

  “A couple of hundred thousand would be his guess,” Forniss said. “Fifty thousand, anyway, to turn the Craig house into a clubhouse. The rest for the golf course, and wells and driveways and the lot. Lot of clearing to be done. And a lot of grading, if they were going to make it anything like a decent course. Said the driveways alone—because the zoning board, if it approves the project, will hold out for decent access and exit drives—would cost one hell of a lot. Gravel alone, if they decided to use gravel, would set them back good and plenty.”

  “Why gr—Oh, sure enough, Charlie. Not too much of it around there?”

  “Not in easy trucking distance, M. L. Which has sent the price per yard up. Two or three times what it was a few years ago, the man says. A lot of demand, with a lot of new houses going up.”

  “Nice for Mr. Finch,” Heimrich said. “But you were way ahead of me on that, naturally. Of course, if he already owns half the town. Or even three eighths.”

  “Happens I went around to the Wellwood town house,” Forniss said. “That’s what they call the town hall. Mrs. Powers’s house is tax appraised at twenty-five thousand. Seems the town appraises for taxes at half what they estimate the property would bring on the market. They assess land around here at fifteen hundred an acre.”

  “The twenty-five thousand includes both house and land?”

  It included five acres of the land. An additional five Arthur Powers had purchased after he bought the house was a separate plot, separately assessed. At seventy-five hundred.

  “I told Crowley to go into Barracks,” Forniss said. “Tells me you’ve got a job for him.”

  “Car rental agencies,” Heimrich said. “Mrs. Lambert thinks Pederson, or Nagle if he is Nagle, was driving a rented car. Perhaps his three fishermen friends were. Maybe under other names, naturally, because rental places look at driver’s licenses. Could be Nagle, if he is Nagle, rented under his own name.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Unless he got his license under the name he’s been using around here. Tomorrow I’ll need Ray to help go over Mrs. Powers’s house. Not that I know what we’ll be looking for. O.K., M. L.?”

  “Yes. While you were at the town house did you…?”

  “Yep. Mr. Finch does own a lot of the town. More than five hundred acres of it, a good deal of it bought within the last year or two. Seems he’s a developer, among other things and it’s a good time for developers around here. Town clerk says the population of the area—that’s the town, not the village—has more than doubled in the past four-five years. Says most places within commuting range have.”

  “Quite a lot of land,” Heimrich said. “At three thousand an acre. Mortgaged? Mr. Finch’s land?”

  “Nope. Anyway, they send the tax bills to him. Usual setup is, mortgage companies pay the tax bills, just to be sure they’re paid. Up the mortgagor’s payments to cover, of course.”

  “Sounds like a very solvent man,” Heimrich said.

  “Yep. Does at that. Incidentally, seems he wants to get even more solvent. Got a permit a few months back for another gravel pit. Same strip of land along the brook. Looked it up on the land map. This one will be just about opposite Thomas Peters’s house. That’s all I’ve got, just now. Only I think I’ll get a room at the inn. Make some bar acquaintances tonight, if they’ll make acquaintance with an outside cop. Expense account, M. L.?”

  There is an advantage to being an inspector. “Yes, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Put it in and I’ll see it goes through. Good poking around.”

  “Ought to be,” Forniss said. “Some sort of shindig at the inn this evening. Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis—one of those. Set up in the main dining room. Speakers’ table and everything. Most of the leading citizens ought to show up. Way I figure it, a lot of them will visit the bar before and after. Be talkative, maybe.”

  “Sort of thing that happens,” Heimrich said. “Good listening. Have you—” He stopped himself. It was Charlie’s. Learn to delegate.

  “Arthur and his side-kicks are going to do a good deal of cruising around tonight,” Forniss said. “Out on Hayride Lane, among other places. Where your friend Brinkley lives. And where the Martins had taken this house. With their flashers going, shouldn’t wonder. Making rather a show of it. You were going to say something, M. L.?”

  “No, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Not a thing.”

  It was growing dark in Heimrich’s office as he put the telephone back in its cradle. Automatically, he switched on his desk lamp. He reached again toward the telephone to call Susan; to tell her what she would certainly already know, that he was going to be late. That he hadn’t realized how late it had got—

  He looked at his watch and withdrew his hand from the telephone. It was still a little before six. There ought to be, still, several hours of daylight—of saved daylight in late May. He went to the small window of his small office and looked out of it toward the west.

  The sky was black where the sun should have been. As he stood at the open window he heard, far off, the rumble of thunder. Under the black clouds there was a still distant flashing. Moments later the thunder sounded again. A good way off, still; a good many miles up the Hudson Valley. Perhaps Van Brunt was already getting it. It looked like being a big one.

  Three miles up the Taconic, on his way to Van Brunt, Heimrich had to switch on his headlights. The whole of the northwest sky was black. Lightning slashed through the black clouds. It still did not rain. The storm held its breath.

  As a storm of another kind held its breath in North Wellwood? The analogy was fanciful. What was going on in North Wellwood was not, looked at logically, obscure; looked at with the logic imposed by the times. A community which had thought itself secure from change, from intrusion by the world, was threatened with both. Because there was a chance that Negroes and whites might have a place to play golf and tennis together, swim together, eat together in a club dining room.

  A woman had been shot to death on a lonely road and her car had plunged into a gravel pit. The plant of a small-town weekly had been damaged by a dynamite blast. There was no certain, or even probable, connection between those things. A man who might, or might not, be a member—perhaps a leading member—of a group of right-wing fanatics had left a hotel room abruptly, but not without paying his bill. Three fishermen had had no luck fishing. A television network might, or might not, intrude on a village which did not like intruders.

  Of course, in New York City, the police had rounded up twenty or so men whom they accused of planning to blow up Communists, when found, and who seemed to have been equipped to do it. But those called themselves “Minutemen,” not “Patriots United.” Of course, the right wing, like the left wing, probably had splinters in it. Of course …

  Heimrich was in The Flats, a few miles below Van Brunt Center, some five miles from home, when the storm quit its ominous holding in of breath. Lightning tore holes in the sky and water poured out of the sky; thunder shook the small, close houses of The Flats. The road ahead almost vanished in the downpour.

  Heimrich put his lights to full, and saw only a wall of water. He dipped them and could dimly see the road, and he crept the car along it. He crept to Van Brunt Center, leaning forward over the wheel. The car was sluggish; Heimrich felt as if it were swimming uphill.

  There were no lights in the Center, as Heimrich sloshed the car along Van Brunt Avenue, which is also NY-11F. The buildings on either side of the street were dark—dark as this sudden night in late afternoon. Even the Old Stone Inn was dark. It, like the other buildings, momentarily flashed into view as the lightning flashed. The traffic light at the Corners was out. Normally, Heimrich would have turned there, into Elm Street, then on to Van Brunt Pass. It was the short-cut home. But this was no night for the Pass.

  He went on to High Road. Water rushed down as he turned into it, began to cl
imb it. It was like trying to drive up a waterfall. The car’s motor faltered for an instant and Heimrich moved his gear lever to L. He had never needed to use low gear before; the Buick’s automatic transmission had always taken care of such matters. He almost missed his own driveway, but his lights dimly picked up the two boulders which flanked it and he crept between them and up the steep drive.

  Power was off here, too. Electricity tamed to wires is no match for electricity leaping unfettered in the sky. The house was dark. Now, as he drove in front of it and into the garage, there were candles burning behind windows. There was flickering light in the house—light flickering red.

  A breezeway connected garage and house. It was a galeway as Heimrich ran through it—was hurtled through it with a cold wind at his back. Down twenty degrees within the hour; more than twenty degrees from the feel of it.

  The house door opened as he reached it and the wind blew him home. Inside, he leaned hard against the door but was not quick enough. Several of the candles flickered out. He stood for a moment with his back bracing the door and looked down at Susan, who wore slacks and a sweater; she looked up at him and said, “Not for man or beast, is it? I was worried, Merton. I—I hoped you’d stop some place until it was over. I …”

  She was shaking when Merton Heimrich put his arms around her. She quieted in his arms.

  “It’s just a thunderstorm,” he told her.

  “It’s fine now,” she said. “Look.”

  She nodded toward the fireplace.

  Colonel was lying, facing the fire, his forepaws stretched enormously toward it. And between the dog’s great paws there was a small black curl. A head came out of it and rested on one of the paws and the curl became a small black cat.

  “Colonel brought the mite in when he heard the thunder,” Susan said. “You know how storms frighten him. Our cat didn’t much want to come, but Colonel picked him up. Got him very wet all over again, of course. So I lighted the fire. I’ll get us drinks.”

  But for a moment they stood side by side and looked at enormous dog and tiny cat.

  “Colonel,” Susan said, “thinks he’s a papa.”

  XII

  Summer storms grumble their way from west to east. The sun was still bright in North Wellwood at around six, when Ann Martin drove the little car—Eric’s little car—up the drive toward the square white house. She drove up fast, with gravel spurting from under the wheels. Eric would be wondering what on earth …

  Eric was not there to wonder. She was at once relieved and mildly concerned. The station wagon was never very resolute. It might have tired on its way from New Canaan. She left the sports car in front of the house and was on the porch when she heard the telephone begin to ring. It rang three times, but only three, before she reached it.

  Eric was tied up at the plant; would be, at a guess, for another half an hour. So, in an hour or a little more. If the damned station wagon agreed to start. Eric Martin disliked the station wagon strongly; Ann sometimes thought that the wagon responded in kind.

  “Roy Strothers is coming by for a drink,” Ann said.

  “Roy Str—Ann. You haven’t let them hook you? We agreed.

  I thought we’d damn well agreed.”

  “Things,” Ann said. “All sorts of strange things, Eric. The nice Mrs. Powers I told you about. Somebody shot her. And somebody blew up the local newspaper and—”

  “And when I get there,” Eric Martin said, “we’ll load this damn wagon up again and get the hell out of there.”

  “Of course, darling,” Ann Martin said. “Whatever you say, darling.”

  “And,” Eric said, “none of that, my dear. You can skim the resigned acceptance off and throw it. At Mr. Strothers. No. Tell Mr. Strothers to go roll his hoop. And don’t say, ‘Yes, darling.’”

  “No, darling.”

  He laughed then. He said, “Sometimes—” and did not go on with that. “I’ll make it as soon as I can,” he said. “Give Roy cooking sherry.”

  “I’ll tell him what you said,” Ann said. “And—”

  A car honked briefly.

  “Somebody’s here,” she said. “Probably Roy. Come as soon as you can, Eric.”

  “Wait!” he said. “Be sure it is Roy. Not—not somebody delivering garbage.”

  She went to a window and looked out at a car marked UNITED BROADCASTING NETWORK and at Roy Strothers getting out of it. She went back to tell her husband that everything was all right.

  “An hour,” Eric said firmly. “Remember the cooking sherry.”

  “There isn’t any,” Ann told him, and hung up. She went to the door and let Roy Strothers in. Outside it was warm and hushed.

  “There’s a storm around somewhere,” Strothers said. “Tried to pick up the six o’clock news on the car radio and didn’t get anything but static. Does an enquiring reporter get a drink around here?”

  She made them drinks, not from cooking sherry. They sat in chairs by an open window, through which no air came. Ann said, “Well, Roy?” and Roy Strothers sipped before he answered. Then he said, “I’d think so. But it’s up to Stu. You?”

  They had divided up interviews; they met now to compare notes before they called Stuart Leffing in New York. Ann told Strothers about her interview with Samuel Bennington and that Bennington, reluctantly, would consent to be interviewed if they went ahead with it. She had gone from his office to Lawrence Finch’s house on Long Hill Road and found Finch relaxing on a deck chair in the shade and sipping a gin and tonic.

  Finch said, sure, he knew there was opposition to the club. He wasn’t for it himself. Not around there. Maybe it was all right in theory. Maybe a lot of theories were all right. The trouble was, come down to it, that a lot of people were trying to do things too fast. The people who were running things now in Washington were trying to cram things down people’s throats. Had been for years. Inciting people, was what it came to.

  “I’m a conservative,” Finch told Ann Martin. “Most of us are around here. Maybe we’re a vanishing breed. Maybe this socialism they’re pushing is what we’re headed for, whether we like it or not.”

  “This club,” Ann said. “You feel it’s Socialistic? At—I heard the initiation fee was to be around a thousand dollars?”

  She was sitting in a director’s chair, in the shade of a big maple. She had been offered, and declined, a drink.

  “It was peaceful,” she told Strothers. “He didn’t argue that the club itself was what he called socialism. Only that it was breaking down old traditions. But he wasn’t violent about it. Resigned, on the whole. He talked a bit about property values going down. He said, ‘All right, I own a good bit of land around here. So I’m not exactly impartial.’ He thinks it’s all not worth our making a fuss about. If Sam Bennington wanted to be interviewed in front of a TV camera that was up to Sam Bennington. He himself won’t be, Roy. Says it’s something he’s not involved in.”

  “Would he show up all right on the screen?”

  “Representing the better element, I suppose so. Big, impressive in a way. Banker type—what people think of as the banker type.”

  “Only banker I know to speak to is thin as a rail,” Strothers said. “There comes our storm, honey.”

  There was the roll of distant thunder.

  Ann had gone from Finch’s big white house to the similarly big, and even whiter, house owned by Thomas Peters, attorney and counselor at law. And Negro.

  “He’s got a wife who’s a knockout,” Ann said. “Put a camera on her and it will open all its lenses wide. He’s good-looking himself. Both very photogenic.”

  But—“We don’t want that kind of publicity,” Peters told her. “This isn’t an issue. It’s a club—a country club. We’re not trying to prove anything. Not trying to stir things up.”

  “A woman’s been shot and killed,” Ann said. “A newspaper’s been blown up, or part blown up.”

  There wasn’t, Peters told Ann, any evidence—any real evidence—those things were connected in any
way with the club. It was tragic about Faith Powers. She had been a fine woman. As for Clayton Foster, he got out a good newspaper. He was quite a guy. And a good many people had grudges against him. The fact that the Sentinel editorially had supported the club might be completely irrelevant.

  The thunder grew louder and closer and it began to grow dark in the living room. But still no air came in through the open window they sat by.

  “If Stu does decide on this,” Roy Strothers said, “will Peters play along? State his side of it?”

  She didn’t know. Peters would not commit himself.

  “Can’t very well play Hamlet without Hamlet,” Roy said. “If it weren’t for this booby trap at the paper I’d recommend to Stu that we skip it. And Peters is right, of course. We can’t tie that in. Not hard enough, anyway. And Mrs. Powers we can’t tie in at all.”

  “General unrest,” Ann said. “Village in tension. Neighbor turned against neighbor.”

  “We’d have to pipe it,” Strothers said. “Blow it up. And this I’ll say for Stu. Simon Legree he may be, but he doesn’t like things piped.”

  Strothers had talked to two of the five men on the zoning board—a man named Leonard Notson and a man named Ben Lacey. Both of them had received letters protesting the club; Notson had got a few telephone calls about it; Lacey said he had not.

  “What you city people don’t realize,” Lacey told Strothers, “is we small-towners get easily steamed up about local matters. Because, I suppose, we feel we’re a part of them in a way city people don’t. Can’t. So we blow off steam and things quiet down. If we’re let alone.”

  “He wants us to leave it alone?”

  “Both he and Notson. They—”

  Thunder, very close now, drowned out his voice. It rumbled itself away.

  But then a sharp flash of lightning split the deepening darkness. Strothers waited it out.

  Ann crossed the room to a light switch and flicked it up. A porch light went on. She tried another switch and three lamps went on in the living room. There was a roar of thunder and the lamps flickered, seeming to wince from the storm. But they came back steady.