First Come, First Kill Read online

  ‘Somebody’s been living here,’ Ackerman said, needlessly, but indirectly brought up a point. Somebody very evidently had, in squalor. But—the man people called Old Tom?

  Forniss had brought what he needed. He was dusting in the more likely places, and prints were showing. He used a small camera and flashlight bulbs, and got enough. They could, then, really get at it.

  And getting at it got them nowhere. They found a can of coffee, half full. Outside they found a bucket, with a length of heavy cord tied to its bail. At a little distance from the house they found an old dug well, covered with boards. Heimrich’s interest rose. Tom, dying, might have said something about a well. Something about this well?

  They took the boards off, and used a flashlight to pierce the blackness of the well. The light reflected from black water. Ackerman brought the bucket and they lowered it into the well and tilted it, and brought it up half full. Cautiously, Heimrich smelled the water. Then he tasted it. It seemed to be clean, cold water, but Heimrich spat it out. He circled the light in the well. There was only water, and the water tasted only of water. They covered the well up again.

  ‘Old wells sort of last forever,’ Forniss said. ‘Friends of mine bought a place with one and never could fill it up. Kept washing out.’

  A well they found, and a bucket, and half a can of coffee. Behind the cabin, they found a five-gallon can almost full of kerosene. But about the man himself they found out nothing, or as good as nothing. Everybody has papers of one sort or another. The man who had lived here—squatted here—had had no papers, or had left none here. They found a small tin box with nails and screws in it, and several rubber bands and a quantity of string, tangling everything.

  They found another path, more clearly marked, obviously more frequently used. This path the man who had lived in the cabin must have taken when he left it. It was an easy path, ran quickly to what had once been a wagon track and, almost at once, to an unimproved road. They followed the road to a blacktop, turned to the right, and were back at the big house again.

  And that, Heimrich decided, did this part of it for the moment. Technical men to go over the cabin to find what they could find. (Which, Heimrich thought, probably would be no more than the three of them had found.) The big house itself to be gone over, which would take longer and probably produce less. But one never knew until one asked, until one looked. Criminal investigation is wasteful of time and energy.

  Trooper Ackerman clocked the distance from juncture of unimproved road and blacktop to the foot of the Heimrich drive, added a hundred yards for the walk from cabin to intersection, and came up with two and three-tenths miles. It was hard to believe, he thought, that the abandonment, the desolation, of the old Waltham place could lie so close to busy highways and clustered houses. He relayed information to headquarters and went back to the substation.

  Heimrich received the information at his desk at the barracks and made a note of it. An easy enough walk even for an elderly man. Judging by the time Old Tom arrived—just after the school bus had passed—he had gone to his rendezvous with death directly from the cabin.

  Judging by that, but not counting on that. Start with a radius of three miles from the cabin, search the circle with that radius. Ask all to be found what they knew of an old man known merely as Tom, and when they had seen him last, and if he had ever said anything to any of them which would, now, make them suspect he might have walked in fear. And find out, of course, whether any of them knew anyone for whom Tom might have been mistaken. Cover everything, with as many men—detectives and troopers alike—as one could lay hands on.

  No marks on the clothing the man had worn. (No helpful name, for example, on a tailor’s label.) In the pockets of the blood-soaked trousers the man had died in, a knife with one blade broken off, a billfold broken at the edges and containing nothing—finally and precisely nothing. In one trouser’s pocket, a nickel. (Not enough for a telephone call.) Cuffs of trousers cleaned out, residue being examined. Shoes had holes in the soles, tops were broken. But they had been good shoes once. Maker’s name once printed on insoles; long since rubbed away. Technicians working on the shoes.

  Heimrich spread what web he could and sat in what he hoped would prove to be the middle of it. Meanwhile, there were other chores.

  It was after noon when Forniss called with part of it. The man had been killed by a .30-calibre rifle bullet, and the bullet had been recovered. It was in a condition for comparison, when the occasion arose. Major pulmonary branch perforated; death probably within two minutes, almost certainly less than five. Almost as certainly, the man could not have moved after he had been shot—could have fallen, only. That he had managed any sound, even a sound almost inaudible, was surprising.

  He had been the man who had lived in the cabin. The prints matched. Copies of the prints from dead fingers were being sent out to discover what else they matched, if they matched anything.

  Heimrich had lunch. He had a lengthy, and not too conclusive, conference with an assistant district attorney from White Plains, and this had nothing to do with the man who had died in the Heimrich driveway. Little that Heimrich did until after four o’clock in the afternoon had anything to do with the death of the man named Tom. Then the telephone on his desk rang and Heimrich picked it up. Forniss said, ‘Hold on to something, M. L.,’ which meant that Sergeant Charles Forniss was as near excitement as he allowed himself to get.

  ‘T. Lyman Mitchell,’ Forniss said. ‘That’s who we’ve got. T. Lyman Mitchell. After all these years.’

  Captain M. L. Heimrich was responsive. Speaking slowly, Captain Heimrich said that he would be damned.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Having T. Lyman Mitchell, deceased, identified by fingerprints, they had something—something quite different from the thing they had had before. A dead man is a dead man, and murder, particularly to Captain Heimrich, who has a special hatred for it, is murder. It is murder when the victim is nobody, somebody ‘not worth killing’—an elderly eccentric in dirty clothing, living as a squatter in a tumbling-down cabin. It is no more murder when the man killed is T. Lyman Mitchell.

  But it would be foolish to contend that, as a practical matter, the difference is not considerable. Sitting at his desk, having told Forniss to come in to the barracks, Captain Heimrich considered the difference. For one thing, and one of the most immediate things, reporters would rain from heaven, if—which Heimrich doubted—that was where reporters rained from. For another thing, and one of more significance: It had been difficult to think of anyone who would have wanted to kill an aged recluse named only Old Tom. Prospective murderers of T. Lyman Mitchell crowded the mind. It was a crowd of shadows, certainly. But there would be no dearth.

  Heimrich could not put a date to it, offhand. It would be easy enough to find the date. Six years ago, or a little more? That felt right. In the spring—on a cold and rainy spring day in the upstate city of Tonaganda. T. Lyman Mitchell had been just over sixty. He had been a justice of the New York Supreme Court. He had told his wife goodbye at the door of their house—their hundred-thousand-dollar house, as the newspapers had pointed out tirelessly—and got into his car and driven off for his courtroom. He had driven off into nowhere.

  In the state of New York, the Supreme Court is not especially supreme. It is a trial court of varied jurisdiction. It issues, or declines to issue, injunctions. It hears damage claims, if the relief sought is of any considerable consequence. Public officials charged with corruption may be called to answer before a judge and jury in Supreme Court. And men and women charged with murder may answer there. Supreme Court justices are jurists of numerous responsibilities, although the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals sit above them. As such, they are reasonably well paid.

  One of the suggestions, made cautiously between the lines, at the time of Justice Mitchell’s disappearance was that, for a man only reasonably well paid, he appeared to be more than reasonably well off. ‘Hundred-thousand-dollar house.’ (In one upsta
te paper it became a ‘mansion.’) That his nomination as a justice—the office is elective—came as a reward for political service loyally performed nobody had ever doubted, and Justice Mitchell had never denied. That there are occasions when a political machine finds fidelity to its advantage on the bench can hardly be questioned.

  If Justice Mitchell had been rewarded, in any direct manner, for extracurricular services to anybody—corporations to which he granted injunctions against labor; labor leaders (there had been one such) he might have been thought to have befriended in court; political leaders who had found a jurist most considerate—it had never been proved, nor had it been directly charged. It was true that he had, during his career on the bench, made some very fortunate purchases, and subsequent sales, of real estate. It was true that he was one of the owners of a construction firm—but a silent, nonparticipating owner—which did occasional jobs for the state. It was true that—

  Heimrich sighed, thinking how many things might have been true of Justice T. Lyman Mitchell, and of how impossible it had been, six years or so ago, to prove any of them. In wrong with ruthless politicians, and even more ruthless associates of such? The possibility had been considered. It had remained only a possibility.

  There were many other possibilities. Men have left wives who had come to annoy them. There was no real indication that Mrs Mitchell had particularly annoyed Justice Mitchell. (‘A devoted couple, according to all their friends.’—Tonaganda Republican.) Men have run out their physical and mental strings, and driven cars off steep places into deep waters. Justice Mitchell had had no record of serious illness, physical or mental.

  He had certainly, Heimrich thought, turned out rather odd toward the end. Perhaps he had been odder six years ago than had been suspected. Perhaps—

  Perhaps almost anything. Several accused of murder had been tried before him and, no doubt by a coincidence, all had been found guilty. On appeal all defense counsel had alleged prejudice on the part of the presiding justice. (Which defense counsel usually did.) And higher courts had found no evidence of reversible error. A member of the Court of Appeals, Heimrich rather vaguely remembered, had registered sharp dissent from the majority findings in one of the cases. Families of convicted murderers often hold grudges against judges who sentence them. Heimrich tried to think of any such grudge-bearing relative who had done anything about it, and couldn’t.

  He wasted time, Heimrich thought. Speculation on the basis of the half-remembered would get him no place. A man named T. (‘T’ for Thomas?) Lyman Mitchell had disappeared, voluntarily or involuntarily, upwards of six years ago in the city of Tonaganda. Why? He had reappeared in the town of Van Brunt. Why? It was to be hoped that one answer would lead to the other. Heimrich telephoned the chief inspector of the Tonaganda police department. It was a place to start.

  ‘The hell you have,’ the chief inspector said. ‘The hell he is. What do you know?’

  ‘Not enough,’ Heimrich told him. ‘What I remember, at the moment. What you passed along then, I’ll get from Albany, naturally. Are the boys who worked on it still around? The people? Mrs Mitchell, for example?’

  ‘Most of the boys,’ the inspector said. ‘Mrs Mitchell’s around as far as I know. What in hell was he doing down there?’

  Heimrich wouldn’t know. Oh, he had apparently been living as a recluse, a squatter. He had been doing odd jobs in an odd way. Beyond that—‘We’ve just started,’ he said. ‘Hardly that. You’ll have somebody tell the widow?’

  The inspector would do that.

  ‘And have the boys go over it again?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll be up, I take it?’

  ‘Probably,’ Heimrich said. ‘Perhaps Sergeant Forniss. Charlie Forniss. He’s a good man. He won’t step on anybody’s toes.’

  ‘Our toes,’ the inspector said, ‘are tough, captain. And—it’s your baby, isn’t it? No killing in our bailiwick.’

  He sounded rather pleased. Heimrich had sympathy. The hard ones in somebody else’s bailiwick. No cop objects to that. Nobody objects to that.

  ‘I know, inspector,’ Heimrich said. ‘One of us will be along tomorrow, probably.’

  He hung up.

  Old Tom had certainly looked old, lying in a huddle on the drive gravel. But not, it now occurred to Heimrich, really as old as all that. Dead, he might have been in his late seventies, or beyond them, from the looks of him. Actually, he had been only by a year or two what those who like words soaked in the milk of euphemism call ‘senior citizens.’ Sixty-six or sixty-seven, if Heimrich’s memory did not trick him. He put through a teletype to headquarters in Albany, asking for everything they had, passing on what Hawthorne Barracks had.

  Sergeant Forniss put his head in, and was invited to bring the rest of him in.

  ‘Donovan’s outside,’ Forniss said. ‘You want?’

  Donovan—Lawrence Donovan, Jr.—was a reporter on the White Plains newspaper. He was also a string man for the New York Times. He represented a hole in the dyke. After Donovan, the deluge. But there was really no dyke.

  ‘It’ll mean the usual clutter,’ Forniss said. ‘But what can we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Heimrich said. ‘Have them give him what we’ve got, with our blessings. And stand by to repel boarders.’

  Forniss went out. He returned almost at once. He nodded his head. He sat down. He said it had been quick, hadn’t it? He said that those were prints that everybody had. Where it took days, sometimes—even weeks sometimes—they had got it in hours.

  ‘Have you ever been in Tonaganda, Charlie?’ Heimrich asked him. He could guess the answer in advance.

  ‘Couple of times,’ Forniss said.

  ‘Know people there, probably,’ Heimrich said. Forniss knows people everywhere.

  ‘Couple of guys,’ Forniss said.

  ‘Charlie,’ Heimrich said gravely, ‘how many people do you know in Tibet?’

  ‘Now captain,’ Forniss said, almost as gravely, ‘nobody as of now. A guy I know was there, but he got out a while back. Says the place isn’t what it used to be. Says it didn’t use to be much, either. I’m off to Tonaganda? It was quite a while ago.’

  ‘You’re on your way,’ Heimrich said. ‘You’re expected. The chief inspector—’

  ‘Dick Norson,’ Forniss said. ‘Knew him a long time ago. Getting along a bit, but a pretty good cop. Or used to be.’

  ‘The people who worked on it are still around,’ Heimrich said. ‘Or some of them are. There’ll be dust on it.’

  ‘Yep,’ Forniss said. ‘I’ll blow off what I can.’

  ‘Take a plane, if you like.’

  ‘Unless there’s a hell of a rush,’ Forniss said, ‘and I can’t see that there is, especially, I’ll drive.’

  Heimrich was not surprised. At one time, a good many years before, Charles Forniss had been a paratrooper. He regards airplanes as things to jump out of—or away from.

  It was after five when Forniss went, to get done by the long June daylight what he could of the more than two hundred miles separating Hawthorne from the city of Tonaganda. There was then, Heimrich thought, no special reason he should sit at a desk in a hot office—he would be as much a center of the web of routine if he sat on a shady terrace, with a gray-eyed woman and a gray-eyed boy—and, to be sure, a mammoth brown-eyed dog. He was standing up to go when the telephone rang on his desk. A report on the routine, he thought; one, it appeared, to be made orally. He said, ‘Heimrich.’

  ‘There’s a Miss Mitchell,’ the desk sergeant said. ‘Mitchell. Wants to talk to someone in authority.’

  It occurred to Heimrich that Sergeant Neil Blake spoke guardedly. Presumably Miss Mitchell was within earshot.

  ‘Related to?’ Heimrich said.

  ‘That’s it,’ Blake said, and was told to ask Miss Mitchell to come in.

  It was interesting. It was also not a little surprising. Larry Donovan would have used the telephone by now. Probably the wire services would be getting it about now. But only about now. It wouldn
’t be on the radio yet, and not for some time in print. So how—?

  A heavy hand knocked at the door, and, when Heimrich said, ‘Yes,’ a trooper opened it, and held it open. ‘Miss Mitchell,’ the trooper said, and Heimrich stood up behind his desk.

  She was, Heimrich guessed, in her middle twenties. About the rest, he did not have to guess—she was slender and brown-haired; her face was tanned. And she had the most remarkable eyes Heimrich could remember having seen—green eyes or gray eyes or—what color eyes? Very large eyes, and very far apart. Blue eyes with green in them or—? Eyes heavily, darkly, lashed.

  ‘I’m Enid Mitchell,’ she said. She had a soft, low voice. ‘I’m—I’m trying to find my father. Are you the man I ought—’ She did not finish. She left space for an answer, having said enough.

  Trying to find?

  ‘I’ll help you if I can,’ Heimrich said. ‘My name’s—’

  ‘They told me,’ she said. ‘My father’s Justice Mitchell, captain.’

  She waited, looking at him through improbable eyes.

  ‘Lyman Mitchell,’ she said. She looked at him for seconds more. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That Justice Mitchell. I think—there’s a place near here called Van Brunt? A town—a village? It has a post office.’

  ‘Yes,’ Heimrich said. ‘Sit down, Miss Mitchell.’ He gestured toward a chair. She sat down. ‘Why Van Brunt?’ he asked her.

  ‘A letter,’ she said. ‘Postmarked “Van Brunt.”’ She opened a summer handbag; the bag was pale green and matched the green linen dress she wore. She held out an envelope—a pre-stamped envelope which had come across a post office counter. It was addressed in pencil—‘Miss Enid Mitchell, 2713 Fernside Road, Tonaganda, New York.’ But the street number had been crossed out and another written in, and that crossed out in turn, and still another written, this in a different hand.