False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  “He probably made the whole thing up and doesn’t want to get caught out,” I thought, with unbecoming cynicism.

  “I don’t understand you, Mr. Pepperday,” Judge Candler said.

  “Possibly not, sir. But I beg you to forget everything. And I wish you good morning.”

  Mr. Pepperday hurried out, more like the March Hare than the White Rabbit, except that he was consulting his big watch as he went.

  Judge Candler looked after him for a moment. Then he sat back in his chair.

  “I’d like to be alone, if you please,” he said to Jerry. As we all moved to the door he added, “Would you mind staying a moment, Mrs. Latham?”

  I said, “Not at all.” When the others had gone and I’d sat down in the chair by the fire, he sat there, tapping the tooled old leather on the table desk with his long slender fingers. They looked so fragile that I glanced at his face uneasily. He had never been particularly robust, I imagine, but now he looked nearly ill.

  After a long time he said, “You’re fond of my daughter, I believe, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Oh, very,” I said.

  He paused again. Then he said, “You know, I presume, that she was very much upset about transferring certain stock back to Karen.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “Mrs. Latham, I believe it was you who called in Colonel Primrose this morning.”

  I thought dismally, “How things do get about.” I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because I was . . . frightened,” I said. “I’d hurt my arm pretty badly. I suppose I was . . . overwrought. He’s a very good friend of mine. I just naturally thought of him. He’s extraordinary in emergencies.”

  The sound of his fingers tapping made me as nervous as a cat.

  “It wasn’t because you felt that . . . Karen had been killed?”

  Since it obviously wasn’t Judge Candler who’d done it, even if she had been killed, and those sombre burning eyes of his could see through any dissimulation of mine, there was no use of my bothering.

  “I suppose that must have occurred to me, Judge Candler,” I answered, as stoutly as I could; “just as it apparently occurred to Philander Doyle. Or I shouldn’t have called him.”

  I couldn’t tell him that it had seemed, some way, the logical resolution for all that had gone before, like spontaneous combustion in a lot of oily trash in the cellar closet; nor could I tell him about the caked snow on the drugget in the garden entry.

  “Your reasons?” he asked quietly.

  “I have none.”

  He looked straight ahead of him for a long time.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Latham,” he said at last.

  I got up. As I got to the door he said, “You’ll stay on with Jeremy a few days, won’t you?”

  I expect I’m no worse coward than most women, but my knees were a little wobbly just then. He was looking at me with those extraordinary steady Candler eyes.

  “Jeremy’s counting heavily on you, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “I should be most grateful to you.”

  I thought, “Oh, dear!” but I said, “Thank you, Judge Candler,” and got out and hurried up to my room. Then I sat there in the window seat looking out at Karen’s house, more disturbed than I’d yet been.

  William had made a coal fire in the grate. The high four-poster with the three steps going up to it, covered with faded worn old gros point, the old-fashioned basin and pitcher in the corner stand, the stiff high-backed fireside chair, the bow front satinwood chest with the mildewed girandole above it, all seemed friendly enough . . . but I could close my eyes and remember the pitch black and cold they’d been the night before. The heavy tassel of Sandy’s bathrobe cord plump-plumping in the dark on the steps behind me made me uneasy just remembering how utterly terrified I’d been. And some one had been in the hall, watching me. I was perfectly sure of that, now that I thought of it again. Some one who had come from Karen’s house—or why hadn’t that cat stayed huddled up in her window, protected from the cold wind? Or why wouldn’t she have come at two, or four, if she didn’t want to stay there? It was perfectly obvious that she’d followed some one to the garden door.

  I sat there in the little room, thinking; and the more I thought the more the prospect of spending another night in that house became a complete nightmare. What, for instance, if Colonel Primrose was right? I hadn’t the slightest interest in being numbered among the unvalorous dead. How had it become known that I called him in? How had they guessed I’d thought Karen had been murdered?

  A knock at the door startled me practically out of my wits. I had to moisten my lips before I could say “Come in.” And when I’d said it, I just sat there practically petrified, watching the door open. Who or what I thought it would be I don’t know; I only know I was absurdly relieved to see it was only Jerry.

  She smiled just a bare fraction of a smile, came in, and sat down beside me. Then, seeing Karen’s house from the window, I suppose, she got up and moved to the wing chair by the fire. She sat there a few moments, poking the dead coals back from the black painted bricks on the hearth with the toe of her shoe.

  “You don’t think Karen killed herself, do you?” she asked abruptly, not moving her eyes from the grate.

  “Why do you say that?” I said.

  “Because I don’t either,” she replied quietly.

  I didn’t say anything. There seemed so precious little I could say. I had the awful feeling that any minute now she’d ask if it wasn’t I who . . . and before I’d got the words out of my mind she’d said them:

  “Was it you that called Colonel Primrose?”

  “Look,” I said. “—How did you know?”

  “Because Mr. Doyle called up and told Father he thought we’d better get you out of the house before you had us all hanged.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly.

  “He said Colonel Primrose only dabbled in high-class murder,” she added, with an odd little sound that could hardly be called a laugh.

  “I’m sorry I called him, Jerry,” I said.

  Her wide yellow-flecked eyes met mine directly for the first time since she’d come in.

  “Oh, I’m glad you called him!” she cried. “It would be horrible, to think she was . . . murdered and nobody knew who did it!”

  I looked at her in astonishment.

  “Grace!” she said suddenly. “You don’t think I did it . . . or Sandy?”

  I shook my head.

  She got up abruptly, moved across to the front window and stood there looking out into Chatham Street. I knew, in some way, that she was making a tremendous decision—making it all by herself. I sat and waited. She turned around in a moment.

  “Grace,” she said slowly, “—I want you to call him back. I know you sent him away because you thought it would . . . embarrass us. It won’t, Grace . . . believe me, it won’t. It’ll embarrass us a lot more if it . . . goes as suicide and Miss Isabel says at a tea some day, ‘You know, they murdered Karen, my dear, they really did.’ ”

  She spoke so precisely with Miss Isabel’s vague aloof inflection that I could see a dozen unnerved dowagers dropping tea cups and saying, “—How awful, Isabel! Are you sure?”

  “You know what she’s like, and now that Mr. Doyle has told her Karen was murdered, she’ll stow it away like she does all those old clothes and bring it out the way she does them, at the worst possible moment.”

  I just stared at her.

  “Oh, Grace, don’t you see?” she implored. “I like Miss Isabel, I really do. I don’t mean she’d hurt us, but she’s always been very odd. You know, it wasn’t till a few months ago that she ever put her foot in this house. She lived just across the street, Mr. Doyle was an old friend—but she wouldn’t ever come with him. Once Sandy and I were talking about it at table and father said, “I dare say she has her own reasons,” the way he does that finishes things. But she never did, not till she thought I wanted to marry Roger. I don’t know why that appalled her so. It’s just that that’s th
e way she is. Don’t you see?”

  “I’m not sure I do,” I said. “—And I’m very sure I don’t understand about your father and Karen and you, at all.”

  She sat down wearily in the window seat and leaned her head back against the trim.

  “You just don’t know him, Grace. Listen. Mr. Lunt was his dearest friend . . . and friendship is more sacred to him than anything else of the sort—love, or his family, or anything. It’s hard for anybody to understand, nowadays. He made a solemn promise to Karen’s father, and the business of his death, and his wife’s ruining him financially, and all the rest of it, just made the obligation greater in his own mind. Then there’s another thing.”

  She smiled as if she realized the tragi-comic irony of it.

  “You see, we’re Candlers. We’re Colonel Candler’s grandchildren and Judge Avery Candler’s great-grandchildren. And Karen’s father’s father wasn’t anybody. That makes it important for Karen to go to a fashionable school and marry well . . . but we Candlers, we don’t need any gilding the lily. We don’t need a lot of money. We don’t need to make a show. It’s only people who haven’t got family and background and what have you that have to make one.

  “You see, father was brought up by people who’d lost everything in the Civil War. Poverty was distinction, to them—having money meant you’d sold out to the enemy. It doesn’t make sense, Grace, but he feels it genuinely. Oh, it’s Sandy’s fault as much as his. We’ve been too proud to tell him how we felt about it. We pretended we wanted to go to the schools we went to, and were proud of our shabby house and the things in it, because they’d all belonged to us always, and hadn’t been bought at an auction because somebody like us had had to part with them. Of course, we’re really tarred with the same brush—we’re as bad as he is, really—except that we can see the waste of it. He never has. We’ve kept him locked in his ivory tower. We’ve never told him how wasteful and extravagant Karen was. When he said Karen needed fifty dollars to pay her throat specialist, we never said a word, even if we knew her throat was O. K. and it was a new hat she wanted.

  “But you see the point is, Grace, that father believed in people. He believes in the sacred obligation of friendship. He believed an orphan girl whose father killed himself because he was broke and his wife was leaving him for fairer fields, needs more to meet the world than his children—they have family and a home and decent cultured backgrounds as far back as William the Conqueror. We’ve got protoplasm—we don’t need tinsel. And of course, money means nothing to him, really.”

  “Was he . . . in love with Karen’s mother?” I asked.

  Jerry shook her head.

  “No—that’s one of the reasons for his attitude toward Karen. Her mother hadn’t any background for anything . . . except a pretty face. Whenever Karen did anything that even father thought was a bit thick, he’d say, ‘I know, my dear, but you must remember her mother’s background.’ We were silk purses. Karen wasn’t precisely the opposite, but—well . . .”

  She shrugged unhappily.

  “You see. And the sickening thing is that I thought by giving Karen back the stock, now, I could avoid . . . the kind of publicity that would hurt father.”

  She closed her eyes and sat there, rocking her head from side to side against the shutter panel.

  “—Who’d ever have thought anything so horrible as this could happen!” she whispered wretchedly.

  “It’s ghastly,” I said. Downstairs I heard the front door close. Jerry moved her head to look out, and caught her breath sharply. I saw her eyes move along the street, following slow steps crunching in the snow.

  “It’s Dad,” she said. “—What’s he going to the Doyles’ for?”

  The alarm in her voice almost frightened me.

  “Jerry!” I said. “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Because he mustn’t!” she said desperately. She twisted around, her knees on the window seat, and tugged at the heavy window. It was too late. I’d gone over to her, and I could see the Doyles’ beautiful white front door open and the Judge’s tall figure disappear inside before it closed again.

  Jerry flew out into the hall.

  “Sandy!” she called. “Sandy!”

  Old William came up the stairs in a minute,

  “He done gone out, Miss Jer’my. He say to tell you he gone to th’ nation’s capital. He didn’t say wheah he was goin’.”

  Jerry came back, her face quite pale. I saw her slim body in the dark-brown wool frock that fitted tightly up to the base of her slender throat stiffen abruptly and draw back from the window. I looked out just as she pulled the glass curtain across it and saw Roger Doyle come out of the house across the street. He ran down the pointed steps, hesitated, and crossed the street.

  I looked at Jerry. The golden streaks in her eyes were almost obliterated. I heard Roger’s quick steps on the stones, arid the doorbell ring.

  “Go down, please, Grace, and tell him no one’s home,” Jerry said. Her voice was so calm and deadly that I started in spite of myself.

  “Why, darling?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask why, Grace—please! Just go and tell him, if you don’t mind.”

  William’s voice came up the stairs.

  “ ‘Deed, Mr. Roger, come in. Miss Jer’my’ll be mighty glad t’ see you. Mr. Sandy, he’s done went.”

  Jerry looked at me. “Please, Grace! I can’t see him, really!”

  I went downstairs. Roger was standing in the hall, looking up eagerly. His face changed instantly when he saw it was only me. A look of complete despair came over it.

  “I’ve got to see Jerry, Grace,” he said.

  He followed me into the parlor where I’d met his aunt that day. “Won’t you tell her?”

  “Look, Roger,” I said. “Jerry doesn’t want to see you. She hasn’t told me why, but I think I know. You must know too. So go away. If you have any explanations—and I hope a lot you’ve got one—write her a letter. I’ll see she gets it.”

  He stared at me so blankly that I could hardly believe my eyes. I knew by now, of course, that his father and his aunt would have been marvellous on the stage, but I hadn’t realized he took after them. Then I thought perhaps I ought to have known it last night, when I saw him come whistling down from the taxi, and talking so cordially to Judge Candler after supper. I found my blood pressure rising a little. And Roger, who after all has more Irish in him than I have, flushed hotly.

  “Look here, Grace,” he blurted out angrily; “Jerry knows I didn’t give a damn about Karen!”

  I must admit that while that wouldn’t have surprised me the day before, it did now. After all, and in spite of his racked avowal to Jerry in my sitting room, his father had at least said in effect that he was engaged to Karen. I suppose too that Sandy and Jerry’s interpretation of his interview with the man with the plastered face had probably colored my belief in his sincerity.

  “I . . . thought,” I began.

  “Whatever you thought, Grace,” he interrupted, “Jerry knows better. My God, I spent most of yesterday morning telling her so.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then why did your father practically announce your engagement to Karen here last night?”

  I was telling myself all this time that I must be careful. A girl had been murdered half a block away less than twelve hours ago. I was telling myself also that Jerry’s instincts were better than mine here: she knew more of what had gone on than I did, and it was her life that was involved, not mine.

  “If he did, he was cockeyed,” Roger said coolly.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I said. “I only know that Jerry’s terribly upset and fearfully distressed by something that I do know happened, and that you’re concerned with. That’s probably more than I ought to say. You can take it or leave it.”

  His face hardened.

  “You wouldn’t be accusing me of murdering Karen, would you, Grace?”

  “Murdering?” I said. “I thought Captain Fox said she’d commi
tted suicide.”

  He flushed darkly.

  “You didn’t think that when you called Colonel Primrose in.”

  “Colonel Primrose has gone home hours ago,” I said.

  “Then what’s he doing down at the police station in Fairfax Street right now?” he demanded curtly.

  11

  I didn’t go back upstairs immediately. I was suffering from an acute attack of the common female malady of pique . . . or perhaps it should simply be called deflated ego. After Roger had gone, hurt apparently, certainly very angry—and chiefly at me—I wandered about the shabby lovely old drawing room. The blue walls were hung with Candlers—British in red with powdered hair, Colonial in a blue and buff without. I kept seeing bits of Sandy in their dim ageless faces, and in the lovely lady with Titian hair piled high in shining curls, her liquid eyes flecked with gold, her low-cut Empire gown revealing the swelling curves of her bosom, I could see the girl upstairs twenty pounds plumper. It was the curled definitely Mona Lisa smile tucked away in the corner of her ripe mouth that fascinated me. Whether nature or the long-forgotten painter had given her that Borgia look I had no way of knowing. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it if everybody hadn’t been whispering “Murder!”

  Of course nobody was, actually. The house was like a frozen tomb. I moved away and examined the little pair of water colors hanging beside the door. One was the ruins of Washington’s grist mill, now restored, near Mt. Vernon. The other was a catboat, the Isabel D. They were both signed “P.C.” I’d never, somehow, thought of Judge Candler as a water colorist, and I’m sure he’s a much better jurist—at least I hope so. I glanced back at the lady over the mantel, and started violently. Mrs. Harris was rubbing against my ankles.

  “Look, cat,” I said. “Somebody’s got to put a bell on you—you’ll have us all, including me, in the madhouse.”

  She apparently understood, because she raised her tail like an offended banner and stalked back toward the kitchen. I stalked upstairs. There was one thing at least, I thought: I wouldn’t have to give Colonel Primrose the minor satisfaction of calling him back. He was still there . . . like a cockle burr in a spaniel’s tail feathers.