Foggy, Foggy Death Page 5

  It was enough for Heimrich to go on with. Marta Bromwell had not died by accident. He looked reflectively at Higgins, who was still a place to start.

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “You can show us where you found the car, you say.”

  Somewhat to Heimrich’s surprise, Higgins brightened at this. He seemed quite eager to show them where he had found the car. Heimrich himself, and a trooper, took the little man, whose nose was running worse than ever. The trooper, who was young and very immaculate, regarded Higgins with marked disfavor, and remained as distant from him as the metal which linked his left wrist to Higgins’s right permitted. The fog, now that darkness was complete, was almost impenetrable. The police car, with Heimrich driving, groped through it. The fog lights helped a little. But Heimrich was once momentarily off the winding driveway before he reached the road.

  There was a police car at the foot of the driveway and Heimrich briefly blinked red lights at it, identifying officialdom. On the road, which was not much wider than the drive, Heimrich turned left toward Vista, as Higgins told him. The road was almost as winding as the driveway and, in the absence of a center line, Heimrich was forced to guide on the left side of the road, which was all the road he could see. He almost ran into another police car, standing half on the pavement some two hundred yards from the driveway intersection, blocking off a gravelled road which the Town called “improved.” Heimrich swerved and stopped and a trooper came over to him.

  “Up there it was?” Heimrich asked, motioning beyond the parked car into the grayness. The trooper said that was right, captain. Up there a bit, up a farm road which was only a track a bit, along a path a bit. That was where you would put the “X.” Was the captain—?

  “Later,” Heimrich said, and got his car grinding, groping, along the road which led toward Vista. He had groped for about a mile when Higgins said, “Right along here somewheres,” and then almost at once, “There you are, cap.” Heimrich drew cautiously over to the right and stopped.

  There was a gap in the wall; once, no doubt, a road had entered here; once hay wagons must have trundled in and swayed out, but that would have been years ago. With the best light they could bring to bear on it, one could more easily imagine than see the old indentations made long ago by ironshod wheels. This made it easy to see the tracks made very recently by wheels shod in rubber.

  “See?” Higgins demanded, in a voice of anxious triumph, and Heimrich saw. A car had been backed well in and turned parallel to the wall, and behind it. Its rear tires had left a sharp pattern in soft ground. And after a few seconds, Heimrich had no doubt that the car had been the Bromwell Cadillac. Almost automatically when he first saw it, Heimrich had checked the car; noted for future reference the deep-grooved snow tires, fresh and unworn like the car itself and of a pattern new that year. Future reference had become present reference.

  Less clear on the soft ground, dim and barely distinguishable under the lights, there were footprints. Heimrich thought two men had made them. One seemed to have got out of the car, walked toward the road. The other, if there had been two, had walked in front of the car, also from the road but apparently from the east, and had got into it, under the wheel. Perhaps with daylight, if they ever got daylight again, one could tell more.

  Higgins watched the investigation and said, “Ain’t it like I said, cap?” Heimrich said “um-m” and got back into the car. He had to grope another mile or so before he found a place to turn around. He groped back the way he had come, again almost running into the parked police car, and would have missed the drive up to the monstrous house if the other police car had not been halfway across it. The car pulled up to let Heimrich in, and backed again into blocking position. Heimrich groped up the winding drive and ran off it again and felt the turf giving under his right wheels. He got back on. Assistant District Attorney Frazee was going to be disappointed, Heimrich thought. Not so quick and easy after all. But not that he believed Higgins, either—except that it looked as if the car had been there, which made it probable Higgins had got it there. “Naturally,” Heimrich said to himself.

  At the house, Higgins was detached from the young trooper, whose relief was evident. (He’d have even less pleasant experiences as time went on, if he stayed in the business, Heimrich thought.) After consultation with Scott Bromwell and since there was no cell in the house—Heimrich would not have been intolerably surprised if there had been—Higgins was tucked away in an upstairs room and a key was turned on him. He protested this, and his entire innocence of everything, but did not seem as worried as he had seemed, particularly after he had been promised sandwiches and coffee. He still needed a handkerchief, but nobody thought to offer him that.

  Heimrich, who had made his arrangements while he stood in the hall, had beckoned Forniss and was starting for the library, when someone knocked on the front door and almost at once opened it. The man who knocked was one of the troopers and he had another man with him—a tall, tanned man, hatless and with black hair.

  “This man says—” the trooper began and then Lucretia Bromwell spoke from the door to the West Room.

  “Mr. Haas,” Lucretia Bromwell said, “we did not expect you.”

  And, Captain Heimrich found himself thinking, we are not amused. His second thought was less automatic. It was that “we” were not, by a wide margin, prostrate with grief. To the loss of her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell was, Heimrich thought, even this quickly quite reconciled.

  He motioned to Forniss again and the two solid men went down the hall toward the library. Inside it, Heimrich listened and Forniss, who had been busy, talked.

  Buy A Client Is Canceled Now!

  IV

  Karen Mason thought of herself as “mousy,” and had done since she was twelve, a matter of some eleven years. She had been a thin girl, lost in a big chair in a big room and almost lost in a book and she had heard someone say, “Such a mousy little thing.” It was not even certain that the words had been meant to describe Karen, but Karen had nevertheless been certain that they were, so afterward she thought of herself with a kind of dull certainty as a “mousy little thing” and gave up expectation of ever being anything else. In a sense it was true that, although in many respects she changed, she continued still to see in the mirror the thin girl of twelve, with the thin face and sandy hair she had seen—first really seen—that afternoon when, with the overheard words filling her mind, she had looked for a long time into glass.

  She had reconciled herself to this and to what she assumed a necessary concomitant of looking “mousy”: that in any group she would become, automatically, unnoticed, merely background material. If she had been less resilient, this conviction might have led her, in time, actually to think of herself as a mouse, and perhaps even to behave as a mouse. As it was, her confidence was not too seriously affected—her mind was quick and so was her body; on a tennis court she was by no means background and often in conversation she forgot almost entirely that she was a “quiet little thing,” which was another description she supposed must be applied to herself, and was not self-conscious enough not to know that others forgot it too. But that for a long time no one had thought of her as “mousy” simply did not occur to her.

  It might have been (although it was not) Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell herself who talked about a “mousy little thing” that afternoon when Karen was twelve. Mrs. Bromwell and Karen’s mother had been friends for many years, and for a long time after she had moved to High Ridge Mrs. Bromwell returned, in a homing which with anyone else might have had a wistful quality, to Massachusetts, staying in a hotel, of course, but seeing much of Mrs. Mason and other old friends. Karen had been eighteen when her mother died and the house with the big room was sold, and then she had been invited to live at High Ridge. She would not do it then, and it was more than two years later, when Mrs. Bromwell’s secretary had left to get married, that Karen had agreed to take the vacated job. She had always insisted on the essentials of an employer-employee relationship. Kare
n was an independent little thing too; that Mrs. Bromwell did say.

  Marta had been in the house when Karen first came to it; Marta had come there when Lorry was born and had stayed on. Scott had been overseas by that time, and he had remained overseas, in Germany, for a long time afterward—for a long time, indeed, after most other men who had seen combat had been home for years. This had puzzled Karen at first; later, when she discovered how things were, she had assumed he remained voluntarily. This had not, however, been openly suggested, or even hinted at, by anyone. Until Scott came home, Karen had not minded that Marta was beautiful and that she herself was mousy. Until then, indeed, she had never particularly envied any other woman’s beauty.

  Standing by one of the long windows in the East Room, worn out physically, worn out, too, inside herself, Karen could not be wholly sorry that Marta was dead. It was shocking to find in herself this absence of sorrow. That anyone was dead, that anyone young and beautiful should have died so, violently, when full of the expectation of life—that was shocking, and tragic; that made your throat swell and made you want to cry, or to He down in the dark. But you would lie so, or weep so, for all men and women, of all ages, who sought happiness and found death and for those most of all, of course, who were waylaid by death, as Marta had been. But instead of this anonymous humanity, Karen felt deeply, she should weep for Marta as a friend dead, and not for Marta as an abstract of humanity. That she could not do. It would be infinitely easier to weep—if she were to weep at all, which she did infrequently—for Scott, for the children, even, oddly enough, for Mrs. Bromwell.

  Scott looked across the room at her and his thin, expressive face was somehow twisted, and the left eyelid was flickering. (It had not done that before the war. Or was it before Marta?) For a moment she thought he was about to cross the room toward her and in that moment, obscurely, she wanted to run, because she had no idea what she would say to him. But he did not move from where he was standing, near his mother’s chair, and she did not know whether her expression had warned him off, or whether he had changed his mind for some other reason. But perhaps he had not planned to come.

  Instead, it was Hume who joined her.

  “It’s tough waiting,” he said, in his light, carrying voice.

  Until then she had not thought of it as waiting; it was merely being there, in a familiar room, but with unfamiliar fears. But of course they were waiting; they were all waiting. They were waiting for the police to do something, to decide something.

  Karen said, “Yes.”

  She was a little thing; a little, quick thing. Her forehead was high and she had curling hair, light brown and sometimes glinting red; the lower part of her face was delicate and her lips were unexpectedly full and beautiful. If Everett Hume, looking down at her, had been told that she was, by anyone, supposed to resemble a mouse he would have been completely astounded. He was a man astounded by very few things. And he was not a man to walk even a few steps across a room to hold conversation with a mousy little thing.

  “Were you very fond of her?” Hume asked, unexpectedly.

  “I’d known her a long time,” Karen said. “Of course.”

  Hume seemed about to smile, but did not. He nodded, instead.

  “She could be very charming,” he said. “And, of course, she was beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Karen said, “it’s so—”

  It was one of those sentences one does not finish, because no word is quite the proper word. But then Karen was puzzled because, while Marta had been beautiful by the brook, the dead cannot be charming.

  “But,” she said, “you speak as if you had known her.”

  He looked down at her for seconds before he answered.

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew her, Miss Mason.” He paused. “At one time,” he said.

  “But then—” she began. This time she was interrupted.

  The interruption was the return of Captain Heimrich and the trooper, the request that Scott find some place for the temporary detention of Higgins, and then the return of Rudolph Haas. At some time while she watched and listened to these things, and while a kind of tightness grew in her—it was absurdly like the tightness she had sometimes known before a match in one of the tennis tournaments she played as a girl—Hume left her. He walked, she was vaguely conscious, toward the rear of the long room.

  After she greeted Rudolph Haas, if her words were to be interpreted as a greeting, Mrs. Bromwell turned her back on him—and on her son, Captain Heimrich and Forniss, Higgins and his attendant trooper—and went into the East Room. She went to the chair near the fire, and sat in it. It was as if she withdrew from all of it.

  “Didn’t expect you,” Scott Bromwell said to Haas, repeating his mother’s words, but not her tone. He hesitated. “You know?”

  “Marta?” Haas said.

  Scott Bromwell nodded. He briefly devoted himself to looking at the other man.

  “The trooper who brought me up,” Haas said, “told me there’d been an accident. And—Marta isn’t here.” He waited.

  “Dead,” Scott said. “Apparently, they don’t think it was an accident, Haas. They seem to think somebody killed her.”

  “Why?” Haas said. He seemed to lean toward Scott Bromwell. “For God’s sake, why?”

  “The way she—the way the body was found,” Scott said.

  Haas shook his head, almost with violence.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “Why? Why kill her? She was—she was just a gay child.”

  “She was a good many things,” Scott said. “Wasn’t she, Haas? But I don’t know why. Perhaps for her jewelry. They picked up a little man making off in my car, and her jewelry was in the glove compartment. That’s what they say.”

  “But her jewelry? What do you mean by that?”

  Scott did not answer. He merely waited.

  “You mean, more than she was wearing?”

  “All of it,” Scott said. “Just about all of it, apparently. An odd thing, isn’t it, Haas?” He paused a moment. “Isn’t it?” he repeated.

  Haas looked at him and after a few moments answered.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Haas said.

  But what Scott’s talking about is plain, Karen thought. What you’re both talking about is plain. And then she thought, why did Haas come back?

  “The fog was worse than I thought,” Haas said, as if she had asked the question, or as if Scott had asked it. “I turned the wrong way, apparently. Several wrong ways. Spent hours creeping around wrong roads. And ended up here.” He shook his head. “Of all places,” he added. “And Marta’s dead.” He seemed to Karen a little dazed, as if he still were driving in the fog, lost in it. But then he appeared to pull himself out of it. “Not my choice, Bromwell,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Scott told him, and the eyelid flickered. “I imagine they’d—have found you, Haas. You just made it easier.”

  “You know, Bromwell,” Rudolph Haas said, and his voice was suddenly soft. “You know—I wouldn’t try it. I really wouldn’t, you know.”

  And then Forniss came into the room, and up to Scott, and said, “The captain wonders if you can give him a few minutes, Mr. Bromwell, if it’s convenient?”

  But it didn’t, Karen realized as she watched Scott go with the tall police sergeant, make any difference at all how the order was phrased. Not any at all.

  That was the beginning of time which seemed to stretch on endlessly. That was the real beginning. That was when Karen became conscious that they were, in fact, waiting. It was a little as if, frightened about herself, anxious almost beyond bearing, she were in a doctor’s waiting room, with others there before her; as if, before she found out whether she was to go on living, she had to sit, aware of others, forced by their presence to some sort of composure, while slowly, one by one, they went on ahead of her. Yet even as she had this feeling, she was conscious that it was disproportionate, unjustified by anything which had happened to her, or threatened her. Because, Karen thought, I’m no
t the one to be afraid; not for myself.

  If Scott had returned it would not have been the same. He went with Forniss, the door was closed behind him, and a trooper stood outside the door—stood casually, in spirit detached from the others in the room—from Mrs. Bromwell, from Hume and Rudolph Haas, from Karen herself. (But when Hume, who had gone toward that end of the room, stood abstractedly there near the door to the library, the trooper joined them long enough to make a small gesture, which told Hume to go back into the room, away from the door.)

  Possibly it was the trooper’s presence, possibly it was something less tangible, which seemed to prevent conversation among those who were left. (And perhaps it was that which made Karen think of a physician’s waiting room, filled with people preoccupied with themselves, conscious of the presence of others only to the extent of vague smiles and exaggerated small courtesies. Thus when William came in with sandwiches and offered them to Mrs. Bromwell first, Rudolph Haas made rather elaborate indications that he was next to offer them to Karen, although Haas must have known that the butler would do that in any case. And when, after Karen had tried to eat and found the bread and meat too dry to swallow, and taken out a cigarette, Hume was needlessly ready with a lighter.) Mrs. Bromwell sat quite still, not fidgeting—she disapproved always of those whose nerves interfered with dignity—and did not appear to look at anyone or, indeed, at anything. Hume and Rudolph Haas were, it seemed to Karen, studiously unconscious of one another’s presence.

  Minutes went slowly; twice Karen thought her watch must have stopped. (Now it was as if someone dear to her were in the doctor’s examining room and the time the examination took was frightening.) Once Hume looked at her and smiled—he had seen her look at her watch, she supposed—and the smile repeated what he had said earlier, that waiting was tough. She could not manage a smile in return; her face seemed to have frozen. Then she realized she was shivering and walked over and stood by the fire.