Foggy, Foggy Death Page 17

  “Mr. Nickel,” Heimrich said, “there seems to have arisen—or to have been, perhaps—some confusion about what Marta Bromwell planned to do yesterday evening. Mr. Haas thought she was going away with him.”

  “With him?” Nickel repeated. He looked at Haas and smiled again. “That’s a new one,” he said.

  Haas looked at Nickel now. Then he looked at Heimrich.

  “How does this concern Nickel?” Haas asked. “A notorious—” he stopped and shrugged.

  “Go ahead, pal,” Nickel said. “Notorious what?”

  “It is of no importance,” Rudolph Haas said. “No doubt the captain already knows.”

  “He knows I get around,” Nickel said. “He also knows I’m legitimate. Don’t you, captain?”

  “Now Mr. Nickel,” Heimrich said. “Keep to the point. Tell Mr. Haas your—version.”

  “Why not?” Nickel said, and did.

  Nickel’s account was terse, matter of fact. Haas reddened as he listened.

  “This man is lying, captain,” he said. “He—he has some purpose. His lies are slanderous. Mrs. Bromwell planned to join me in Stamford.”

  “Sorry, Haas,” Nickel said. “No. She was coming with me. She and our kid. She was stringing you along, I guess. Using you as—”

  “You’re lying!” Haas said, and started up.

  “—cover,” Nickel said. “A fall guy—red herring—whatever you like. An ingenious little tramp, our Marta. She—”

  “You will be quiet!” Haas said, and suddenly his voice went up; suddenly, too, his whole idiom changed. “You lousy small-time—”

  “Stop it,” Heimrich said. “Sergeant!”

  “—was always a good deal of a tramp,” Nickel said, and his penetrating voice was unchanged; his faint smile still apparent. “But a damn pretty tramp, of course. Fun to—have around, wasn’t she, Haas? Every now and then, anyway. Fun in—”

  There was nothing formal, nothing dignified, about the epithets Haas shouted across the little room at Stephen Nickel. There was nothing suave in his movements. He jumped toward Nickel, and as he moved his right hand went inside his coat.

  Forniss moved fast, but the chair Haas had left was in his way. It took him only a second to swing around it, pushing it aside as he moved. But a second can be a long time.

  Nickel, his hands still hanging free, did not wait. Almost as Haas jumped, Nickel moved toward him. Karen felt a hand go up toward her lips; felt a scream forming in her throat. Heimrich was standing behind the table, and his right hand moved with startling quickness toward his left chest, under his coat. And Scott was on his feet as abruptly.

  But, with such quickness that the scream in Karen’s throat had no time to reach her lips, it was over. Haas, throwing himself forward, seemed incomprehensibly to stop; then to fall backward. His hand still was inside his coat, but it seemed to be pinned there. Then Sergeant Forniss had long arms wrapped around Haas, and the musician—no longer suave, his face distorted, ugly words gasping from his lips—was helpless.

  “He’s got a gun, you know,” Nickel said, and his voice had not changed; his breathing was unhurried. “Dangerous for such an excitable little man.”

  Then, as if unconsciously, Nickel gently rubbed his right shoulder, into which Rudolph Haas had run, and off which he had bounced.

  “One of these days,” Nickel said, “somebody’s going to get sore and push you around, Haas. Maybe even slap your face.”

  “Get his gun,” Heimrich said. Forniss got it. “You’re a fool, Haas,” Heimrich said. “And shut up. We’ve all heard enough of that.”

  Haas was suddenly quiet in Forniss’s enwrapping arms. But his face was still distorted with anger; so distorted that, until the expression faded, he looked hardly sane. Forniss turned him around and pushed him into the chair he had left.

  “My God,” Nickel said, “didn’t you know she was a tramp, Haas?”

  “Now Mr. Nickel,” Heimrich said, “we’ve had enough of that. Have you got a permit for this, Haas?” He indicated the automatic on the table in front of him. Haas had; he produced it.

  Heimrich looked slowly around at them, then. He seemed about to speak; then did not. A minute or more passed, and it passed slowly.

  “All right,” Heimrich said then, “that’s all for now.” He gestured toward the door.

  They went separately, Karen first. In the East Room, in the entrance hall beyond it, they remained separate.

  “A very violent man, Mr. Haas,” Heimrich said to Forniss in the room they had left. “Would have been glad to kill Nickel, just then. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Charlie? Suppose he did know, say yesterday evening, that Marta was what Mr. Nickel calls a tramp. Suppose he just found out then, found out she was using him—that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Charles Forniss said, but he added one word: “Higgins.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “If Haas, why Higgins? Unless it was something Higgins found out we don’t know about. Or—” He paused and closed his eyes. “We could make it really hard, of course,” he said. “Say Haas—or Nickel, for that matter—killed the girl. Or this Miss James did. Say the one who did come on Higgins right after he’d seen Bromwell last night; maybe overheard enough to realize that Higgins was trying a shake-down. Figured that killing Higgins is going to pin the other on Bromwell—as it does, Charlie. As it does, naturally. Or seems to. But then, if we hadn’t guessed Bromwell’s little plan, it wouldn’t would it? Very complicated, isn’t it?”

  Sergeant Forniss realized Heimrich was talking to himself, so all Sergeant Forniss said was “yep.”

  “Higgins was a mistake,” Heimrich said. “There’s no doubt about that. Panic or—or arrogance, Charlie. Poor Higgins was such an unimportant little man. So we could look for someone who blows up, like Haas, or someone who doesn’t—like Nickel, say.”

  He got up from behind the table.

  “Except that this is all academic now, naturally,” he said. “Interesting, but a waste of time.”

  Forniss looked at the captain and waited.

  “You know what I think I’ll do, Charlie?” Heimrich said. “I think I’ll take a nap. You’d better, too. Let them stew a while.”

  There was a leather couch in the room and Heimrich moved toward it. He waved Sergeant Forniss toward the next best bet, a deep leather chair with an ottoman in front of it.

  XII

  The gray afternoon crept; time was thick and slow; there was a kind of sullenness about time, as about the persisting fog, the steady doggedness of the freezing rain. It was as if each of those in the house carried time like a load on his shoulders. The result was weariness and more than weariness; there grew in each person under the sprawling roof of the monstrous house a feeling of futile exasperation and a nervous desire for action—for the taking of some step. As Captain Heimrich had anticipated, they stewed in it. For some the stewing was more difficult than for others, and for one—one accustomed to acting with confidence—the waiting was a greater ordeal than for any of the others.

  Conditions imposed, although tacitly, enhanced the pressure of time, increased the exacerbation of nerves. It had not been explicit that each person was to remain in his room; that mingling, conversation, was not allowed. It would have been simpler if Heimrich had ordered that. Then the order could have been resented, even resisted. But it was merely that the corridors of the second floor were occupied by State troopers—one in each wing corridor, a third at the head of the staircase. Karen discovered this an hour or so after she had left the library. She opened her door and, as she did so, a trooper was in front of her. He did not physically bar her way. He merely shook his head, then said, “I wouldn’t, miss.” Karen had been going into the children’s room, and she looked across at the door of their room. “The kids are all right, miss,” the trooper said. “Don’t you worry.” Then he looked at her until she closed her door.

  But she did not know whether this interdiction of movement, this confinement,
was something inflicted only upon her, or on all of them. She did not know whether Scott had tried to leave his room at the far end of the west corridor, and had similarly been discouraged; whether Mrs. Bromwell herself had been denied free movement through her own house. As a result, Karen felt cut off and alone and, since the others who had sought to move through the house had in fact been similarly discouraged, each of them felt similarly isolated and, perhaps, discriminated against. (Mrs. Bromwell herself had made no move to leave her room. Enforcement of the conditions was not, therefore, put to the ultimate test. But this Karen did not know.)

  So Karen was left—as all of them were left—in circumstances conducive to the development of anxiety, and with much heavy time in which to think things over. And none of them knew what Heimrich had found out, or what at the moment he was doing. Imagination was therefore encouraged to take flight. Perhaps, each of them had time to think, Heimrich is now—at this particular moment—taking some final step, fitting into place the last piece of his puzzle. Perhaps now he is getting up, summoning Sergeant Forniss, coming slowly up the stairs…. Perhaps, one of them was supposed to think, I have made a mistake and he has found it out; but perhaps there is something I can do, even now, to rectify that mistake. Perhaps I forgot something—perhaps—perhaps—

  (That Captain Heimrich, relying on such action to make certain, and evident, what he had every reason to believe true, was merely taking a nap while he waited did not occur to anyone, and was not supposed to. That he, like a chess player who has made a pressing move, could now wait, even dozingly, for the pressure to take effect upon his opponent, was a thing at once too obvious and too unlikely to occur to any of them, even to the one who had had the most experience with the working of the police mind.)

  Pressure was exerted on those who had nothing directly to do with the murder of Marta Bromwell as well as upon the person with most to hide. Even Karen Mason, who had not killed Marta, or thought of it, or of killing anyone, and who did not know who had, was not immune. Inevitably, there was some fear for herself. Heimrich had, at least for a time, suspected her, as at one time or another he had appeared to suspect each of the others—Scott, Miss James, Nickel and then Haas, even (Karen thought) Mrs. Bromwell herself. But she could not tell on which of them suspicion had finally fixed, if, by now, it had become fixed. (Without specific reason for thinking so, she felt it had.) Heimrich had listened, his eyes closed, his eyes open; he had observed them all, pointing now at one, now at another, never quite saying “You!” He might well by now believe she, or more likely she and Scott together, had planned all this, and carried it all out.

  Yet her fear was not essentially for herself, and her anxiety not primarily about what might happen to her. She did not believe—being young and having had no special interest in criminal matters—that the innocent were not always proved so, in the end. Believing Scott innocent, this should have relieved her special anxiety about him, but it did not. One is always more confident of one’s own invulnerability than of anyone’s else; it is human experience that it is the other people who die. It is someone else, and most of all someone loved, who risks losing a front wheel at seventy miles an hour. It is for someone else that the laws of nature, including the law that the innocent are proved to be so, may fail. So, knowing him to be innocent (but she repeated the word “knowing” to herself) Karen Mason was very frightened for Scott.

  Perhaps even now, Heimrich was going—had gone—to Scott and had said, “You!” and then whatever the formal words were. “Scott Bromwell, I arrest you for the murder—” Was that it?

  She moved restlessly about her room, hardly conscious she was moving, that now she was looking from one of the windows—looking the little way one could through fog and rain, her eyes encountering almost at the beginning of the drive that thickening gray wall. She looked, as the house faced, to the south, and as she stood there she could have seen—looking a little to her left, and but for the fog—the willows which grew in the Ralwood swamp; grew along the edges of the brook. Now she could see nothing except the grayness. It had been the same yesterday. Could it be that only a little less than twenty-four hours before she had gone toward the brook, calling Lorry’s name? That, twenty-four hours ago, Marta was alive? The hours since seemed many times as many.

  She had gone through the fog calling and heard other voices—and then she thought, but Marta must have been looking too, why didn’t I hear her calling? In a moment, however, she realized that it was not certain Marta had been alive. If Pauline James had been following her she might have overtaken her much earlier; must have done if, after taking the child to Nickel, she had then seen Marta and followed her as Mrs. Bromwell said. Pauline would have had time, but not too much time, to have killed Marta and then returned to the house to tell them Lorry had disappeared. If Pauline was the one. If she was not, then it must have been one of the searchers, including Nickel among them—he had after all “found” the boy—or, if he were lying about waiting in Stamford, Haas. Haas or Nickel could have killed Marta either before or after the boy was found gone; so, she realized, could Mrs. Bromwell. Scott could not, she thought, and then realized that that was wrong. She had been some time in her room, getting ready to go to New York, and during that period anything might have happened. It was hopeless.

  It was hopeless, yet something—or was it several things?—nagged at her mind. One of them was somehow associated with the direction—toward the swamp—in which she now looked from her bedroom window, seeing nothing but the grayness. Or was it associated merely with looking out the window into grayness? Was it—

  Then with a little start, unwillingly, unhappily, she found one of the things which was nagging at her mind, and it was connected with direction, not with grayness. She had gone east from the house to look for Lorry and then, half lost in the fog, must have turned south toward the swamp. But before she turned she now remembered—as she had not remembered when Heimrich questioned her—she had heard Scott calling Lorry’s name. And Scott’s voice had come from ahead of her and to her right! Then, from the direction of the swamp! That was why, running back toward the house after finding Marta’s body, she had thought Scott would be the first to hear her.

  It proved nothing—she told herself it proved nothing. She might easily have been confused; the fog, as she had insisted to Heimrich, did things to voices. Even if he had been there, or near there, it proved nothing. Scott hadn’t killed Marta. He would never have killed her, never have hurt her. That was true, however he might himself doubt, and be afraid. That had to be true.

  But Karen Mason turned from the window and sat on the bed, her head between her hands. After a time she turned and lay on the bed, on her back, one arm over her eyes.…

  The rain continued, although by four o’clock the wind had begun to back from northeast to north; at that hour, in New York City, the rain had stopped and the fog was beginning to lift a little. At High Ridge the rain varied in intensity; sometimes it was only a mist in the air. But again it was authentically rain, and at all times the ice continued to thicken.…

  For some hours, the weight of ice had been bearing hard on trees. Under the trees for some miles around twigs lay on the icy ground, and here and there a sizeable branch had fallen. Many white birches, growing erratically at angles, as white birches will, had broken off under the weight, since they are brittle trees. The oaks and maples and ashes stood it better; the older among them had stood a hundred such burdens and now only bowed a little. There was a maple a mile or two from High Ridge, on a main road, which had endured all manner of things for more than a century. Ice sheathed it and grew thicker, inexorably. The maple, moving as the wind shifted and began a little to freshen, creaked in its ice armor. One heavy bough of the old tree extended over the road, and over the power and telephone lines which ran along the road. The bough looked strong, but for a year or two it had been weakening at the crotch. Although trees which grow by the roadside are examined each spring, and pruned—and, if hazardous, tak
en down—nobody had happened to notice what was happening to the old maple….

  It was after four o’clock when Heimrich, who had been awake for fifteen minutes, sat up on the couch in the library and swung his feet to the floor. After a moment, he got up and went to one of the windows which looked out toward the east. It was already almost dark; the day’s light had never attained an intensity greater than that of dusk. Yet, peering into the growing darkness, Heimrich thought the fog was lessening. The darkness was growing harder.

  Heimrich turned and Forniss was sitting up and looking at him.

  “O. K., Charlie,” Captain Heimrich said. “Let’s push them around a little. All of them.”

  Sergeant Forniss got them. He got them in the East Room, with all of the lights, including the big light overhead, fighting the room’s shadows. He got them in what was, inescapably, a rough semi-circle around the fireplace. A fire was bright in it; during the afternoon—and this to Karen was surprising, almost grotesque—the house had continued to run, as if of itself. The late afternoon fire had been laid, and lighted; the room cleaned; the ash trays emptied. Probably as they sat there, the cook was starting dinner; William might be laying out the silver, rubbing dulled pieces with a soft cloth. As if it were a day like any other day, the routine life of the house went on. The fire was even spirited; its flames danced in the gloom, danced on the brass knobs of the tall andirons.

  Forniss did not suggest where they were to sit, except generally that they were to be in a group. But by force of habit, those who came first—Scott, Pauline James, Karen—left the big chair to the right of the fireplace for Mrs. Bromwell. The lines in Scott’s face were deep; he looked at Karen and then, without conveying any message to her, looked away again. Haas came next, and now his smooth face showed nothing. He said, “Good afternoon” to all of them and sat down as far away from them as circumstances permitted. Then Stephen Nickel walked down the room from the hall, looked around and said, “Well, very comfortable, anyway,” and sat down next to Karen. Pauline James put a hand to her forehead when he came in, shielding her face.