A Client Is Canceled Read online

  All that was ever going to happen to Paul J. Barlow had happened, and I thought he would be all right where he was. I didn’t think anyone would steal his body and I knew damn well he wasn’t going to get up and walk away. So I grabbed the Pooh and got her out of there. Once we were around the pool, and not looking back, she was really all right, and we ran up the path toward the Townsend house. We got warmed up quickly enough that way—physically, at any rate. I didn’t feel warm at the center. One of the things I’d planned not to do was to see anybody else after a bullet had gone through him. But a lot of guys planned that in 1945; maybe the whole world did, for a little while.

  There were two or three lights upstairs in the big house and, as we got close, but were still to anyone on the terrace only a sound of people running, somebody sitting there shot a cigarette butt out from between thumb and finger, toward the grass. It was a little spark, twisting over and over in the air, and we turned a little to make for the terrace.

  George was there, smoking a cigar, and Dwight Craig was there too, not smoking anything by that time. They both had glasses, and as the Pooh and I got there, George got up in the moonlight and took a step toward us and then said, “What the hell?”

  We told him what the hell. That is, I told him.

  He said, “Jesus Christ!”

  Craig was standing up by then, too. Craig said, “You say he was shot?”

  I told Craig Uncle Tarzan was shot all right. In the back, I told him. From close quarters. I thought with a forty-five. I said the impact of the slug probably knocked him into the pool. Craig said it was a hell of a note. George went over to a switch and turned on a couple of lights, one of them by the bar, which was still out there. I don’t know what he thought we needed light for; I suppose he just thought electricity would make everything more matter of fact, more sensible, than moonlight. George said we’d better both have a drink, and we both did. Mine didn’t taste like anything. The Pooh was still shivering a little, only from dampness and cold now, I thought, and I asked George if there was a coat or something we could put on her. He went in and got one, and I took my own jacket and put it on. I still didn’t have any shirt; I’d thrown it down somewhere by the pool after I’d used it as a towel.

  I told George—who wasn’t, it seemed to me, taking hold of things in the proper executive-like fashion—that we’d better tell somebody about Uncle Tarzan and he looked at me a moment and then said he guessed we had. He seemed, I thought, a little dazed by the whole business. He started in and then somebody else came running up from the direction of the pool. We heard the running and then somebody yelled, “Hey!” and Francis Eldredge came up the path, slowing to a trot but still breathing hard.

  “Mr. Barlow,” Eldredge said, panting the words, “He’s—he’s down there by the pool. He’s—he’s hurt, or something.” He looked at us, then. He looked pretty shocked by the whole thing, I thought, which was reasonable enough. “I guess you know,” he said.

  “The Otises just found him,” George said, from the door. “They say he’s dead.” He looked at me, and I nodded. I said he was dead enough.

  “I thought so,” Eldredge said. “I—I don’t know about that sort of thing. I found this.”

  This was my shirt and he held it out. It was wet—and a little pinkish. It wasn’t a pink shirt. Eldredge looked at the shirt and then at me, working it out. I held out my hand and he gave me the shirt and there was this watery pink on it, all right. I supposed that, after I’d wiped the Pooh off with it, I’d dropped it on the grass over which we’d dragged Uncle Tarzan, getting him out. It looked as if he must still have been bleeding a little.

  “I was just taking a walk,” Eldredge said. Nobody had asked him, although I suspected that a good many people might, from there on in. They would also, I imagined, ask the Pooh and me a good deal about my shirt. “It’s such a warm night,” Francis Eldredge said, although nobody had asked him about that, either. He meant it, clearly enough, as an explanation of his walk, which had taken him as far from home as George Townsend’s pool. I figured that would be over a mile and a quarter, round trip. I’d have thought he would have cooled off more quickly sitting at home, but it was his story.

  “Get yourself a drink, Francis,” George told him, and Eldredge said thanks, he would. He did, and George went on in. He turned on lights inside and after a few minutes, indistinctly, we could hear him talking, obviously on the telephone. I sat down by the Pooh and put an arm around her and she said, “I’m all right, Oh-Oh. Don’t worry.” I said, “Sure you are.”

  George came back to the door and said he’d got the State Police and that he was going to waken Faye and have her waken Pauline. He told us this very carefully, as if he were making clear something extremely important; he still, I thought, seemed a little dazed. He went back in, and Craig and the Pooh and Eldredge and I stayed out there, the Pooh and I sitting down, Eldredge standing by the bar drinking and Craig moving around, a little pointlessly. He offered the Pooh and me cigarettes—Blends, of course—and we took them. He offered Francis Eldredge one, and Eldredge said he’d stick to a pipe, if it was all right. He said he always smoked a pipe after dinner. I said, “Well, well” and he looked at me, evidently wondering what I meant. I hadn’t meant anything in particular; I was merely noticing him.

  “Maybe somebody ought to go down there,” Eldredge said then, holding his pipe and getting ready to fill it. “I mean—”

  He stopped and waited for somebody to answer him. Craig did; he said he didn’t see the point of it. He said that if Eldredge wanted to go, it was all right with him. Eldredge said, “Well—” and filled his pipe and lighted it, and didn’t go. I told the Pooh to drink her brandy, which she was merely holding. She shook her head and said, “Not when everything’s this way” and, of course, I knew what she meant. Brandy—good brandy—is for when things are all right, or almost all right—when they’re somewhere between the fine way they’d been at the pool when we were swimming and the way they were now. The Pooh said, “Anyway, I’m all right. Perfectly all right.”

  Then, at the same time, we heard Faye’s voice in the living room saying, “It’s impossible, George” and George’s voice saying something—presumably that it wasn’t at all—and, still a long way off, a siren. Craig said, “Well, here they come,” and Eldredge said yes, he guessed they did. And the Pooh shivered again, just a little, because there is something forlorn and frightening about a siren crying in the night; just in the sound itself, aside from what it means, although I suppose the two things get hopelessly tangled up in our minds. Anyway, I knew what the Pooh was feeling, and held her tighter for a moment.

  “It was like—what was it like, Oh-Oh?” she said, very softly, only for me. “Like crystal?”

  That came close enough; it was broken now. Faye came out and said, “Isn’t it dreadful?” and I stood up and the Pooh stood up too. “It must have been awful for you,” Faye told us, sounding about as she always did. “Your poor uncle.” I said it had been bad enough and the Pooh merely nodded. Then a couple of state troopers on motorcycles came up the driveway, making the racket motorcycles always make. They came as close to the terrace as they could on the driveway, and propped their motorcycles up and came over to us. They were good-looking, alert men, ready to take things over.

  “This where there’s been an accident?” one of them said.

  “I’m afraid it is, Officer,” George said. “Down by the pool. I’m afraid—”

  “Mr. Townsend?” the trooper said. “Maybe I’d better ask you to show me, sir.”

  There wasn’t, I thought, any “maybe” about it, and George obviously thought the same thing. He went off down the path toward the pool and the vocal trooper went with him. The other trooper just stood there, easily, looking at us. Then we heard more sirens. The trooper who had stayed didn’t indicate he had heard them; he just merely waited. Everybody else did, too.

  It wasn’t motorcycles, this time. This time reinforcements came in a sedan, with p
olice red lights on front, and a light truck. Two men got out of the sedan, which came first, and four out of the truck. The two men who came in the sedan were in civilian clothes and, at first, looked a little alike. They were both solid men with weathered faces; one of them was taller than the other and his face, particularly, might have been cut out of a block of very hard wood. The other man was as broad, but shorter. Neither of them looked as alert and aggressive as the young troopers had; they merely looked solid and—well, I guess tireless is the word. If they were going to be in charge of the investigation of Uncle Tarzan’s taking off we weren’t, I decided, going to encounter any particularly subtle minds—intuition and esoteric ratiocination weren’t going to come into it.

  The shorter of the two men walked a little in front of the other, as if that was where he belonged. He looked around and picked on Craig, and said, “Mr. Townsend?”; thus going neatly off on the wrong foot. Craig told him he wasn’t Mr. Townsend, and who he was, and where George had gone.

  “Oh yes,” the broad man said. “Naturally. Maybe you’d better take the boys down, Sergeant. Down that way?” The last was to Craig again; the taller man apparently was the sergeant. Craig agreed it was in the direction the broad man indicated. The sergeant went that way, and the “boys”—who had a good bit of gear, including cameras—went with him.

  “My name’s Heimrich,” the broad man said. “Captain Heimrich. I understand a Mr. Barlow has been shot? Paul J. Barlow?”

  Craig looked at me, and I said, “That’s right, Captain.” Then I told him my name was Otis and that this was Mrs. Otis. He looked at the Pooh. Then he looked again and said, Oh, he saw. Apparently her white hair had thrown him for an instant, but only for an instant.

  “We found him,” the Pooh said.

  Heimrich made a sound with his tongue and teeth, indicating that that was too bad.

  “He was in the swimming pool,” the Pooh said and then added, I don’t know why, “He swam a good deal.”

  “It’s a very unfortunate thing,” Heimrich said and paused. “Naturally,” he added, as if he felt the sentence needed rounding off. Then he found out who Faye was and who Francis Eldredge was and then Pauline came out. She had been crying, I thought, but wasn’t then. He found out who she was. He made the sound with his tongue and teeth again.

  “I’m very sorry about this, Miss Barlow,” he said. “Very sorry.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Pauline said. “I can’t make it seem true.”

  I had a feeling she had written those lines for herself to speak, and hadn’t been very inventive. I looked at Heimrich, but he seemed to think what Pauline said a perfectly adequate reading for a girl whose father had just been murdered. (I’ll have to admit I don’t know what she should have said; it’s not a situation for which most of us have words ready.)

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “A very sad thing, Miss Barlow.”

  He spoke as if he did really feel it was a very sad thing. It was, of course, even if the sadness was only about Uncle Tarzan.

  “An ugly thing,” Heimrich said, and that startled me a little, because it was what the Pooh had said. I suppose Heimrich had a right to think that too, but I was still surprised. I didn’t have much time for that, however.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “If you and Mrs. Otis can tell me about it?” He looked around the terrace. “Inside, somewhere,” he said. “I’m afraid Mrs. Otis is cold out here.”

  I suppose it was obvious that we were both rather damp still, and hence might be cold. Nobody else had noticed it much and I’d more or less forgotten it. But it did appear that Heimrich saw what he looked at; not much more, I thought, but at least that. A good many people don’t.

  4

  Faye found us a place in the library, off the living room, where it was certainly warm enough—even with all the windows open—and we told the captain about finding Uncle Tarzan’s body in the pool. I told most of it; I didn’t try to make a picture, but merely told him the facts—we’d been hot and stopped off for a swim, after about fifteen minutes, just as we were getting ready to leave, the Pooh had dived and swum under water and seen her uncle. I called her “my wife,” not the Pooh or Grandma, or any of the other things I call her. Heimrich listened, and most of the time he kept his eyes closed. The first time he closed them I stopped talking and, after a moment, he said, “Now Mr. Otis, go on, please” without opening his eyes.

  “I dived down,” I said, “and we got Uncle Tarzan out.”

  He opened his eyes at that, and said, “Uncle Tarzan?”

  I said I’d called him that—that my wife and I had called him that—pretty generally, although ordinarily only between ourselves.

  “Why uncle, Mr. Otis?” he wanted to know, and opened his eyes, apparently so he could hear better.

  “He was my uncle,” the Pooh said. “My mother’s brother.”

  Heimrich said “Oh,” and then, “Go on, please.”

  I said we’d both known he was dead and, when we had him out of the pool, realized why. I told him about the wound. I said it looked like a forty-five to me.

  He had his eyes closed again. I said we had dried ourselves as well as we could, using my shirt as a towel. I said that, somehow—I supposed off the grass—the shirt had got blood on it, I was pretty sure after we’d used it. I thought I’d better get that in before somebody else did. I said the shirt was out on the terrace then; I’d dropped it again. He nodded, still without opening his eyes—so far as I could see I was boring hell out of him—and I told about our coming up to the house and finding George and Dwight Craig smoking and drinking, and, I supposed, talking, on the terrace. I stopped, then.

  “Why did you think it was a forty-five, Mr. Otis?” he asked me, opening his eyes for a change.

  I said it just looked like it; that I’d seen men before after a forty-five slug had gone through them. He said, “Had you?” and I said, “I was around in the last one.” He kept on waiting, so I said I’d been flying airplanes. Then I stopped, having told my story, and for a minute or two he didn't say anything and I thought he really had gone to sleep. I thought maybe the Pooh and I ought to tiptoe out carefully, maybe after gently putting something warm over him. But then he opened his eyes.

  “I wonder, Mrs. Otis,” he said, “if you can tell me a little more about your uncle?”

  He left it up to her to decide what more.

  “I didn’t see him often,” the Pooh said. “He lived in New York and we live up here. Near here. Oh-Oh called him Uncle Tarzan because—well, because he did rather beat his chest. I don’t mean literally.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “I realized that.” He kept his eyes open, and waited.

  “He was something in a company which makes cigarettes,” the Pooh said. “What was he, Oh-Oh?”

  I didn’t know exactly, when I came to be pinned down. He was a vice-president in charge of something; I supposed advertising, or sales. Or both. I said it was a little out of my line. He said, “Which is, Mr. Otis?” and I told him. He said “Um-m.” He said, “You say you ‘suppose’ advertising or sales, Mr. Otis. Why?”

  “Townsend runs an advertising agency,” I said. “The Pooh's uncle was a client.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes. He said, “The Pooh?”

  “My name’s Winifred,” my wife said. “Oh-Oh used to call me Winnie and then—”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “You were on your way home when you stopped at the pool? You’d been?”

  I told him where we’d been. I said the Townsends had asked us to use the pool whenever we wanted to. I said this was the first time we had. There was, I began to realize, a certain compulsion to go on talking to Heimrich. You wanted to say something which would make him open his eyes. It didn’t make any difference whether it was the first time we’d used the pool or not, since it was, certainly, the first time we’d found a body in it. I said we hadn’t expected to find anybody there.

  “So it was all right our not having suits
,” the Pooh said. I thought Heimrich’s singularly un-watchful waiting was getting her, too. There was something about it which made one run on, babbling. Heimrich did open his eyes; they were, I noticed for the first time, very blue.

  “It must have been pleasant there,” he said. “Before this—this unfortunate thing, naturally. It’s a beautiful night.”

  “It was,” the Pooh said. “It was—very nice.”

  “There’s a Winifred Otis who writes verse,” Heimrich said. “Very pleasant verse; very—gay. Are you that Winifred Otis?”

  “Yes,” the Pooh said.

  “I like verse,” Heimrich said. “Once I thought—” He stopped. He closed his eyes again. He said, “Your hair is very unusual, Mrs. Otis. Hereditary?”

  “Yes,” the Pooh said. “We run to white-haired girls.”

  “You were at the Birch Hill Inn,” Heimrich said. “You had dinner there. Before that?”

  “We were here for a while,” I said. “We had cocktails here.”

  “Your uncle—Mr. Barlow—he was here, naturally?”

  I didn’t know why it was natural for Uncle Tarzan to have been at the cocktail party. Then I decided it probably was. I said he had been. Heimrich said, “And?”

  I didn’t for an instant realize what he wanted. The Pooh did. She named the people who had also been at the party.

  “Miss Dean?” Heimrich said. I told him who she was. He said, “Oh yes, the Hibbards,” in a way which indicated he knew, or knew of, the Hibbards, and that indicated he wasn’t an outsider. I suppose it was part of his business not to be.