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Burnt Offering Page 5


  Heimrich smiled faintly. He said it was all right; he said any working out was always welcome. They would, he added, know more when the doctors had been at it. The trooper shook his head to that. He pointed out that there wouldn’t, so far as he could see, be much to—well, much to work on. Grant the teeth, for identification—after that—he ended with a shrug.

  “Now Ted,” Heimrich said. “A man like Doctor Kramer can find things you wouldn’t expect. We’ll borrow Kramer. Or try to.” He looked once more at the charred body. “Kramer’s very interested in his work,” Heimrich said, and began to wade out through the damp ashes. On the hardened earth beyond the burned area he stamped his feet, but the blackness clung.

  The ambulance came through bright sunlight and took away what it had come for—took it to the nearest hospital with the necessary facilities. They watched the ambulance drive away. “Who found it?” Heimrich asked then, and was told—one of the Purvis boys. Asa Purvis. The trooper pointed toward the garage. He watched Heimrich cross the road, and the trooper shook his head. The captain wasn’t, certainly, a man to let the obvious alone. Somebody gets trapped in a burning building and is burned to death. Tough. A bad way to die. But you’d think, from the way the captain was acting, that Orville Phipps—assuming it was Phipps—had been murdered. The trooper joined the other trooper; helped him tell people in cars, of whom there were now many, to just keep moving, please, that there wasn’t anything to see.

  “Great guy to nose around,” Ted told the other trooper, in a lull.

  “Got so he doesn’t believe anything,” the other trooper agreed. “Nothing to see, sir. Just keep moving along, please.”

  Heimrich found a telephone at Purvis’s garage. He was at it for some time. He told the captain at Troop K that he thought he’d stick around a while and look into things. He said, “Sure. It looks like an accident. But we want to know, don’t we?” He asked they dispatch to him Sergeant Charles Forniss, and was told, a little doubtfully, that Forniss was pretty busy. He said, “Now Joe. I may need him.”

  He talked to county officials at Carmel, and was tactful—was very tactful. He had heard that Dr. Warrender, who acted as county pathologist, had been under the weather recently. He was sorry about that. Under the circumstances—would they mind borrowing Dr. Kramer from White Plains?

  “In other words,” the district attorney in Carmel said, “you think it’s a tricky one? Why? What we’ve got looks like an accident.”

  “The body is badly burned,” Heimrich told him. “Kramer is very good. Warrender is too, of course, but, since he’s not been well—”

  They agreed to ask for Kramer.

  Heimrich put in another call. He told Kramer he would be asked for. He was answered by a sigh of considerable duration. He was asked why; was asked what was supposed to be looked for.

  “Mr. Phipps doesn’t seem to have been universally loved,” Heimrich said. “I’d appreciate it, doctor.”

  Heimrich sought Asa Purvis, who was easily found—who was very young, whose hair was blond and thick, who did not look at all well. He admitted he was Asa Purvis, and swallowed. He swallowed again and looked across the road, and moistened his lips. Heimrich indicated the bench in front of the garage, and sat on it with the boy. He offered a cigarette. Asa reached for it, but then he shook his head. He said he guessed he wouldn’t. He said he smoked too much anyway. Again he moistened his lips.

  “Bad way to start a day,” Heimrich said.

  “I don’t,” Asa began, and then said, “Oh, finding—” He stopped. “I’m all right,” he said. “Didn’t faze me.”

  “Good,” Heimrich said. “Some people can’t take it.”

  “I’m O. K.,” the boy said. “It’s only—there wasn’t much left, was there?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not very much. How did you happen to find it, Asa?”

  “The jeep,” Asa said, and pointed at the paneled station wagon, backed now out of harm’s way. “Blocked the pumps when I got up this morning. I knew it was old man—that it was Mr. Phipps’s. At first I couldn’t figure it out and then I thought, ‘Suppose something happened to him at the fire?’ and I went over and—and looked.” He swallowed again, and moistened his lips again. “First, I hardly didn’t know what it was.”

  “Don’t think about it, Asa,” Heimrich said. It was sound advice. It was also, Heimrich thought, ridiculous advice.

  “Sure,” the boy said. “I didn’t know people burned so—so—”

  “Tell me about last night,” Heimrich said. The boy looked at him. He pushed his hand through his heavy hair. He had a round face, with the soft chin of youth. The back of his neck still was narrow with youth.

  “I don’t know what you mean, captain,” Asa said.

  “You were here,” Heimrich said. “You watched the fire, naturally. I suppose you did. We want to find out how it happened.”

  Asa had watched the fire. Everybody had watched the fire. No, he had not actually seen Orville Phipps. But he’d be bound to be there. Everybody had come from the meeting.

  “It looked like a parade,” Asa said. “Everybody was honking his horn.”

  “Before that,” Heimrich said. “You must have seen it when it started.”

  “I did all I could,” Asa said. “I was here all alone. What could one guy do?”

  Heimrich didn’t question that. That was not the point.

  “You were here alone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened.”

  They closed the pumps at nine o’clock, or about that. They did every night. Asa himself had got to the garage about eight-thirty; he had helped Orville—“my brother Orville, that is”—for half an hour or so. Orville and Bide. Bide Jenkins that was. Bide was the mechanic and—

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Your brother and Bide left around nine. Then?”

  Asa had closed the big doors, and gone into the office and turned a light on there. He had spent a few minutes working on his car. “Choke stuck.” That had been in the garage. When he had finished he had gone outside again, sat on the bench and read that morning’s Daily Mirror by the light which came through the office window.

  “Then I just looked up and the fire house was on fire,” he said. “You could see the fire through the window.”

  He had run across the road and looked in, and had seen the fire already had headway. “There wasn’t anything I could do. I saw that.” He had gone back to the garage and telephoned and reported the fire. He had called his father and told him, and his father had said he would try to get hold of some of the members of the fire company. “Guess most of them were at the meeting, though,” Asa said.

  The fire had spread very rapidly. Ten minutes after Asa had first seen it, it was “coming out the roof.”

  “Actually?” Heimrich asked, and got a correction. Fire had broken a front window and was coming out that; it was jumping darn near as high as the roof. It lighted things up, then. People began coming, then. They came from all directions, but mostly from the meeting. It had been about half an hour after he had first noticed the fire that the “parade” had come from the meeting at the Town House.

  “Cars parked every which way,” Asa said. “Nothing anybody could do, though, till the boys got here from Cold Harbor.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t much then,” he said.

  “You stayed here at the garage?”

  “Pretty close. Got hold of an extinguisher and stood around. Lucky there wasn’t any wind.”

  His father and both his brothers, Orville and James, had attended the fire. They had gone when it had burned out. That had been a little after ten. Most of the spectators had been gone by ten-thirty; the men from the Cold Harbor Fire Company had stayed another half hour.

  “There wasn’t any fire left then?”

  “It was hot,” the boy said. “You could see a little red now and then. In toward the middle. But it was all right to leave.”

  “You didn’t see Mr. Phipps?”

  “I said I didn’t, mister.�
��

  “That’s right,” Heimrich said. “I remember. But his station wagon was still here? Over by the pumps?”

  “Well,” Asa said. “Sure, it must have been. Only—” He stopped.

  “Now son,” Heimrich said. “Only what?”

  “It was pretty dark,” Asa said. “There was only the light from the window after the firemen left. And he wouldn’t have left his lights on.”

  “The point is,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t see it. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  Asa looked puzzled, then. He said it was a funny thing.

  “I guess I must have seen it,” he said. “Just didn’t take it in. You know how? The sub-consciousness.”

  “You don’t remember seeing it? After the fire, I mean?”

  “No,” the boy said. “I don’t. But I guess I must have, because when I saw it this morning—well, it was funny. It was like I’d seen it there before. What I mean is, I wasn’t surprised to see it. You see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I guess so, Asa. But when you went to bed—you stayed here in the garage last night?” The boy nodded. “When you went to bed, you thought all the cars had gone?”

  “Yes. Only, I didn’t go around and look. Wasn’t any reason to.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. It was not particularly satisfactory. It was, he thought, as satisfactory as, for the time being, it was going to get. “Where do you sleep?” he asked.

  “Back there.” Asa gestured.

  “Show me,” Heimrich said, and they went through the garage, past a pit in which somebody—Bide Jenkins, probably—was working under a car, past the open door of the office where a red-faced man sat at a desk, to a small room at the end of the long building. There was a bed there. Asa pointed. There was a telephone across the room from the bed. On the sill of an open window there was a thermos bottle.

  Heimrich nodded. He looked back through the garage. A boy asleep here, with the garage doors closed—a boy who no doubt slept soundly—would be undisturbed if— Heimrich considered. If the fire across the road had flared up again in the night? If—say—Phipps had driven back, after leaving with the other spectators, had left his station wagon near the pumps, had gone across the road and—and what? Burned himself up?

  He remembered Mr. Phipps from the night before. He had seldom seen a man of Mr. Phipps’s age, and contours, more vigorously alive, apparently more determined to remain alive. Of course, it was not yet certain that he had not managed it. Heimrich walked, Asa a step behind him, through the garage. As they passed the open office door for the second time, the man at the desk spoke. He had a hearty voice.

  “Kid tell you what you wanted to know?” he boomed. “I’m Purvis. Jim Purvis. It’s a bad thing about old Orville.”

  “Very,” Heimrich said. “Yes, Asa told me what I wanted to know. What he knows of it, anyway.”

  “Went in to get the records, like as not,” Purvis said. He stood up. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt and a red necktie. He was a large man—a man large in all directions. “Fool thing to do.”

  “Phipps?” Heimrich said.

  “Sure,” Jim Purvis said. “Phipps. He was treasurer of the fire company, you know. Must have been some papers up there.” He gestured. “Second floor. Went up to get them, poor old Orville did and—zowie.”

  “He would have done a thing like that?”

  “What do you mean, would have? He must have. What else could have happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “You’re probably right, Mr. Purvis. If it was Mr. Phipps.”

  Purvis was broadly astonished. He said, “Who else?”

  Heimrich said he didn’t know. He said probably it had been Mr. Phipps who died. He said it probably had happened as Mr. Purvis said. He went on, Asa still following, Asa’s father standing in the door of the office, looking after them. Heimrich went to the jeep station wagon and looked at it. He had Asa show him where it had been. He looked into the wagon, not touching it more than was necessary.

  “It was unlocked?” he said. “Must have been.”

  “That’s right,” Asa said. “No key in the ignition. Ignition turned off and—” He stopped suddenly. He looked puzzled. “Yes?” Heimrich said.

  “I don’t know,” Asa said. “It’s sort of a funny thing. Old man Phipps always locked the jeep—the Caddy too—when he left it for a minute. He’d come here to see pop, just for a minute, maybe, and darned if he wouldn’t lock the ignition. Right in front of the pumps sometimes. Right in the middle of the day.”

  Heimrich waited a moment.

  “Guess he must’ve been in a hell of a hurry,” Asa said. “All steamed up about the fire.”

  “Probably,” Heimrich said. “When you moved the jeep, Asa, you had to open the door, naturally. Handle the wheel. Let the brake off. Shift.”

  “Sure,” Asa said.

  “Do you remember,” Heimrich asked him, “whether you touched anything else? Any other part of the car?”

  Asa shook his head, after thinking a moment. He looked at Heimrich, and it was evident he engaged in thought.

  “Fingerprints?” he said. Then he said, “Jeeze! You think—?”

  “We like to be sure about things, Asa,” Heimrich said. “Think you can keep anybody from touching the jeep until we get a chance to go over it?”

  “Sure,” Asa said. “Sure I can, captain.” He looked at the station wagon with increased interest. “Jeeze,” he said, this time softly, reflectively. (He patted his hip, where a police revolver almost dangled. An inner voice was hard; unspoken words were clipped. “Purvis, FBI.”)

  IV

  The old stone inn stands well back from the road—which there, for a mile or so, is more properly a street. There are large trees between the inn and the road, and the trees are very old. The inn is long, and built of field stone, and externally it is somewhat somber. It is, however, approved by the A.A.A. The inn’s sign, which is discreet, promises a cocktail lounge and accommodations for guests. The grounds of the inn occupy most of the west side of a block in the community of Van Brunt. Across the street from the inn is the First National Bank and Trust Company of Van Brunt, which is a neat brick building, rather recently built. Next the bank, to the north, is a large, white frame house, also set well back from the sidewalk. Near the walk there are two neat signs: “Samuel Jackson, Attorney-at-Law.” “The Van Brunt Library.” The stores—Hopkins’ Pharmacy, the A. & P., The Decorating Shop, the Van Brunt Hardware Company and the rest—are in the blocks to the north and south.

  Captain Heimrich sat at a table by a window in the taproom of the Old Stone Inn. He could look out among the trees. He could see the First National Bank and Trust Company of Van Brunt, where business was, to outward appearances, as usual. A man in a grocer’s white apron went in, carrying what appeared to be a bankbook stuffed, no doubt, with checks. Captain Heimrich sipped his second cup of coffee, which was admirable. At one of the windows in the pleasant room, an air-conditioning unit hummed softly. At the bar in the rear of the taproom a man in a white jacket polished glasses and, as he finished each, set it shining on a shelf behind the bar.

  The main dining room was across the central hall from the tap-room, and eight women—all of whom, Heimrich had noticed with some interest, wore hats—were finishing lunch. Mrs. Paul Stidworthy was one of them. Heimrich had noticed her as she went in with the others. She was large but her largeness was well ordered. She wore a dark silk suit and a white blouse ruffled at the neck and a small blue hat on curled and shining gray hair. When she went in with the others she had been wearing white gloves.

  Myra Burns also was one of the eight. She had hopped in with them, looking quickly, almost anxiously, this way and that. If she had noticed Heimrich, who at that time had been eating scallops sauté meunière, she had given no indication of it. Now Heimrich lighted a cigarette and the bartender came around the bar and to him, and asked if there was anything else. One of the women in the other room raised her voice
, which was a carrying voice, and said, “But Antonio spends all his time watering them as it is.”

  “Ladies from the Garden Club,” the bartender said, musingly. “A little dessert of some kind?”

  “No,” Heimrich said.

  “Goes with the lunch,” the bartender reminded him. “Ice cream? Pastry?”

  “No,” Heimrich said.

  “It’s a bad thing about Mr. Phipps,” the bartender said. “Pretty important around here. Owns the bank, you know.”

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Of course,” the bartender said, “I wouldn’t say he didn’t step on some people’s toes. You’re the police, aren’t you?”

  “One of them,” Heimrich said. “Just one of them, Harold.”

  “Staying around a while, they tell me,” Harold said.

  To that Heimrich nodded, closing his eyes. Harold said, “Expect they could put in a conditioning unit if you want. Want I should ask?”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Thanks just the same. You might give me the check.”

  He got the check. He paid it. He was thanked. He resumed coffee and cigarette, and looked from the coolness of the pleasantly dim taproom into the hot glare of the street. He smoked and sipped with the air of a man whose time is unlimited, who has an afternoon to spend at lunch. There was no impatience about Captain Heimrich as he sat and smoked. Some things take time. He was not pressed for time; he did not press against time.

  A large, square man came into the taproom. He ducked his head slightly as he entered, although his head would not, Heimrich thought, have brushed the lintel. When you were Sergeant Forniss’s height, you usually ducked slightly, on the chance. Forniss had an oblong face which was not noticeable for its play of expression. He came to Heimrich’s table. He said, “Yep.” He looked around the room, his eyes lingering momentarily on Harold, who polished a glass with anxious care.