Murder Roundabout Page 7

  “Few weeks ago,” Drake said. “Before Labor Day sometime. Hell of a hot day. Took a break and looked out the window. Maybe around three o’clock in the afternoon. I can see the parking lot here from my window.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and knew he was listening to a man who had come to bear a tale.

  “Jim and Nettie came out,” Drake said. “Walked over to her car. Looked to me as if she was weaving a little. Anyhow, he put his arm around her shoulders. To steady her, I thought. Got into that big Continental of hers and took off. He was driving. Turned up the avenue and you’d have thought there was only one person in the car. Felt like a peeping Tom.”

  And were, Heimrich thought. And waited.

  “At The Corners,” Drake said, “he turned left on Elm. She lives—lived over that way, M. L. We all do.”

  “I know where she lived,” Heimrich said. “You thought he was driving her home? And that she was, say, a little tight?”

  “Don’t know where they went,” Drake said. “Only the way they turned.”

  And had, Heimrich thought, told the tale he had come across the street bearing. One does not have to like talebearers. But to a policeman they may come in handy.

  This time Heimrich crossed Van Brunt Avenue in midblock. A policeman cannot always set a good example. Colonel was alone in the showroom of “susan faye, fabrics.” He was lying stretched out on the floor and occupying most of it. He began to pant when Heimrich went into the shop. “No,” Heimrich said, “I won’t turn the air conditioning on. Ask the lady.” Colonel sighed deeply, having spent a morning asking the lady, and put head on paws. Then he moved enough to put one paw over his eyes.

  Susan came from the rear room. There was now a fresh streak of green on her smock. She kissed her husband and said, “Drink a nice lunch, dear?” and moved back and smiled up at him. Then she said, “Mrs. Drake is sending Plimpton down for some samples. She wants to do the breakfast room over.” She paused. “In cheerful colors,” she said. “Yellows and pale greens. Brighten the room up, she says.”

  Heimrich raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “The opposite of mourning. In celebration. Oh, that’s possible, Merton. All the same, I can’t help rather liking the duchess.” She paused and her eyes went a little out of focus, as if she looked into the past. She said, “Remember when Mrs. Van Brunt was the duchess, dear? Before you put her in jail.”

  He remembered. He had cause to remember. He had met Susan Faye because Mrs. Van Brunt, the abdicated duchess, had killed a man named Phipps.

  “I rather liked her, too,” Susan said.

  Speaking of liking, did she like Leslie Brennan?

  “Yes. She’s—oh, younger than she ought to be for her age. Not that she’s got much age, but you know what I mean. And vulnerable—look, my forgetful one, I told you all this not more than an hour ago.”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “Not that forgetful. You said she was very much in love with her husband. Did she talk about him? Tell you—”

  He stopped because she was shaking her head in the way she sometimes did when she thought him obtuse, slow on the uptake. Or he thought she thought that.

  “I said I liked her,” Susan told him and looked up at him and then smiled up at him. (Tolerant of me, Heimrich thought.) “I don’t like women who talk about their husbands. And you’d be surprised at the way some of them—” She did not finish, but she looked at him carefully. “No,” she said, “I guess you wouldn’t, Merton. You know too much, I guess.”

  Which was consoling.

  “Got to get along with it,” he said. “Colonel wants the air conditioning on.”

  “He’s told me,” Susan said. “Also that he’s running a high fever.”

  Heimrich pulled his car into traffic and turned right, when, beyond The Corners, he reached Brickhouse Road. The pleasant small house the Brennans rented from the Drake estate was half a mile or so on the narrow, winding blacktop. Trees shaded it and as a result some of the lawn was almost green. More of it was brown.

  It was not that Heimrich did not trust Ray Crowley. But the young can be susceptible to the young.

  The door of the house was closed, although it was warm enough for anyone to want what ventilation he could get. Nobody answered the doorbell at first. Then a dog answered it, loudly. The dog reared to hind legs so as to look out through the glass panel in the door. The dog barked more loudly and began to scratch at the glass.

  “All right, Lady,” Heimrich said, and walked around the house. There was nobody behind the house, gardening or at other occupation. The two-car garage was empty.

  Heimrich walked back to his car and thought he should have worn a summer suit—not like Ralph Weaver’s. Autumn, he thought, should recognize itself as autumn. He drove to the Hawthorne Barracks, headquarters of Troop K, New York State Police, and knew that his office would be hot. It became hot with little provocation.

  His office was hot and stayed so with both windows open. His “In” basket was full. It was always full.

  VI

  Forniss made it to the West Forty-sixth Street branch of the Metal Exchange National Bank & Trust Company before a guard locked its heavy glass doors. Forniss sat beside a desk behind a railing and waited the return from somewhere of Arthur Cooper, Assistant Manager. He was not especially hopeful. He watched Arthur Cooper walk from somewhere and release the catch on a gate in the railing. Cooper, Forniss thought, looked exactly like a banker. But he had looked rather like a banker in the uniform of a lieutenant, USMC. He had not acted like one in Korea.

  He saw Forniss waiting and would be damned and came on with his hand out. He would be damned if it wasn’t Captain Charlie. They shook hands and sat down at Cooper’s desk, Charles Forniss, ex-captain USMC, at the end of it. The world had been treating them both all right. Neither of them looked a day older, which neither thought true, particularly of the other. No, Forniss had not come to open an account. A man doesn’t run to the Metal Exchange’s minimum on a cop’s pay. Forniss had come …

  Cooper shook his head, all banker. He said, “Listen, Charlie. You know I can’t. Throw me out on my ear if I did.”

  He shook his head again.

  “Even for my company commander,” he said. “You ought to know that, Charlie. Have a cigar?”

  Charlie Forniss would not. He lighted a cigarette.

  “Bad for you,” Cooper told him, and lighted a cigar. A uniformed guard stopped opposite them, on the other side of the railing, and looked at his watch. “Go ahead, Paul,” Cooper said. “Lock them up.” The guard went toward the front doors to lock them up.

  “Absolute rule,” Cooper said. “No information about depositors’ accounts without a court order.”

  “Credit references?”

  “Can say, yes, So-and-So’s got an account. Say, sometimes, how many figures it runs to. Matter of ethics, much as anything. Man’s got to be able to trust his banker.”

  “All right,” Forniss said. “This, then. Is the account blocked?”

  Cooper considered this. Then he said that, unless somebody had been sound asleep, the account was blocked. But—wait a minute. He left the lesser executives’ enclosure and walked the considerable length of the bank’s public area and knocked on a door and opened it. After a time he came out again. Walking back he looked more than ever like a banker. He sat down and picked up his cigar and found it had gone out, and put it back in the tray.

  “Yes,” he said then. “The flag’s up. But only—” He paused. He used a lighter to revive his cigar.

  “About five minutes ago,” he said. “We don’t have much time to listen to the radio around here. Or, come to that, read newspapers. Way it is …”

  The way it was was that clerks scanned death notices, checked off the names of deceased depositors. Then the flags went up. They had got to the Weaver account after banking hours.

  Actually, it had been quicker than usual this time. There had been no need to read the small type of death
notices. Both the World-Telegram and Sun and the Journal-American had given it eight-column streamers. “Movie Star Found Slain,” the WorldTelegram told the world. The Journal-American’s streamer was shorter. It was also fatter. It read: “Annette LeBaron Murdered.”

  Several employees of Metal Exchange had brought newspapers back with them from lunch. But the reading of newspapers at desks during office hours was not encouraged. “Makes the place look sloppy.” It was after customers had trickled away that somebody looked at a headline and connected murder with the joint account of Ralph Weaver or Annette Weaver. Then the flag jerked up.

  “He’d have had time enough,” Forniss said. “Could have written—” he consulted the slip of paper from his pocket—“a check for fifty thousand seven hundred and forty-six dollars and nineteen cents and said he’d like it in cash.”

  “Well …” Cooper said, “a teller in his right mind would have wondered a little. Probably asked him to wait. Maybe checked with me. Checked the account records, of course. Depositors can’t add, most of them.” The cigar was going well. It was a good cigar. The kind a banker ought to smoke.

  “He’d have been a damn fool to do that,” Cooper said. “Raised an issue. If I’d been in his place—” He paused again and looked up toward the bank’s ceiling through blue and fragrant smoke. “In his place,” Arthur Cooper said, “I’d have withdrawn about half of it, if I hadn’t wanted twenty-five grand tied up. I’d have got it in a certified check, wouldn’t you, captain? Or maybe just have opened a new, one-person account right here.” He again exhaled the smoke of an excellent cigar. “No,” he said, “I’d have done it the first way, because the other would look like I was in a hell of a hurry about something, wouldn’t it? Got a certified check for, say, twenty-five thousand. Or maybe thirty. Opened an account in another bank. Yes, I think I’d have done it that way, Captain Charlie.”

  He held the flame of his lighter toward Charles Forniss’s second cigarette and Forniss drew on the cigarette.

  “Sorry as hell I can’t help you out,” Cooper said. “Got to follow the rules, Charlie. Get a court order, now—”

  “Sure,” Forniss said. “Can’t ask you to break the rules, Art.”

  He stood up.

  “Tell you what,” Arthur Cooper said, “whyn’t we get together for a drink sometime soon?”

  “Sure,” Sergeant Forniss said. “We’ll do that, Art.”

  The guard opened the heavy glass doors for him and said, “Good afternoon, sir” and Forniss found the nearest telephone, which was in a street booth. M. L. might be at the barracks. He might, of course, be almost anywhere.

  Heimrich was at the barracks. He said, “Got something, Charlie?”

  “Weaver got in under the wire,” Forniss told him. “Took out maybe half of it. Certified check. The flag’s up now, but he beat it. Probably about thirty thousand. My friend was cagey. Has to be. But I’d say about that.”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “it’s his own money. Of course the State mightn’t think so. Picky about inheritance taxes, the State is.”

  “For details,” Forniss said, “we’ll have to get a court order.”

  They had enough to go on with, Heimrich told him. For now, naturally. Meanwhile …

  “This man you’re buying drinks for,” Heimrich said. “When, Charlie?”

  “Five-thirty, if he can make it by then.”

  “Might go around to this law firm Drake and Brennan are connected with,” Heimrich said. “Ask Stephen Drake about this car he heard last night. What made him think it was a Porsche. If he had any special Porsche—hell, Charlie, you know what to ask him.”

  “Brennan?”

  “Not yet,” Heimrich said. “I’ll fill you in on that later. But not yet. Might find out if he’s in the office. If you can without pressing it.”

  “Don’t want to scare him off?”

  “Now, Charlie. A long way from that, I think. But—no harm in knowing where he is, is there?”

  Forniss could walk to the law offices of Sharpless, Drake, Lipsky & Brennan. It was easier than getting his car out of the Hippodrome Garage, where it probably was buried. It would have been more comfortable to go by taxi. New York steams if given half a chance, and this late September afternoon was giving it one. On the other hand, the New York State Police expects its members to be sturdy men, capable of walking any reasonable, or unreasonable, distance. Drinks for Clem Brothers would be all the force could swallow on an expense account, if it could swallow them.

  Mr. Drake was in conference. Perhaps someone else might…? Or, if Sergeant Forniss—it was Forniss?—would care to make an appointment for some other …?

  Forniss sat on a leather-covered sofa in the waiting room and looked at framed photographs of famous jurists, most of them probably extinct. He waited almost half an hour, looking now and then at his watch.

  “Mr. Drake will see you now, sergeant. He’s sorry to have kept …”

  Stephen Drake had a larger corner office and a carpet on the floor. He had a large desk and he stood up behind it when Forniss was admitted by the receptionist. Stephen Drake was tall and thin and slightly stooped. He took heavy-rimmed glasses off and put them on the desk. His eyes were blue and looked as if too much light would bother them. He had blond hair which lay submissively on a long head. He said, “Good afternoon, sergeant. About the death of my former wife, I assume?”

  “Yes,” Forniss said, and sat in the leather-covered chair Drake indicated. “Trying to fix the time of it, Mr. Drake. Thought you might be able to help us.”

  Drake himself sat down. He shook his head, in doubt. He said, “Nothing my mother didn’t tell the captain, I’m afraid. When he saw her earlier.”

  The Mrs. Drake apparently had been on the telephone, Forniss thought. Which, he thought, was mildly interesting.

  “We have to go over the same ground a good many times,” Forniss said, and Drake said, “Oh, I realize that, sergeant. I entirely realize that. But I doubt if there is anything I can add. None of us heard a shot.” He paused and looked at Forniss. “Consciously,” he added. “One hears shots from time to time in the country.” He paused again. “Woodchucks are rather prevalent this year in Van Brunt. Destructive animals, woodchucks. Quite legal to shoot them, you know.”

  “Yes,” Forniss said. “I understand that. All of you did hear a car, Mrs. Drake told the captain. About when was that, Mr. Drake?”

  “We have dinner at eight,” Drake said. “It was perhaps fifteen minutes before that.”

  “On the driveway, you thought? Perhaps somebody who had come the wrong way and was turning back?”

  “We thought that, at the time.”

  “Now?”

  “I assume,” Drake said, “that the police think it may have had other significance. Since you are checking it. So thoroughly. Have, evidently, come into town to check it.”

  “May have had,” Forniss said. “You …” He paused as if he were considering. “You thought it probably was a sports car, Mr. Drake?” He paused again. “A Porsche, your mother told the captain you guessed it to be?”

  “Idly, sergeant,” Drake said. “A random guess.”

  “Why a Porsche, Mr. Drake? Something special about the sound of them?”

  “No,” Drake said. “Just the sports-car sound. Sharper motor sounds than big cars. Particularly if they need tune-ups.”

  “You did think it was a Porsche?”

  “Several of them around Van Brunt,” Drake said. “It just came into my head, sergeant. Not evidence at all.”

  “Only,” Forniss said, “people who live in the town wouldn’t come up your drive by mistake, would they?”

  “Dark by then,” Drake said. “Raining a bit. Easy enough to make the wrong turning. While back I got lost couple of miles from home. In the fog, I’ll grant you. And not for long, of course. But it can happen.”

  “Sure,” Forniss said. “Didn’t have any special Porsche in mind, Mr. Drake?”

  Drake had a long
face. Surprise seemed to creep down it, starting with the eyes.

  “Why do you ask that?” Drake said. “The answer is No, but why did you ask that?”

  “Because,” Forniss said, “you said ‘particularly if they need a tune-up’. You know one that does, Mr. Drake?”

  “Well …”

  “Mr. Brennan’s?”

  “Fact is,” Drake said, “Jim’s does. Understand he left it at the garage today.”

  “You thought the car you heard might have been Mr. Brennan’s?”

  “Crossed my mind. Brennan’s a partner in the firm, you know. Thought something might have come up he wanted to talk to me about. Realized I was wrong when the car sounded as if it had turned back. Also, Jim would have called first. Found out if we were free.” He leaned back in his chair. “Probably why I said Porsche,” he said. “Association of ideas. Could have been any make, obviously. Didn’t even have to be a sports car. Any car with a leaky exhaust system. Not helping much, am I?”

  “As much as you can,” Forniss said. “I don’t doubt that, Mr. Drake. Just wondered why you happened to say the car probably was a Porsche, the captain did. Clear enough now.”

  “Not very, I’m afraid. But all I can tell you, sergeant.”

  “Appreciate that,” Forniss said.

  “So…?”

  “Oh,” Forniss said, throwing it away, “the usual thing, of course. Know anybody might have had reason—thought he had reason—to kill your former wife, Mr. Drake?”

  “Thought you’d come to that,” Drake said. “Answer’s No, of course.” He looked at the ceiling. “Happen to know my former wife, sergeant?”

  Forniss shook his head.

  “That’s right,” Drake said. “Don’t live in Van Brunt, do you, sergeant?”

  Forniss had to admit he did not live in Van Brunt.

  “Fact is,” Drake told him, “I haven’t seen much of her for years, in spite of their living so close to mother’s house. No reason she shouldn’t, of course. Her house. Part of the—er—arrangement when we were divorced.” He looked at Forniss more directly. “A bit awkward, in some ways,” he said. “But there you are.”