False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  “You don’t actually think,” I demanded heatedly, “that Roger sent that man after you and Jerry!”

  I was wondering, perfectly coldly inside of me, why—as Sergeant Buck would put it—I had to stick my neck out at somebody else’s funeral, and least of all Roger Doyle’s. Except of course that it was Jerry’s too.

  “It’s absurd,” I said. “After all, he’s a friend——”

  “Oh yes?” Sandy said. “Then we’ll take nothing but enemies, thanks. Fried, if you’ve got ’em.”

  I gave up. “Very well, angel,” I said. “But allow me to add that I think you’re being a stubborn idiot—first class, front row.”

  He lighted a cigarette and shied the match in the empty fireplace, glowering like an angry bulldog.

  Jerry tossed back her burnished head.

  “Oh, Sandy, maybe . . . maybe she’s right! Maybe he wasn’t——”

  He cut in shortly. “Okay. I know you’re in love with the guy—have been since you were seven. All right, go ahead. Stick up for him. But don’t come bawling back to me the next time you get it in the neck.”

  If I hadn’t known he was her brother I’d have been more upset than I was. The taped knuckles on his hand denied practically all of it.

  Jerry was up like a flash, her eyes sparking fire.

  “What if I am in love with him!” she cried hotly. “It’s my affair, isn’t it? It doesn’t hurt you!”

  Sandy stared at her silently for a moment. Then he got up, took a quick step on the worn old bearskin rug and put his enormous long arms around her shoulders. “There, there!” he mumbled. “I’m a dirty hound. I didn’t mean it. I just don’t want it to hurt you, honey.”

  She clung to him a moment, her head buried in his arms, and pushed him away.

  “I know it,” she said. She hunted for a handkerchief and took his, and stood blinking back the tears. “It’s just that if . . . if it wasn’t as bad as it looks, it would——”

  “Why in heaven’s name don’t you ask him what it’s all about?” I demanded. “It’s so simple.”

  That was a mistake. They both stiffened like the couple of red-haired proud young Tartars that they were. It was the old clan against the world. Roger had hurt them, sweet reasonableness was no part of the code. They’d rather hurt themselves than have Roger know how deeply he’d hurt them.

  “Or see the man whose skull you cracked,” I went on stubbornly. “He’ll probably be delighted to talk if you can get him out on a country road.”

  I was definitely shocked, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, to hear myself talking so exactly like Sergeant Buck.

  “Yeah,” Sandy said. “But he’s skipped. I ran him down this morning. Your taxi driver took him to a hotel on Vermont Avenue. I went around with my hand in my pocket and said I was the guy whose car hit him. They said he left at nine this morning and came back in a hurry and checked out. He’d registered as Samuel Smith of New York City—name printed in block letters.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Jerry touched my arm lightly. “Look!” she whispered. She was staring out through the curtains, her breath coming quickly between her parted lips. I turned. Across the street, standing in the handsome doorway of the original Candler house, was its present owner and occupant, Philander Doyle. He was speeding the parting guests with a large expansiveness that would have been a pleasure to watch if the parting guests had been anybody other than Colonel Primrose and his guard, philosopher and friend, Sergeant Phineas T. Buck.

  I looked at Jerry. Her face was pale, her hand through my wool sleeve was icy cold.

  Sandy’s low whistle went shivering through the dead branches of my heart, making them tremble a little.

  “Grace,” he said abruptly,—“is this bird Primrose as good as they say he is?”

  “He’s better,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound as depressed or as resigned as I know I did. Then I remembered I hadn’t told them all I’d learned.

  “He’s figured out, for instance, that whoever”—I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘Murdered’—“whoever it was last night, had it all planned so that the oil burner would come on at six this morning, when the house was full of gas, and blow the whole thing to bits.”

  They sat looking at me, their faces as blank as stone walls . . . and I suddenly remembered something else; what I’d heard through the flimsy wall of the tiny closet. I moistened my lips with a paralyzed tongue and forced myself to look away out the window.

  Colonel Primrose and his sergeant were crossing the street directly below us.

  “How . . . how does he know, Grace?” Jerry breathed, so softly that if my head hadn’t been so close to hers I should never have heard her.

  “The chronometer was set to go off at twelve and come on at six,” I said. “I suppose he figures that if she planned to sleep till noon, as she’d written the maid, she wouldn’t have had it go on much before.”

  She nodded. “She was terribly thrifty about a lot of things. She never had it on before eleven.”

  “Captain Fox turned the power switch off just three minutes to six,” I said. I thought there was no use stopping now I’d begun. “It almost blew him and everybody around there to kingdom come.”

  We heard the heavy tread of feet on the steps outside and the doorbell far off in William’s kitchen tinkle pleasantly.

  “Well, well!” Sandy said grimly. He drew a deep breath. The telephone on the table by the bed buzzed loudly—urgently, it sounded to me, in spite of the fact that I know they’re quite impersonal.

  Sandy picked it up. “Just a minute,” he said. “It’s for you, Grace.”

  I took it. A cool aloof voice came from the other end—across the street.

  “My dear . . . wasn’t this the afternoon you were to have tea with me? Surely I haven’t made a mistake? It’s all ready and waiting. My brother will be so disappointed . . .”

  I glanced at Jerry.

  “I must have misunderstood, Miss Doyle,” I said. “I’ll be right along.”

  I put the phone down.

  “I’m going to have tea with Miss Isabel,” I said.

  Jerry’s eyes kindled.

  “Maybe I can glean a little news from the trenches.—Any message for Roger?”

  She shook her head. “Be careful, Grace!” she cried. I went out thinking she’d meant to be careful what I said to Roger. I’d got half-way down the stairs before I realized that that wasn’t what she’d meant at all.

  I crossed the hall. The library doors were closed. Colonel Primrose’s overcoat and hat lay on the needlepoint bench, Sergeant Buck’s hat and neatly folded coat were laid underneath the bench on the floor. It’s amazing how rank will stick.

  14

  It was the great Philander Doyle himself who opened the handsome white door of the old Candler house. He took my hand in one of his and laid the other over it, patting it once or twice as if I were some way in a particularly bad spot and needed comforting. I suppose it was sort of the bedside manner of a lawyer whose most lucrative practice had once been divorce and alimony and breach of promise and little women who thought they’d had a rotten deal and wanted to cash in on it. Or such, at least, was the reputation that still clung to Philander Doyle like the vaguely malodorous miasma that rises from a cellar that isn’t aired very frequently.

  Of course, that might be really awfully unfair and prejudiced, I thought. Maybe it was just that Philander Doyle had from the beginning had an uncanny flair for publicity. Like some doctors who can’t cure a stomach ache without making the front page, Philander Doyle couldn’t take a case without its becoming instantly a cause célèbre. Perhaps, like the doctors who grub away doing the hard jobs without even getting paid for them, many lawyers looked askance at Philander Doyle as a grand tour de force. But many a woman whose mind was a complete blank while she filled her unfortunate husband’s hide with lead from a pearl-handled revolver she just happened to have in her hand counted heavily on Philander Doyle. People actually
said if she hadn’t known she could count on him she wouldn’t have bought the gun. However, be that as it may, he’d prospered under it, arid the broad lovely rooms of the house that the Candlers had once owned showed it.

  There wasn’t a stick of mahogany or satinwood, from the Chippendale card table with the three feathers of a Prince of Wales inlaid in hollywood in its rich waxed surface to the petitpoint footstool with a box of candied cherries from the corner tea store on it in front of the gleaming old silvered fireirons, that any museum wouldn’t have been delighted to have. The plump cupids in lovely pale pink and green and grey on the Aubusson carpet bore aloft the initials of a Queen of France in their rosy fingers. The Chinese Chippendale mirror above the Ming garniture on the carved roses of the pearwood mantel reflected the rainbow sparks from the Waterford lustre and the elaborately simple broken pediment of the doorway I was entering, with its carved rosettes and center pineapple. On the panelled walls hung a Watteau and a Reynolds, and a lovely Allan Ramsay of George III in wig and ermine so soft you could feel its warmth. On a low Chippendale table in front of the fire a silver tea service, so simple and lovely that I knew it must be early Baltimore, was set out on a broad balcony tray that made me simply green with covetousness.

  Philander Doyle took my coat. I heard that awful key in my pocket clump against the Philadelphia Chippendale chair by the door.

  “Sounds as if you’re in the old iron trade, Mrs. Latham,” he boomed, smiling. I tried to laugh, but I’m afraid I wasn’t particularly convincing, because I saw something move behind his warm blue eyes that were certainly blue but not awfully warm, when you stopped to think about them. But it was only for a fraction of an instant.

  “Sit here, Mrs. Latham. My sister will be down in a minute,” he said cordially. “Let’s not wait for her. She’s just as apt to start mooning about upstairs and forget all about us as not.”

  He laughed with good-humored resignation, as if Miss Isabel and her vagaries were a sort of amusing cross he had to bear.

  “You pour, will you? It’s one of the little compensations of life, you know.”

  I didn’t, but I sat down at the tea table and said, brightly, “Cream or lemon, Mr. Doyle?”

  As he took the priceless Crown Derby teacup and balanced it precariously on his crossed enormous knee, his face changed like the decoration of a theatre from the mask of comedy to the mask of tragedy.

  “It’s pitiful about poor little Karen,” he said slowly. And he made it sound so. I found myself suddenly rather moist-eyed, which I’d not been before, not even when I sat in her tiny glass house.

  “I understand from my good friend Colonel Primrose that there’s a question, not of how, but of—shall I say—the circumstances, of her death,” he said. He hadn’t looked at me. His soft blue eyes were fixed on the rosy cupids serving the French queen in the tapestry carpet.

  “I must not drop one of these teacups” I thought. As I put down the one I had in my hand, the thin silver spoon clattered musically against the lovely porcelain.

  “But I’m afraid our police methods are too clumsy to be of much use,” he went on, as if he hadn’t noticed. After a moment’s silence, he said, “Karen was almost a daughter to me. I thought I was in love with her mother once. Not very seriously, because she already happened to be married to Lunt.”

  A dreamy tender smile of lost young love moved his lips nevertheless.

  “Karen was like her—especially that last night.”

  I couldn’t make out whether he meant the last night he’d seen her mother, or just last night when he’d seen Karen, until he said,—“With her curls on top of her exquisite little head, and that velvet gown. I kept thinking I must be dreaming. —And I was, I’m afraid, Mrs. Latham.”

  He looked at me and smiled—a whimsical kind of a smile that said, “Don’t be too hard on a foolish old man, my dear.”

  “Colonel Primrose tells me you’re an old friend of his,” he went on.

  I thought, “Ah—Colonel Primrose staking out signs to save my neck.” I said, “Yes, I’ve known him a long time”—which wasn’t true but seemed a justifiable stretching of a point under the circumstances.

  Philander Doyle’s eyes were fixed on me now with the utmost friendliness and even affection.

  “I hope you’re planning to stay on with little Jeremy until this . . . is over. Colonel Primrose said he was trying to persuade you to.”

  “The beast,” I thought. I realized instantly that the Colonel was counting on me—as usual—as a decoy duck, and my safety was all a blind. Which wasn’t a pun mixed with a metaphor, but just bitter truth.

  “It may be a cruel thing to say, Mrs. Latham,” Philander Doyle remarked, so telepathic that I blinked until he went on. “But my deepest concern in this terrible business is for my old friends across the street.”

  He looked at me gravely.

  “You’re a woman, my dear, and women have a God-given sense that men never approximate in this world. I want to help Jeremy. I believe the way I can help best is by you and I working together to keep our official friends from riding too roughshod. I’m a lawyer, you’re a woman. Together, Mrs. Latham, we can do it.”

  For a moment I hesitated. The room, the tea, the man himself were so beguiling. Then I said, “I don’t think Colonel Primrose would ride roughshod over anyone,” which was a blatant lie. He’d ride roughshod over his own grandmother if the necessity arose, and I knew it only too well.

  “I know,” Mr. Doyle said. “Loyalty to one’s friends is heaven’s greatest boon. But after all, John Primrose is a policeman. His duty and yours and mine are very different things. You know that, don’t you? I knew you did. A woman knows from her cradle that her part in life is defending the weak from the strong, protecting the defenseless from the iron hand of the blind goddess. It’s something that not the law but the practice of the law has taught me, Mrs. Latham.”

  “You aren’t implying that Jerry, or one of the other Candlers, did this awful thing—or that if they did they’re to go unpunished, are you, Mr. Doyle?” I asked. I was trying desperately to shake his siren’s song out of my ears before I said too much.

  “To the first, No—on my soul, No!” he said earnestly. “To the second—Yes. A million times Yes, Mrs. Latham.”

  Rich passion rose in his fabulous voice.

  “Murder is something no man understands. How are we to judge what has gone before . . .? There are times no one would hesitate to take human life—if our homes, if everything we hold dear, were threatened. If your children were threatened, Mrs. Latham, you wouldn’t stop and ponder any Critique of Pure Reason, any Ethic of Aristotle. You’d act. And what policeman has a right to say, ‘She’s got to hang by the neck until she’s dead’?”

  “Oh dear!” I thought. I could quite see myself shivering in a jury box, saying desperately, “Why shouldn’t the little woman slay her husband?”

  He smiled. “That’s why I’m asking you . . . as a friend of my friends.”

  He held out his big warm hand.

  “Is it a bargain, Mrs. Latham? You and I versus the State?”

  My hand in his was cold as ice. He gave it back to me.

  “The first thing we’ve got to know, then,” he went on confidently, “is how much the police know—or think they know. I saw you over there after lunch.”

  I poured myself another cup of tea, feeling like a rabbit under a snow-covered hedge with a large, apparently quite friendly hound trying to coax me out. I knew I was a fool even to move a whisker, but I just couldn’t sit and say nothing.

  “They didn’t let me in on much,” I said. “Except that all Karen’s plans for the next day were written down, so they decided she couldn’t have been thinking of not being there herself.”

  He nodded.

  “Karen, my dear Mrs. Latham,” he said with a faintly ironic smile, “was the last person in the world to take her own life. I’ve known a good many suicides in my day. They killed themselves when they were at the b
ottom of the heap—not on top of it. Last night Karen was walking on air. She hadn’t an idea Jerry would quietly hand over the stock. She thought she was going to have to make a fight for it. Moreover, if she’d ever contemplated suicide, it would have been the quintessence of the dramatic. She wouldn’t have gone to any elaborate—if simple—arrangement to blow herself to bits, possibly . . . or risk burning herself to death if a spark from the electric icebox happened to ignite the gas before there was enough of it to blow up.”

  I said to myself, “Slowly, my girl.” To Mr. Doyle I said, “That was . . . odd, wasn’t it. I suppose it may have occurred to Captain Fox too.”

  “You mean to Primrose. I’m afraid Fox has too much faith in human nature,” he said. “In fact, I must say it’s unfortunate Primrose happened in. I understand he was on his way to Norfolk and heard it on his radio.”

  “That’s what he told Captain Fox,” I replied, and added—thinking he might as well have a token of my entire frankness, especially as he already knew it in some way—”actually he was just trying to save me. I telephoned him.”

  “You, Mrs, Latham?”

  Philander Doyle raised his dramatic eyebrows ever so faintly and shook his head gravely. “Then it’s doubly your duty to help save the pieces. Why, may I ask, did you ever do it, my dear young woman?”

  I put down my teacup. I knew perfectly well that somehow I had to get away. I had less of a chance than if I actually were the rabbit under the hedge. I couldn’t dig myself a hole in the floor to escape through. Whatever I said, not knowing how much he knew, would be just the wrong thing. But I didn’t know how to get out the door into the dark street without letting him see I was terrified and utterly unequal to the combat.

  Just then the front door burst open. Mr. Doyle looked up sharply. Roger Doyle was standing in the doorway under the carved broken pediment set with the white wood pineapple. His face was white and his eyes stormy.

  “Dad!” he said. Then, as he saw me, his lips tightened to a line in his hard-set face. He gave me a curt nod and turned to his father again.