Burnt Offering Read online

  The statute of limitations had run against prosecution for the theft. But no statute of limitations covers prestige. When Phipps got around to using the confession, it was as useful as it needed to be. He could start the story going, back it up. A Van Brunt was a common thief. On the other hand, Cornelia Van Brunt could sell off the Van Brunt property—a little at a time, as needed—and see what she sold turned into another Flats. Very literally see it, since it would be stretched out below her.

  She had sold one piece, and sold it cheap, under this compulsion. The night of the meeting at the Town House, of the burning down of the fire house, Phipps was ready to take another bite. He went to take it. And, quite possibly with a feeling of virtue, Mrs. Van Brunt shot him. She transported his body to the scene of the fire, and completed the sacrifice.

  Actually, Heimrich told Susan Faye, speaking slowly, ordering the events in his own mind, it had been a reasonably neat murder. The unloading of the body had been seen. But Mrs. Van Brunt had not been identified by a sleepy youth who rubbed his eyes in front of a garage. Mrs. Van Brunt had parked the jeep station wagon and walked home, using a path across fields. It had been a matter of three miles.

  “And, except for his theft, Henry had nothing to do with it?” Susan asked.

  “Not then. He was just leaving Chicago. He had nothing to do with the murder. But—when he got home, he did ask questions. And his mother gave him facts, as one Van Brunt to another.”

  Henry had then decided that matters needed a few touches of repair. They did not, for one thing, have the confession. They did not know that Asa Purvis was unable to identify Mrs. Van Brunt. And, before he was shot, when he knew what Mrs. Van Brunt planned, Phipps had tried to save himself by saying that people knew where he was.

  “Specifically,” Susan said, “that I did.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “So Henry decided to clean things up. His mother told him to leave well enough alone, but he wouldn’t listen. He looked for the confession at Phipps’s house—and didn’t find it because, when Phipps made Mrs. Van Brunt sell the first piece of land, he had taken the confession along to show her, and had worn a tweed suit, and had left the paper in the pocket of the tweed jacket.”

  “For me to find,” Susan said. “And, Henry put me where I could find it.”

  It had, Heimrich agreed, been a blunder. It had been one of several—all that Henry Van Brunt had done had been blundering, and worse. He had shot Asa to silence him, when Asa had known nothing vital to talk about, and had only hurt the boy. He had looked for his confession, and not found it. He had threatened young Michael to keep Susan from telling something she did not know.

  Heimrich paused momentarily at that.

  “No,” Susan said, and smiled and shook her close-cropped head. “No, what I said was true. Orville didn’t tell me where he was going. Why should he?” She sipped from her almost full glass. “Henry just—floundered around in the underbrush, didn’t he?” she said. “Attracting attention. And ending up trying to kill me? Did he set fire to the house? Or was it really lightning?”

  “Probably Van Brunt set it,” Heimrich said. “He improvised. Your body was to be found in the burned house. The question would have been—as Mrs. Van Brunt saw at once—what were you doing there?” He emptied his glass and put it on the flagstones. “That would have been troublesome,” he said. “A jury likes things uncomplicated. Fortunately—”

  “Fortunately,” she said, “you can climb trees. I haven’t forgotten, captain.” She looked at him. “You must have a name,” she said.

  Heimrich chose to ignore that.

  “You guessed he was the one,” Heimrich said. “How, Mrs. Faye?”

  “He had been gone a long time,” Susan said. “I suddenly thought—he’s the one Michael wouldn’t know. And then—” She paused. Heimrich waited.

  “I said the man who called didn’t have a—what did I say? A cultured voice?”

  “Educated,” Heimrich told her.

  “Educated, then,” she said. “And I thought—if you try disguise, you go by opposites. If your hair is light, you dye it black. Isn’t that so?”

  “Not always,” Heimrich said. “If you’re trying it for the first time. If you’re not too—subtle.”

  “Henry Van Brunt has such a cultivated voice,” she said. “It’s—” She stopped. “You know,” she said, “I just thought. It’s the most distinctive thing about him, isn’t it? That, and being a Van Brunt, of course. And—his mother and Mrs. Barker are friends, so Cornelia would know how often Michael goes to see Johnny. And—” She paused again. “I came to in the middle,” she said. “I tried to find you. Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “They told me. I—”

  “Before Henry got to be—well, mother’s little helper,” she said. She spoke quickly. “There had been something. Something she had done. Or not done. About the grass.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “Yes, Susan.” He stopped, as if he had stubbed a toe. “Mrs. Faye,” he said. “Yes, she had cut the grass in front of the house. The lawn that runs down to the retaining wall above the road. In very dry weather, people let grass grow as long as it will. But hers was cut very short. I don’t know what else she could have done but—there it was.”

  She shook her head.

  “Mrs. Van Brunt is a small woman,” he said. “An elderly woman. Phipps was not a large man, but I doubt if she could have lifted him into the station wagon after she had killed him. At any rate, she didn’t try. She backed his station wagon up to the retaining wall, and dragged the body across the lawn and into it. Used the wall as a kind of loading dock. Naturally, she wrapped the body in something—a blanket probably. And, she took along a can of gasoline.

  “The grass was long, of course. It hadn’t been cut in weeks. The passage of the body dragged it down. And—there was blood on the grass. So, she cut the grass, and raked up the cuttings, and put them on the compost heap. Did it quite early in the morning, naturally. Before anybody was up.”

  “The people who work for her,” Susan said. “They’d notice. They’d wonder.”

  “I suppose,” Heimrich said, “that she didn’t think much about that. They were servants. Servants—do what they’re told. Like other inferiors. In any case, she hadn’t much choice.”

  “She admits all this?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “quite readily. She didn’t do anything wrong, you see. And her son is merely—impetuous.” He was silent, then, for some minutes.

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “that’s the size of it. I’m glad you’re feeling all right, Mrs. Faye. So I’d better be—”

  He started to rise from the low chair.

  “There are things in the refrigerator,” Susan Faye said. “Some ham and—oh, quite a few things. You’ll do better at the inn, of course, but—And you really should have another drink. And—”

  Heimrich was a little surprised to discover that he had settled back in the low chair. But then he leaned forward in it.

  “You asked about my name,” he said. “You may as well know, sooner or later.” He swallowed. “My given name is Merton,” Captain Heimrich said, and closed his eyes.

  He heard her laugh softly. But not as if she thought his an especially comical name.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries

  I

  Asked why, Margaret Halley said because it would be good for both of them. She said this with decision, as she said most things. She said they needed a change of scene; to do something which they did not always do or, indeed, had ever done.

  “I have,” her husband said. “When I was younger, to be sure. Which is rather to the point.”

  He was told that he spoke as if he were an old man.

  “Which,” Margaret said, “is not good for you, John. Not in the least good for you.”

  “And going to the country in mid-winter, having a party—a New Year’s Eve party—there, would be good for me? It would—what,
my dear?”

  “Stimulate,” Margaret said. “Part of therapy is to—”

  “Again,” John said. “There is nothing the matter with me, my dear. With all respect, of course. Speaking as a layman.”

  She made a quick gesture of rejection, as of a remark not worth listening to. She said that, of course, there was nothing the matter with him. As, she added, she told him perhaps too often, since, if one wanted complete accuracy, that was a statement which could be made to, and of, no one.

  “In the simplest terms,” Margaret said, “I should like to get away for a few days. You have imagination. You should realize that a steady diet of—” She did not finish, except by a movement of her hands. She had very attractive hands, John Halley thought. Still. She would not like the “still” and, in fact, its use—even its use in the quiet of his mind—was almost as unjust as it was ungenerous. She was, to be sure, a few years over forty. She was, in her fashion, quite beautiful. It was not necessary at all to say that she was “still” quite beautiful. In another fifteen years, perhaps. If she lived so long.

  “It’s what you want,” he said. “There would be no reason otherwise. As we both know.”

  “Of course,” she said. “As we both know. But not every day, day in day out. I see enough of what that does. Helps to do.” She smiled at him. They sat on either side of a bright fire—a fire which seemed all the brighter because it did not need to warm; a small fire, nurtured for its gayety. Her smile was as quick as one of the little, jumping flames. “There won’t be any strain in it,” she said. “We can get the Speeds. Have them there a day or two before. They’ll see to everything.”

  “Strain?” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it as a strain. Why do you call it strain?”

  “A chore, then,” she said. “It won’t be even that. And—it will be as good for you as for me.”

  She paused to light a cigarette. She was unhurried—fitted the cigarette carefully into a long holder, flicked flame from a table lighter, inhaled deeply. That done, she held the cigarette package up for an instant, and toward John Halley. He shook his head.

  “It’s a mistake to settle so completely into the familiar,” she said. “To accept the familiar as the inevitable. It can become a retreat—one of the retreats. A surface peace, but actually a kind of sloth. Underneath, in the subconscious, there can be a building up—” She broke off. She used her cigarette in its long holder as a kind of pointer at her husband. “We’re not old,” she said. “Not by any means. It’s not healthy to think we’re old.”

  “I haven’t thought that,” he said. “Or—that we—I, at any rate—are precisely young. After fifty—”

  His face was thin, and rather long. His hair had receded, so that now the heightened forehead added to the length of his face. There was a slight depression—hardly more than a flattening—of the bones at the top of the skull, and now this lay just, but only just, beyond the hairline. (The knowledge of this, then fully hidden, imperfection had worried John Halley when he had been much younger.) The skin of his face and forehead, and of his long, thin hands, was deeply browned.

  “In the simplest words,” she said. “In the layman’s words. You brood. That’s the reason, as much as anything.”

  “For this party?”

  “Specifically. For what it represents.”

  “What it represents,” he said, “is a drive of sixty miles or so. A house that hasn’t been lived in for months. The starting up of the furnace. The turning on of water. The—”

  “That’s it,” she said. “What I was getting at, John. The piling up of obstacles. Until they block the way. I told you, the Speeds will do all that. Go up several days ahead. Get in all we need. If the lake’s frozen, we’ll skate. Build a big bonfire and—”

  “I gather you’ve already arranged it? Written the Speeds or telephoned them?”

  She smiled, this time slowly.

  “So that now it is really easier to go than not?”

  Still smiling, she nodded her head. She had, had always had, the—the neatest head. The hair was like a black cap, the conformation of the skull under the hair delicately precise. A precision instrument, all of Margaret Halley, her husband thought. He said, “The lake almost never freezes before mid-January. Not for skating. At least, it almost never did, as I remember.”

  “Don’t go back into it,” she said. “It’s bad for you, all this going back into the past.”

  “You take your patients there,” he said. “That’s the—therapy, isn’t it?”

  “Under direction,” she said. “For a purpose. Under control, to find a cause, not a hiding place. But you know that. About the party?”

  “It seems to be settled, doesn’t it?” Halley said. He looked at his wife curiously, as if seeking to read in her face something beyond her words. He smiled faintly. “Why do you so often treat me as one of your patients, Margaret?” he said. He spoke with no insistence, as if the matter were of little concern.

  She looked at him steadily through eyes which were almost black.

  “Well,” he said, “how am I, doctor?”

  “You’ll be all right,” she said.

  “But aren’t now?”

  “You’re fine,” she said. “We’ll go up the day before, then? Thursday, that will be. Stay over Monday?”

  “However you’ve planned it,” he said.

  “Invite—whoever we invite—for Friday afternoon. So that, if they like, they can get there before dark. The three forty-two, for those who come by train. Speed can meet them in the wagon.”

  “However you say. But—it may be a little difficult to catch your guests, mayn’t it? They may lack enthusiasm. As I did.”

  She shook her head. She said she did not think so.

  “Probably you’re right,” he said. “Tom Kemper, I suppose? But naturally, Kemper.”

  “And Miss Latham,” Margaret said. “Dear Audrey.”

  “We’re both very understanding,” he said, with no particular inflection. “Both so civilized. So—what would you say, doctor? So well adjusted?”

  “Did you want it any other way? Ever?”

  He reached to a table near his chair and took a cigar from a humidor. He clipped the end of the cigar with the blade of a little silver knife, and held his hand toward Margaret, who put the table lighter in it. He thanked her before he held the cigar’s end in the little flame, leaning forward as he did so. As he started the cigar the flame lessened and grew bright, lessened and grew bright so that, in the softly lighted room, light wavered on his brown face.

  He had not answered.

  “You look tired,” she said. “Depressed.”

  “How could I be?” he said. “I do nothing. And, I have what I want. Have always had. As you mention so often. Kemper and Audrey, then. And—who else, my dear?”

  II

  THE IMPORTANT THING was that she had been able to decide. That, she realized now, was always the important thing. Only those who had been through it could understand; only those who had been in that dim, gray place where choice was impossible. Even now, with all of it over and not to recur—Margaret Halley said it would not recur—she remembered with that familiar twinge of terror, that sudden coldness in the mind. She sat again at a restaurant table, with the menu in her hands—trembling a little as her hands trembled. And she could not decide between creamed chicken and broiled spring lamb chop (one).

  If you tried to explain, explanation was ridiculous. But that was as clear to you as to anyone. The choice was trivial; it did not matter to yourself or to the waitress or to anyone whether you said, “The creamed chicken, please,” or “The lamb chop, I think.” But you sat there, the menu trembling in your hands, and your mind was numb, and full of fear. (Finally, she had sat shaking her head slowly from side to side, and then she had begun to cry at the dreariness of the world, and in pity for herself, and had got up, still crying slowly, and gone out into the darkness of a sun-flooded street. It was after that that her father had taken her to Mar
garet.)

  “The dark year,” she called it, in her mind, and it had been only a year, or a little more than a year. (A short piece of iron piping, probably fallen from a truck, was on the pavement in front of her. She could swerve the car to one side. She could straddle the pipe. Without thinking of it, she steered so as to straddle, and only after some seconds realized that she had done so, making this decision without thought, as such decisions must be made—without thought, without hesitation. Two years ago she could not any longer drive a car—or choose between black shoes and brown.)

  Asked by Dr. Margaret Halley whether she would like to drive into the country, to spend the New Year’s weekend in the big Halley house by the lake, she had chosen instantly, and chosen to accept. It was another proof of her complete recovery, another assurance that she was through the dark year, as Margaret had promised her she would be. It had only been necessary—but how difficult!—to understand that such things happened to minds, not only to hers but to many, and that this understanding, and time, would bring her back, and bring the sun back.

  She was Lynn Ross again—all of Lynn Ross. The little things which had worried her so much, the little failures, were no longer important. They remained parts of Lynn Ross, but she herself was whole. She was a tall—oh, too tall still—woman of twenty-four, driving northeast beyond Bedford Hills, where the parkway ended, following careful directions toward Lake Carabec. She would reach Katonah soon, and must turn north, to a fork three miles beyond, then right for another two miles to a fork. At the fork the road to the left led to the club, which was closed in winter; the road to the right, which she must take, circled the lake. Half way around the lake, opposite the clubhouse—which could be seen now that the leaves were gone—was the Halley house. The house was to the right, the boathouse to the left.

  It was three-thirty on the afternoon of Friday, December thirty-first. She would, easily, arrive before dark, although already the light was dimming. She flicked on the car radio and, after it had warmed, pressed the foot button which selected stations. The indicator stopped. “—are feared lost,” the radio said. “Here is the weather: Increasing northeast winds this afternoon and tonight, with a chance of some snow. Lowest temperature tonight in the upper twenties in the city and along the coast, and in the low twenties in the normally colder interior. Tomorrow partly cloudy and continued moderately cold. This is WNEW, the radio station of the Daily News, New York’s picture newspaper.”