Accent on Murder Page 23

  “The point is,” Susan Faye said, “why is it here? Instead of the design? Set up to—to be looked at. By whom?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “That is a point, Susan. Why, then?”

  “For her to look at? She came—why?”

  Heimrich shook his head. She had come; she had died. He waited.

  “They talked about the past. There—there must have been a past?”

  If she was right about the age of the picture, there must have been a past. The past, at least, of a painter and a model. A not remote past, clearly; Peggy Belford had died a young woman. They would have to find out how young; they would have to find out a good many things. She was certainly not a child when Collins had painted her.

  “I’ll say not,” Susan Faye said.

  Heimrich smiled at that, mildly. He said he saw her point. He said, “Go on, Susan. They were talking about the past?”

  It was, she said, obvious enough. They had—it was impossible to guess what they had said, because it was impossible to guess at the tone of their exchange. Was it building then, already, toward—“toward that?” Susan said and moved her hand and arm a little, indicating what lay outside the studio. At any rate, they must have at some time said “remember?” of the painting, and set it up and looked at it.

  “And—” Susan said, and stopped, and then said that that was as far as she could go. She waited. Heimrich closed his eyes. He nodded his head slowly, but his eyes were closed. Then he opened them.

  They were guessing, Heimrich said. Hers was a good guess, probably. There was another.

  “You knew him,” he said, and, when she began to shake her head, “I know. Not well. But I didn’t know him at all. Suppose—”

  Suppose Collins had killed—in fury, perhaps. In outrage at something done, something said. And, seen her lying, not beautiful any more, on the floor of the living room. And—

  “You say he loved beauty,” Heimrich said. “He might have—in a sense have gone back to find her beauty, which he had destroyed. Got this out and stood looking at it—looking at what he had destroyed. For a long time perhaps, remembering whatever he had to remember. Then—then he went back.”

  Heimrich stopped for a moment, stood looking at the painting. “You see, Susan,” he said, “he—I suppose it was he—rearranged the body so that it was in the pose of this. Perhaps in some tormented effort to undo what he had done. Or, restore what he had destroyed. Because, people don’t fall down gracefully when a thirty-eight slug hits them. They sprawl, my dear. It’s a very ugly thing, Susan. He may have tried—well, to take some of the ugliness out. As a kind of final apology. Before he shot himself.”

  She looked at him; he could still surprise her.

  “You’re sure?” she said. “Not of all of it—the reasons. But, that her body was—posed?”

  “Now Susan,” Captain Heimrich said, “not sure, naturally. But, I think the odds are very high. Yes. The drawn-up knee. It’s hard to see how it would have been just that way. And in the picture, the same position. Not sure. But—I’d say several hundred to one.”

  She said nothing for some seconds. Then she said, “May I cover it again?” and when he said, “Of course, dear,” lifted the cover canvas and let it fall over the picture.

  “The curtain coming down,” she said. “That’s what— That’s it! It’s all—unreal. Composed. As if—” She stopped, and looked at him through widened gray eyes. “As if, out there, too, the curtain might go down and they would get up and—and take bows.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “It’s uglier,” she said. “Not—not better. As if it were all some—” She did not finish, and he could see that she had begun again to tremble. He put his arms around her and she trembled in his arms, and then grew quiet, then freed herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a hindrance, really. I’m sorry, dear.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You said—composition. Or, rather, composed. As a painter thinks of composition?”

  She supposed so.

  “It seems to me,” Heimrich said, “rather more like a scene. From a play. You said that too, of course. The dead fall gracefully, in acceptable patterns. A matter of direction.”

  Her eyes widened again.

  “I don’t know, Susan,” Heimrich said. “I’ll have to try to find out.”

  Faintly, they heard the sound of a siren. That would be a cruise ear, Heimrich thought. A cruise car would almost certainly be first.

  III

  It would, Sergeant Charles Forniss said, be a matter of going through the motions. Because, Forniss said, there wasn’t really anything wrong with the way it looked. “Of course,” he said, “it’ll be interesting if he turns out to have been left-handed.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “if there was a dog that didn’t bark.”

  To this Forniss, driving the police car carefully down the steep drive from the sleek house on the hilltop, said, “Huh?” and was told not to worry about it.

  “A literary reference,” Heimrich said. “Not apropos. It won’t turn out he was left-handed. And, as you say, there isn’t really anything wrong with the way it looks. Including the time element.”

  What was to be done at the house was, for Heimrich and Forniss, done. Others remained; the collectors remained—the men who sought dust in an almost dustless house, and fibre fragments and things in desks which might prove helpful. (A signed statement, saying, “I killed Peggy Belford and am now going to shoot myself,” would be among the latter. It was not expected.) The photographers had taken pictures of the bodies from many directions; a sketch artist had looked at the living room and sighed and done a detail sketch of it. Then the bodies had been taken away. All the motions were being gone through, and probably it was a great waste of time.

  The house had been measured, fore and aft, its dimensions set forth in lines and figures. (“I now show you a floor plan of the house of the late Brian Collins and ask you—”) It had been discovered and noted down that the glass panels between living room and pool responded to manual pressure but that the similar panels between pool and terrace were operated electrically. And could be so operated either from the pool room or from the terrace. The plan showed the bedrooms off the corridor which ran back to the studio, and the kitchen at the start of the same corridor, and the shower stall and dressing room accessible both from the pool, at its far end, and the studio. (Convenient both for swimmers and, presumably, for models Collins might have used.)

  All the motions had been, or were being, gone through. The routine is fixed, nothing escapes it. And it was highly probable that, in this case, routine wasted much time and no little energy.

  “It won’t be the first time a guy’s killed a dame and waited two-three hours to finish the job,” Forniss said, and went carefully down and around a steep corner on Sugar Creek Lane. “On himself,” Forniss added.

  That there had been at least that period of time between the deaths of Peggy Belford and Brian Collins had been partially, if somewhat grudgingly, confirmed by the physician, representing the Putnam County coroner’s office, who had examined the bodies. People were all the time expecting the impossible, asking for definite answers when only guesses were available; refusing to wait for the results of autopsies. But, if Heimrich had to have it—the woman had died sometime between two and four, and the median time was the best guess; the man was alive then, and at least until five and was certainly dead by six-thirty.

  “Because,” Forniss said, “killing somebody else is one thing and killing yourself is another. And getting that picture out and maybe spending an hour or so looking at it. People like that do crazy things. Artists.”

  “All kinds of people do crazy things, Charlie,” Heimrich said.

  “Not,” Forniss said, “that she wasn’t something to look at. Alive. You really figure he fixed the body up to look like the picture?”

  “Somebody did,” Heimrich said. “I suppose he did. At least, I never saw anybody lie l
ike that after a thirty-eight slug caught them. Did you, Charlie?”

  “Nope,” Forniss said. “And, when they check the bullets, they’ll be from the same thirty-eight.”

  “Turn right down here,” Heimrich said. “I’ll stop by Mrs. Faye’s and pick up the car. Yes, I don’t doubt they will be. If it isn’t the way it looks, nobody is going to have made it that easy.”

  The bullet which had killed the man had gone through his head, the wound of entrance torn and gaping, that of exit small and neat, and lodged in a chair, from which it had been extracted. The bullet had been battered as it battered bone. It was where they had first looked, assuming that Collins had held the automatic against the side of his head and pulled the trigger as he sat in the chair they had found him in. The ejected shell had rolled on the tile floor, but was near enough the expected place.

  The bullet which had killed the woman had been fired from not less than four feet away and, probably, not more than ten. She probably had been standing at the time and the course of the bullet through her body was slightly upward—an autopsy would confirm the physician’s immediate judgment, the physician was reasonably certain. So Collins might well have been sitting in a chair and she standing in front of him. The bullet had gone through the heart and Peggy Belford had been dead in that instant. Hence, the small quantity of blood. Cadavers do not bleed. Collins had lived at least for some minutes, as those with brain injuries often do.

  The bullet which had killed the woman had been found partly embedded in wall paneling, again in an area which had appeared most probable, assuming she had been shot near where she lay dead. This bullet was little damaged.

  There were other things; other bits and pieces, at the moment proving nothing. The girl had been in the pool, almost certainly. When her body had been photographed, could be moved, it was found that the back of the fragmentary bathing suit was perceptibly damp. They had found a white beach coat on a chair at the far end of the pool. Presumably it was hers; presumably she had worn it, over the golden bathing suit, when she came to Collins’s house. Presumably she had come in the station wagon. Presumptions were everywhere. They could guess and guess again.

  On a clothesline in the rear of the house they had found a pair of swimming trunks, black, damp. The day was humid; the trunks, when they were found, had been hanging in the shade. Collins’s, presumably; worn that day, almost certainly. Had they been in the pool together, or at different times? There was nothing to indicate.

  There were smudges on the butt of the .38 automatic, and more smudges on the barrel. Nothing that told them anything, or ever would. There was a partial print, apparently Collins’s, on the base of one of the ejected shells. So, presumably he had put the shells in the clip. Which was nothing of a surprise, nor proof of anything. The gun was his. He had a permit for it; the permit was in his neatly ordered desk.

  Bits and pieces, odds and ends. Items to be noted down; notes to be filed. They went through the motions; added totals, knowing the answers. A successful commercial artist in his late thirties had shot and killed an extremely beautiful motion picture actress and then, after a rather long pause, shot and killed himself.

  Neither Heimrich nor Forniss said anything for some minutes. The police car moved slowly down hill, around curves, generally toward the east, generally toward Van Brunt Center.

  “So,” Sergeant Forniss said, “why don’t you buy it?”

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “What makes you think I don’t?”

  “Come off it,” Charles Forniss said, friend to friend, not sergeant to captain.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I think probably I’ll have to buy it. As you say, there’s nothing wrong with it. A little arranged, maybe. A little—”

  He did not finish immediately. Forniss edged the police car to the side of Sugar Creek Lane and a small, eager car went past it, driven by a young, eager man.

  “Teddy Barnes,” Forniss said. “Deadline Wednesday night and here it is Saturday already.”

  Theodore Barnes was managing editor—with two reporters to manage—of the Cold Harbor Weekly Chronicle, published every Thursday of the year.

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “He’ll cover for the New York papers. Until they can get their own men here. It’s going to make a stir, you know.”

  “And how,” Forniss said, and turned right off Sugar Creek Lane into Oak Road. “If you don’t buy it as it stands, they’ll love you. You know that?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “So—we buy it, Charlie.”

  “For now,” Forniss said.

  “For now,” Heimrich repeated.

  Forniss turned left into High Road and slowed and looked enquiringly at Heimrich.

  “Drop me at the drive,” Heimrich said. “You may as well start with Collins. I’ll pick you up at the Inn sometime around—” He looked at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. “Around ten-thirty,” he said. “Get something to eat, Charlie.”

  Forniss asked if Heimrich had never known him not to and watched the captain walk up the driveway, between two ill-placed boulders. (A car coming out of that drive had to come out by inches or risk the loss of its ears.) A nice girl Heimrich had found. Forniss wished him luck and drove on toward the Center.

  She had been watching for him. She stood on the edge of the terrace and looked at him gravely. When he came up to her she held out both hands, and he took both her hands. He said he was sorry as hell, but that was the way things were. She said, “You’re going to have a drink. And something to eat. Lamb curry, which won’t take five minutes. And—it was the way it looked?”

  “It—” he began, but she said, “Wait a minute. The drink first. It runs to variety nowadays. Gin or bourbon.”

  They sat with martinis, not on the chaise; in terrace chairs on either side of a terrace table.

  “We haven’t found anything to change it,” Heimrich said. “Murder and suicide. Only—she was his wife, Susan.”

  She said, inelegantly, with her eyes widening, “Huh?”

  “Had been,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps a better way to put it, he was one of her husbands. The first, apparently. I’d guess she was the wife he built the house for.”

  Susan said, reflectively, that she’d be damned.

  “One of the boys,” Heimrich said, “one of the troopers, is a fan. Reads movie magazines. Only—it wasn’t any secret, Susan. Apparently everybody knows about it.”

  “Everybody,” Susan said, “whose interests therein he. Not, for one, me.”

  He sipped martini, which was cold and almost innocent of vermouth. He said she could make it two. He said that the trouble with them was that they didn’t keep up with things.

  “With Hollywood marriages?” she said. “Does anyone? Including those involved?”

  It appeared that many did. Perfect marriages flowered amid cheers, withered to the accompaniment of universal sobs. It was another world. She agreed. She looked into the cocktail pitcher. She said, “This is ice water. Wait.” She went and returned. She poured and said, “Go on, Ricky.”

  He choked over his first sip. He looked at her wildly.

  “When I got back with your car,” she said, “I hadn’t anything in particular to think about that—well, that I wanted to think about. If you know what I mean? Up there wasn’t—” She shivered, in spite of the warmth of the July evening.

  “So,” she said, “I thought. He hates Merton. For no reason, but that’s his business. So, what? And I thought, there’s a man at the club named Robinson, but everybody calls him Robby. Including his wife. So—”

  She paused and looked at him. His blue eyes were very wide open.

  “So,” she said, “I decided on Ricky. Unless you mind?”

  “Including—” Heimrich said, as if from a great distance, and she waited, leaning a little forward. “I don’t mind at all,” he said. “I—I don’t mind at all.” He paused for a longer time, and she waited, did not prompt, did not say, “Including, you were going to say?”
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  “Naturally,” Heimrich said.

  She sighed, inaudibly. “About Peggy Belford?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “I’m having it checked out in New York. My trooper doesn’t remember what happened back in the dim ages—eight years ago or so, apparendy. He thinks she was a dancer or singer in New York, and that Collins married her there. Lasted about two years, he thinks and then, probably, she got a Hollywood offer. She married two-three times after that. My boy thinks her last marriage ended about a year ago. It was to a man named Roland something.”

  “Brian was trying to get her to come back?”

  “Now Susan,” Heimrich said. “How would I know that?”

  “It could have been that. Only—”

  He waited.

  “Ricky,” she said, a little tentatively. He did not object. He did not even close his eyes. “Ricky,” she said, “I don’t believe it. It’s—it’s wrong.”

  There was only one question for that, and Heimrich asked it.

  “It’s no good saying he wasn’t the type, is it?” Susan said. “Because you’ll say, ‘Who is?’ Or, equally, Who isn’t?’ ”

  “Now Susan,” Heimrich said. “No. I like to see the character fit the crime. Why wasn’t he?”

  “Too—sure,” she said. “Of himself. I said he might have been trying to get her to come back. Implying that, when she wouldn’t, he got into a—a jealous rage, I suppose. And killed her. Only, that was just something to say. Something that leaped to the mind.”

  “Because,” Heimrich said, “it’s obviously the way—a way—it looked.”

  “All right,” she said. “I only met him a few times. I told you that. It isn’t enough to go on, and I realize that.”

  “Go anyway.”

  “A man who would do that would be—what? Not sure of himself, wouldn’t he? Emotionally unstable, to use a cliché for it. Not sufficient, of himself. So that, with something he wanted taken away from him, he’d go into a tantrum. Like a child. Say, ‘You give me what I want or else.’ Well—I don’t believe it. If a woman walked out on Brian Collins he’d—all right, he’d have been likely to think the loss was hers and the hell with it. I’m not very coherent, am I?”