Accent on Murder Page 21

  He was a Great Dane, massive even for his breed. He stretched ponderously, he turned around and sat down—on his tail—and looked at them. He looked at them through tremendous brown eyes, and seemed to weep.

  “He’s gone to camp, Colonel,” Susan Faye said. “You know that. You drove up with us.”

  Colonel put his tongue out, and wept with his tongue.

  “Six weeks, Colonel,” Heimrich said. “You can stand it for six weeks.”

  Colonel looked at Heimrich. He extended forelegs in front of him and collapsed, with a thud. That was his way of lying down. He put his great head on his enormous feet and a mammoth sigh ran through his body.

  “You,” Susan Faye said, “are a most depressing dog.”

  Colonel made no reply. All hope was evidently abandoned.

  “He does,” Susan said, more or less in defense, “have his enthusiasms. Whatever he looks like. The boy, of course—most of all the boy. But now and then, somebody else. Heaven knows how he picks but he can be very demonstrative. Almost like a puppy.”

  Colonel said nothing, but moaned slightly. Heimrich said, “Hm-mm.”

  Suppose, Susan Faye thought, I just said, “I love, you, you great oaf. I’ll marry you tomorrow. And you’re not clumsy and I won’t break and we would have a fine time together and it would be very good for both of us. And as for a few years’ difference in our ages—poof. Poof and phooey. And—”

  “Why,” Susan Faye said, “don’t you make us another drink? We’ve time for a short one before—you don’t mind stopping by Brian’s, really? I told him you might be with me.”

  “Of course not,” Heimrich said, and swung himself off the chaise, moving with great definition, great economy and thinking that he probably looked rather like a hippopotamus. He went across the terrace toward the house and she turned and watched him. A tall, solid man who nevertheless moved lightly. And hadn’t the faintest idea he did.

  “What shall I do about him?” Susan asked the big dog. The big dog sighed. “You’re probably right,” Susan said and lighted a cigarette.

  Heimrich came out with short (presumably) gin-and-tonics on much ice. He sat on the side of the chaise, facing her. He held a drink out to her and she took it in a slim, brown hand. The hand which relinquished the glass to hers was brown, too, and rather square and evidently very strong. Didn’t the great oaf know what to do with hands like—

  “Michael mind leaving all the excitement?” Heimrich said, speaking quickly, matter-of-factly, and acutely conscious of the slender tanned legs within touch. He put his free hand in his jacket pocket.

  All right, Susan thought. Any way you want it, for now. But don’t think—

  “It isn’t,” she said, “as if they were cowboys. I pointed Mr. Dale out to Michael in front of Hopkins’ and said, ‘That’s Francis Dale, the movie actor’ and you know what he said? He said, ‘All right. Can I have a Coke?’ It’s the lack of horses, I suppose. And six-shooters. In civvies—just a man to Michael. And an old one.”

  And there, she thought, I go again. I deserve what I get—what I don’t get.

  “Dale was in the taproom when I came through,” Heimrich said, and did not need to identify the taproom, since there was only one thereabouts which might be graced by Mr. Francis Dale. “Wearing a green velvet coat and an embroidered waistcoat and knee-breeches. And slippers with silver buckles. And drinking what looked like a Bloody Mary.”

  “And,” Susan said, “handsome as hell. And—he must be in his fifties.”

  Heimrich supposed so. He said that he thought young Michael might have liked the green velvet coat.

  “Makes a nice change,” Susan Faye admitted, and sipped. “He was wearing a polo shirt and slacks when I showed him to Michael. So he was just a man with gray hair. And a beard, of course. I told Michael we had seen him a few weeks ago on the Early Show, only then he didn’t have a beard, and Michael was very polite about it. He said, “The one with the funny automobiles?’ Which, as I recall, it was.”

  “They all are,” Heimrich said. “Naturally enough.”

  “Actually,” Susan said, “the men seem to stand up better than the women. It gives one pause. Accent on maturity.”

  And there she had gone again, harping on it. Damn the man. And there wasn’t, really, anything to harp on. He wasn’t ninety. He was a lot younger than Francis Dale, and look at Francis Dale. Drinking a Bloody Mary in a green velvet coat.

  “La Belford?” she said, changing the subject slightly.

  Peggy Belford had not been in the taproom of the Old Stone Inn of Van Brunt.

  “They space it out,” Heimrich said. “Seem to, anyway. To lessen the impact, naturally.” He stopped. “I suppose,” he said, in belated revision. Falling into speech habits is, of course (not “naturally”) a sign of approaching senility. He must remember that, if he could.

  “Of course,” she said. “Two suns would dazzle the natives.”

  “And diminish each other,” Heimrich said. “Na—”

  She laughed then, softly, and in an instant, but for an instant only, they were close as sometimes (before the photograph) they had been close. He would take that damn hand out of that damn pocket and— Oh, the great oaf!

  “They’re all taking off in a few days,” Heimrich said. “That’s the word. Protective patrol to be recalled, which pleases them at the barracks. No longer a surging mob to be kept in check.”

  “Was there ever?”

  There had been, as surging mobs go in western Putnam County, an area of tossed hills above a great river. But, for the first day only. After that there had been nothing much for state troopers to do. Heimrich chuckled suddenly. “Hear about the ’copter?” he asked Susan and Susan moved her head slowly from side to side, and smiled slowly. He was coming out of it.

  “They were making long shots of the house,” Heimrich said. “And a bright red ’copter came down at roof level, making a ’copter’s racket. Anton Zersk practically went up to join it, they tell me. From a standing start.”

  “The director?” Susan said and, when Heimrich nodded, that one could see how he might have felt like rocketing, going into orbit. “An old Dutch mansion in”—she considered briefly—“the late seventeenth, with a helicopter on its roof. Why didn’t they just build it on a set? And—it isn’t that old anyway. The Van Brunt mansion, I mean.”

  It was not; not by fifty years at least. And the rear of it was in a state of collapse.

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Oh, I suppose ‘filmed in the historic Hudson Valley, where the patroons’—the patroons what?”

  “ ‘Held sway,’ ” Susan said, without hesitation. “A talking point.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “And—nobody can fake the river. Give it that.” They both looked down at the river. Nobody could fake the river.

  “Dale and Miss Belford and a man named Latham were the only principals they brought along,” Heimrich said. “And a lot of bit players. The rest are technicians and—God knows what. God and, I suppose, Marley. The producer.”

  He seemed, Susan said, to know a good deal about the visitors from—“from another planet.” Which Hollywood might as well be.

  Allied Pictures had sought the cooperation of the state police with somewhat elaborate thoroughness. News had reached Heimrich, who was professionally unconcerned, by osmosis. Since Van Brunt was the nearest community providing suitable accommodations, at least for Francis Dale and Peggy Belford, for Paul Marley and others of suitable rank, Heimrich had seen most of them around. Since Heimrich lived, when he could, at the Old Stone Inn.

  She smiled again, gently, at that. Eighteen months ago—wasn’t it?—a solid captain of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation of the New York State Police, had decided that the Old Stone Inn at Van Brunt would be a “convenient” place to live. Convenient to what? she might have asked, and had not, knowing. To a fabric shop across Van Brunt Avenue, to a hilltop house which once had been a bam. And—had slowed to a walk. The—the bump on
a log. As if there were all the time in the world, which there never was.

  Nor, she thought, is there now and said, “What time is it, dear?” (She could allow herself the “dear.” That would not alarm him. She had heard that La Belford called everyone “darling.” La Faye could be allowed a trifle.)

  It was a little after six. Heimrich had to take his hand out of his pocket to look at his watch. For a moment she thought he might not put the hand back in the pocket. He did.

  “He said anytime after six-thirty,” she said. “When he telephoned this morning. The show at the library closed this afternoon, you know, and Brian had to collect his pictures, because next week is arts and crafts.”

  “God,” Heimrich said.

  “In which,” Susan said, with formality, “I am showing two or three carefully chosen designs, representing modern examples of the still-continuing artistry of the Hudson Valley. Unquote.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “I’m sorry.”

  He needn’t be. His remark was appropriate. It represented an attitude which she fully shared. One, nevertheless, played along.

  “Since large dogs have large appetites,” she added. “To say nothing of small boys. We don’t need to stay more than a few minutes. Brian said the thing just came to him, and, since it was so far out of his field, would I have a look at it? It’s flattering, in a way. Since he’s very good in his own line. You know?”

  “Vaguely,” Heimrich said. “Straight lines. A feeling that—that the air is very clear?”

  He was not vague at all, she told him. It was precisely that quality which was the special value of Brian Collins’s illustrations—his magazine covers, his commercial painting. She said Heimrich ought to be an art critic, since he had the, in that field, singular virtue of being comprehensible. She got, “Now Susan.”

  “Actually,” she said. “It’s what you’ve got, really. The critical mind. You see—oh, something that doesn’t shape as it should. You say, ‘Huh-uh.’ You keep on looking until you see what is wrong with the—the picture, the situation.”

  Heimrich smiled at her. The smile changed his square face—reformed it; in some fashion she had never understood, revealed it.

  “Do I?” he said.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “a spur-of-the-moment notion. A way of saying it. I’ll have to put a skirt on if you really mean the Bird and Bottle.”

  “I do,” Heimrich said.

  She stood up and he stood too. He was not quite a head taller. And—what was the matter with her—she had stood on the wrong side of the chaise, so that its breadth was between them. And in that instant she could tell by his eyes—oh, damn. Oh damn and damn. I deserve what I’m not getting, Susan Faye thought, and said that she wouldn’t be a minute and went off across the terrace, a tall and slender young woman in white shorts and a soft white blouse who had, Heimrich thought, watching her lithe walking, got up on the far side of a wide chaise so that he wouldn’t, great hulking hippopotamus that he was, get any embarrassing notions. She was kind; she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  He knotted a tie in a white shirt. Which, he thought, was more than a hippopotamus could do. He could give himself that. She came back, a green wrap-around skirt smooth around slender hips, swinging about slim brown legs. She moved crisply, now.

  There is a time to moon, Susan Faye had thought, buttoning a skirt of pale green linen around a slim waist, over white shorts. There is a time not to moon, she thought, running a comb through short brown hair. Mooning gets me nowhere, she decided, refreshing the color of a wide mouth, of softly curved lips which were getting damn tired of waiting. Not today. Not, at any rate, so far today. And why, knowing the bump on the log was moving far enough off it to reach a terrace, had she agreed to stop by Brian Collins’s house, and studio, and tell him whether what he thought was a fabric design was a fabric design, or could be made into one? Or ought to be made into one.

  Perhaps her asking the great oaf if he minded stopping by with her, if only for a minute, had been the throwing of the monkey wrench. The setting up of a time to do something else, hence the delimitation of their own time—possibly it was that which had, today, put him off. There would be no reason to it, but there did not have to be—not with Merton Heimrich. Or, admit it, with anybody worth the bother. These things are balanced on razor edge.

  She walked out on the terrace, the sun on her. Heimrich was a big, solid man in sports jacket and gray slacks, in white shirt and a dark gray tie. A stolid man, she had thought—in a flicker of the most casual thought—when she had first seen him, after the fire house had burned down, before the charred body of Orville Phipps had turned up in its ashes. A man who, identified as a policeman, had fitted perfectly into preconceptions. No doubt a slow, sure man; a man who, called in to do a policeman’s work, would inspire confidence if by no means promise brilliance.

  He still looked much the same, except that now she did not see, at all clearly, what he looked like from the outside. And part of it had been right—he was unhurried, if not slow; he was thorough; he got what he started out to get. (Her out of a burning house, for example.) He was also, by and large, as intricate a person as any she had ever met. And as—as sluttish.

  She smiled faintly at her own choice of a word, moving toward—moving crisply toward, since this was no longer a time for mooning—an extremely solid man, who looked a little as if he had been planted on the terrace and was growing there, like an oak. Skittish indeed!

  Seeing her smile, Heimrich thought of straightening his tie. He did not, being by no means a fidgeter. Well, if something about him amused her, it did not matter. There would be only friendliness in her amusement. He knew her well as a person; knew her to be without malice. (Or as closely as it was human to be.) She liked him. There was no doubt in his mind of that. She seemed to have affection for large animals.

  Colonel sat part way up at her approach. He did not sit all the way up, preferring to be sure that the effort—in his case considerable—would be worth the trouble. “No, Colonel,” Susan Faye said. “Not this time.”

  It was no more than Colonel had expected. Whatever he had done that was wrong was still held against him. They had taken the small god—the real god—away from him because he had done wrong, and still his expiation was incomplete. They would not let him go for a ride. Colonel thudded down on the flagstones again and sighed. “Poor Colonel,” Susan said, and patted the great head. Colonel moaned at that.

  “It’s only,” Susan Faye said, “because you’re so outsized. Such a great lump of animal.”

  She doesn’t, Captain M. L. Heimrich told himself sternly, mean any more than she said.

  II

  He didn’t, Heimrich said, know his way precisely. She would have to guide. First along Oak Road?

  “And then,” Susan said, “left on Sugar Creek Lane until the end. Or almost. Why Sugar Creek, do you suppose? There isn’t any creek, as far as I know.”

  It was to be supposed that once there had been; that somehow sugar had been associated. Perhaps there had been sugar maples, although this was not the region for them. Perhaps someone—fifty years ago; three hundred years ago—had dropped a bag of sugar in a tiny stream. Or the stream, come upon by thirsty men, had seemed, after brackish water, of unexampled “sweetness.” Possibly Brian Collins would know, since he lived at the end of the lane named for the creek.

  Susan doubted that. They were easy again, now; the tension was gone now. They drove, climbing, toward the setting sun. It was seven-fifteen, the car clock said. They talked of matters of no conceivable importance, and not to avoid discussing what had importance. It was a waiting time; a time between.

  She doubted it because Brian Collins was, by the standards of the countryside, a newcomer. She did not know him particularly well; it was only since she had opened her shop on Van Brunt Avenue that she had known him at all. He had dropped in one day—a year ago? a year and a half ago?—and looked at fabrics, with the eye of a man who sees color. He had i
ntroduced himself; had said that, in a sense, he was in the same line of business. He had given his name.

  “And I,” Susan said, as the car turned into Sugar Creek Lane and continued to climb, “said, like any other half-wit, ‘The Brian Collins?’ And he asked what the hell anybody was supposed to say to a question like that, and why the hell did people keep on asking it, and if I meant did he do magazine covers and illustrations for nauseating stories, he supposed he was. He has moments of being abrupt, in a long-winded sort of way.”

  She had known vaguely for some time that Brian Collins lived in the area. She had thought it was nearer Cold Harbor, up the river a few miles. A good many people who lived on the back lanes in the town of Van Brunt went to Cold Harbor rather than to the Center to shop, partly because Cold Harbor had more places to shop in, and partly because it had a railroad station. She had mentioned Collins to somehody—she had now forgotten to whom—and been told about him. Or, more precisely, something about him. “He doesn’t join in,” Susan said, explaining that, and explaining it, to Heimrich, fully.

  Collins had bought a few acres, “on the last high hill,” above the river and built a house there. An entirely modern house, largely of glass; a house which was at the same time a dwelling and a studio. That had been about eight years ago.

  “He was married then,” Susan said. “I suppose he built the house for his wife, but apparently it didn’t work. Anyway, there isn’t any wife now—hasn’t been for years. He’s never said anything about her. As a matter of fact, I don’t know him at all well. Went up once with some other people—people from New York—and looked at some of his things. Ran into him once someplace else—at the Kelseys’ in Cold Harbor, as I remember it. And he stops by the shop now and then and looks at my things. Once he bought yardage enough for curtains and once he took me to lunch at the Inn. It was that time, I think, that he said he was having a go at fabric designing, for the fun of it. And that if anything came of it, he’d ask me to give an opinion.”