Burnt Offering Read online

  Susan Faye had been born Susan Upton, only daughter of John Upton, deceased, of Van Brunt Avenue, Van Brunt. At that, Heimrich had closed his eyes. Mrs. John Upton, also deceased, had been a first cousin of Orville Phipps. Susan was the widow of Michael Faye, late Lieutenant, USMC—and also a native of Van Brunt, Town of Van Brunt, County of Putnam. Susan was twenty-nine. She had attended the Art Students League after being graduated from the Cold Harbor High School. She designed fabrics. (“Free lance; apparently good but there’s no fortune in it.” That was the judgment of a detective, NYPD.)

  Cornelia Van Brunt was in her early sixties. She was the widow of Henry Van Brunt; she was also a Van Brunt in her own right. Her husband, who had been a corporation lawyer, had been a distant cousin. (The Van Brunts, it appeared, kept themselves to themselves, and the name in the family.) Mrs. Van Brunt had lived in the Van Brunt house (on Van Brunt Lane, in the Town of Van Brunt) all her life, if one excepted numerous trips to Europe, some summers in Bar Harbor and not a few winters in Palm Beach. Of recent years, however, she had remained much at home, which might indicate dwindling reserves, physical or financial—or, of course, no more than lack of interest in visiting again places so often visited.

  Henry Van Brunt III was her only child. He was twenty-nine, a graduate of Harvard, at present living in Chicago. (As he had said, of course.) He had been living there for, it appeared, some four years. He had, as he had said, taken a cab from Harmon late the previous afternoon, and the time coincided with the arrival in Harmon of a train from Chicago. The train had left Chicago a few minutes after midnight. It appeared that Mr. Van Brunt was taken care of, however odd his anxiety about the progress of young Asa Purvis might appear. (But Heimrich was not certain it appeared odd. Heimrich was not yet certain about anything, except that a man was dead and a boy hurt.)

  Heimrich turned off the Taconic State Parkway and continued north and west, meanwhile fitting Samuel Jackson, counsellor-at-law, into a mental pigeonhole. Jackson was thirty-eight; he had commanded a PT boat in the Pacific during the Second World War and been twice wounded. He had been returned to inactive duty as a lieutenant commander early in 1945, as no longer physically qualified for sea duty. He had returned to the practice of law, which, when he received his commission, he had just begun. He had married after leaving the Navy; his wife had died a year later. (How casually the facts of a dossier dismissed tragedy.) Such Democratic party activities as went on in that section of Putnam County centered around Mr. Jackson, who nevertheless had an apparently lucrative law practice. This, Heimrich gathered, was pleasant but not essential to Mr. Jackson’s comfort; his family had been in the Hudson Valley only less long than the Van Brunts, and were only less affluent. During the past two years, Jackson had apparently seen a good deal of Susan Faye.

  Paul Stidworthy was a stockbroker, with an office in that section of Manhattan haunted by stockbrokers. He and Mrs. Stidworthy had lived in the community only about five years, and during winters absented themselves from the then rather bleak countryside and took a hotel apartment. Stidworthy had, two years before, involved himself in town politics, being active in a group—substantially Republican—which had attempted to take the town back from Mr. Phipps and his “gang,” more or less on the theory that it was the turn of someone else. It had proved not to be.

  Edgar Noble, who had rather lengthily espoused the virtues of graceful living at the town meeting—and the contribution to such grace of good, stiff zoning laws—was an importer, and another fairly recent comer to Van Brunt. He had joined Stidworthy in the earlier revolt against Phipps, and in being put down rather absent-mindedly. (Jackson had, it appeared, regarded that abortive insurrection from the sidelines, and with amusement.) There seemed to be no apparent reason why Noble should have continued insurrection, already proved abortive, to the point of assassination.

  The trouble was, Heimrich thought, and turned in at the Old Stone Inn—the trouble was that there seemed to be nobody with an adequate, or even a moderately persuasive, reason to want Phipps dead. He was not, as Sam Jackson had noted while they watched the fire, universally loved. But not all the unloved die.

  Ten thousand dollars can seem a nice round sum, Heimrich thought, as he got out of the car and walked into the taproom of the inn. With ten thousand dollars, in a lump, a road can be relocated. Spread with care over a period of years, ten thousand dollars will make the bringing up of a small boy—a small, grave boy with widely set gray eyes—appreciably easier.

  Sergeant Forniss was finishing lunch. Heimrich talked while he ate, and Forniss listened, his face expressionless. When Heimrich finished Forniss said that there seemed to be a good many people in it. He was told that there were even more—the Westlakes, Myra Burns, a Miss Shively, who was most easily described as a type—who had seemed, at the meeting, an excitable type; a woman set against evil. “Down on Phipps because the bank has a mortgage on this bar-room,” Heimrich said. “If it has. You might find out, Charlie.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “And?”

  “The boy, when they’ll let you, and Phipps’s house,” Heimrich said. “There might be prints around the safe. And the desk; and on the fire tongs, for that matter.” He looked absently at his left hand, which was a little swollen and a little stiff. “Could have been just a grab while the grabbing looked good.”

  “Doesn’t have to be,” Forniss said, and was agreed with.

  “He could have got from the Phipps house to the garage?” Forniss said. “There was time enough?”

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “I’d think so, Charlie. Rather putting the cart before the horse, I’d think. Only, we don’t know the color of the horse, do we?”

  “We know the color of ten thousand dollars,” Forniss said. “A very pretty color, I’ve always thought. That’s where you’ll be?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It seems the place to start, naturally.” He spoke without enthusiasm. Forniss noted this. Forniss waited. “Oh,” Heimrich said, in answer to a question not phrased, “the old question, Charlie. A matter of character.”

  “You think it doesn’t fit the crime?”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know yet. I’ve barely met the lady.”

  “But you don’t,” Forniss said, and then Heimrich closed his eyes. He did not answer otherwise. “O. K.,” Forniss said, “we’ll do the house first.” He went, leaving Heimrich to regard, with still closed eyes, a glass which no longer contained beer.

  “Well!” a sharp, acrid voice said, putting much into the word. “I might have known!”

  Heimrich opened his eyes and looked toward the sound, which caused him to look toward the door leading from the taproom to the inn’s central hall. A thin, white-faced woman stood there. She was hung in a cotton suit. She wore a felt hat. Her eyes were slightly protuberant and appeared to glitter.

  “Drunken stupor!” the woman said and her thin voice knifed into the room, knifed at Heimrich. “And we have to come to men like you!”

  There was no mistaking the voice, or the style. Once encountered, both were remembered.

  “Now Miss Shively,” Heimrich said, and stood up. “You wanted to see me?”

  “For what good it will do,” Miss Shively said. “Come out of that degrading place. Don’t expect me to come in.”

  Heimrich looked around the pleasant taproom. He looked at the bar at the end, and Harold, behind the bar, grimaced elaborately. Heimrich walked across the place of degradation. “Come to see a public servant,” Miss Shively said. “And find him guzzling alcohol in a bar.”

  Her eyes really did glitter. Heimrich wondered how she managed it. Her thin, inadequate body seemed shaken by the violence it sheathed. She had a long jaw and a thin-lipped, insufficient mouth. But it was sufficient, now, for its purpose.

  “An example to youth,” she said. “You!”

  Since the doors of the inn stood open, as the inn panted for air, it was probable that Miss Shively’s penetrating voice was clear on Van Brunt
’s main street, audible to Myra Burns in the library across it, to Sam Jackson, in his office in the big white house. The assumption would be that a captain of the State Police was drunk to staggering.

  “What is it, Miss Shively?” Heimrich said, and kept his deep voice notably low, as an example. Miss Shively did not follow it.

  “I’m a taxpayer,” she said. “I pay my taxes.” The implication was clear that Heimrich did not. “We have a right to law and order. I intend—”

  “Tell me what you want,” Heimrich said. “There’s no reason to be excited.”

  “No reason!” she said. “You say there’s no reason! With that place corrupting the community? Selling death to children? But there will be retribution.” She paused. She moved closer to Heimrich, looked more intently, and he was impaled on twin swords. “There has been!” she said. “But the end is not yet.”

  “Now—” Heimrich said.

  “I have been to the police,” she said. “To the sheriff. And the district attorney. To the governor! Do you think they would do anything? Don’t you know they are in league with men like that?”

  “Men like what?” Heimrich said. He was patient. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Shively. You have something to tell me about Mr. Phipps?”

  “The evil that men do lives after them,” Miss Shively said, with the triumphant air of those who quote. “He was only a symbol of the corruption. Vengeance was taken.”

  “On Mr. Phipps?” Heimrich said. “By whom?”

  “A servant of righteousness,” Miss Shively said, and kept her voice up. “The jackals remain. Armstrong. And the rest.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “You’re talking about Armstrong’s tavern? The Three Oaks? The place you charge is selling liquor to minors?”

  “To children,” she said. “To boys in their teens. To the girls they drag down with them.”

  “Miss Shively,” Heimrich said, “I’m trying to find out who killed Mr. Phipps. Not whether the rules of the alcoholic beverage commission are observed. If you have evidence—”

  “A hundred times,” she said. “I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve told the police. You’re a police officer.” She shook her head at that. “You!” she said. “A police captain!”

  “Although all unworthy,” Heimrich said. “You are making a formal complaint to me that the law is violated at the Three Oaks?”

  “I shall not stand by silent,” Miss Shively said, in a voice which proved her assertion.

  “I’ll see that your complaint reaches the proper authorities,” Heimrich said.

  She laughed, shrilly, in derision.

  “Oh,” she said. “I know. You stand together. Men like Phipps. His lackeys. Those in whited sepulchers. Come here!”

  She went toward the doors of the inn, which was, Heimrich felt, at least in the right direction. He went after her.

  “There!” she said, and pointed with a long and bony hand at the building of the First National Bank and Trust Company, which was not whited, but of red brick. “The root of all the evil.”

  “The bank?” Heimrich said. “Oh—because it holds a mortgage on this drinking place? Or, you say it does.”

  “More,” she said. “Far more. Don’t you know?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “The Flats,” she said. “Where do you seek sin, captain?”

  The question, he assumed, was rhetorical.

  “A slum in this green and pleasant land,” she said. “A place of hovels, of filth and licentiousness.” She paused. “Phipps owned it,” she said, and her voice was suddenly quite rational. “Every stick and stone and contaminated well. There is profit in squalor, captain. Or didn’t you know? Money in degradation. For men like Orville Phipps.” She paused again. “Vengeance was taken,” she added, and again her voice was shrill. “The torch of righteousness was set alight.”

  That was, Heimrich thought, one way of putting it.

  “You think,” he said, “that this has a bearing on Mr. Phipps’s murder?”

  “Retribution for the ungodly,” Miss Shively said, and then, in her other voice, “Yes. One way or another. What are you going to do about that gin mill?”

  “We’ll look into it,” Heimrich said. “Someone will. Do you have any information about the murder?”

  “Look among those driven to desperation by the unrighteous,” Miss Shively advised. “When you’re sober enough.”

  With that, quite suddenly, she went out of the inn, into the hot sun. She walked with a kind of rigidity, and although there were other people on the sidewalk when she reached it, she seemed to walk among them without awareness.

  “Nuts,” Harold said from behind Heimrich. “We all know her.”

  The word, Heimrich supposed, was as good as any. But whether they all knew her was less certain. Fanaticism is unpredictable. The righteous may indeed light a torch. Or, Heimrich thought, make a burnt offering.

  It was, nevertheless, interesting to discover that Phipps had owned that area—apparently a slum area—known as The Flats. It might, Heimrich thought, be worth the time to drive through it on his way to see Mrs. Susan Faye.

  VII

  To reach the community called The Flats, if you seek it from Van Brunt Center, you drive south along New York 11-F. A mile or so from the First National Bank and Trust Company, which may be considered the center of the Center, you pass an intersection, and there you see the last of those neat signs which the Town of Van Brunt has pridefully set up. One arm of the sign identifies your road as “Van Brunt Avenue”; the other assures you that you are passing “Thorn Briar Lane.” You continue thereafter for a mile or more, remaining in the Town of Van Brunt, but with no sign to tell you so. It is as if the town had turned away its face. Just before you enter The Flats, you come upon a sign which reads, “Populated Area.”

  The Flats puts its worst foot forward, and trips the attention. The first house is on the left as you drive south; it is one story, unpainted; from its unrailed porch two-by-fours rise, dubiously supporting a sagging roof. When Heimrich drove by slowly, an automobile occupied the grassless front yard of the house, and was (he thought) quietly disintegrating there. At least, it had lost its front wheels and, apparently, its motor. A very fat man sat on the porch, in a rocking chair. He wore a pair of blue trousers and an undershirt and what appeared to be a yachting cap. A small and dirty child of indeterminate sex sat on the porch floor, legs dangling. A chained dog glared at Heimrich’s car, and snarled. The man’s hands were clasped across his pendulous belly.

  The next house was generally similar, except that it had—or had had—a corrugated iron roof. It had no porch; wooden steps ran up to the door, which was open, and unscreened. In the front yard of the second house there was a bathtub and, near it, part of what had once been a wood-burning range. A cat, with all ribs evident even from the distance of the road, sat on the second step leading to the door, and scratched behind an ear. This second house, however, had a television aerial emerging from its roof.

  In front of the third house in this first sequence a complete, and not particularly old, car was parked on hard-beaten earth. The right front fender of the car dangled and the right front window was broken. Here two children, looking much of an age, which Heimrich guessed at three or four, sat in the dust and stared at him. A young woman, nursing a baby, sat on the front porch, and stared at nothing. She waved a hand in front of her face, tiredly shooing flies.

  The area remained “populated” for about a mile along the straight, unshaded road. There were perhaps forty houses in all, close to the road on either side. They varied only slightly in design but, as Heimrich drove on slowly, he found they varied more in the state of their repair. Toward the southern end of the area, several of the houses had recently been painted. One had awnings. In front of a few, grass—and even bushes—struggled in the heat, and in two instances with moderate success. Not all the occupants had given up so wearily as those who lived unabashedly in squalor at the northern
end.

  But none of it was good. It was a country slum. You could call it “tobacco road”—and no doubt many did. You could call it “the flats.” It was poverty, or near poverty, packed too close, rubbing frayed elbows, where the whole reach of fields and sky seemed to invite the spreading out of arms. (But land costs money.) It was a stretch along which one would have chosen to drive at speed, but could not, because there were many children. (In slums there are always many children.) It had been there, Heimrich thought, a good many years, deteriorating slowly as paint peeled and nails rusted. (Paint costs money, too.)

  At a guess, the houses of The Flats had been standing before 1932, when Orville Phipps had come to the Town of Van Brunt from the City of New York. Hence, if he had died owning them—as Miss Shively so bitterly asserted—it was by acquisition, not establishment, of a tottering concern. The houses did appear to have been built about the same time, and to the same pattern—Heimrich would have guessed the time to be fifty years ago, but that was only guessing. If they were owned by one man, or had been, and rented, then the tenants were left to provide upkeep, or what passed for it.

  A store stood behind a gas pump at the end of the mile. It was a neat store. Beyond it, the road ran again between fields for a distance and then, on the right, there was a long, low building, painted brown, which was the Three Oaks Tavern. There was a neon beer sign bright in one window; there were several cars parked so that they seemed to nuzzle the building. It looked, Heimrich thought, like any country tavern dedicated rather to drink than to food, although by law required to provide both. Heimrich circled the car in front of the tavern and drove back. He still drove slowly.

  There were mailboxes in front of the houses. The names on them were, for the most part, the English and Scottish names most familiar in the Hudson Valley. There was a Jones, of course. There was an Adams, and a Nelson, and the Parsons lived in one of the houses recently painted. The Osbornes had a television set; the Van Werts did not. The Richardsons had two Plymouth Rock hens in their front yard; the Fitzgeralds had grass, dried by the summer’s long drought. The Sullivans had a hedge, neatly trimmed, surrounding their yard; the Fayes had washing on a line; the Snoddy mailbox was—