Show Red for Danger Page 10

  “Various things, I gather,” Heimrich said.

  “As to the time—I don’t remember exactly. Ask Louella. Or, I suppose it was in the papers. Gertrude’s overdose sure as hell was.” He shook his head. “The damnedest thing,” he said. “Why the hell did she?”

  Heimrich made no suggestions, assuming none to have been requested.

  Zersk sat down again. He sat down with as much vigor as most men jump.

  “From what I hear,” Zersk said. “From what she said, as a matter of fact, Belford was getting very nice alimony from this—” Apparently he had difficulty remembering the name of this outsider. He snapped his fingers. “Fielding. Mostly, alimony stops when a woman gets married again.” He looked at Heimrich.

  “Apparently,” Heimrich said, “it would have this time.”

  “Of course,” Zersk said, “it also stops when the woman dies.”

  “Now Mr. Zersk,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. I take it that Mr. Marley hasn’t a great deal of money?”

  “He makes plenty,” Zersk said. “Of course it’s damn hard to hold on to—” And stopped. And looked at Heimrich with dark intensity. He said, “Why?” explosively.

  All he meant, Heimrich said, was that Marley had not had enough money to tempt Peggy Belford to sacrifice the very nice alimony she was getting from Fielding. He assumed that that had been in Mr. Zersk’s mind. Granting his estimate of Peggy Belford, of what Peggy Belford had been after.

  Zersk said, “Oh.” Then he said, “The kid got it,” and seemed to think he had explained things. Heimrich shook his head.

  “Gertrude had a lot,” Zersk said. “Had saved plenty—you could put it away when she was making it, and she did. And old Waggoner left her plenty more. But it all went to the kid.” He paused; made the explanation complete. “Chris,” he said. “Her daughter.”

  “Nothing to Marley?”

  That was what Zersk heard. Heimrich could always ask Marley himself. It didn’t seem to Zersk that that was so surprising; Marley was making plenty. Didn’t need more. The girl—well, it was natural for a mother to want her daughter to have everything she needed, if it ran to that.

  “She’s underage, isn’t she?” Heimrich said. “Probably has a guardian. Marley?”

  Anton Zersk said that Chris was a baby and considered, and said he thought just over seventeen. He didn’t know anything about a guardian. When he spoke of Chris Waggoner, Zersk’s barbed voice was less barbed. He even smiled faintly; Heimrich though unconsciously.

  “She seems a nice child,” Heimrich said, testing.

  “Very,” Zersk said. “All full of nonsense, like a lot of nice kids are. You should see her do her queen of tragedy bit.”

  “I did,” Heimrich said. “Guess I did. She wants to be an actress?”

  Zersk said, “Why sure,” as if the question were absurd. “Will be, too, if she gets the breaks. She’s another live one—going to be, anyhow. Already been badgering Marley to give her bits. Only, of course, she doesn’t think about bits. Leads. For example, she thought she would be a lot better than Peggy in this opus.”

  “Would she have?”

  “Well,” Zersk said. “You mean in the box office? No. Not yet. You mean doing the part? Who wouldn’t?”

  “Actually? Or just because—”

  “Peggy got in my hair? So I’m not objective? You’ve got something there, of course. All the same—yes, with no training—she’s had a few months at an acting school and we’ll have to knock that out of her—still, she’d have been better. With a choke collar and me at the other end of the lead.”

  “She was jealous of Miss Belford?”

  Zersk was up and walking. He walked over to Heimrich and glared at him. He said, “Why?” and made it an expletive. Heimrich closed his eyes; after a second or two opened them and said, “Now Mr. Zersk. Because Miss Belford had a part she wanted. Wasn’t that what we were talking about?”

  Zersk continued to glare at him.

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “because the girl had a crush on Mr. Dale and Mr. Dale was paying attention to Miss Belford to discourage Miss Waggoner?”

  “Who says that?” Zersk demanded.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “Mr. Dale.”

  He stood up then and thanked Anton Zersk and said Mr. Zersk had been helpful and that he appreciated it. And left, and could feel Zersk glaring at him as he walked to his car. A very intense man, Mr. Zersk, and one who had given him several things to think about.

  He thought about them driving back to the Old Stone Inn, where Forniss awaited him, with one or two more things for them to think about. Item: Roland Fielding had driven up to Cold Harbor the afternoon before and had talked to one Jacob Goodman about a deal. And that had been at around two o’clock and the conference had taken about half an hour. And it is a twenty-minute drive from Cold Harbor to the Van Brunt area. Item: It was difficult to get much on Sunday, but Forniss had remembered a man he knew in New York. (Heimrich is always a little surprised at the variety of men Forniss knows, and the variety of places he knows them in.) This man said that Roland Fielding did, indeed, have a number of irons in a number of fires—the export of new and used cars, primarily to South America, was one of the irons—and that there were rumors around that some of the fires had cooled off in the last year or so. Nothing too definite; something to think about.

  “Twenty-four grand is twenty-four grand,” Forniss said. “He could have got to the Collins place in plenty of time.”

  “Expecting to find Miss Belford there? Alone? Knowing that Collins was going to come into town for his pictures?”

  “She could have told him,” Forniss said. “Or somebody else could. He could have seen Collins here. Or somebody could have told him Collins was here. Or—I can think of half a dozen more. He could have asked here at the Inn and somebody—”

  “I know,” Heimrich said. “Anything else?”

  George Latham, the juvenile lead, wasn’t around, and nobody seemed to know where he was. “Could be,” Forniss said, “he’s gone to church. Ought to be back pretty soon if he has.” It was then a little after noon. “And,” Forniss said, “Mrs. Faye called. Wonders if you can call back or stop by.”

  Heimrich looked pleased, and was not conscious of it. Sergeant Forniss did not mention this, by word or expression. Heimrich said, very casually, “All right, Charlie” and then, “Who do you know in L.A., Charlie? Hollywood?”

  “Well,” Forniss said, “there’s Ben Cohen. On one of the papers. Nice guy. Saved my life once on one of those damn beaches. Makes him feel obligated. And a guy named Cooke, who’s on the cops in L.A. And a second cousin of mine who’s a cameraman at—”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “Call the gossipiest, Charlie. And the one who might know the most. Pick up what you can. About all of them. And about Mrs. Waggoner, who died about a year ago and seems to have left her money, and she seems to have had money, to her daughter. Wheat and chaff, Charlie.”

  “Yep,” Charles Forniss said.

  “And, of course, whether Dale appeared to be as—call it casual—about Miss Belford as he indicates. And whether Anton Zersk is as happily married as—” He stopped. He said, “Sorry, Charlie.”

  “O.K.,” Forniss said. “I’ll call Ben. From the barracks.”

  “Naturally, Charlie,” Captain Heimrich said.

  VIII

  There is no use using a telephone when, with ten minutes of driving, one can talk face to face. Heimrich told himself that, driving up Van Brunt Avenue, turning left, and toward the Hudson, on High Road. He found it entirely convincing. Turning into the driveway between the boulders, he found he had overestimated the time needed. Eight minutes.

  Susan wore a sleeveless white tennis dress; its pleated skirt swirled around brown legs as she walked toward him across the terrace. How, Heimrich thought, could he ever have thought she wasn’t pretty, but only fun to look at? Pretty? Make it beautiful.

  “If you haven’t eaten,” Susan Faye said, “it gives sand
wiches, Merton.”

  It was, she thought, as good a time as any other to get that established.

  Heimrich was somewhat relieved, but at the same time—ridiculously—disappointed. He wasn’t the Ricky type. That went without saying. He was the Merton type. Which probably, also, went without saying. “I could use a sandwich,” Heimrich said, and let himself touch the nearest of the slender brown arms as they crossed the terrace to a table, to chairs at it, to a place with a napkin over it. It was surprising how cool the brown arm was under his fingers, considering how hot the day was, how muggy.

  “Fill the glasses,” she told him. “I’ll get the coffee.”

  He filled tall glasses with as much ice from the bucket as they would hold. She came back—how could she look so fresh on such a drippy day?—with a glass coffee maker shaped like an hourglass and poured steaming coffee on ice.

  “Now,” Susan Faye said, “I remembered something, half remembered something. I couldn’t get in touch with you so I went up to the house to see.”

  “Susan,” Heimrich said, “I don’t want you taking—”

  “Sh-h-h,” Susan said. “Listen. Anyway, Ray Crowley was there. And, before I left, the house bulged with reporters. Now, listen.”

  He listened. He did not ask whether she was sure the color was “wrong.” He would as soon have asked an expert from the Fingerprint Bureau if he was sure this print matched that print. She finished and waited, eating a sandwich, sipping iced coffee.

  “You think,” Heimrich said, “that somebody put ihis glaring red on over the original color? As a message?” She nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment “I’d think,” he said, “that the original color would show through. I mean—influence the color added. Bleed through it.”

  “No,” she said. “We use gouache for this sort of thing. That or show card colors. But this was gouache. It comes in tubes and—” She paused. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s opaque. That’s the point Water colors run. Gouache covers completely. Nothing shows through it.”

  Heimrich nodded. It was, he said, a somewhat obscure message. Of course, Collins had known that Susan was coming. Been confident she would notice.

  She supposed so.

  “But,” she said, “then put it against the wall? Where I wouldn’t see it unless I looked? He probably worked on it on the easel. Why not leave it there? Instead of putting this nude of the girl there.” She stopped. “You see what it comes to?” she said.

  “Now Susan,” Heimrich began, and smiled suddenly. “Yes, Susan,” he said. “I see what it comes to. There was somebody else there. Somebody Collins had reason to fear. Probably, somebody who was holding a gun on him.”

  “And set the stage,” she said. “Rather—stagily. Why?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “There was a time lag to be accounted for. At least, that seems most likely. Collins died some time after the girl. A good many people think a doctor can look at a body and say, ‘Died two hours and fifteen minutes ago.’ Which a doctor can’t. But, the time difference was there and our somebody wanted to account for it, figuring nobody would believe a man would merely sit for a couple of hours and look at a woman he’d killed.”

  “That,” Susan said, “is about as easy for me to believe as—as this other. His getting out the picture and arranging her body and all the rest of it.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “For you. For me. But in plays, movies, people don’t merely sit and—brood. They do things, or say things. To be or not to be.’ I suspect that people in the profession get to—well, supposing that all things move at that tempo.”

  What he was saying, Susan told him, was that one of the people in the movie company had been the somebody. Of course, that was something which leaped to the mind. She paused. “Too quickly?” she said and Heimrich nodded his head, pleased with her, and said, “Perhaps.” One learned to be suspicious of ideas that jumped into the mind, suspecting they had been nudged to jump. He told her briefly of Marley and of Zersk, of the pretty histrionic Chris; he told her about the loose man named Roland Fielding.

  “Somehow,” Susan said, “he doesn’t sound that bright. I mean if this was staged so that, first, it would look like Brian and then, if that fell through, like someone who thinks in theatrical terms—” There was doubt in her voice.

  “He plays chess,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know how well, of course. At least, there was a chessboard, set up, in his living room. In chess, one thinks some moves ahead.”

  “I,” Susan said, “was never any good even at checkers. Look, darling—”

  He did look. There was that to be said. And then, apparently, he decided merely that her tongue had slipped, or that, talking of people of the theater, she had fallen momentarily into the phraseology of the theater. There was that to be observed.

  “Merton,” she said. “Does this really prove anything? Or, is there some other explanation? That Brian was only trying something that didn’t come off?”

  She was asked if she thought that. She shook her head.

  She had had it in her mind longer than he had. Had she another explanation? Sudden color-blindness she rejected. Then?

  “Somebody else might have done it,” she said, with doubt. “Any of those who had been there. Any time yesterday.”

  “My dear,” Heimrich said, “if we’re going to include somebody else— Peggy herself. Why? Malicious mischief, like drawing of mustaches on girls on posters?”

  It was possible, Susan pointed out, and was told that, always, there were a great many possibilities; that, always, almost anything was possible. And that Peggy Belford did not seem to have been a young woman to indulge in pranks which got her nowhere. She was a young woman who kept carbon copies of her letters; who added with precision and subtracted with reluctance. Or, seemed to have been. Of course, it was possible that, stepping out of character, she had daubed at Collins’s design and, being caught at it, had been killed for her desecration.

  “Merton!” Susan said.

  He pointed out that, as she had suggested, anything is possible. One chooses among possibilities.

  “You said, ‘Prove anything,’ ” Heimrich said. “Against the obvious physical evidence, in court, no, probably not. But—it’s something that would have to be explained away. By a defense attorney, if we turn up somebody who needs defending. Up till now there hasn’t been. So— State’s Exhibit A, if it ever comes to that.”

  “Will it?”

  “My dear,” Heimrich said, “I begin to think it may.” He finished the last of his coffee. “You’d better come along,” he said. “Pick up the exhibit.”

  She started to say something; started to say, “To help you carry it?” and caught herself. Because there was no reason to disturb a pleasant balance, when he was so difficult a man to bring into balance.

  “To help me carry it,” Merton Heimrich said gravely, to the astonishment of Susan Faye.

  They were on Sugar Creek Lane, almost at the turnoff to the Collins house, when Susan said there was one thing she had forgotten to tell him, and told him about the station wagon which had come down as she was going up.

  “One of them picking up the car,” Heimrich said. “The one Miss Belford drove up in. I told Marley it would be all right and passed the word along to Crowley. I suppose it was Marley himself?”

  She didn’t know. A man, half hidden seen behind a glary windshield. And she had had enough to look at, in the mirror, then craned out the window, as she backed down.

  They went, cautiously, up the narrow, curving driveway. There was no police car in the turnaround. “Told him to lock up after the press finished,” Heimrich said, swinging the car around to face again toward the driveway. “Other things for him to do, once he’d seen the reporters didn’t carry away souvenirs and—” He stopped. He was looking at the open garage. There were again two cars in it—the jeep and, this time, an open Chevrolet. With a rental company’s plate above its license plate. Which was—

  They walked quickly across the
terrace to the glass wall, the glass door. And stopped, and Susan drew her breath in quickly and, as quickly, Heimrich put steadying fingers on a brown arm.

  Inside the room, in a chair near the fireplace, a man sat slumped. Nearer the fireplace, a girl lay on her back, on the floor, one knee drawn up so that the pose was one of grace. The girl wore a white bathing suit which molded her slender body. Dark hair swirled about her head. Neither man nor girl moved. Horribly, the man seemed lifeless in the chair.

  And Susan, trembling a little, said, “No!” the word only a breath.

  For a moment they stood, side by side, frozen. Then Heimrich moved quickly—moved two steps quickly toward the glass door. And the girl on the floor turned her head to look at him, and the man in the chair turned too. They watched for a moment as Heimrich opened the unlocked door and then Chris Waggoner got up off the floor, seemed to flow up off the floor. When Susan and Heimrich stood inside the house and looked at the two, Chris said, “Oh!” in a surprised, uneasy voice. And the man got up and faced them, and he smiled a little.

  He was a tall young man in polo shirt and walking shorts; an uncommonly handsome young man, with thick, rather long, blond hair. His body tapered from broad shoulders to narrow hips. He was, at a guess, in his early twenties.

  “Well?” Heimrich said, and then, “You were in the wrong place, Miss Waggoner. Miss Belford’s body couldn’t be seen from outside.”

  “I—I know,” the girl said, in a girl’s voice. “I just couldn’t— couldn’t bring myself to—” She stopped. When she resumed it was in the low voice, the voice with a throb in it. “We were re-enacting,” she throbbed. “Seeking the—” She paused. “The inwardness,” she said.

  “I see,” Merton Heimrich said. “Did you find it, Miss Waggoner?”

  His voice was very grave.

  She looked at him, now with suspicion. There was nothing in his expression to confirm suspicion, or to allay it.

  “One must live the part,” she said, and still throbbed, but with, Heimrich thought, lessened confidence. “Re-creating the physical circumstances—” She stopped, confidence quite gone. “All right,” Chris said. “No. This is Georgie-Por—this is George Latham, Captain Heimrich.”