I Want to Go Home Page 26

  But the sergeant had pressed a button and another man in uniform came in.

  “Store this one for a while, Jimmy,” the sergeant said. “He’s been stealing Cadillacs.”

  “Sure enough?” Jimmy said. “Who’d have thought it? Come along, you.”

  Bill Higgins went along. He managed to say “take it back to Mr. Bromwell” just before the door closed behind him.

  The sergeant, his mind uneasily on the fortune in gems, passed the case along at once. The captain to whom it was passed had heard of the Bromwells, and passed it to an inspector, who passed it to an assistant district attorney who had once spoken—on “The Woman’s Place in Law Enforcement”—at a club over which Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell firmly presided and had afterward had tea at the Bromwell house.

  It was because of this, as much as anything, that normal procedure was not precisely followed at this stage of the Bromwell case. Normal procedure would have been to get Scott Bromwell on the telephone and invite him to come in and pick up a Cadillac car registered in his name and identify a quantity of jewelry, presumably also his or his wife’s, found in the car—and have a look, meanwhile, at an insignificant man in a windbreaker and unclean corduroy trousers who told two unlikely stories, both pretending some acquaintance with Mr. Bromwell. But the assistant district attorney felt that this might unduly, and needlessly, inconvenience a Bromwell and so arranged to be driven to the Bromwell house himself, in a county car, following the Cadillac and Bill Higgins, both in custody of State policemen. The jewels remained behind, in a safe.

  As a result, Bill Higgins was hauled out of the station-house lockup shortly after he was thrust into it. As a result, also, law officers arrived at High Ridge only a few minutes after Hume had returned a sleeping, fair-haired little boy called Lorry for short. This rather incongruous promptitude surprised everyone, and led, at the start, to considerable misunderstanding, since the doctor, and a few minutes later Scott—it had taken some time to round up those who were searching for Lorry—talked about an accident of which neither the police nor the assistant district attorney had heard a word, while the attorney insisted on talking about a Cadillac, jewelry and someone named Bill Higgins.

  It was this unexpectedly prompt arrival of policemen, Captain Heimrich of the criminal investigation division of the New York State Police afterward assumed, which kept Everett Hume from going on about his business after he had brought Lorry back. He was there when the first police arrived, with recovered Cadillac and Mr. Higgins, and while he might have left at once it was to be assumed he had thought this inadvisable. By the time the police, and the assistant district attorney, discovered they might have something more serious to deal with than a stolen car—even a Cadillac—and a “fortune in gems,” Mr. Hume’s presence was required, since he had been second on the scene of Marta Bromwell’s death and had, as Karen told them, seemed to feel the death was not accidental. If Hume had left, which would have been incautious of him, things might have been simpler. On the other hand, Heimrich was in the end forced to admit, they might not. Heimrich, whose sphere of activity was state-wide, and whose headquarters were in Albany, happened to be at the Hawthorne Barracks of Troop K when a report came in that one Marta Bromwell, of High Ridge, Town of Poundridge, had been found drowned under circumstances which were not clear. He went over with Sergeant Forniss, several uniformed men and part of the technical squad. He was surprised to find that Assistant District Attorney Frazee of Westchester County was already there and had decided not only that Marta Bromwell had been murdered but that he had the man who had murdered her.

  “Not much to it, captain,” Frazee said, almost before Heimrich knew there was anything to it at all. “Killed for the car and the jewelry by this man Higgins.” He indicated Higgins, who had been brought in, handcuffed. Then Frazee looked at him again. “Doesn’t look it,” Frazee admitted. “But of course they often don’t.” This last seemed to renew momentarily shaken confidence. “Leave you to fill in the details.”

  “Naturally,” Captain Heimrich said, in a low-pitched, grave voice. Momentarily he seemed to close his eyes. He opened them again. “Doesn’t admit it, I suppose?” Heimrich said and then added, “Naturally.”

  “Listen, captain,” Higgins said. There was now a desperate whine in his voice. “What’re you trying to do to a guy? What would I kill anybody for?”

  “A Cadillac,” the assistant district attorney said. “Jewelry.” He looked at Higgins again. “Or a ten dollar bill, probably,” he added. “Haven’t you got a handkerchief, for God’s sake?”

  “I didn’t kill nobody,” Higgins said, taking this last question as rhetorical. “I gotta have a lawyer.”

  “For some reason,” Arthur Frazee told Heimrich, “Mrs. Bromwell—the young Mrs. Bromwell, of course—was sitting in her husband’s car. Perhaps down at the end of the drive. For—some reason—” He paused over that and looked at Heimrich with meaning. “For some reason, she had almost all of her jewels in the car. This man”—he indicated Bill Higgins—“comes along, sees a chance, grabs her and gets her to the brook and drowns her and makes off with the car. Probably didn’t know about the jewelry, although she could have had it out looking at it or something. And then he passes a red light.” He looked at Higgins again. “That he does look like,” Frazee said.

  “There are details,” Heimrich said. “You see that.”

  His voice was very quiet. He regarded Frazee and Higgins with, apparently, equal interest.

  “Won’t you listen to a guy?” Higgins demanded, his voice almost a sob. “This ain’t Russia, is it?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “We’ll listen. Naturally.”

  “Not me,” Frazee said. “I’ve heard it. You get the details, captain. Keep me filled in. I’ll get along back.”

  Heimrich was not surprised. He said, “I’ll do that” and, through half-closed eyes, watched Assistant District Attorney Frazee go from the library into the larger room beyond, which Heimrich was later to discover was called the East Room.

  Heimrich was a substantial man, with a square face, and no one could have pretended he did not look like a policeman—especially, of course, after one was told that he was a policeman. (He might as easily have been a business man who had played football at college and golf since, the latter with an enthusiasm which took little account of weather conditions.) He sat comfortably in a comfortable chair, and looked briefly at Bill Higgins, who sat on the extreme edge of a straight chair.

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “I’m listening.” But he thereupon closed his eyes, which did not encourage Bill Higgins. Higgins made a premonitory sound and stopped to see if the policeman’s eyes opened. “Go on,” Heimrich said, without opening them.

  “I was walkin’ along this road, see?” Bill Higgins said. “Maybe three-four o’clock. And I came across this car, backed off the road, sort of, into a gap in one of these here stone walls. Behind the wall. Dry stone wall.” He paused, hopefully.

  Heimrich sighed. Higgins was to be one of those who built things up, diligently providing the small details which are supposed to bulwark the improbable. “Go on,” Heimrich said. “You came across this car.”

  “It looked like Mr. Bromwell’s, see?” Higgins said. “So I says to myself, ‘Bill,’ I says—”

  He had said to himself that it would be only the act of a good neighbor to return the car, abandoned here in the foggy dampness, to its owner. There were guys around there (and this was said darkly) you couldn’t trust, not as far as you could see them. But being as how he was a friend of Mr. Bromwell’s, having worked on the place, he had again addressed himself, assuring himself there was only one thing a guy could do Get in the car and drive it home.

  Heimrich opened his eyes briefly, regarded Bill Higgins and closed his eyes again, as if the sight of Higgins pained them. He said, “Go on.” His tone was very weary.

  It did not encourage Bill Higgins, nor were the closed eyes helpful. When you couldn’t see a guy, not really see h
im, you couldn’t tell how you were doing. That was the size of it.

  “So I gets in the car,” Bill said, “after I looks around to see that Mr. Bromwell wasn’t there, nor nobody, and there wasn’t no flat or nothin’, and sure enough it was unlocked, see? So I says to myself, ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘Mr. Bromwell would do as much for you, if you had a Cadillac,’ see, only I ain’t, just an old jalopy, see, about fifteen or twenty years old and so I—”

  “Drove around for a couple of hours. Drove to White Plains,” Heimrich said, without opening his eyes. Then he opened them suddenly. “This isn’t getting you anywhere, you know,” he told Higgins. He closed his eyes again. “Nobody gets burned for stealing a car,” he said, stating an abstract truth in a voice of abstraction.

  “Stealin’!” Higgins said. “That’s all you guys can think of. Listen.” But then he paused, giving Heimrich nothing to listen to for several seconds. “Can’t see a guy might just want to take a little ride?” he said. “Got to make it stealing.” He was aggrieved. “Fact is, I said to myself, ‘Bill,’ I said, one of these days Mr. Bromwell might want you to drive for him, see, and you ain’t never driven one of these here big Caddies, so how’s it to take a little drive, sort of, since anyway he ain’t using it now, or why was it there?’” He paused and looked hopefully at Heimrich, who kept his eyes closed.

  “How’s a guy to know it’s all full of joolry?” Higgins demanded. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes then and regarded Higgins for some seconds, rather as if Higgins, also, were an abstraction. Then he got up, moving with a quick lightness one would hardly have expected, and went to the door and opened it. A man several inches taller than he, and giving a little the impression of something carved out of hard wood, said, “Yes, captain?”

  “Ask Mr. Bromwell to come in a minute, will you, sergeant?”

  Sergeant Forniss moved into the East Room. After a moment, which Captain Heimrich spent regarding Bill Higgins, Forniss came back with Scott Bromwell, whom Captain Heimrich was sorry to trouble.

  “You know this man?” he asked.

  Scott Bromwell looked at Higgins.

  “In a jam again, I see,” he remarked. “Yes, he’s done odd jobs on the place. Lives over near Vista. Does odd jobs for several people. Cuts grass, spades gardens. What’s he got to say?”

  Heimrich told Scott Bromwell, briefly, what Higgins had to say. Higgins looked at both men anxiously; ended by looking only at Bromwell.

  “Pretty feeble story,” Scott Bromwell said. “What would the car be doing there? He got it from the garage, of course. Probably while the people were having lunch. The garage is quite a way from the house, you know, and the drive—you noticed that, of course?”

  Heimrich had. The drive circled from the garage to the house, avoiding one of the wings, curved in to a turnaround in front of the porch. But it was not necessary to drive into the turnaround; one might go straight down the drive, always remaining some distance—two hundred feet or more, perhaps—from the entrance to High Ridge. In the fog, with a car as quiet as the Cadillac, a thief with nerve—

  Heimrich looked at Higgins, saw that he was looking hard, with eyes very wide open, at Scott Bromwell. Even so, even with this new display of alertness, Bill Higgins did not look like a man with nerve. However, as Assistant District Attorney Frazee had pointed out, you couldn’t go by looks.

  There might, of course, have been two men in it. One to drive the car from the garage, Higgins to pick it up later. The car might even have been left for Higgins to pick up at some such place as Higgins described, some gap in a dry stone wall. But none of this explained the jewelry.

  Nor could Scott Bromwell explain it, he assured Heimrich. Since it had been in the car, the jewelry evidently was, had been, Marta’s. It should have been in a wall safe in her room; it was not. How it got in the car—Scott spread his hands.

  “And,” he said, “what the hell does it matter now, captain? Marta’s dead. You talk about the car, about the jewelry!”

  “One starts some place, naturally,” Heimrich told him, without excitement. “Higgins is a place to start, as Mr. Frazee found. It’s quite probable Higgins killed her.” He paused. “If she was killed,” he added.

  “Why don’t you find out?” Bromwell asked. The eyelid flickered violently, which a little interested Heimrich.

  Heimrich said they expected to. It would have been easier if the body had been left where it was found.

  “Good God!” Bromwell said.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, and thanked Scott Bromwell and indicated no further immediate need of him. When Bromwell went out, Forniss came in.

  “The M.E.’s here,” he said. “And the boys are back.”

  The boys—who were the technicians—had been at the brook. There were two of them, and one was tall and completely bald.

  “Looks like it,” the bald one said. “Nothing to stumble over. Nothing much to hit her head on except soft dirt—mud, actually—and a few small stones. A good deal of scrambling around, as if she might have struggled. Trouble is, first this girl hauls her out, and then this guy Hume is all over the place. Still—” He shrugged.

  “She got killed,” Heimrich said.

  “Looks as if,” the bald man said. “Haven’t looked it over yet. Had to wait for the M.E.”

  “It” had been Marta Bromwell, who had come out of Omaha and had loved things which glittered, which shone.

  They did not have long to wait for the man from the county medical examiner’s office. It was nine-fifteen when he came down to tell them Marta had died between four and two hours earlier, and had died of drowning. There were no marks on the body, except for a minor abrasion on one hand. There was dirt on both hands. The physician agreed that the heavy coat could have protected the body from bruising if she had been, for example, pushed and then held down; that it would not have been, by grasping the sides of the hood attached to the coat, difficult to hold Marta’s head under water—long enough.

  And after they had examined the dirtied, dead hands, the technical men were inclined to think, although admitting it would be difficult of proof, that, as someone pressed her down into cold flowing death, Marta had tried to push herself back to the air—tried, with her hands under her, to raise herself and whoever it was, whatever it was, that weighed on her. The dirt might be explained, of course, by the fact that, in falling, she had caught herself on both hands. But if she had caught herself, why had she not saved herself, since she had not struck her head and so lost consciousness?

  It was enough for Heimrich to go on with. Marta Bromwell had not died by accident. He looked reflectively at Higgins, who was still a place to start.

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You can show us where you found the car, you say.”

  Somewhat to Heimrich’s surprise, Higgins brightened at this. He seemed quite eager to show them where he had found the car. Heimrich himself, and a trooper, took the little man, whose nose was running worse than ever. The trooper, who was young and very immaculate, regarded Higgins with marked disfavor, and remained as distant from him as the metal which linked his left wrist to Higgins’s right permitted. The fog, now that darkness was complete, was almost impenetrable. The police car, with Heimrich driving, groped through it. The fog lights helped a little. But Heimrich was once momentarily off the winding driveway before he reached the road.

  There was a police car at the foot of the driveway and Heimrich briefly blinked red lights at it, identifying officialdom. On the road, which was not much wider than the drive, Heimrich turned left toward Vista, as Higgins told him. The road was almost as winding as the driveway and, in the absence of a center line, Heimrich was forced to guide on the left side of the road, which was all the road he could see. He almost ran into another police car, standing half on the pavement some two hundred yards from the driveway intersection, blocking off a gravelled road which the Town called “improved.” Heimrich swerved and stopped and a trooper cam
e over to him.

  “Up there it was?” Heimrich asked, motioning beyond the parked car into the grayness. The trooper said that was right, captain. Up there a bit, up a farm road which was only a track a bit, along a path a bit. That was where you would put the “X.” Was the captain—?

  “Later,” Heimrich said, and got his car grinding, groping, along the road which led toward Vista. He had groped for about a mile when Higgins said, “Right along here somewheres,” and then almost at once, “There you are, cap.” Heimrich drew cautiously over to the right and stopped.

  There was a gap in the wall; once, no doubt, a road had entered here; once hay wagons must have trundled in and swayed out, but that would have been years ago. With the best light they could bring to bear on it, one could more easily imagine than see the old indentations made long ago by ironshod wheels. This made it easy to see the tracks made very recently by wheels shod in rubber.

  “See?” Higgins demanded, in a voice of anxious triumph, and Heimrich saw. A car had been backed well in and turned parallel to the wall, and behind it. Its rear tires had left a sharp pattern in soft ground. And after a few seconds, Heimrich had no doubt that the car had been the Bromwell Cadillac. Almost automatically when he first saw it, Heimrich had checked the car; noted for future reference the deep-grooved snow tires, fresh and unworn like the car itself and of a pattern new that year. Future reference had become present reference.

  Less clear on the soft ground, dim and barely distinguishable under the lights, there were footprints. Heimrich thought two men had made them. One seemed to have got out of the car, walked toward the road. The other, if there had been two, had walked in front of the car, also from the road but apparently from the east, and had got into it, under the wheel. Perhaps with daylight, if they ever got daylight again, one could tell more.

  Higgins watched the investigation and said, “Ain’t it like I said, cap?” Heimrich said “um-m” and got back into the car. He had to grope another mile or so before he found a place to turn around. He groped back the way he had come, again almost running into the parked police car, and would have missed the drive up to the monstrous house if the other police car had not been halfway across it. The car pulled up to let Heimrich in, and backed again into blocking position. Heimrich groped up the winding drive and ran off it again and felt the turf giving under his right wheels. He got back on. Assistant District Attorney Frazee was going to be disappointed, Heimrich thought. Not so quick and easy after all. But not that he believed Higgins, either—except that it looked as if the car had been there, which made it probable Higgins had got it there. “Naturally,” Heimrich said to himself.