Death and the Gentle Bull Read online

  Heimrich closed his eyes and leaned back. He said, absently, that he had heard a rumor Mrs. Landcraft was planning to let Ballard go.

  “Whoever told you that was crazy,” Thayer said. “Unless Maggie’d gone crazy. He could get a better job half a dozen places I know of. Including my place. I said that.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “Hell,” Thayer said. “I don’t know. ’Less it was the big bull kept him. Thinks a lot of that bull.”

  Heimrich sipped. He opened his eyes. He asked whether Mr. Thayer had made an offer for the bull while Mrs. Landcraft was alive.

  “Nope,” Thayer said. “What would have been the use? Maggie wasn’t a fool. If she’d ever thought of selling, she’d have wanted Fort Knox. It’s only because things are this way—” He had held his glass as he started the sentence; now he set it down, abruptly, on the table. He looked hard at Heimrich.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Mrs. Landcraft’s death changed things, naturally.”

  “Look,” Thayer said, and now his manner changed a little, his tone was no longer casual. “Look, mister. You wouldn’t be trying to say—anything. Would you?”

  “Now Mr. Thayer,” Heimrich said. “Such as what?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Thayer said. “Tell you how it is: I wouldn’t want to know. See what I mean?”

  Heimrich said he saw what Mr. Thayer meant. He said, “Take it easy, Mr. Thayer,” but Thayer finished his drink in a gulp. He said, “Well?” challengingly.

  “Nothing,” Heimrich said. “Thanks, Mr. Thayer. You’ve been helpful.”

  “Think so?” Thayer said. “Think so if you want to.” He stood lip.

  “Going over to the Landcrafts’ now,” he said. “Get their answer on the bull. That all right with you?”

  He exaggerated the question.

  “Now Mr. Thayer,” Heimrich said. “Why not?”

  “Whatever the answer is, I’m going home tomorrow,” Thayer said. “You get that, mister?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I heard you, Mr. Thayer.”

  Thayer turned away, and walked away. Crowley and Heimrich watched him.

  “Stirred him up at the end,” Crowley said.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It did seem that way, Ray. Well, stirring them up’s useful, sometimes.”

  Heimrich looked at his watch. It showed six-thirty, and that was a later hour than Heimrich had expected, although an early hour for dinner.

  “What do you think, Ray?” Heimrich asked. “Likely to be another fog tonight?”

  Ray Crowley got up and walkd to a window and looked out into the clear evening. He came back and said he shouldn’t think so.

  Then, Heimrich said, they might as well have something to eat, and he enquired of the bartender. They could eat in the bar. They ordered, and ordered steaks.

  The steaks were a long time in coming; time at the inn was not, apparently, of the essence. Heimrich, waiting, had another drink. It was clear enough; should have been clear from the first. It was going to be difficult to prove, however, unless things went just right. It was unfortunate he had left a fingerprint on the padlock—or that the murderer of William Smith had not. Probably, of course, the other had never touched the lock.

  The steaks came, finally. They were not, Heimrich decided, cut from Angus steers.

  It is difficult to remember how the days shorten by mid-September, how even with daylight saving time they shorten. The warmth, which may be almost that of midsummer—which that day had been—misleads.

  It was dark when they left the inn. It was also foggy. The spaced street lights of Carmel’s main street were softly wrapped in fog, glowing dimly.

  “You’re not a very good weather prophet, Ray,” Heimrich said, and his tone was mild. But his blue eyes were very wide open, and he moved toward the car at much more than his accustomed pace. “The wind changed,” Ray said, going around the car.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “We want to get back as fast as we can, Ray.”

  The sedan had fog lights—amber lights, set low, their beams hugging the ground. They helped, but in fog nothing helps enough. It was not too difficult while they were still in the village, where street lights, however watery, paled the gray darkness. It was very difficult on the winding road which led them out of Carmel. Wipers swished at the dampness which formed on the windshield; formed and was whisked away, but formed again before the hurrying blades could retraverse their arcs.

  “See why Miss Merritt couldn’t identify the men,” Ray Crowley said, going at twenty-five—which was fast for the night—hugging the center of the black-surfaced road. “Lucky to see them at all.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “unlucky, Ray. How long do you figure to get back?”

  Half an hour might do it, Ray Crowley thought.

  “Three quarters, more likely,” Heimrich said. He rolled down the window on his side of the car, leaned out of it. It was surprising—it was always surprising—what a difference the absence of windshield glass made; it was surprising how much one could see through fog, providing always one did not look ahead into the light which danced back from the air’s vapor. “It’s longer than I like, Ray. But—probably it will be—”

  He stopped abruptly. They were going around a curve, down an incline. Ahead of them, in the middle of the road, the lights of another car peered at them—peered myopically, grew brighter. The horn of the police car blared, in warning, in anger; Ray wrenched the wheel around, the car swerved to the right. Ray added his voice to the horn’s harsh hooting, condemning with fury all drivers from cities, hogging country roads on foggy nights.

  The approaching car veered right, finally, but too late. The police car went to the shoulder, and the shoulder was soft. The car yawed in unpacked earth, and Ray fought it. The other car passed, clearing by inches. Ray braked and they skidded. Then, joltingly, they stopped. A front tire blew, sharply.

  “Hit a culvert,” Ray said, and added to what he had said about the other driver.

  They got out with flashlights and looked at things, and things frowned back. They had hit the edge of a culvert, and the tire was done. The wheel was dished. There was, also, no place to put a jack.

  It was slow work, backing first to the road again, while Heimrich waved a flashlight in warning; edging then on the road’s surface, lurching as the car edged, around the culvert and off the road again onto the yielding shoulder. The jack slewed twice under the front bumper; the damaged wheel was jammed in place, and it took them both to wrench it off—and if the car slipped from the jack while they wrenched, it was going to be too bad all around. It just didn’t, which was a small favor to give thanks for.

  It had been a quarter of eight when they left the inn. It was after nine when they had the spare tire on and could start again. They had covered two miles of a dozen, and the fog had thickened. They crept through it.

  Heimrich’s fingers played a soundless tune on the top of the instrument panel, as he leaned forward, peering into the fog. Things could hardly have gone more completely wrong. He looked at the microphone through which he could summon help. But—they were as close as anyone, and could move as fast. Close enough and moving fast enough? There was no way of telling that. Heimrich was not a man who often rebelled against impersonal obstacles, but now, inwardly, he cursed the fog.

  He had taken a chance, but one had to take chances. And the plan had been good. By now—long before now—Thayer would have reached the Landcraft house; inevitably he would have mentioned their meeting at the inn; mentioned that he had left policemen there, obviously intending to have dinner there. To someone who would hear him, the relaxed position of policemen would be highly encouraging. All according to plan—but not the fog. Not the venomous, the inscrutable, fog.

  “We want to make as good time as we can, Ray,” Heimrich said, mildly. “We don’t want to be late.”

  “I don’t—” Ray Crowley began, his attention all on the road, which seemed to waver in front of them.

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nbsp; “At the Merritts’, Ray,” Heimrich said. “That wouldn’t be so good, naturally.”

  XIII

  She sat with a book in her bedroom, dressed in shirt and shorts, and held the book in front of her eyes, and did not see the pages. She saw two men, one taller than the other, standing by the roadside in the fog, behind a small car. She saw a broad-shouldered man, heavily built, walking as if he would walk through anything. She heard the disbelief in Heimrich’s voice when, on the terrace, he had asked, not for the first time, whether she was sure she had recognized neither of the men by the road.

  And again she tried, as she had tried so many times in recent hours, to see the men as she had seen them then. It was evident, now, that one of the men had been Smith—must have been Smith. The police, unless they had been sure, would not have drained the quarry pool. That they had not found Smith’s body there, but had found it elsewhere, did not matter. They had been certain that Smith and the man with him had stopped there, and that the pool might have been the place chosen for Smith’s death. The plan had changed, but only in method. Smith had died. The change in method—that must have been decided on because she had seen the two together.

  So—one of the men had been Smith. She forced her mind back to the scene; stared at the book as if she were looking again into the fog of the night before and could drive her vision through it. The small man was Smith—the small man was Smith. If knowing that now, she could see the man as Smith, then she might see the other man. It might all come back. Then she could go to Heimrich and tell him who it was—tell him it wasn’t Wade. That was what mattered—who the man was not, not who he was. He could be—all right, he could be anybody, but not Wade. A stranger would be best—would be infinitely best. But if not a stranger, than anybody, excepting only Wade. She had to remember. It had to come back. She would make it come back.

  Knowledge was somewhere there, under the surface. She had passed close to the men; subconsciously, she must have recognized them, or known that she did not recognize them. The surprise of coming so close on to them, the shock of concentration in avoiding them, had driven the picture of them under the surface. Well then, she would bring it up. The car had been so—she could see the car. The men—

  Evelyn was in the “birthday room”; the room which had been given her when she became eighteen; the room she had come home from school to find waiting. It was on the ground floor of the house, and when she was growing up it had been her father’s workroom. He had had a lathe in it, and she could remember the shrieks which used to come from the room, as a power saw bit through wood. (She could remember, also, the yells of pain and outrage which had come from it, on one fall evening, when the rotating, impartial saw had nipped off the end of her father’s right forefinger. She could remember, Evelyn thought, everything but the thing she had to remember.)

  The room had been changed beyond recognition when she came home from school the summer of her eighteenth birthday. It had been made much longer; one side had become a wall of windows, which slid in tracks; could, in very hot weather, be lifted out entirely. At the end of the room, where there had been a single narrow door, there were french doors, opening onto a small terrace of the room’s own—a terrace shielded on one side by a windowless wall of the house, on the other by an evergreen hedge. The french doors could be locked from outside, as well as from within, and the symbol of the room had been the two keys to the lock—both of the keys, not merely one. When you can lock your own door, a door opens wide—if you are eighteen.

  “Had enough of you tramping up the stairs when you come back from dates,” her father had told her sternly. “Never could see how such a small girl could make such a racket. Wake us up at all hours.”

  But the stairs were heavily carpeted, and Evelyn moved lightly.

  —one of the men had been Smith. The other had been much taller. Had he been—yes, he had been hatless. He had been wearing— But it broke down there. She went back. He had been standing with an arm around the shoulders of the shorter man; he had looked at the lights momentarily, his face a white blur, and then away again. The blur had been—

  She laid the book down and pressed against her temples with the heels of her thumbs. The blur had been a face—a face—a face. She would make the face come out of the fog, drag it up out of the fog. She would—

  There was a small, sharp sound from the end of the room, where the french doors opened on the terrace. The sound was repeated. It was as if tips of branches, moving gently in the breeze, were tapping at the glass.

  The sound was repeated several times, but not more loudly the last times than the first, before it broke into the concentration of the girl who was driving memory into fog. She was aware of it first as an annoyance, an intrusion. She tried to close her ears to it. But when it was once more repeated, the sound acquired meaning. Someone was tapping at the glass of one of the doors; tapping softly, with finger tips, the nails of the fingers clicking on the glass.

  She looked up, and toward the end of the room. There was a shadow there, but as she looked up, sitting under the reading lamp, the shadow receded. She shook her head slightly, and then got up and walked to the doors. She switched on a lamp near the doors, and light went out through the doors, and was hazy on the terrace. There was fog again.

  Just where the light died against the fog, a man was standing and, when he saw that she had seen him, the man beckoned. He was tall and indistinct in the fog and, after he had beckoned, he patted his lips with the fingers of one hand, signaling silence.

  Then Evelyn, although still the man was a blur, decided it was Wade. The disreputable hat of his, worn for the most part in the barns, worn tonight obviously because of the dampness in the air, was unmistakable.

  He often came around the house to her special door, but he had before come only by daylight—had come on sunny mornings and sunny afternoons, his car parked in the drive beyond the terrace; had come to drive her into the city for lunch and a matinee; to drive her slowly, lazily, on back roads which led nowhere and did hot need to, since the two in the car carried their destination with them.

  But it was different now. Now he came at night, and not openly. The tapping on the glass had been a veiled tapping, stealthy. It had been for her ears only, for her secret ears. The gestures, first to tell her to join him, then to come silently, had been abrupt and urgent. He was disturbed. (Wade’s movements commonly were smooth, unhurried; his brother was the quick one, the urgent one.)

  When he realized he had been seen, his gestures recognized, the man withdrew further into the fog, avoiding light. But she could still see him, dimly, as a kind of darkness outlined on darkness. She turned to a chest by the doors and started to open it, reaching for a flashlight. But, as she did so, the man outside threw a circle of brightness on the flags of the terrace. Wade was telling her that he had a flash, that she would not need one.

  She opened the door, then, and opened it quietly. The light, crepe-soled shoes on her bare feet made no sound on the flagstones. The air was wet and cool and she shivered, but only partly from the dampness, and colder air. She closed the door behind her, as quietly as she could, and she whispered, “Wade?”

  There was no answer. But again, very briefly, the circle of light from the flash, pointed directly downward, was on the flagstones. This time, it moved away from her, and so it beckoned.

  The implication was obvious. They were too close to the house—to her father and mother, and the servants, in the house. They must talk secretly, and not there. The light went out, and she heard his footsteps on the gravel of the drive. She heard them only for a moment, and then, as she followed, she realized that he had stepped from the gravel and its telltale sound, to the lawn which bordered the drive. To show her that, the light appeared again, on gravel now. It moved away from her.

  She had to cross the drive to reach the silent grass, and did so as carefully as she could, as soundlessly. On the grass, she followed after. There was tightness in her throat; there seemed to be a
band around her chest, constricting, making her breathing shallow. Because all this could mean—She tried not to think what it could mean, but the knowledge was heavy in her mind.

  Something had happened—something again had happened. It involved Wade, made it necessary that he move secretly. It had brought him to her because he needed her. Or because—because— If Wade had to go away, had to run in the night, he could come to her first. He would come to say goodbye. Whatever had happened, he would do that. Whatever he had done.

  She could not see him now, even as darkness moving on in darkness, nor hear the sound of his feet on the grass. But she was certain he still was moving ahead of her, and that he must now, as they walked beside the drive, toward the road, be moving more quickly. So she moved more quickly, too. The wetness of the grass soaked through the thin fabric of her shoes; with the wetness in the air, her thin shirt clung to her. It was clammy and, as she moved, she half-consciously plucked at the shirt, holding it out from her body. But when she released the material, it fell back and clung to her, coldly.

  As she neared the road, she peered through the fog, expecting to see Wade’s car parked near the driveway entrance. That must be what he had in mind; that they should get into the car and drive slowly and then, where they could not be overheard, he would—would tell her.

  But she could not see the car, nor, in the drive entrance, between the low pillars of the wall which ran along the road, could she see Wade, although that, surely, was where he would stop and wait for her. She went on and now, far enough from the house, she spoke again, softly. “Wade?” she said. “Where—”

  She was seized from behind—seized harshly, roughly, a heavy hand on either of her shoulders. There was violence in the hands, and she tried to scream, and one of the hands clasped bruisingly over her mouth. She was forced back against the man behind her. The hand which had been brutally hard on her mouth moved toward her throat.