by Leslie Ford
A SCRAWLED NOTE WAS THE BEGINNING OF MURDER . . .
My dearest dearest—I can’t bear what you said to me tonight, but I can’t bear to live without . . .
That was all. A few simple lines. A simple suicide note? That’s what everyone thought, at first, including those two super-sleuths Colonel Primrose and Mrs. Latham. But it turned out to be murder—and the desperate killer returned to strike again . . .
“You can’t go wrong with this highly expert number . . . unusually readable.”
—New York Herald Tribune
FALSE TO ANY MAN
“. . . to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
—HAMLET
By LESLIE FORD
DEDICATION
To
Janet’s March Wind
who is NOT a spavined hack
False to Any Man
Copyright © 1939, renewed 1967, by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
1
The fact that I’d seen Karen Lunt tripping gaily out of the polished granite façade of the Commonwealth Trust Building in K Street meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Everybody one knows in Alexandria spends most of the time in Washington anyway, at a job or shopping or going to parties. It certainly never crossed my mind that she might be coming out of Philander Doyle’s imposing suite of walnut-panelled offices that occupy the entire rear end of the second floor. For one thing, it’s commonly assumed that Philander Doyle’s clients never use the K Street entrance. People who don’t approve of him say they come and go through the alley, and that’s why the back stairs of the Commonwealth Trust Building are full of recesses and so dark that only a mole—or something used to prowling by night—could find its way there.
If I had any mental process at all, it was simply to think how enchanting Karen looked, laughing and batting her long black lashes to keep the snow out of her enormous blue eyes, and to wonder vaguely who the exceptionally good-looking young man was, leaning out holding open the door of his car for her. I saw both ideas reflected an instant later in the face of the other young man who came out of the Commonwealth Trust portals just then . . . and I thought something else too, as he saw Karen duck her high mink hat and bright corn-colored curls into the low car, followed by the rest of her, also swathed in mink. Even then I didn’t connect her with Philander Doyle, largely, I suppose, because I didn’t then know that Roger Doyle was in his father’s office. Certainly the look on his face as he pulled his hat down against the snow wasn’t one a lawyer ordinarily gives a departing client, not one who looked as enormously pleased with life as the girl in mink, anyway. Roger Doyle’s face as he set out toward Connecticut Avenue was definitely what his aunt, Miss Isabel Doyle, would refer to as “a study, my dear, I assure you, a real study.”
I went on into the bank. For a moment I couldn’t get that almost savage look in Roger Doyle’s lean, good-looking but rather complex face out of my mind. It was a little puzzling, too, for one heard so often, around places, that wasn’t it too bad Karen hadn’t had better luck with Roger. Like most marriageable girls in Washington the last five years since the Doyles had come back from New York, she’d tried and failed . . . leaving Roger, friendly but casual and definitely not interested, still loose in the sea. It would be ironical, I thought as I waited in line at the teller’s window, and rather like life, if he was interested now that she wasn’t.
Then I caught a glimpse of the green alarm clock on the teller’s desk, and promptly forgot all about the two of them. I was already half an hour late for lunch with Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), at the Army and Navy Club a block away through the snow and ice. While he wouldn’t mind, his self-styled “functotum”—guard, philosopher and friend, as the Colonel puts it—Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), would mind intensely, if it isn’t absurd to speak of a slab of frozen granite as being intense. I could see him—he lives with Colonel Primrose in their house on my street in Georgetown, as a kind of social, financial and spiritual manager—looking at his large gold turnip of a watch, won like most of his other very considerable worldly goods at the old Army game, his granite face, not smooth and polished like the façade of the Commonwealth Trust Building but harsh and seamed and fissured like the side of Mt. McKinley, congealing a notch lower, his viscid fishy slits of eyes in his lantern-jawed face glinting a colder grey. I’ve known for some time now that Sergeant Buck conceals, or rather doesn’t conceal, behind that stony dead pan of his a deep-seated aversion to any potentially marriageable woman. If he could do it, I don’t think he’d hesitate a minute to clap his Colonel into a monastery run on military lines and keep him there, never allowing him out to see one.—Not to lunch with one, anyway, and certainly not to be married by one when he wasn’t looking. And least of all by me, Grace Latham, widow, aged thirty-eight.
So for a moment, with that gauntlet to run, I forgot Karen Lunt and Roger Doyle and the way Roger had pulled his hat down, watching her go off with the other man. It wasn’t till Philander Doyle’s name came up casually in the luncheon conversation, with the curried shrimps and chutney—which Colonel Primrose always orders at the Army and Navy Club and I steadily loathe—that I thought of them again.
“Do you know Karen Lunt?” I asked, apparently out of a clear sky.
Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and around—a bullet in the neck at the Argonne makes him do that, and he looks exactly like a parrot when he does—and looked at me with those sparkling black X-ray eyes of his, a little surprised.
“I’ve seen her around,” he said. “She’s quite fascinating, I suppose. I’m always surprised when I see her that she isn’t married to somebody. However, I imagine she’d be pretty realistic about anything like love in a two-room apartment.”
“Roger Doyle wouldn’t present that problem,” I observed.
He laughed shortly. “No, I should think not. Not with that father he’s got. Is that the way it is?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “But about Karen?”
He shook his head.
“All I know is that she’s Judge Candler’s ward, and lives out in Alexandria in the Candlers’ old carriage house.”
He picked up the pack of cigarettes I’d opened carefully at one corner and tore the blue revenue stamp across its face. “If I don’t, Buck will,” he remarked with a smile. “He thinks laymen encourage crime.”
I don’t know why that came into my mind again as I passed their house on my way home that evening and saw Sergeant Buck, back from whatever fascinating thing his Colonel was doing for the F. B. I., clearing the snow off the sidewalk. I could hear his shovel ring against the uneven brick, the only sound in the street, as I let myself in my own front door. The snow had stopped, the road was still white, covered with the dry carpet that in a few more moments would be churned black by home-coming cars. I stopped for a moment on the doorstep. P Street in Georgetown looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card, and when I closed the door behind me I could hear the chains of passing cars like hollow sleighbells.
I shook the snow off my hat, listened to its sharp sizzle in the crackling fire in the living room, and drew the curtains aside to look out on the snow-covered back garden. The room, the fire, the snow-peaked frames over the dark boxwood, the patches of warm light from the window, the inside, the tea-tray on the low table in front of the chintz-covered sofa . . . all of it made the fact that a blue revenue stamp on a pack of cigarettes is worth six cents, and that racketeers steam them off and cheat the government out of a million dollars a year, se
em very unreal and far-fetched, some way. I dropped the curtain in place again, thinking how remote crime is from ordinary people’s lives. It seems peculiarly silly, now, that I should have stood there just then, boggling about Sergeant Buck and crime. As Roger Doyle’s aunt Miss Isabel said a day or so later, “You know, my dear, I think it’s just as well we don’t know what Providence has in store for us, I really do.” And I dare say she’s right, except for the Providence part of it. I shall personally always doubt that Providence had any hand in what happened in Chatham Street in Alexandria, Virginia, on the night of February 3rd.
Certainly I had no remotest inkling that the dark foreshadow of that night was already lengthening across the path—even less that it was creeping up my own doorstep at that moment, behind the light young feet scuffing off the snow against the old iron mud scraper. Karen Lunt and the scene in K Street were as far away as summer at April Harbor, my colored cook Lilac waddling up out of the basement kitchen, muttering darkly to herself as she answered the tinkling doorbell, was no more ominous than usual when she’s interrupted starting dinner. Then I heard her voice, high-pitched whenever she’s pleased, say, “ ’Deed, Miss Jerry, come right in. Law, chile, you bin wallowin’ in th’ snow? Let me brush you off. There you is!—Mis’ Grace, here Miss Jerry!”
And there was Miss Jerry the very next instant, glowing from the crisp cold night, her copper-colored hair red-gold in the firelight, framing her flushed pointed little face, her tortoise-shell eyes shining like stars, so radiant and alive that I positively gasped.
“Darling! What’s happened? Have some tea!”
“Oh, everything’s happened, Grace!” she cried. “And I’d love some. Milk and no sugar.”
Jeremy Candler pushed the fraction of brown velvet hat off her bright curly head, deposited it with her bag and newspaper and woolly gloves on the chair by the door, and flopped down in the sofa beside me.
“Have you seen the evening papers?”
I shook my head.
“I just got in. Anyway, I avoid them as long as I can. My young are getting too near war age. What is it?”
She loosened her short beaver jacket and took the tea cup I held out to her and ate three hot marmalade rolls one after the other. Then she said, “Nothing, really—unless you read between the lines. Oh, Grace, it’s marvelous!—Dad was at the White House today.”
I looked blank. Everybody goes to the White House these days. Then I remembered, with a sudden catching of my breath, what some columnist had written about Judge Candler.
“Do you mean——”
She put her fingers across her red lips.
“You mustn’t breathe it, Grace! It’s all an awful secret, and it’s not settled, nearly. Won’t be for a month, perhaps. But I had to come by, Grace! I’d have burst, or driven too fast and gone in the Potomac before I got home, or something shattering. I’m so happy I could die!”
She laughed again. “The boss thought I’d lost my mind, or had a bottle of champagne in the wash room!”
Then suddenly she became more serious than I’d ever seen her, even Thanksgiving Day when her young brother who goes to school with my younger boy—which is how I happen to know her—had such a pain that it didn’t seem possible it was just an old-fashioned stomach ache and we had three doctors in to take out his appendix on the kitchen table.
“You know, Grace,” she said, and stopped, her wide-set yellow-brown eyes fixed on the fire. “—But I don’t suppose you do know at all, there’s no reason you should.”
She stopped again and smiled. Then she said quickly, “Dad’s had pretty tough going.”
I didn’t say anything. Judge Candler had always seemed to me one of those extraordinarily untouchable people who dwell outside the common world. I’d never known him, however, except by reputation and the most occasional meeting at rather staid receptions, until the school holidays of the past winter. A fifteen-year-old boy always under foot can be an astonishing catalyst. Whatever tough going there’d been I’d more or less assumed had been on Jeremy’s side of the road. It was she who took over when her mother died and raised her freckle-faced younger brother, and put up with her harum-scarum older one, Sandy, so her father could keep his head and heart in the clouds. Still, an airplane can hit bumpy patches ten thousand feet up, and I suppose men can too, even in the rarefied heights where Judge Peyton Candler lives.
“I don’t mean he’s ambitious,” Jeremy said quickly. “I mean, not like . . . some men are.”
I was a little surprised. I’d never thought of him as striving to get where he’d got.
“Not for money, I mean. I don’t think he’s ever thought about it. It would have made it easier, sometimes, if he had.”
She smiled suddenly.
“I’m being a pig, and I don’t mean to. And anyway, that’s all over. But I mean after mother died, and he was appointed to the Court of Appeals, it seemed as if everything was—was marvelous. It was what they’d wanted, he and Mother, and all of us. Then he got sick and had to give it up.”
I nodded. I remembered that from the newspapers.
“He was so frightfully conscientious, and he wouldn’t stay on the Court and let the others do his work. Anyway, the doctors all said he’d die, he couldn’t live six months.—That was just when the Doyles came back from New York and bought our old home across the street.”
She gave a strange little laugh.
“He used to hate it so when Mr. Doyle would come and boom out about it being the drawback of Cavalier ancestry, that he was glad his ancestors were Irish navvies brought up on potatoes and peat smoke. Of course he was just trying to cheer him up, but, . . . well, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I hate cheerful people when I’m sick. I’m sure I couldn’t bear it if I knew I was dying.”
“That’s what I used to think,” Jeremy said. “Then he got well. I guess the Cavalier blood was pretty good after all.—And now!”
She got up. The firelight glowed in the burnished glory of her hair. “It’s too wonderful! It’s just as if being poor and so tragically alone, and then being so ill, and coming back, had all made him a so much bigger person, really bigger! Oh, he’s marvellous, Grace—I adore him!”
She stood there by the fire, slim and young. I thought, “It’s you that’s done the heaviest part of it, my lamb—you with your own Cavalier blood.”
It was the Cavalier spirit burning there now in her firelit eyes and in the proud upward tilt of her thoroughbred young head. I suppose that’s why I was so totally unprepared for her sudden reversion into . . . I can’t think of anything to call it but just plain Salem witchcraft.
She turned to me.
“Did you ever feel, Grace, when everything was . . . perfect, that maybe it was—too perfect? That maybe it was all more than you’d any right to, and that . . . fate, or life, or something, was getting ready to give you a frightful—well, sort of kick in the pants? That something you never dreamed of when you thought you’d thought of everything would happen to send everything crashing down on top of you?”
There was a frightened look in her odd autumny eyes.
I nodded. It had happened to me, one cloudless summer afternoon, and to two small boys catching crabs in the shallow bay.
“That’s the way I feel,” she said softly. “Everything’s so perfect. About Dad, and Sandy’s suddenly becoming adult and working like a beaver. The stock Dad put in trust for me and Billy when they thought he was going to die is paying enough so I don’t have to worry about Billy’s school bills. It’s all too good to be true. Billy even passed his Latin last month. It’s unbelievable! I’m . . . scared. I’ve had my fingers crossed all day.
She stopped and looked at me.
“You know, Grace, I guess I’m crazy . . . but you know the way primitive people used to make burnt offerings, and . . . the way they put flowers at wayside shrines, to try . . . well, to try to keep on the right side of whatever gods there be?”
She stopped again,
her face a little flushed, and pulled a small brown paper bag out of her jacket pocket.
“Its just raisins and suet,” she said. “I thought, if you didn’t mind . . . maybe I’d make a . . . well, a sort of sacrifice, to the birds in your garden. I’ve got to do something—and they’d think I was crazy, at home. Do you mind?”
I looked at her, a little startled. She was perfectly serious.
“Not at all,” I said. I always wish on the evening star or a load of hay, so it didn’t seem entirely crazy to me, just a little surprising that it came from someone so clear-eyed and direct as Jeremy Candler. I heard her open the garden door, felt the brief cold blast, and felt it again as she came in. She sat down beside me again.
“Don’t tell Sandy.”
“All right,” I said. “And what about yourself, Jerry?” I asked. “Are you going to keep on with your job?”
“Of course. Unless Dad . . . well, I mean, if this does work out, and Dad thinks I shouldn’t . . . But I don’t dare think about that. I suppose if I don’t need the money I oughtn’t to keep it from some girl who does. And besides, Dad would need me.”
I glanced at her. All the proud Cavalier and all the Salem witchcraft was gone, suddenly. She was just a twenty-year-old girl, sitting wistfully in the firelight.
“And what about getting married?” I said. “Have you ever thought of that?”
“Not lately.”
She spoke so abruptly and with such a dead sort of voice that I was startled.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, it’s all right. It’s just that . . . well——”
She got up, trying desperately to get back the starch that had gone out of her.
“It’s just that I guess Karen Lunt’s got him instead. She had more time to work on it than I did—and more of what it takes, I guess.”
She laughed, bent down and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“I told you I was a pig.—Oh Lord, I’ll be late for dinner. Goodbye, Grace.”