Frans Frankel was not in the apartment above the garage. Forniss had to wait for a minute or two for Mrs. Frankel to come to the door and tell him that. First she said, “You again.”
“He’s working,” she said. “He’s got work to do. So’ve I.”
“We all have work to do,” Forniss said. “Where’ll I find your husband, Mrs. Frankel?”
“In the garden, where else?” she said. She started to close the door. Forniss said, “Where’s the garden, Mrs. Frankel?”
“Other side of the house, where else?” Mrs. Frankel said, and closed the door firmly.
Forniss walked back to the house and around it. A hundred yards or so north of the house, a little lower down the hill, bordered by a low, taut, chicken-wire fence, was a leveled area of roughly two hundred by four hundred feet. It was bisected by a path of pine bark.
Frans Frankel was a big man in worn slacks with dirt on the knees of them. He was digging something out of the ground—something set in rows. Forniss stepped over the fence. Frankel turned to look at him and then thrust a spading fork into the soil. He’ll say, “You again,” Forniss thought. Frankel said, “Morning, Lieutenant. We got a frost last night. Got to clean up for winter.”
He forked a bulb out of the soil. He lifted the still-green blades to which it was attached and shook it and earth fell away from the bulb. He tossed vigorously and the bulb and the blades flew over the fence to join others lying in a heap on grass in the sun.
“Glads won’t winter over up here,” Frankel said. “You wanted to see me, Lieutenant? Already told you all I know.”
He thrust the spading fork again into the soil and wiggled it and bent to grasp the blades of another glad bulb.
“About something else,” Forniss said. “Think maybe you can help us.”
Frankel said “Uh” and shook earth from another glad bulb and tossed it over the fence.
“Couple of years ago,” Forniss said, “Mrs. Jameson got killed in an accident. More than two years ago. Her horse threw her into a stone wall.”
Frankel said, “Yeah.” His tone was flat. He thrust the fork into the soil again, but this time he turned from it and faced Forniss. He said, “Crazy damn horse. She was a nice little lady.”
“From what we hear,” Forniss said, “Miss Jameson asked you to row across the lake and saddle the horses. So that she and Mrs. Jameson could go around in the Jeep. That’s the way it was?”
“Yeah. That’s what she told me, so that’s what I did. Rowed over and rowed back. I was planting glads. Like these I’m digging up. They was right pretty in July.”
“You went over and saddled the horses,” Forniss said. “When you came back, did you see Miss Jameson and her sister-in-law?”
“No. Went around the back way. Shorter.”
“You didn’t see them drive off in the Jeep?”
“Can’t say I did. Couldn’t, the way I came back here. To get the bulbs in.”
“You didn’t stop by to tell them the horses were ready?”
“No. Been no point to it, would there? She knows when I’ve got a job to do I do it. Wanted to get the glads in before I knocked off.”
He prized another bulb clump out of the soil. This time two bulbs came with the blades.
“About what time was this?” Forniss asked him.
“Maybe four. Maybe a little after.”
“Did you hear the Jeep when it started up? I suppose Miss Jameson would have been driving it?”
“No. House in between. And I was down on my knees putting bulbs in. Sure she’d have been driving it.”
“About how long did it take you to row across, saddle the horses and row back and tie up the boat?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. You think I keep looking at my watch?”
“So you were back at, say, about four-thirty?”
“About then, I’d guess.”
“They might have driven off in the Jeep while you were over on the other side of the lake?”
“Sure. They hadn’t got around when I tied the horses up, though.”
“Or,” Forniss said, “they might not have gone until after you came back?”
“Sure.”
“This was on a Friday? The twenty-ninth of May? Since Memorial Day fell on a Saturday that year, the holiday was the following Monday?”
“If you say so,” Frankel said, and thrust the spading fork into the soil beside another glad plant and prized another bulb out of the earth.
“Way we get it,” Forniss said, “Miss Selby was here that day—that Friday. Working in Mr. Jameson’s office, although Mr. Jameson himself was in New York. Way you remember it, Mr. Frankel?”
Frankel shook earth from the newly excavated glad bulb and threw it over the fence to join the others.
“Don’t remember it one way or the other,” Frankel said, and pushed the fork back into the earth. “Usually here on Fridays, I guess. See her. Volks out in front of the house.” He left the fork sticking upright in the earth and turned to Forniss.
“What goes on in the house ain’t much concern to us,” he said. “To me and Gretchen. Now and then she goes oyer and helps out in the house. Special like. I take care of the grounds and do outside work. Call it caretaker if you want to. Or ‘yardman,’ way she does.”
“She?”
“Miss Jameson, who else? Thing is, they’ve got people working in the house. What she calls the staff. Nothing to do with Gretchen and me ’cept when she asks her to help out.”
Forniss said he saw. He thought that he wasn’t getting much of any place and that Frankel was rather going out of his way to make it clear that he and his wife weren’t servants at The Tor.
“All the inside people quit after Mrs. Jameson got herself killed,” Frankel said. “Not that Miss Jameson wasn’t running things before that. Has been as long as we’ve been here.”
“How long’s that been, Mr. Frankel?”
“Five years. More like six, I guess.”
“Then you and Mrs. Frankel weren’t here when the first Mrs. Jameson was alive?”
“No. I was running the greenhouse then. Place my father used to own, if you want to know.”
Forniss didn’t especially want to know.
“By the way,” Forniss said, “was Mrs. Frankel in the apartment that afternoon, do you happen to remember? You can see the turnaround from the apartment windows, reason I’m asking,”
“This was a Friday from what you say. Fridays the wife does her marketing. For the weekend.”
“You and your wife have your own car, I suppose? I mean, she can drive herself in to do the marketing.”
“Sure do. What’d you think?”
Frankel turned back to his spading fork and dug up another glad bulb and shook it and tossed it over the fence. Forniss. said, “Thanks, Mr. Frankel,” and thought it was thanks for nothing and stepped back over the fence. He walked back up to the house and across the turnaround, past the terrace and the path which led from it to the top of the steep brick staircase. He climbed the stairs to the apartment above the garage and rang the doorbell and waited for a minute or two. Mrs. Frankel came to the door, carrying a mop. She said, as he expected, “You again. Couldn’t you find him?”
“Yes, I found Mr. Frankel,” Forniss said. “You remember the day Mrs. Jameson was killed, Mrs. Frankel? Thrown from her horse?”
“Of course I do. Bad thing. She was such a pretty little lady.”
“We’re trying to check up on times,” Forniss said. “When Mrs. Jameson and her sister-in-law drove over to the meadow to ride their horses. You can see the space in front of the house from your windows here. Just wondered if you happened to see the Jeep start off and can help us about what time it was.”
“I was in Cold Harbor marketing,” Mrs. Frankel said. “So how could I see when they started over to this meadow? All over when I got back. Poor little thing.”
“Mrs. Jameson,” Forniss said. “Yes. You’ve twice said she was little. So did your husband.”
“Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Skin and bones I’d call it. For all she was always doing things. Like riding horses and playing tennis and all. And swimming in that lake of theirs, for all she shouldn’t have ought to.”
“Shouldn’t have ought to?”
“Drains into a water supply,” Mrs. Frankel said. “Some law about it. Think you’d know that, being a policeman.”
Forniss said, “Thank you, Mrs. Frankel. Sorry to have interrupted your work.”
He got “Huh!” and an abruptly closed door and went back down the stairs.
Not more than a hundred pounds, Forniss thought. Not too heavy a burden for a strong man. Or, for that matter, a strong woman. He looked at his watch. It was a little after eleven. Too early to meet M. L. at the Old Stone Inn in Van Brunt. He hoped M. L. was getting more than he was and walked back toward the house.
Geoffrey Rankin was still sitting in the sun on the terrace. He wasn’t reading a newspaper, and there was a glass instead of a coffee cup on the table beside his chaise. Forniss walked up onto the terrace and said, “Good morning, Mr. Rankin.”
“You,” Rankin said. “How long are you guys going to keep me here?”
“We’re not keeping you,” Forniss said. “The inspector told you that.” He pulled a chair up and sat on it.
“The hell you’re not,” Rankin said. “I can’t stir without one of your men on my tail. I went over to see Miss Selby because I couldn’t get her on the phone. Damn line was busy for hours, then the operator said it was out of order. So I got in my car and took off. But what if I hadn’t come back here?”
“You wouldn’t have been stopped, wherever you went. Those were the inspector’s orders.”
“Just followed,” Rankin said. “Got a cigarette on you?”
Forniss held out a pack toward Rankin. After Rankin had shaken a cigarette out of it, Forniss pulled one out for himself. They both lighted cigarettes.
“So,” Rankin said, “are you getting anywhere? Finding out who killed the old boy?”
“We will,” Forniss said. “By the way, way I get it you’d not been here before. Not until the party Saturday night, when Miss Selby showed you the way up. That’s right?”
“That’s right. And I’d never seen Arthur Jameson until he put on that god-awful show. Just heard about him.”
“From Miss Selby, I suppose?”
“Yes. Distinguished old gentleman, she called him. Distinguished old—”
He stopped himself. Forniss gave him time, which he did not use.
“So you couldn’t have been here—here at The Tor—on the Friday before Memorial Day a couple of years ago?”
“I sure as hell wasn’t. Wait a minute. That was the day Mrs. Jameson fell off her horse, wasn’t it? Don’t tell me you’re prying into that, Forniss. Why the hell would you?”
“No special reason I know of,” Forniss said. “Inspector Heimrich gets curious about things. I suppose Miss Selby told you about Mrs. Jameson’s accident?”
“Do you? Maybe she did. Also, it was in the papers. Read the Times this morning?”
“Glanced at it,” Forniss said.
“Front page,” Rankin said. “Mysterious death of member of a distinguished Hudson River family. State police are investigating—”
“Yes,” Forniss said, and drew on his cigarette.
“Mrs. Arthur Jameson dies in riding accident,” Rankin said. “Wife of a member of long-established Hudson Valley family. Something like that two years ago.”
“You seem to have kept up with the Jameson family,” Forniss said. He paused to draw again on his cigarette and let smoke drift from his mouth. The wind caught the smoke and the smoke vanished. “Why is that, Mr. Rankin? Because Miss Selby worked for Mr. Jameson? As a matter of fact, she was here in the house the day Mrs. Jameson was killed.”
The cigarette had burned down. He stubbed it out. I smoke too fast, Forniss thought. Rankin has had only a couple of drags from his. In fact, Rankin has let his cigarette go out.
“Did she tell you that, Mr. Rankin?” Forniss asked.
“Any reason she should have?”
Forniss shrugged his shoulders.
“Just thought she might have mentioned it,” Forniss said. “Sort of thing people’d talk about, I’d think. ‘Dreadful thing about poor Mrs. Jameson. And I was right there in their house when it happened.’ That sort of thing.”
“Maybe she did. Dot and I haven’t seen much of each other the last couple of years. As I told the inspector.”
“Sure you did,” Forniss said. “I forget things, I guess. Before that—before she went to work as Mr. Jameson’s secretary—you saw quite a bit of each other. Or don’t I remember that right, either?”
“We saw a bit of each other, yes. There was no secret about it.”
“No reason there should have been, I’d think,” Forniss said. “You and she being related and all. Distantly related, that is. Not—how was it you put it, Mr. Rankin? Within the bounds of con-something?”
“Consanguinity,” Rankin said. “Kinship. In our case not anywhere near close enough to—” He stopped. Then he said, “Getting at something, Lieutenant?”
“I think you’re getting at it, Mr. Rankin. A pretty young woman, as you pointed out. Only a few years younger than you. A great many years younger than the man she was engaged to. A girl you seem to have stopped seeing about the time she came here to work with Mr. Jameson. Any objection to telling me why you and she stopped seeing each other?”
“Yes,” Rankin said. “And it’s none of your damn business, is it?”
Forniss lighted another cigarette before he answered. This sort of thing was causing him to step up his smoking when he was trying to step it down. When he spoke, he spoke very slowly.
“Mr. Rankin,” Forniss said, “I’m a detective working on a murder case. Anything related to that case, even remotely, is my business. Miss Selby was engaged to Arthur Jameson. A couple of years back you and Miss Selby saw a good deal of each other. Rather suddenly, I gather, you pretty much stopped seeing each other. All I asked you was why.”
“What you’re hinting at,” Rankin said, and he, too, spoke slowly, “is that I’m in love with Dot and killed the old boy so he couldn’t marry her. That we stopped seeing each other because she was going to work for Jameson. Which, Forniss, is a lot of bull.”
Forniss said, “All right, Mr. Rankin.” But he did not make any move to get up from his chair. He merely looked at Rankin and Waited, as if he expected Rankin to go on with something, to finish something. Sometimes it works.
“So you’re way off base,” Rankin said.
“All right.”
“It was that mother of hers,” Rankin said. “She—all right. She wanted to break it up. Not that there was anything to break up. Said it wouldn’t be seemly. That Flo—well, she gets ideas into that head of hers. Crazy ideas. About genes. About which she doesn’t know a damn thing, actually.”
“About genes, Mr. Rankin?”
“Old wives’ tales. Men and women who are related even as distantly as Dot and I are shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Never heard of the royal families of Europe, apparently. Trouble with Dot, she believes what Mama tells her. Believes—well, believes all the taboos. Even makes them up herself. Flo, I mean.”
“That was the—” Forniss began and stopped because Rankin was not listening; was ready to go on. You never stop a witness who wants to talk.
“Having short little fingers on the left hand runs in a family,” Rankin said. “If even distant blood relations in that family marry and have children, the children won’t have left arms. See anything the matter with my hands, Forniss?”
He held his hands up, the fingers spread apart. There wasn’t anything the matter with his hands.
“All right,” Forniss said. “And I’ve seen Miss Selby’s hands. When she was shooting arrows at a target, incidentally. Very good-looking hands, hers are. You’re going a long way around something, aren’t you?”
“Ever hear about the wharf cats in New York, Forniss? Kill the wharf rats for a living. And inbreed like crazy. And keep on getting bigger and tougher and killing more rats.”
“I’ve heard about them,” Forniss said. “Apparently you’ve given this thing about inbreeding a good deal of thought, Mr. Rankin. Because of this very distant relationship between you and Miss Selby. Which makes it pretty obvious, doesn’t it?”
As he had talked on, Rankin had been looking not at Forniss but across the closely mowed lawn—had been, in fact, looking in the direction of the top of the brick staircase which plunged down toward the lake. Now he looked at Forniss, and his eyes narrowed.
“Makes what obvious?” Rankin said.
“Oh,” Forniss said, “that you and Miss Selby were, at one time anyway, a good deal more than the casual acquaintances you’ve been telling us. That you wanted to marry her and that her mother scared her off. Made her believe you were too close kin to marry.”
“Which we damn well aren’t.”
“All right.”
“Hell, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had the same great, great—I don’t know how many greats to put in—grandfather. So what?”
“So nothing,” Forniss said. “I’m not agreeing with Florence Selby, Mr. Rankin. The point is, apparently, that she persuaded her daughter. You did want to marry Dorothy Selby. Isn’t that right? Do now, at a guess.”
“What you guess isn’t—”
“I know,” Forniss said. “Isn’t evidence. You told us Miss Selby asked you, relaying a message from the Jamesons, of course, to come up to this party Saturday night. That you accepted, thinking it was just a birthday party for a man she worked with. That nobody told you it was also a celebration of her engagement to Jameson. Must have come as something of a shock to you, Mr. Rankin.”
Again, Geoffrey Rankin looked away across the lawn. He said nothing for several seconds. Then he said, “Got another cigarette? I seem to have let this one go out.”
Forniss had another cigarette to give to Rankin. Rankin lighted the cigarette.
“All right,” he said. “It was a bitchy thing for her to do. There’s a little bitchiness in all of them, isn’t there? Even in the best of them.”
“There’s a little bitchiness in all of us,” Forniss said. “It isn’t limited to women.”
He stood up.
“And,” Rankin said, “I didn’t kill the old boy to keep him from marrying Dot.”
“All right, Mr. Rankin,” Forniss said, and walked off the terrace toward the turnaround, in which the police cruiser was standing, its motor dead but its radio chattering. As he walked, he looked at his watch. Eleven-forty. Still too early to meet M. L. at the Old Stone Inn at Van Brunt. Still—
“Your sidekick in the house?” Forniss asked the trooper.
The trooper returned, with a visible start, from wherever he had been. He said, “Yes, sir, Lieutenant. We were told to stick around. Just to see nobody—”
“Yes,” Forniss said, and went around the car and got in beside the trooper. “You can run me in to the Inn in Van Brunt. Your sidekick can see that nobody gets away.”
The trooper said, “Sir,” and started the motor.
Of course, Charles Forniss thought as they went south on NY 11F, Rankin merely confirmed what we’d already guessed.
It was still too early for the lunch customers to have showed up at the Old Stone Inn. Not that there would be many on Monday. On the other hand, on Mondays the bar didn’t have to wait until one in the afternoon to open.
Heimrich was not in the taproom. Neither was anybody else, except the new man behind the bar. He was reading the New York Daily News. He put the News under the bar when Forniss walked up to it and said, “Good morning, sir.”
“Mother isn’t here,” Dorothy Selby had said when she opened the door of the house on Vine Street. “Is it Mother you want to see? Because she’s out with prospects, I think. Did you try the office, Inspector?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “Perhaps you can spare me a few minutes yourself, Miss Selby? Help me get one or two points straight in my head?”
She said, “Of course, Inspector,” and he followed her into the big living room.
She was much more composed today than she had been the day before, Heimrich thought. The shock of her fiancé’s death appeared to have worn off. Rather quickly, Heimrich thought, and thought that the young are resilient. She looked very young in a short skirt and a sleeveless blouse. She had very pretty legs. She had applied lipstick expertly. She did not look as if she had planned to spend the day alone in the house. Expecting a visitor? The same visitor she had had the day before?
“Just trying to clear up a couple of points,” Heimrich said. “Think maybe you can help. Not about Mr. Jameson’s death, directly.”
Momentarily, she closed her eyes. They were large blue eyes. Her blond hair curved softly down to her shoulders. She opened her eyes.
“I want to help in any way I can,” she said.
“I’d like you to remember back,” Heimrich said. “Back more than two years. You were working with Mr. Jameson then?”
“For him. Yes.”
“The Friday before Memorial Day two years ago,” Heimrich said.
“The day Janet was killed. In that awful accident. No, Inspector, I’ll never forget that day.”
“From what we hear, you were at the Jameson house that afternoon. In Mr. Jameson’s study, working.”
“His office. Arthur always called it his office. Yes, I was there, Inspector. Making a clean copy of what we’d done during the week. On the book, I mean.”
“About when did you leave that afternoon?”
“Somewhere around four, I think.”
“Had Miss Jameson and her sister-in-law driven over to the meadow when you left, do you remember?”
She was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t think I saw either of them at all that day,” she said. “I think I got there—oh, around ten that morning. Went directly to the office without seeing anyone. I had my own house key. Miss Jameson gave one to me when I first went there to help Arthur. But I don’t think the door was locked that morning. Anyway, I went to the office and began to type. Around one o’clock the man they had then—it wasn’t Barnes then: I don’t remember the man’s name—anyway, he brought me in sandwiches and coffee. Then I went back to work.”
“Until around four,” Heimrich said. “Did the others in the house know you were there, do you think? Aside from the man who brought you your lunch, I mean?”
“I don’t know. Oh, probably they heard the typewriter going.”
“You went out of the house about four,” Heimrich said. “Was the Jeep in front of the house, do you remember? The one they drove in to the meadow. After Frankel had saddled up their horses.”
She closed her eyes again, as if she were trying to remember. Then, slowly, she nodded her head.
“I think so,” she said. “I think I remember its being there. Headed toward the drive, I think.”
“The motor running?”
She didn’t remember about that. Anyway, she didn’t remember that it was. Then she said, “Wait a minute.” She opened her eyes again.
“I said I didn’t see Miss Jameson or Janet that day,” she said. “I just remembered. I was in my car and starting toward the driveway when they came out of the house. Dressed for riding. I saw them in the rearview mirror.” She paused. She said, “Why all this, Inspector? I don’t understand.”
It had taken her, Heimrich thought, some time to get around to the obvious question. He told her he was just trying to get things straight in his mind.
“When they came out,” Heimrich said. “Dressed for riding. Did they go over and get in the Jeep?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know,” Dorothy Selby said. “I just saw them come out of the house. Then I’d gone around the curve at the top of the driveway and couldn’t see them any more.”
Heimrich said he saw.
“Just the Jeep in the turnaround?” he said. “No other car?”
“I don’t remember any other car.”
“Mr. Jameson—Mr. Ronald Jameson, I mean—hadn’t got there yet? Apparently he did come up a little later. Was there, anyway, when Miss Jameson drove back to tell what had happened.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “His car wasn’t in front of the house. But then, if he was going to be there overnight, he always put the car in the garage. He’s sort of—oh, old-maidish—about that car of his. It’s a Mercedes, you know. Like Mother’s. Not an old rattletrap like mine.”
Heimrich said, “Yes,” which didn’t mean much of anything. He said, “Speaking of cars, Miss Selby. Mr. Rankin drove over here to see you yesterday.”
“And you had him followed,” she said. “He knew it. Did you know he knew it?”
“Yes. He told us he saw the police car. What did he come to see you about, Miss Selby?”
She said, “About?” Then she said, “Oh, to see if I was all right. To—to tell me how sorry he was.”
“Considerate of him.”
“Of course. That’s the way he is. And after all we’re—we’re relations. Cousins. Didn’t we tell you that?”
“Very distant cousins,” Heimrich said. “Yes, you’ve told us that. Not at all a close degree of relationship. He drove over to—call it make a sympathy call—because you and he are distant relatives?”
“Of course. Oh, we were friends, too. Some time ago he used to take me places. In the city, mostly.”
“Because you were what you call cousins?”
“Of course. What else could it have been?”
He merely looked at her, and let her see that he was looking at her. He thought she was intelligent enough not to need words for it.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all. How could it have been? We are cousins. And Mother made me see—” She stopped abruptly. Heimrich waited.
“Nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
Heimrich nodded his head acceptingly.
“When Mr. Rankin came up here from town Saturday night,” he said. “When you guided him over to the Jameson place, having passed along their invitation—he thought the party was just a birthday celebration?”
“Yes. I guess so, anyway. I hadn’t—” Again she stopped without finishing the sentence.
“So when Mr. Jameson announced that you and he were going to get married, it must have come as a surprise to Mr. Rankin?”
“I hadn’t told him about it, if that’s what you mean. He was a little late in getting here that night, and I went right off in the Volks and he followed me. We didn’t—didn’t stand around talking. He didn’t even get out of his car.”
“At the party you did. You didn’t tell him then you were going to marry Jameson? Before Jameson made that—that announcement of his?”
“I didn’t want him to,” she said. “Not that way. It—it seemed a very old-fashioned way. Rather—oh, I don’t know. Theatrical? You were there, weren’t you? At the party?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “So it came as a surprise to Mr. Rankin. As far as you know, anyway. An unpleasant surprise, Miss Selby? Even, perhaps, a rather shattering surprise?”
She said she did not know what he meant. She said, “‘Shattering,’ Inspector? What a strange word to use. As if—” Again she did not finish.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “As if he were shocked by what you were going to do.”
She shook her head in bewilderment. Or a simulation of bewilderment?
“Why should he have been, Inspector? I told you we were—we are—friends. Jeff—why, Jeff would want me to be happy.” She paused. “And we would have been happy, Arthur and I. You talk as if—you talk as if you think there was something between Jeff and me. We were just friends. I keep telling you that. Friends and relatives. Anything else would have been—would have been impossible. Surely you—”
She stopped, this time because Heimrich was slowly shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “Not impossible, Miss Selby. And yes, I do think there was something more between the two of you than casual friendship and distant relationship.”
She had been relaxed in her chair until then. Then her slim body stiffened. She grasped both arms of the chair, as if she were about to pull herself out of it. Her lips began to move, but for seconds no words came from them. Finally she spoke, but in a voice so low. Heimrich could barely catch the words. He thought they were, “You’re crazy,” but he could not be entirely sure. Then she pulled herself forward to the edge of the chair.
“You’re trying to make out that Jeff was jealous, aren’t you?” she said, and now her voice rose and the words were no longer indistinct. “That’s what you came here to ask about, isn’t it? Not all this about Janet. You’re—you’re trying to drag Jeff into it, aren’t you? All right, aren’t you?”
“We don’t drag people into things, Miss Selby,” Heimrich said. His voice was very soft. “If they’ve dragged themselves into things we try to find out about it. That’s all, Miss Selby.”
“You’re awful,” she said. “Cruel and awful.”
Then she leaned forward in the chair and put her hands over her face and began to cry.
“No,” Heimrich said, and stood up. “Just a cop, Miss Selby.”
She did not answer and did not look at him. She merely sat in the chair, her body shaking.
Merton Heimrich left her so.