First Come, First Kill Read online

  ‘Blood frightens them,’ Heimrich said. ‘Angers them too, sometimes. You didn’t hear a shot?’

  She shook her head. Colonel had been barking at the man—barking very loudly. But there was more.

  ‘I may have heard it,’ she said. ‘Almost must have heard it, mustn’t I? How far away could it have been?’

  ‘Some distance,’ Heimrich said. ‘With a rifle powerful enough. We’ll know when they’ve got the bullet. If they get the bullet, and I think they will. But not out of earshot.’

  ‘You hear things that don’t register,’ Susan said. ‘In the country, a good many shots. And since Ollie Perrin took up this hobby—’ She shrugged rather square, slim shoulders under the absurdly large shirt, which was Merton Heimrich’s shirt. ‘Call it,’ Susan Heimrich said, ‘voluntary deafness.’

  ‘Was he at it this morning?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But, he might have been. And I’d have heard, thought, “There’s Ollie at it again,” and not remembered. I might have.’

  Sergeant Forniss made the small, enquiring sound of one left out.

  ‘Our next-door neighbors,’ Heimrich said. ‘The Oliver Perrins. You can’t see the house—good-sized house, sort of—’ He looked toward Susan.

  ‘Unassertive modern,’ she said. ‘Sometimes called contemporary. You can’t see it when the leaves are out.’

  ‘Quarter of a mile or so,’ Heimrich said. ‘That way.’ He gestured toward the east, away from the river. ‘Same ridge. Last few weeks, Perrin has taken up target practice. Revolver. Target. Bunker of sorts. All quite legal, Charlie. And—’

  ‘And,’ Charles Forniss said, ‘a hell of a lot too far. Only—’

  ‘Now Charlie,’ Heimrich said. ‘Look for yourself.’

  He gestured again. Cleared land to the east of the house which had been a barn, and still rather looked it, extended for almost two hundred feet, and ended with a stone fence. Beyond that, the rising land was wooded.

  ‘Coming up the drive—’ Heimrich began, and Forniss nodded his head, and said, ‘Yep.’

  ‘It is,’ Susan Heimrich said, ‘impolite to whisper. Or to talk in a foreign language.’

  ‘Coming up our drive,’ Heimrich said, ‘the old man would have been walking north. He was shot in the right side. If someone—someone with a revolver—had come from the direction of Perrin’s house, he would have had a long shot—long with a revolver—from the other side of the wall. If he’d climbed the wall, you’d have seen him. Unless—’

  ‘No,’ Susan said, ‘the old man didn’t turn. He was walking straight up toward me when he fell. Slowly. Almost plodding. But as if he knew very well where he was going. As I think back, with a kind of determination. I thought he wanted a handout but—’

  ‘Yes,’ Heimrich said. ‘He may have been coming to see a cop. And all he said was something that might have been “Hell,” or something like that. Or, “Well!” In—what? Affront?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. ‘It doesn’t sound very adequate for a man who’s just been shot. There’s Ollie Perrin now.’

  They looked in the direction she was looking, the direction in which Heimrich had just gestured. A tall man in a polo shirt and walking shorts was standing on top of the stone fence. He jumped down from it, lightly, and walked toward them across the grass.

  ‘Hi, neighbors,’ Oliver Perrin said. ‘What’s the rumpus?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Oliver Perrin was deeply tanned; his black hair was brush-cut. Very Ivy League, Susan had thought when they first met the Perrins, and had found no reason to change her mind. Perrin’s greeting had been lighthearted from the fence top; he had been smiling cheerfully. But as he walked toward them he sobered, matching his mood to that of the Heimrichs, of Sergeant Forniss. When he was quite near he said, ‘Trouble?’

  ‘A man dead,’ Heimrich said, and gestured toward the drive. ‘There.’

  Oliver Perrin looked at the dark place on the white drive. He turned.

  ‘Shot,’ Heimrich said. ‘Did you hear a shot about—’ He paused. ‘Within the last hour?’

  Perrin shook his head. He said, ‘Who?’

  ‘All we know at the moment,’ Heimrich said, ‘probably a man named Tom something. An elderly man. Supposed to live somewhere around here in a shack and—’

  ‘Old Tom?’ Perrin said, and there was incredulity in his voice. ‘Why the hell would anybody want to shoot Old Tom?’

  Heimrich didn’t know. Perrin knew the man he called ‘Old Tom’?

  ‘Strange old cuss,’ Perrin said. ‘Crazy old cuss, I guess. But harmless. You mean he didn’t come around here?’

  ‘No, Ollie,’ Susan said, and was told that that was funny, because he thought Old Tom went everywhere. They waited.

  ‘You’d go out some morning,’ Perrin said, ‘and there he’d be. Maybe raking the drive. Maybe weeding a flower bed. Often as not something you’d been planning to do yourself, and hadn’t got around to. You’d say, “Hi, Tom,” and he wouldn’t say anything, just go on working.’

  ‘You mean,’ Susan said, ‘He’d just come and start doing something? On his own?’

  ‘Yes,’ Perrin said. ‘Always something that needed doing or, anyway, that there was no harm in doing. He’d work an hour. Maybe he’d work three hours. Then he’d look you up and say, “All for today,” and you’d pay him. “Whatever it’s worth,” he’d say, and whatever you gave him he’d put in his pocket and go off. I thought he went everywhere. You’re sure he never came here?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Susan said, and Perrin said, again, that that was funny. Then he snapped his fingers. ‘Probably the dog,’ he said. ‘Probably he was afraid of the dog.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. ‘This morning Colonel barked at him and he didn’t pay any attention.’

  Perrin shrugged his shoulders. He said it was just an idea. He said, ‘Yours must have been the only place he didn’t—tidy up. Only place for a couple of miles around. Been coming to us, when he felt like it, pretty much since we first moved in. You never even heard of him?’

  They had not heard of him until he died on the driveway. Not even Susan had heard of him, and she had lived for some years in the house that looked like a barn—lived there as Susan Faye long before she lived there, quite differently, as Susan Heimrich; lived alone there with growing boy and (which was a sobering thought) aging dog and memories, changing slowly from pain to something locked away in a secret compartment of the mind, of a man named Michael who had been killed in war.

  ‘No,’ she said, and looked at her husband, who shook his head. State troopers are likely to know almost everyone in the area of their assignment; Heimrich’s assignment, and that not constabulary, had only recently centered in the town of Van Brunt.

  ‘You know where he lived?’ Forniss said, and then it was Perrin’s turn to shake his head.

  ‘Back land around here nobody ever goes into,’ Perrin pointed out. ‘Including the people who own it. Hard to adjust to when you first come up here from town, but there it is.’

  There, of course, it was, as neither the Heimrichs nor Forniss needed telling. The developers were, God knew, on their way. But the environs of Van Brunt are at a considerable distance from New York and railroad service by no means improves. It was, however, to be assumed that if Old Tom were somewhere squatting on land he didn’t own, it was with the at least tacit consent of the owner. Forniss made a mental note.

  ‘About the shot,’ Heimrich said. ‘Probably from a rifle. You didn’t hear it?’

  Perrin shook his head.

  ‘Using your own shooting gallery?’ Heimrich asked, and Perrin laughed, and again shook his head.

  ‘Down in the darkroom,’ Perrin said. ‘Puttering.’

  Heimrich nodded his head. He knew the darkroom in the basement of the Perrin house. The Heimrichs and the Perrins were on the larger cocktail party basis, except that the Heimrichs do not commonly give large cocktail parties. The Perrins were pleased
with their house; liked to show it to guests.

  ‘Do a lot of puttering as a bachelor,’ Perrin added. ‘Time hangs heavy.’

  ‘You’ve heard from Marian?’ Susan asked, reminded.

  ‘Safe and sound in London,’ Perrin said. ‘Having a wonderful time. Wishes I were there. And so do I. Got a cable yesterday.’ He sighed. ‘May be a week more before I can get things squared away at the office. To get back to the shot—no, I didn’t hear anything. Pretty isolated in the darkroom. Can’t even hear the telephone, most of the time.’

  ‘You did hear the sirens,’ Heimrich said. ‘Anyway, I suppose you did?’

  He had come up for air by then, Oliver Perrin said. And sirens were another matter. Shots in the country—well, you could say they went in one ear and out the other. Sirens were a different matter, particularly when they stopped next door.

  ‘So,’ Perrin said, ‘I stuck my head over the fence, in a manner of speaking. Full of the curiosity so fatal to cats. Didn’t anybody hear the shot?’

  ‘Now Mr Perrin,’ Heimrich said, ‘I don’t know about anybody. Susan didn’t. I wasn’t here. From the looks of things, it would have come from over your way.’

  Perrin raised his eyebrows. This imparted an appearance of almost naïve innocence to his face.

  ‘From the way he was facing,’ Heimrich said. ‘From the way he was hit.’

  ‘Well,’ Perrin said, ‘There’s plenty of cover. You mean, somebody was roaming around our place with a rifle. Taking pot-shots?’

  It looked like that.

  ‘Just as well I wasn’t shooting,’ Perrin said. ‘I’m not that wild, and there’s a bunker of sorts but—’ He paused. ‘But I’m just as glad I wasn’t banging away,’ he said.

  ‘Your target’s two hundred yards from there,’ Heimrich said, and gestured again toward the dark place on the white gravel. ‘You use—what? Twenty-two target, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever hit him hit him hard,’ Heimrich said. ‘It wasn’t a spent bullet.’

  ‘For the record,’ Perrin said, ‘I don’t own a rifle.’

  The remark was not intended to be a remark of importance.

  ‘Noted on the record,’ Heimrich said, gravely. And Perrin, rather suddenly, looked at his watch. Then he said he had almost forgotten. Then he said he was expecting a telephone call.

  ‘Sorry I can’t help,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t hear the shot. Or, see the guy who fired it.’ He looked again at the driveway. ‘Who’d want to shoot poor old Tom?’ he asked. ‘Poor, harmless old guy. What would anybody have against him?’

  The questions were clearly rhetorical. Heimrich shrugged his shoulders. They watched Perrin walk, lithely, across grass, go easily over the stone fence, disappear in the wooded area beyond.

  ‘He’s got something there,’ Forniss said. ‘Wouldn’t think the old codger was worth killing, would you? Meant for somebody else, d’you suppose?’

  That was rhetorical, too.

  ‘This is Friday,’ Forniss said. ‘This office he has to get things squared away in. Keep it at home?’

  ‘You are a very suspicious man, sergeant,’ Susan told him. ‘No. His office is in New York. It’s a brokerage office and he’s—what, Merton?’ (There had proved to be no reasonable substitute for Merton. Heimrich was getting used to it. Susan was not one to commit a ‘Mert.’)

  ‘Customer’s man,’ Heimrich said. ‘I doubt if he slaves at it, Charlie. His wife’s well heeled.’

  ‘And,’ Heimrich said, ‘having a wonderful time in London. I wonder why the old man didn’t come here?’

  ‘Perhaps Ollie was right,’ Susan said. ‘Perhaps it was because of Colonel.’

  ‘He came today,’ Heimrich said. ‘As you said yourself. What was special about today?’

  She said, ‘Now, darling,’ in a reasonable imitation, and he grinned down at her. She said, ‘I don’t know, naturally.’

  ‘Noted on the record,’ Heimrich told her. ‘Because this was a place a policeman lived?’

  ‘He came today,’ Susan said, and he nodded his head.

  ‘Stay away from policemen,’ he said. ‘A matter of natural caution. Unless you need a policeman. He was often a trespasser, probably. Perhaps he worked when he found people at home and—pilfered when he didn’t. Little things nobody would bother about. Perhaps a little harvesting in vegetable gardens. A few eggs from henhouses. No use making himself conspicuous to the police.’

  She said, ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Until he needed them,’ Heimrich said. ‘For what?’

  (I’m a sounding board, Susan thought. Or a backboard to bounce questions against. Damn the man. I’m Susan.)

  ‘I don’t know, captain,’ Susan Heimrich said, using an appellation kept in reserve.

  ‘A harmless old eccentric,’ Heimrich said. ‘Not worth killing, as Charlie says. By mistake for somebody else?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Susan said, ‘look like anybody else. Can we get somebody to—to scrape that up? Or—or put more gravel on to cover it? Before Michael gets home from school?’

  ‘No,’ Heimrich said, ‘he didn’t, did he? Not like anybody around here, or likely to be around here. Yes, I’ll get hold of somebody.’ They took a sample of the bloodstained gravel before they left. Not that there was any doubt as to whose blood it was, but that courtrooms can be places filled with doubt, real and simulated. Long before the school bus stopped and Colonel, who had been waiting fifteen minutes with his ears reasonably up, rushed to meet it, men had brought a yard of white gravel and spread it on the space. No one could see that anything had happened there.

  There was a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the house. It hung crooked from a pole and nobody had bothered to straighten it, and that was a tip-off, if one needed a tip-off. Once Trooper Ackerman had got so far, had got the name of the place, neither Heimrich nor Sergeant Forniss had been in need of one. The old Waltham place; everybody knew the old Waltham place. And for years nobody had lived in it.

  The house, which not even the real estate man thought anybody was going to buy, was a big house—a big frame house, set far back from a side road in an unkempt field; a field of tall weeds. It was an unpainted house; it was a falling-down house. As Ackerman’s cruise car went slowly up what had been a driveway, and then around the house on what had been a circle to the barns, Heimrich, in the sedan which followed it, could see that the floor boards of the porch which stretched the length of the house were falling in. Termites, among other things. The windows on the front were, for the most part, broken. Youthful vandals, among other things. Beyond the house, Ackerman stopped the cruise car and got out of it and waited for the others to join him. ‘Ought to be back there somewhere, captain,’ Ackerman said, and looked back there.

  ‘Back there’ was a tangle—a tangle of bushes and weeds, of young trees seeking to restore a forest; of fallen trees, symbols of a forest’s dying.

  ‘They tell me it was like a park once,’ Ackerman said. ‘Before my time. Kept up like a park, they say it was. Two hundred acres or so, they say it is.’

  There had been no Walthams, not to call Walthams, for many years. If anybody owned the place now—and it was, of course, owned—many people owned it. Some of them might be Walthams, but not to be called Walthams—not really Walthams. Most of them had kinship, but not the name; most of them had never heard of one another. One might own a seventh of the Waltham place; the most distant heir a seventieth. Some time a developer would come. Two children of a man who owned a seventieth might sometime get a hundred and fortieth each of what the developer paid.

  ‘Looks like a path through here,’ Ackerman said, and tried it, and Heimrich and Forniss, as became senior officers, let the younger man make the pace. It was a slow pace, but there was a path—the trace of a path. ‘Must be an easier way if we’re right,’ Ackerman said over his shoulder, making slow going of this harder way. ‘Old man couldn’t have got through here I shouldn’t think.’

  They did get
through there. They came, after a time—a hot time, even in the shade; a breathless time where no breeze reached—to a bridge across a stream. Part of the bridge had fallen into the stream. A pretty little bridge, a rustic bridge, it had been once, long ago; a bridge across a bright small brook. They crossed what time had left of the little bridge. Beyond it the ground rose slightly. Then it dipped again. Then what remained of the path curved, and curved back to the brook—or to another brook. And there the little house was. Perhaps, Heimrich thought, looking at it, they had called it a lodge. Perhaps it had been merely ‘the cabin.’ Children might have played in it once; once older boys might have said to older girls, or girls to boys, ‘Let’s go down to the lodge. It’s away from things, the lodge is.’ These might have walked side by side, and hand in hand, along a well-kept path, across a pretty rustic bridge, and come to the little cabin in the woods. It would have been painted then, or stained brown. The steps leading up to the door would have been whole then, not broken.

  The old man had lived in it. There was little doubt of that, once they had climbed the broken stairs and gone into the house. It smelled of occupancy. It smelled of an oil stove, and of an old man and of food fried. ‘Didn’t open windows much,’ Forniss said, and pulled at a window, which stuck.

  There was a main room—a room of reasonable size, containing a wooden table and several wooden chairs; an oil heating stove and another oil stove for cooking. There were shelves on one wall, and a few cans on the shelves. There was a battered breadbox, with half a loaf of bread in it—dried-out bread. There was a plate on one of the shelves, and a heavy cup beside it, and a knife and fork. There was a bread knife with rust on it.

  There was a second room, with a cot in it, and two blankets on the cot. A frayed leather jacket hung on one nail driven into the wall, and on another nail a pair of black trousers hung. Heimrich looked at the trousers. A strip of satin ran down the outside of each trouser leg. Dress trousers, by all that was incongruous. Part of a dinner suit. A handout to the old man, to Old Tom? Heimrich felt the fabric—the thick, heavy fabric. A very old pair of dress trousers, he thought. Fabrics were lighter now, especially in dinner clothes.