With Option to Die Page 18

  “Do I, dear? Perhaps I do. Not only because we don’t want to be pushed around. Because, Eric, I think we’ll like it in the village. If the tempest has blown out in the teacup.”

  The man they were holding at the Brewster substation was a dark and narrow man—long-faced and with a nose rather like a scimitar splitting it. He had deep-set black eyes and black hair and he wanted a lawyer. It was outrageous that he was being held and of course he had a permit for the .32-calibre Smith & Wesson in the pocket of his raincoat. Didn’t happen to have it with him. His name wasn’t Pederson. His name certainly wasn’t Aaron Nagle. His name was Johannes Schmidt and he was a piano player. He’d never been in North Wellwood in his life. He’d been in Brewster at a friend’s house for dinner. He was a patriotic American citizen.

  The last statement did not, to Lieutenant Forniss, seem particularly relevant. The .32 Smith & Wesson, with no permit forthcoming, did. Violation of the state law against the carrying of concealed weapons. Which would do for a start.

  “Traffic violation too,” the trooper sergeant told Forniss.

  The narrow man had driven up to the Brewster railroad station in an MG. He had run it into an area reserved for taxicabs and jumped out of it and started for the last train to New York, which was at the station, its Diesels breathing heavily. He had been at the steps of the second of the train’s two cars when a uniformed trooper said, “Hold it a minute, mister. Want to talk to you.”

  The narrow man had turned abruptly and tried to run back to the MG. He had got only a couple of steps.

  “Didn’t hear me?” the trooper said, and held him. “Said I wanted to talk to you. Guess we’ll make it back at the substation.”

  He slapped the narrow man’s pockets and said, “Well, well,” and took the revolver out of the right-hand raincoat pocket and put it in a pocket of his own. He had driven the narrow man back to the substation, which was not far. “Could be the one we’re looking for,” the trooper told the sergeant. It was then the narrow man began talking about his right to a lawyer.

  Forniss used the telephone.

  “Oughtn’t to let you,” the hospital physician said. “Lost a bit of blood—hell, quite a lot of blood. Under mild sedation. Fighting it, though. Some of them do.”

  “Tell him to keep on fighting it,” Forniss said. “Won’t be ten minutes. Won’t—shouldn’t—take more than a few seconds. O.K.?”

  Reluctantly, the resident physician supposed so.

  Roy Strothers was out of the recovery room and in a private room at the hospital. He was propped up in the bed. Both arms were heavily bandaged and his head was bandaged. But his eyes were uncovered and open when Forniss propelled the thin man into the room, with the resident and a nurse behind them.

  “Know this man?” Forniss said. “One word will do.”

  Strothers’s voice was low and had a crack in it. But it was steady and he did not hesitate.

  “Yes,” Strothers said. “Hello, Nagle, you rat.” He did not move his head, but he moved his eyes toward Forniss. “He the one who plays with hand grenades?”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Could be, Mr. Strothers. You can go to sleep now.”

  Forniss took the narrow man, who had said nothing in the hospital room, back to the substation.

  “You can add fugitive from justice to the charges,” Forniss told the sergeant. “And suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “I want a lawyer,” the narrow man said. “It’s my constitutional right to have a lawyer. We’ve got that much left of it. In spite of what the Commies in Washington. I—”

  “From the Barracks you can call a lawyer,” Forniss told him. “You’ll have plenty of time, Mr. Nagle.”

  Walter Brinkley thought the threat of a TV invasion of North Wellwood had forced the board’s hand. Sam Bennington hadn’t said as much to Clayton Foster, but Foster thought he had said almost that much.

  “A washing of dirty linen in public,” Brinkley said. “It might have come to something like that, Merton. A way to stop that would be to wash the linen in private first. For the good name of the community. I’ve no idea how these things work, but I’d think granting the permit would take the wind out of the network’s sails. In my dotage I no longer care too much about a mixing of metaphors.”

  They were in the living room of Brinkley’s house on Hayride Lane. Heimrich used a finger to circle ice in an old-fashioned glass which had a very little bourbon in it. Walter Brinkley, after urging a nightcap on his friend, had himself elected milk, with a little rum in it.

  “Foster thinks that was what decided them?” Heimrich asked him.

  Foster did; had told Brinkley he did. As an effort to protect the community’s good name. “What’s left of it,” Brinkley said and shook his head and sipped milk with a little rum in it. “Already, I’m afraid, we sound like a violent people. Intolerant, uncontrolled.” He sighed. “Archaic in attitude,” he said. “Will Mrs. Martin be all right? And this man Strothers?”

  Mrs. Martin certainly, Heimrich told him. Strothers, from last reports—Heimrich had checked before he left the substation—probably would be all right. A bit scarred up, but all right.

  “What the Martins must think of our town,” Brinkley said. “What they must think, Merton.”

  He shook his head again, and sighed again.

  “Probably they don’t think much of it,” Heimrich said. “The community hasn’t spread the welcome mat, exactly. Tell me about your car, Walter.”

  The MG had been taken out of the garage just as the storm was passing. Brinkley had heard nothing. “But there was still a lot of thunder.” When the rain slackened, he had gone out to close the garage door. “After the horse was stolen,” Brinkley said. “My night for bromides.”

  Brinkley had gone back into the house to report the theft of his car but had gone in to hear the telephone ringing. It had been Foster to tell him of the sudden decision of the zoning board. And while Foster was on the telephone, just as he was finishing his account and his speculations, another telephone in the Sentinel office had rung and he had said, “Wait a minute, Walter” and gone to answer it. He had come back and said, “More hell’s broken loose. Somebody’s bombed the Martins.”

  “So,” Walter Brinkley told Heimrich, “I decided the police had enough to do, for the moment, without my bothering them. It’s really quite an old car. Lately it’s taken to stalling at the most inopportune moments.”

  Did he happen to remember the license number?

  “Of course not, Merton. Does anyone, really? But it must be around some place. I’m quite sure it must be. Unless, of course, I left it in the glove compartment. I’ll—”

  He put his glass down on the table with a blink and bounced out of his chair and into the hall and up the stairs. He bounced down after several minutes and waved a billfold as if it were a flag.

  “Right where I thought it was,” Walter Brinkley said in triumph but also, Heimrich thought, somewhat in surprise.

  The registration certificate was in the billfold and this, also, seemed to surprise Walter Brinkley.

  Heimrich called the local substation. He was on for several minutes before he came back to tell Brinkley his car was in Brewster and would be brought back as soon as someone was free to bring it back.

  “A getaway car,” Brinkley said. “Think of that.”

  There was pleasure in Walter Brinkley’s voice. Once, some years before, he had been involved—personally involved—in one of his friend’s cases. It had been unpleasant, of course. It had been shocking. But it had been exciting. Having his car stolen as a getaway car wasn’t anything like that. Still, it was something …

  I can, Heimrich thought, driving back in the moonlight toward North Wellwood center, go on to the Barracks and sit in on the questioning of Aaron Nagle, wanted in Missouri for murder. Which would come first, of course. Assault with a deadly weapon, violation of the Sullivan law, grand larceny—all these are serious enough matters but all of them, even lumped
together, come after murder. And, naturally, if Missouri slipped up on it, they could always haul Mr. Nagle back to New York.

  But if I go to the Barracks and sit in, Heimrich thought, I’ll be superseding Charlie—once more superseding Charlie. I assign him to a case and the case is his. Ought to be his. Damn it all, is his. And it’s too late at night now to do what, primarily, I came here to do. Anyway, that too is Charlie’s. I’ll go home now and in the morning I’ll go to my desk at the Barracks, and tomorrow—all of tomorrow—I’ll sit at it. And delegate.

  For no special reason, except that the house Faith Powers had lived in was part of what he had horned in on, was now horning out of, Heimrich slowed when he was abreast of the house. Then, opposite the driveway, he stopped the Buick and looked up the drive at the house, which was white in the moonlight. And in front of which, standing black in the moonlight, there was a car.

  Moonlight plays tricks. It is mirrored on windows and the shadows of leaves move in it, so that its reflection flickers. There was no way of being sure, without driving up to see, whether somebody really was using a flashlight to prowl Faith Powers’s house. Using a pocket light after the electricity had come back into the wires? Of course, sometimes after a storm one house will remain dark after the others come alight. Sometimes one transformer burns out beyond recovery. Still …

  Heimrich backed the Buick until he could turn up the drive. When he was just in it, he switched off his lights. He could see the rest of the way by moonlight.

  He did not drive the rest of the way. Halfway up the drive he stopped the car and got out and walked toward the big house, which looked so much bigger in the moonlight. He left the Buick to block the drive.

  The car in front of the house was big, too, in the moonlight. It was a Lincoln Continental, big in any light. Heimrich reached into his pocket for a flashlight, felt its hard roundness and decided there was, for the moment, enough light without it. He leaned down and read the numbers on the license plate of the Continental and tucked the numbers into his memory. He stayed for a moment crouched in the car’s black shadow and looked at the house.

  He saw nothing at first. The moonlit windows stared at him blankly. But then, behind one of them—a window which would, at a guess, be on the left of a central entrance hall—there was, briefly, the moving beam of a flashlight. A fairly powerful light. It was not being pointed at the window, but away from it.

  Heimrich went from the car’s shadow into a strip of moonlight between car and house. On the porch of the house he was again in darkness. The porch flooring creaked when he stepped on it, which was unfortunate. He stood motionless for some seconds and listened and heard nothing. Then he tried the door.

  It was not locked, and he opened it slowly. A faint click of the latch could not be avoided. But the door did not creak as he pushed it open.

  Inside, he felt for a light switch where, on the right of the door, it would most likely be. His fingers found it. The switch lever was down. Unless it was a three-way switch, that meant that whoever was prowling the house had not wanted more light than a flashlight would supply. Had not probably wanted light which would be seen from the road.

  If the prowler had been listening, and prowlers ought to listen, he had by now heard Heimrich on the porch. Or heard the Buick in the driveway before Heimrich cut the engine. Or seen me, Heimrich thought, as I walked up in the moonlight. So I’m not going to surprise him. I may as well have lights on things.

  He flicked the light switch up. And nothing happened.

  The transformer which served the house, this single house, had burned out, probably. Or a surge of electricity through wires had burned a house fuse or tripped a main circuit breaker.

  Heimrich took his flashlight out of his pocket. He did not immediately turn it on. He stood and listened.

  The room on the left of the central hall had windows on the moon’s side. The door to it was open and moonlight lay on the floor inside. Heimrich waited. There was no sound from the room.

  Then a black shadow moved on the lighted floor and, as it moved, Heimrich could hear the footfalls of the man who made it. The prowler had decided to make a break for it.

  The beam leaped from Heimrich’s flashlight and he ran across the hall. He ran into the room and heard a door close hard and was in an empty room. The closed door was at the end of the room.

  Heimrich swung the beam from his flashlight around the room. The walls were lined with books. Near one of the windows there was a desk and the drawers of the desk were open. There was a small filing cabinet beside the desk and its single drawer gaped open.

  Where Ray Crowley had found checkbook and passbook and bank statements? Probably. Where a prowler had been looking for them? That, too, was probable. For such financial records and for something else?

  Heimrich’s mind worked and his legs worked. He was across the room, yanking open the door. He sent the light’s beam along a short corridor which led toward the rear of the house. The corridor was empty. It ended at a closed door.

  Heimrich ran the length of it, not trying to run silently. There was no longer any sense in that. At the door he stopped abruptly and then turned back. He had passed a closed door on his right. He went back to the door and opened it, turning the knob with his left hand, which also held the flashlight. He might need his right hand.

  The door opened to a bathroom. The bathroom was empty.

  He had wasted seconds. But a prowler could have dodged into the bathroom and, when pursuit had passed, dodged out of it again.

  The door at the end of the corridor opened into a pantry, with a kitchen beyond it. There was a swinging door in the right wall of the pantry. It was not swinging.

  On the far side of the kitchen there was a closed door. Already out that way? If that way was a way to the open? Or through the swinging door into, at a guess, a dining room? Heimrich stood in the middle of the kitchen, in moonlight up to his knees, and listened.

  He heard wind against the house. He heard the sounds a house makes by itself, alone in the night and the temperature changing. From above him there was a cracking sound. But it was a single sound, sharper and quicker than a man’s feet would make. And it seemed unlikely that the prowler would have fled upstairs.

  The prowler, Heimrich thought, probably knows this house well—knows how corridors led into rooms and rooms into other rooms. From the size of it, this could be a labyrinth of a house; could be a house to get lost in. Was the prowler holed up somewhere, waiting for pursuit to blunder? As, Heimrich thought gloomily, it was certainly blundering now. It was pursuit at a standstill. And, come to think of it, very visible in the moonlight from a kitchen window. Heimrich moved out of the moonlight. There was no special reason to think the prowler had a gun with him. There was, on the other hand, no special reason to think he hadn’t.

  Heimrich, making as little noise as he could manage, went to the kitchen door and looked out at an empty yard with moonlight on it. The door was locked. More than that. The door was bolted on the inside. Which answered one question, for what it was worth.

  He went back to the pantry and pushed open the swinging door and went into a dining room. There was a round table in the center of it, and four chairs arranged around the table and there were other chairs set against the walls. There was a closed door at the far end of the room and Heimrich walked toward it.

  And then, when he was some distance from it, he heard the sound of heavily running feet and, in an instant, the slamming of a door. The sounds came from the front of the house.

  Heimrich yanked at the dining-room door and it was locked. From the other side. It takes only an instant to turn a key in a lock. A locked door slows pursuit.

  Heimrich went back through the dining room, the beam of his flashlight bouncing on the floor. He went into the pantry and along the corridor and into the book-lined room. The door from it to the central hall was closed. I left it open, Heimrich thought, and tried it. The prowler hadn’t missed that, either.

 
Back through the kitchen and out the kitchen door and around the house and—

  The starter of a car whined harshly. Heimrich jumped to a front window of the library, and looked out at the drive. As he pulled the window up the lights of the big Continental went on. The big car jerked backward and then jumped forward down the driveway the Buick blocked.

  The big car slowed when its lights picked up the blocking car. The driveway was a little depressed there. The Continental tilted as it went off onto the grass around the Buick but it did not tilt too much.

  Heimrich went out through the window, which seemed quicker. Not that there was any great hurry now. He took time to run the flashlight beam up and down the furrows the Continental had made in wet sod. Good tread prints. The technical boys would be pleased with them.

  Heimrich backed the Buick toward the road. He had to be careful in swinging, because a truck of the New York Electric and Gas Corporation was parked on the other side of the road. A man was up a pole, doing something to the transformer. Electricity would soon be available to an empty house.

  Heimrich drove toward North Wellwood center on Hayride Lane. But when he reached its intersection with South Lane he turned right. After a few hundred yards he turned left and was on Long Hill Road. He didn’t hurry. He did look for a big car which might be parked by the roadside, its lights off.

  As it had been, perhaps, the night before? Farther along the road, then, and on the other side of it? Heimrich rather doubted it had been. Big cars show up in moonlight.

  Names on mailboxes show up in the lights of a car. Heimrich turned the Buick up a driveway. Again, he did not drive on to a house, and again he cut his lights when he was in the drive. Again he left the Buick to block the drive. Again he walked in the moonlight, which was unavoidable. He kept to the side of the drive and was part of the time in the black shadows of trees. But there were patches of moonlight he had to walk through.