Accent on Murder Page 15

  And, of course, the burr no longer rankled in his mind—had, at any rate, been isolated and identified and waited only to be passed on. Tomorrow, with suitable apologies for proffering so small a gift, he would hand it to Heimrich. It had been a little foolish to take it, and himself, so seriously as he had earlier, when he had tried to reach Heimrich on the telephone. If anything would keep, a thing so tiny—a guess at the best—certainly would.

  Brinkley paused for the lights at the northern end of the Saw Mill River and, permitted, drove on. He followed familiar roads to North Wellwood. He traversed Hayride Lane to his own driveway and went up it and got out of the M.G. and opened the garage door, and got back into the M.G. and drove it in, and got out of it and closed the garage door. It was then, as he stood still facing the door, that the night was filled with a great roaring noise. Simultaneously, there were several sharp cracking sounds in the wood of the door beside him and several sharp stinging pains in his buttocks. And, simultaneously with these things, Walter Brinkley threw himself to the side, felt himself falling and—falling, in a final instant—heard the angry blasting sound again and knew that the second barrel of a shotgun had been fired.

  It was as if the sound had shaken out all the lights. Walter Brinkley fell into darkness.

  The telephone by Heimrich’s bed rang once. By its second ring Heimrich, who had been deep in sleep, had it and he said, “Heimrich,” and, after an instant, “Yes, Charlie?”

  “The professor’s been shot,” Sergeant Forniss said, from North Wellwood. “Shotgun again. Outside his garage. His man just called.”

  Heimrich swore briefly. He said, “Killed?”

  “No,” Forniss said. “The man says not. I’m on my way now. Ambulance is too. But—alive, the man says. You’ll—”

  “Fast as I can,” Heimrich said.

  The act of murder fills Captain Heimrich with deep and bitter anger—an emotion below the surface, below any professional attitude. He had felt that bitter anger when he looked at the torn body of Caroline Wilkins and again—although he had no reason to think well of a man who was probably up to something nasty—when he saw the similarly shattered body of Conrad Beale. And now again—but this time the anger surged more hotly. Brinkley was a man he knew, liked. And Brinkley was a man who had been trying to tell him something.

  And I, Heimrich thought, called it a day and went to bed. The bitterness, then, was married to self-contempt.

  XII

  A GOOD MANY LIGHTS were on on the lower floor of Walter Brinkley’s house, and a good many cars were in the drive and turnaround. Flashlights bobbed and quested on the lawns, among the shrubs. None of this, Sergeant Forniss told Heimrich, was bothering the professor. The professor was out.

  “Not from being shot,” Forniss said. “A few pellets, mostly where you’d expect. Seat of the pants. But, when he fell, he banged his head. On a sundial, of all things.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “Concussion, the doctor says,” Forniss told him. “Got him upstairs. Doesn’t want to move him for a while. Then they’ll take him to the hospital and do x-rays.”

  “He’ll make it?”

  “Yep. Anyway, the doctor’s pretty sure. Just concussion. No sign of a fracture. In a way, he got a break. Whoever had the gun figured, when Brinkley fell, that he’d got Brinkley. And then—got going. Washington was there in a couple of minutes. Quite a guy, Harry Washington. Because, how did he know the gun hadn’t been reloaded? Plenty of time for that before he could get down.”

  “Harry’s quite a guy,” Heimrich agreed. “I suppose he didn’t see anything?”

  They were in the living room of Walter Brinkley’s pleasant house. As if he had heard his name, Harry Washington came into the room through a door at the rear. He wore a white coat. He carried a silver tray with cups on it, and a silver coffeepot. He put the tray down on a table.

  “I thought you might both like some coffee,” Harry said. He was no longer, in inflection, in attitude, an old Southern retainer. He was a man who thought a couple of other men, working late at night, might like coffee to sustain them.

  They had coffee.

  “Sit down, Harry,” Heimrich said. “Have some yourself.”

  Harry Washington smiled faintly, and sat down. “I’ve had all the coffee I can take right now,” he said. “What would anybody have against Mr. Brinkley, captain?”

  Heimrich didn’t know, and said so. He said, “I suppose you didn’t see anything?”

  Harry Washington took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of the white jacket, and lighted a cigarette.

  “No,” he said. “Only heard. A shotgun, twice. Both barrels close together. That was at twelve-thirty-five, give or take a minute or so.”

  “Good,” Heimrich said. “That you looked, I mean. You were asleep?”

  He had been in his room, Harry said. Not really asleep. He was not supposed to wait up for the professor; nevertheless, he usually did.

  “But apparently I dropped off,” Harry said. “The gun waked me up. I was pretty sure Mr. Brinkley hadn’t come in. I’d have heard him.” He drew deeply on the cigarette. “The stairs creak,” Harry said.

  He moved when he heard the shots; moved fast. His way downstairs took him past Brinkley’s bedroom. The door was open, a night fight burning, the room empty. He ran down the stairs and turned on the outside floodlight as he passed the switch.

  The professor was lying near the garage door. Harry thought he was dead. He found that he wasn’t, but was breathing with, Harry thought, a good deal of effort. It was evident that, whatever else had happened to him, he had hit his head violently against the sundial as he fell.

  “I carried him inside,” Harry said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have moved him but—” He shrugged his shoulders. “The doctor says it didn’t do any harm,” he said.

  He had telephoned the State Police for an ambulance; had telephoned a doctor down the road; had, then, telephoned Sergeant Forniss at the inn. He had put blankets over the unconscious man and, with a damp cloth, staunched the blood from the head wound. Brinkley had not been bleeding much.

  “The doctor got here first,” Harry said. “Then the ambulance. The doctor says he’ll be all right.” He drew again on the cigarette; ground it out. “What would anybody have against a man like Mr. Brinkley?” he said. “A good man.”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “We’ll find out. You didn’t hear anybody? Running, say? Or driving off in a car?”

  “No,” Harry said. “Probably he—whoever it was—got startled when he saw Mr. Brinkley fall. I was still inside then—running down the stairs. Making some noise myself. No, I didn’t hear anything.”

  “He might have been waiting,” Heimrich said. “Might have had time to reload and wait.”

  “Well,” Harry Washington said, “there wasn’t any point in worrying about that, captain. And—there wasn’t time.”

  Harry sat for a moment. Then he got up and refilled Heimrich’s cup, and Forniss’s. The coffee was very good.

  “He may be out for hours, the doctor says,” Harry told them. “But—I’d doubt he saw anything. From the way he was lying, I’d guess he had just pulled the door down, was still standing in front of it, when this bastard—” He stopped with that.

  Heimrich finished his coffee. “Let’s go look,” he said, and the three went out, across the terrace, to the garage turnaround, where the floodlight beat down whitely on gravel.

  The sundial was a few feet from the corner of the garage—more ornament, Heimrich thought, than teller of the passing hours. There was a little blood on the edge of the stone plate. “Right here, he was,” Harry Washington said, and showed them. Brinkley had, it was evident, staggered several paces before he fell. It was probable, Heimrich thought, that he had tripped on the coping of the driveway.

  The wooden garage door was scarred, where shot had hit it. The pellets had not, however, penetrated deeply.

  Bushes were planted around the curving edge of the
turnaround. Any one of them would have provided concealment. The nearest was some thirty feet distant from the door. At a guess, whoever had tried to kill Walter Brinkley, had fired over, or through, one of the bushes. The shot had had time to scatter, the aim had been a little to one side. And so Brinkley was still alive. Two troopers with flashlights were behind the bushes, searching. It seemed unlikely they would find much. The ground was hard.

  They went back inside and waited.

  “You showed a picture of Beale around, Charlie?” Heimrich asked, while they waited. “Or didn’t you get it soon enough?”

  Thanks to somebody’s Polaroid, Forniss had got a quick photograph of Conrad Beale.

  “He looked dead,” Forniss said. “But the face was clear enough.”

  Admiral Bennett—stiff as ever, crisp as ever, but with a look of almost final fatigue on his face—had looked at the picture; looked at it for several seconds.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s the man. Older, of course. Looks more like a rat than ever. But that’s Beale.”

  Commander Wilkins had looked at the photograph with stony eyes. He, too, had looked at it a long time, and then he had shaken his head. “I never saw him,” Wilkins said, and handed the photograph back.

  “He didn’t show anything,” Forniss said. “Could be he’s telling the truth. Could be he isn’t. By the way—he says he left the undertaker’s sometime after seven. He doesn’t know when. But—he didn’t get back to the house until almost ten. Says he was just driving around. You can drive quite a ways in that time.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Of course—he probably didn’t want to see anybody right away. He’s taken quite a beating, Charlie. She was young, Charlie. Very lovely. Before—”

  “She gets killed,” Forniss said, “while her first husband is in the neighborhood. And nobody’ll say where her present husband was—including him. And then, her first husband gets killed. And her second husband is—driving around somewhere. Doesn’t remember where—just driving. And, it’s a hundred to one the gun was his gun.”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been that way.”

  “They might have thought he was safely somewhere else,” Forniss said. “He might have meant them to.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “The others?”

  Neither Alan Kelley nor Dorcas Cameron had seen Beale alive, if the man photographed dead was Beale. Or—neither admitted it. Dorcas had said, “But why would the old man—” and stopped with that because, Forniss said, Alan Kelley had pressed her arm.

  “She can’t get away from it,” Forniss said. “Or—that’s the idea she gives.”

  Forniss has, Heimrich thought, precisely the right attitude for a cop to have: Don’t believe anything until you have to.

  “She and Kelley were getting a marriage license in New York,” he said, mildly. “You get around to Mrs. Craig?”

  Forniss had got around to both the Craigs. He had driven up the drive to the monstrous house only after he had made sure lights were on in it; he had found Mrs. Craig—but not, especially, Craig himself—co-operative, but not helpful.

  “He started out scratchy,” Forniss said. “What the hell was a cop doing bothering him? That sort of thing. She quieted him down. He’d never seen the man before. She hadn’t either—and it wasn’t the man who had tried to sell her brushes. The same type, perhaps, but not at all the same man.”

  “You believed them?”

  Forniss hesitated but primarily, Heimrich thought, because he was loath to believe anyone. He compromised, finally. He said he didn’t disbelieve them.

  “I—” he began, and Harry Washington, who had taken the coffee tray out, came back. He said there was something he had forgotten to tell them—something that probably didn’t matter, but that they’d probably want to hear about. At a little after ten o’clock, somebody called the professor on the telephone. Harry had said the professor wasn’t there.

  “Man or woman?” Heimrich asked.

  Harry shook his head.

  In a sense, it had been neither. Actually, of course, a woman. But—a telephone operator, with a person-to-person call. “New York,” in the abstract apparently, was calling Professor Walter Brinkley, and only him.

  “I said the professor was in New York,” Harry told them. “That he wouldn’t be back, probably, until after midnight. She said, ‘Thank you,’ and hung up.”

  “You’ve no idea who—” Heimrich said, and stopped, because the question was meaningless. The telephone company doesn’t tell who.

  “No,” Harry said. “I thought possibly it was you calling again, captain. From New York.”

  Heimrich shook his head. But he was reminded of another question—probably also fruitless. Had Harry any idea what it was Brinkley had wanted to tell the police?

  “No,” Harry said.

  “Yesterday around noon—” Heimrich said, and looked at his watch. It was Thursday, now; had been Thursday for some time. “Tuesday,” he said. “When Mrs. Wilkins probably was killed. You and Mr. Brinkley were in the village?”

  They had been. They had left the house about eleven-thirty, in the station wagon—Harry to market; Brinkley to go to the library. They had got back a little before one o’clock.

  “There weren’t any shots before we left,” Harry said. “None after we got back. But, you’d already decided it happened sometime around noon.”

  “During the morning,” Heimrich said, “what was Mr. Brinkley doing?”

  “Working,” Harry said. “Typewriter going pretty steadily—from around nine until—oh, eleven-fifteen.”

  Heimrich briefly closed his eyes. He opened them. He wondered whether, without disturbing Mr. Brinkley, he could see the room Brinkley worked in—the study, he supposed it was.

  “Office, we call it,” Harry said. “Yes. I don’t think we’ll bother him. Other side of the house from his bedroom.”

  Heimrich and Harry Washington went up the wooden stairs as silently as they could. The “office” was a square room; it held a desk and a typewriter on a separate table. It held a good deal of manuscript, neatly piled. Sitting at the typewriter, with a window behind him, Brinkley faced another window. Raising his eyes from the typewriter, as it was to be assumed he sometimes did—on the chance the word he sought was flying by outside—Brinkley looked up the ridge. He looked, Heimrich discovered—by sitting in the chair in front of the typewriter—over meadowland toward the old Adams house. The light was milky now, from half a moon. But in daylight, probably, a man with good eyes, if he happened to be looking at the right time, might well see, and identify, callers who walked from parked cars to the front door of the square white house.

  “Mr. Brinkley see well, Harry?” Heimrich asked.

  “For a man his age, very well,” Harry said. “At a distance, especially.” Harry stood and looked through the window, up the ridge. “Only,” he said, “we weren’t here at the time, captain.”

  “Someone might have come earlier,” Heimrich said. “Been there for some little time before—acting. Nobody’s come forward to say he was, Harry.”

  “It would explain a good deal,” Harry said. “I see that, captain. If Mr. Brinkley saw someone. Didn’t realize what he had seen was important until later. And—the wrong person found out he’d been seen.”

  Heimrich sat at the typewriter for a moment longer, looking up the ridge through the milky night. There were no lights on at the Adams house; not on this side of the house, at any rate. Probably, what the professor had to tell about was something he had seen, sitting in this chair, looking through this window—but looking, as Heimrich did not, over sunlit fields. Found significance in what he had seen—when? When he had seen the same person again, under other circumstances?

  There was little point in sitting there, wondering vaguely. Possibly, without meaning to, Professor Walter Brinkley had somehow become in some sense the catalytic agent Heimrich so often finds in the complex of a crime. Obviously, not precis
ely that. The professor had been acted upon.

  They went out into the upstairs hall. A door opened on the other side of the hall and a man came out through it, carrying an identifying bag. He did not close the door immediately and, looking into the room, Heimrich could see Walter Brinkley, propped up in bed. In the dim light in the room, Brinkley appeared to be sleeping peacefully, and looked healthily pink of face. The pinkness was accentuated by the wide white bandage the professor was wearing.

  “The police, doctor,” Heimrich said. “How’s the professor?”

  “Concussed,” the doctor said. “Rather mildly, I think. No sign of a fracture. Wake up with a headache, probably. And, won’t be comfortable sitting down for a few days.”

  “He’ll remember what happened?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” the doctor said. “Probably not at once. But perhaps he will. Concussion does odd things sometimes.”

  “How long?”

  “Before he comes to? I can’t tell you that, either. He’s had some sedation—not a great deal. He might come out of it in a couple of hours. It might be—oh, twenty-four. I’ve got a nurse coming.”

  He waited.

  “I’ll leave a man here,” Heimrich said. “Just to be sure.”

  “When he comes out of it,” the doctor said, “I don’t want him questioned until I’ve had another look at him. That’s understood?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Naturally.”

  “He’s going to be all right, doctor?” Harry said, and there was anxiety in his voice, in his dark, intelligent and friendly face.

  “Don’t you worry, Harry,” the doctor said.

  Heimrich and Harry Washington went downstairs. The doctor went back into Brinkley’s room. Forniss was no longer in the living room. Heimrich looked out through the french doors. Forniss was in the floodlighted area in front of the garage. He was talking to a trooper, who was holding something. I’ll be damned, Heimrich thought, and went out to join Forniss and the trooper, who was holding a shotgun by a cord run through the trigger guard.