Death and the Gentle Bull Read online

  He went through the other three rooms of the house, and went down into the basement, where there was a coal furnace. He went back out of the clean, empty house and into the yard behind it. The reddish chicken came around the house, and now it looked at him. There was a vegetable garden on the right, with broccoli still growing in it. But the broccoli shoots were breaking into yellow flowers. The flowers were pretty enough, yet added desolation—it had been a couple of days, or more, since anyone had bothered to cut the broccoli. There was corn growing beyond the other vegetables, and there were a few ears on it, but they were, Heimrich thought, over-due for picking.

  And then he heard a gasoline motor running, its sound muffled. He followed the sound down a path, around cultivated blueberry bushes, and came on a square low structure of concrete blocks, which had somewhat the appearance of a tomb. The sound came from the concrete tomb, and Heimrich went to it. There was a low door, up to which the path led. Behind the structure, on the surface but blocked for permanence, was a large tank. The motor inside continued to put-put contentedly.

  The hasp which could secure the door was open; from the staple over which it could be passed dangled an open padlock. Heimrich opened the door of what was obviously a pump house, and looked in. He pulled a dangling cord just inside the door, and a bulb lighted dimly.

  It was a pump house, as he had supposed. It was more than that. Along with the pump, the structure housed a small generator, driven by the gasoline motor. It was all neat, efficient, compact. If William Smith had been a larger man there would hardly have been room for him to lie on the cement floor, between the brisk little motor and the pump housing. As it was, he was doubled around the pump.

  Heimrich backed out of William Smith’s mechanized tomb, and took a deep breath of cleaner air, and held his breath as he went in to shut off the gasoline motor. There was no window in the structure, and the carbon monoxide would dissipate only slowly through the open door. Heimrich came out again, waited, and went back. He had no doubt that Smith was dead. He made sure. Smith had been dead for a number of hours. From the odor of alcohol on the body, he had died drunk.

  And it was obvious, after a few minutes of investigation, that Smith had killed himself. A rubber hose had run from the exhaust of the motor through a hole in the side of the pump house. The hose was there, still fixed to the exhaust. The hole was there; it had been chiseled out neatly enough. But the hose did not run through the hole; the hose ran from the exhaust to a place on the floor near Smith’s face. It was all quite obvious.

  Smith had killed Mrs. Landcraft, possibly in a moment of ungovernable rage. (He had been a man to “fly off the handle.”) He had been, subsequently, overcome by remorse, or by fear, or by both. He had come home and gone into the pump house, where the little motor ran, turning the generator, providing the current the New York State Gas and Electric Company had felt it impracticable to furnish. He had closed the door after him, and pulled the hose from the hole he had on some brighter day chiseled through the wall, and put it down on the floor, and Iain down beside it, and waited—probably not long—to die. It was all very obvious, very neat. The physical facts told a story which could not be questioned.

  And Captain Heimrich of the New York State Police did not, for a moment, believe a word of it.

  Leaving the motor off, he went out of the pump house and walked around it, looking for a mistake. He found none—he found a five-hundred gallon tank with a lead-in, automatically controlled, to the smaller tank of the motor itself. He knocked on the side of the tank with a stone, and decided that it was about half full. He looked for other footprints than his own, and found none—the earth was dry, packed. He stood in front of the tomb-like structure and looked at the wooden door which closed it. He could not see that the killer of William Smith had made any mistakes at all. It was a pity, but one had now and then to expect such awkward efficiency.

  No doubt, when the body was examined, it would be discovered that Smith had been drinking rather heavily before he died. And that would prove nothing—nothing helpful. He had drunk to nerve himself to die; to swaddle death. Even if he had had a companion in his drinking—someone to say, “Have another, Bill,” or, “Take one for the road, Smitty,”—there would be no onus attaching to such encouragement. A man is supposed to know what he can drink.

  Heimrich sighed, in the quiet of the warm afternoon. It was all rather unfortunate; it would have been convenient if things had been otherwise.

  He crouched in front of the hasp and examined it. It was rough iron, would retain no useful prints. The padlock might.

  Heimrich put the hasp over the staple; handling it carefully, he put the padlock through the staple, and pressed the tongue down into the socket, until it clicked. He tried it, and the lock held. He walked back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out the slender steel rod used to operate the jack. He returned to the pump house, worked the rod into the staple and prized. The staple came loose without too much effort, and Heimrich regarded his handiwork. There was no reason it should not look authentic, since in fact it was. The pump house had been forced open.

  It was quite unscrupulous of him, Heimrich thought—or would be, if carried far enough. But it is quite unscrupulous to murder a man and make it appear suicide. It is especially unscrupulous to do this without making mistakes from which the police may benefit.

  Captain Heimrich went back to the empty house, looked at the note which would never be read by the man it was meant for, and found the telephone, pleased with the enterprise of the New York Telephone Company, which came back-lots when needed. He got the operator; he got the people he wanted, reported what he needed to report.

  “No,” he said, “I’ll not wait, I think. Got people to see.” He listened. “Yes,” he agreed, “it was a waste of time. I realize that, naturally.”

  He drove back along Old Road toward the quarry. He was again on the black-top surface when sirens began to sound ahead. He drove far to the right, to give passing room to the motorcycle men, the patrol car, summoned by radio from the quarry pool, where they had been “wasting time.”

  As he approached the Merritt driveway he slowed, but then he shook his head and drove on. If Evelyn Merritt had gone to the Landcrafts’, it would be inconvenient, but a problem to be met when it arose. Problems ought, from now on, to arise with frequency. Well, Heimrich thought, that’s what policemen are for.

  At the quarry pool, men were already loading equipment on the trucks, hauling the boats out of the water. The foreman regarded Heimrich dourly; said that they had sure gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.

  “It’s the sort of thing that happens,” Heimrich told him, and picked up Ray Crowley, who no longer was web-footed, and Crowley drove them on.

  “We drew quite an audience,” Heimrich said. “Most of the neighborhood, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Well,” Crowley said, “we had to expect that, captain.”

  “Naturally, Ray,” Heimrich said.

  XI

  When Heimrich knocked on the screen of the open front door at the Landcraft house, Harvey Landcraft came through the house from the terrace and let him in. He looked at Heimrich. He said, “I hear you found Smith.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “Dead?”

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “He’s dead, Mr. Landcraft. Your brother around? Mr. Ballard?”

  They were down at the barns, Harvey said. He led Heimrich and Crowley through the house to the terrace beyond. Bonita was there; she and her husband had evidently been sitting side by side when Heimrich knocked. She said, “Oh, it’s you again, captain.” She appeared now to be entirely sober. She was not, evidently, pleased to see Heimrich. People often were not, Heimrich reflected, and Harvey Landcraft said, “I’ll call down—no, here they come now.”

  Ballard and Wade Landcraft had come through the door of the nearest barn, were walking up the slope toward the house, talking as they walked. They were much of a height, Heimrich noticed—of a cons
iderable height. Ballard was bare-headed; Wade wore a battered felt hat, its brim an irregular undulation.

  “Why,” Bonita said abstractedly, “does he wear that thing?” It appeared that she was talking to herself.

  The two men saw Heimrich and walked faster, across the grass, the late sun slanting behind them.

  “Thought you’d show up,” Wade said, when they were a few feet away. “So—Smith’s found?”

  “Dead,” Harvey answered for Heimrich.

  “The poor little guy,” Ballard said. “You’d think—”

  They waited, but Ballard did not say what one would think. He shook his head, instead.

  “Not in the quarry,” Wade said. “You wasted time on that.” He said, then, that they might all as well sit down. They did; the Landcrafts and Ballard waited.

  “In his pump house,” Heimrich said. “You know the place?”

  “Sure,” Ballard said, and Wade nodded. Harvey shook his head, and Bonita looked out over the green fields, toward the green hills, and said nothing.

  “The motor was running,” Heimrich said. “I suppose it ran most of the time?”

  “He could cut it off,” Ballard said. “Turn it on when he wanted power. Cut it off when they went to bed, probably. Started it up in the morning. Ice box uses gas, I know. After he got it set up, he said he didn’t care if they ever got the electric from the company. Said this cost a lot less and—” He stopped. “Poor little guy,” he said.

  “He killed himself?” Wade asked.

  “He had a rubber hose to take care of the exhaust,” Heimrich said. “Went out through a hole in the blocks. It had been pulled inside. The place was pretty much airtight—near enough, anyway.”

  There was a pause. Then Harvey said that he supposed it was an easy way to do it—as easy as any.

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “I suppose he just went to sleep.”

  “Could you tell when it happened?” Wade asked, and Heimrich said that, at a guess, Smith had died some time the night before. He waited, looking around at the three men, at Bonita Landcraft.

  “Well,” Wade said, “that seems to be that.”

  “Does it?” Heimrich said.

  Their expressions changed, then—all but Bonita’s. Bonita continued to look at the hills.

  “That Smith killed Mrs. Landcraft, you mean,” Heimrich said. “Decided we’d catch him and killed himself. That’s what you meant, Mr. Landcraft.”

  Wade nodded his head.

  “Look, mister,” Ballard said, “what else would it be? You say Smitty killed himself, so sure we think—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t say Smith killed himself, Mr. Ballard. I said he’s dead. Dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, which is a frequent method of suicide. Because, as you said, Mr. Landcraft, it’s an easy way. It was meant to look like suicide, naturally. But—Smith was murdered. Somebody knocked him unconscious. Put him in with the generator and pulled out the exhaust tube and closed the door and—waited.”

  He paused as if for comment; there was none.

  “Closed the door,” Heimrich said, “and—made his mistake. Very foolish mistake. Perhaps it was an accident, something he—or she, of course—did without thinking. You see—the door was locked when I was there this afternoon. Locked from the outside. I had to force the lock.” He closed his eyes. “Padlock,” he said. “Through a staple. Couldn’t have been done from inside, naturally.” He opened his eyes then, and looked from face to face. He saw only surprise; then, on the faces of Wade and Alec Ballard, what he took to be incredulity.

  “Look,” Ballard said, “nobody would be that much of a damn fool, mister.”

  “Apparently,” Heimrich said, “somebody was, Mr. Ballard. Of course, as you say, it gave the whole thing away. If somebody’d wanted to advertise it as murder, he couldn’t have done more.”

  “Wait a minute,” Wade said. “Suppose somebody—Mrs. Smith, maybe, saw the latch open and locked it? Not knowing Smith was inside.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “without looking? When he was missing?”

  “Sometimes,” Bonita said, without taking her gaze from the hills, “sometimes people do things without thinking.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Somebody did, Mrs. Landcraft. But I don’t think it was Mrs. Smith. I think that, if she went there at all, she saw the door locked and decided—very logically—that her husband couldn’t be there. We’ll ask her, but I’d imagine that happened.”

  Harvey Landcraft spoke slowly. He said that Heimrich was guessing, had to be guessing. He said that, so far as he could see Bonny’s guess might be as good as Heimrich’s. If the murderer—assuming there was a murderer—had locked the door to the pump house, he must have done it without thinking, as a kind of reflex. But, if you assumed he might do that, you could also assume that Mrs. Smith might, as easily, have done the same.

  Heimrich listened, he nodded his head, he said he saw the point, naturally.

  “But,” he said, “if Mrs. Smith did, why didn’t she unlock it again and look in?”

  “Didn’t think of it,” Ballard said. “Or—maybe Smith had the only key on him. Did you think of that, mister?”

  “Now Mr. Ballard,” Heimrich said. “Yes, I did. I thought of several things. If he had the key, the boys will find it. But I’d think there’d be another key, wouldn’t you? That Mrs. Smith could put her hands on, anyway?”

  “A very absent-minded murderer,” Bonita Landcraft said. “Can’t you do better, captain?”

  “Now Mrs. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “I can think of alternatives. The murderer locked the door so that Mrs. Smith wouldn’t look there for her husband. Meant to go back later and open it again. Or, he locked it so that Smith wouldn’t come to and get out. Perhaps there was some reason the murderer couldn’t wait around. Had to be somewhere else, perhaps. Again, meant to go back and didn’t—or thought there was no hurry, that we wouldn’t look there. It doesn’t matter too much, does it? One way or another way. The same mistake.”

  “You had to break the lock to get in?” Ballard asked.

  “The staple,” Heimrich said. “I pried out the staple.”

  There was a somewhat long pause.

  “I suppose,” Harvey said, “you think Smith knew something about—about what you say is mother’s murder. Had to be got rid of?”

  “Possibly,” Heimrich said. “And—possibly it was even simpler. We’re looking for a murderer. We are given one—dead. And, as one of you said, that seems to be that. We stop bothering people. Pack up and go home.”

  “Just like that?” Bonita said. “Without even—hatred? Even dislike?” She looked at Heimrich now. “Because it was useful for him to be dead?”

  “Possibly,” Heimrich said. “Yes, I think it may have been that, Mrs. Landcraft. A matter of—evaluation. A murderer may have a scale of values it is difficult to understand.” He closed his eyes. “We caught a man once who’d killed a woman,” he said. “Didn’t deny it, Didn’t seem to be sorry about it. Completely calm—until we suggested he’d stolen the revolver he killed her with. Very upset by that; kept saying he wasn’t a thief.” He opened his eyes. “Turned out he wasn’t, as a matter of fact,” he said. “We had to admit that. He seemed to feel that that cleared everything up.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said.

  “Near enough,” Heimrich told her. “Values upside down. A man up in Canada killed a lot of people in a plane, with a time bomb. Didn’t like his wife who was on the plane. Here it could come closer home. Kill Smith, save your own life. You might think it was merely self-defense.”

  “I?” she said. “Not I, captain.” She returned to her study of the distant hills. “If I hated enough—I don’t know. But it would be personal. I’d think it would be with—anyone.”

  “The ‘you’ was impersonal,” Heimrich said. “Like Smith’s murder.”

  “Listen,” Harvey Landcraft said. “This is all very well. Very illuminating, perhaps. But—you don’t kno
w anything, do you? It’s all speculation.”

  “Your mother was murdered,” Heimrich said. “Smith was murdered, as a result. We know those things. Somebody thought it to his advantage to kill twice.”

  “One of us, you mean,” Wade said. “Harvey or me. For the—advantage.”

  He hadn’t, Heimrich pointed out, said that.

  “Yet,” Harvey said.

  “If you like,” Heimrich said.

  “For a man who spent hours dragging an empty swimming hole,” Harvey said, “you’re confident, captain. You could be wrong again.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “naturally. The pool seemed most likely. Because—” He hesitated. “Because I think Smith was to have been thrown into the pool,” he said. “From the lip of the cliff, probably. So that any head injuries would be covered up. But—Miss Merritt happened along and Saw Smith and the man who was planning to murder him. Even if she didn’t recognize the men—she still says she doesn’t—the murderer couldn’t know that. She’d seen enough so that the quarry plan had to be abandoned. But—not enough so that the whole plan had to be. When she—if she identifies the taller of the two men, he can say he was merely taking Smith home; doesn’t know what happened after Smith got home. If we believed in Smith’s suicide, that would be that.”

  “You started,” Wade said, “to say ‘when’ Evelyn identifies the men. She didn’t recognize them. You know that.”

  “Now Mr. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “I’ve been told that.”

  “She’s not a liar. If she were, why should she lie? You don’t argue she’s involved herself?”

  “Not if she saw two men, as she says,” Heimrich said. “Not directly. But—” He stopped. He shrugged. “Of course, she may not have seen anyone.”

  “You think she did?” Bonita said. “Because—I do. Wade’s right, of course. Evvie’s not a liar. Most people are, more or less. She’s not.”

  “If she’d recognized the men, she’d have said so,” Wade said. He took off the battered felt hat and tossed it to a chair. It was, Heimrich thought, as if he found some physical action essential. “You know damn well she would. Why wouldn’t she?”