Death and the Gentle Bull Page 17

  It was not over.

  “You recognized this man, Miss Merritt?”

  She looked up again, looked at Captain Heimrich. She nodded her head slowly. He had wanted it this way; wanted this held until the end. One way was as good as another.

  “Who was it?”

  The word was no more difficult than any other word, no harder to say and no easier, no dryer in the mouth.

  “Wade,” she said. “It was Wade.”

  Now it was over. She looked down again at her hands. Dully, she felt that Wade Landcraft was looking at her across the room; dully she knew that he had started to get to his feet, and that Heimrich had stopped him with a gesture. But these things happened far away, dimly.

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded her head.

  She heard her name, spoken sharply, with demand. It was Wade’s voice. “Listen to me, Evvie. Listen to me. No. No, Evvie. It wasn’t—” She did not look at him. “Listen to me!” She listened, did not hear. But she heard the words.

  “You deny it, naturally,” Heimrich said. “I take it you do, Mr. Landcraft?”

  She did not hear an answer; Wade had merely nodded his head.

  “She saw you.”

  “She couldn’t have,” Wade said. “I was nowhere near. I wouldn’t hurt Evvie—not Evvie. Beyond anybody. Don’t you see that?”

  He seemed to speak to Heimrich. But, although she did not look up, she could feel his eyes on her; feel—but dimly, from behind the fogged glass which separated her from the others—the demand in his gaze, and in his voice.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I’m afraid I don’t, Mr. Landcraft. I’m afraid it all hangs together very well.”

  She would not listen any more; there was nothing more to be said that mattered. But still she heard the words.

  “It all adds up,” Heimrich said, and spoke slowly and was not interrupted. “Your mother—for money, to get away from a life you hated.”

  (That was not the word, she thought; it did not matter, but the word was wrong. No—it must have been right. She had not thought Wade hated the life at Deep Meadow, but only that he was restless there, unsatisfied. But, he must have hated it. She had been wrong there, too—wrong about hate as about love.)

  “—wanted to sell out,” Heimrich said. “To get away. Your mother wouldn’t sell. Her life was here. And so her death was, naturally.”

  Still Wade did not speak.

  “Then Smith,” Heimrich said. “Did he see something, Mr. Landcraft? Threaten to tell what he had seen? Or—was it merely to give us someone, when you realized we were going to get someone? A murderer who committed suicide. It could have been that simple, naturally.”

  Wade did not speak. Perhaps slowly, hopelessly, he shook his head again. She did not look to see.

  “Murder without hate, as Mrs. Landcraft said.” Heimrich’s voice went on, heavy, uninflected, without emotion. She supposed that it had to be this way; that all which was obvious had to be said in words, spelled out. She heard the words. “A little man of no importance. A man who—”

  “Listen, mister,” Alec Ballard’s voice said. “I don’t know about the rest. Got it right, I guess. But—nobody would kill Smitty just for that. Get him drunk and put him in that place—just to get yourself out of something.”

  There was a pause, then, but it was brief.

  “You don’t think so, Mr. Ballard?” Heimrich said. “It’s hard to tell what people will do. Sometimes I think—” He let the sentence hang, started over. “Perhaps Smith saw something,” he said. “Saw too much. It doesn’t matter a great deal. He was killed. Got drunk, as you say, Mr. Ballard, and put in the pump house to die. It looked like a tomb. I thought that when I first—”

  (The numbness was wearing away a little; words were eroding it. Would he go on forever? Was there never an end? Would he say over and over what was obvious—that Wade had killed, and killed again, and tried once more to kill?)

  “You got him drunk,” Heimrich said, and it was clear that he still spoke to Wade—spoke inexorably to Wade. But she did not look at Wade, did not look at anyone. “The first plan was to push him over the quarry cliff, of course. But—you were seen, or thought you were. Identified—or thought you were. It didn’t make much difference which, as long as you doubted. Miss Merritt.”

  She heard him, looked up at him.

  “Again,” he said. “You say you didn’t recognize the men by the car last night? You still say that?”

  She nodded her head, and looked down again at her hands.

  “But you couldn’t know,” Heimrich said. “There was that doubt. A frightening doubt, naturally. She might be lying, for some reason. Most likely to protect someone. And—whom would she protect? We come to that, don’t we? Only one man, of course. But, even that man—how long? We come to that too. It’s hard to believe a man will kill his mother. Maybe Miss Merritt couldn’t make herself believe it. Kept on hoping, as people do. But after Smith—well, there wasn’t any doubt about that. If she’d recognized the man, she’d have told then—or told soon. Whoever he was.”

  (On and on he went; heavily, spelling it out. Why didn’t he get it over with? When it was over with she could go—But it didn’t matter where she went.)

  “So the attack on Miss Merritt,” Heimrich said. “That turned out to be the next step, naturally. To make sure. Things hadn’t worked out as they’d been planned. Mrs. Landcraft’s death wasn’t taken as accident, as it was supposed to have been. When I found the pump house locked from the outside, Smith’s death wasn’t suicide. So—there had to be another step. What happened tonight. Because—”

  “No,” Wade said. “I tell you, no! I was nowhere near there. Down at the barns, getting the bulls in. They’d been put out, as usual, and I looked down and they were still out—in the fog. So—”

  “Now Mr. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “In the barns? Wearing that hat?”

  He pointed to the hat on the chair.

  “I don’t know,” Wade said. “What about the hat?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “Miss Merritt recognized your hat, Mr. Landcraft. It’s quite recognizable. One of the ways she knew it was you. The hat was unmistakable, even in the fog.”

  “I don’t—” Wade said, and stopped, and when he spoke again there was a new note in his voice. “No, I wasn’t,” he said. “Picked it up off the nail in the big bam when I came through on my way—” But the new note faded. “What’s the use?” he said. “You’ve got it all added up and—”

  “No,” Harvey Landcraft said, and there was a sharpness in his voice that startled Evelyn, so that she looked at him, and saw he was leaning forward under a light. “It doesn’t all add, captain. Because—why is Evvie still alive?”

  It was only that; it had been foolish to think it was any more than that.

  “Why, Mr. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “She told us that. She struggled, got loose. She’s an active young woman, obviously. Hard to hold on to anybody who wants to get away bad enough.”

  “And ran and got away?” Harvey said. “From a man Wade’s size? Who had a flashlight? Hell, captain, don’t you—”

  “I’ll tell you,” Alec Ballard said, “the captain’s right, Mr. Landcraft. Likely you haven’t had much experience. But you get anybody who’s real scared and tries real hard—Hell, I’ve had trouble holding on to a scared cat. You wouldn’t know, living in the city. Ask anybody’s been around animals—Mr. Thayer over there.”

  There was a long pause. And now, although it was nothing—a thing meaningless in itself, a detail unduly stressed—Evelyn looked across the room at Arnold Thayer, who sat in a shadow and who remained in a shadow, who said:

  “Wouldn’t know, Alec. No use bringing me into it.” He paused. “Or trying to,” he said. “Actually, no point I can see in my staying around. So—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “We’re about done, Mr. Thayer. Stay around.”

  “Captain” Bonita Landcraft said. “Listen to Harvey. Don’t y
ou see?”

  “Now Mrs. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “See? Go on, Mrs. Landcraft.”

  She said, “Harv?”

  “All right,” Harvey Landcraft said. “If Evvie got killed, she couldn’t identify Wade, could she? But, if she was grabbed, and let go and chased a little way, she could identify the one who did it, couldn’t she? Or—the kind of hat he was wearing.”

  (She was awake, now. There was a wild hurrying in her mind. The hat—but of course it was Wade! He had come as he often came, to the locked door of her room. He had stood outside on the terrace as he often stood, and—But it had been the hat which had made her certain. The rest had come afterward. It had been—)

  “Expecting it to be Wade because, I imagine, he often went to this door of hers,” Harvey said. “Seeing the hat—it’s a hell of a hat, Wade. And, from that, everything falling together, or seeming to, so that—”

  “Tell you what it is, Mr. Landcraft,” Alec Ballard said. “You ought to write stories. Know how you feel but, hell, you try to hold on to somebody who’s scared and you’d find out. Even a guy as little as Smitty, you’d—”

  He stopped, and there was suddenly a very heavy silence in the room. The silence lay there for seconds, and something sang in Evelyn Merritt’s mind.

  “Yes, Mr. Ballard,” Heimrich said, and spoke slowly. “Even a guy as little as Smitty. Even when he was drunk, probably. When he heard the padlock snap and—”

  Alec Ballard was standing up; he stepped toward Heimrich.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “What the hell you saying, mister? If you think you can pull another frame-up on—”

  But once more he stopped, and now, at a signal from Heimrich, Ray Crowley moved beside the big man. And Heimrich stood, too.

  “Another frame-up, Ballard?” Heimrich said. “There was only one, you know. But—how do you know, Ballard? The door wasn’t locked, until I locked it. That was a frame. Murder framed to look like murder. But—how did you know, Ballard? And Smith was drunk when he died. But—how did you know, Ballard? You weren’t told that, Ballard.”

  Ballard looked at him a moment, dully. He shook his head, slowly.

  “You’ll never get away with it,” he said. But there was no certainty in his voice. “You’d have to prove I stood to get something out of it and—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t, actually. But, I can of course. That stood out all along. You all see that, surely. You do, don’t you, Mr. Thayer?”

  “The way I said,” Arnold Thayer said, and there was no inflection in his voice. “There’s no use trying to bring me into it. Nothing to do with me.”

  Ballard began to swear, then. He turned toward Thayer, and cursed him, and made as if to move toward him. But there were enough of them to stop him.

  XV

  They sat at a corner table on the porch of the Inn at Ridgefield. Heimrich sat at the end of the table, his back to West Lane; Wade Landcraft and Evelyn Merritt sat on his right, Harvey and Bonita at his left. He felt slightly paternal—at any rate avuncular. They finished petites crêpes confiture, drank espresso and were replete; the breeze under the awning was gentle, softly cool. “Worth the trip?” Harvey asked, having suggested it, and there were contented sighs. Bonita patted her husband’s wrist and told him he had been very bright to think of it.

  He assured her it had been nothing to think of—that they had all needed a deep breath of different air, needed an interval. “Out of the night that covered us,” Bonita said and then looked across the table at Evelyn and did not say anything, but smiled at her. “Oh,” Evelyn said, “I’m fine. I—” She looked at Wade, and there was something uncertain in her expression. Wade touched her hand.

  “All the same,” Evelyn said. “I should have known.” She turned to the solid, blue-eyed man at the end of the table. She said, “You did, didn’t you? Knew it wasn’t Wade?”

  Heimrich poured black-roasted coffee into a tiny cup, twisted lemon peel over it, and drew deeply from his cigarette. Blue smoke from his lips floated over the chimneyed candles. He nodded his head.

  “You said,” Wade told him, “that it stood out all along.” Heimrich nodded again. He closed his eyes.

  “Please, captain,” Bonny Landcraft said. “Awake, for morning in the—”

  “I don’t,” Harvey said, “know why I ever taught you to read.”

  It was often this way, Heimrich thought, and opened his eyes. Afterward, there was a flight to frivolity. The faces of the four still showed strain, and Evelyn’s the most.

  “You had no way of knowing, Miss Merritt,” Heimrich said.

  “You could have told me,” she said. “But—you wanted—what? I suppose you thought I wouldn’t be able to act. But—what difference did it make?”

  “Now Miss Merritt,” Heimrich said. “It helped. I wanted him to move. To make a mistake.” He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray. “You were right, of course,” he said, and spoke to Harvey Landcraft. “Miss Merritt couldn’t have got away—from Ballard, from either of you, for that matter—unless she’d been let get away. That was obvious.”

  “Not to me,” Evelyn said. “Oh—not to me, captain.”

  She had not been, Heimrich told her, in a position to consider with detachment. Ballard had been; when he had begun to argue that Evelyn’s apparent escape had been real, he had begun to move.

  “In other words,” Bonny said, “you led him along. Gave him enough rope.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “In other words.”

  “And,” Wade said, “already knew.”

  “Now Mr. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t see any other way things fitted—crime and character. I was fairly certain. But—I needed something overt. Unintentional admissions. Something like his attempt to attack Thayer, when he saw Thayer getting out from under.” He lighted another cigarette. “Thayer probably will get out from under, incidentally,” he said. “He’s grown quite talkative, Mr. Thayer has. In an innocent way. The district attorney is pleased with him.”

  “Ballard’s not talking, I suppose?” Harvey said. He was told that Ballard was not talking—yet. Not in the sense meant. He was being questioned. He was answering questions; answering many of them time after time. It was the usual thing, prompted by the usual necessities—the matters of time and place, of the specific how, the precise when; the details which filled out the picture, once you had the outline of the picture.

  “You arrest first, get the evidence afterward,” Harvey said, and added that it was very interesting.

  “Now Mr. Landcraft,” Heimrich said, and smiled faintly. “It’s not quite that simple. But in a sense—yes, I suppose I do.”

  “It seems to me,” Bonny said, “that you also invent evidence.”

  “Now Mrs. Landcraft,” Heimrich said. “Let’s say I arrange circumstances a little. Increase tensions a little. I wouldn’t have taken the padlock matter into court, naturally.”

  “The defense will,” Harvey said, and Heimrich shrugged. He said the defense might, if they thought it would help them. He said he doubted whether it would, since suicide was out, anyway—or a possibility too remote to be considered seriously.

  They waited.

  “Autopsy,” Heimrich said. “Alcohol in the blood. High concentration—point forty something. Unless the man had great resistance, he was in a coma. He didn’t have great resistance—we’ve checked on that. He was too drunk to kill himself. The defense will be reasonable doubt.”

  He did not continue. The reasonable doubt would be Wade Landcraft; there was no use bringing that up now, if it had been missed. He doubted it had. Well, it would worry them. That couldn’t be helped.

  “He won’t get away with it?” Harvey asked and Heimrich said, “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. The whole pattern’s too much against him. Who else would frame the bull?”

  Again they waited. He said it must be obvious; pointed out that he had already given them the outline, after Ballard’s arrest the night before.


  “I’m not sure,” Wade Landcraft said, “that Evvie and I were—were listening very carefully.” His hand was still on hers.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Probably not. Well—for Ballard the method was a part of the motive. It wouldn’t have been for anyone else—for either of you.” He indicated the brothers. “Suppose you—or you—had wanted money badly enough to kill your mother to get it. Suppose one of you, or both of you together, had decided to kill her. Your purpose would have been to sell the herd, naturally. Get the cash. Naturally, you’d have wanted to sell as high as you could.

  “So, you might have arranged an accident, or tried to. But—the accident wouldn’t have involved the bull. You know enough about breeding, Wade, to know that that would bring his value down—bring the whole herd’s value down. Perhaps not as much as Thayer wanted you to believe. It was to his advantage to exaggerate. But—nobody wants a mean bull. They breed mean.* Your whole interest would be to keep the value up.

  “Ballard’s interest was exactly opposite—to bring it down. That was his deal with Thayer—the way Thayer tells it, anyway. Thayer hinted enough when Crowley and I were talking to him to put me on the track. Not that the track wasn’t pretty obvious anyway. Thayer says, now, that Ballard came to him and said, ‘How’d you like to pick up Prince for twenty-five or thirty thousand?’ Thayer says he just laughed, asked who wouldn’t. ‘O.K.,’ he says Ballard said, ‘if I can get him for you for that, do I get a half interest? Or—some sort of deal to breed heifers to him?’ Thayer says he thought Ballard was having a pipe-dream, hadn’t any idea what Ballard planned. Maybe he hadn’t—then. He denies he ever did have. Well—Anyway, he doesn’t deny he promised Ballard a deal—not a full share in the bull, he says, but ‘a good deal.’