Murder Out of Turn Read online

  The path from the front door half circled the house, passing close to the open kitchen window. They had passed it when Mr. North saw something and stopped. The others stopped and he pointed.

  “Somebody throwing lighted cigarettes in the grass,” he said. “It’s too dry for that. Risky. I’ll just stamp it out.”

  A thin twist of smoke was rising from the grass where he pointed and he moved toward it.

  Weigand said: “Wait a minute.

  “Neither of you threw it, did you?” he asked. “Pam and Miss Hunt didn’t come this way. Kennedy didn’t and the others have been gone too long. So unless some of your troopers have been sneaking a drag, Heimrich—”

  Heimrich called the two troopers who had been waiting on the other side, down by the stone wall, to act as messengers. He said he would forget any infraction of regulations, this time. He just wanted to know. Had either of them been smoking near the house and thrown a lighted cigarette away? They were both firm in denials.

  “So—” Heimrich said.

  “Right,” said Weigand. “It looks as if somebody had been standing here listening. Now, I wonder what he wanted to hear?”

  He went over to pick up the cigarette, but there was nothing left to pick up—only a gray ash, toward the end of which a coal was dying.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “that’s one we won’t find lipstick on. Or anything else.” He looked at Heimrich. “It looks as if we haven’t been very careful, mister,” he said. “I wonder if whoever it was heard anything he wanted to know?”

  8

  SUNDAY

  1:10 P.M. TO 2:20 P.M.

  The path they followed dipped toward the tennis courts and then, a little beyond them, forked off to the left from the path which Weigand remembered as leading to the shower. It came out of the prevailing sumach into a field which was occupied by a fat man in his sixties clad in an undershirt and, precariously, in trousers. He was sending a scythe swishing through the tall grass in a movement which appeared, from a little distance, to be effortless. But as they neared, he rested the scythe on the ground and mopped his head with a blue handkerchief.

  “Hot,” he announced.

  “Looks it,” Mr. North agreed. “Hiya, Mr. Marvin.”

  Mr. Marvin grunted, and repeated that he was hot. He looked at the two men with Mr. North and grunted again.

  “See you got some friends, Jerry,” he said. “Hear you’ve been having some doin’s around here, ain’t you?”

  He spoke of the “doin’s” with a kind of pleased relish.

  “I guess these must be the detectives I been hearin’ about,” he said, pushing the handkerchief back into his pocket with a force which, under the circumstances, was clearly foolhardy. “These gentlemen the detectives, Jerry?”

  Mr. North said that that was right.

  “Lieutenant Heimrich,” he said. “Lieutenant Weigand.”

  Marvin shook hands damply.

  “Glad to meet you, gentlemen,” he said. “From what I hear around they sorta got you stumped.”

  He laughed a subterranean rumble, and turned on Mr. North a wink that seemed to dislocate his face.

  “This is Mr. Henry Marvin, Bill, Heimrich,” Mr. North said. “Mr. Marvin has a farm on the other side of the valley. Now and then he helps out around the lake. Sort of gives Van Horst a hand when he needs it. Isn’t that right, Mr. Marvin?”

  Mr. Marvin said it was, and looked mysterious. He looked around and saw no one.

  “Van ain’t no hand with a scythe,” he said. “That’s why I have to give him a hand. There ain’t many around here nowadays who know how to use a scythe.”

  He demonstrated that he was one of that limited number, sending the scythe whispering through the grass. The grass fell, cut clean as by a mower and hardly higher above the ground’s surface.

  “Takes practice,” Mr. Marvin admitted. “Wait till I get my beer.”

  He hitched his trousers and lumbered to a patch of shade. He uncapped a bottle, lifted it and the liquid bumped out of the bottle into Mr. Marvin, leaving only foam behind. Mr. Marvin wiped his mouth with the blue handkerchief and returned. He said there was nothing like beer.

  “Give me beer any day,” he said. “There’s some around here who drink apple right through the summer, but me and beer get along all right. You can give me beer.”

  He looked at Mr. North as he repeated his offer. Mr. North nodded, and said he thought there were a couple of bottles on ice, if Mr. Marvin wanted to get them. Mr. Marvin said he wasn’t like some people. He didn’t have to have it on ice.

  “Just so as it’s beer,” he said. He picked up the scythe, apparently ending the discussion. The two detectives and Mr. North started to walk on. Mr. Marvin let them walk a few yards and then he said, “Hey.” They paused and he said, “Come back here a minute.” They hesitated and went back, North and Weigand looking a little amused. Heimrich looked impatient. Mr. Marvin said he would tell them how it was.

  “You gentlemen look all right to me,” Mr. Marvin said. “I might give you a hand. Just keep an eye on this Mr. Van Horst of yours.”

  He then returned to scything, with an air of accomplishment complete. Heimrich started to speak, but Mr. North shook his head and touched the State Police lieutenant on the arm.

  “How’s that, Mr. Marvin?” he asked. “I’ve been telling these gentlemen they ought to come to you if they wanted facts. I told them you knew more about the people around here than all the rest of us put together.”

  “You was right, Jerry,” Mr. Marvin admitted. “You was right, all right.”

  “About Van Horst?” North suggested.

  Mr. Marvin put down his scythe again, and said he wanted it understood that Van was a friend of his. He said he wouldn’t give a hand to anybody who wasn’t a friend of his, because fifty cents an hour was just about not worth the trouble. But Jerry was a friend of his, too. “Ain’t that right?” he asked Mr. North, and Mr. North said it certainly was. Mr. Marvin said he wouldn’t say anything to get anybody in trouble; because he didn’t hold with getting people into trouble, and Mr. North said he knew just how Mr. Marvin felt.

  “All right,” Mr. Marvin said. “You just ask Van about his wife.”

  Mr. North looked authentically surprised.

  “His wife?” he repeated. “Van hasn’t got a wife.”

  Mr. Marvin looked at him, consideringly, and then began to nod, slowly, meaningfully.

  “That’s what I say,” he said. “He ain’t got a wife. But that ain’t saying he didn’t have a wife, is it? You bet it ain’t. Seven-eight years ago, when he first came, he had a wife, all right. One of these women in pants.”

  He spat.

  “Women in pants!” he said. “What do you expect?”

  “Mrs. Van Horst,” North pressed. “What became of her?”

  Mr. Marvin looked at him again, and his look was overflowing with the curd of hidden meaning. He nodded several times, including all three in a gloomy gaze and said that was what a lot of people wondered.

  “One week she was here and the next week she wasn’t here,” he said. “All at once she just wasn’t around, in pants or anything. What do you think of that, gentlemen?”

  “Well, Mr. Marvin,” Mr. North said, “I’d think she went away for some reason.”

  Mr. Marvin snorted.

  “That’s what Van was telling people when they asked,” he said. “Telling them she just went away.” His tone suggested doubt of their belief.

  “Well,” said Mr. North, “what do they think?”

  Mr. Marvin wasn’t saying what they thought.

  “It ain’t for me to tell detectives their business,” he said. “I’m just tellin’ you what some thought.”

  He looked at them darkly.

  “Get what I mean, don’t you?” he said. He paused. “That was when he was livin’ in the camp where the Corbin woman lived—the one that got burnt,” he said. He grew increasingly portentous. “There was some as figured that if you
looked under the floor of that cabin you’d find things,” he said. “I ain’t making any statements, but that’s what some thought.” He nodded his head, and then he advanced a step toward the detectives and Mr. North, exhaling beer. “Maybe that Corbin lady looked!” he said, and stared at them to further the sinkage of his words. Then he went back to scything and, without looking back, moved away from them along the straight edge of his previous swathe. They looked after him and after a time Mr. North said, reflectively, “Well.”

  Heimrich snorted, angrily.

  “The old loon!” he said.

  “Oh,” said Mr. North, “do you know Marvin?”

  Heimrich said he did.

  “Just looking around for killers, I’d pick old Marvin as a likely one,” he said. “He pulled a knife on his son-in-law a couple of years ago, you know. Cut him up pretty bad, too, but got off with a jail sentence. Now he’s got it in for Van Horst, apparently—I’ll pass the word along.”

  Weigand nodded and said that seemed wise.

  “I wonder, though,” he said, “whether Van Horst was married, and where his wife is now?”

  Heimrich walked on a few paces and then he half turned and nodded.

  “So—” he said. “We’ll have to find out, of course. Just for the record, like.”

  The path crossed a brook by a wide plank, turned among some lilac bushes and emerged by a cabin. Mr. North said that here was Van Horst’s now, if they wanted to talk to him and, when they nodded, yelled, “Van!” Then he yelled again and finally they knocked at the door. But nobody answered, and they followed the path on around Van Horst’s cabin until it came out on a grassy plot in front of a rambling frame house, which had obviously been a farmhouse. Arthur Kennedy was sitting on the porch, talking to a comfortable, white-haired woman in her late fifties whose face was pale and rather drawn. They walked on to the porch and North introduced Weigand and Heimrich to Mrs. Wilson.

  Mrs. Wilson acknowledged them in a still voice and then, as their presence reminded her, her eyes filled with tears. The detectives and Mr. North waited, and Mr. North wished he had not come. Then Heimrich said that they were very sorry; that whatever they said or did must, obviously, come as an intrusion. But Mrs. Wilson would realize—

  She nodded and started to speak in a choked voice, and cleared her throat and spoke again.

  “Of course,” she said. “I realize that certain things must be done. But there isn’t anything I can tell you.”

  There was little, it seemed, that she could tell them of her daughter’s movements the day before; little that they did not already know. The trip to the station to meet Thelma; the luncheon; the tennis match.

  “She came back with Dorian a good while after the Askews went by and I knew the game was over,” Mrs. Wilson said. “But she said she was at your house, Mr. North?”

  Mr. North nodded.

  Then they had had dinner, rather late, and Helen, with Arthur Kennedy, Dorian and Thelma had gone to a party at the Fullers’. Thelma had come home early, but the others had not come.

  “I would have worried if Arthur and Dorian hadn’t been with her,” Mrs. Wilson said. “But they were and I didn’t worry and then—Then a trooper came and told me.”

  Her face worked and her voice choked. Heimrich waited.

  “Kennedy, here, says she was your stepdaughter, Mrs. Wilson,” he said, after the pause.

  She nodded and found a handkerchief in her lap and pressed it to her eyes.

  “But it didn’t make any difference in the way I felt,” she said. “She was mine ever since she was a little girl and. I loved her as mine. It didn’t make any difference.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “It would be that way. It was—”

  But Mrs. Wilson seemed not to hear him, and went on talking as if to herself.

  “—she was a little girl with yellow hair and it curled,” she said. “And when she was tired she would come up and lean her head against me.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “Try not to remember for a little while, Mrs. Wilson.”

  She seemed not to hear him.

  “—and after all that trouble about Mr. Hunt,” she said. “And just when it seemed such a wonderful thing was going to happen.” She started up, and then sank back again. “It isn’t fair,” she said. “She was gentle and loved people—”

  It was embarrassing to find nothing to say, to know that nothing could be said. Heimrich turned his hat in his hands, twisting its brim. He looked at Weigand and gestured with his head. But Weigand was looking at Mrs. Wilson, pityingly but with speculation.

  “What was the wonderful thing, Mrs. Wilson?” he asked. “What was going to happen?”

  Mrs. Wilson did not seem to hear him at first, and he waited, without repeating. Then, as if his words had hung until then in the air, she heard and looked at him, as if from a long way off.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was thinking of the money, and how she could do all the things she had wanted to do—go places and—and everything.”

  “The money?” Weigand prompted.

  She told them, then, haltingly, and from her first words the two detectives were alert, startled. “The Brownley fortune,” were her first words, and she hardly needed to go farther. Everybody knew about the Brownley fortune—the fortune which had grown slowly for three generations of sitting tight and holding land; of living tight and hoarding money, until only one strange, crotchety old man was left. And then, in a house near the Hudson at the tip of Manhattan, the old man had died at night, and there had been a great hullabaloo and a scramble. He had been the last of the Brownleys, in direct line, and he had not bothered to make a will because he had not wanted to think of dying, and it made trouble for the surrogate of the county. It made a good story for the newspapers, too, and as the story spread there had been Brownleys nobody had dreamed of in the most out-of-the-way bushes. But, so far as Weigand could remember, there had as yet been no decision; the surrogate was still weeding out claimants, seeking the kin in the nearest degree.

  But apparently, if Mrs. Wilson was right, matters had progressed farther than the public knew—had progressed to the point where the principal heir was established. And the principal heir, the next of kin, was Helen Wilson. It would have meant a fortune. How big a fortune no one knew, Mrs. Wilson thought. The newspapers had talked generously of millions, making a good story better, but apparently it was not to be millions. But at the least, and of that the lawyers were sure, it would be a great deal of money; enough money so that Helen Wilson, had she lived a little longer, might have begun to do all the things she had wanted to do since she was a tiny girl with curling yellow hair and old enough to think of beautiful, wonderful things to do.

  “And now?” Weigand asked. Did Mrs. Wilson know what happened to the money now?

  Now, Mrs. Wilson knew, it went to several distant Brownleys who were kin in the fifth degree, to be divided among them. She had heard Helen and Johnny Blair talking about it and Blair had laughed and told her to watch out she wasn’t ganged on, because it was a lot of money.

  “Blair?” Weigand said. “Why Blair?”

  Mrs. Wilson looked at him, puzzled, and then her face cleared and she said it was stupid of her, and of course there was no reason he should know.

  “Johnny is one of the others—the next in line,” she said. “He and Helen were some sort of cousins, and—”

  But then she broke off and looked at the detectives and a strange expression came over her face.

  “No,” she said. “Oh no—it couldn’t be.”

  But the first “no” was more assured than the second, and toward the end her voice trailed off.

  9

  SUNDAY

  2:20 P.M. TO 3:15 P.M.

  The two police lieutenants and Mr. North had walked a hundred yards along the path away from the Wilson house before anybody said anything, and then nothing very conclusive was said.

  “Well,” said Mr. North. He thought it over. “Well,” he said.

>   They went on a little farther.

  “I would have thought that Helen Wilson, of all people, was—well, wasn’t the sort of person things happen to,” Mr. North said. “And now—my God.”

  Weigand nodded. Things were, he admitted, piling up.

  “Listen,” he said, to Heimrich. “I thought we were unraveling this. I thought we were getting places.”

  Heimrich’s reply was short and emphatic. Then he thought a moment and said that, anyway, they were getting to know where they stood.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “we’re getting the Corbin girl out of it. That’s something. We won’t have to look hard to find out who killed her, once we find out who killed Helen. That’s something.”

  He said it emphatically; a little too emphatically. He looked at Weigand for agreement. Weigand started to say something and stopped and looked along the path. A man was turning the corner by the Van Horst house.

  “Van,” Mr. North said. “Want him now?”

  The detectives consulted, wordlessly.

  “All right,” Weigand said. “We’ll take him now.”

  Mr. North yelled, “Hey, Van!” and the man stopped, looked at them a moment and waved. When they came up he agreed to go on to the Norths’ cabin and answer a few questions.

  “Routine questions, of course?” he said, smiling. “They always are, aren’t they?”

  “Sure,” Heimrich said. “Just routine.”

  But even routine questions were delayed when they reached the North cabin, because Pam North was back before them. She looked at them without cordiality, and then smiled at Mr. North. Then, after hesitating a moment, she smiled at the others. And however she felt, she had spent her time well.

  “Dorian didn’t want to come back,” she said. “She said she wanted to be alone and walk it off. So I made sandwiches.” She looked at them. “Although heaven knows why, for you—you buzzards,” she said.

  The sandwiches, however, were piled comfortably on a plate and went fine with beer, although when he looked for beer Mr. North snorted. “Marvin took three bottles!” he reported, indignantly. Those that were left, cold, just went around, with the Norths sharing a bottle. Van Horst said he had had lunch, but sat with a beer in one hand and his pipe smoldering in the other, and seemed agreeably at home. They finished and Van Horst said, “Well?”