Foggy, Foggy Death Read online

  “Scott!” Karen said. “The whole thing’s—preposterous! Can’t he see that?”

  Scott had been walking back and forth as he talked. Now he stopped in front of her and looked down at her.

  “Preposterous?” he repeated. Slowly he shook his head. “Why no, Karen,” he said. “It isn’t, I’m afraid. Because—part of it I did plan. Just that way, Karen.” His face was very strange. “Maybe,” he said, “I planned all of it. Maybe I—”

  “No!” Karen said.

  Scott turned away. He crossed the room and sat down on a chair, with his left elbow on the back of the chair and the fingers of his left hand pressing against his forehead. He seemed to try to stop the flickering movement in his left eyelid.

  “You see,” he said, “I’ve been damned near crazy the last few months. Did you know that? I was going to try to—well, I guess, to bribe her to leave. With Haas. With anybody—so she went. So long as she left Lorry and Pethy here. I was going to offer her the jewelry, the car—money too. The jewelry wasn’t all hers, you see. Only part of it. Most of it was mother’s, but—that would have been all right with mother. Only—I wasn’t going to hurt Marta. You believe that, Karen?”

  He waited a moment.

  “Can you believe that?” he repeated.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Heimrich wouldn’t,” he said. “Not that I tried it on him. I said what you did—preposterous. He said, ‘Now, Mr. Bromwell.’ If I’d told him, he would want to know why I made all these complicated arrangements just to offer Marta a bribe to leave. When—when I could see her any time, here at the house. He’d want to know—”

  He broke off. He stood up suddenly and walked back to Karen.

  “Karen,” he said, “I want to know myself! I kept telling myself I was just going to offer her money to go away—and all the time I was going on with it and thinking, ‘If she won’t do it, I’ll do something to make her, I’ll—’ Never finishing it, but knowing what the circumstances would be, how easy it would be. You can’t understand that, can you? I can’t myself.”

  He walked back to the chair. But now he continued to look at her, searching her face as he spoke.

  “You see,” he said, “it comes down to this—I don’t know whether I planned to kill Marta or not. I don’t know, Karen.” There was anguish, almost terror, in his voice.

  I should be shocked, Karen thought. I might even be—frightened. But she wanted to put both hands on his head and hold it tight.

  “It didn’t happen, Scott,” she said. “That’s what matters.”

  He shook his head.

  “I might have killed her,” he said. “Perhaps I—perhaps I planned to kill her. That’s what matters. And—she’s dead. Perhaps in a sense I—”

  “Stop it,” Karen said. “When it came to it, if it had come to it, you wouldn’t have hurt her. You know that.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. How can I?”

  “I know it,” she said.

  He said she couldn’t, that nobody ever could. If Lorry hadn’t wandered away, so that the whole pattern was changed, nobody would ever know what would have happened. Karen shook her head at that; she pointed out that, even without Lorry, the plan would have fallen down. Because Higgins had taken the car.

  “And,” Scott said, “Higgins is dead. Why? Heimrich thinks he saw me leave the car, and maybe he did. Heimrich thinks the little man tried to blackmail me, and I killed him. But—I didn’t even see him. It all fits, but that part of it isn’t true. Who did see him? And kill him? What did he know, if it wasn’t about me?”

  He looked at Karen as if she might answer. But she could only shake her head. He looked at her, very intently. “I don’t know, Scott,” she said. “I know you didn’t kill Marta. Wouldn’t have killed her. So—so Higgins must have known something else, if that was why—why he got killed.”

  “In a way,” Scott said, “I killed him too. I killed them both. You see that, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I hated Marta,” Scott said. “It’s—it’s grown for years, Karen. All the time I was away it was growing; when we were both here and she began on Pethy and—other things—” He broke off.

  “Pethy?” Karen said. “What about Pethy?”

  “She’s—in certain ways she’s like Marta was,” Scott said. “Don’t you see that? In looks, in—I don’t know the word to use. You see, Marta had—I guess you’d call it spirit. Fire. I loved that in her, at first. Maybe if—if we could have stayed together, she wouldn’t have got to be—well, what she was. Selfish, cruel, irresponsible. You knew what she was? But you couldn’t have, could you?”

  “I’ve—I’ve tried to be sorry she’s dead,” Karen said. She hesitated. “I can’t be,” she added. “So I suppose—”

  “You got something of it,” Scott said. “There’s no point in—in trying to explain it all. But Pethy—well, Pethy has something of the same fire Marta had. Now she’s gay and sweet. But lately Marta had begun to notice her as she hadn’t before, to—to take trouble with her. I think she began to see herself in Pethy and to—encourage herself in Pethy. Her present self, you see. She would—I think she would have made Pethy what she was herself. Partly because she liked that self, thought Pethy ought to be like she was, thought everybody ought to be. Partly because she knew what it would do to me. First Lorry, then Pethy.” He broke off suddenly and sat looking at Karen.

  “Lorry?” she repeated, after a moment. “Lorry’s all right. What about Lorry?”

  “He’s not mine,” Scott said. “Didn’t you guess? I supposed—I supposed everybody knew. Except, until about six months ago, me. You see—he could have been mine. I was back in Washington on a job for a week or two and Marta came down. I hated her even then but—” He shrugged. “Anyway, Lorry could have been mine, and I thought he was. Then, last summer—when I’d had plenty of time to get to know the kid, and love him—she said, ‘Oh, by the way, he’s not yours, you know.’ Said just that. And laughed as if it was all damned funny. Said that I’d better be very sweet and very careful, if I wanted Lorry to stay around and grow up a Bromwell. If I wanted him to go on thinking he was a Bromwell, not a bastard. If—” Again he broke off. “She was a sadistic little tramp,” he said. “I haven’t the faintest idea who Lorry’s father was, or what he was. And—I love Lorry the way I do Pethy. He’s as much mine as Pethy is. She waited until I felt that way—so she could use the way I felt.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Karen said. “Now he’s yours. It’s all over now.”

  “No,” Scott said. “She’s dead. But it isn’t all over. You know that.”

  There was no answer; she tried to make none.

  “Incidentally,” Scott said, “I think mother knows, or guesses, what I planned. She saw me going off with the jewel case, I’m pretty sure. And I think she heard the message from the kennels on an extension and knows I Med to Marta. So she probably puts it all together and thinks I killed Marta. She knows about Pethy—what Marta was doing to her, planned to go on doing. And—well, I suppose she knows the rest of it, too. Heimrich spotted it, quickly enough. I suppose she had.”

  “The rest of it?” Karen said.

  He looked at her a moment, again as if trying to read something in her face.

  “Heimrich thinks you’re protecting me, Karen,” he said. “Didn’t you realize that? Protecting me because—well, obviously, because we love each other. He thinks that being in love with you was my real motive. He calls it the ‘priming motive’—the thing which made what he thinks happened happen now, instead of last year, instead of six months from now. Thinks I killed her so you and I—”

  She was shaking her head. She closed her eyes and shook her head. It was that made him pause. He had been speaking almost tonelessly.

  “No,” he said, then. “I realize that, Karen. I know he isn’t all right. But—you see, my dear, he’s half right, anyway. For quite a while now I’ve been in love with you. It’s no use denying that mad
e Marta—well, harder to take. Thinking of her, and of you, and—”

  Karen opened her eyes and looked up at Scott. He was standing in front of her again. She did not say anything.

  But, after he had looked down at her for a moment, Scott spoke slowly and in a quite different voice.

  “Well,” Scott Bromwell said, “I’ll be damned!”

  He kissed her then. Afterward he said, “You’re lovely, Karen,” and then he stood up suddenly, and almost as suddenly went out of the room.

  Karen sat for a time where he had left her. Then, as if she were half asleep, she went across to her dressing table and sat on the stool in front of it and looked into the mirror. She sat there for several minutes, looking at a girl she had never seen before, surprise growing in her mind.

  IX

  During the night the weather changed and, although that would have seemed hardly possible, changed for the worse. The fog did not lift, but rain started to fall and, just before dawn, the temperature went down. It went down only a little, but it went down enough so that the rain froze as it fell and, slowly, a film of ice formed over everything—formed on the ground and on the driveway; stiffened bushes so that they seemed to bristle; coated the northeast sides of tree trunks and grew smooth and hard on the branches of trees. At first the rain did not freeze on the highways, but after an hour or so it began to. Then highway employees got gloomily out of bed in answer to telephone calls, got chains on trucks and the trucks loaded with sand. The trucks began to creep over the ice while men ladled sand onto it. But the ice formed on the sand too, after a time.

  The telephone and power companies which served the area made corporate mutters of disapproval, and summoned emergency crews to stand by. On Route 22 near Goldens Bridge a trailer truck jackknifed, blocking the road; private cars, essaying a long, curving hill on the Saw Mill River Parkway, lost traction halfway up and slid disconsolately back down again, now and then bumping gratingly together. An hour or two after dawn, trees moving in the wind began to creak, protesting the growing ice burden. But almost worst of all was that the fog continued, so that the ice did not glitter; gloom and peril unfairly combined.

  In Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell’s monstrous house there was enough of both, without the connivance of diverse areas of barometric pressure. A high pressure area, the radio reported, had “backed” down the coast, involving itself with the low which already had caused enough discomfort. The radio also reported that the State police were investigating the mysterious death of Mrs. Scott Bromwell, of New Canaan—picking the nearest town of which anyone was likely to have heard—but also a member of café society. Mrs. Bromwell had apparently drowned in a brook on the estate of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell.

  Karen Mason, who had had three hours’ sleep, turned off the radio by her bed. She looked at herself briefly in the dressing table mirror. Nobody, under any circumstances, would call her “lovely” now, she thought. She did what she could, but life did not come back into her face, nor color. She was unutterably tired, and that was the way she looked. She went downstairs numbly, because on getting up one went downstairs and had breakfast. Rudolph Haas was already in the breakfast room and when Karen reached the door he was glaring, angrily, at poached eggs and strips of bacon on his plate. His expression startled her and she paused; but hearing her, Haas eliminated the expression of anger from his face, letting a look merely of gravity replace it. He stood up. He said, “Good morning, Miss Mason.” He was suave again; whatever strain he might have felt, or might be feeling, was not now reflected in his face.

  A maid brought Karen orange juice and, afterward, toast and coffee. Haas ate his more substantial breakfast, saying nothing, but managing to convey by his manner a sympathetic regret distributed between himself and Karen. It was clear that much had befallen which was lamentable; it was only an intimation that Haas was himself restraining emotion. Without seeking to analyze this—seeking only to drink coffee and eat toast—Karen felt that Haas was treating both of them as if they were ill—treating the whole situation with a kind of anxious delicacy. Well, she thought, the situation has to be treated some way. She couldn’t, herself, think of the right way.

  Stephen Nickel came next and stopped at the door, as if he had been seeking the room and paused to verify its identity. He said, “Good morning, Miss Mason. How are you?” and waited to be told.

  “All right,” Karen said.

  Nickel nodded to that and then, briefly, nodded to Haas. Haas looked at him and nodded even more briefly. Nickel shrugged, then, and found a place opposite Karen. Karen, to whom such duties seemed delegated, rang a bell for the maid, who came with orange juice and enquiries; also, for Karen, with the information that Mrs. Bromwell was having breakfast in her room and Miss James, as usual, with the children. Nickel said, “Anything. It doesn’t matter” and then added, “No cereal.” When the maid had left he finished the orange juice in a long draught and said it was another lousy day, apparently.

  “Nickel,” Haas said, “I want—”

  Nickel looked at him and waited. His attitude was not encouraging.

  Scott Bromwell came in before Haas could speak again, and then Haas said, “Later.” Scott greeted the other two tall men with nods, said, “Good morning,” gravely, to Karen. She looked at him and tried to smile. He did not look as if he had slept at all; he looked older than she had ever seen him, and the tic was more evident. When the maid came in answer to Karen’s ring, Scott wanted only coffee. He asked whether the police captain was still there; whether, if there, he had had breakfast. The maid said, “Yes sir,” to both. Then she started to cry. When they all looked at her, she said, “I just can’t help it,” and went out quickly. Scott Bromwell’s eyes followed her briefly, then dismissed her.

  “They’ll be at us all again, I imagine,” Stephen Nickel said. “Stubborn so-and-so’s.”

  “I suppose so,” Scott said. “They’ve got to be.”

  “Mr. Bromwell,” Rudolph Haas said, “I want you to know I regret very much imposing myself, being imposed in this way, on you and—and your mother.”

  “All right,” Scott said. “All right. You can’t help it. It doesn’t matter.”

  “If you would explain to the captain—” Haas began.

  “Afraid he doesn’t want explanations from me,” Scott Bromwell said. “Not—about you, if that’s what you mean. You’ll have to explain yourself.”

  “But that is it,” Haas said. “There is nothing—”

  “Why,” Nickel said, “don’t you tell it to Heimrich? We’re all in the same boat.” He considered. “More or less,” he added.

  Unexpectedly, Haas reddened.

  “If you’re trying to say—” he began, and the anger which Karen had first seen in his face was there again, and in his voice.

  “Skip it, Mr. Haas,” Scott said. “Save it for them.”

  “A very good idea, Mr. Bromwell,” Captain Heimrich said from the doorway. “Everybody’ll get a chance. Miss Mason? When you’ve finished?”

  She had finished. She went with Heimrich. They went again to the library.

  “Now, Miss Mason,” Heimrich said, “now that you’ve slept on it, I wonder if you don’t want to change your story?” He paused momentarily. “About last night, naturally,” he said. Then he waited.

  “I don’t want to change it, Captain Heimrich,” she said, and heard the weariness in her voice. “I told you what happened. All that happened.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can’t help what you believe. What you want to believe.”

  Heimrich reached into his pocket. He brought his hand out closed and opened it above the table behind which he sat. Earrings, bits of ingeniously convoluted gold wire, tinkled on the wood. Karen looked at them; involuntarily, softly, said, “Oh!”

  “They’re mine,” she said, then, quickly.

  “I know they are,” Heimrich said. “They were in one of Higgins’s pockets, Miss Mas
on. But you didn’t see Higgins, Miss Mason?”

  “I don’t know how he got them,” she said. “I may have left them—”

  “Now Miss Mason,” Heimrich said. “You were wearing them last night. He got them last night, naturally. If he wasn’t in your room, how did he get them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see him. If he was in my room, it was when—” She stopped.

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Precisely,” he said. “You say you went to your room after I talked to you last night and undressed and went to bed. I suppose you took the earrings off, naturally?”

  “I must have. I don’t remember.”

  “You must have,” he said. “Then, you didn’t leave your room again until you went to Mrs. Bromwell’s, looking for her—and went on and saw these shadows of yours and found Higgins. Dying. You didn’t give him the earrings then, did you? Didn’t put them in his pocket?”

  That was not worth answering. It was not supposed to be.

  “He could have come in my room while I was asleep,” she said. “Stolen the earrings then.”

  “Without waking you?”

  She remembered, then.

  “When I woke up,” she said, “I felt that there had been somebody—something—in the room. Something that didn’t belong there. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No, Miss Mason.”

  “It could have been his being there that wakened me,” she said. “But didn’t waken me until afterward—after he had gone. Don’t you know that happens, captain?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. He spoke with them closed.

  “Miss Mason,” he said, “I have every reason to believe Mr. Bromwell planned to kill his wife. His plan was rather elaborate, essentially too elaborate. Foolish, even. I think Higgins saw Mr. Bromwell at a certain stage, doing a certain thing—and tried to get paid for not telling what he saw. I think that, as he might have anticipated, he did get paid—by being killed. I think you know part of this—or all of it. I think you recognized Mr. Bromwell with Higgins at the door to the storeroom. Or—knew he was there. You see what I mean?”