Murder Roundabout Page 10

  “Roundabout,” Forniss said, and got, “Now, Charlie. It often is, you know,” which needed, and received, no answer.

  “Only,” Heimrich said, “Susan likes Leslie Brennan, and Susan’s a perceptive woman. All right, Charlie, before you say it—maybe with an exception.”

  “Wasn’t going to,” Forniss said. “You’re what they call selfconscious, M. L.”

  “Says Leslie’s younger than she ought to be for her age,” Heimrich said, ignoring that. “Very much in love with her husband, Susan thinks she is. And she’s the daughter of a clergyman. There’s that.”

  “You’ve missed me,” Forniss said. “Come again.”

  “Perhaps grew up in a very moral environment,” Heimrich said. “Tangled up. Jealousy and moral revulsion. The wages of sin, Charlie. Punish the evildoers. Do God’s work for Him.”

  “If she’s nuts,” Forniss said. “Anyway, anything to show Brennan and Mrs. Weaver were shacking up?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “all murderers are nuts, Charlie. Wouldn’t murder if they weren’t. As for the shacking up—Oliver Drake went out of his way to hint at it. No evidence. No. But the bartender at the Inn’s a gossip and he hinted, too. Not directly. But—opened a few doors a few cracks.”

  He amplified; told Forniss what Oliver Drake had seen, or said he had seen, on a hot afternoon a few weeks before.

  “Mrs. Brennan went to the Inn now and then,” Heimrich said. “Took prospects there for lunch. Could be she was there that day. Saw her husband and Annette together. Saw them leave together. Put two and two together. Came up with an X to mark the spot.”

  Forniss said, “Mm-m-m.” He said, “Why’d Oliver Drake go out of his way?”

  “Could be he had a yen in the same direction,” Heimrich said. “I rather suspect he had, as a matter of fact. A way of getting his own—”

  The telephone rang in the house and Heimrich paused to listen to it. It rang twice and stopped in the middle of a third ring. Susan would have had to get up from the table at which she was trying to learn, from a son who understood all of it, some small part of the new mathematics. She would have had to cross the long room to the telephone. She appeared at the doorway and said, “The barracks, gentlemen. Either of you.”

  Forniss started to get up, but it was Heimrich who went across the terrace toward the house. He came back in a minute or so.

  “Brennan’s worried about his wife,” he told Forniss. “Seems she went to town this afternoon and ought to have been back hours ago. Wanted to know if there was a report of an accident.”

  Forniss stood up.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I guess we’d better, Charlie.”

  VIII

  There were lights in all the windows of the Brennans’ house in Brickhouse Road. As they walked toward the house, James Brennan opened the door and stood in the doorway and it seemed to Merton Heimrich that, seeing them, he slumped a little. When they were still some way from the door he said, “You’ve come to tell—”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “We’ve got no news. No bad news. No reason to think Leslie’s not fine, Jim. Probably got a flat tire somewhere. Or the motor’s conked out.”

  “She left her father’s house about four,” Brennan said. “It’s—” He looked at his watch. “Twenty of ten,” he said. “Almost six goddam hours, M. L.”

  There was nothing good to say to that. They went into the house which was so brightly lighted, lighted so bright to welcome. They followed James Brennan into the living room. There was a chair near a front window and turned to face it. On the sill, within reach, there was an ash tray. It was piled with cigarette butts, most of them the long butts of cigarettes smoked briefly, nervously, ground out unfinished. Brennan lighted a new cigarette and turned to face the two tall policemen.

  “She went into the city,” Heimrich said. “You’re sure of that, Jim?”

  Brennan nodded his head slowly. Then he reached into a pocket of his slacks and took out a sheet of note paper, creased down the center. He held it out to Heimrich.

  Leslie Brennan wrote a rounded backhand. She had written: “Darling: Gone into town to see Dad. Probably be back long before you are. This is just in case. Les.” There was a postscript. “Got most of the glad bulbs up this A.M.” That was signed merely, “L.” Heimrich handed the note to Forniss.

  “She called my office,” Brennan said. “Left the same message. I was out at lunch.” He paused for a moment and drew on the cigarette and then looked at the full ash tray. Then he moved to another ash tray on a table and ground the cigarette out in it.

  “Anything unusual about her driving in to see her father?” Heimrich asked him, and Brennan said, “God, no!” almost as an exclamation. He lighted another cigarette.

  “She does it often,” he said. “In a way—oh, say she’s never grown away from her father. They’re very close. Always have been, I guess. Since her mother died, anyway. Les—” He paused for a moment. “You and Susan know her, M. L.,” he said. “She’s—in some ways she’s young for her years. In some ways not—call it entirely grown up.”

  “Sort of thing that happens,” Heimrich said, when Brennan paused again and looked at him as if he expected comment. “Doting father? Spoiled her?”

  It was a sidetrack. It was one to which Brennan had switched them. Brennan shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Not in the usual way, anyhow. Her father’s quite a guy, M. L. Not his doing if she’s not quite grown up. Not his wish. I’m pretty certain of that. Fact is, he and I’ve talked about it. Feel the same way about it. Funny thing is, she does too. Only …”

  He shrugged to finish that.

  “She did go in to see him today? You’ve checked that?”

  “Sure I did. Got in around two, or a little after. Left around four, the bishop’s pretty sure.”

  “He’s a bishop?”

  “The Right Reverend Dr. Jonathan Cunningham of the Episcopal Church. Emeritus, if that’s what they call it. Retired, anyway. Got a house in the Nineties and lives in it alone—oh, with a housekeeper—now that Les and I are married.” He ground out, abruptly, the still just-begun cigarette. He said, “What’s the point of all this? Something’s happened to my wife, damn it to hell!”

  “Now, Jim,” Heimrich said. “She’s being looked for. An alarm’s out. Black Volks, license number PC—” and gave the rest of it. “Description of Leslie. I gave them that. State police, city police by now.”

  “It’s an hour and a half from the Nineties to Van Brunt,” Brennan said. “You know damn well something’s happened to her. This crap about a flat tire! Five hours, man!”

  “Her father say why she wanted to talk to him?”

  It was crap about a flat tire, of course. About motor trouble. Unless Leslie Brennan, driving back, had taken a very secluded road indeed. And cars did, sometimes, go out of control and off roads and out of sight. There was no point in trying to convince James Brennan they didn’t.

  “No. He said—oh, something about she had just got an urge to come in and talk to him. He said, ‘She’s fond of the old man, Jim,’ and that we’d been over that. He said she was perhaps a little worked up about Annette’s death, but that he gathered they hadn’t been close friends. They weren’t.” He lighted still another cigarette. “Nettie didn’t have many,” he said. “Among women, anyhow.”

  “Any idea what Leslie might have worn when she went into the city?”

  Brennan had thought of that. He thought probably she had worn a lightweight gray suit. There was one and it was not in her closet. It might, of course, be at the cleaner’s. But it was a fairly new suit and the weather had been too warm for her to wear it much. So, unless she’d spilled something on it—

  “Probably what she wore,” Heimrich said. “Want to pass it along, Charlie?”

  Charles Forniss went to the telephone on a table in the entrance hall and passed along the information that Mrs. James Brennan, the woman in the missing Volkswagen, probably had been wearing a lig
htweight gray suit. He called in from the hall. “Hat? Shoes?”

  No hat, Brennan told him. Gray shoes, probably.

  Forniss passed that along and put the handset back in its cradle. A lamp on the table lighted, at an angle, a memo pad in a holder. There was nothing written on the top sheet of the pad. But there was the indentation left when somebody had written on the now-torn-off sheet above it, and apparently pressed hard on the pencil. It was difficult to be sure from so short a sample, but Forniss was pretty sure that Mrs. Brennan had written on the torn-off sheet and pressed hard with her pencil.

  In a day or so, sometimes in an hour or so, a good many notations get scrawled on telephone memo pads. Numbers and times and names. Or merely doodles. Probably, since that was true, and there was no such accumulation on the sheet exposed, Leslie Brennan had quite recently pressed hard with her pencil on the sheet which had been above it. Possibly just before she had decided to drive into New York. Didn’t have to mean anything, of course. But they were not investigating merely the delayed return to her home of Mrs. James Brennan.

  Forniss went back into the living room.

  “… a little after noon,” Brennan was saying. “To ask me if I’d called her. Seems she was working the garden and the phone rang but by the time she got in it had stopped. Happens all the time. You know that.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said and looked at Charles Forniss and said, “Come on something, Charlie?”

  “Doesn’t need to mean anything,” Forniss said. “You know somebody named Knight, Mr. Brennan? J. K. the initials are, apparently.”

  Brennan repeated, “Knight?” which was inevitable. Then he shook his head. Then he said, “Why, sergeant?”

  “Your wife—I think it was your wife, anyway—wrote the name down on the telephone pad. Pressed down hard, so it’s traced on the sheet below. Recently, at a guess. Maybe just before she left here today. Probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know a William Knight,” Brennan said. “Municipal court justice. Can’t think, offhand, of any ‘J. K.’ My wife’s writing?”

  “Looks like it to me,” Forniss said. “Like her writing in the note. Might have a look at it, Mr. Brennan.”

  Brennan, after he had looked, was quite certain that the handwriting was that of his wife. So was Heimrich, when he had taken his turn.

  “It could be,” Heimrich said, “that this Knight, man or woman or whichever, was somebody she planned to see while she was in New York. An off-chance, naturally. Might explain why she’s late.”

  Brennan was standing by the window. He whirled to face Merton Heimrich.

  “For God’s sake,” he said. “If she’d just been held up, don’t you think she’d have phoned? Said she was going to be—” He jerked his hands apart to finish the obvious. Then he finished it anyway. “If she was all right, she’d have called,” he said. “If she could have called, she would have called.”

  He looked intently at Heimrich after he had said that, and Heimrich had no contradiction to offer, and no reassurance. He had only silence, for the moment, and the silence was a form of agreement. Then he said, “Got a Manhattan directory around, Jim?”

  Brennan gestured toward the entrance hall and said, “Hall closet. Top shelf.” Forniss went to the closet and took a Manhattan telephone directory off the shelf, and also the Westchester-Putnam directory. He brought them both back.

  A good many Knights were listed in the Manhattan directory; fewer, but still a good many, in the Westchester-Putnam book. In neither directory was there a listing of a “J. K. Knight.” On the other hand, in both directories there were Knights with given names which began with the letter “J” and no middle initial indicated.

  “Ray Crowley’s on tonight,” Heimrich said. “Catching, I think.”

  Forniss said, “Yep.”

  “Give him something to do to pass his idle hours,” Heimrich said. “Find a J. K. Knight who knows Mrs. Brennan. Perhaps telephoned her here about something. And about what, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Forniss said, in the tone of one who has just been told the obvious, and went to the telephone.

  “Any idea what kind of a handbag your wife would have been carrying?” Heimrich asked Brennan, and Brennan looked at him blankly for a second. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  “She’s got several,” he said. “Like most women, I guess. Bag for the country. Bag—maybe a couple of bags—for the city. Has to keep shifting things—billfold, keys, all the things they carry—from one bag to another.”

  “They all do,” Heimrich said. “And leave things they need in one bag and carry another. We might have a look at the country handbag, Jim. The one she wouldn’t have been carrying.”

  “I don’t—” Brennan said but then said, “Sure,” and went through the hall in which Forniss was using the telephone and along a corridor toward the rear of the house. He came back with two handbags—one of white straw; the other, smaller, a transparent box of plastic.

  Heimrich opened the straw bag and there were a good many things in it—folded tissue, a coin purse with a quarter and a penny in it, a simulated leather key folder with a safe-deposit box key in it, and what Heimrich took to be a spare ignition key, and a small key which was probably for a suitcase. There was another key, separate, with a wooden tag attached—the Realtors’ Association key to the Association’s lock-up boxes. There were several slips of paper in a slot compartment in the bag. On one of them, Leslie Brennan had written, “Wed. Hair. 3:30.” Another was a shopping list. Recently she had bought, or she soon planned to buy, “Tth pst, Rumvr., typ.rib. and cs.gn,” and to “see J re Imp.” These slips appeared to have been torn from the memo pad by the telephone, or one like it elsewhere.

  There was another slip. On it, Leslie had written: “J. K. Knight. 7. Weav. Hs.” The name had been written carefully, with pressure on the pencil. With, Merton Heimrich thought, emphasis. “7. Weav. Hs” was written lightly. Heimrich put the shopping list and the notation of an appointment with a hairdresser back in the handbag and the other slip in his pocket. Brennan watched him.

  “Your wife sells real estate,” Heimrich said. “Happen to know whether she had Ralph Weaver’s house listed?”

  “Doesn’t sell it much,” Brennan said. “What she’s got listings of I wouldn’t know.”

  It was, Heimrich thought, as if he pushed the subject away from him with rejecting finger tips. Kind of man who didn’t want his wife to work? They were still around, of course. Heimrich thought, idly, that he wouldn’t have expected James Brennan to be one of them.

  They both heard a car coming along Brickhouse Road and Brennan turned, abruptly, and went to a window from which he could see the road. Heimrich did not need to look. He could hear the car pass the house and go on up the road. He could see Brennan’s shoulders sag a little.

  “Mr. Brennan,” Heimrich said, “you say your wife and Annette Weaver weren’t close friends. You and Mrs. Weaver?”

  Brennan looked at Heimrich and his eyes narrowed slightly. He said, “You sound like a cop now, M. L.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes momentarily. He said, “Oh, I’m a cop. Well?”

  “She was the firm’s client. I handled her affairs, mostly. Nothing important—checked her contracts. That sort of thing.”

  There was, Merton Heimrich thought, wariness in his tone. Another subject which Brennan pushed away with rejecting finger tips?

  “Also,” Brennan said, “Annette was my wife for a while. Which you damn well know, Captain. Not that that made us close friends, God knows. The other way around, if anything.”

  “Sometimes,” Heimrich said, “you took her to lunch at the Inn. So I hear, anyway.”

  “So did Ollie Drake,” Brennan said. “And other guys, I suppose.” He walked across the room and put out another cigarette. He turned back. He said, “What’re you getting at?”

  “Now, Mr. Brennan,” Heimrich said. “Just being a cop. The way you say I just sounded. Poke into all sorts of things, c
ops do.”

  “Have things for her to sign,” Brennan said. “Or she’d have things she wanted me to go over. Lawyer and client. She liked to be taken to lunch, so I’d come up and take her to lunch. My God, man, if there’d been—if we’d wanted to be secret about it—you think we’d have gone to the Inn? In a town where everybody knows both of us? What the hell are you getting at?”

  “A few weeks ago,” Heimrich said, “you and she had a longer lunch than usual in the taproom. Went off in her car afterwards.”

  “Harold’s a nosey bastard, isn’t he? Sure we did. Ralph had got her a contract for a series of commercial spots. She felt like celebrating after we’d gone over the contract. She took me back to her house to pick up my car. We’d gone in hers because it was air-conditioned and the bug isn’t.”

  “By the way,” Heimrich said, “speaking of bugs. You get the bugs taken out of that Porsche of yours?”

  “And,” Brennan said, “you’re a nosey bastard yourself, Captain.”

  “What I’m paid for,” Heimrich told him. “Anything much the matter with the Porsche, Mr. Brennan?”

  “Needed a tune-up. Needs a new exhaust system, to boot. Have to get the parts from Cold Harbor for that. Purvis says that’s the main reason it’s making such a—” He stopped with that.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I’ve heard it makes a racket. A fairly distinctive racket, I gather.”

  “So?”

  “Did you drive this noisy little car of yours last night? The one you’re now trying to have the noise taken out of?”

  “Sure. From the station here. From the parking—” He broke off and took a long step toward Heimrich, until he stood close to him. He looked angry; very suddenly angry. He said, “What’re you getting at, Heimrich? Idea was, you and the sergeant came here to help about my wife. Or wasn’t it?”

  “That,” Heimrich said. “Other things. Fact is, I’d have come anyway. Things to ask you. Ask your wife.”