Accent on Murder Read online

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  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You broke the lock—I agree it wasn’t much of a lock. You went in. Beale wasn’t there, I gather.”

  “No,” Wilkins said. “I—looked around.”

  “You did indeed,” Heimrich said. Then he leaned a little forward. “And wore gloves, didn’t you? Gloves you just happened to have handy?”

  “Captain,” Dorcas said. “You’re not being—”

  “No, Miss Cameron?” Heimrich said. “Whoever killed Mrs. Wilkins wasn’t being fair. Well, commander?”

  “There’s not much use in this, is there?” Wilkins said. “You figure you know all of it. Nice and neat and simple.”

  “The gloves?” Heimrich said.

  “What’s the use?” Wilkins said, but then, “All right. Yes. I did just happen to have them. Before I went to—to where she was—I changed. Put on a dark suit. One I hadn’t worn since—oh, sometime in the winter. There was a pair of gloves in one of the pockets. A pretty thin story, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And—you put them on, why? To keep your hands warm?”

  (If a man under strain is taunted, a man may flare, lose control. If he is that kind of a man, has that kind of character; is a man who might, more greatly challenged—challenged on the dearest thing he knew—explode into violence. In short, into murder.)

  There were arms on the chair Wilkins sat in. He moved suddenly, gripped the arms of the chair hard—so hard the knuckles of both hands whitened. His whole body tensed, as if he were about to come out of the chair. Then, slowly, as if mind shouted orders to unwilling muscles—shouted them down, commanded them down—the gripping hands relaxed. Preparatory tenseness went out of the body.

  “No,” Wilkins said, in an entirely steady voice. “You’re a very funny man, captain. But—no. So that I wouldn’t leave prints. For your men to find if Beale raised a howl. Does that suit you, captain?”

  “You didn’t find anything? For all your looking? What were you looking for?”

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “Letters? That sort of thing?”

  “Anything. I don’t know what.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “the gun? The gun used to kill your wife. Was that it? And—didn’t you find it? Know then that Beale was the killer? And—figure he’d come back? Park his car in the lot? Get out of it under the light?”

  “It’s no use, is it?” Wilkins said. “No—and no and no. As many noes as you want. And won’t listen to.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “perhaps this, Wilkins?”

  He took out of his pocket the photograph of a blocklike man, of a slender, pretty girl with a face which described nothing—of The Dutchman Schneider, and Opal Schneider, who had been Opal Potter. He held it out to Wilkins, who looked at it, and did not touch it.

  “In his suitcase,” Heimrich said. “If you looked at all thoroughly, you found it.”

  “All right,” Wilkins said. “I found it. Looked at it. Put it back. It hadn’t anything to do with us. With—Carry. Just an old picture of people I never saw before.”

  “Wilkins,” Heimrich said, “was it Beale Professor Brinkley saw at the house that day? And—did he tell you he’d seen Beale? So that, when he heard Beale was dead, he’d come to me and say, ‘Captain. This man Beale was around at about the time she was killed and I told Commander Wilkins about it’?”

  “No,” Wilkins said. The word came, seemingly, by a great effort.

  “Did you realize that if he told us that you’d have had it? Did you put in a person-to-person call to him last night to find out whether he was home? Find out he wasn’t and go there to—wait for him? The way you waited for Beale? And—”

  “No,” Wilkins said. “Oh—you can fit it together. I realize that. But—it’s all wrong.” He looked at Heimrich steadily. “All wrong,” he repeated. “But that’s no good, is it? Not good enough.”

  It wasn’t, Heimrich thought. By all logic, denials—and the steadiness of eyes—weren’t good enough. Why, then, the reluctance which was a shadow in his mind? Because Caroline Wilkins had been a girl with life stretching ahead, and seeming to stretch bright? Because Conrad Beale had been—what he evidently was, and a murderer to boot? Because, if one could stand off and judge, weigh value against value, Caroline and Brady Wilkins, singly or together, might be toted as outweighing a hundred Beales?

  It is not for the police to stand off and judge. Heimrich, a policeman first, has often to do things he does not, as a man, want to do. He had to do one of them now. He stood up slowly.

  “Commander Wilkins,” he said, “I’m afraid I have to—”

  He stopped. A big car came up the driveway. Paul Craig was driving it and his wife sat beside him. There was, Heimrich thought, a curious rigidity in their attitudes.

  A plump man who seemed to be wearing a white turban was in the back seat of the big car.

  XV

  WALTER BRINKLEY, professor emeritus of English Literature, got out of the car first. He got out a little awkwardly. He appeared to be wearing a bright yellow shirt, bright blue slacks and a tweed jacket—rather greenish in general effect—in addition to a white turban. He got out of the car awkwardly, it was apparent, because he had a revolver in his right hand and was pointing it at Mr. and Mrs. Paul Craig.

  He opened the door on Margo Craig’s side of the car—opened it politely—and Margo got out. She was tall and slender and entirely lovely and she wore walking shorts and a shirt but was, somewhat unexpectedly, barefoot. Professor Brinkley stood back a little, being careful—Heimrich observed—not to let the opened door come between him and the two who were, quite obviously, his captives. He waited for Paul Craig to get out, and Craig got out. He was wearing a terry cloth robe over swimming trunks, but he had canvas beach slippers on his feet. His face was as outraged as Captain Heimrich had ever seen a face.

  Professor Brinkley waggled the gun slightly, indicating direction. Paul Craig and his wife, tall, straight people, walked toward the terrace. Margo walked uneasily, like a cat on wet ground. Gravel is injurious to bare feet. Craig’s slippers slapped as he walked.

  Professor Brinkley was much plumper behind them, and not nearly so tall, and was, of the three, the most oddly clothed. But a revolver, held ready, adds sufficiently to stature.

  None of the five on the terrace said anything. There did not seem to be anything to say.

  Paul Craig was the first to speak. He slapped up onto the terrace and said, “Captain Heimrich. This preposterous behavior—”

  “Scotch and water,” Brinkley said. “I can’t understand why it took me so long.” He looked at Heimrich and shook his head. Then he blinked, as if it had hurt to shake his head. “Not in the least like Maryland,” he said, with the air of a man who explains all. “But of course that was the Misses Monroe.”

  “Obviously,” Margo Craig said, “the poor man is out of his mind.”

  It was, of course, as obvious as she said. A blow on the head had jarred Walter Brinkley’s brain. It appeared that it had jarred it loose. Brinkley looked at Margo Craig and blinked again, and then, quickly, Dorcas was across the terrace and had her arms gently around the baffled little man. She defended; her look at Margo was close to a glare.

  “Don’t say that,” Dorcas said. “It isn’t that at all. He’s—” She paused and held Brinkley to her as she might have held a child. “He’s hurt,” she said. “A little confused. It isn’t fair to say—” She did not finish. She drew Brinkley to a chair and soothed him into it. “There,” she said. “Don’t listen to her.”

  “But that is precisely—” Brinkley began, but Craig did not wait for him.

  “Then,” Craig said, “you didn’t send him, captain? I hardly thought you had, for all he said.”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “We were having breakfast on the terrace,” Craig said. “He drove up. Early for a call, I thought. But Walter has often been—unconventional. I said something like, ‘Morning, Walter,’ and—he pulled
a revolver out of his pocket. A revolver.” It needed to be said twice to be believed once. “Said you wanted us. Forced us to drive here at—” He seemed to consider. “Gun point,” he said.

  “Miss Cameron is right, of course,” Heimrich said. “Mr. Brinkley was attacked last night. Injured his head. He’s not supposed—”

  “If,” Brinkley said. “If you will listen.” He put the revolver down on the table in front of him. “People so seldom listen—really listen. At the party—my party—Mrs. Craig asked for scotch and water. I’m sorry, Paul, but there it is—scotch and water.” And, as he used the word for the second time, its sound twisted oddly in his mouth. It was almost as if he had started to say “wagon” and changed his mind in mid-course.

  “Of course,” Brinkley said, and nodded his head slightly in agreement with himself, “I exaggerate somewhat. Nearer ‘water,’ actually.” This time the sound was just perceptibly changed. “Much nearer,” Brinkley said, and nodded his head again. A small man, round and pink of face, most strangely clad, with a bandage around his head and aware, Heimrich realized, of none of this—a teacher, making a point clear to a class he, probably, found a little backward.

  “There,” Dorcas said. “There, Mr. Brinkley. Just don’t worry about—”

  “One of the most difficult things to eliminate entirely,” Brinkley said, explaining further. “Oh—‘dog,’ perhaps. I’ll grant you ‘dog.’ Particularly, it seems, for people from Kansas. Oh—northwestern Missouri, perhaps. And parts of Iowa.” He granted them a section of Missouri, a part of Iowa. “But really indigenous, it seems, to Kansas. And certainly not indigenous to Maryland.” His lecture ended abruptly. He looked at Craig. “I’m really sorry, Paul,” he said.

  “You damned well ought to be,” Paul Craig said with asperity. “Coming at us with a gun in your—”

  “Oh,” Walter Brinkley said. “I had to do that. I didn’t mean that. For—for finding out that Mrs. Craig doesn’t really come from Maryland. Couldn’t, you see. Anyone with an ear—”

  “Captain Heimrich,” Margo Craig said, and her voice was cool, each word as she continued shaped immaculately. “Do we have to listen to such preposterous statements from a man who, obviously, is—”

  But she stopped. Heimrich was not looking at her. He was looking down at Brinkley and, although Heimrich said nothing, Brinkley nodded his head again. “Quite certain, captain,” Brinkley said. “Certainly not Maryland. Almost certainly, Kansas. Rural, I’d imagine. Of course, so much of Kansas is.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and now he did turn to Margo Craig. “It is, isn’t it—Opal Potter?”

  He did not stress the name.

  For an instant, Margo Craig’s handsome eyes went blank. And then a strange thing happened to her face—it seemed to twist itself into another face, a very different face.

  “You lousy copper,” Margo Craig said, and her voice was no longer cool. Her voice had changed as much as her face had changed. “You and that crummy shakedown artist. That squealing punk.” And—her accent had changed.

  Paul Craig looked at his changed wife. He looked at her coldly, and his face was set harshly. Craig, Heimrich thought, after a quick glance at him, disapproves of his wife. That was it—that unquestionably was it. Paul Craig dismissed the changed woman with firm disapproval. And—that was all it was.

  The glance was a mistake. He realized that as Margo Craig moved—moved with the quickness of a cat, struck out with her right hand almost as fast as a snake strikes. And—had Walter Brinkley’s revolver in her hand. She backed away, then. Moved the gun slowly from side to side, showing what she could do with it.

  “What do you know?” she said, and her voice was shrill. So—she was the one who cracked under tension. It was interesting to know; not, at the moment, particularly helpful to know. “The whole lousy bunch of you? How to say words nice. That’s all. Dutch could have squashed the lot of you. Rubbed you out like he did a lot of punks. And laughed at a bunch of lousy cops. Like I’m doing.”

  But she was not laughing. She was screaming at them, and waving the revolver more rapidly, gesturing with the revolver.

  “Wrapped up in cotton,” she said. “That pretty-pretty wife of yours. The whole stinking bunch of you. What the hell business was it of hers? I worked like hell to bring it off—and brought it off—and that better-than-anybody bitch—what did she want to live around here for? I—you’d better not, copper. You’re no different from the rest of them. Cop or not I can shoot you full of holes—just like the girl—and that double-crossing punk of a Beale and—”

  Heimrich moved. His hand came down in a fist, aimed at the wrist. He was quick, and knew he was not going to be quick enough. No hand moves as fast as a bullet moves. He could see her hand tighten on the revolver and knew, here it comes, and I make a hell of a big target—

  She pressed the trigger

  And nothing happened. The hand came down on the wrist and the revolver clattered on the flagstones and Commander Wilkins, nearest, moving the fastest, had it.

  She tried to run, then—run barefooted on biting gravel, toward the car. She did not run far.

  Held, she tried to fight free, and was lithe and violent in Heimrich’s hands, in Alan Kelley’s hands. But it did her, of course, no good.

  Nor, when she knew it was ended, did the words she screamed at them do her any good. Nobody tried to stop that, since it would do nobody any harm.

  Through all this, Walter Brinkley sat listening intently and now and then nodding his head.

  She ran out of breath.

  “Definitely Kansas,” Brinkley said. “A very characteristic accent.” He nodded once more, confirming his certainty. Then he looked at the revolver in Commander Wilkins’s hand.

  “By the way,” Walter Brinkley said, mildly. “That isn’t loaded, you know. I never keep a loaded gun around the house. One never knows what might happen.”

  What Margo Craig had said before was nothing to what she said, screamed, when she heard that.

  XVI

  As NEARLY AS he could come to phrasing it, Walter Brinkley said, it had been as if he were having a dream. It—the thing in his mind—had had the disproportion, the raw immediacy of a dream. A bubble, if Heimrich liked, a bubble unpunctured by the rational mind. Brinkley digressed. He said that, when he had been a very young man, he had tried to write stories. “Before it became apparent that I was better at professing,” he added, and smiled. During that time he had sometimes dreamed plots—dreamed them in full and fantastic detail. Sometimes he had wakened with such a plot, in all its carefully worked out absurdity, clear in his mind. Always, such plots had dissolved in the mind’s reason. It had been as if this one did not.

  They sat over drinks on the terrace of Walter Brinkley’s house, and it was late Friday afternoon. Brinkley no longer wore his turban. A strip bandage did for that. Nor, of course, did he any longer wear a yellow pajama jacket and bright blue slacks.

  Heimrich, with other things taken care of, for the time being, had come to congratulate Walter Brinkley on going so straight to the heart of the matter and to find out how, not knowing at all where the heart lay, he had managed to do it. How, in short, had Brinkley realized the significance of Margo Craig’s—Opal Potter’s—State of birth. The answer was that Brinkley had not known it at all.

  His conviction that Margo did not come, as she had said, had told Craig, from the State of Maryland, had seemed to him an entirely trivial discrepancy, even after he had managed to “localize” it, thanks to a casual remark of one of the Misses Monroe, made while discussing the weather, that the new Mrs. Craig was a Marylander by birth. An “unconsidered trifle,” Walter Brinkley said, sipping a martini on his terrace. Something he might pass along to Heimrich when the occasion arose. Nothing, certainly, that he felt any urgency to pass along.

  “Until I came out of it,” he said. “Or—thought I had come out of it. With my wits addled. But then it had swelled up in my mind, become the one idea in my mind. Mrs. Crai
g was lying and she had to be made to admit it. It seemed of overpowering importance. As if it were that—only that—we had to prove.”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “as a matter of fact, it was. As important as you thought it.”

  “Dreamed,” Brinkley said. “Not thought. Would you really have arrested Commander Wilkins?”

  “Held for questioning, at least,” Heimrich said. “A case could have been built up—had been. I can’t say I liked it too well. Not the right character for the crime. However.”

  “She is?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “She is. A violent woman, brought up in violence. Taught a violent way of life—and that only your own, what you want, matters. The Dutchman had a ready pupil.”

  “She’s talked, I gather,” Brinkley said.

  “At length,” Heimrich told him. “Almost without interruption, since she started on the terrace. She knows all the words. You’d be surprised.”

  “I doubt it,” Brinkley said. “Harry?” Harry Washington appeared. He said, “Yassuh, professor, suh,” really laying it on. Brinkley motioned toward the empty glasses.

  “Now Walter,” Heimrich said.

  “Now Merton,” Brinkley said, and Heimrich did not even wince, and Harry Washington—beaming, and laying the beam on also—went toward the bar.

  “I know most of the words, actually,” Brinkley said. “In an academic sense, perhaps. Because she’d made herself all over, of course. And the—surface was cracked. Why Mrs. Wilkins? Because Mrs. Wilkins would recognize her as—as Opal Potter?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “As Mary Evans. At the university—Missouri University. At least, Margo—seems simpler to call her that—assumed she would, since she herself recognized Caroline Wilkins when she saw her at your party. Whether Mrs. Wilkins would have—” He shrugged. “It’s a human habit,” he said, “to think of one’s self as unique, essentially unchanging. Other people change. You don’t.”