I Want to Go Home Page 18

  “No reporters,” the trooper said. “What do you want?”

  “Mrs. Phillips,” the man said. “Is she here? I have to see her.”

  “Yeah?” the trooper said.

  “For God’s sake, man,” the hatless one said. “For God’s sake give me a break. Is she all right?”

  “Mrs. Phillips?” the trooper said. “I guess so. You want to see her?”

  Ray Forrest merely looked at the trooper.

  “I don’t know,” the trooper said. “You a friend of hers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody said anything about you. Who are you?”

  “Listen,” Ray said. “I’m a friend of Mrs. Phillips. Is there some reason I can’t see her?” He moved forward. “What’s happened?”

  “Well,” the trooper said, “you can see Heimrich, if he wants to see you. It’s up to him, fella. What’s your name?” He listened. “Yeah,” he said. “Friend of Mrs. Phillips.”

  “God,” Ray said. “Yes!”

  “Don’t get tough, fella,” the trooper said. “It’s what I’m here for. Come ahead.”

  The trooper went ahead, staying close to Ray Forrest. They went into the square central hall and the trooper knocked on a door on the right. Then he opened it.

  “Captain,” he said, “there’s a guy here. Says he’s a friend of this Mrs. Phillips. You want?”

  Ray could see into the room. A square-faced man was sitting in a chair, with his head restfully against the back of the chair. He looked as if he had just opened his eyes. Another man, larger, was standing in front of him, his head now turned toward the door.

  “Bring him in,” the man in the chair said. “Why not?”

  Ray went in and the man in the chair stood up.

  “My name’s Forrest,” Ray said. “What’s happened? Has something happened to her?”

  “Not to Mrs. Phillips,” the man who had just stood said. “Why did you think something had, Mr. Forrest?”

  Ray motioned toward the trooper. He extended the motion to include the other two in the room.

  “Yes,” the shorter of the two square-faced men said. “Naturally. The place is full of cops. I’m Heimrich. This is Sergeant Forniss. Both cops. But why would you think something had happened to Mrs. Phillips?” He shook his head. “Why not burglars?” he said, and looked at Ray Forrest with interest, his eyes wide open now.

  “Was it?” Ray said.

  “Oh no,” Heimrich said. “Murder, Mr. Forrest.” He nodded. “Mrs. Phillips’ aunt,” he said. “Her great-aunt. Mrs. Meredith.”

  “Oh,” Ray said. “Jane’s all right, then? She got here?”

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. She got here. Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Because she was kidnaped once,” Forrest said. His voice was hard with impatience. “In Kansas City. Hauled off a train.” He looked at Heimrich without friendliness. “While the cops cheered, so far as I can tell,” he added.

  “Now Mr. Forrest,” Heimrich said. He waved toward a chair and sat down again in his own. “Now Mr. Forrest. How do you know? Did she tell you that?”

  “When?” Forrest said, not sitting. “I haven’t found her yet. Haven’t seen her. Haven’t known what happened to her.” He did sit down, and leaned forward. “She was in danger getting here,” he said. “That’s why I came after her.”

  “From Los Angeles?”

  “Why not?” Ray said. “Sure. They tried to get her there. I realized it after she left and came after her. I was going to catch up with her in Chicago, I thought. But they got her in Kansas City.” He looked hard at Heimrich. “Well?” he said.

  “You’re upset,” Heimrich told him. “Naturally. But she got here. She is here. Nothing’s happened to her.”

  “The hell’s nothing happened to her,” Ray said. “The hell it hasn’t. Ask her. Let me ask her.” He stood up. “Where is she?” he demanded.

  “Sit down, Mr. Forrest,” Heimrich said. “Why did you come here? Instead of going to Kansas City? If you thought she was there?”

  Quickly, in curt outline, Ray told him of his pursuit of Jane, of his uncertainty in Chicago, of his efforts to meet her in New York, of his final glimpse of her near the Grand Central. “Where would I go?” he finished.

  “Here,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. You met all the trains?”

  “I tried to.”

  “The planes?”

  Ray told him what he had done about the planes. Heimrich nodded.

  “For your information,” he said, “she says she changed at Newark, came in at the Hudson Terminal.”

  “Of course!” Ray said. “Damn!”

  Heimrich shut his eyes and said Ray couldn’t be everywhere. He did not open his eyes, and he said: “Actually, she was apparently already here last night. In time to poison her aunt.” Then Heimrich waited, still with his eyes closed. But Ray Forrest did not say anything and after a time the detective opened his eyes and found that Forrest was looking at him, studying him with an odd, controlled intentness. Heimrich met the eyes of the younger man.

  “You don’t believe it,” Forrest told him. “You’re not a fool. It’s part of the same thing. Of what they tried to do to her on the way.” He paused and spoke again. “Damn it, man,” he said. “You think she can’t prove this. Ask her.”

  “Oh, I asked her,” Heimrich said. “It’s quite a story.”

  “Provable,” Forrest said. “It would be.”

  “Could be,” Heimrich said, correcting. “If it happened. Naturally.”

  “It happened in Los Angeles,” Ray said. “And, a little after she left, somebody telephoned her from here. Why? To see if she’d got started.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes. Heimrich pointed out that Mr. Forrest had not told him about that.

  Ray told him.

  “The voice?” Heimrich said.

  Ray shrugged. A man’s voice. Anybody’s voice. And another man denying that there had been a call to Jane Phillips.

  “You can check,” Ray pointed out, and Heimrich opened his eyes, said, “Naturally,” and closed them again. Then, without opening them, he nodded to Forniss, who said, “O.K.” and went out.

  “Suppose what she says is true,” Ray said. “Suppose it.”

  “Now Mr. Forrest,” Heimrich said. “I have supposed it.” He opened his eyes quite wide. “I’m not part of any conspiracy,” he said. “Naturally not. If there is a conspiracy. I just want to find things out, Mr. Forrest.” He went so far as to lean forward in the chair. “Everything. This telephone call to Los Angeles, now. I’m glad to find that out. Anything else you know.”

  “I don’t know the picture,” Ray pointed out. “The shape of it. What we’d call the story line.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You don’t, Mr. Forrest. Tell me about Mrs. Phillips. Why did she want to come home?”

  “I don’t know,” Forrest said. “She didn’t know. I mean, there wasn’t any definite reason. She just wanted to.”

  “For how long?”

  “She began to talk about it—oh, about a month ago. I think she made up her mind a couple of weeks ago. She wrote a letter to her great-aunt last week, I think.”

  “Wednesday,” Heimrich said. “They got it Friday. They didn’t tell the old lady.” He had leaned back and closed his eyes. Now he opened them. “They thought it would be too exciting for her,” he said. “She was pretty sick. The doctor gave her a week. Last Friday that was. He was an optimist, you see.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Well?” Heimrich said. “What else?”

  “She doesn’t lie,” Ray said. “She’s sincere.” He paused and shook his head. “They’ve made it a cliché,” he said. “But that’s it—she’s a candid person.”

  “Did she talk about her relatives? These people here? Her aunt? All the rest of them?”

  “Not much,” Ray said. “About her aunt, some. She said her aunt was the nearest she’d had to a mother. She said her aunt was a dear. Then she said she sou
nded like Cousin Alice, calling people dear. She said it was a big old house. She said her aunt hadn’t approved of her marriage or of her going into the Navy. I gathered her aunt liked to direct things, be in charge.”

  “She wanted to see her aunt? Make things up with her?”

  “I suppose so,” Ray said. “Only, I think it was—I don’t know exactly how to phrase it. More general than that. She just wanted to come home. Get oriented again. Once she laughed and said, ‘I want a fix, Ray. You know what that is?’”

  “Did you?”

  Ray nodded and said he had, near enough. It was a known place, a located place. It could be a place to go on from, a point of departure.

  “Or arrival,” Heimrich said. “Yes. A navigator’s term. I suppose she heard it used in the Navy. Naturally.”

  “Well,” Ray said, “I think it was that, more than anything. A lot of people were that way after they had got out. She was in a good while, for a girl.”

  “She never mentioned that her aunt was ill?” Heimrich said. Ray shook his head. “Or that there was a lot of money?”

  “Oh yes,” Ray said. “Casually. She has her own money.”

  “A lot?”

  “My God,” Ray said. “I don’t know.”

  “The old lady had a lot,” Heimrich said. “Somebody wanted it, and didn’t want to wait. That’s what did it.”

  “All right,” Ray said. “Not Jane.”

  Heimrich did not answer that. Ray waited and after a time Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “I want to see her,” Ray said. “Now. Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “To help her,” Heimrich said. “Naturally.”

  But he did not seem to have ended the conversation. He kept his eyes open.

  “Actually,” he said, “I don’t mind in the least. It might be helpful. Keep things moving. Stirred up. You know what a detective is in conditions like this, Mr. Forrest?”

  Ray merely looked at him.

  “Not all detectives, naturally,” Heimrich said. “We differ. I try to be a focus of irritation.” He closed his eyes. “It seems to work,” he offered then, mildly.

  “Then I can see Jane?”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “You feel you’ve got the picture?”

  “No,” Ray said.

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Your Mrs. Phillips leaves Los Angeles,” Heimrich said. “She was due here this morning, twenty-four hours within the time limit the doctor tentatively set. She was—well, says she was delayed. She got here tonight. That’s what she says. Monday, at about the time your Mrs. Phillips was getting on the train in Los Angeles, her great-aunt had a serious upset. Digestive, you know. Vomiting and everything. By Tuesday she thought she was being poisoned and told young Arthur Meredith, who told us. We talked to the doctor. She wasn’t being poisoned.”

  “Jane was still in Los Angeles,” Ray pointed out.

  “I said that,” Heimrich said. “She couldn’t have poisoned her great-aunt, then. But—her great-aunt wasn’t poisoned—then. She just ate something that disagreed with her. As a matter of fact, it seems to have been shrimps. But the cook says she didn’t give her shrimps. Naturally, because she knew the old lady had an allergy to shrimps. But the cook says some left-over shrimps disappeared and that there were traces of shrimps in a meat grinder.”

  “I don’t—” Ray began. Heimrich shook his head.

  “Odd,” he said. “I’m telling you what I hear. So you can help. Tuesday the old girl was sick again. That’s when she told Arthur, who told us.” He opened his eyes. “You see this, Mr. Forrest,” he said. “If nothing else had happened, we’d have thought she was an old lady who was getting delusions. Imagining things. Senile dementia. Mental incapacity. Anyway, we might have thought that. Anybody might have.”

  “Yes,” Ray said.

  “In which case, she couldn’t change her will again, could she?” Heimrich said, with interest. “Put Mrs. Phillips back in. She’s not in now, you know. Not to any extent. It’s this way—” He told Ray about the will. He waited for comment, and got it in a narrowing of Ray Forrest’s eyes. Heimrich seemed content with that.

  “She was sick off and on until this morning,” Heimrich said. “Then she died very suddenly of nicotine in her medicine. There was enough left to kill a couple more people. In the medicine. The medicine was all right last night, at about eight o’clock. It killed Mrs. Meredith this morning.”

  “The medicine bottle?”

  “In the room, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Taken out, poisoned, put back. The night nurse was asleep.”

  “For God’s sake!” Ray said.

  “She thinks she was given sleeping powder,” Heimrich said. “In some coffee she warmed up for herself about midnight. She says she thinks that. Maybe she just went to sleep. She had night duty and had been in town all day, instead of sleeping. Or maybe the medicine was poisoned while the nurse was warming the coffee.”

  “But look,” Ray said. “Don’t you have to come closer than that?”

  Heimrich opened his eyes fully. He said he might, if he needed to.

  “At the moment,” he said, “I’m told Mrs. Phillips was seen leaving the house at about two o’clock this morning. Perhaps that’s close enough.”

  “There’s your murderer,” Ray said. “That—whoever told you that.”

  “You think so?” Heimrich said.

  “Which one of them?” Ray said.

  “John Lockwood,” Heimrich said. “The lawyer. A careful man, I’d think, Mr. Forrest. He—”

  “Wait a minute!” Ray said. “When did he tell you this?”

  “A little after we got here. About ten-thirty this morning.”

  “Listen,” Ray said. “Suppose she had come in on the Century. She couldn’t have got here by then.”

  Heimrich nodded and waited.

  “So—this Lockwood knew she wasn’t on the Century. He knew it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have said that. If he was honest, if he didn’t know she wasn’t on the train, he’d have waited to see whether she showed up. On the chance that it might have been someone else he’d seen, on the chance she could prove she’d come on the Century and hence couldn’t have been here last night. He hadn’t met the train, had he? No—of course not. He couldn’t have been here either. So, he was the one—.”

  But Captain Heimrich was shaking his head.

  “I thought of that, Mr. Forrest,” he said. “Naturally. He had a man from his office meet the train. He telephoned this man, a young fellow named Carroll, about a quarter of ten and Carroll told him the girl hadn’t showed up. So, you see, you go too fast. Very natural.”

  “This Carroll might have missed her,” Ray said. “He couldn’t be sure.”

  Heimrich shrugged at that. He said that, apparently, Lockwood had confidence in Carroll.

  “And after all,” he said, “she wasn’t on the train. You know that. She admitted that before you came. So Carroll was right.”

  “I—” Ray began, and his voice was doubtful. A knock at the door interrupted him, and Forniss stood in the door. “Mrs. Phillips,” Forniss began, but then he moved aside without finishing, and Jane was in the doorway. She was there only for a second, and then she was almost running across the room.

  “Ray!” she said. “Oh—Ray!”

  He held her very close to him, his hands behind her shoulders. “All right, Jane,” he said. “All right.”

  She pulled back and looked at him.

  “Ray,” she said. “How did you—? You came after me!”

  “It’s all right,” he said again, still holding her.

  “They think I killed Aunt Susan,” she said. “All of them. They—look at me. Hate me.” She shook her head, still leaning back against his hands, looking in his face. “They’re all together,” she said. Neither of them seemed conscious of Captain Heimrich, who had stood up when Jane came into the room and whose eyes were open now—quite wide open, quite interested. Forniss stood in the doorway, and his e
yes, too, were interested. Then Ray Forrest turned his head to look at Heimrich and said, “They could be, you know. Just that.”

  “Now Mr. Forrest,” Heimrich said. “Now let’s look at it. Why don’t you and Mrs. Phillips sit down?”

  “You,” Jane said. “Can’t you see?”

  Heimrich shook his head slowly.

  “Not altogether, Mrs. Phillips,” he said. “Naturally.” He did not say why it was natural. “You wanted to see me?”

  “No,” she said. “I—I just had to get away. Out of that room. And then I thought I heard Ray.” She looked back at Ray. “I thought I heard you and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. Because you were in California. But you’re not.”

  Ray took her to a chair and she sat in it, and held to one of his hands. Again he said it was all right. But he looked at Heimrich and was angry. “What’ve you been doing to her?” he said. “What’s the game?”

  Heimrich shook his head and said there was no game. He sat down and leaned his head against the back of the chair in the manner which had already, to Ray, become oddly familiar, expected.

  “Nobody’s doing anything to anybody,” he said. “Naturally, Mr. Forrest. They’re just—available for questioning.” He opened his eyes and looked at Ray. “Waiting.”

  “Talking,” Ray said. “Wondering what the hell.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes again. “Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “And you?” Ray said.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said again. “They know I’m here, Mr. Forrest. They wonder about me.” He nodded slightly. “So hard to let things lie. Naturally. Somebody will want to do something. Like Mrs. Phillips here.” He smiled faintly. “You’d like to do something, wouldn’t you, Mr. Forrest?” He opened his eyes. “What?”

  “Make you see sense,” Ray told him. “This started when Jane was in Los Angeles. She’s out of it. You know that.” Heimrich, Ray saw, was keeping his eyes open. “You don’t think the shrimps were an accident?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Oh no.”

  “Then?” Ray said.

  “She didn’t die of shrimps,” Heimrich said. “And when she died Mrs. Phillips wasn’t in Los Angeles. I don’t know where she was.”