A Client Is Canceled Read online

  I didn’t want to move, but I did enough to get ahead of the Pooh—and into a small but vigorous clump of poison ivy. I lifted my head enough so that I could look up along the wall to the point at which the marksman who was using us as targets would appear when he discovered he couldn’t shoot through a stone wall. I twisted around and looked at the cow, which was lying still. The other cows had gone back to grazing, evidently having decided it was none of their business.

  I wished I had a hat so that I could raise it on a stick over the wall to see if it excited our marksman. But I didn’t have a hat, or any substitute. I just lay there, waiting for something more to happen, and nothing did, except that the Pooh said she thought what she was lying in was poison ivy. I told her it probably was, and that I had some of my own.

  “Your legs are in mine,” the Pooh said. “But that’s all right.”

  It was generous of her. I told her so. I said I hoped we both lived to have ivy poisoning.

  “He must be a very bad shot,” the Pooh said. “Even worse than you say most people are with pistols.”

  I thought about that for a moment, and realized she was right. He had been shooting downhill and had shot high enough over us to hit a cow out in the middle of the field beyond. The bullets must, I realized, have been fifteen feet over our heads. It did seem uncommonly bad shooting.

  “But Mr. Eldredge wouldn’t have any reason for shooting his own cows, would he?” the Pooh said. “Nobody would have any reason for shooting cows. Do you suppose somebody was merely trying to scare us?”

  If that had been the idea, I pointed out, it had certainly worked. It had got both of us lying behind a stone wall, in poison ivy, out of sight of the house and— It made me mad.

  “Damn!” I said. “Stay there, Pooh.” I got on my hands and knees and began to go on along the wall. I heard sounds behind me, and realized the Pooh wasn’t staying there. Then I took a chance and stood up. Nothing happened. There was the house, blank in the sun, and the terrace, half in the sun and half in shade, and deserted. Everything was perfectly sylvan again, and smelled of the country—not of the battlefield—and it would have been easy to think that we had imagined the whole thing, except that one of the cows was still lying down. The other cows had meandered away and left it. It looked to me like a dead cow.

  The Pooh stood up, too, and I managed to get between her and the house, but I didn’t try to push her down behind the wall. I yelled at the house. “Hey! Eldredge?” Nobody answered. “You there, Eldredge?” I yelled again, and the cows turned and looked at me, but nothing else happened.

  “It looks strange,” the Pooh said. “False. As if it were painted on something. It isn’t really a house.”

  It was a house, all right. But it didn’t look real.

  I said “Wait here” to the Pooh and began to walk toward the house. She didn’t wait, of course. I felt foolish and exposed walking up toward the make-believe house, but I didn’t know what else to do. We couldn’t wait forever behind the stone wall; I suppose we could have waited until dark, but it would have been a—well, I guess, an undignified thing to do. I couldn’t see the Pooh accepting it or, for that matter, accepting going back home without finding out who had been shooting at us. So we went on.

  And nothing continued to happen. I realized I was walking very tightly, as if to make myself smaller, and that now we were crossing the lawn of a white country house, a few miles from Mount Kisco—in suburbia, actually—on a hot Sunday afternoon, and the whole thing became intolerably silly. Almost without knowing it, I began to swear and the Pooh said, “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

  We walked on up to the terrace. By then the house was just a house; the sun wasn’t playing the strange trick of light any longer. It was just a house, with french doors opening on a flagged terrace. And nobody in sight. The french doors were open and one of the inside screens was standing a little ajar. I called Eldredge again, at the doors, and then something did happen. There was a sound from inside—a dreadful sound, low and throaty and choked. I’d heard sounds like that before. I pushed Pooh back and went in.

  Eldredge was on the floor inside the door and he’d tried to answer me. That was the sound—Eldredge trying to answer through blood in his throat, with blood coming out of him, bubbling out of his mouth. His eyes were open and he was looking at me and trying to say something. He’d been shot through the chest and the bullet must just have missed his heart. It hadn’t missed it far enough, and he was dying, and knew he was dying.

  I knelt down on the floor beside him and could feel the wetness of blood on my knees and said something. I don’t remember what I said; maybe I just kept on swearing.

  He tried to talk again, in that horrible, bubbling way which was the only way he had left. He tried very hard.

  He said something I thought was meant to be “light” or perhaps “bright” and looked at me to see if I understood and saw I didn’t, and tried again.

  “Light,” he said. I was pretty sure of it this time and repeated the word, and he tried to move his head and couldn’t. Then he tried again. This time what he said might have been “back.” I couldn’t tell, and he could see I couldn’t tell. He tried again, and it still sounded like “back.” Then he made a sound which perhaps should have been another word. It sounded a little like “three”—but not very much. It didn’t make any sense. He could tell it didn’t. Then he died.

  I stayed kneeling there for a moment looking at Eldredge and then I stood up and turned around. The Pooh hadn’t waited outside. She was standing there, very white and with her face drawn, looking down at us. She made a little motion as if to push it all away and I got to her and took her out to the terrace. I closed the screen door behind me, because flies were getting in—big, ugly flies. I took the Pooh to the edge of the terrace and she sat down on it and put her hands over her face. She was shaking again, but she didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything much to say.

  Francis Eldredge had the same sort of wound the Pooh’s uncle had had, although this time the shot had been fired by somebody standing in front of the target—very close in front of him. It was the forty-five automatic again, at a guess. I looked at my watch and it was seven thirty-five and Eldredge had been dead a couple of minutes. He could, I thought, have been shot five minutes before we got there, or as much as half an hour before. It would take a doctor to tell how long a man could live with that kind of hole through his chest, and even a doctor, I imagined, would have to guess. It would depend on how tough the man had been.

  I knew, sitting there holding the Pooh against me, wishing she would stop trembling, that there had been more than five minutes between the time Eldredge was shot and the time he died. We had been behind the wall for five minutes, anyway, and before that for at least another five, while we were walking along the path—and the Pooh was pricking her finger on a rose thorn—during which we would have heard a shot. I might have imagined hearing the bullet that went over us the first time we were shot at, in which case that bullet might have been the one that got Eldredge and nobody had been shooting at us at all. I didn’t think I was mistaken, but a man can hear funny things when he thinks he’s being shot at. There wasn’t any doubt about the second bullet; it hadn’t killed Eldredge; it had knocked off a cow.

  The Pooh was still shaking, and there wasn’t anything to do but to hold on to her and try to work it out. It worked out that, almost but not quite certainly, Eldredge hadn’t fired at us. He-might, conceivably, have shot himself first and then—still holding onto the gun—have fired again for some reason, either intentionally or accidentally in our direction. He would have had to be on the terrace to do that, or just inside the living room, firing through the open door. He could, I thought, have seen us from there. After that, he might have fallen down to die. But I didn’t believe any of this, partly because I was still pretty sure about the whine of the first bullet but chiefly because I couldn’t see anybody doing much shooting with that kind of a hole in him. />
  The Pooh moved a little and took her hands away from her face. She was still white and her lips, very pale under not much lipstick, were trembling. She said, “I’m all right now, Oh-Oh” and tried to make up a smile to go with the words. She didn’t have much luck. She tried to speak again, and at first had trouble making words come. Then she said, “Is it over? Did he kill himself?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “He didn’t, you mean,” the Pooh said. She didn’t really ask me a question. She just accepted the fact it wasn’t over yet.

  “I’m afraid not, Pooh,” I said.

  There was one way to make pretty sure. I took my arm from around the Pooh and stood up. I didn’t want to go back into the house, but I’d have to, anyway, to telephone.

  I told the Pooh I’d have to get somebody and went over to the doors. She didn’t move, but she nodded her head. I went back into the living room and saw I hadn’t been quick enough in closing the screen. This didn’t make things any different, really, but it didn’t make them any better. It would, I thought, be a hell of a note if I got as sick as I felt like getting. I looked around fast, first near what was on the floor, and then around the rest of the room. I didn’t see any gun, and I thought that if Eldredge had shot himself he would have dropped the gun pretty quickly, so that now it would be near where he lay. I thought less than ever that he had shot himself.

  I found the telephone after a minute or two. It was on a table by a staircase leading up from the living room, near the front door. Anyway, I supposed it was the front door; it opened on the same side of the house as the terrace—actually on the terrace, at the far end. Eldredge had left his cigarette holder on the table—empty, propped on an ash tray. There was a cigarette end in the tray. I started to pick the telephone up and then thought I’d better not touch it bare-handed, and reached for a handkerchief. Then I noticed that the handset was not quite true in its cradle. It was lying a little diagonally, and so that it didn’t press down the two buttons far enough to disconnect. The telephone itself was making faint, squawking sounds, which meant that somebody was trying to attract attention and get the telephone put straight, so that somebody else could use the line. And then the telephone rang. The only person who can make a telephone ring when it is off the hook is somebody at the central office, and perhaps it’s only possible on a party line; perhaps it’s difficult, because they usually arrange to have the thing make squawking sounds to attract attention before they ring the bell.

  Anyway, it began to ring then and I jumped. Then I started to reach for the instrument, with a handkerchief around my hand, and a voice on the terrace said, “What are you doing here, Mrs. Otis?” I put the handkerchief back in my pocket and didn’t touch the telephone, which rang again. There was no need to telephone for anybody. The cavalry had arrived. I went around Eldredge’s body and through the french doors, closing the screen very carefully and very quickly this time, and said, “Well, you got here, Captain.” It was a fairly silly thing to say, but I couldn’t think of any sensible thing.

  Heimrich was standing on the grass, looking down at the Pooh, still sitting on the edge of the terrace. Sergeant Forniss was behind Heimrich. I thought they looked rather like a couple of wooden Indians, without feathers or war paint, and in civilian clothes—tweeds, so far as Heimrich went; Forniss was wearing a dark summer suit, which wasn’t quite wide enough across the shoulders. It’s been some time now since that moment of a late, hot Sunday afternoon, but I can still see them standing there, looking down at the Pooh, and see her head tilted back as she looked up at them. I can even see the lovely line of her chin and throat. I can see the tightness of Sergeant Forniss’ jacket across his shoulders.

  Heimrich and Forniss looked at me as I came out and the Pooh turned her head and then got up.

  “Eldredge is dead,” I said. “He got shot too.” I motioned back toward the living room. The telephone rang again. “It’s the operator,” I said. “It’s not straight on the base.” I thought I wasn’t managing to say anything with the right words, which is a hell of a plight for a professional writer to be in. “The cradle,” I said.

  Heimrich’s face didn’t change perceptibly. He motioned with his head and Forniss went into, the living room; I wanted to tell him to be careful about the screen door, but I didn’t. He was careful anyway. He was gone for a couple of minutes, which Heimrich spent looking at us. His eyes were wide enough open then, and bright blue enough. Then Forniss said, “All right,” presumably to the telephone operator, and after a moment he came out again. He nodded to Heimrich.

  “You’ll stay here, naturally,” Heimrich said to us, and went in to join Forniss. There was no particular expression in his voice. The Pooh and I sat down on the edge of the terrace, side by side. I told her there wasn’t any gun, so far as I could see. She said, no, she’d thought there wouldn’t be. I held both her hands in mine, trying to stop her shaking—and maybe to stop my own, too—and we just waited. After about five minutes Heimrich came out and then we could hear Forniss on the telephone. He was giving instructions to somebody. “Just above the Otis place,” he said. “Next drive. It’s a white house.”

  We both stood up when Heimrich came out and he told us to sit down, if we didn’t mind. There were terrace chairs and we sat in a couple of them, and, after standing and looking at us for a moment, Heimrich pulled another chair around so that he could sit facing us, and did.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” he said, “suppose you tell me about it.”

  I told him. I told him pretty much all of it—about deciding to ask Eldredge whether he’d seen anybody prowling around Mean Abode; about trying to get him on the telephone; about walking up the path.

  When I told him about the second shot and the cow he stood up and looked down toward the meadow. I went over and stood beside him and pointed. The cow was still there. Then we went back and sat down again and Heimrich said, “I see, Mr. Otis. Will you go on, please?”

  I told him the rest of it.

  “After you’d been shot at twice, you walked on up to the house anyway?” he said. “In the open?”

  We had. I tried to explain why, and discovered that the explanation didn’t make a great deal of sense. I could hear it not making much sense.

  “We decided somebody was trying to scare us, Captain,” the Pooh said. “That whoever it was had gone.”

  Heimrich looked at me.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I tried to get the—my wife to stay back. She wouldn’t.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t have expected her to. Go on, please.”

  I told him about the open french doors, and the screen door’s being ajar, and the final answer Eldredge made when I called his name; I told him about kneeling down by him and then looked down at the knees of my slacks. I hadn’t been wrong about what I had knelt in. Heimrich looked too, and didn’t say anything. I told him about Eldredge’s effort to tell me something and what I had made of it. “Light,” probably—almost certainly. “Back”—I didn’t know. I said I thought that Francis Eldredge had not said what he wanted to say—not got it across—and had died knowing that.

  “It was hard for him to speak at all,” I said.

  Heimrich nodded. He’d seen Eldredge.

  Eldredge had died about seven-thirty—perhaps seven thirty-two or thirty-three. I said I had brought my wife out to the terrace, because she’d seen enough of it, and then had gone back in. I didn’t tell him about the flies. I said I hadn’t been able to find the gun and then had gone to the telephone, planning to call for help.

  “Then you got here,” I said. I left it obvious that I wondered what had brought him.

  “Somebody heard a sound,” Heimrich said. “A Mrs. Jackson. She thought it was a shot. She went to a neighbor’s house and telephoned us.”

  I waited.

  “On the telephone,” Heimrich said. “One of the children had left the receiver off. For some reason, this one was off too.” He indicated the living room with a mo
tion of his head. “She was going over to put it on again and heard this—sound. She couldn’t use her own telephone, so she went to a neighbor’s and used theirs. So we came.” He paused and closed his eyes. “She thinks it was about ten minutes after seven,” he said. He opened his eyes. “It’s strange you didn’t hear it, don’t you think, Mr. Otis?”

  I tried to work it out. Ten after seven was, at a guess, about the time we’d left Mean Abode. If we were still in the house, or on the terrace beyond it, we might not have heard the shot. If we were on the path, I thought we would have heard it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If we were inside, we might not have heard anything. We didn’t hear anything.”

  “I should have thought you would,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. Sergeant?”

  Forniss came to the door.

  “There’s a dead cow down there in the field,” Heimrich said. “Anyway, a cow that’s lying down. Will you have a look at it?”

  Forniss didn’t seem surprised. He said “Yep,” and went off toward the field. We sat and watched him. The other cows turned and watched him and the cow on the ground didn’t do anything. Forniss walked up to it, and looked down at it, and then squatted down and looked at it. Then he got up and started to walk back. Heimrich had closed his eyes and he didn’t say anything while Forniss was gone. When Forniss got back, he opened his eyes.

  “Shot,” Forniss said. “Slug’s still in it, apparently.” Heimrich waited. “From quite a ways off, probably,” Forniss said. “A forty-five, probably.” Then he waited. Heimrich nodded after a moment, and Forniss went back inside. Heimrich closed his eyes again. After a few moments, I said, “You didn’t expect this, Captain?”

  He opened his eyes.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” he said. “Why do you ask that? Naturally I didn’t expect this.”