Accent on Murder Page 12

  A Volkswagen turned into the driveway and began to hop up it. Lieutenant Howard Nelson, clearly, was returning. It was to be hoped with news.

  “Professor Brinkley, captain,” Alan Kelley said, through the screen of the french doors. “Wonders if you’ve got a minute. Says it’s not important if you haven’t.”

  “Thanks, lieutenant,” Heimrich said. “Do you mind telling him I’ll call back?”

  Lieutenant Nelson unraveled himself from the little car. He came across to the terrace, shaking his head. He stopped, looked at the admiral, looked at the Navy car.

  “Admiral Bennett?” Nelson said. “Sir, I can’t tell you—”

  “No,” Bennett said. “You can’t. You’re this Intelligence officer?”

  “Sir,” Nelson said.

  Bennett looked at his left hand. No ring. Involuntarily, Nelson looked at it, too. He started to put it in his pocket, and thought better of that.

  “You’re supposed to turn up the commander, as I understand it,” Bennett said. “Well?”

  “Something went wrong with the ’copter, sir,” Nelson said. “Had to turn back. Got another one standing by and—”

  “Fly boys,” Bennett said. “Anything else?”

  “No sir,” Nelson said, and ceased, for the admiral, to exist. The admiral turned back to Heimrich, who had started to get up from his chair, planning to call Walter Brinkley back.

  “This man Beale—” Admiral Bennett said, and stopped because, half out of his chair, Heimrich had stopped moving. Heimrich sat down again.

  “Beale?” he said.

  “Beale,” Bennett repeated, with emphasis. “The man we were talking about. The puppy who married—”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “you hadn’t mentioned his name, admiral.”

  “Conrad Beale,” Bennett said. “Kind of name you’d expect, isn’t it? Went out to Hollywood after he got paid off. Place you’d expect him to go. Probably still there.”

  Why probably still there, Heimrich wondered—why, after half a dozen years, “probably” anywhere? But that was not really what made Captain Heimrich sit, again, firmly in the terrace chair. Beale? With a faulty telephone connection, “Peel”?

  “What kind of a looking man was he?” Heimrich asked.

  “Black hair,” Bennett said. “Spindly sort. Army hadn’t done much to set him up. Put him in the Marine Corps, now, and—”

  Black hair. Spindly sort. A man in a battered car, driving away from the Craig house—where he had unsuccessfully attempted to sell brushes to Margo Craig—he had had black hair. Glimpsed, briefly, he had appeared to be thin—tall and thin. Or, if one preferred, spindly. Of course, thousands of men had black hair, carried little weight. And—

  “Captain,” Dorcas Cameron said. They looked at her. She was not so quenched, now. She leaned forward in her chair and, as she did so, a shaft of sunlight, finding its way through leaves, glinted on her hair. “That’s the name of a man who called up a few days ago—Friday, I think it was. I’m sure he said his name was Conrad Beale.”

  “Unlikely,” Admiral Bennett said. “Very unlikely, child. Man’s on the West Coast. Probably writing some of this trash you—”

  “Admiral,” Heimrich said, in a tone which made Admiral Bennett look at him in astonishment.

  “Oh,” Admiral Bennett said. “Sorry, Heimrich.” And that astonished Heimrich.

  “Called up, Miss Cameron?” Heimrich said. “About what?”

  “Our subscribing to a magazine,” Dorcas Cameron said. “One I’d never heard of. We were—”

  She and Carry had just sat down to dinner when the telephone rang. Dorcas had answered it. The man had said, “Mrs. Wilkins?” and Dorcas had said it was not, and asked who was calling.

  “The Shakeup!” he said—she was sure he said, however improbable it sounded. “The magazine,” he had said then. “My name is Beale—Conrad Beale. We’re making a special offer to new—”

  “No,” Dorcas said. “We take more magazines than we can read. I’m sorry and—”

  “Miss,” he said, “can I speak to Mrs. Wilkins? Might be she—”

  “I told him no,” Dorcas told Heimrich, leaning forward in her chair, the sunlight on her hair. “I hung up and went back and told Carry”—her voice quavered at the name—“told Carry it was just a man trying to sell magazine subscriptions. And we finished dinner.”

  “Miss Cameron,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t mention the man’s name to your cousin? That he called himself Beale?”

  “No,” she said. “It—it didn’t matter.”

  Which was obvious.

  “He didn’t call back?”

  “Not when I was there,” she said. “Of course—”

  And that was obvious, too. Conrad Beale, unsuccessful seller of magazine subscriptions—and of brushes?—might have telephoned again when it was Caroline Wilkins’s turn to answer the telephone, or when Dorcas was at her desk in the city. It would have been a coincidence—a preposterous coincidence—if a Conrad Beale had telephoned the former wife of a Conrad Beale by chance only, to sell her a subscription only.

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Nelson said, addressing the senior officer present.

  Admiral Bennett looked at him as if he had never seen him before. He said, however, “Well, Nelson?”

  “We had occasion to investigate a magazine called Shakeup!” Nelson said. “In connection with—a restricted matter, sir. It’s what is called a scandal sheet, sir. That is, it—”

  “Nelsonl” Admiral Bennett said. “I know what a scandal sheet is. Precisely the sort of thing I’d expect a man like Beale to wind up connected with.” He turned to Heimrich. “See what kind of a man he is, Heimrich?”

  “Sir,” Nelson said, and waited to be spoken to. He was snorted at, but snorted at permissively.

  “This man Beale,” Nelson said. “He is—one of the editors, sir. Not a subscription solicitor. At least I shouldn’t—”

  “Very well, Nelson,” Admiral Bennett said. “Er—thank you, Nelson.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Lieutenant Howard Nelson said.

  Bennett looked at him with renewed frost. He snorted at Lieutenant Nelson, who thought, How the hell do you get along with the trade school boys?

  X

  THE MAGAZINE CALLED Shakeup!—a designation it apparently lived up to fully—had been in existence for something over three years. Its illustrations went as far as postal regulations would tolerate and its text flirted as playfully with the laws of libel. (It had, as a matter of fact, had to settle once. It appeared that the movie starlet in question—very much in question—had been demonstrably in London at the time.) Half a dozen more libel suits were pending against it. But such suits often pend indefinitely. There were, it was suspected, still other aspects to the operation of Shakeup! The problem there was that the blackmailed are often reticent.

  Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss sat, over drinks, in the barroom of the Maples Inn. (The Maples Inn preferred the designation “cocktail lounge.”) Forniss, having enquired, reported. Heimrich knew the racket.

  “Set up in type,” Forniss said. “Proofed. Proofs sent to subject with the notation that the enclosed article, in which he—usually she, probably—may be interested is to appear in an early issue. If subject has changes to suggest, the editors will be glad to discuss them with him. Maybe something about the expense already incurred in collecting the material and so forth. In case subject is outstandingly dumb.”

  “Any squeals?”

  That, of course, was it. Subjects seldom squealed. They reimbursed Shakeup! for expenses incurred. Or they said, Publish and be sued.

  “One or two squeals—” Forniss said. “Nothing they could make stick.” “They” being the city police.

  “Beale?”

  Conrad Beale was an associate editor, one of three. The executive editor was one Oliver Felson. “Got him once on a shakedown,” Forniss said. “Six-seven years ago. Suspended sentence. Nothing since.”

  “Beale?�
�

  “Nope,” Forniss said. “Nothing on him. He wasn’t at the office, of course. No idea where Mr. Beale could be reached, they hadn’t. Begins to look like the old man’s off the hook, doesn’t it? But—he was there. Saw something that scared him.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “shocked him. It does look like it, Charlie.”

  “Be a relief to the girl,” Forniss said, and emptied his glass. “She’s taking it hard.” He considered his empty glass. “Harder than you’d figure,” he said, to the glass. “Makes you wonder whether—” He did not say what it made him wonder, or need to.

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “An ugly thing to come on. Particularly when you were all—lighted up. As she must have been. And then to feel that, if you’d tried a little harder, done a little more, there wouldn’t have been that to come on. With, we’ll have to admit, some reason.”

  “Actually,” Forniss said. “Not much.”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps not, actually. Everything can be explained away. She asked somebody who should have known and—got bad advice. If she did. But, things like that happen inside people, Charlie. Especially people as young as she is. I don’t think it’s anything more than that. Anyway, she was in New York at the time, with Kelley. At the Municipal Building.”

  Forniss looked at Heimrich and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I asked them to check. They were there, as stated.”

  “So,” Forniss said. “The husband came back, they tell me.”

  Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins had come back—come at a little before six, with a face all strained tendons, hard lines, with eyes blank. He had answered what Heimrich asked in a voice without expression. He had known of no reason anyone might have for killing Caroline. He had never heard of Ashley Adams; he had known, of course, of “the place” where the girls lay in the sun. Once or twice, he and Caroline had gone there together. His voice remained expressionless, although—Heimrich thought—the memory of those times in the sun, and of her slender beauty then, must have been almost unbearable. He knew Caroline had been married before, and to a man named Beale and that the fact had “worried” her. There had been no reason it should. It had made no difference. He had never met Beale.

  Wilkins had been, during the short questioning, neither patient nor impatient. In a sense, he had not been there at all. Only the shell of him was there. Brady Wilkins did not, Heimrich thought, care where the shell was, or what happened to it.

  Where had he been from the time, on Monday, when he had left his wife and Alan Kelley at Grand Central was not pin-pointed. Wilkins had been asked.

  “Now wait a minute, captain,” Lieutenant Nelson, who was sitting in, said, in a great hurry. Admiral Bennett looked at him; Heimrich looked at him. Commander Wilkins looked at nothing; merely waited; was somewhere far away, the shell of him left behind.

  “Sir,” Nelson said, and flushed slightly. “My orders, sir—”

  Admiral Bennett snorted.

  “In general, commander,” Heimrich said.

  “I had certain people to see on Long Island,” Brady Wilkins said. “I can’t be more explicit.”

  Heimrich could guess. There are Defense Department suppliers on Long Island. Presumably, some of the things they supply are secret things. He did not guess aloud.

  “All the same,” Sergeant Forniss said, having been brought up to date—“all the same, it could be a—convenience.”

  “As you said this morning, Charlie.”

  “It’s still true,” Forniss said. “In the abstract. Better than the old one—the lady’s reputation gimmick. And—he gets the money. And—could be Mrs. Wilkins had a date with her former husband yesterday morning. Could be the commander happened to come home unexpectedly. Found them together. Got—upset.”

  “And killed his wife,” Heimrich said. “Not bothering with Beale.” Forniss started to say something. “I know, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I can think of explanations, too. We’ll know more when we pick up Beale.”

  “Funny he wants to get in touch with you,” Forniss said. “Funny he doesn’t if he wants to. If he was the one who called.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “We’ll ask him that too when we find him.”

  “And,” Forniss said, “what he had on Mrs. Wilkins. That he thought she might be willing to pay for. That sort of thing’s his racket.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Probably it is. Carrying on his trade, it looks like. And that the admiral’s right—Beale’s a mongrel pup. You’d expect him to be the one rubbed out, wouldn’t you? Not the girl. However—”

  He turned toward the bar and held up two fingers. The bartender, pleased, nodded at him. He brought drinks. With them, he brought canapés. “Damn,” Captain Heimrich said. “That reminds me.”

  Forniss looked at him.

  “Canapés,” Heimrich said. “Cocktail party. Walter Brinkley. He has something he wants to tell me.”

  Heimrich found the telephone, in an aperture. He found Walter Brinkley’s telephone number and dialed it and waited and was told that this was Professor Brinkley’s residence.

  “Heimrich,” he said. “Could I speak to Mr. Brinkley?”

  “’Fraid not, cap’n,” Harry Washington said, adjusting his accent. “Professor, he’s in New York. Dinner for somebody at the Faculty Club. Won’t be back till pretty late, seems like. I’s sorry, suh. Mighty sorry.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “He asked me to call him back. Tell him I called, will you? And that I’ll call again in the morning?”

  “I sho will, cap’n,” Harry said. “I’ll sho do that.”

  Heimrich went back to the table. They finished their drinks. They went into the dining room for dinner. It was eight-thirty when Mrs. Lambert, who owned the inn, came to their table and said that there was a telephone call for Captain Heimrich.

  “—overemphasis that will inevitably result in communication entirely by mathematical formulae,” Abel Milner, exaggerating by intention, said with emphasis, and leaned forward in his chair in the lounge of the Men’s Faculty Club of Dyckman University. “With the further result that—”

  Walter Brinkley listened, with as much of his mind as he could spare, to Abel Milner, Ph.D., associate professor of English Literature. The collar of Milner’s dinner jacket gaped excessively as Milner leaned forward. Poor Milner had only his salary, and a wife and two children. A brilliant young man, all the same—a man only in his early fifties and already with several admirable publications. A good ten years from emeritus. Walter Brinkley, supporting a cocktail glass on the arm of his chair, nodded his head thoughtfully. But he was not, save fractionally, thinking of what Abel Milner was saying. Brinkley was thinking, primarily, that he really should try once more to get in touch with Captain M. L. Heimrich.

  Looked at in one way, Brinkley thought and nodded his head again, and then finished his drink—looked at in one way, he had made every effort which could properly be expected to get in touch with his friend Heimrich. Looked at in another, what he had to tell—to suggest, rather—was of such negligible importance that only a fussy old man (a professor; face it) would think it at all worth passing on. Looked at in another, what he should be thinking of was the few remarks with which, as toastmaster, he would (after delicately knocking on the rim of his water glass with the edge of a knife) introduce to assembled professors (all of whom knew him very well) Professor Francis Anderson (dear old Andy) who had, as of the end of the just-completed semester, retired as head of the English Department. Welcome to the ranks of the emeritus—

  “Thank you, Fergus,” Walter Brinkley said to a club servant, accepting another martini. One more, he trusted, would dull his appetite sufficiently. Confronted by the food of the Men’s Faculty Club of Dyckman University, one sought dulled appetite. Walter Brinkley sighed.

  “Precisely,” Abel Milner said, and leaned even further forward. “The outlook, Walter, is appalling. There is no other word fo
r it.”

  “None,” Walter Brinkley said. “None at all, Abel.”

  It was such a tiny thing, a thing of so little importance. The proper course was to forget it entirely. Or, if not entirely, at least for the time being. Tomorrow would be time enough to offer to Heimrich—who would be polite; who would undoubtedly be tolerant—the tiny fact, or theory (it was no more than that) which had lodged in the meshes of Walter Brinkley’s mind as, having garaged his car after his lunch with the Misses Monroe, he stood at the kitchen sink and let water run cold for drinking.

  Brinkley looked at his watch. Eight-fifteen. Fifteen minutes, then, before the assembled professors departed reluctantly from the comfort of the lounge—how the same club could sustain so admirable a bar and so depressing a kitchen had been a matter of general and gloomy speculation for some twenty years—and entered the dining room. Just time enough to give it one more try.

  Walter Brinkley finished his drink and snapped his fingers, in the gesture of a man who has just thought of something too long forgotten. Abel Milner stopped. “Telephone call I damn near forgot,” Brinkley said, and shook his head—in the gesture of an ancient whose memory fails—and went to a telephone booth in the hall outside the lounge. By leaving the door open and sticking his head out occasionally, he could see the beginning of the exodus.

  Fortunately, he had coins. He started with the police barracks in Hawthorne. The barracks answered quickly, but at a subordinate level. Transfer took time; minutes ebbed. A less subordinate level had to check, and that took time, also. Captain M. L. Heimrich was, at last reports, at the Maples Inn in North Wellwood.

  “Thank you,” Walter Brinkley said, and hung up, and immediately realized that the police barracks would have had available the telephone number of the Maples Inn, which he, now, could not remember. It was written down, clearly, in a black book of telephone numbers frequently called and that book, on the downstairs telephone table, Brinkley could clearly visualize. The book, not the number.

  Brinkley stuck his head out of the telephone booth. The exodus had started. Professors stood, making final remarks to one another, putting glasses down. A few minutes only—as toastmaster, he could not be tardy.