Death and the Gentle Bull Page 22

  “She doesn’t know?” Heimrich asked. “I mean, she wasn’t there last night. Didn’t wonder where Mr. Phipps was?”

  “Goes home every night after dinner,” the trooper said. “Comes again in the morning about seven-thirty. I asked about that. She said, ‘What do you think, young man? I’m a respectable woman.’ She’s about seventy. Phipps is—was—somewhere in his sixties.” He shook his head. “Maybe Kinsey’s got something,” he added.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, looking down at the body. It was certainly, as the deputy had rather unfortunately said, done to a crisp. “Smells of gasoline, doesn’t it?” Heimrich said. But the whole area had the acrid odor fire leaves behind it.

  “Two trucks burned,” the trooper told him. “Did you see the fire, captain?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I watched the fire.”

  “It looks,” the trooper said, “like Mr. Phipps—or you think maybe it isn’t Phipps?”

  “Now Ted,” Heimrich said. “I think it’s probably Phipps. We don’t know yet, of course. Have to have the teeth looked at. That sort of thing. But it’s probably Phipps. What does it look like?”

  “He went in,” the trooper said. “Upstairs, probably. There was a while when you could have got in at the back. Outside stairs. Isn’t that right?”

  “There were some men back there,” Heimrich said. “The fire hadn’t spread that far when I got here.”

  “Could be he wanted to get something that was upstairs,” the trooper said. “Papers, maybe—I wouldn’t know. Got trapped. Then the building fell in and—” He gestured. “Hot in here, then,” he said. “The boys couldn’t get in—probably nobody tried. The gas fumes and all would cover the—well, the smell.” He stopped abruptly. “Don’t know where I get off talking this way, captain,” he said. “Got it all worked out for you, haven’t I?” His tone was apologetic.

  Heimrich smiled faintly. He said it was all right; he said any working out was always welcome. They would, he added, know more when the doctors had been at it. The trooper shook his head to that. He pointed out that there wouldn’t, so far as he could see, be much to—well, much to work on. Grant the teeth, for identification—after that—he ended with a shrug.

  “Now Ted,” Heimrich said. “A man like Doctor Kramer can find things you wouldn’t expect. We’ll borrow Kramer. Or try to.” He looked once more at the charred body. “Kramer’s very interested in his work,” Heimrich said, and began to wade out through the damp ashes. On the hardened earth beyond the burned area he stamped his feet, but the blackness clung.

  The ambulance came through bright sunlight and took away what it had come for—took it to the nearest hospital with the necessary facilities. They watched the ambulance drive away. “Who found it?” Heimrich asked then, and was told—one of the Purvis boys. Asa Purvis. The trooper pointed toward the garage. He watched Heimrich cross the road, and the trooper shook his head. The captain wasn’t, certainly, a man to let the obvious alone. Somebody gets trapped in a burning building and is burned to death. Tough. A bad way to die. But you’d think, from the way the captain was acting, that Orville Phipps—assuming it was Phipps—had been murdered. The trooper joined the other trooper; helped him tell people in cars, of whom there were now many, to just keep moving, please, that there wasn’t anything to see.

  “Great guy to nose around,” Ted told the other trooper, in a lull.

  “Got so he doesn’t believe anything,” the other trooper agreed. “Nothing to see, sir. Just keep moving along, please.”

  Heimrich found a telephone at Purvis’s garage. He was at it for some time. He told the captain at Troop K that he thought he’d stick around a while and look into things. He said, “Sure. It looks like an accident. But we want to know, don’t we?” He asked they dispatch to him Sergeant Charles Forniss, and was told, a little doubtfully, that Forniss was pretty busy. He said, “Now Joe. I may need him.”

  He talked to county officials at Carmel, and was tactful—was very tactful. He had heard that Dr. Warrender, who acted as county pathologist, had been under the weather recently. He was sorry about that. Under the circumstances—would they mind borrowing Dr. Kramer from White Plains?

  “In other words,” the district attorney in Carmel said, “you think it’s a tricky one? Why? What we’ve got looks like an accident.”

  “The body is badly burned,” Heimrich told him. “Kramer is very good. Warrender is too, of course, but, since he’s not been well—”

  They agreed to ask for Kramer.

  Heimrich put in another call. He told Kramer he would be asked for. He was answered by a sigh of considerable duration. He was asked why; was asked what was supposed to be looked for.

  “Mr. Phipps doesn’t seem to have been universally loved,” Heimrich said. “I’d appreciate it, doctor.”

  Heimrich sought Asa Purvis, who was easily found—who was very young, whose hair was blond and thick, who did not look at all well. He admitted he was Asa Purvis, and swallowed. He swallowed again and looked across the road, and moistened his lips. Heimrich indicated the bench in front of the garage, and sat on it with the boy. He offered a cigarette. Asa reached for it, but then he shook his head. He said he guessed he wouldn’t. He said he smoked too much anyway. Again he moistened his lips.

  “Bad way to start a day,” Heimrich said.

  “I don’t,” Asa began, and then said, “Oh, finding—” He stopped. “I’m all right,” he said. “Didn’t faze me.”

  “Good,” Heimrich said. “Some people can’t take it.”

  “I’m O. K.,” the boy said. “It’s only—there wasn’t much left, was there?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not very much. How did you happen to find it, Asa?”

  “The jeep,” Asa said, and pointed at the paneled station wagon, backed now out of harm’s way. “Blocked the pumps when I got up this morning. I knew it was old man—that it was Mr. Phipps’s. At first I couldn’t figure it out and then I thought, ‘Suppose something happened to him at the fire?’ and I went over and—and looked.” He swallowed again, and moistened his lips again. “First, I hardly didn’t know what it was.”

  “Don’t think about it, Asa,” Heimrich said. It was sound advice. It was also, Heimrich thought, ridiculous advice.

  “Sure,” the boy said. “I didn’t know people burned so—so—”

  “Tell me about last night,” Heimrich said. The boy looked at him. He pushed his hand through his heavy hair. He had a round face, with the soft chin of youth. The back of his neck still was narrow with youth.

  “I don’t know what you mean, captain,” Asa said.

  “You were here,” Heimrich said. “You watched the fire, naturally. I suppose you did. We want to find out how it happened.”

  Asa had watched the fire. Everybody had watched the fire. No, he had not actually seen Orville Phipps. But he’d be bound to be there. Everybody had come from the meeting.

  “It looked like a parade,” Asa said. “Everybody was honking his horn.”

  “Before that,” Heimrich said. “You must have seen it when it started.”

  “I did all I could,” Asa said. “I was here all alone. What could one guy do?”

  Heimrich didn’t question that. That was not the point.

  “You were here alone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened.”

  They closed the pumps at nine o’clock, or about that. They did every night. Asa himself had got to the garage about eight-thirty; he had helped Orville—“my brother Orville, that is”—for half an hour or so. Orville and Bide. Bide Jenkins that was. Bide was the mechanic and—

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Your brother and Bide left around nine. Then?”

  Asa had closed the big doors, and gone into the office and turned a light on there. He had spent a few minutes working on his car. “Choke stuck.” That had been in the garage. When he had finished he had gone outside again, sat on the bench and read that morning’s Daily Mirror by the light which came through the o
ffice window.

  “Then I just looked up and the fire house was on fire,” he said. “You could see the fire through the window.”

  He had run across the road and looked in, and had seen the fire already had headway. “There wasn’t anything I could do. I saw that.” He had gone back to the garage and telephoned and reported the fire. He had called his father and told him, and his father had said he would try to get hold of some of the members of the fire company. “Guess most of them were at the meeting, though,” Asa said.

  The fire had spread very rapidly. Ten minutes after Asa had first seen it, it was “coming out the roof.”

  “Actually?” Heimrich asked, and got a correction. Fire had broken a front window and was coming out that; it was jumping darn near as high as the roof. It lighted things up, then. People began coming, then. They came from all directions, but mostly from the meeting. It had been about half an hour after he had first noticed the fire that the “parade” had come from the meeting at the Town House.

  “Cars parked every which way,” Asa said. “Nothing anybody could do, though, till the boys got here from Cold Harbor.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t much then,” he said.

  “You stayed here at the garage?”

  “Pretty close. Got hold of an extinguisher and stood around. Lucky there wasn’t any wind.”

  His father and both his brothers, Orville and James, had attended the fire. They had gone when it had burned out. That had been a little after ten. Most of the spectators had been gone by ten-thirty; the men from the Cold Harbor Fire Company had stayed another half hour.

  “There wasn’t any fire left then?”

  “It was hot,” the boy said. “You could see a little red now and then. In toward the middle. But it was all right to leave.”

  “You didn’t see Mr. Phipps?”

  “I said I didn’t, mister.”

  “That’s right,” Heimrich said. “I remember. But his station wagon was still here? Over by the pumps?”

  “Well,” Asa said. “Sure, it must have been. Only—” He stopped.

  “Now son,” Heimrich said. “Only what?”

  “It was pretty dark,” Asa said. “There was only the light from the window after the firemen left. And he wouldn’t have left his lights on.”

  “The point is,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t see it. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  Asa looked puzzled, then. He said it was a funny thing.

  “I guess I must have seen it,” he said. “Just didn’t take it in. You know how? The sub-consciousness.”

  “You don’t remember seeing it? After the fire, I mean?”

  “No,” the boy said. “I don’t. But I guess I must have, because when I saw it this morning—well, it was funny. It was like I’d seen it there before. What I mean is, I wasn’t surprised to see it. You see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I guess so, Asa. But when you went to bed—you stayed here in the garage last night?” The boy nodded. “When you went to bed, you thought all the cars had gone?”

  “Yes. Only, I didn’t go around and look. Wasn’t any reason to.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. It was not particularly satisfactory. It was, he thought, as satisfactory as, for the time being, it was going to get. “Where do you sleep?” he asked.

  “Back there.” Asa gestured.

  “Show me,” Heimrich said, and they went through the garage, past a pit in which somebody—Bide Jenkins, probably—was working under a car, past the open door of the office where a red-faced man sat at a desk, to a small room at the end of the long building. There was a bed there. Asa pointed. There was a telephone across the room from the bed. On the sill of an open window there was a thermos bottle.

  Heimrich nodded. He looked back through the garage. A boy asleep here, with the garage doors closed—a boy who no doubt slept soundly—would be undisturbed if— Heimrich considered. If the fire across the road had flared up again in the night? If—say—Phipps had driven back, after leaving with the other spectators, had left his station wagon near the pumps, had gone across the road and—and what? Burned himself up?

  He remembered Mr. Phipps from the night before. He had seldom seen a man of Mr. Phipps’s age, and contours, more vigorously alive, apparently more determined to remain alive. Of course, it was not yet certain that he had not managed it. Heimrich walked, Asa a step behind him, through the garage. As they passed the open office door for the second time, the man at the desk spoke. He had a hearty voice.

  “Kid tell you what you wanted to know?” he boomed. “I’m Purvis. Jim Purvis. It’s a bad thing about old Orville.”

  “Very,” Heimrich said. “Yes, Asa told me what I wanted to know. What he knows of it, anyway.”

  “Went in to get the records, like as not,” Purvis said. He stood up. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt and a red necktie. He was a large man—a man large in all directions. “Fool thing to do.”

  “Phipps?” Heimrich said.

  “Sure,” Jim Purvis said. “Phipps. He was treasurer of the fire company, you know. Must have been some papers up there.” He gestured. “Second floor. Went up to get them, poor old Orville did and—zowie.”

  “He would have done a thing like that?”

  “What do you mean, would have? He must have. What else could have happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “You’re probably right, Mr. Purvis. If it was Mr. Phipps.”

  Purvis was broadly astonished. He said, “Who else?”

  Heimrich said he didn’t know. He said probably it had been Mr. Phipps who died. He said it probably had happened as Mr. Purvis said. He went on, Asa still following, Asa’s father standing in the door of the office, looking after them. Heimrich went to the jeep station wagon and looked at it. He had Asa show him where it had been. He looked into the wagon, not touching it more than was necessary.

  “It was unlocked?” he said. “Must have been.”

  “That’s right,” Asa said. “No key in the ignition. Ignition turned off and—” He stopped suddenly. He looked puzzled. “Yes?” Heimrich said.

  “I don’t know,” Asa said. “It’s sort of a funny thing. Old man Phipps always locked the jeep—the Caddy too—when he left it for a minute. He’d come here to see pop, just for a minute, maybe, and darned if he wouldn’t lock the ignition. Right in front of the pumps sometimes. Right in the middle of the day.”

  Heimrich waited a moment.

  “Guess he must’ve been in a hell of a hurry,” Asa said. “All steamed up about the fire.”

  “Probably,” Heimrich said. “When you moved the jeep, Asa, you had to open the door, naturally. Handle the wheel. Let the brake off. Shift.”

  “Sure,” Asa said.

  “Do you remember,” Heimrich asked him, “whether you touched anything else? Any other part of the car?”

  Asa shook his head, after thinking a moment. He looked at Heimrich, and it was evident he engaged in thought.

  “Fingerprints?” he said. Then he said, “Jeeze! You think—?”

  “We like to be sure about things, Asa,” Heimrich said. “Think you can keep anybody from touching the jeep until we get a chance to go over it?”

  “Sure,” Asa said. “Sure I can, captain.” He looked at the station wagon with increased interest. “Jeeze,” he said, this time softly, reflectively. (He patted his hip, where a police revolver almost dangled. An inner voice was hard; unspoken words were clipped. “Purvis, FBI.”)

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
<
br />   Copyright © 1954 by Richard and Frances Lockridge

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5039-5

  This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  MysteriousPress.com

  www.openroadmedia.com

  THE CAPTAIN HEIMRICH MYSTERIES

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.

  Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.

  MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

  MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.

  The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.