Show Red for Danger Page 3

  “There isn’t any doubt, is there?” Susan Faye said, and Heimrich shook his head slowly. There wasn’t any doubt. This very beautiful naked girl, delineated with exquisite attention to detail, was beyond question Peggy Belford.

  “My guess would be,” Susan Faye said, “that it was painted several years ago. And—Brian Collins loved beauty. Why would he kill anything so beautiful?”

  The question could be assumed to be rhetorical. It could not, in any case, be answered. The statement—

  “Why several years ago?” Heimrich asked.

  “Because—” she said, and broke off. “I’m not an expert,” she said. “It’s only an impression. If it’s important—”

  Heimrich lifted his shoulders a little.

  “An expert might be able to tell,” she said. “But—how long have they been here? The movie people?”

  They had been around for about two weeks.

  “Pigments fade,” she said. “It’s—oh, there’s a patina. Easier to see than to explain. I’m fairly sure that this wasn’t painted within two weeks. I’d doubt if it was painted within two years.”

  “Fairly?” Heimrich said.

  “All right,” she said. “More than that. But, I’m not an expert, Merton.”

  “He never said anything about her?” Heimrich asked. “About knowing her.”

  This time she shrugged, quickly, almost impatiently. She had told him that she barely knew Brian Collins. She had no idea whom he might have known, might not have known. He had never mentioned knowing Peggy Belford. “But,” she said, “I doubt if he would. Because—oh, because she was so well known. People would have said, ‘You mean you really know her? Tell me—’ It would have been like saying ‘the’ Brian Collins.”

  It was not too clear; it was clear enough.

  “Only,” Heimrich said, “with them here—with the subject brought up. Almost anyone might have said—‘Oh, I knew her once. She posed for me once, as a matter of fact.’ ”

  “Until he called me this morning,” Susan said. “Asked if I wanted to look at a design, I hadn’t spoken to him in—months. So—I’ve no idea what he may have said since the subject was ‘brought up.’ And—you’re being very like a policeman, aren’t you?”

  He smiled at that, and again the smile re-formed, revealed, his face.

  “Now Susan,” he said. “I am a policeman. There’s no getting around it, naturally. You thought you’d find a fabric design on the easel?”

  She had. It was because she had that she had lifted the drop sheet which covered the picture on the easel. It would have been the natural place for Collins to place his design for her to look at. The most obvious place. Clearly, he had not chosen the obvious place. It didn’t matter now.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Still—he did expect you. Unless, of course, something—the thing between him and Miss Belford—put it out of his mind. Still— You’d know this design if you saw it? I mean, he gave you some idea about it?”

  She smiled faintly at that, smiled inwardly. You didn’t tell people about designs when you could show them designs. She shook her head. “But,” she said, “I’d know it was a fabric design. Not—” She looked at the picture on the easel. “Not a portrait. But—it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  He said, again, that it didn’t matter now. And, again, he said, “Still—” and looked around the studio; looked at the canvases on their stretchers, leaning against one another along the walls. He turned one so that it faced them. It was characteristic—rooftops in very clear air. He tried another.

  “It won’t be on canvas,” Susan said. “On paper. Rolled up or, maybe, thumbtacked to a drawing board. About—oh—” She measured in the air; measured what seemed to be more or less a square, the sides four feet or a little more in length.

  Heimrich abandoned the canvases. He moved along the wall, looking for a drawing board with paper thumbtacked to it.

  “The point is,” he said, “Collins expected you. Unless— Susan, you’re sure it was Collins who called you? Asked you to stop by, look at the design?”

  “Of—” she began, with confidence. But she stopped with that. “A man called,” she said. “Said he was Brian Collins. You mean, am I sure from the voice? No. Except that there wasn’t anything wrong with the voice. Nothing unexpected. You think it was somebody else? But—why? And, he called hours before—before this could have happened.” She considered, was careful. “Somebody called,” she said.

  Heimrich said, “Hm-mm,” and then, “This?”

  He turned to face a drawing board with heavy paper taped—not thumbtacked—to it. He held it up. The paper was covered with colored blotches, irregular in form. Yet it was not haphazard.

  “Yes,” she said, and moved a little way, and back, and a little to one side, and back. “That could be it. Or one of them, if he did several.” Heimrich, acting as easel, waited. “You can see what he was after,” Susan said. “But—busy.” She said this, Heimrich thought, more or less to herself. “And—” she said. “But it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that we’ve found it. So—it wasn’t somebody else to—to get me here. And why would anybody?”

  Heimrich had not, he said, the least idea. A question came up, even a very minor question. You answered it if you could. Answered it as you went along, if you could.

  A plodder’s way, Heimrich thought, leaning the board back where he had found it. And—his way. Which couldn’t be helped. And there was certainly no point in telling Susan that he, clod that he no doubt was, considered Brian Collins’s fabric design—well the word seemed to be “alarming.” He could not see, even remotely, what Brian Collins had been “after.” He tried to imagine the design, printed on cloth, as the cover of, for example, a sofa. He abandoned the effort. Probably it was the sort of thing that anyone with imagination, anyone with a sense of color, would find admirable. Even exciting. Susan had certainly looked at it; for a moment, he thought, she had forgotten other things—even this evening’s other things—while she looked. A thing—a perception—he didn’t have. So—

  Heimrich went over and stood in front of the painting of Peggy Belford. It, at any rate, spoke for itself; made no demands he could not meet.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Susan said.

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Do you know,” he said, “whether he did much of this sort of thing? Most of the things of his I remember were—oh, the edges of roofs; streets—villages. This is—what, Susan?”

  “Calendar,” she said. “Oh, superior calendar, I think. But—his style, if you’re thinking somebody else did it. Also, it’s signed.” She pointed. The canvas was signed in the lower right-hand corner: “B. Collins,” in the just decipherable blur of a painter’s signature.

  “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 like 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 gon
e 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.