Let Dead Enough Alone Page 4

  It had been a pleasant evening. It had been one of the pleasantest evenings he could recall. He was still somewhat surprised that he had brought himself to embark upon it. He was an old dog, learning new tricks.

  It had started with a notice, to its customers, from the Old Stone Inn of Van Brunt. As was its custom, the Inn had announced, there would be a special New Year’s Eve dinner. Dinner would be followed by dancing. Only forty reservations were to be accepted, so that such prized guests as Captain M. L. Heimrich would find the inn uncrowded. The Inn hoped that the valued guest to whom this invitation was directed, would make his reservation in good time, thus securing a table advantageously placed.

  Heimrich had received this invitation some days before Christmas, at the Hawthorne Barracks of the State police. He had folded it neatly and placed it in a wastebasket. Some little time later he had taken it out, and unfolded it carefully, and read it again, with the thought that the Inn must be more or less scraping the bottom of its barrel of valued guests. Heimrich had stayed there for a few hot summer days during the investigation of the murder of the late supervisor of the Town of Van Brunt. He had not had, particularly, the sense of being valued. Over the whole incident, he had thought, the Inn, together with the rest of Van Brunt, would have preferred that a veil be drawn.

  Heimrich had folded the invitation again, with the same care, but this time had put it in his pocket. Being a deliberate man, he had thought matters over for the rest of that day, and for most of the next. The matters he thought of appeared, at first, ridiculous. He was old for this sort of thing. A young woman like Susan Faye—a slender gray-eyed young woman, with square shoulders and other seemly attributes—would long since have planned for the holidays. In Van Brunt, and its environs, there were doubtless many young men of her own age who would be delighted to take Susan Faye to the special dinner (to be followed by dancing) at the Old Stone Inn. He—he must be fifteen years older than she. Perhaps even a year or two in excess of fifteen. He would be making himself ridiculous. He was anything but a dancing man.

  “Why—hullo, captain,” Susan Faye had said, when she answered her telephone. It had been absurd of him to find her voice exciting.

  She had been very well. Yes, young Michael had also been very well. The Colonel had eaten something which had disagreed with him, but was now, also, in admirable health.

  “Is he still as sad as always?” Heimrich asked.

  “He seems to be,” Susan Faye said, in her grave young voice, and did not hurry Captain Heimrich.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said then, apropos of nothing in particular. “Mrs. Faye, I wondered whether by any chance you—”

  She heard him through, which, as he spoke, he felt to be more than he deserved.

  “I’d like to very much,” Susan had said. “There is nothing I’d like better, Merton.”

  Captain Heimrich, who had always regarded his given name with dogged disapproval, found that it sounded pleasantly in his ears.

  At three minutes after midnight Heimrich, putting down the glass from which he had drunk a toast to the New Year, found that Susan Faye, sitting beside him on the banquette, was looking up at him, as if there were still something to be expected. For a moment, Heimrich had been at a loss, and then he remembered. Somewhat to his astonishment, and greatly to his enjoyment, Captain Heimrich had kissed the sweet, wide mouth of Mrs. Susan Faye, widow, mother of a boy of seven (and a half, by now) and custodian of the largest of Great Danes. Leaving her at her home some time later, Heimrich had kissed her again. He had driven back to the inn through heavy snow, and had been quite unconscious of the fact that dangling links on one of the tire chains were banging angrily against the fender.

  Heimrich, who was a very solid man, with a brown face which might have been carved from some durable wood, got out of bed. He wore dark blue pajamas. He went into the bathroom, and ran a tub, since there was no shower. He had one foot in it when the telephone rang. He had a momentary feeling of pleased expectancy, which was, again, ridiculous. He said, “Heimrich speaking,” wished for the briefest of instants that he had used other words, and discovered that he had not needed to.

  “Yes, Charlie,” he said, to Sergeant Charles Forniss, speaking from Hawthorne. “Yes, I was awake.”

  “Young Crowley,” Forniss said. “Trooper Ray Crowley?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I remember Crowley.”

  “Just phoned in,” Forniss said. “Answered a squeal from up around Lake Carabec. Man named Halley—John Halley. Found in the lake. Wife says it’s suicide. Says she was afraid he might. Man had been in a depression.”

  “Crowley doesn’t like it? Say why?”

  “Halley had to walk a hundred yards, through pretty deep snow. Jump in a very cold lake.”

  “Well?”

  “There was a bottle of sleeping pills on the bed table in his room. All of them he would have needed.”

  “All right,” Captain Heimrich said. “I’ll pick you up, Charlie.”

  Buy Accent on Murder Now!

  IV

  The police car moved with slowness appropriate to the surface. The plow had been through on the road around Lake Carabec, but the thin packed snow it had left behind was very slippery. A link of one of the tire chains continued a rhythmic assault on the under side of the fender. Snow still was falling, but now very lightly.

  Where the road came closest to the lake, was separated from it only by an ancient wooden rail and a pitching bank, Sergeant Forniss drove with particular care. At one place, where the road curved sharply in toward the water, part of the rail was down. Something had hit the rail and scarred it, so that unweathered wood showed.

  “Somebody had a narrow squeak there,” Heimrich said. To this, Sergeant Forniss said, “Yep. Looks like it.” They came to a driveway and turned up it. Here the plow had not been, but there were ruts in the snow. They followed the ruts until they came to a police car, parked so that it obstructed entrance to, or exit from, a three-car garage. Forniss pulled up beside it.

  “Ambulance been and gone,” Forniss said, indicating the broad, deep tracks of a vehicle with chains. “But they’d moved the body anyway.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “They had to, of course.”

  The door opened and a young trooper came out. Heimrich said, “Morning, Ray. Had another hunch?”

  Trooper Ray Crowley flushed. He looked younger than ever. He said it could be he was nuts. He said there wasn’t much of anything to go on, and the more he heard about it, the more he thought maybe he was nuts.

  “But?” Heimrich said.

  “Why would a man go out and jump in a cold lake?” Crowley said. “Do it the hard way? Only—his wife says he’s tried several times to kill himself. Says he was in a depression. And—seems she ought to know, being a doctor. Psychiatrist. Also, she says there’s no telling how somebody will go about killing himself.” He paused. “Guess maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, sir,” he said. “On a hunch, like you say.”

  “Well,” Heimrich said. “You did, Ray. And—the water must have been very cold. Not like a nice warm garage, with the motor running.”

  “Or sleeping pills,” Ray Crowley said. “Half full bottle in his room. Nembutal, his wife says. She prescribed it. That would have been the easy way.” He looked at Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss. “And then,” he said, “maybe it was just an accident. Only—”

  Heimrich waited.

  “You want to see where it happened, captain?” Crowley asked. “Or talk to them first?” He gestured toward the house.

  “Oh, at the beginning,” Heimrich said. “The end, rather. Where was it, Crowley?”

  Crowley led them through the snow, in an area where there had already been much walking in the snow. He led them down to the road, and across it, and then down a sharp slope. There was a small building at the edge of the water.

  “Boathouse,” Crowley said. “No boat in it, they say. Here’s where they say it was.”

  Near the boa
thouse, the snow was much trampled down to the water. There was a rimming of ice on the lake, and there it had been broken. (And was now beginning to freeze again.) Something had been dragged through the snow.

  “This way when I got here,” Crowley said. “But, you can’t blame them for getting him out, I guess.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. He ventured into the trampled area, moving carefully. He slipped and caught himself. “Rock on the surface here,” he said. “Very slippery with the snow on it, naturally. How deep’s the water, Ray? Here at the edge.”

  “Three or four feet. According to a man named Perry—he’s a doctor, too—Halley hit his head on something. Knocked himself out, Dr. Perry thinks. As a matter of fact, Dr. Perry thinks it was an accident. Only—what was he doing down here?” He paused. “Of course,” he said, “there’d been a party.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I supposed there had. He may have been a little drunk. Come out for fresh air—or just to see if it was still snowing—or for any other reason a man who’s a little drunk has for doing things.”

  “They say he wasn’t drunk. His wife says that. Dr. Perry says that.”

  Captain Heimrich said, “Hm-m,” and came back up the bank, using considerable care. He stood and looked around; looked across the lake. “Pretty here in the summer,” he said. “Always liked Carabec.”

  He continued to look around—at the trodden snow by the bank, out of the water. Far out, briefly, a stretch of water caught sunlight. “Breaking up,” Heimrich said. “It’ll get colder, now.” He looked at the boathouse, long and low. The snow had drifted at the end farther from the water. “No boat, you say?” he said, to Ray Crowley. Crowley said that was what they told him. “No night for a boat ride anyway,” Heimrich said.

  Three heavy wires, neatly spaced, went into the boathouse, coming down to it from a pole. The wires, supported by two more poles, went up to the house on the other side of the road. “Must have a lathe or something in there,” Heimrich said. “Wouldn’t you think, Charlie?”

  Charles Forniss said, “Yep.”

  “Seem to have come right to it,” Heimrich said. “The ones who found him, naturally. What did they say about that, Ray?”

  They had said, Ray told him, that there were shallow depressions in the snow. Not tracks, in a real sense, but what remained of tracks after blowing snow had almost filled them. A man named Kemper—Thomas Kemper—had noticed them. He and Dr. Perry had followed them.

  Heimrich nodded. He looked again toward the boathouse, and the unmarked snow around it. “Snowed hard until an hour or so ago, didn’t it?” he said. “Three hours after they saw these hollows. Maybe more than three hours. But nobody would come down to run a lathe either, you wouldn’t think.”

  “There’d still be some marks,” Forniss said.

  “Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Depends, doesn’t it? On the wind, for one thing. Well—”

  They went back the way they had come, and on the porch of the Halley house they stamped snow from their feet. A tall thin man with glasses opened the door.

  “This is Captain Heimrich, doctor,” Crowley said. “And Sergeant Forniss.”

  “We were waiting for you,” Brian Perry said. “They’ve taken John’s body. Autopsy, I imagine?”

  “Matter of routine,” Heimrich said. “We won’t bother you people long, I hope.”

  “He drowned,” Brian Perry said. “Head injury, but that was superficial.”

  He stepped away from the door, and they went in, Heimrich first. Perry led them into a long living room. A charred log was all that remained of the cheerful fire of the night before, but the room was warm. There was a dust cover on one long sofa. Heimrich looked at it.

  “Wet,” Perry said. “We put him there. Mrs. Halley will be down in a minute.” He looked at Heimrich, then at Forniss. “She thinks he killed himself, you know,” he said. “Blames herself for that. But it does happen, in spite of all we can do.” Perry shook his head slowly. “Come down to it,” he said, “we don’t know too much. Looking at him, I wouldn’t—”

  He broke off, at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Heimrich watched a trimly built—delicately built—woman come into the room. She was, he guessed, in her forties. She was very pale. She had not, he thought, been crying. She said, in a voice without emphasis, that they were from the police. Perry told Margaret Halley the names of the policemen.

  “I’m sorry we have to—” Heimrich began, and was interrupted. Margaret Halley quite realized what they had to do.

  “I know the rules,” she said. “I’m a physician, captain. One gets used to rules. And—other things. Even to sudden death.”

  She did not reveal a great deal, Heimrich thought. Except that she was under stress.

  “He killed himself,” Margaret Halley said.

  “Why?” Heimrich asked her.

  “He was sick,” she said. “Mentally sick. Manic-depressive psychosis. I’d thought he was improving but—it isn’t always easy to tell. Sometimes not even possible. Dr. Perry will tell you that.”

  Heimrich looked at Perry, and Perry nodded.

  “He didn’t leave a note?” Heimrich said.

  “He didn’t,” Margaret said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to. You see—it is difficult to explain to a normal person, captain—they get to feeling that nothing matters at all. Not even explaining oneself, which is almost the last thing to go. With anyone.”

  “He was depressed last night?”

  Margaret Halley looked at Perry, as if she expected him to answer that. But he merely waited. His face showed very little expression, and the rimless glasses, catching lamplight, hid his eyes.

  “Toward the end,” Margaret said. “You didn’t notice it, Brian?”

  “He became quieter late in the party,” Brian Perry said. “It’s quite possible a depressive phase was beginning. But—I wasn’t attempting diagnosis. I was—” He paused for an instant. “Having a good time.”

  She nodded to that. She said that, after the others had gone up to bed, she had sat for a few minutes with her husband, in front of the fire. She had tried to talk about the party, but he had answered very briefly, without interest. She had said that she was sleepy, was going up to bed, and he had looked into the fire, and merely nodded. She had urged him to go to bed, and to that he had said, politely enough but from far away, “Presently. Presently, my dear.” She had asked him if he wanted his usual milk and rum punch and, when he said neither yes nor no to that, had gone to the kitchen, and warmed milk in a saucepan, and poured it into a glass, added rum and bitters and taken it to him. He had nodded, and she had set it down on a table within reach. “He didn’t drink it,” she said. She had left him there. And that, she said now, had been a mistake.

  “I was tired,” she said. “Let down, with the party over. All I wanted was to get to sleep. I blame myself for that, captain. I—I feel that I failed. As a person. As a physician.”

  Perry seemed about to speak. She said, “It’s no use, Brian.”

  “Dr. Perry,” Heimrich said. “This head injury. Was it enough to make him lose consciousness?”

  “Yes,” Perry said. “Probably. As a matter of fact, I think it did. I think he slipped, struck his head, and drowned while he was unconscious. I’ve told Dr. Halley that.”

  “In other words, that it was an accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “It would look like that to me, naturally.”

  He looked at Mrs. Halley, and she shook her head. Her expression did not change.

  “Why would he go down to the lake?” Heimrich said. “If he wanted to kill himself, there must have been easier ways. Sleeping tablets, for example? They were available, I understand?”

  She said, “Yes. Oh yes,” but spoke impatiently.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “There’s no reason you should. But—the lake was part of it. At the center of it.” She looked at Brian Perry. She spoke very slowly. She said, “You realize
that, Brian.”

  Brian Perry merely looked at her. The glasses still hid the expression in his eyes.

  Lynn had waited a long time in the breakfast room which was behind the dining room in the Halley house. At first, Tom Kemper had been with her. Then, after some time, Struthers Boyd had come into the room and complained about a headache. At first, she had watched the snow falling beyond the windows. Then the snow stopped and, after a time, the sun showed itself periodically. The snow on the ground would glitter in sunlight. Then dark shadows would hurry across it. Lucinda Speed came in twice from the kitchen into the small room, and brought fresh coffee. She sniffled when she entered, and sighed deeply when she left, and as she poured coffee for them she shook her head dolefully from side to side. Mrs. Speed, Lynn Ross thought, was equal to the occasion.

  Lynn did not, herself, feel adequate to it. What had happened was shocking; it was especially shocking under the circumstances—a party weekend changed suddenly into hopeless dreariness. Yet not, for her, turned into tragedy, even in the commonest, which was the most exaggerated, use of the word. Not, at any rate, into tragedy to be felt as such. She was sorry that John Halley had killed himself; shocked that he had; saddened for Margaret. But it would have been unreasonable to expect that she, Lynn Ross, should feel that sense of loss which turns the shocking into the shattering. She had, most simply, hardly known John Halley.

  She told herself this, and yet thought that she should feel more deeply about what had happened—feel something other than a gritty emptiness, a kind of disappointment.

  But if she was not equal to the situation, as Mrs. Speed so clearly was, it seemed to her that Tom Kemper was even less so. When she had first met him she had thought, “How cheerful he is,” and, now that cheerfulness was obviously out of the question, she looked at him again and could not think anything at all about him. A youngish man, of medium height, with a rather square face and rather regular features, with lines to show that he smiled a good deal. He maintained an expression of gravity, or, she supposed, an expression so intended. The trouble, she thought, was that gravity was an attitude unfamiliar to Kemper, and one in which he felt insecure. The situation, she thought, was one requiring more maturity than Tom Kemper had achieved. Or, it appeared, than she had either.