A Client Is Canceled Read online

  “Probably,” I said, “because the roots hadn’t passed along the word.”

  Everybody looked blank, then, and I remembered I’d only thought about Forniss and the others absorbing information and sending it along up. I explained what I meant: that Forniss hadn’t, when Heimrich talked to us, yet taken whatever steps were necessary to find out things like that. I wondered what steps one could take on Sunday, with everything closed up, and decided that maybe the State Police could open a lot of things if they needed to.

  “You really didn’t know, Mrs. Otis?” Craig said, and the Pooh shook her head again.

  She wasn’t then, or later, able to explain to herself, or to anyone else, precisely why she hadn’t known, except that nobody had ever thought to tell her. It was, we found out later, entirely true that Pauline had been adopted—openly, from an agency, through the courts, when she was about a year old. It had happened, of course, when the Pooh wasn’t much, if any, older than Pauline herself, and by the time they were both growing up and the Pooh was old enough to understand, she and her mother weren’t seeing the Barlows much, or thinking about them much. Perhaps by that time, the Pooh’s mother had forgotten she had never told the Pooh about Pauline. “Or perhaps,” the Pooh said, “she did tell me once when I was too small really to understand, or just didn’t think it was important enough to remember.” She said this much later, not that afternoon under the apple tree.

  “I didn’t know,” the Pooh said to Craig that afternoon. “I always just thought she was my cousin. I almost never saw her, of course. Does she know?”

  Craig shrugged to that; he said Heimrich had just mentioned it, and passed on. He said he didn’t know why Heimrich had mentioned it, or what bearing it had.

  I didn’t know why Heimrich had mentioned it either, except that sooner or later he seemed to mention almost everything. The bearing, I thought, was tangential, but all the same real. It made it comfortable to include Pauline among the people who might have killed Uncle Tarzan; made that inclusion psychologically more acceptable. There was no deep sense to that since, as I’ve said, children do now and then kill their parents, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of an adopted child killing an adoptive parent. But the psychological point is still there. There are certain ideas we shrink from, and now this was one from which we no longer had to shrink.

  “I suppose Miss Barlow inherits what Mr. Barlow had, all the same,” Ann Dean said.

  Craig said again he wouldn’t know. I said that, if she had inherited before, I didn’t think this would change anything; with or without a will, and clearly there had been a will, an adopted child has the same legal rights as a child biologically achieved. I’d run across this fact somewhere, doing research for something.

  Nobody said anything more about Pauline then. She was just there—another possibility, and we already had too many possibilities. I said, “What about Eldredge?”

  “He had his knife out for P. J., all right,” Craig said, and added that, from what he had himself seen of Francis Eldredge, he wouldn’t have thought it much of a knife. Eldredge’s father had been forced out of the tobacco company—all quite legally, so far as had been proved, although Francis had still been trying to prove it wasn’t. It was, Heimrich had told Craig, rather complicated. “Naturally,” Heimrich had wondered whether, during his own association with Barlow, Craig had heard him mention Eldredge, or express any particular attitude toward him, and Craig hadn’t. Heimrich had said that, although others had been involved with Uncle Tarzan in getting the Eldredges out—the other three who now ran Blends, apparently—Francis had had his knife particularly out for Paul J. Barlow. He’d invited Craig to speculate as to why, and Craig hadn’t had any speculation to make. Heimrich had said that it was interesting that Eldredge had taken a walk just when he had, and Craig had said, wasn’t it?

  We sat around for another half an hour or so after that, going over what we had been going over before, and coming out nowhere, also as before. It was interesting, I thought, how after a few minutes, we had begun to talk very much as if we had all known one another for a much longer time than we had. Murder, or Captain Heimrich, or something, had brought us together. We talked a bit about Heimrich himself, who puzzled us, and about what he was up to, which we couldn’t quite get.

  “He leaves you feeling you ought to do something,” Craig said. “Almost as if you have to do something to get yourself out of—out of a kind of web.”

  He did; that was it. He somehow made one feel surrounded, and anxious to break out.

  “I wonder,” the Pooh said, “if that isn’t what he plans? To get someone to make a move? The person he wants to move?”

  It seemed reasonable enough. It didn’t alter the fact that, as the Pooh and I had been left feeling we ought to do something, so apparently had Craig—so, for all I knew, had Jovial George and Faye and Pauline Barlow and Eldredge. If we all started moving, we probably would collide. I wondered whether that wasn’t what Captain Heimrich had in mind.

  6

  The four of us sat in the shade for ten or fifteen minutes longer, not saying much, but just worrying quietly to ourselves. I suppose, that is, that the others were; certainly I was. I wondered what move Heimrich was waiting for, and who was going to be the one to make it, and I had a very odd feeling that Heimrich was sitting around somewhere, looking sleepy, waiting to pounce—I had the feeling that he knew that the four of us were sitting there, and what we had been saying and, now, what we were thinking. It was absurd to feel that, of course. Heimrich was, obviously, just another man who happened to be a policeman, and he hadn’t any powers the rest of us didn’t have. He could be fooled like anyone else. It was entirely irrational to think that he had everything more or less planned and that we four—presumably along with the Townsends and Eldredge and Pauline—were following his plan, not planning for ourselves. Nevertheless, I did think that, or almost think it.

  Perhaps it was the feeling that, so long as we didn’t actually move, we were somehow safe, even hidden, that kept us sitting there after we didn’t have anything more to say. It lasted, as I’ve said, for about a quarter of an hour. Then Ann asked if we didn’t all want a drink. That seemed to me a reasonably safe, move to make, and I was about to say so when the Pooh said, no, we had to be getting along. “Things to do,” the Pooh said, and I tried to think precisely what the things were, and couldn’t. But the Pooh got up, and, of course, Craig and I got up too. Ann Dean said she’d love to get us a drink, and the Pooh said it was nice of her, but we really couldn’t.

  We started over toward It and then the Pooh stopped, just in the sunlight, which made her white hair alive and shining, and said, “Oh, by the way.” She said it to Craig, who looked attentive and waited.

  “Did you happen to tell the others we were at the inn last night?” the Pooh asked him. “When you got back, I mean?”

  Craig looked puzzled for a second and then said, “Oh, you mean about the gun?” and the Pooh nodded her white head.

  “I don’t remember,” Craig said. “I might—”

  “Yes,” Ann said. “You did. Don’t you remember?” Then she told him what he ought to remember.

  They had, it appeared, driven over to the inn in the Jaguar and, after their couple of drinks, back to the Townsends’ so that Ann could pick up her own car. The others had been on the terrace still and Jovial George had asked where they had been, and they had told him. Then one of them—Ann thought it was Craig and he thought it might have been—had mentioned running into us there.

  “So everybody knew,” Craig said, and we started on toward It. “Except Eldredge,” he said. “He wasn’t there.”

  So that was that, for what it was worth. They hadn’t, of course, known how long we were going to stay at the inn, since we hadn’t ourselves. For all they knew, we might have bolted a quick dinner and dashed home. We weren’t, of course, known as dinner bolters, and the inn isn’t a place where one bolts. However—

  Craig looked at It,
with that pained, faintly unbelieving expression most people have when they look at It, and we kicked the front tires and got in. The Pooh pressed the starter and the usual hideous noises began. Craig recoiled slightly, as people do from It, and the customary odor of raw gasoline enveloped us. Then It’s motor expired.

  “You’re over-choking it,” Craig told the Pooh who, absently, said, “Yes, dear,” and then, “Oh, I thought for a moment you were Oh-Oh. It hasn’t any choke.”

  Ann Dean, who learns fast, came over and Craig opened the garage door for her. She pushed us with her Chevvie out to the road, and then along it, It gulping and exploding and backfiring and finally, after only about half a mile, giving in and agreeing to go to work. The Pooh tooted at Ann, who tooted back, and we went on toward home. We were almost there when the Jaguar passed us with an inspiring whish. Both Dwight Craig and Ann were in it, and they were going somewhere hell bent. We bucked along to Mean Abode, backed It up the incline down which it was supposed to start next time, and got out and kicked it sharply in the rear tires. Then we went down to the little brook which runs at the bottom of the hill we’re halfway down and Eldredge is at the top of, and undressed and splashed around. It wasn’t like the Townsend swimming pool had been the night before, but it was fun in its way and cooling—in a way. Also, there were no bodies in the brook, which rather added to its charm.

  In the sun, the Pooh was brown—a very delightful goldeny brown—and not the almost translucent white she had been in the moonlight; she was just as fine to watch and more immediate than she had been the night before. We splashed water on each other and I tried to duck the Pooh and got ducked for my pains and I suppose we would, to an outsider, have looked a little silly. But there were no outsiders to look, so far as we knew, and we didn’t feel silly. We just, for a few minutes, felt relaxed and swell. Then we ran back up to the house, carrying our clothes, and changed into other, and fewer and dryer clothes, and sat on the terrace and had drinks and decided, over again, that it would be fine to have fifty thousand dollars. But as soon as we thought that, we got, again, to thinking about the rest of it.

  “I wonder,” the Pooh said, “if Mr. Eldredge can see us when we’re in the brook?”

  I didn’t think he could; there were trees and bushes intervening. We agreed that it wasn’t very important. We also agreed he could see Mean Abode from his house, as we had agreed earlier in the afternoon.

  “If only he weren’t so much like one of his own cows,” the Pooh said, and I agreed. Cows—at any rate eastern cows, the milking kind—don’t seem to associate themselves with violence, nor do the people who own them. I don’t know much about milkmen, whose hours don’t normally coincide with mine, but I always feel that they are a race of gentle men and bland. And Eldredge was, in my mind, a kind of super-milkman. Nevertheless, he was in the best position to drop down the hill and steal my automatic; he apparently had thought he had a reason for killing Uncle Tarzan and he had certainly been around the Townsends’ swimming pool at about the right time and without any especially good reason. One o’clock in the morning is, certainly, one hell of a time to take a walk in the country, moonlight or no moonlight. I’d once known a man who did, but he was a man peculiarly prone to cosmic thoughts, which he found it necessary to walk off. I doubted Francis Eldredge had cosmic thoughts very frequently.

  So we kept coming back to him. He fitted, if not perfectly, still better than anyone else we could think of. The cows aside, we didn’t know much about the kind of man Eldredge was; possibly he was a violent milkman. He had motive, apparently. He’d been in Mean Abode and knew the general layout, and the hall closet was where one would keep a gun if one was going to keep a gun. It was quite possible I’d even mentioned having it there, although that I couldn’t remember. And, so far as we knew, he was the only one who had, admittedly, been at the pool about the time Uncle Tarzan was taken off.

  “Why,” the Pooh said, “don’t you call Mr. Eldredge up and ask him?”

  It seemed, I told her, a little abrupt, and perhaps not the kind of question to which one could expect an entirely forthright answer, particularly on a party line. Also, Heimrich had no doubt asked Mr. Eldredge if he killed Uncle Tarzan and Eldredge had said—

  Oh, the Pooh said, “I didn’t mean that, precisely. I meant ask him whether he saw anyone prowling around here last night, while we were at the inn.”

  I said “Oh,” and thought about it. I pointed out that, if Eldredge really had stolen the automatic, we would be as good as inviting him to lay it on someone else. The Pooh nodded, and drank from her collins, and said that was more or less the idea. “To see, if he accepts the invitation,” she said.

  “In other words,” I said, “to stir him up.”

  “Oh yes,” the Pooh said. “In the Heimrich rhythm. And, of course, there’s some truth even in a lie, if one can find it. Nothing is quite made up out of whole cloth, however we try.”

  There was a good deal to that, of course, and after finishing my drink I went to the telephone.

  “—and he’s just too dreamily wonderful,” someone said. “I just sat there, Doris, and thought I’d—”

  I hung up the receiver and went back and told the Pooh that the Jackson girl was telephoning, was telling Doris about somebody dreamily wonderful. The Jacksons are one of the three other parties on our line and Barbara’s parties are almost incessant, either in anticipation or in retrospect, and inevitably to be discussed. I mixed us fresh drinks. In ten minutes I tried again. For a moment I thought the line was clear. Then I realized it wasn’t; it had the peculiar emptiness of an open party line, although nobody was talking on it. There was no dial tone. This wasn’t uncommon—almost nothing is uncommon on a four party line. There was also a clicking sound I couldn’t identify. Probably the Jackson girl had thought of something she wanted to read to Doris—they read one another snatches of their mail, particularly their mail from boys, and giggle over them a good deal—and the faint, indefinable presence I felt on the line was Doris waiting, with her mouth open—maybe clicking her teeth. I said “Hello” tentatively and waited a few seconds and nothing happened. Then I disconnected and went back to the Pooh and told her there was no progress.

  “It would almost be better not to have a telephone,” the Pooh said. “When we get the fifty thousand dollars, let’s see if we can’t get a private line.”

  We drank at our new collinses and, after another fifteen minutes, I tried again. This time there was nothing except, far off, a faint patter of childlike voices. One of the younger Jackson kids had left the receiver off again. When that happens, there is nothing to do but wait for action by the New York Telephone Company. I reported to the Pooh.

  It had, somehow, got to be almost seven o’clock by then, and it was a little cooler—not much, but a little. It was the Pooh, I think, who suggested we walk up to Eldredge’s house, on the chance he would be there. We discussed this dubiously while we finished the current collinses, and then decided we might as well. We put on a few more clothes and went out on the path which led up to Francis Eldredge’s. We went first in the shade of some trees and then came to the stone fence and climbed over it. Then the path went along the fence, still partly shaded, and climbing not too steeply. It was hot, but the air was full of country smells. Somebody had been mowing on the field beyond the wall, and the air smelled of that; the brook trickled through the field on our right, and the air smelled of that. It smelled, too, of Eldredge’s cows, still at pasture beyond the brook, but that also is pleasant in the country. All the cows turned their heads slowly and looked at us, stirred by that almost imperceptible curiosity which is what a cow uses for a mind.

  The shade, which was intermittent but to be prized, came from a row of ash trees planted on the far side of the stone fence—marching single file up the hill, setting off one field from the next, in the fashion immemorial to the countryside, and a very pleasant fashion. We walked without hurrying, because we were in no hurry and it would have been too hot to hur
ry if we had been, and the Pooh found wild roses blooming along the wall and tried to pick one and pricked her finger on a thorn and put the scratched finger in her mouth, like a little girl. I told her papa would fix it, and kissed the back of her neck. She said it was fine now.

  The fence swung to the right after a time and, when we turned, we were only a hundred yards or so from the Eldredge house. The windows on our side reflected the sun, so that the house, momentarily, was only the façade of a house—a flat, lacking a third dimension. The terrace at one side of the house was empty. The wall was between us and the house, but it was low enough to look over and there wasn’t, as there usually is on fieldstone walls, enough ivy to cut off the view. We looked across the low stone fence, between big ashes, at a two-story white house with the sun on it, and behind us a cow said something, in a low, detached voice, to another cow. It was very sylvan. Then somebody started shooting at us.

  The shots came from the house. There was an explosion, and for an instant I thought that It had somehow managed to get up to the Eldredge house and had gone crazy. But then I realized that what I had heard wasn’t It, and that what else I had heard was the whining sound a bullet makes going through air, looking for something solider than air.

  The Pooh was between me and the house, and a little ahead. I grabbed her and dragged her down behind the wall, and was down at the same time beside her, trying partly to cover her. Then there was another shot and another bullet went by, looking angrily for something and one of Eldredge’s cows gave a surprised sound and then a kind of shriek, and started to run and fell down. I pushed the Pooh closer to the stone fence and hoped that whoever was shooting would keep on hitting cows, if anything, and not move so he could fire down along the wall. As it was, we were—I hoped—reasonably safe.

  We lay there, waiting for another shot. There wasn’t anything else to do, that I could think of. All whoever had the gun had to do was to walk down from the house, move over to our side of the wall and pick us off, presuming he could hit us. I hoped he was using the same old forty-five automatic and not a rifle; I thought he was; it sounded like an automatic.