Accent on Murder

  Accent on Murder

  A Captain Heimrich Mystery

  FRANCES AND RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  I

  WALTER BRINKLEY, professor emeritus of English Literature at Dyckman University, typed to the bottom of page three hundred and fifty-two of “A Note on American Regional Accents” and decided that it devolved upon him to give a small party for Paul Craig and the new Mrs. Craig. The decision was so sudden, so apparently unmotivated, that Mr. Brinkley blinked slightly and re-read what he had just written, hoping to find explanation in typescript.

  He was at once successful. He had been discussing—briefly, for four pages only—the subtle, and to so many nonexistent, difference in the pronunciation of the words “marry” and “Mary” and advancing, with appropriate reticence, certain theories as to regional customs in this connection. Mr. Brinkley was reticent because this was, after all, not actually his field. His field was Milton. His Milton’s Boyhood: Twelve to Sixteen was, he did not doubt, a book which would stand. On regional accents he was, at best, an informed amateur. It was this fact which had led him to add “A Note on” to his earlier and tentative title which, standing brazenly as “American Regional Accents,” might have seemed presumptuous.

  The word “marry” was, of course, the key word. Paul Craig had married, for the second time, almost a year before. But it was only now—only a week ago, at any rate—that he had brought his new wife home to the big Craig house in North Wellwood—the house which had been closed for so long that many of North Wellwood’s newcomers regarded it rather as a monument to the past than as a residence of the present.

  His young friend Craig was going to find things greatly changed, Walter Brinkley thought, separating the ribbon and carbon copies of page three hundred and fifty-two and placing them in their respective piles. Craig would not, probably, be pleased. His young friend Craig—

  He must, Brinkley decided, quit thinking of Craig in that fashion. Paul Craig was—Brinkley made a quick computation—upward of fifty. Some years upward of fifty. And I, Walter Brinkley thought with that faint disbelief, that momentarily shadowing disappointment, which never failed to accompany such thoughts—I am sixty-seven. A doddering old man; a man turned out to pasture. Nevertheless, I will give a small cocktail party to welcome young Craig and his new wife.

  Walter Brinkley thereupon bounced up from his typewriter—a rather short, comfortably round, noticeably brisk man, with thick and shining white hair and a little-lined pink face. He bounced out of his study, which was on the second floor of his white house on Hayride Lane, and bounced to the head of the stairs and said, down them, “Harry?”

  Harry had been doing something—dusting, possibly—in the living room. He came out into the hall and looked up the stairs and said, “Yassuh. Yassuh, professor?”

  How he loves the rôle, Walter Brinkley thought, crinkling inside but showing nothing—except good humor—in his face. The old family retainer; the faithful servant from the deepest South. What a game Harry Washington makes of it, without too much burlesque; without, Walter Brinkley thought, bitterness of any kind; how he plays a part for his amusement and—yes, that too—for mine. And he knows perfectly well that I know perfectly well he was born in New Jersey—South Jersey, admittedly—and went to public school there, and speaks, when he chooses to step out of character—as, for example, at meetings of the N.A.A.C.P.—precisely like anyone else born and educated in South Jersey. An interesting variant, the South Jersey accent—

  “Yassuh?” Harry Washington repeated, tolerantly. He was tall and lean and middling brown. He knew perfectly well what the professor was thinking. Every now and then the professor stopped, right in the middle of things, and thought. A very interesting man, the professor.

  “Harry,” Walter Brinkley said, “I’ve decided to give a party.”

  “A party?” Harry said, in honest astonishment. He corrected himself quickly. “A pahty?” he said.

  That was a new one. Two or three people in to dinner—yes. A party, no. Not in the five years during which Harry had been Walter Brinkley’s houseman. When Mrs. Brinkley had been alive—no doubt. But that was before his time.

  “You means a real pahty, professor?” Harry said, partly to make sure and partly to get firmly back into the character from which, momentarily and in surprise, he had slipped.

  “Cocktail party,” Brinkley said. “For Mr. and Mrs. Craig. They’ve opened the big house.”

  “Sho nuff?” Harry said, rather overdoing it.

  Harry knew quite well that Mr. Paul Craig had reopened the enormous brown-shingle house, with turrets no less, on Craig Lane. He knew that Mr. Craig had been married for about a year, and that he and his new wife had spent the ensuing time in journeying around the world; he knew that the new Mrs. Craig was a good many years—twenty, and more—younger than her husband, and that she was tall and slender and had black hair in tight curls (a real knockout, they said) and that she and her husband had brought a male cook (white) up with them and two maids, also white, and that Ellen White (who wasn’t) was employed five days a week, six hours a day at a dollar seventy-five an hour, to do general cleaning, but that Joe Parks was being kept on as outdoor man and that Mrs. Joe Parks was expected to lend a hand as needed.

  “You means that big brown house up toward Brewster?” Harry Washington said. “Great big old place? That’s the place you means, professor?”

  I must learn to be more exact, Walter Brinkley thought, and crinkled again inside.

  “That’s the place, Harry,” he said, gravely. “The old Craig house.”

  “Oh,” Harry said. “That house.”

  It’s probably, Brinkley thought, because he slipped up on “party.” He waited.

  “When?” Harry said, and crinkled inside, also. And was externally grave, also.

  “Let’s see,” Brinkley said. “Today’s Tuesday.”

  “Nosuh,” Harry said. “Wednesday, professor. Wednesday the eighteenth.” He paused. “Of June,” he added.

  Walter Brinkley said, “Oh,” not questioning it—Harry was always right in such matters. “Then—next Sunday?”

  “Whatever you sez, professor.”

  So—not the next Sunday. Brinkley suggested Saturday, but without conviction. It was still whatever he said.

  “All right, Harry,” Walter Brinkley said. “When shall we give the party?”

  “Whenever you sez, suh. Week from Saturday would be ’bout right. Time to invite people. Get me somebody to help—be twenty-thirty people likely—”

  “Oh,” Brinkley said, “I don’t—”

  “No suh,” Harry said. “Thirty-five, probably.”

  Walter Brinkley had, a little vaguely, thought of a dozen or so. But, no doubt, Harry was right—he was always right in such matters, also. Brinkley remembered that in the old days—how saddening, yet, obscurely, how warming to think of the old days—parties had always turned out to be much larger than he, innocently, had expected. When one came—when Grace had come—to make a list— The warm sadness flowed over Walter Brinkley, who had loved his wife. He turned, without saying anything, and started to go back to his study, and now he did not bounce.

  “Ice in the glass, professor,” Harry said, and spoke very gently, so that the gentleness in his voice flowed too over Walter Brinkley. Brinkley swallowed and turned back.

  “It’s pretty near one o’clock, professor,” Harry said. “Want I should mix it now? And’s all right with you, suh, I thought maybe an omelet like. With creamed mushrooms? Cut a nice head of romaine this morning and it’s good and crisp now, suh.”

  As gentle with me, Walter Brinkley thought, as if I were a child, not an old man, lonely in a house too large. He started down the stairs and for a moment Harry stood t
here, and looked up at him. Then Harry nodded his head once, as if he were satisfied, and Walter Brinkley nodded back, also once. Harry went off, then, to the kitchen, and Professor Brinkley—who much preferred to be called “Mr. Brinkley” but almost never was—went on down the stairs and across the hall and through the living room to the shady terrace beyond, and by the time he reached the terrace he was bouncing again.

  Harry brought a martini in a little pitcher, with much ice, and a long-stemmed fragile glass, still frosty from the freezer for all the warmth of the early summer day, and poured into the glass quickly while the frost still held.

  “Thank you, Harry,” Brinkley said and Harry said, “Yassuh, professor. You makes yuh list, suh.”

  “Who,” Margo Craig said, and held an invitation card in sight, “is Walter Brinkley? He wants us for cocktails on—” she looked at the card again—“a week from today.”

  It was Saturday afternoon, and the mail had just come, just been brought up from the rural-route box on Craig Lane, where the long, winding driveway from the big brown house—the big brown-shingled house, with turrets—joined the side road named after some generations of Craigs. The mail came late because the house was near the end of the mail driver’s long route from the North Wellwood postoffice.

  Margo Craig spoke with clarity, each word softly distinct—it was as if she found pleasure in the perfect formation of each word. But, as she sat on the awninged terrace of the big house—when she first saw the house two weeks ago she had thought, unexpectedly, of a great brown bear; ungainly, to some degree monstrous, but yet shaggily appealing—there was clarity in all of Margo Craig. A kind of special distinctness, Paul Craig thought, watching her.

  Tall, slender, with long and stockingless legs, brown—a special brown where an intruding splinter of light touched them—from winter in the sun, she was very pleasant to look at. Paul Craig looked at her with approval, and he was a man who did not give approval lightly. Sitting in so low a chair, he thought, most women would seem to sprawl. Margo did not. Breeding, he thought, and that he had chosen wisely. It was appropriate that this young woman, immaculate of body and of mind, should, in a sense, have been appointed Craig.

  “A professor of English,” Paul Craig said. “Retired now, I think. The Brinkleys have been around here since the Revolution. Almost, indeed, as long as the Craigs. He spoke to me about the party the other day—yesterday or the day before—in the village. I gather that we are—rather the subjects of his party, my dear.”

  She said, “Oh?”

  “A welcome back,” Craig said. He was a tall, spare man, gray-haired; he wore slacks and a polo shirt, yet he seemed more formally clothed. He sat in a chair which, while certainly comfortable, was not essentially a terrace chair. It is difficult to achieve austerity on a shaded terrace on a summer afternoon, particularly while sharing the terrace with a wife whose slim legs—revealed without indiscretion in walking shorts—are of quite disturbing symmetry, but Paul Craig did retain a certain austerity. He was not unconscious of Margo’s pretty legs nor, indeed, of the rest of her—of her wide-eyed face, the delicate rise of her breasts under the (properly) loosely fitted shirt, of the delicate perfection of the fingers which held the invitation to cocktails at Walter Brinkley’s house. He was proud of her; really, quite proud of her. He had been fortunate to find a second wife so suitable. She was more suitable, actually, than poor Helen had been. Helen, it had to be admitted, had been somewhat emotional; at times, even moody.

  “I take it then,” Margo Craig said, “that we go to Professor Brinkley’s party?”

  “I think so,” Craig said. “It is, on the whole, thoughtful of Walter. A thoughtful gesture.”

  “I suppose,” she said, “a rather—intellectual party?”

  Craig smiled slightly, and sipped his drink and shook his head.

  “I gather,” he said, “people from around here, for the most part. Some of the people who’ve always been here—the Sands, the Farnleys, no doubt—and quite possibly some of the—new arrivals.”

  “The ranch-house set?”

  He smiled again, again slightly, and said that that, too, was quite possible. “Walter,” he said, “is rather the gregarious type. He always was. Tolerant is perhaps the word. Or—unworldly.”

  She nodded and for a time neither said anything. Then she said, “I suppose the community has changed a great deal from—in recent years.”

  She had started to say “from the old days” and decided not to. Paul was not unduly sensitive about the difference in their ages—at least, he gave no indication of being—but he might find a certain connotation in “the old days.”

  He did not appear to notice that she had changed the wording of her sentence. He nodded; he said that the community had indeed. He said that the change was, he supposed, characteristic of all such communities as that which sprawled around North Wellwood Center.

  “When I was growing up here,” he said, “there were only the big houses. Like this one.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “perhaps not exactly like this one. Grandfather rather—let himself go when the old house burned down. Twenty acres—that was more or less the minimum, probably. Now—two-acre plots. And—ranch types. Since it is possible—just possible, I’d be inclined to think—to commute by way of Brewster.” He lighted a cigarette. “Progress, I imagine they call it,” Paul Craig said, with rather marked detachment.

  “No others?” she said, and he raised his eyebrows. “I mean,” she said, “when you were growing up here. Farmers? People who worked on farms and—that sort of thing?”

  “Oh,” he said. “People like that—yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking of them. There was even a place everybody called ‘shack-town.’ A rural slum, they would call it now, I suppose. I was thinking of the people we knew.”

  “Of course,” she said, but now with only politeness in her voice. Then, “Are we swimming?”

  Paul Craig swam very well. Like most people, he enjoyed doing what he did well. Margo Craig, in the eleven months of her life with Paul had noticed that, as she had noticed a good many things.

  She was a small, quick girl; she had the deeply red hair of all the Camerons—hair so deeply, darkly red that a few women, not of generous nature, looked on it with skepticism, feeling that if valid it was outrageously unfair. She wore white shorts and a white shirt which had, for no special reason, a small green dragon embroidered above the breast pocket. She watched through an open window of the house on Hayride Lane and said, “He’s even later than—there he is now,” and said it to her cousin, and went out of the house and down the drive to get the mail.

  Caroline Wilkins, who had been washing up after the late Saturday lunch, dried her hands and went to the door and watched her cousin go quickly, with something like exuberance, down the drive. As hopeful, of course (Caroline thought) of a letter from that Alan of hers as I of one from that Brady of mine. And then, somewhat irrelevantly, Damn the Navy anyway.

  But Caroline Wilkins did not, of course, mean really to damn the Navy. One’s family may well prove irritating, but one does not really damn one’s family. Three years ago—no, going on four years ago—Caroline had married the Navy, in the person of Lieutenant Commander (then Lieutenant) Brady Wilkins. So now she was a Navy wife. But before that, and always—except for three months not to be counted, never to be remembered—she had been a Navy daughter—daughter of Vice Admiral Jonathan Bennett, USN (Ret.). She had been in China when she was four, and in Singapore when she was six, and in France from the time she was ten until she was twelve. There was always, for Navy families, much tentative perching on new branches. As, of course, now.

  This particular perch was, to be sure, even more tentative than most. When Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins, USN (Annapolis, 1945; special courses at M.I.T., 1947–1948) had been transferred from Norfolk to the headquarters of Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier, 90 Church Street, New York City, a rented house in Northern Westchester had seemed a quite reasonable perch. She had assum
ed—they had both assumed—that for a couple of years (one planned no further ahead than that) Lieutenant Commander Wilkins would live a life reasonably like that of any other man who worked in a New York office and lived outside it. He might be expected to catch a train in and, most nights—when he did not have “the duty”—a train out.

  It had not worked out that way; they should both have guessed it would not. Wilkins’s assignment to Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier, turned out—as they might have expected—to be more subterfuge than fact; it was a place to hang up his pay account, his health record. It was a place at which the Bureau of Naval Personnel could, officially, point a finger and say, “There he is.” But there he seldom was. He was in Alaska, in Florida, in, as likely as not, London. That was what two intensive years at M.I.T. had done to Lieutenant Commander Wilkins—made him an always unpredictable migrant, veiled by security, most mysteriously employed.

  And, the summer before, after they had rented a white house on Hayride Lane and moved into it, this had led Caroline to feel herself almost as much Navy widow as Navy wife. “For the next while,” Brady told her one evening, on the terrace—“for the next quite a while, I’ll be here and there. If you’re going to stay here, you’d better get somebody to stay with you. Dorcas?”

  And Dorcas—Cousin Dorcas, Dorcas Cameron, daughter of Caroline’s Aunt Dorcas Cameron—it had turned out to be; turned out, on the whole, most satisfactorily to be. Four years younger, which had seemed a span a dozen years ago, and seemed a snap of the fingers now; destined, it now appeared, to rejoin the Navy community from which her mother had seceded—if the Navy would let Lieutenant Alan Kelley light long enough; small and quick and gay, with burnished hair; by her own, slightly rueful, statement “cute.” “You’re beautiful,” Dorcas had said when they were discussing such matters. “I’m—cute.” But that was not, Caroline thought now, looking down the driveway toward Hayride Lane, fair to Dorcas. The term diminished Dorcas.

  Dorcas, at the mailbox, looked toward the house, and held her right arm up and waggled something white in her right hand. So he had; at any rate, one of them had. Dorcas came up the driveway from Hayride Lane with a considerable collection of mail under her arm, and something slipped out of the collection and lay, small and white, on the gravel. “Hey!” Caroline called from the door, and pointed, and Dorcas stopped and said, “Oh,” and went back for the something white.