With One Stone Page 6

  “Only,” Forniss said, “to get the picture. I realize I’m—that this isn’t easy for you.”

  “Why the hell,” Bedlow said, “don’t you go out and catch this bastard? You think I’ve got him here some place? Listen—I’d take him apart. I mean it. Take him apart—slow. The hard way.”

  The heavy voice did not rise. There was no special emphasis in the voice. It sounded as if Bedlow were merely stating a fact—a rather obvious fact.

  “We’re trying to,” Forniss said, and his own voice was mild. “I realize this all seems pretty unnecessary. It’s the way we have to do things.”

  “All right,” Bedlow said. “That’s all I know. I found my wife in the swimming pool and she was hurt bad. I carried her here and she died—out in the living room. On a sofa. She didn’t say anything. She was past saying anything. You say somebody killed her. Find the son—”

  There was knocking at the door.

  “Well?” Bedlow said. He raised his voice then, spoke loudly.

  The long-faced man in the white jacket opened the door. He said, “I’m sorry, sir. The sergeant is wanted on the telephone, sir.”

  “All right,” Bedlow said, and Harry Simpkins said, “Thank you, sir,” and went out and closed the door.

  There was a telephone on Bedlow’s desk. Forniss looked at it.

  “House line,” Bedlow said. “This is the office line. Take it in there. The red one.”

  He gestured to his right, toward a door in the wall on his right. The door, Forniss noticed as he opened it, was unexpectedly heavy; fitted very closely in its frame.

  The office beyond was much smaller; had file cabinets, a stenographer’s desk and a covered typewriter beside it. Here, as in Bedlow’s office, one wall of the room was of glass brick. And here, as in the larger office, there was a special kind of hush. As he walked the few steps to the desk, Forniss glanced up at the ceiling. Acoustic sheathing. The whole place was as near sound-proofed as made no difference. Which accounted for the weight of the door, among other things.

  There were two telephones on the desk, one black, the other red. Forniss picked up the receiver of the red telephone and said, “Forniss.” He waited a moment. He heard the click of another extension telephone somewhere being replaced. Well trained, the butler seemed to be.

  “Go ahead,” Forniss said.

  The identity of the “tramp” hadn’t tumbled out of a sorting machine anywhere. On the other hand—

  “Hm-m-m,” Forniss said. “Yep. I sure as hell will. About the tire marks?” He listened. “Yep,” he said. “I was afraid so. Looked pretty gooey to me, too.” He listened again, and said, “Yep,” again. Then he said, “Any idea where my boss has got to?” He listened more briefly. “Not up to me,” he said. “If they do, he uses this motel chain, you know. Reservation one night for the next night? Keep records, they tell me.” He listened again. He said, “This is an extension telephone, captain. I’ll call in an hour or so.”

  He put the receiver back. The sound-proofing must be very effective, he thought. When one extension rings, they all ring and this one—this red one—hadn’t. Anyway, they hadn’t heard it in the next office. Give sound-proofing a gold star unless—

  Sure enough. A cut-off switch on the red telephone. A switch to still its ringing. Switch turned to “Off.”

  There was a door in the far wall of the small office—the stenographe’office. A Miss Amy Winters, the stenographer was. Obviously off on Saturday. Door to another office?

  Forniss went to see. The door opened to the out-of-doors—to a flagged path which ran around the house. Forniss closed the door and pressed the locking button in the knob. He crossed the room and went back into Bedlow’s office. Bedlow was talking on the telephone. “Go to ten, then,” Bedlow said. “And not a shilling more.” He hung up. He looked hard at Forniss, and Forniss had the momentary thought that he was expected to apologize for something. For returning?

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Curtis,” Forniss said. “If you’ll tell me where I can find—”

  Bedlow jerked his left hand, this time, toward another door. Forniss started to it. “Hold it,” Bedlow said, and hit a switch in the intercom on his desk. A voice said, “Yes, boss.” The voice was made of old metal. “This police sergeant wants to see you,” Bedlow said. “How you coming with it?”

  “About done,” the voice of scrap metal said. “Tell the sergeant O.K., will you?”

  “Go ahead,” Bedlow said, and jerked the directing hand again. “He’s got a job to do, so don’t take all day about it.”

  Forniss went, opening another heavy door—this one, like the one in the opposite wall, could be locked on Bedlow’s side, Forniss noticed absently—into the third office of the suite. It was, in size, between Bedlow’s own office and Miss Winters’s.

  The man in this room was a spare man, of a little more than average height. He had a lean, intelligent face, with widely spaced gray eyes. He had a dent in his nose. There was a typewriter on a stand pushed to one side of the desk; there were two telephones on the desk, one black, one red. Norman Curtis was making pencil changes in a typescript. He said, “With you in a minute,” in a pleasant voice, and went on with the pencil. Forniss waited perhaps three minutes. “So,” Curtis said, and clipped sheets of grayish paper together and tossed them into a basket. He looked up at Forniss, said, “Sit down, won’t you?” and slid a pack of cigarettes across the desk toward the square, solid man. Forniss shook his head.

  “You say Ann was killed?” Curtis said.

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Curtis,” Forniss said. “By somebody who’d been holing up in the—what do you call it? Bath house? Guest house?”

  “Both,” Curtis said. “One end, showers and changing rooms. According to sex. The other end—most of the building, actually—a guest suite. In case of overflow. Call it what you like.”

  Forniss nodded. The spare man looked tired, he thought—tired and under strain. Which was natural enough. Perhaps he always looked tired and under strain. Forniss had no way of knowing.

  “Who’d kill a woman like that?” Curtis said. “Like—what kind of animal would do it?”

  “A scared one, probably,” Forniss said. “You got here, I understand, just before Mr. Bedlow found his wife? Some time after she had gone out for a walk?”

  “Yes,” Curtis said. “There’s nothing much I can tell you, I guess.”

  “Drove up from town.”

  Curtis looked at him for an instant, as if the question surprised him. But he said, “Yes,” with no special inflection.

  “Mr. Curtis,” Forniss said, “had you been in the guest house—the guest suite part of it—recently?”

  He watched carefully. Watched the gray eyes carefully. He thought they narrowed a little.

  “Not since some time last fall,” Curtis said. “Early October, I think. Anyway—a last swim before they drained the pool for the winter. And afterward a drink in the living room to get warm.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because,” Forniss said, and now spoke slowly—spoke like the policeman he was—“your fingerprints are in the living room. Yours and the late Mrs. Bedlow’s. And—they seem more recent than last fall, Mr. Curtis. Might have been made—oh, yesterday. Or—the day before.”

  There was no doubt, this time, that the widely spaced gray eyes narrowed.

  “What makes you think they’re mine?” he said and then nodded, answering his own question. “Army,” he said. “Went through Washington, of course. And hers from—” He did not finish.

  “I don’t,” he said, “know when Ann was there last, sergeant. I was there last in October. Your lab boys have slipped up.”

  “They don’t often.”

  “I wouldn’t know. This time they have. Last time I was there was in October. So?”

  “All right,” Forniss said. “Last time in October. Coming up here Thursday—driving up from New York—you seem to have driven in mud somewher
e, Mr. Curtis. How’d that happen? With the Saw Mill and Route Twenty-two and all? You did come that way, I suppose?”

  “Sure. Got the car out of the Chronicle garage around four-thirty. Got here a little before six. You want to charge me with speeding, sergeant?”

  It was a little quick, Forniss thought. A little light.

  “The mud?” Forniss said.

  “After I turned off Twenty-two,” Curtis said, “I got something in my eye. Right eye, sergeant. I pulled off on the shoulder. The shoulder was soft. Hence, mud.”

  “I see,” Forniss said. “There’s a back road into this place, isn’t there? You know about it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Service road,” Forniss said. “Comes up near the garden, the greenhouse. Also, of course, near enough to the guest house.”

  “I know the road, sergeant. I just said I did.”

  “Some time recently,” Forniss said, “somebody started to drive up the road. Found it pretty muddy and gave the idea up.”

  “Jason,” Curtis said. “Jason Sarles. The gardener.”

  “He says not. Says he’d know better than to try this early on. Somebody could have left a car there and walked up to the guest house.”

  “Sure,” Curtis said. “Probably this tramp you’re looking for.”

  “Would have got mud on the tires,” Forniss said.

  “You know,” Curtis said, and was admiring, “I think you’ve got something there, sergeant. And your lab boys make casts of the tire marks and—sure enough, 1959 Chevy, wearing Goodyears, nick in the tread of the right front and—”

  “Thanks,” Forniss said. “Thanks a lot. We just might.”

  “Unless,” Curtis said, “it was too soft. The mud, I mean. Too squishy to hold the impression. Wet around here this time of year. Water trickles down. Everything gets gooey.”

  “There’s that,” Forniss said.

  “The Jaguar wasn’t there,” Curtis said. “I wasn’t there. I’d have no motive for killing—no reason to wish Ann Bedlow any harm.”

  “You were good friends?”

  “We were good friends.” He paused. “If that’s all you mean.”

  “Sure,” he said. “This is your office, Mr. Curtis?”

  “My office,” Curtis said, “is on the fifteenth floor of the Chronicle building. This is Len Young’s office. Leonard Young. The boss’s secretary. He’s in London at the moment. I’m here getting the boss’s approval of a series of articles about the city government. New York City government. Showing what it means to let Democrats run things. The boss doesn’t like Democrats.”

  He hadn’t worried Curtis, Forniss thought. Or, perhaps he had. Too quick? Too light.

  “Your lab boys are wrong, sergeant,” Curtis said, and in a different tone. It was as if he had heard the questions in Forniss’s mind. “You’re wasting time.”

  “You may be right,” Forniss said, to that. “We have to waste a good deal, for one reason or another.”

  Mr. Curtis couldn’t think of anything else—anything he hadn’t been asked—that might be helpful? Mr. Curtis couldn’t. Mr. Curtis hadn’t known, on Thursday, that the guest house had been broken into? Mr. Curtis hadn’t.

  “I may think of something else later,” Forniss said. “You’ll be around, Mr. Curtis.”

  It was not precisely a question. It was not really a question at all.

  “Apparently,” Curtis said.

  Forniss started toward the door which would open into James Bedlow’s office.

  “Better use this one, unless you want to see the boss again,” Curtis said, and pointed at “this one.”

  Forniss came out into the anteroom. He went in search of others, who might tell more—more, he hoped, which was entirely true.

  VI

  This time, Dinah thought, they were really going. She did not know what they had come for, or what they had got. And—it was not over. She knew that, although neither of them—neither the solid man in his late thirties nor the much younger one, the good-looking younger one—had said it in words. You waited a long time, tension growing, for the doctor to be ready, to examine, thinking to get it over with. And then found out that it was not over with.

  The older one—the sergeant—had talked to her father and then to Norm, to Mary after that and last of all to her. The younger one, apparently, had talked to the servants—to Harry Simpkins, and Mrs. Fleming in the kitchen, and to the two maids. She did not know what questions they had asked any of the others, and there was cause for uneasiness in that. The uneasiness was simply based—why, if some outsider had killed Ann, some violent man surprised in the guest house, was so much attention being paid to them, to the insiders, by the sergeant and the trooper with him?

  What Forniss had asked her explained nothing. She had told of Thursday afternoon—of Ann’s coming down, dressed to go out; of Mary’s coming down afterward and then going to the kitchen because she was hungry. She had told of her father’s coming out of the office wing and asking about Ann and had said that he had not, then, appeared to her to be worried.

  “By the way,” the sergeant had said then, “your stepmother—did she make a habit of taking these walks? At about that time?”

  Dinah had thought she did; at least, since the Bedlows had come back from Florida and opened the house, and Dinah had come up from the apartment to join them, Ann had walked almost every day. No—she had missed a rainy day. That had been for a week. About a week. But she did not, really, know much about Ann’s habits—not as much as the others would know. She had been away a good deal. She told him about that, briefly. He had nodded his head.

  She wouldn’t, then, know much about Mrs. Bedlow’s friends—friends outside the family, he meant? People she knew in town? That sort of thing?

  “No,” Dinah said. She spoke slowly, and there was puzzlement in her voice.

  The big, solid man smiled, apparently in sympathy. He said he realized they asked a lot of questions; questions, sometimes, which seemed to have no special point. He said it was merely that they always tried to get the whole picture.

  Dinah knew that her father and Ann had led a normally active social life—in New York, here in the country; she supposed also in Palm Beach, where, this year and the year before, they had rented a house, each time for two months. She thought, but did not know, that most of their friends were more nearly in his age group than in hers. “I’ve been around so little since they were married,” Dinah said, knowing that she repeated what she had said before.

  “Mr. Curtis,” Forniss had said then. “He’s an employee, of course. But—I’ve a feeling, don’t know why, that he’s something of a family friend, too. Would you say that?”

  She supposed so. Yes, that probably was the right way to put it. As to being an employee—of course, Norman Curtis was that. But—

  “Somehow,” Dinah had said, “it doesn’t seem quite the right word. Norm’s executive editor, you know. Was managing editor before Father bought the paper. Except in matters of—I suppose you’d say policy—he runs the paper. He comes up often—and goes to the apartment often when they’re in New York—to discuss policy matters. To—to work out Father’s ideas.”

  “Probably stays here every now and then,” Forniss said. “Weekends. That sort of thing.”

  She said, “Oh yes. There’s a room they call Norm’s room and Father got him into Carabec—that’s the country club.” She paused. And in the pause, uneasiness returned—uneasiness, this time, that she was “running on” too much about Norman Curtis.

  “Very pleasant association, obviously,” Forniss said. “He and Mrs. Bedlow were good friends too, of course?”

  And she hesitated—knew she hesitated, that she should not, and could not help herself.

  “Oh, I think so,” she said, not quickly enough. And—too casually. Not in the right tone at all. “They always seemed to be,” she added, and knew the addition lame. She started to say more, and caught herself.

  There was nothing in the soli
d man’s expression to show that the hesitation, the wrong tone, had been noticed. He merely nodded his head, in the manner of one who agrees, considers an explanation entirely reasonable.

  She had said, then, that she was afraid she hadn’t helped much and he had smiled and said he was sure she had done all she could.

  “It was—somebody in the guest house?” she said. “Some—tramp?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “That’s the way it looks, Miss Bedlow.”

  Then he had gone out to the car and, after a time, the younger man had got into the car and, watching through the living room window, she had seen that they were talking. But, when she thought they were about to drive away, they had, instead, got out of the car and walked around the house on the path which circled it.

  There was, she supposed, something they wanted to check up on in the guest house. Perhaps they had found there something they had missed before; something which would help them find the tramp. When they did, then it would really be over and done with.

  Mary had come into the living room while Dinah still stood at the window.

  “Nosy pair, aren’t they?” Mary said. “Think they’d be out with bloodhounds instead of going in for all this social chit-chat. What did they ask you, kitten?”

  Mary had picked the “kitten” business up from their father. Dinah sometimes wished she hadn’t. Not that it mattered.

  “About Thursday afternoon,” she said.

  “Me too,” Mary said. “They certainly ought to know all about it by now. Except—who killed Ann and where he is.”

  “Mary,” Dinah said, “were you fond of Ann?”

  The older sister looked at the younger and raised her eyebrows.

  “Why,” she said, “of course. What an odd question.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dinah said. “I suppose it was.”

  “If you mean, did I love her like a mother. Or a sister, for that matter—”

  “Forget it,” Dinah said. “It was a—needless thing to ask. Here they are, finally.”

  Why, she wondered, “finally”?