The Distant Clue

by Frances

  Colonel got up from in front of the fireplace and walked across the room and thumped down in a corner, his back to everything. “He simply doesn’t make sense, does he?” Susan Heimrich said, and Merton Heimrich said, “No, he never does.”

  “Did you expect him to confess?” Susan said, not bothering, or needing, to arrange relatives.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I never expect them to confess. Actually, they do more often than not. Amateurs especially. But I never expect it. And this he’ll probably repudiate, once his lawyer gets hold of him. Unless he’s worried about his son because he used his son’s car when he went to smother the old man.”

  She said, “Merton, you didn’t threaten to blame it on his son!”

  “Used it,” Heimrich said, “because he thought it would be less conspicuous than the Bentley. No, dear, I didn’t. Of course, I couldn’t control his—anxieties. He’s naturally concerned about his son and his grandchildren.”

  “A man who killed three men,” Susan said. “One of them very old and helpless.”

  “‘They were outsiders,’ he said. ‘Outsiders who threatened.’ He found it quite logical, apparently. Still does, I think. He confessed because he is a logical man. He said, ‘You appear to have me, gentlemen.’ The fingerprints did that, of course. He realized that that had always been a risk, but he had thought his friend Mitchie too young to have been in the Army in the First World War. As Mitchie was, actually. But he was in the R.O.T.C. at college and his detachment was mustered into Federal service just before the war ended. Mustered out again quickly, but not before their prints went on record. We took Hutton’s prints and he said, ‘You seem to have me cold, gentlemen.’”

  “I don’t,” Susan said, “see how he ever thought he’d get away with it.”

  “He got away with it for nearly forty years,” Heimrich said. “He said, ‘I had quite a run for my money.’”

  “Mitchie’s money,” Susan said. “What happens to it now?”

  Heimrich sipped from his glass and shook his head. He said that that, now, was somebody else’s worry. If a suitable Mitchie relative could be found, he would also be finder and keeper. If not, the state of New York probably would benefit.

  “Did they look alike? This man and the real John Mitchie?”

  “Not particularly, he says. But—they were the same general size and build, the same general coloring. Hutton knew a good deal about Mitchie by the time he took his place—knew that the two best friends he had had before he left the States to go to Paris had been killed in the war. Knew that Mitchie’s father had only a year or two to live. Gathered that Mitchie had always been what Hutton calls ‘a bit standoffish’ at home. Of course, when he took on the role of Mitchie he avoided people they had both known in Paris. It wasn’t difficult. He was actually in a hospital most of the time. He stayed away from this country until after Mitchie’s father had died, naturally. He closed the house and fired the servants by cable. He listened to such Americans as he could and modified his accent. The one he acquired as a boy in England is coming back now, incidentally. He married his wife as Mitchie; he says she never knew he wasn’t Mitchie. I don’t know how true that is, or that it matters. Mitchie’s signature was on several papers in the knapsack, and he practiced it. Mitchie had told him a good deal about himself, and he remembered it. He says, ‘The poor lad had been away for going on four years. People change in four years, especially in their twenties. I figured it was worth having a go at.’”

  “The poor lad indeed!” Susan said. “My glass is empty.”

  Heimrich rectified that. While he was up, he refilled his own.

  Actually, he told Susan, Hutton seemed to have been rather fond of John Mitchie. It wasn’t, he said, as if he were doing the old boy out of anything. He was merely taking advantage of an accident.

  “Probably,” Susan said, “he pushed the poor lad.”

  He said not, and Heimrich was inclined to believe him. He also said—and Heimrich thought it very likely true—that the impersonation had begun in a quite reasonable mistake. As they fell, both had lost their knapsacks. The gear lay between the two men on the ledge. When Hutton came to after about a week he says the first question was, “M’sieu Mitchie?” He says he at first thought he was being asked the identity of his companion, and said “Oui, m’sieu.” It wasn’t, he says, until a couple of days later he realized he was being taken for Mitchie. The idea came then. “I was stony,” Hutton told Heimrich, told the county district attorney. “Decided I might as well have a go at it. Gift horse, y’ know.”

  When he had come “home” there had been uneasy moments, but not as many as he had expected. He had taken full advantage of the Mitchie “standoffishness” and emphasized it. The few acquaintances he had made had been among people who had never known the real Mitchie. “Like the old boys at the club.”

  The only real catch, he told the listening men—the men who would, in the end, see that he went to the electric chair—was “poor old Mears.” Jasper Mears had been very much up and around when Hutton came to Cold Harbor as Mitchie, and he had known the Mitchies for a long time.

  “Didn’t fool the old boy for a minute,” Hutton said. “I didn’t know why, then. He never said. Just let me know. And let me know that he knew which side his bread was buttered on—had better be buttered on.”

  So Hutton had buttered the old man’s bread. It had all, he said, been quite amicable. “As if I’d retired the old boy on a pension.” During the last few months, however, the old boy had become more demanding. “Said he couldn’t get around any more and that he was finding things a bit dull. Said he ought to have a TV set and a decent stove. Cost me a packet.”

  And then—somehow—Homer Lenox had got wind of it. Lenox was very much another matter. Lenox wasn’t a man he could pension off. Lenox’s goal would be to set things straight—publicly.

  “Called me up Thursday,” Hutton told them. “Said he had some documents he thought I’d like to see. And called me by my real name. Bit of a shock.”

  He had arranged to stop off Friday on his way to New York and have a look at the documents. He had taken a gun along. “Bagged my pocket a bit, and the old boy saw it.” The “old boy” had gone for his own gun; Hutton had knocked it out of his hand with the barrel of his own and used it, instead of his own. “Had to shoot old Wingate,” he said. “No choice I could see. Also, they seemed to be in it together.”

  He had hurriedly done what he could to make it appear there had been a struggle between the two, and gone on to keep his luncheon appointment. “Rather pushed the old bus. Everybody knew me for a slow driver.”

  He had gone back that night and burned what he could find, hoping the “documents,” whatever they were, would be among the things burned. He had not tried to burn the books. “Takes a sizable fire to burn books. Fire people could see for miles.” He had also broken into the library, and taken all the documents he could find there. “Wasted time on that,” he said. “Those I took time to go over. Nothing in them I could see.” He had, however, destroyed them. To be on the safe side.

  “Poor old Mears hadn’t been a problem before,” Hutton told them. “Figured he might be now. Knack of putting two and two together, the old boy had. Thought he might draw the line at killing. So …”

  He had rather hated to do that. He’d got rather to like the old boy. But he had had to be on the safe side.

  Heimrich put another log on the fire. He said he wouldn’t like to be playing baseball on a day like this.

  “They don’t seem to mind,” Susan said. “The Drews are bringing him home. Almost time, I’d think. And in the end, he missed the documents?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “What mattered, anyway. He apparently got and destroyed the report from the London detective agency. But the doctor’s records were locked up in the trunk of Wingate’s car. If Lenox had notes, or had written something about the impersonation—well, Hutton burned that. But there was this, too.” He took this out of his pocket.
It was a small, aged book. “Among the books he didn’t try to burn,” he said, and handed it to Susan. It was The Mitchies of Cold Harbour, written by John Mitchie, privately published in 1865. On the flyleaf was stamped, “Van Brunt Public Library.”

  “Dry as dust,” Heimrich said. “Dryer than poor Lenox’s book, if possible. Only—I’ll quote it for you. ‘Male members of the Mitchie family have been for generations distinguished by the absence of the small toe on the right foot. The characteristic apparently is hereditary.’”

  “I like ‘distinguished,’” Susan Heimrich said. “Word well chosen, isn’t it?”

  “Characteristic” was nicely selected, too, Heimrich thought. Anyway—

  They could only guess about a man now dead. He would guess that Homer Lenox had come on this passage during his research; had not remembered that the John Mitchie who was his contemporary had been short a toe. But, could not remember much about Mitchie. He had shared what at first was a vague suspicion with his friend Wingate; Wingate had apparently asked aroundasked Michael among others—about the feet of their playmates, with young James Mitchie chiefly in mind and had come up with negative reports. The newspaper picture of Johnny Three, which Lenox probably came across, showed him with all his toes. So—Lenox bought binoculars and started counting toes. Verified that the Mitchies had the usual number.

  “Could he? From there?”

  “With those glasses, yes,” Heimrich told her. “I could almost count the feathers on a robin’s wing.”

  But Lenox was a fair man, and a careful man. At any rate, if Heimrich was right in guessing about him, he had acted like one. Probably, Heimrich said, he had realized that the hereditary malformation might have run out in the Mitchie clan—that John Mitchie II, although a true Mitchie, might have had all his toes, and passed normality on to his son and grandson.

  “I’d guess,” Heimrich said, “that Lenox thought of old Mears, and went around and asked him if Mitchie’s feet were normal. I suspect he got an evasive answer. Mears had a vested interest, naturally. A secret shared isn’t any longer a profitable secret. It probably was that visit, that question, the old man wanted to tell me about, after it had gone to murder.”

  Lenox wasn’t, obviously, satisfied. If Mitchie was not really Mitchie, the impersonation must have begun abroad. When he came on the name of Malcolm Hutton in the newspaper account of Mitchie’s return, and read of the climbing accident, he, quite sensibly, widened his enquiries—widened them to London.

  “We haven’t got Hood’s report yet,” Heimrich said. “It won’t, I imagine, tell us as much as Hutton himself has told us. Anyway, Lenox didn’t need it by the time he got it By then a Van Brunt cleared out junk in preparation for moving on, and Wingate fell heir to the doctor’s case records. And looked up John Mitchie II and found ‘he.ped.malf.’ They had him, then. That’ll make him toe the mark,’ Lenox told somebody, almost certainly Wingate. And, in a way, it did.”

  “The poor souls,” Susan said. “Not the way they had in mind.”

  The telephone rang. Michael, Susan thought. Something’s happened to Michael. But she kept her voice steady when she answered.

  Merton Heimrich heard her say, “Oh,” and heard a car outside and went to open the door, to ask the Drews in for a drink. “I’ll tell him,” he heard her say, as he stood at the open door, waiting for the Drews and Michael. Colonel jostled him, almost knocked him down. Colonel hurried to meet his god.

  “It was Scott Lenox,” Susan said. “Said you were so interested in where they went and what they did he thought you ought to know—hello, Marge. Ken. It’s turned—”

  “Know,” Heimrich said firmly, “what, dear?”

  “Oh,” Susan said, “that they were married this afternoon. By a justice of the peace in—Colonel! You impossible—”

  Kenneth Drew caught his wife as she staggered into his arms. Colonel had done his best, but he had not quite knocked her over. He got to god before god disappeared, as god was all the time doing.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the terrace, Susan Heimrich could not see the bus, but she could hear the screech of brakes as it stopped—hear the brakes go on and, as always, know a moment of trepidation. Should brakes really sound like that? This was hilly country; buses needed good brakes. Were these—? She stopped this thought, as always. You’re not that kind of mother, she told herself, as always. She heard the voices of children and then the harsh grinding sound as the bus started on—on along High Road to the turn into Van Brunt Pass. When the bus slowed for the turn its brakes protested again. But that was all right, now. It was a bright morning in very early June, and everything was fine now.

  A very large Great Dane came up the steep drive, moving as if each step might be his last and as if he rather hoped it would be. When he came in sight of Susan Faye, standing on the terrace in the sunlight, he stopped and shook his head and Susan, as always, waited for him to lift a heavy paw and wipe his streaming eyes. He did not. He never had yet. He plodded on, a dog going nowhere of importance and, evidently, considering suicide.

  ‘He’ll be back, Colonel,’ Susan said, across bright grass. No dog should be so unhappy in so green a world. ‘You know he will.’

  Colonel stopped, his great head hanging low. Then he plodded toward her on heavy feet, all too obviously making the best of an impossible bargain. The boy was gone. The boy would never come back. There was no point in being a dog. It wasn’t worth it.

  He never learns, Susan thought. I wonder if he is really a very bright dog. Not that that matters. ‘Come here, Colonel. I’ll tell you again.’

  Colonel came to the terrace. He collapsed on it, and put his head on his paws and looked up, from the tops of his eyes, at Susan Heimrich. She could go ahead and tell him again, and he wouldn’t, again, believe a word of it.

  Five days a week he went down the drive with the boy, and waited with the boy. Five days a week the monster, with its terrible smell, came along and engulfed the boy and when Colonel moved forward, behind his small god, the boy said, ‘No. No, Colonel.’ Then Colonel sat down, his tail tucked under him, and wept. The monstrous, evil-smelling thing went off, the boy in it. And Colonel plodded back up the drive, although there was no point in that, or in anything.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Susan said, gravely, to the mourning dog. ‘A little after three. And you’ll go, ten minutes too early, and sit in the drive and when you hear the bus you’ll bark once and gambol—’ She stopped. Colonel was not a dog to gambol. What, then? Lurch? ‘You’ll gambol down the drive,’ Susan told her dog, although really Michael’s dog, ‘and the bus will stop and he’ll get out. Don’t you remember?’

  Colonel closed his eyes. The lies people tell to dogs! This one smelled all right, and scratched in the right places, but the lies she told.

  ‘Come and help me look for zinnias,’ Susan told the dog, and got up and went to look for zinnias among the weeds. Surely they must be coming up now, late as the spring had been. Some time there would be the kind of spring people wrote about—spring that was really spring, and not one with snow in the middle of May. She had lived almost all her life in the town of Van Brunt, county of Putnam, state of New York, and there never had been yet. And each year she had heard others say, and said herself, that spring was late this year, sharing the assumption that it was ever otherwise. Three weeks or so ago, snow, to fall if not to stay. And this bright morning, summer.

  She went to look for zinnias. It had been, at any rate, a fine spring for weeds. But there was one and there another and—for heaven’s sake!—a cluster of half a dozen, seedlings without room to turn around in. Plants are ridiculous, Susan thought, and got down on her knees and began to pull up weeds.

  She was rather tall, and slender and in her late twenties. She had widely separated gray eyes, and brown hair worn short and rather square shoulders. She wore a man’s white shirt, which was far too big for her, with the slee
ves turned back at her wrists—and, at intervals as she plucked out weeds, falling down over her hands. She wore corduroy slacks and tennis socks and old tennis shoes, and smelled slightly of insect repellent. The shad flies were venomous this year. (As every year.)

  A boy off to school, a husband off to work, a country woman seeking timorous zinnia seedlings among aggressive weeds. Everything fine; everything placidly as it should be. Susan pushed aside a small tendril of guilt. Martha Collins would mind the store—the shop, but showroom really, on Van Brunt Avenue in Van Brunt Center; the little shop with the words ‘Susan Faye, Fabrics,’ lettered small and neat in the lower left-hand corner of the window. Tomorrow would be time enough for Susan Heimrich to assume that other identity, which now seemed so much less important than it once had. Tomorrow she would let weeds go (and wouldn’t they just!) and slap gouache on drawing paper. Today I am Mrs M. L. Heimrich, housewife and family weeder.

  Damn, she thought. That was a zinnia I just pulled up. She put it back in, but with no confidence. Transplant when they have four leaves. This one had only two, poor little thing. Far too young to be wrenched from its mother’s—

  The big dog, who had thought looking for zinnias beneath him, barked loudly. He barked once, which was to indicate that something or other was happening, and then barked several times more, which indicated that whatever it was he didn’t like it. Susan stood up.

  The cutting garden was beyond the house, which stood—which stretched like the low barn it once had been—on a rise, from which one could look down and see the Hudson River. When Colonel continued to bark, and now like a dog in a watchdog mood, Susan Heimrich walked around the house to the terrace.

  Colonel, with hair ridged along his back, stood beyond the terrace and looked at the drive. Then, stiff-legged, he began to move forward, and to mingle growls with his loud barking.