18-With Option to Die

by Lockridge, Richard

  There were lights behind two upstairs windows in this house.

  One of the doors of a two-car garage was open. The garage had its back to the moon and it cast a black shadow. Heimrich walked into the darkness of the garage—into the stall which held a big car.

  He had to use his flashlight to read the license plate. He walked to the front of the car and felt the hood. Not that he needed to, but he might sometime have to swear in court that he had felt the hood. And found it warm.

  He walked out into the moonlight. There was no other place to walk.

  There was a flash from the porch of the house he started toward and the crack of a rifle and, behind him, the thud of a bullet into the closed door of the garage. The bullet whined at Heimrich as it passed him.

  Heimrich got his gun out and yelled, “Police!” and raised the revolver.

  The man on the porch of the house fired again and this time the bullet came close enough to Heimrich to hiss at him.

  Heimrich fired a shot, but fired it into the air.

  Then the whole area—the porch, the turnaround, the garage—was flooded with light from above.

  The man with the rifle, it lowered now, came down shallow steps from the porch and said, “My God, Inspector. I might have hit you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Finch,” Heimrich said, and walked on toward the big man who now stood at the foot of the shallow flight to the porch. “You might have at that. Do you always shoot first and ask afterwards?”

  “Heard somebody in the garage,” Lawrence Finch said. “My God, I’m glad I missed. Wasn’t actually shooting to hit, you know. Just to scare off a prowler. If I’d wanted to hit—” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I made quite a target in the moonlight. And you only miss when you want to, don’t you? Put the gun down, Mr. Finch. I’m a fairly good shot myself.”

  And he waggled his revolver back and forth.

  Finch put the rifle down on the ground.

  “A man has a right to protect his property,” Finch said. “They haven’t taken that away from us yet. Damn near everything else, but not that. I hear somebody getting ready to steal my car and—”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Defend your home. Sure. Did you find what you were looking for in the Powers house, Mr. Finch? Let’s go inside, shall we? We’ve got a bit of talking to do. Windy out here. No use yelling at each other over the wind.”

  Inside, Finch did not deny he had been at the Powers house. He did deny there was anything surreptitious about it.

  “I’m the executor,” he said. “Some papers I wanted. As her executor, I had a key.”

  He had gone over after power came back to North Wellwood. But it hadn’t come back to the Powers house, so he used a flashlight. And …

  “I was just about to call the police. Report that there was somebody in the house—somebody looking for what he could find to steal. I heard him banging around and figured if I came home and called up maybe you people’d be able to catch him.”

  “You hadn’t called yet, I gather?”

  “Just going to when I heard you in the gar—” He stopped and snapped his fingers. He said he’d be damned. “It was you in the house,” he said. “Saw a light, I suppose and—I will be damned. Followed me here, thinking you were following a burglar.”

  Finch laughed. He said it was a damn funny mixup.

  Heimrich did not laugh. He said, “Again, Mr. Finch. Did you find what you were looking for? Her bank records, perhaps? We’ve got those, Mr. Finch. Been over them, naturally. Nothing much that helps. Probably she had another checking account. In the city, perhaps. Used it to deposit these considerable sums she got from your selling her bonds for her.”

  “The deposits don’t show on her account in the First National?”

  “No, Mr. Finch.”

  “Then she must have had another account,” Finch said. “One of the things I’ll have to find out, as the executor of her estate.”

  “Started to try to find out tonight, I suppose,” Heimrich said. “Very diligent of you. Didn’t have any luck, I gather. Or was it something else you were looking for, Mr. Finch?”

  Finch shook his head, a man bemused.

  A detective has to follow hunches, make his stabs in the dark.

  “Like,” Heimrich said, “the letter you wrote her? Making an appointment for Monday night. Only, leaving the time up to her. Which was why she called you from the inn, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re crazy,” Finch said, and his voice went up. “I didn’t write her any such—”

  “Now, Mr. Finch. You did, you know. Happens we’ve got it along with—”

  Finch interrupted him by jumping to his feet and by laughing—laughing loudly, almost hysterically.

  “The hell you’ve got it,” he said. “You think I’d leave—”

  And then, only then, he seemed to hear what he was shouting at a man who sat less than six feet from him.

  He started to run toward the living-room door which opened to the entrance hall—and toward the front door and a rifle lying outside it on the ground. At least that was Heimrich’s hunch. A detective has to follow his hunches.

  Finch moved well for so big and soft a man. But Merton Heimrich was bigger and not soft at all. He caught Lawrence Finch in the entrance hall.

  Finch swung at him. Heimrich had to knock him down. He used only the force necessary to subdue a man resisting arrest. The New York State Police try to be scrupulous in such matters.

  XV

  It was warm again by Saturday—terrace-warm at the Heimrich house on its hill above the Hudson. It was a day, for Susan, for shorts. Merton Heimrich, who considers himself ungainly for shorts, wore a blue polo shirt and gray slacks and no gun. He was off-duty for the day and for the next day. At least, that was to be hoped for.

  Colonel lay in the shade, resting his tongue outside. His duties as a parent had, during the morning, been arduous. The small black cat, after a time of playing with Colonel’s tail, had wandered off and had had to be found. Mite was in sight now. He was stalking something—something invisible except to his own yellow eyes. He stalked his own illusion through the grass. Young Michael had been picked up to pitch a ball game.

  Susan and Merton Heimrich sipped pre-lunch drinks. And, as was inevitable, the telephone rang in the house. Susan said, “Damn!” which was equally inevitable. She said, “I’ll get,” but Heimrich was already on his way across the terrace.

  He was gone for almost ten minutes, but when he walked back to their spot of shade and peace on the terrace, he smiled and shook his head. Which meant that, still, he was off-duty.

  “Charlie,” he said. “The Missouri State Police are very pleased with us. The Governor of Missouri is in the process of saying to the Governor of New York that they want Aaron Nagle, alias Harry Pederson. They’re pleased, out there, because the threatening letters to a minister somebody beat to death were written on a portable typewriter we found for them in a car with Nagle’s fingerprints widely distributed.”

  Nagle denied that he had had any part in the murder of a clergyman in southern Missouri, which was to be expected. For a time he had denied everything, including that he was Aaron Nagle, ex-educator, ex-American Nazi, present executive of Patriots United.

  “Charlie talked to him,” Heimrich told Susan. “Charlie and an assistant district attorney from White Plains.”

  A lawyer had been present; the lawyer had advised—had, as was to be expected, advised complete silence. Beyond denials. For a time he had got it, or something like it. Then …

  “Since you just happened to be in North Wellwood,” Charles Forniss said. “Doing your writing. With no interest in what was going on. Since it was that way, you won’t be interested in the fact that the club got its permit.”

  And then, rather to the surprise of everyone and entirely to the indignation of Nagle’s lawyer, Aaron Nagle had blown up. He had ranted; for more than a quarter of an hour he had shouted at them, gesticulated
at them; called them—all of them—part of the Communist conspiracy. The conspiracy had taken over North Wellwood. “Reds. Niggers. Jews. Moscow. The Commies in Washington. The betrayal of the Constitution. The …”

  Words tumbled out of Aaron Nagle—violent words; a jumble of violent words. He became incoherent with his violent words, and the lawyer, finally, had looked at the others and shrugged hopelessly and not tried to stop his client.

  “Probably,” Heimrich said, speaking relaxedly on the terrace above the Hudson, “if Nagle gets away with it out West and we get him back—for arson and attempted murder and, for that matter, illegal parking in Brewster—” He stopped and sipped from his drink and looked down at the distant, shining river. He closed his eyes.

  “If,” Susan Heimrich said, “you’d really rather go to sleep.”

  “If,” Merton Heimrich said, “we get him back and he gets the same lawyer, the plea probably will be not guilty by reason of insanity. I doubt if we’ll get him back. I think Charlie has given the State of Missouri a wrapped-up package.”

  “I do realize, darling,” Susan said, “that you had nothing to do with any of it. That you delegated it all to Charlie and sat properly at your desk. Barring, of course, the night you got yourself shot at. And chased Mr. Finch through an empty house and finally had to knock him out.”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said, “down. Not out.”

  “And guessed he had written a letter to Mrs. Powers, asking her to come and see him and to call to fix a time. And tricked him into admitting that he had written that letter and had got it and destroyed it. After he killed Mrs. Powers, of course. Got it at her house?”

  “Probably. And also found and destroyed a list of securities which she had just begun to realize she didn’t own because Finch had sold them, using the power of attorney she had given him a year or so ago when she went abroad. Used the money to buy land. A simple case of embezzlement, to begin with. Which, now Charlie knows what to look for, he won’t have any great difficulty in proving.”

  “How did she find out what was going on?”

  “We don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Maybe we’ll never know. She probably wanted cash to invest in the club. He stalled her off. Ann Martin says that when she and Faith Powers were having lunch at the inn and Finch stopped by their table she had a feeling that Finch was stalling about something. The guess—Charlie’s assumption, anyway—is that Faith got suspicious because of his stalling. And this we do know, she had, a few days before, gone to the town hall and looked over land records. The town clerk will testify to that. And he’ll testify that she was interested in Finch’s ownings. There’ll be a lot of bits and pieces for Charlie to put together. There always are. It’s not too difficult after we know what we’ve got to look for. After we got our break—Charlie got his break. In, as it turned out, a fairly literal fashion.”

  “If,” Susan said, “you’re going to be cryptic I think we might have another drink.”

  Merton Heimrich got to his feet. So, more laboriously, did Colonel. There was always something experimental about Colonel’s arising; it was rather as if he were putting his long legs together for the first time. He stood and looked around the terrace and around the lawn stretching beyond it. He turned and looked at Susan and, a little querulously, woofed.

  “I don’t see him, either,” Susan told the big dog. “But I’m sure your cat’s around somewhere, Colonel. He’s a competent little cat.”

  Colonel woofed again. There was no conviction in his woof. He walked off across the lawn toward the trees which bordered it.

  Heimrich brought their drinks and put them within reach.

  Susan sipped from hers. She said, “All right, darling. Break’s the word.”

  “Of,” Heimrich told her, “Faith Powers’s right index finger. The finger she would have used to dial a telephone number with. As most right-handed people do.”

  “I,” Susan said, “use a pencil. Better for the nails. But all right. So?”

  So, instead of dialing Finch’s number on the night she was killed, Faith Powers had used another finger to dial the operator. And the operator had helpfully dialed Finch’s number for her.

  “The real break was that the operator she got happened to be a local girl—a girl who knew her and knew her voice. And, being a local girl, knew Lawrence Finch’s telephone number. And, being a retentive girl, remembers the incident.”

  “So that was how, when you said you wanted to see a man about a gun, you were pretty sure who the man was.”

  “Whoever murdered her, shot at Peters, used a twenty-two. There wasn’t any twenty-two in Nagle’s armament—damn near everything else, but no twenty-two.”

  “There wasn’t any real connection between what Nagle was up to and what Finch did?”

  “Now, Susan. Yes, probably there was. Finch knew that Nagle was in town, and what he was in town for—to make a demonstration against the club. He knew because Nagle got in touch with a contractor named Amos Smithton who had been publicly violent about the club. And who has two loutish sons, who, the village police suspected, had been sicked on the Martins by their father.

  “Smithton passed the word on to Finch. He says casually, when they were arranging for a couple of loads of gravel.”

  Finch thought he had a cover. That would, at any rate, be contended when he came to trial for murder. Anything done against anybody who advocated the club would be blamed—Finch hoped it would be blamed—on Patriots United.

  “If we didn’t catch up with them,” Heimrich said, “he probably would have pointed a finger at them.”

  He had taken two shots at Peters, not planning to hit him, to start what he hoped would be taken for a pattern—a pattern of impersonal violence, directed against Negroes and Communists. He believed that the shooting of Faith Powers would be taken as part of that pattern, since she was openly in favor of the club.

  “He should have used a hand grenade.”

  “Naturally. Didn’t have one handy. Also, he’s a rifleman. Member of a rifle club. Thinks in terms of rifles.”

  “In her house? The night he shot at you. Did he, by the way, plan to miss you, too?”

  “Probably. When he saw who I was and that I had a gun of my own. In her house? You mean, what was he after?”

  “Naturally, darling.”

  “Her bank records. Which didn’t show what they should have shown. Which, of course, he should have taken the first time round. Probably he didn’t because he thought their absence would be more suspicious than their presence. Changed his mind when we showed interest in her finances.”

  “The bank could have duplicated them.”

  “Yes, Susan. If we’d guessed there was a discrepancy worth checking on. I suppose he thought that, without her statements to set us off, the idea of checking with the bank might not occur to us. To Charlie, that is.”

  “Of course to Charlie,” Susan said. “Who else, dear? I do realize it was always Charlie’s case and that you—”

  Barking interrupted her. It was barking to match the size of the dog who made it—and who, with a great loping, came toward them across the grass. At the edge of the terrace Colonel stopped, skidding a little. He looked from one to the other and woofed at each, and there was anxious urgency in his woofing. He turned as if to go back the way he had come, but stopped and looked back, alternatively, over his shoulders.

  They went as their dog directed. With each step he looked back to make certain. They reassured him as he led them toward the trees which bordered their lawn.

  There was a clump of trees and he led them into it. He came to the base of a tall ash and reared himself up against it and barked up it.

  From a rather high crotch, Mite looked down at them. He was very small and very black in the big tree. When he was sure he had been seen, he made a plaintive sound down to them. Colonel barked back; he turned to Susan and Merton and whimpered.

  “I know, Colonel,” Susan Heimrich said gently to her dog. “It does seem un
natural to climb trees. But cats will do it, Colonel. You mustn’t worry so. He’ll come back down when he’s ready.”

  Mite wasn’t ready for almost an hour. But he did come down to join his family on the terrace. Colonel licked him to make sure. Mite was tolerant.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries

  1

  One of the men in pink coats said he was worried about Grandpa. He said that things wouldn’t be the same without the old boy. “Not around all summer,” the man in the pink coat said, and shook his head and waggled his highball glass at a man in a tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows.

  “Well,” the man in the tweed jacket said, “he was getting along, you know. And then there’s this mange going around. They’re all getting it. Reds and grays both.”

  “Could be,” Pink Coat said. “I’d have figured the old boy was immune to anything, but maybe it was the mange. Remember how he used to show up on that rock of his and you could swear he was laughing at us? Like he’d won another game?”

  “Well,” Tweed Jacket said, “he always did. Drove hounds nuts, Grandpa did. Enjoyed every minute of it, it always seemed to me. Won’t be the same without the old boy.”

  “One way to look at it,” Pink Coat said, “it’s getting built up around here. Could be he felt sort of fenced in. Could be he’s gone over toward Brewster for his fun and games. Morning, Miss Mercer. Talking about Grandpa, Harry and I were. Didn’t show up this morning. Hasn’t shown up for three, four months. Harry thinks it could be the mange….”

  Lyle Mercer was not in riding clothes. She was in a light brown dress—a dress lighter in tone than her dark brown eyes and deep brown hair. She said, “Grandpa, Mr. James?” and then, “Oh, of course. Father’s told me about him. The one all of you chase every Saturday.”

  “Pretty much,” Marvin James said. “Until four months ago. Not hide or hair of him since. Measly little red today. After him, not a damn thing.”