Heimrich could only crouch behind the free-standing fireplace and look over it—keep his eyes open, keep his eyes strained, wait out the cautious visitor. He could keep ears open, too; ears strained, too. But there was little likelihood he would hear anything as long as the visitor stayed outside. The glass walls were thick and tight; the air-conditioning unit hummed gently through the house.
The visitor might do several things. If for some reason—perhaps the inadequately concealed car—he had grown suspicious, the visitor might merely go away. And with the door closed, Heimrich could not hope to hear the putt-putt of eventual departure. The visitor— the quarry, it was to be hoped; warily approaching, it was to be hoped, the trap—might decide that all was well and cross the turnaround, just beyond which it could be assumed he now lurked, and walk into Heimrich’s waiting hands. He might, alternatively, edge around the house, staying out of sight—which would not be too difficult—and try the door into the studio. And walk into Forniss’s waiting hands.
There did not seem to be anything especially wrong with it. Not yet, at any rate. If suspicion had been aroused, they had wasted time with their trap, and would have to think of something else. But it was most likely that necessity would, in the end, outweigh caution. Whoever had come up the driveway had felt compelled to come, to chance it. The same compulsion, which must be extreme, might be expected to continue to dominate. I hope, Heimrich thought to himself, and crouched and waited, and watched for movement in the night. He waited for some minutes. He worried while he waited, worried more as he waited longer. He could not determine why, if there did not seem to be anything obviously wrong with it, there was still something obscurely wrong with it. Not the delay. The delay was reasonable. Wary animals sniff around what may prove to be a trap. A wary animal this one almost certainly was; wary and, it could hardly be denied, ingenious. Then—what? That the light had seemed closer to the ground than was to be—
lt was brief and intangible; it seemed, for an instant, to be entirely in Heimrich’s mind and there indecipherable. The senses had, for the flicker of an instant, responded to something. Sound? Light? Light. That was it. Somewhere, a flash of light.
The mind caught up with the senses. Light, briefly around him. No—behind him. Light without center, only a momentary pulsation in the room. Or—beyond the room?
Heimrich, not standing, turned. In the dim light, one of the glass panels between side terrace and pool was moving. He watched through intervening glass, across dark water. The panel was moving almost invisibly; it was only that, at the end most distant from him, a slit appeared in the glass wall—a slit of just perceptibly clearer night.
He waited. A flashlight had been used, briefly, to find the control button—the button rendered inconspicuous by its housing. Somebody had known where to look, and had needed to look only briefly. Now, still invisible, still outside, somebody waited to see whether the soundless opening of the glass panel was noticed, led to anything.
Heimrich tried to be as soundless as glass moving in almost frictionless channels. He did not quite manage it as he edged around the fireplace, got it between himself and the inner glass panels which separated living room from pool. But, since those panels were still closed, since the visitor—the wary intruder to the trap—was still outside, he thought he had been quiet enough. And if whoever was coming in used the flashlight to search the living room, Heimrich might be missed. Which was desirable. Let the quarry commit himself. And, it was even possible that there might be bait in a baitless trap. It would be pleasant if their visitor, looking for something which existed only in a policeman’s strategy, found something more actual, and to a policeman useful.
Minutes passed, and the light was not used again. A very cautious quarry, a very worried small animal. Small? Why had he thought “Small?” The light carried low. That, of course, was it. But this animal would not be small; not if Heimrich’s hunch had any validity. Not if—
The visitor was, on that instant, a black shadow in the narrow oblong of clearer night. Black—entirely black. And—small. Still indistinguishable; a figure all in black, with a blurred face which seemed to float above shadow. Tight black sweater, close black slacks, black sneakers—that would be the costume. Not, certainly, a costume of innocence.
The shadow moved, the deeper blackness moved. Moved beside the pool at the far end; moved quickly, with assurance, needing no light. Heimrich watched. He swore, without sound. A woman, obviously. A young woman, obviously. The movement was female movement; the sure-footed grace was youth’s grace. Undoubtedly the rubber-soled sneakers made a soft padding sound on the tile of the ledge which surrounded the pool. Heimrich could not hear the sound, with the inner panels closed.
She knew where she was going, and now Heimrich also knew. She was making for the door which led to shower and dressing room between the pool and the studio. So—heading for the studio. Where Forniss waited. Waited, Heimrich was afraid, too openly. He could not think of anything in the studio which would give even as much concealment as the fireplace behind which he himself crouched. Unless Forniss could manage to hide himself behind canvas. Or, conceivably, behind the easel. His legs would show, but—
The girl went through the door, still no more than a moving shadow, still unrecognizable. Not that there was much doubt. Reconsideration was called for. Heimrich could not argue that his hunch had included surreptitious entry by Miss Chris Waggoner, rather extremely costumed for the task. All very well here, now that she was here. But she had had to get here and must have been, on a scooter, on a warm evening, conspicuously got up for something.
The costume, certainly, was in character. Only—this was not. Never before that he could remember had Captain M. L. Heimrich found so much difficulty in making the character fit the crime. Well, he had guessed wrong, evaluated wrong.
There was no longer any sufficient reason to crouch uncomfortably behind the low pedestal of the fireplace. Heimrich started to stand up.
And as he stood, the room was flooded with light. He dropped again, but doubted whether he had been quick enough. Not if this new visitor, the headlights of whose car glared through glass into the room, had had his eyes open. And Heimrich was still on the wrong side of the fireplace. He was on the floor—full on the floor, now. Did one of the chairs partially screen him? He twisted to look. Very partially.
On the other hand, this new visitor had clearly approached with mind unwary. There was nothing surreptitious about this arrival. So, perhaps, there had been no concentration on what headlights showed.
Then, as abruptly as the room had come alive with light, it died in darkness. The headlights had been switched off. Heimrich moved around the fireplace to the far side, and looked over it, and was in time to see a large shadow get out of the car. A man, this one was. He, also, seemed to be wearing dark clothing. His face, too, was only a pale blur in milky light. He came toward the door openly enough, and reached for the glass knob. He did not seem surprised when it turned in his hand. He came into the room.
He came in and, without pause, without hesitation, rushed at Heimrich. He had some distance to come across the room; he came with reckless determination and almost absurd confidence. It was evident that he had not only seen Heimrich when the headlights picked him out, but memorized his position in the room. And planned to do something very definite about it.
The charging man’s hands were empty. That much Heimrich saw, as he came up to his feet, set himself. He would hardly, in any case, have had time to draw his gun from its shoulder holster.
The big man—and now he was close enough so that Heimrich could see his face, and see it with some surprise—did not say anything. He merely ran at Heimrich, with hands formed into fists. Heimrich thought, in the instant before they met, that the man did not recognize him, although he recognized the man.
“Hold—” Heimrich said, loudly, and had meant to add “it” but did not have a chance.
The man was there. The man swung. Explanation, if any was available, would have to wait.
Heimrich moved, and the blow—which might well have knocked him half across the room—grazed his face.
Heimrich’s answering left moved only inches, and did not graze anything. The charging man came to a halt, but swung again. Heimrich used his right, this time—used it with solid pounds behind it. And the man staggered.
“You damn—” Heimrich said, and blocked a roundhouse right. Strong and agile the man was, but not up to this sort of thing. Heimrich had always supposed that boxing was something—like dancing and, presumably, riding horses—that all actors had to learn. Apparently not, Heimrich decided, and, with some reluctance, knocked George Latham sprawling on the tile floor. He slid on the floor. He slid into a table and knocked it over.
Physical combat is a hazard of the policeman’s trade. Heimrich, like most policemen, was prepared for it. It was a little hard on the knuckles.
“Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, as Latham began to scramble to his feet, set himself to charge again. “What on earth is all this—”
Latham put his hands down. (Then he raised one of them to rub his jaw.) He said, “You?” loudly, in a tone of complete astonishment. “What are you doing here?”
“Working,” Heimrich said. “And what are—”
He did not finish. Feet pounded in the corridor, pounded down from the studio. Forniss to the rescue, Forniss to join in. The table had banged loudly on the tile floor. Latham had not fallen silendy. But Forniss wouldn’t leave the—
Forniss came into the room with his gun ready. He stopped abruptly.
“You won’t need it, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Mr. Latham isn’t—where’s the girl, Charlie?”
And Charles Forniss looked at him blankly. Forniss repeated, “Girl?”
“She is here,” Latham said, and yelled it. “Where is she? What’s happened to—”
“Get back,” Heimrich said, to Forniss. “She’s probably there by now, even if she—”
Forniss did not wait. He went. Latham clenched his fists again, confronted Heimrich again.
“If anything—” he shouted.
“Shut up,” Heimrich said. “Quit yelling. Go with Forniss.”
Heimrich himself ran to the glass paneling between pool and living room. He did not wait to see if Latham went as he was told. He wasted moments finding the handhold hollowed in the glass. Then he slid the panel open violendy and ran on slippery tile—it would be a fine ending to this confused affair if he fell into the pool—toward the door which opened on the dressing room. His shoes clattered on the tile. But there was no longer any use in silence.
Heimrich and Forniss confronted each other at opposite ends of a narrow room, with a shower stall in one corner, a dressing table along one wall. There was nothing else between them. There was no black-clad girl in the room. Latham appeared behind Forniss and demanded, in a shout, to be told where Chris was.
It took only moments to find out, not where she was, but how she had got away from where they were. She had not bothered, not taken time, to close the studio door behind her. The shadow of Chris Waggoner had rejoined other shadows of the night.
Heimrich had run halfway down the driveway toward the road, and Forniss had had time to scramble some distance down the path, before they heard the putt-putt of the scooter. They were too distant to consult, and did not need to. They plodded back and met on the turnaround, by the Buick station wagon in which George Latham had precipitously arrived. Latham was getting into it.
“Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, and took his arm. Latham got out of the Buick. He whirled as he backed out of it, wrenched his arm free. He faced Heimrich then, glared at him—a large and solid and very angry young man. His fists doubled.
“Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, mildly. “Do we have to go through that again?”
The glare faded from Latham’s face, faded slowly, left behind it an expression of anxiety. (What mobile faces these actors have, Heimrich thought.)
“Suppose,” Heimrich said, “you tell me what this is all about, Mr. Latham.”
Latham made a quick gesture, as if he would relegate that to some other time.
“You’re going to stand here?” he said. “Talk? Not try to find out what’s happening to Chris?”
“She’s going somewhere on the scooter,” Heimrich said. “Probably back to the Center, to the Inn. She’ll be all—”
“How the hell do you know she will?” Latham said.
The answer was obvious.
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
“Because,” Latham said, “can’t you see—she’s trying to find something. This—this thing you were hinting about. Whatever it was that somebody was after and got the design by mistake for. For God’s sake, man!”
“She told you that? Did she tell you what she expected to find?”
Latham made the gesture again.
“You’re wasting time,” Heimrich said. “She told you she was coming here? To—find something she’d missed before? Something she couldn’t let us find?”
“For God’s sake,” Latham said. “Not that she’d left. Something that would prove what she guessed.”
“Which was?”
Latham shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice was suddenly dull. “She wouldn’t tell me. Said it was only a guess.”
“But, that she was coming here? To look?”
Latham shook his head again. He said he hadn’t known about that. He said “the damn fool kid,” and there was anxiety in his voice; more than anxiety. (In his actor’s voice.)
“You’ll just stand here?” he said. “Do nothing? Until—until I go through the whole thing?”
“Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, and meant “yes” and was so understood.
Then—
There had been nothing tangible, George Latham told them. Chris Waggoner had seemed, to him, abstracted. “As if she had something in that mind of hers.” He had tried to find out what; been told that it had nothing to do with him; told that he would learn soon enough.
“This,” Heimrich said, “was after I had a telephone conversation? That a good many of you overheard?”
Latham looked at him through abruptly narrowed eyes. He said, slowly, that he’d be damned. He also said that he ought to have known, that they all ought to have known. Heimrich merely waited.
It had been after that, after dinner, that Latham had found the girl abstracted, as if she were “up to something.” Or, about to be. “I know that crazy little mind of hers,” Latham said, and, paradoxically, his tone was one of admiration. He had tried to find out what the thing, the plan, in her mind was. He had been told only that he would find out in time and—“that she was pretty sure of something.” That was what she had said. He had tried to get her to promise not to do anything, barge into anything, and had been told not to play the heavy. And then that she was tired, and that he bored her, and that she was going to bed.
Latham, annoyed—and himself tired and hot—had had a nightcap in the taproom and gone up to his own room, on the second floor. It was a room that looked out over the parking lot. He had stripped down to shorts, and sat near the window and smoked, and wished he were cooler, and that the crazy kid weren’t so much under his skin. Or so, now, he said.
He had not seen Chris cross the parking lot. He had not been looking. It was when he heard the scooter start up that he looked.
“And there she was,” he said. “In the silliest damn getup I ever saw—black sweater. On a night like this. Black slacks. Wonder is she wasn’t wearing a mask and—and carrying a magnifying glass. The crazy little—made up like something in a scare movie. The crazy—”
“You saw her in the parking lot light, I suppose.”
Latham merely nodded to the obvious.
“What I’m getting at,” he said. “She might as well—have carried a sign. In lights. ‘I’m up to something. I’m the girl detective.’” He moved abruptly, as if to get back into the car. He stopped before he was stopped.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked, his tone now weary. “Anybody could have seen her. Anybody. Whoever it was she was trying to get something on. And—” He shrugged his shoulders, hopelessly. “We just stand here,” he said.
“Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said. “Hasn’t it really occurred to you that you may have things upside down? That she planned things that way? That she herself—”
“Damn it,” Latham said. “No, damn it!” His denial was violent.
And Latham could not, Heimrich thought, more clearly have disclosed his own uneasiness, his own doubt. Heimrich looked at Latham; saw realization of this in Latham’s face. (His actor’s face. It is an actor’s profession to reveal. To reveal what is chosen to be revealed. Which was, of course, the catch—the catch in so much of this.)
“So,” Heimrich said, “you decided to follow her. To—protect her.”
“And a hell of a lot of good I’ve been,” Latham said. “Am being now. But—you can call it that.”
He had dressed quickly, putting on whatever was close to hand. Heimrich looked at the man in the dark blue polo shirt, the dark gray slacks, the black shoes. Not as obviously, not as theatrically, he, too, was dressed to move unnoticed through the night.
Latham looked puzzled. Then he said, “Oh, I see what you mean. It just happened.”
He was told to go on. He said there wasn’t much more. He had dressed and gone downstairs and out of the Inn—
“See anybody you knew?”
He hadn’t. He hadn’t been looking for anybody. He might have been seen, if that was what Heimrich was getting at.
“Go on, Mr. Latham.”
He had assumed the station wagon would be unlocked. It almost always was. It had been. So—
“So you came here,” Heimrich said. “Guessing that she would come here.”
“Hell,” Latham said. “You made it plain enough.”
“And,” Heimrich said, “jumped me. Very—impetuously. Thinking?”
“All I saw was—somebody,” Latham said. “Anybody. Thought whoever it was—whoever Chris suspected—had got here ahead of her and was waiting for her.”
“Who?” Heimrich said, and was looked at blankly. “Did you think I might be?”
Latham shrugged. He hadn’t had a notion.
“Somebody my size?”
But even that did not help. Until Heimrich had stood up—“and got ready to knock me down”—Latham had not, he said, had any idea as to the man’s size. His glimpse in the headlights had been brief; Heimrich had not been standing. As far as that went, he might have been—anybody.
Such as?
If he wanted names, Latham couldn’t guess at names. If Heimrich couldn’t. All right, then—Marley, Dale, “this fellow Fielding.” All about the right size. Zersk—Zersk was smaller, sure. But, again, until he was in the room, already “trying to knock somebody’s block off,” Latham had had no clear idea of the size of the man he had seen.
“Looks to me,” Latham said, “as if you didn’t catch what you wanted in this trap of yours. Unless—” He stopped suddenly, as if the idea had just then entered his mind. “For God’s sake,” he said. “You don’t think it was me?”
“Now Mr. Latham.”
“Assume it isn’t me,” Latham said. “Assume Collins didn’t kill Peggy and himself. Somebody’s wandering around who’s killed two people. Only—not wandering now, is he? Not wandering into this trap of yours, anyway. And—if I noticed Chris was planning something, anybody might have noticed. And the crazy kid is off somewhere on that damned scooter—”
There was, obviously, something to what Latham said. And—there was more to it.
Young Crowley was there. Crowley was competent to take care of things. Nothing could slip up. Only—
“Stick around,” Heimrich told Latham, told Forniss—the latter with a nod at Latham. “I want to make a telephone call.”