With One Stone Page 4

  The living room was across the corridor—a room of modern furniture. There was, at first glance, no sign that the intruder had reached this room.

  “They close the house in the winter?” Forniss said, as they went across the living room, out the front door.

  The house had been closed since Thanksgiving—the main house and, of course, the combination bath house and guest suite. Sarles had checked both from time to time, the pool house about ten days before. He had not gone into it, but looked through windows. There had been no sign, then, that anybody was holed up in the house.

  “You live on the premises?” Forniss asked, as they stood again on the flagstones in front of the pool house.

  Sarles didn’t. He had his own house a few miles away, and his own wife in it. He was a full-time gardener for the Bedlows; had been, for Bedlow, for more than ten years. When the house was closed in the winter he kept the drives open, worked on stone fences as they needed it and on trees as trees needed care; he saw that the heat stayed on; that the reserve generator was exercised weekly. From mid-February on, he had “plenty to do” in the greenhouse.

  “Yep,” Forniss said, watching the photographer and Crowley as he listened. “No idea when somebody broke in here?”

  Sarles hadn’t. He sounded aggrieved. Some time within ten days. Once the family was back—they had been back for a week—he didn’t check on things so much. “I’m a gardener,” he said. “Not a watchman.”

  “Sure,” Forniss said. “You’ve told them up at the house?”

  Sarles had telephoned, using an extension in the greenhouse. He had told Simpkins, who had said he would tell Mr. Bedlow when Mr. Bedlow came down to breakfast. Sarles supposed he had told “the old man.”

  “You ought to know,” Sarles said, and still seemed aggrieved, “sort of thing happens all the time. Young squirts, mostly. Break things up just for the fun of it.”

  “Sure,” Forniss said.

  All the same, somebody had broken into the house, not to break things up but to live in it. For several days at least. Somebody, conceivably, Ann Bedlow had walked in on the evening before? Somebody it had been, for some reason, dangerous to walk in on? A man hiding, with the law after him, ready to strike—to kill if it came to killing—to avoid being caught?

  The photographer had finished. Crowley, crouched low, was moving again along the path, looking on either side of it. The other trooper was working up the path toward the house as Crowley worked down it. Crowley was rather like a dog looking for a trail. Good kid, Crowley. If Mrs. Bedlow had been struck down on, or near, the path, and carried to the pool for the “accident” there would be traces. Jagged scalp wounds, even if only the scalp is involved—not the skull, not the brain under it—bleed profusely.

  Odd the stone had been left so near the path, so unconcealed. Tossed a few feet into deep grass, it would have lain undetected. And with a good rain to wash its surface, it would soon have been nothing at all—not Exhibit A, not any exhibit. It was almost, Forniss thought briefly, as if they had been meant to find it.

  That seemed unlikely. They had been meant to see an accident. Why, then? Strike her down; put the stone down so that hands would be free to carry; drop her in the pool. And, forget the stone? Or—hear somebody coming and have to run for it? The last, probably.

  “Tell me about yesterday,” Forniss said. “You helped Mr. Bedlow with her, they tell me.”

  “He yelled,” Sarles said. “First her name, and you could tell something had happened. Then he yelled for me. I came running and—”

  “Where were you, Mr. Sarles?”

  Sarles had been in the garden—the vegetable garden. Up “there.” About a hundred yards. He had been cleaning up the asparagus bed, because with any decent weather they’d begin to cut in a few weeks. He had run down the slope. Bedlow had been going down into the pool, at the shallow end. When Sarles saw what Bedlow saw, he went after him. They got her out.

  “Poor thing,” Sarles said. “Head all smashed in, mister.”

  Bedlow had carried his dying wife and Sarles had walked along behind him, ready to steady him if he needed it. He hadn’t needed steadying.

  “He kept saying her name over and over,” Sarles said. “But she didn’t hear him, I guess. As good as dead already.”

  “Before he shouted,” Forniss said. “As if something had happened. You hear anything before that?”

  “Called her a couple of times,” Sarles said. “First from up near the house. Then from closer. Then maybe five minutes and he yelled. When he found her.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Forniss had lowered his voice.

  “What say?”

  Forniss repeated what he had said, and spoke more loudly.

  “Nope.”

  He looked at Forniss and frowned slightly.

  “Nothing the matter with my hearing, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Jason Sarles said.

  “Sure not,” Forniss said. There was no point in starting an argument. Probably there hadn’t been any sound that would carry a hundred yards, anyway. A heavy stone breaking a fragile skull doesn’t make much noise.

  “The asparagus bed,” Forniss said. “You said you were cleaning it up?”

  “Raking. Getting stones out.”

  A rake makes a noise when it hits stones. A man gets preoccupied when he’s doing his job.

  “From where you were working you couldn’t see down here? The pool? The path?”

  “Roof of the house. That’s all.”

  “There’s another way in? I mean—to the garden? A service road of some sort?”

  “Sure. Comes in back of the pool house and swings around. Way I come in, mostly. Right now, it’s pretty soft, with the frost out. You figure somebody—”

  He stopped, because Forniss had walked abruptly away. He walked to Crowley, who had beckoned and bent to look at what Crowley had found.

  Dry leaves had collected in a little hollow, halfway between where the stone lay and the pool. There was blood on the dried leaves and, beyond them, on grass, on other leaves, more spots of blood.

  More pictures—not that they would show much; would show more than dead leaves with, possibly, spots on them.

  “When you get what you want,” Forniss told the trooper with the camera, “take the chunk of rock, and some of the leaves too, I guess, to the sub-station. And call the barracks and tell them it doesn’t look so much like accident, and tell them why. O.K.? And tell them I’ll be at the house. Oh—and that the coroner better have a long look at her, because this chunk of rock is jagged, and the pool floor isn’t.”

  The trooper said, “O.K., sergeant.”

  “Better come along with me, Ray,” Forniss said, to Raymond Crowley, and watched the kid’s face brighten.

  A hell of a time for the captain to be on leave, Forniss thought. A captain is better than a sergeant for talking to people like Bedlow. Any captain than any sergeant, which is the way things are.

  So—the captain wasn’t here. And Forniss was here.

  He led the way up the path, and around the house and across the turnaround toward the front door. A Jaguar was standing in the turnaround. Been driven through mud, the Jaguar had. Got mud on its pretty feet.

  IV

  The shadows of the night were forgotten, only the tenderness of the night remembered. The sun was bright in Georgia as they drove north from Brunswick on Saturday morning; it was bright in South Carolina. (Two weeks before Charleston had had its “blizzard.” They had read about it in Palm Beach, and read with surprise, with disbelief. Prostrated, Charleston had been, snarled its traffic and dismissed its schools. There had been nothing like it in the memory of the city. The snowfall had measured a full half inch.)

  There was nothing now remaining to mark the city’s ordeal. The sun was bright in Charleston, as they went into it over a long bridge; bright still as they went out of it, over a longer and far higher bridge, having paused for lunch at a restaurant which promised, and produce
d, “Lounge.” They had supposed “Lounge” a euphemism, and found it so.

  “That was it,” Heimrich said, with satisfaction in his voice, when they had finished with the long, high bridge, and were north of Charleston. “Bridges, naturally. Not so absurd as it sounded. Ice on bridges. Bridges all over the place.”

  “Had it been worrying you?” Susan asked, gravity in her voice.

  He was driving and could only glance quickly at her face. The face was grave, as her voice was grave. Then it crinkled around the edges.

  He laughed, then.

  “All right,” he said. “I like explanations. An occupational disease. Half an inch of snow, even allowing for the inhabitants’ surprise—huh? But ice on bridges. No ‘huh’ about it.”

  “None whatever,” she said. “No possible, probable shadow of huh.” Whereupon, for no sufficient reason, except that she was young and alive (brush away that last remaining shadow) and with, finally with, the man she wanted to be with, Susan began to sing softly. What she sang was from Gilbert and Sullivan, and concerned the unhappy lot of a policeman with constabulary duty to be done. He joined her. It had come as something of a surprise to Susan that her husband had a baritone voice of the type called “pleasing.” One lived and learned.

  She turned on the radio. The news would continue after this announcement. “Are you getting as many eggs as you should from your hens? Hundreds of chicken farmers in the Carolinas have found yield vastly increased when they fed Blossoms, the superior poultry food. If you are now feeding—”

  “Goodness,” Susan said. “How far away we are, aren’t we? I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “Very far away. But there was that advertisement of snuff on TV last night. So what’s a little—”

  “And now back to the news,” the radio said. “All but one of the half dozen men picked up for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of Mrs. James Bedlow, wife of the New York newspaper publisher, have been released, the Putnam County district attorney admitted today. The man still held is believed to be wanted in Chicago, and to have no connection with Mrs. Bedlow’s murder, which the police at first described as an accident. It has now been established that she was fatally beaten by someone who used a jagged rock as a weapon, and afterward threw the unconscious woman into an empty swimming pool on the fifty-acre Bedlow estate to simulate accident. According to the county authorities, the State Police are looking for someone, presumably a man, who had broken into the bath house near the pool and may have been surprised by Mrs. Bedlow, who was taking a late afternoon walk when she was killed. On the international scene, Chancellor Adenauer was quoted today as—”

  Susan switched the radio off. Merton Heimrich was looking straight ahead, up the long straight road. It was, she thought, as if he sought to look beyond the range of any eyes—look across hundreds of miles, to a place sixty miles or so north of the city of New York. Toward murder—

  But, which was a little strange, the shadows did not return. It was the meaninglessness that frightened me, Susan thought—the cruel emptiness of accident. Murder is as cruel, but the mind can cope with murder. There is meaning in murder; murder does not empty life of meaning.

  “You feel left out, don’t you?” she said, to the man who was looking at something hundreds of miles away. “You want to be there, not here.”

  “What did—” he began, but then he heard her. He shook his head; he turned long enough to smile at her, and shake his head slowly.

  “Only here,” he said. “There’ll be plenty there.” “Sergeant Forniss?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “naturally Forniss. They may send somebody down from Albany if—if it looks too tricky. Not that they’d need to. Charley’s as good as—” He shrugged his shoulders. “But there you are,” he said.

  “How would they know it wasn’t—wasn’t just falling into the pool?”

  “Nature of the wound, at a guess,” he said. “They say ‘jagged.’ Probably uneven penetration instead of just—” He stopped. “Sorry, dear.”

  “You’re a cop,” she said. “I’m a cop’s wife.”

  (It was an odd moment, a most inappropriate moment, to hear a singing in her mind.)

  “No reason why I should rub your nose in it,” Heimrich said.

  (Susan Heimrich thought, Oh damn it, not again! Not his thinking again that I’m too fragile to be touched. By him, by life. Not any more the cotton wool. The great oaf! The—the dear oaf!)

  “Why,” Susan Heimrich said, skipping that—“why do you suppose he went to the trouble? About the pool, since—”

  Heimrich slowed the car abruptly, then. He turned it off onto the shoulder, and put the brake on and turned.

  “I,” he said, “must look at you, Susan. I really must.”

  He really did. He did more. He leaned over and kissed her, firmly.

  “Thank you very much,” Susan said. “Is it all right to ask why? Not that it matters, but—”

  “Now Susan,” Heimrich said, “because you’re such a bright girl. A head-of-the-class girl, naturally. I sit here thinking, there’s something about it doesn’t jibe and you—” He picked up her hand and looked at it. “This one?” he said, and pulled at the index finger. “Which one? Which finger?”

  Smiling, happy, she shook her head.

  “Did you put on it?” he said. “So precisely. Why did he go to the trouble. Go on with it.”

  “You,” she said. “I’ll quit when I’m ahead.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “He’s broken into the bath house,” he said. “Whatever it is. Holed up there, probably. She comes along and—walks in on him? Sees him, starts to run. To run to get help, to get him caught. He can’t have that—we don’t know why. Wanted somewhere, at a guess. Wanted bad. Grabs a piece of rock and runs after her and throws it at her, or catches up with her and uses it like a hammer. Realizes he’s killed her, or near enough.”

  She nodded her head.

  “All he wants,” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes and spoke slowly, “is to get away. Get away fast. What good does it do him to make it look like an accident? He’s got to run anyway—run like hell. Accident or not, we’ll find out he was there, be after him. Pick her up and carry her whatever distance he’d need to? Why? Waste of time. Also, get blood on himself. A jagged rock would tear, and the scalp bleeds a lot.”

  “Of course,” Susan said, “he may have been muddled. Not thought things out. Not been able to think things out.”

  “Now Susan,” Heimrich said. “That’s precisely it, nat—isn’t it? To fake the accident would have been thinking things out. A man who would have gone that far—under these circumstances, when the only idea would have been to get away—would have gone further, and thought, What’s the point? If she was killed that way, it was because a man panicked. Panicky men run.”

  He looked at her carefully.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Someone who wouldn’t need to run if the accident was believed,” Heimrich said. “That would be a different matter, wouldn’t it? Someone who could just sit tight.”

  He started the car, let a truck pass (with considerable reluctance) and turned out onto the road again.

  “Forniss’ll spot it,” Heimrich told Susan, told himself. “If there’s anything to spot. The reporters may have balled it up, naturally.”

  At a little after one o’clock on Saturday afternoon—at about the time Merton and Susan Heimrich were entering the “lounge” in Charleston, South Carolina, with a hope that the word “lounge” was indeed a euphemism—Sergeant Charles Forniss parked a police car in the turnaround in front of the Bedlow house. He got out from behind the wheel on one side and Trooper Raymond Crowley, in civilian clothes now, got out on the other. The Jaguar was still there; its tires still had mud on them. He’d ask about that, now. Now that District Attorney Ferguson Knight had decided to bring things out into the open. What the great hurry had been, Forniss couldn’t see. Knight wasn’t, at the moment
, running for anything.

  The day before it had been only routine; only the getting of the lay of the land. If James Bedlow hadn’t, the day before, felt up to answering routine questions, that had been all right. That had been something of which Forniss could say, “I quite understand, Mr. Curtis. No use bothering him at a time like this.”

  Yesterday had been a time to feel one’s way, putting no pressure on. Why put pressure on when one merely assembles facts for an accident report? When pressure becomes part of a picture, it changes the picture.

  Not, Forniss had thought, driving to the house from a conference in Carmel with District Attorney Ferguson Knight, that they really had much pressure to apply. Had anyone—member of the family, member of the staff—seen or heard anything from the direction of the bath-guest house since the big house had been opened? Seen or heard anyone? Some little thing, something of no apparent importance—a brief flicker of a flashlight; possibly the sound of a car on the back road—when noticed, now taking on new significance?

  “Somebody must have seen something of this tramp,” Ferguson Knight said firmly, being a firm man. “Or heard something. Something that will give us a line.”

  “If it was a tramp,” Forniss had said, mildly.

  Knight didn’t, he said, get what Forniss was driving at. Sure it was a tramp. Somebody who had broken into the bath house for warmth and food, and for a hiding place. Forniss wasn’t suggesting, was he, that anyone—well, call it closer—to Mrs. Bedlow had something to do with it? If Forniss was, Forniss was barking up the wrong tree.

  “Look,” Knight said, “I know the Bedlows. Bedlow and his daughters and poor Ann. Hell, man, they’re members of the country club. Carabec.”

  “Sure,” Forniss said.

  “Chances are,” Knight said, “the roadblocks’ll get him. He’ll be running.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Chances are.”

  Roadblocks had picked up a number of conceivable suspects. Roadblocks always did. That was one thing you could say for roadblocks—they always blocked something. Ten suspects by noon on Saturday—five of them local farm laborers; two possible juvenile delinquents with nothing else against them but the potential; one man who was trying to hitchhike back in the general direction of Florida, which he had hitchhiked away from too early in the season; one—which was unfortunate—a quite prominent and rather rich retired lawyer, who had been taking a walk in old clothes. Leaving one man Chicago wanted on suspicion of armed robbery. Unfortunately, that one had been drunk in a tavern near Brewster from four o’clock Thursday afternoon until he was thrown out at a little after eight. Chicago could have him.