With Option to Die Page 11

  “It wouldn’t,” Forniss said, “have made any difference in this case. Mrs. Powers was dead, or as near as made no difference, when the car went into your gravel pit, Mr. Finch. I understand it is yours?”

  “Yes,” Finch said. “There’s a good vein of gravel through there. There’s a good demand for gravel, now the community is growing. Although whether with this club they’re talking about—” He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

  “Apparently,” Forniss told him, “Mrs. Powers made a telephone call from the inn. She was there with Professor Brinkley, we understand. He was the last person to see her alive, far as we’ve been able to find out. Says, the professor does, that she got into her car at some time after nine and then got out of it and said she had to make a telephone call. Like to know who she called, of course.”

  Finch could see that that might be important. He wished he could help about that. About anything.

  “She wasn’t, then, on her way to see you? When she was killed?”

  “No. At any rate, I didn’t expect her. Chances are she’d merely been driving around and was on her way home. Our road—Long Hill Road—leads into South Lane, you know. And then intersects Hayride Lane. As I said, she drove around a lot. Just to drive around.”

  “Way it looks to us,” Forniss said, “somebody knew about where she’d be and about what time. And waited for her with a rifle.”

  “It couldn’t have been an accident? Somebody trying out a new rifle?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Could have been. Hell of a place to try out a new rifle. Any rifle, come to that. On a public road in pretty much the middle of the night. Still have to look into it, the police do. Start, like always, by trying to find out who profits. Reason I’m bothering you, Mr. Finch. Taking up your time.”

  Finch waved that off.

  “I suppose you mean who inherits,” Finch said. “Man to see about that is Sam Bennington. He was her lawyer. Drew up her will.”

  “We know who inherits,” Forniss told him. “Bunch of nieces and nephews, Mr. Bennington says. And that you’re the executor of her will. And have been her broker. Matter of fact, it was Mr. Bennington suggested I bother you. Thought you might be able to give us at least a rough idea as to the size of her estate.”

  “She wasn’t a rich woman,” Finch said. “General idea around is that she was, I suppose. Driving a Mercedes. Taking long trips to Europe, as she did last year. A good deal of the time, come right down to it, she acted—spent—as if she thought she was a rich woman.”

  “A rough idea,” Forniss said. “One of the things we like to know, Mr. Finch.”

  “Most of what she had left was in bonds,” Finch said. “I’ve always kept them for her. In my office safe in town at the moment. Haven’t got a list of them here. Get it for you tomorrow, if you like.”

  Forniss told him that that would be fine. Meanwhile, a rough idea?

  “Probably around thirty thousand in securities,” Finch said. “Maybe a little more. She’d sold a good many. Or I did for her. Had to to keep to our agreement.”

  Forniss said, “Agreement?” and waited.

  Her husband, Arthur Powers, had left Faith somewhere around two hundred thousand in securities, most of them bonds. Finch would have to look up the exact amount, but it was somewhere around that figure. Say they paid 4 per cent, which most of them didn’t. But say they did. Bring her in around eight thousand a year. She had felt she needed more—a good deal more.

  “So,” Finch said, “we arranged that I’d pay her twelve thousand a year, quarterly, and sell bonds to make up what the interest didn’t cover. So that she’d live partly on interest and partly on capital. She said, ‘I’m getting to be an old woman, Larry. We’ll sort of space it out.’”

  Finch hadn’t liked it, he told Forniss. Nobody knows how many years are left, for one thing. He had tried to get her to at least buy an annuity so that she could be sure of something. She had decided against that.

  “It might have worked out,” Finch said. “I’m no actuary, but it might have. Only, the twelve thousand a year wasn’t enough. She kept selling more securities—living off capital.”

  Finch sighed at that. He shook his head sadly at that. Living off capital was, Forniss decided, a heinous thing to do. It violated commandments.

  “Cars,” Finch said. “New one every year, damn near. Trips to Europe. And she just gave a lot of it away, Lieutenant. Contributed to the new library wing, for one thing. And to the rehabilitation of the civic center—the old Bennington mansion, that was. Gave it to the Civic League, Sam and R. A. did. When they couldn’t sell it, I guess. Needed a lot done and Faith contributed a lot. Had to sell bonds to do it.”

  He paused to shake his head again.

  “Come down to it,” he said, “Faith was a dear person. Everybody thought that, Lieutenant. Loved her for being the way she was. But she had no head for business. That she didn’t have. Used to argue with her. Talked myself blue in the face. Nothing came of it. She’d say, ‘After all, it’s my money, Larry. Arthur left it to me.’ Wasn’t anything to say to that, of course.”

  “Nope,” Forniss said. “Wouldn’t be, would there? We heard somewhere she was planning to invest in this club they’re organizing. The one a lot of people seem to be against.”

  If she had planned to do that, Finch said, she hadn’t told him. On the other hand, it would have been like her. If she had come to him about an investment in the club he would have tried to talk her out of it—tried like hell to talk her out of it.

  “That,” Finch said, “would have been about the last straw. Throwing her money away on a thing like that. Also, it wouldn’t have made her popular.”

  Forniss said they’d gathered there was opposition to the club. Not that it was any business of the police, but how did Mr. Finch himself feel about the club?

  “I’m not enthusiastic,” Finch said. “Not for around here. Maybe it’s an affirmation of brotherhood, the way Clay Foster puts it in that paper of his. I’d just as soon brotherhood got affirmed somewhere else. Way most of us feel. Those of us who’ve got a stake in the place, anyway.”

  “Mr. Bennington,” Forniss said, “seems to feel it will affect property values. Said something like that in connection with the value of Mrs. Powers’s house.”

  He stood up as he said that, and Lawrence Finch also stood up and again reached his hand across the desk. Forniss took it. It was a little pudgy, but the grip was resolute.

  “You’re damned right it will,” Finch said. “Change the rural character of the whole town.”

  “More than a gravel pit on a pretty slope down to a brook?” Heimrich said, when Forniss had finished his account.

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “That’s the general idea, anyway. I didn’t bring it up, M. L.”

  “He was forthcoming, wasn’t he?” Heimrich said. “Anxious to help.”

  “Seemed to be,” Forniss said.

  The taproom had filled gradually. Most of those who came into it were men and, Heimrich thought, local men—Main Street merchants in business suits; countrymen in jackets and slacks. (Most of the jackets were of tweed; countrymen have a well-grounded suspicion of May weather. Summer jackets wait until mid-June.)

  Women came into the inn’s small lobby and came in groups. But, for the most part, they went into the main dining room. Two waiters began, briskly, to carry trays of drinks from the bar, through the taproom, across the lobby. A good many of the drinks were pink.

  Of the men who came into the taproom and found tables or stood talking at the bar, none resembled the thin dark man Brinkley had described. One of them was a tall, heavy man. “Mr. Finch,” Forniss told Heimrich. Mr. Pederson, who might possibly be named Nagle, was running late for lunch, or eating it elsewhere.

  Ann Martin came into the taproom and stood just inside it looking around. Behind her was a tall and noticeably bony man. He was bareheaded and his brush-cut hair was blond. He was deeply tanned. Eric Martin, back so early from his work in New C
anaan?

  Ann Martin saw Heimrich and smiled at him. She and the bony man walked into the taproom in the direction of a table at the end of it. But by the table Heimrich and Forniss sat at, Ann Martin stopped. Heimrich and Forniss stood up.

  “This is Roy Strothers, Inspector,” Ann said and “Inspector Heimrich of the state police, Roy. And—” She looked at Forniss and

  Forniss said, “Ser—Lieutenant Forniss, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Strothers,” Ann said, “is connected with the network, Inspector. An associate producer.”

  “I take it,” Heimrich said, “that you changed your mind, Mrs. Martin? About taking the summer off?”

  “I thought it over,” she said. “Thought there might be a story here. Called the office and Stu Leffing thought maybe there might be. Not the murder, of course. No pictures in that. But—oh, how the town reacts to the prospect of an interracial country club. So …”

  “So me,” Roy Strothers said. “To have a look around and see how much of a fuss there is. We won’t get underfoot, Inspector. Try not to, anyway.”

  Heimrich said he was sure they’d try. He did not add that he was equally sure they would not succeed, if they did decide to do a documentary about North Wellwood—about a quiet village shaken out of serenity and forced to a choosing up of sides. With, he was coming to suspect, neighbor set against neighbor. UBN would, if it moved in, give the town the jitters.

  “Also,” Ann Martin said, “Roy knows this man Nagle you were talking about. Interviewed him—when was it, Roy?”

  It had been several years ago, when Roy Strothers had been working for a newspaper, not for a network; it had been on the West Coast and Strothers’s newspaper had been trying to find out what, in fact, Patriots United was all about. Nagle had been elusive; others had spoken more freely about the intentions of Patriots United, and said that the organization’s only purpose was to arouse Americans to the danger of communism and denied as malicious propaganda all rumors that the Patriots were stacking arms. Aaron Nagle had stayed in the background.

  “I had a feeling he worked from there,” Strothers said. “Probably manipulated from there. I was sure somebody was doing that. There was a feeling of that. I did run him down. He said he was only rank and file. That now and then he helped out the cause by writing in its behalf.”

  “You’d know him if you saw him again?” Heimrich asked the bony man.

  Strothers thought he would. Thin-faced, dark-haired and wiry; dark eyes set rather close together in his narrow face.

  “The man Mrs. Powers wondered about was like that,” Ann said. “I thought—Roy and I thought—he might be having lunch here. But I don’t see anybody who looks like him.”

  “Neither have we,” Heimrich said, and Ann Martin and the bony man went to the table at the end of the taproom.

  And Detective Ray Crowley came from the lobby into the doorway and looked around the taproom and then came to the table and pulled a chair out.

  Crowley, who looked like and was dressed like one of the locals at the bar, shrugged the wide shoulders under the subdued tweed jacket, and said he was afraid he didn’t have much.

  He hadn’t needed the key they had found, undamaged, in Faith Powers’s charred handbag, which was under her charred body in the broken Mercedes. The front door of her house had been unlocked. Which didn’t, of course, need to mean anything. A good many country people trustingly leave their doors unlocked. There were no lights on in the house, which might mean that Mrs. Powers had expected to be back in it before it was really dark. Country people do leave lights on in their houses when they go out at night.

  In Faith Powers’s desk he had found her current checkbook. It showed a balance of $5,414.79. It showed a deposit, on April third, of $3,000, source not identified. He had found her previous checkbook and, entered in it, a deposit of the same amount, on January fourth.

  “Quarterly payments from Finch,” Forniss said. “As per this agreement of theirs.”

  There was a passbook of the North Wellwood Savings Bank. It showed a balance of $8,375.16. There were no recent deposits. There was, on March 16, a withdrawal of around six thousand dollars.

  The checkbooks were of pocket size and Crowley had them in his pocket and took them out. He also had the passbook. The withdrawal had been for $6,396 and no cents. “Looks like she had a payment to make and knew the exact amount she wanted,” Crowley said. “Didn’t transfer it to her checking account, far as the checkbook shows. Probably bought something that cost $6,396. The new car, maybe? But a Mercedes would run to more than that, new.”

  “We’ll dig around,” Heimrich said. “Any list of securities?”

  There had not been, in the desk where Crowley had found checkbooks and passbooks, and bank statements, which he had left in Heimrich’s car. Nor in bureau drawers and a few other places which seemed likely. “It’s a big house inside,” Crowley said. “Bigger than it looks outside. Take time for a real search. Gin and tonic.”

  The last was to the waiter, who looked at two almost empty glasses and got a shake of the head from Heimrich and a hand cupped over his glass from Lieutenant Charles Forniss.

  “Any sign anybody had been there before you?” Heimrich asked Crowley.

  There had not been. Which did not, of course, mean that nobody had been—which meant only that nobody had taken the place apart looking for anything.

  They ordered lunch and ate it, and other lunchers thinned out of the taproom and drinkers from the bar. And no thin, dark, narrow-faced man came into the taproom. Ann Martin and Roy Strothers pushed back their table and walked toward the lobby. As they passed the table where the policemen loitered, Ann smiled and Strothers flipped a saluting hand.

  “Check out on this nephew in White Plains?” Forniss said.

  “To keep things tidy, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Job for Ray here. Also, don’t you think, he might drop around and see the estate tax people? Have them dig out the appraisal for tax purposes of the estate of Arthur Powers, deceased—when was it about, Charlie?”

  “About five years, according to Finch. The nephew’s Donald Powers, Ray. Lives on North Main Street.” He gave the address on North Main Street in White Plains.

  They watched Ray Crowley, detective, New York State Police, walk out into the lobby.

  “Doesn’t look much like a cop, does he, M. L.?” Forniss said.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Good kid, all the same.”

  They waited on over coffee and cigarettes.

  “Could be,” Forniss said, “that our friend has skipped lunch. Could be he’s on a diet.”

  “Or,” Heimrich said, “gone across the street for a sandwich in the drugstore.”

  He poured more coffee into his cup and the waiter looked at him with resignation.

  “Maybe Missouri,” Heimrich said. “Maybe Arkansas. Happen to know anybody out that way, Charlie? Southern Missouri, at a guess.”

  It is always worth while asking Charles Forniss if he happens to know somebody almost anywhere because it so often happens that he does. This time, however, he merely looked thoughtful.

  “Can’t say I—” he began and stopped. “Happens maybe I do,” he said. “Unless he’s gone somewhere else. Used to be a man on one of the St. Louis papers. Correspondent in Korea when I was over there. Only St. Louis isn’t really Southern Missouri, M. L. Eastern edge, more or less in the middle.”

  “Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Settle for what we have. You might see if you can get this man on the telephone. See if he knows whether our Mr. Nagle has come out of the background since Mrs. Martin’s friend found him there. And whether, of course, he has some special reason for wanting to stay there. For not wanting to be recognized and identified somewhere else.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Here. By Mrs. Powers. Worth trying, could be.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “There’s a booth in the lobby, Charlie.”

  IX

  The plant of the North Wellwood Sentinel was a low
brick building at the end of one of North Wellwood’s few side streets. The street was Clinton Street and the houses on it were smaller and closer together than on the other streets Roy Strothers drove the UBN car through in search of the Sentinel. On Clinton Street the houses were not so freshly painted as on Main Street. There were small children chasing each other along narrow sidewalks on either side of the narrow street, and into the street. The children were, for the most part, Negro. Strothers crept the car along the street. The car had UNITED BROADCASTING NETWORK lettered large on either side.

  THE NORTH WELLWOOD SENTINEL, Clayton Foster, Publisher was lettered on the door of the low brick building. So were the words, JOB PRINTING. A pleasant-faced youngish woman behind a counter wanted to know what she could do for Ann Martin and Roy Strothers. Told, she said that Clay was up to his ears. But …

  Clayton Foster’s office was small. He and a desk and a typewriter were alone in it, and the typewriter—on which he used two fingers of each hand—was making a clatter. “With you in a minute,” Foster said, and kept on clattering. There were two wooden chairs, their backs to a wall, and they sat on the chairs and looked at the editor and publisher of the North Wellwood Sentinel who looked intently at the keyboard of his typewriter.

  He was a very thin man, in a white shirt, collar unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up. He had a long face and no hair to speak of, and it seemed to Ann that he and the typewriter vibrated together.

  He reached the bottom of a page and yanked paper out of the typewriter and whirled to his desk and began to read copy on what he had written. He drew a heavy line through part of a sentence. He wrote a word above one line and gave it a caret below. He got up and said, “With you in a minute,” and went out of the office. He was back in less than a minute. He said, “Now,” and waited.

  “UBN,” Strothers said. “My name’s Strothers. This is Ann Martin—Mrs. Eric Martin.”

  “Item about Mrs. Martin,” Foster said. “And her husband. Taken the Barnes place. Oh. You’re Ann Langley.” He looked intently at both of them.