Foggy, Foggy Death Read online

  “—before,” the voice said.

  And then there was a murmur. It was low, indistinct, and, listen as Bill Higgins would, hold his own breath as he would, he could not clearly get the words. The tone seemed to be protesting.

  “Quite possibly not, my dear,” the stronger voice said. “It was a thin story to begin with. It hasn’t got any thicker. Stick to it anyway.”

  The murmur answered this.

  “Let me handle it,” the one with the penetrating voice said. “Whether they believe it or not, you’ve nothing to worry about. There’s nothing on you; nothing that matters. I’ll take care of that, as I said I would.”

  The murmur came again. It was longer this time.

  “There’s no time for all that,” the man said— Bill was almost certain now the murmuring person was a woman. “We’ve been over it. They’ll want you any time now; there’s no point in their finding me here. Stick to it, for now, anyhow. We’ll see what comes up.”

  Again the murmur, more briefly than before.

  “I do,” the man said. “You know it damn well. If anybody was being crossed up, it wasn’t you, my dear. Now I’m—”

  What he was doing was clear to Higgins from the sounds. The man with the penetrating voice was coming out. Bill moved quickly, took a long chance, opened the next door down the corridor and popped behind it. Luck was with him; he popped into a linen closet. The shelves came close to the door and with Bill between, the door would not entirely close. But with more luck, this would be unnoticed.

  Apparently it was. The man passed the door without noticing that it was partly open. He was a tall man, with light hair. Not the party, certainly; not anybody Bill had seen before. But wait a minute. The man had been one of those in the big room. Bill remembered now getting a glimpse of him from the hall, while the trooper was unlocking the handcuffs. Whoever he was, he was one of “them.” Bill started to emerge, heard other footfalls, and popped in again. This time it was the tall cop. He went to the door outside which Bill had been listening—and he, too, apparently failed to see that the door of the linen closet was ajar. The cop knocked on the door, said, “The captain would like to see you for a few minutes, miss, if it’s convenient.” The door opened almost at once and a young woman, who looked disturbed, but at the same time excited and animated, came out. Bill knew her; she was the children’s nurse, or whatever they called it. James, that was her name. So she’d been up to something.

  Maybe, Bill Higgins said to Bill Higgins, if the other party don’t come through, this lady or her boy friend might feel different. They were up to something, all right. Maybe—

  But the other party was still the best bet, if to be found. Bill came carefully out of the closet and started down the corridor. The only thing he could think of to do was to listen outside more doors and, as occasion provided, look through keyholes. Fortunately, the keyholes were large and old fashioned. Bill bent to peer into one and then heard, again, footsteps on the stairs from the ground floor. They were heavy and assured and Bill thought “that damn cop again.” He was too far from the closet now; it was between him and the stairs and if he went that way he would run into the damn cop’s arms. He hurriedly opened the door he had been peering through and got himself inside. He closed the door, huddled against it, and shivered.

  But there was nobody in the room and then Bill realized that he had popped into the room outside which he had a few minutes ago been listening—the nurse’s room, apparently. That should give him a few minutes, since apparently the cops were asking her questions; Bill had vaguely gathered there was something about a kid who had got lost, although he couldn’t see where that fitted in. It was hard to see, in fact, where anything fitted in, including what he had seen earlier in the day. It was also hard to determine what his next step should be. Bill swore under his breath.

  He had pictured everybody downstairs, probably being called in one by one to be questioned and then returned, as it were, to the pool. That would have given him the second floor more or less to himself; he could have tried probable rooms one after another until, in one, he found belongings which would identify it as the right room. Bill was pretty sure he would be able to identify the right room, the party’s room, when he found it. But it began to look as if somebody, the cops most likely, would find Bill first.

  Instead of staying where they should have stayed, people—including cops—were tramping all over the damn place; sooner or later he would dodge in somewhere too late, or dodge into the wrong place. What he should have done, Bill realized, was waited longer in the room upstairs—waited there until things quieted down. The trouble with that was that, if he had waited too long the cops would have come to get him before he had a chance to contact his party. What he’d better do now was hide out for an hour or so. But not, Bill thought, here. This was, obviously, only temporary haven. What Bill wanted was an unoccupied room.

  The room he was in had three doors: the one to the corridor and one in either side wall. Bill tried the one on the right and found it led into a closet. Turning from it, he found a half-filled package of cigarettes on a table and pocketed it. Then he tried the other door. It opened on a bathroom—a very large bathroom which once might have been an only moderately small bedroom. Across the bathroom there was another door and Bill walked across, on tiptoe, and opened it. Then he was in a largish room with two small beds dimly visible. So far as he could tell in a faint glow from somewhere—he could not at once identify the source—the room was unoccupied. It would do, Bill decided, and then a very small voice said, “It’s not the same man, Pethy. The other man was bigger. Lots bigger.”

  “Sh-h-h!” another small voice said, except that this one, while quite as audible as the other, was a small whisper. “Sh-h-h! He’ll hear!”

  “This is a very little one,” the first small voice said. “What’s he doing in the bathroom?”

  The other child involuntarily giggled.

  “You’re so funny, Lorry,” Elspeth Bromwell said. “Everybody has to go to bathrooms.”

  “I don’t care,” Lorry said. “That’s our bathroom. And Miss James’s. Why doesn’t he go to his own bathroom?”

  “Sh-h-h!” Pethy said. “It’s a friend of mamma’s. He’s lost. ’Member when we were saying good night in mamma’s room and Mr. Haas got lost—”

  “Mr. Haas went away,” Lorry said. “Anyway, this is another one. A little one.”

  “Ask him,” Pethy said.

  “No,” Lorry said. “You ask him. You’re older.”

  Bill Higgins was good and tired of being called a little one. He was no littler than lots of guys. He was, admittedly, in a worse spot.

  “He looks like a gardener or something,” Pethy said. “Maybe he shouldn’t be here at all. Maybe—”

  Bill gulped. He had to think fast, which was hard.

  “Your papa sent me,” he said. “Wanted me to see if you was all right.”

  “We don’t call him papa,” Pethy said, not at all taken aback that a dialogue, and one presumably inaudible, had become tripartite. “And it’s were, not was.’’

  “Uh course we’re all right,” Lorry said.

  “We call him daddy,” Pethy said. “And you were in the bathroom.”

  “Got th’ wrong door,” Bill Higgins said, involuntarily entering into what appeared to be an argument. “Got sorta mixed up, is all.” Then he became cunning. “Thought your dad said next to his.” He gestured vaguely beyond, toward the wall farthest from the bathroom.

  Pethy giggled.

  “That’s gran’ma’s,” she said. “Everybody knows that Daddy’s is way off the other way.”

  “It’s a suit,” Lorry said.

  “Lorry,” Pethy said, and giggled again. “You’re so funny. A suite.”

  The children’s voices were becoming more audible; the effect of night, of strangeness, was wearing off.

  “Sh-h-h,” Bill Higgins said, alarmed. From what he had, maybe he could work out what he wanted. He’d better ge
t out of there before somebody heard the kids. “Tell him you’re all right,” he said, quickly, and went back into the bathroom and closed the door. After a moment’s thought, he bolted it. Then he bolted the other door. Then he realized he had managed to get himself nicely bottled up.

  “I liked the other one better,” Lorry said, his voice only slightly muffled by the door. “He carried me. Wanta go to the bathroom.”

  “He’s in there,” Pethy said.

  But almost at once, Bill Higgins was out of there. He remembered to unbolt the door on the children’s side; he went into Miss James’s room, found it unoccupied still, and then heard steps approaching. Bill kept on going, into the closet. Two people came into the room, from the sounds. Bill tried the keyhole, and got faint glimpses. Miss James, and the tall blond man—

  “Well?” the man said.

  “I don’t know, Steve,” Miss James said. “He—he just listened. Most of the time as if he were half asleep.”

  “Not tough?”

  “No. Maybe he believed me.”

  “I doubt it,” the man said. “However—”

  “I don’t know how I got into this,” Pauline James said.

  The man laughed.

  “Yes you do,” he said. There was a pause. Bill couldn’t see them, but he thought the blond man was kissing Pauline James. After a moment she said, “All right, you win. That’s how I got into it, all right.”

  “With your eyes open,” he said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’ll be all right,” the man said. “Work it out another way. You need some rest.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Run along, Steve.”

  Bill thought they kissed again. Then a door opened and closed. He heard the nurse moving around the room, presumably undressing. All he needed now was for her to want to put something in the closet or get something out. But after a little time, the movement stopped; there was no sound, but the light remained on. Now what the hell? Then he heard the faint, unmistakable, sound of paper being handled. The dame was either reading something, or writing something down. Jeeze.

  Bill had no watch, but he knew a long time was a long time. Actually, it was perhaps half an hour after Stephen Nickel had left the room that Pauline James finished writing a letter to her mother—a thing she often did when she was disturbed, because the complete unreality of all she wrote, the familiar task of writing many words in sentences which embodied neither truths nor untruths, were “chatty” and “loving” and without import, took her out of her own life and brought a kind of agreeable numbness. When she had finished the ietter, she did not read it over. She put it in an envelope and sealed it and then, moving carefully as if any quickness would awaken her from dreaming, went across the room and into the bathroom.

  In crossing the room, she came momentarily into the sliver of vision the keyhole allowed Bill Higgins. He could see her close the door behind her, hear the sound of the closing door. He immediately got out of there.

  In the corridor, he started in the direction of the stairs and was almost there when he heard voices in the hall below.

  “All right,” Captain Heimrich said, “have one of the boys get him. We’ll give him another chance.”

  Bill said to himself, me they mean. He went quickly back down the corridor and as he went heard—or thought he heard—steps on the stairs. This time Bill had little choice—Miss James’s room was out, the children’s room was out (God knew!) and the room beyond was “gran’ma’s.” This left two doors on the opposite side of the corridor and he took the first one. Making as little noise as he could, he opened the door and popped in. He was getting damn tired of rooms, particularly wrong rooms.

  This room was almost dark; to Bill at first completely so. Then his eyes responded to a dim glow near one of the walls and, after a few seconds, he recognized it as coming from a table beside a bed. It was a minute before Bill, standing just inside the door, realized there was someone besides himself breathing in the room, and it was another half minute before he made out the girl in the bed. And then she spoke and Bill jumped involuntarily.

  “No,” she said. “No. No!”

  At first Bill assumed she was speaking to him, and he almost went out of the room precipitately. But then she said, again, “No!” and after a second, “No, Scott. No!”

  The girl was talking in her sleep, Bill Higgins realized, and pulled the door almost closed, leaving it ajar so he could listen. He moved cautiously closer to the bed. The old girl’s secretary, that was who it was. Having a nightmare, apparently; she had been tossing around and had tossed off most of the covers. She was even partly out of her nightdress. Catch cold that way, Bill thought, and at the same time thought that she was quite a babe. She moved restlessly, as if she might be about to awaken, and Bill backed from the bed, toward the door. The movement brought him beside a dressing table; his hand brushed it and he looked at what was on it. It was more or less by force of habit that he picked up, and dropped in a trouser pocket, a pair of earrings lying on the table.

  The girl stirred again, restlessly, and Bill went to the door. He listened, and now heard nothing in the corridor outside, or on the stairs. They hadn’t started yet; maybe he could just make it. Bill slipped out of the door and moved down the hall toward the stairs. But then he heard voices in the hall below and doubled back.

  VI

  After Captain Heimrich had told Karen to get some sleep, he watched her leave and then, for a minute or more, regarded the door she had closed behind her. Then he said to Forniss that it would be more probable if she were bigger. Forniss, seeming to follow the line of thought with no difficulty, agreed that she wasn’t very big. He pointed out that surprise, and physical position, could readily take the place of size and that they had both known cases. Heimrich said, “Naturally.”

  “She was there,” he said. “We don’t know that anybody else was. She didn’t get along with Marta Bromwell too well, probably. They were different breeds. It’s easier to kill someone you don’t like, obviously. And it’s evident she’s in love with Bromwell.”

  Forniss said he guessed so.

  “Not so evident she knows it,” Heimrich said, agreeing with the unexpressed doubt. “And she is little. But physically very active, from accounts. The old lady’s account. Fine, wholesome, out-of-doors type; wiry New England breed. So unlike poor dear Marta. No love lost there either, as they say.”

  “Nobody liked her much,” Forniss said. “That sticks out.”

  It did indeed, Heimrich agreed. It stuck out a mile.

  “Except, apparently, Haas,” he added. Forniss said, “Well,” drawing it out.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “No meeting of souls. That wouldn’t have been the idea.”

  Forniss pointed out that Haas’s story was thin, and was told that nobody’s story was particularly fat. He was invited to take Nickel’s.

  “So thin you can see right through it,” Heimrich said. “Yes, he did know Marta Bromwell once, years ago. He had to say that, since he’d given himself away to Miss Mason, and could bank on her telling us. But known her only casually, of course. And that had nothing to do with his being here. He had a flat and no lug wrench; the place had a telephone. So has the gate cottage. He didn’t know that; didn’t see the wires; too much fog. All pure coincidence. Just happened to have a flat here, happened to come to telephone, happened that a young woman he’d once known got killed the same afternoon. You can see through it and back again. He realizes that perfectly; doesn’t even bother to make it better. Why not just in the neighborhood, dropped in to see an old acquaintance?”

  “Too much fog,” Forniss said. “Nobody drops in in weather like this. They stay in.”

  That, Heimrich agreed, probably was right.

  “But you gather he isn’t too special to touch?” he said. “In town?”

  That was what Forniss had gathered. Nickel owned a good many things; no doubt he could get favors. Possibly he had a few arrangements here and there. But
no big “in.” No district leaders at beck and call; no supreme court justices delighted to give him lunch. Just an operator, very adroit, very careful, not in trouble with anybody—that was Stephen Nickel, so far as Forniss could find out. And Forniss had been on the telephone. If Nickel had a game or two running—and undoubtedly he had—they had resulted in no squeals. If he had angles—and no doubt he had—they prodded no one else. He was welcome along Fifty-second Street and elsewhere; he knew very nice people.

  “Including young Mrs. Bromwell,” Heimrich said.

  Not, so far as Forniss had yet gathered, noticeably well, at least lately. Haas and Marta Bromwell; yes, they got around. They were reasonably circumspect about it, but they were often together, particularly for lunch and cocktails. “Haas works at night,” Forniss pointed out. “Not Sunday night, which was why he could come here. But should be leading his band tonight. If he hadn’t got lost.”

  Heimrich said it was too bad.

  “Haas,” Forniss said, “got divorced six months ago. A singer—girl named Glynn something, or something Glynn. Got it here—” He turned pages of his notebook. “Mavis Glynn,” he said. “Night club? Radio?” Heimrich shook his head. “Anyway,” Forniss said, “she went to Reno. Nothing to show that Mrs. Bromwell had anything to do with it. Nothing to show she hadn’t, for that matter.”

  Heimrich agreed there wasn’t. He said that, so far as they could prove, Marta and Haas had been what Haas said—good friends.

  “Which,” he said, “leaves Haas without the obvious motive, if true, and also doesn’t help with Bromwell. You don’t kill your wife because she has a good friend.” He closed his eyes. “Fortunately,” he said, “Haas doesn’t have to be telling the truth. If we had to believe all we hear we’d never get any place, would we, Charlie? Maybe Haas split with the singer for Marta’s sake, maybe Marta tossed him out, maybe he got sore and—well, tossed her in. You like that, Charlie?”