Accent on Murder Read online

  He put a dime in and dialed Operator. He asked and was told; for out of town numbers, he should dial 211. His dime came back, and was re-inserted. The lounge was, without any doubt, emptying.

  “North what, please?” “Wellford? Oh—Wellwood. So sorry. One moment please.”

  Brinkley stuck his head out again. It was noticed by Professor Abel Milner. Milner beckoned; Brinkley nodded the exposed head briskly.

  “The number is—” the operator said. “Thank you,” Brinkley said. “Will you get it for me?”

  “Certainly,” the operator said, and the telephone made sounds. Abel Milner hovered in the doorway between dining room and lounge. He looked at Walter Brinkley with evident anxiety.

  The telephone produced further sounds. It produced the busy signal.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator said. “The line is busy. Shall I try again in—”

  Brinkley put the receiver back. He went out of booth and across lounge, at a pace just under a trot.

  For which, subsequently, he blamed himself, at first excessively. But with the facts assembled, it was not—was obviously not—true that if he had kept on trying he might have saved a life.

  “Heimrich speaking,” Heimrich said.

  The man’s voice was one Heimrich had never heard before. It was rather high-pitched. The man spoke quickly.

  “My name’s Beale,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to get you.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Conrad Beale?”

  “All right,” Beale said. “Gather they’ve filled you in. Yes. Former husband of Carry Wilkins. I suppose you’ve got the bloodhounds out?”

  “Now Mr. Beale,” Heimrich said. “Why?”

  “Went by to see her that morning,” Beale said. “Happened to be in the neighborhood—” He stopped suddenly. “Not convincing, is it?” he said.

  “Not the last,” Heimrich said. “No. Where are you, Mr. Beale?”

  “About—” Beale said, but then, “Never mind. I’m not trying to run out.”

  “Good,” Heimrich said.

  “I think maybe I can give you a lead,” Beale said. “Not sure but—maybe. You’ll give me a break?”

  “If you had anything—”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Beale said. “I don’t mean that. You’ll listen to what I’ve got to tell you? If it turns out there is something?”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said.

  “Tell you what,” Beale said. “I’ll come there—to the inn. Anyway I’ve got a room there. O.K.?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “How soon?”

  “Oh,” Beale said. “Give me half an hour. I’ll—”

  There was, faintly, a clicking sound on the line. But then Beale spoke again.

  “Not longer than half an hour,” he said. “Pick you up in the lounge?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and listened to Beale hang up a telephone.

  Beale was, as he said, staying at the inn. He had a room in what the inn called The Annex, where a good many permanent residents—permanent and for the most part aged—stayed. He had not telephoned from his room. The call had come from outside.

  The suggestion of a passkey ruffled Mrs. Lambert, which Heimrich could understand, could sympathize with. He unruffled her, gently. Forniss went to see what of interest there might be in Conrad Beale’s room, and Conrad Beale would never know he had—unless there was reason he should know.

  Heimrich waited. He waited in the cocktail lounge. A reporter found him there and advanced with enthusiasm. “No,” Heimrich said. “Nothing new. You’ll know when there is.”

  The reporter tried. He failed. He ordered a drink and took it with him—took it, Heimrich supposed, to set beside a type-writer. Several typewriters clicked in the inn. Heimrich, faintly, could hear them through open windows as he waited. He could also hear a whippoorwill, tearing holes in silence.

  Heimrich had waited fifteen minutes or so when Forniss came back. He came fast, with something to tell.

  “Somebody—” Forniss said and the night roared—roared once and then again.

  The sound came from outside the inn; it seemed to come from everywhere outside the inn. A shotgun, barrels fired in quick succession, can gash the silence of a rural night—blast it into fragments. Heimrich and Forniss were running toward the inn’s door while the sound of the explosions still echoed. And then, on wooden floor, wooden stairs, of the old inn many feet clattered.

  A porch stretched the front of the inn, with steps leading down from it at either end and wider steps toward the street. Forniss ran left on the porch, his feet heavy on boards. Heimrich went right, went down the steps at the end to the driveway which led toward the rear of the building, toward the parking lot. One way seemed as good as another, and Heimrich ran down the sloping drive toward the lot.

  There was one light on a post in the lot, and it seemed to make more shadows than it made light. There were half a dozen cars—dark cars. Nothing there, Heimrich thought and stopped and listened, and heard a sound.

  It was human; a human made it, trying to speak, to call out. There were no words in the sound; the sound was choked, meaningless. And horrible—a bubbling sound.

  Heimrich went toward the sound.

  The man spilled from the open door of a car, shoulders inside, lower body hanging down. It was as if somebody, something, had started to pour him from the car. Heimrich took two strides across the center of the lot and a car leaped at him from the side. The car had no lights, was a hurtling blackness.

  Heimrich threw himself to the side—threw himself from his feet, caught himself on his hands and rolled on rough pavement. For an instant he could feel one of the car’s tires brush his feet.

  He rolled to his knees and had his revolver in his hand and there was no use in that.

  The car had not gone up the drive he had run down. It had gone on toward the rear of the lot and, there, plunged suddenly into blackness.

  A big car—but even that was a guess. Any car, hurtling out of darkness, is big enough. A car, at a guess, itself dark in color. And—gone, now.

  Gone and, Heimrich knew within seconds, left death behind. Nobody could live who was so hurt.

  The man, the tall thin man, the black-haired man, had caught both charges in the chest. And yet, when Heimrich reached toward him, began to lower him to the ground—it didn’t matter what one did with him—he was still alive. His eyes were alive and saw Heimrich—saw him for an instant. In that instant the man—the dead man still alive—tried to speak again. But words did not come from his lips, only blood. And then the dead man was dead.

  Forniss ran down the driveway and then, out of darkness, there were others. One of the others was a photographer and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light. The light was enough to show the photographer he had a picture he couldn’t print.

  “All right,” Forniss said, in a cop’s hardest voice. “Get back.”

  But that didn’t matter, either. Heimrich stood up.

  “Beale?” Forniss said.

  “I suppose so,” Heimrich said. He looked around at those who formed a half circle, who stared. One of them was the bartender.

  “You,” Heimrich said. “You recognize him?”

  “Mr. Beale,” the bartender said. “Oh God!” He stepped forward a pace and looked down at the dead man. He moved backward more quickly and turned away, and then took several uncertain steps toward the edge of the lot.

  They got it started then; got started the slow and patient compilation of the facts of murder. A motorcycle trooper was the first there, and then they could leave the body under guard and get on with it.

  The car which had lurched at Heimrich had gone down a narrow passageway between the main building and the annex of the Maples Inn and, beyond it, to an alley which led to a street. Presumably, its lights had gone on then and it had gone—wherever its driver wanted it to go. There was nothing to go on.

  No license number. License plates do not show on a dark car. No identif
ication as to make or model. There had not been time for that.

  “Got here first,” Heimrich said. “Parked and waited. Got out when Beale got here and, at a guess, walked over. Probably not showing the gun. It’s pretty dim light.” Beale had started to get out of the car and the gun had roared at him, from very close. The murderer had gone back to his own car and started the motor and then, it was to be assumed, heard Heimrich’s feet on the drive and—waited. When Heimrich was in range, the driver had tried again, with a different weapon. No luck this time, but it had been close.

  “Damn close,” Heimrich told Forniss, and they walked back up the drive to the inn. “You found something in his room?”

  “In a way,” Forniss said. “That somebody else had been looking. Forced the door. Anybody could do it—with a nail file, damn near. Prized his suitcase open, went through what I guess was his other suit—hanging in the closet, that was. Turned the pockets out and left the suit on the floor. In a hurry. So—we’ll have to have it printed before we look ourselves.”

  Which was obvious; which took more time.

  There were ways to fill it. Item: Young Ash Adams said his father was in his room, and locked in it. Which was conclusive—if they took Young Ash’s word. And—took his word his father could not drive a car.

  Dorcas Cameron and Lieutenant Kelley, and Admiral Bennett, were at the Wilkins house. (The old Adams house.) Commander Wilkins was not; had not been since a little after six—since, in fact, a few minutes after Heimrich had talked to him. He had gone to the undertaker’s to do those things—those necessary, meaningless, agonizing things—which have to be done, and had been left waiting for him to do. He had gone alone because he had wanted to go alone. He had not returned. The admiral had gone earlier in the afternoon and looked at the unscarred face of his dead child.

  They would have to check, of course—check the time of Wilkins’s arrival, of his—

  “Better give them a ring, Charlie,” Heimrich said, and Forniss called the undertaker’s. Commander Wilkins had reached there at about six-thirty. Certain formalities had required some ten minutes. They had taken him, then, to the room his wife’s body lay in. He had stayed there, alone, for perhaps half an hour.

  “Funny thing about the commander,” Forniss said. “Always seems to be somewhere else but—where?”

  There was that, admittedly.

  Joe Parks, on the other hand, was readily come by. He was in a tavern, and he had been there for two hours—a considerable part of which he had devoted to rather loud comment on Paul Craig (the bastard). But there was no longer much reason, if there had ever been, to count Parks in.

  Conrad Beale had checked into the Maples Inn Monday evening. He had had a suitcase and a typewriter, and had wanted—for four or five days, at an estimate—a quiet room where the sound of typing wouldn’t bother other people. That had got him a corner room in the annex.

  “Poor Mr. Simpkins almost never uses his hearing aid,” Mrs. Lambert said. “So it seemed like a good place. He’s in the next room, you know.”

  Those who had rooms in the annex did not, leaving it, pass through the main lobby of the inn, so that Beale could have come and gone as he chose and done both unobserved. Which was possibly, of course, the idea.

  And, among many uncertainties, one special one remained unresolved. Neither Heimrich nor Forniss, after looking carefully at Beale’s body, could be sure that he was the “brush salesman” who had driven away from Paul Craig’s monstrous house, after failing to sell his wares to Margo Craig. On the other hand, they could not be sure that he was not.

  “What it comes to,” Forniss said, “there’s no shape to the damn thing.”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “One we don’t see. Yet.”

  But that, Charles Forniss thought, came to much the same thing.

  The fingerprint men finished. They had found Beale’s prints, and those of a woman. The woman had been established as one of the maids. The maid had certainly not—the very idea!—gone through Beale’s things. If they thought she was that kind of girl—then tears of indignation.

  “Gloves,” Forniss said, “are the invention of the devil.”

  The room was comfortable, comfortably furnished. There was a portable typewriter on a table and a typewriter case under it. There was typewriter paper in the case, and a dozen letterhead sheets, which proved that Conrad Beale had, indeed, been an associate editor of Shakeup! Unfortunately, nothing was typed on any of the sheets, nor was there anything in the wastebasket.

  There was no doubt that the room had been searched by someone. It appeared that the searcher was looking for anything there was to be found—for things big enough to go in bureau drawers, small enough to go in watch pockets. Perhaps, then, not for one special thing.

  The suitcase had been emptied on the floor and its contents—shirts and socks and underwear, used and unused—left there. The shirts had laundry marks, now duly noted; the typewriter was an Underwood, fairly recent model. Heimrich typed the usual lines—that the party needed aid, that the brown fox was lively as ever.

  The “o” was out of line. The upper case “M” had a nick in it.

  They were quick and they were expert and they were thorough, as experts are. It was Forniss who found the photograph, investigating an apparently accidental rip in the lining of the suitcase. The photograph was under the lining—a snapshot, and not a recent one; a somewhat faded one.

  The photograph was of two people—of a girl in a bathing suit; a slender, rather tall girl, with curled blond hair; a very young girl. She stood beside, had an arm around, a broad and apparently affable man, clearly much older than she, who wore trunks and who was quite remarkably muscular, and whose broad chest bore three scars—bullet scars. The man looked very pleased with himself.

  They looked at the photograph. They looked at each other.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Not much doubt about it.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not much doubt. Imagine meeting The Dutchman here.”

  XI

  THE GIRL in the snapshot—which had to have been made some years before, since Homer (The Dutchman) Schneider had been dead for some years—might, Heimrich and Forniss agreed, be any pretty girl. Any pretty blond girl.

  “Mrs. Wilkins was blond,” Forniss pointed out. “She had pretty much the same kind of figure.”

  The girl in the photograph was, at a guess, in her middle teens—at a guess, sixteen or so. She had regular features—regular and pretty and softly young; she had a face which had not firmed into pattern. (But also she was squinting a little against the sun, and the photograph was somewhat faded and not too sharply focused to begin with.)

  “Ten years ago,” Forniss said, “The Dutchman was still around. Ten years ago Mrs. Wilkins would have been—what? Sixteen?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And—going to school in Honolulu. Or, California.”

  Forniss raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “All right, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t get it year by year, obviously. We will, naturally. What do you remember about The Dutchman, Charlie?”

  “Big-time punk,” Forniss said. “Ten, fifteen years ago. In K.C., mostly. Got taken care of in—” He stopped; he shrugged. “It was quite a while ago,” Forniss said. “And a long way off.”

  Which was the point, and the problem. The heavy, affable face of the late Homer Schneider was unforgettable, particularly to policemen. Policemen watched for his affable face and, whenever and wherever it appeared, took suitable precautions, since the only thing affable about The Dutchman was his face. But he had not appeared, or at any rate not been noticed, often in the East.

  “I don’t remember,” Forniss said, “that we ever had a run-in with Mr. Schneider. Headache to the boys out West. Unless he happened to be a meal ticket. Doubt whether we’ve got much dope on him.”

  Heimrich nodded his head slowly, and took a last look at the photograph and put it in his pocket.

  “You know,
Charlie,” he said, “I think I’ll take a run into town.”

  Again, Forniss raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “to check a little. They’ll have plenty. And—I don’t know exactly why, Charlie. As you say, there’s nothing to show he fits in at all. An entirely different iron our friend Beale had in the fire, very likely. May be a waste of time, as you say.”

  Forniss had, he decided, said a good deal by raising his eyebrows. Not, when he thought of it, that he hadn’t meant to.

  “May have nothing to do with the pattern, naturally,” Heimrich said, and was, Forniss decided, talking largely to himself. “But, if he has he—rather sticks out, doesn’t he? Nice private murder and all at once The Dutchman. And some of the punks out there had quite a way with shotguns, Charlie.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Only, he’s dead. You don’t argue he isn’t dead?”

  “The evil that men do,” Heimrich said. “No, I don’t argue he isn’t dead. I think I’ll go into town all the same. Suppose you get a picture of our friend Beale—nice clean picture. The face is all right. One of the boys has got one of these developing cameras, probably. Show it around a little?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “In a nice way? If they happen to be up and about?”

  “By all means, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Nicest way possible. Tomorrow, if it’s more convenient for everybody. I’ll be back before then, naturally.”

  Heimrich, for no reason he could think of, drove into New York rather faster than is his custom. There is usually no great hurry in checking on the past of a dead man. But Heimrich does not, while investigating a case, like bodies to accumulate.

  Centre Street had a good deal on Schneider, Homer; alias “The Dutchman,” alias several other things. Centre Street had photographs, all better than the snapshot, although in none of them did Schneider look especially pleased with himself. In most of which he was wearing numbers. Centre Street had fingerprints, and history.

  Schneider had been born in 1905, in Chicago. He had begun with the to-be-expected boyish thefts; had come into his own during prohibition, beginning modestly as a truck driver; graduating within a short time to hijacking; proving a handy man with a sawed-off shotgun. (Several arrests; no major convictions.) He had left Chicago for Kansas City not at the request of the police, some of whom were nevertheless grateful, but after a misunderstanding about territories—a misunderstanding into which .45’s entered. He had done well in Kansas City, rising rapidly. When prohibition ended, The Dutchman had still found much to occupy his time—gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and the like. The Dutchman did not, Heimrich decided, differ markedly from others in his line of work; he had, however, been more successful than most. This had, it was evident, aroused jealousy here and there; Schneider had been often shot at and several times hit. He had, however, proved unusually bullet-resistant. Heimrich took the snapshot from his pocket and looked at Schneider’s scarred chest. Very resistant.