by Leslie Ford
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“And Sandy?”
“He felt the same way about it,” Jerry said quietly. “After all, we’d sacrificed a lot ourselves—if that doesn’t sound too noble, because we weren’t ever that. We used to gripe horribly to ourselves about what we’d do if it weren’t for Briar Hill.”
She smiled suddenly, and some way the fact that she could made the “gripe” not terribly important.
“Anyway, I’d got my back up, and I went to see Mr. Doyle. He said he thought I was perfectly right. If Father insisted, and he would insist—he knew him well enough to know that—he’d have to sign over Billy’s rights, but he felt it was my duty to keep Father from making an unselfish fool of himself. After all, the Lunts had run through a big fortune in a few years, and if my father had sold the stock to any broker Karen couldn’t have gone around and got it back. He said he was glad there was one Candler who had a vague instinct of self-preservation. What if Father got sick again and what if the next telephone pole got Sandy instead of vice versa? What would Billy do, and old William, and half a dozen ancient cousins and all the rest of it? He said everything that was exactly what I’d thought myself.”
I looked at Colonel Primrose. His sparkling black parrot’s eyes were resting very intently on her, and the expression on his usually bland countenance was not very pleasant.
“And then?” he said.
“I told Father I wouldn’t think of it.—And then, last night, I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head politely.
“Now look, my dear,” he said. “Let’s not be unreasonable. Karen Lunt was murdered last night in perfectly cold blood. I don’t think, at this moment, that you had any hand in it, and I don’t want to think it. I think Mrs. Latham will tell you that I have a lot of admiration for you. I don’t want to see all this glaring in the headlines—which it will do if Captain Fox is in duty bound to ferret out what you’re trying to hide.”
“That’s the reason I decided to give her the stock,” Jerry said quietly. “—Headlines.”
“What made you think there’d be any?”
She was silent, her little chin set, her dark eyes smoldering.
“You might as well tell him,” I said. “He’ll find it out anyway.”
She nodded after a minute.
“I didn’t go to the office yesterday morning,” she said. “I was too upset. I did go back around four. A man was waiting for me in the lobby. He followed me up in the elevator and got out with me, and said, ‘Just a minute, Miss Candler. I’ve been instructed to look into the management of Miss Karen Lunt’s estate. I think you’ll see the wisdom of returning her stock to her. It won’t look so well for your father if we have to take it to court.’ That’s all he said. He got in the elevator as it stopped on the way down. I was just stunned. Mr. Doyle had said she hadn’t a legal or moral leg to stand on, that she was just trying to get something for nothing.
She stopped again. Colonel Primrose waited, watching the smoldering anger rising in her flushed cheeks.
“I didn’t go home right away,” she said. “I went out and walked around a while, trying to . . . to cool off, I suppose. Then when I did go home Sandy came in. The same man had caught him when he was coming out of the office and said about the same thing, I guess.”
“And what did Sandy do?” Colonel Primrose asked.
She hesitated.
“I hope he beat him up?”
“He did,” Jerry said. “But we were both scared—not of him but what was behind it. We both know that if it never got to court even, where Father could go on the witness stand and explain a fight between a man in public life and his orphaned ward; it would make a grand story—especially if anyone wanted a story.”
“Especially just at this time,” Colonel Primrose put in. She looked at him gratefully, and nodded her copper head.
“We decided—Sandy and I—not to tell Father. I don’t think he’d have believed us if we had. Anyway, we were sick of the filthy business—it wasn’t worth having Dad’s name ruined. No one would ever have stopped to see that the orphaned ward living in an old stable on her guardian’s place was a lot better off than the people living in the colonial mansion with poor old William expanded into a retinue of liveried servants.”
Colonel Primrose chuckled.
“Then we were going to Karen’s for supper. I didn’t want to go, but Sandy said I had to. We didn’t know whether she was planning to serve us a summons with the soup or not. So Sandy went over early. I got dressed and went down just as Mr. Pepperday, who’s a notary, came, and Mr. Doyle as Billy’s guardian. He told Father he thought it was a mistake, and then it started all over again.”
She hesitated.
“Somehow, at home, and seeing Karen’s little house so beautifully lit up and ours so dark, I began to think I’d dreamed the man in the elevator. Just then you came in, Grace. Then I don’t know what it was. It seemed to me Mr. Doyle was sort of on the qui vive, but still I didn’t think it was anything except that he wanted to get it over with and get some food.”
She hesitated again.
“Until he made a sort of speech that I couldn’t tell about—whether it was supposed to hurt my pride and goad me into signing, or just what. And then, all of a sudden, it struck me like a flash that he really didn’t want me to sign it . . . and not because of us at all, but . . . well, I didn’t know. And then it all came back—the man, and lots of things. And I saw it—whatever it was—just as a whole set-up in which I’d acted exactly as anyone knew I’d act. So I . . . I asked Father for his pen, but before I could take it Mr. Doyle had grabbed the paper and thrown it in the fire. I knew then that that was what he’d been on edge about, that he’d been ready all the time to do just that. Only Grace’s coming had made it a little less smooth than he’d planned.”
She smoothed back her hair with one trembling hand and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“It was too late then,” she said evenly, “because Mr. Pepperday has to go to bed at eight o’clock if the heavens fall. I didn’t want to make a scene. Father, of course, hadn’t the faintest notion what was going on in my mind—or in Sandy’s and mine earlier. Then we went out. Sandy’d got worried and come back, afraid I’d gone berserk again. And then, as we went over to Karen’s house, we looked back and saw that man again—who’d spoken to me by the elevator—and he was coming out of the Doyles’.”
Colonel Primrose looked steadily at her. “Are you sure? It must have been pretty dark by that time?”
She nodded unhappily—and so did I for that matter.
“He’d got his head all bandaged up. Anyway, we both recognized him in the headlights of the taxi he was getting in.”
Colonel Primrose nodded. “Go on.”
“Well, we went to Karen’s. Sandy wanted to go back and finish the job he’d started when the man talked to him, but I wouldn’t let him.”
—No mention, of course, I thought, that he wanted to include Roger Doyle in that program. Roger might have been in Baghdad for all of us.
“I knew the minute I got inside Karen’s house that this was part of the same show. The people there—except one man I’d never seen at Karen’s before. They were exactly the sort of people that if the point came up, could hurt Father the worst, with the best intentions in the world, and for the public good—so they’d think.”
Colonel Primrose nodded again, with a scarcely perceptible sidelong glance at me.
“So in the first moment I could, when I knew everybody would have to hear, I told Karen I was giving her back her stock in the morning.”
Colonel Primrose looked steadily at her for a moment.
“And thereby,” he said, very placidly, “quietly signed her death warrant.”
She looked at him, her wide thoughtful eyes very steady.
“I’ve been wondering if I didn’t,” she said. Her voice was
leaden, as if it weighed too much to lift past her lips. “And yet I can’t figure just why. I never meant to. I was . . . well, like the boy with my finger in the dike, trying to keep it from going out, while all those people were there, trying to . . .”
She finished with a hopeless shrug of her slim shoulders. Colonel Primrose looked at her oddly. I had the sickening feeling that the analogy of the Dutch boy had been horribly unfortunate. He knew the burghers would come and relieve him. Had Jerry known death—or murder—was coming to relieve her? It was such a little step for Colonel Primrose to take . . . and I knew he was precisely the man to take it.
17
Colonel Primrose got to his feet.
“My advice to you, my dear,” he said gently, “is to go home and try to forget it. And don’t worry.”
Jerry reached for her jacket.
“I’m not worrying, about myself,” she said. “It’s just that everything I tried to keep from happening is so horribly much worse, now.”
“Not if we can prevent it,” he said quietly. He helped her on with her jacket. She went quickly out into the hall and opened the door. Colonel Primrose picked up my coat. I heard Jerry go quickly down the steps and open my car door.
“I think perhaps we may be able to get somewhere with Mr. Philander Doyle, now,” Colonel Primrose remarked. “Unless of course Buck has decided he’s a blackguard and takes matters in his own hands.”
I looked about in a perfectly involuntary movement.
“Buck? Is he here?”
Colonel Primrose smiled.
“Of course. I assumed you’d know he wouldn’t allow me in an empty house with two women.—He’s in the kitchen.”
The dog on the hearth, hearing a magic word, pricked up his ears and looked around.
“Well, I hope Mrs. Fox left the dishes,” I said, philosophically. “Did he tell you, by the way, all the things he gleaned out of old William?”
“About the foreign gennaman?”
I nodded.
“I knew that before,” he said. “I saw Mr. McClure after I talked with the judge. He’s in a state of petrifaction—about his family and his job on the one hand, and Karen on the other. He’s really knocked in a heap. I gather he was actually pretty much in love with her. That note was to him, of course. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
I’ve long ago given up allowing him the satisfaction of “Elementary, my dear Watson.” I just nodded.
“That’s how I found out about the stock business,” he went on. “Apparently Karen thought that if she got the stock back, they could get married. So did he, I imagine.”
I looked quite blank.
“No,” I said. “He thought it was dishonorable . . .”
I couldn’t stop in time, and Colonel Primrose, one hand on the door knob, looked at me, his brows lifting a little.
“I hoped I’d get something out of you, sooner or later, Mrs. Latham,” he said, very blandly. “Buck! Go out and tell Miss Candler to wait a minute, please.”
Sergeant Buck’s great granite form appeared from behind the swinging kitchen door and passed through the narrow hall with the agility of an out-sized elephant. He cast me one glance en passant, but he didn’t say anything. There was a slightly brassy flush on his dead pan, as if he’d been raiding the icebox when his chief called, and I saw him wipe his mouth vigorously with his hand as he went out the door.
“Come back here and tell me about it,” Colonel Primrose said. His voice was pleasantly suave, but I caught a faint clank of the mailed fist just the same. As a matter of fact, my concern for Geoffrey McClure had waned a good deal in my rising concern for Jerry and Sandy . . . and for Jerry and Roger. It’s hard for any American, I suppose, to see the European point of view about marriage, in spite of the enormous sense it makes. If he’d said “I love you, Karen—blast the foreign service and my family and my mouldy sisters,” I’d probably never have abandoned him as instantly as I did. But I rationalized it, of course. What, I thought, if by some chance the things William had said had a deeper significance than the mere curiosity of an Englishman about American plumbing? What if Colonel Primrose was right, that he was so entangled with Karen, and the pull from the other side was so great, that he knew that while he had an even chance to escape the gallows he hadn’t a ghost of one to escape the altar?
“Sit down, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said, most politely. “Tell me all about it.”
I sat down again.
“It’s quite simple, really,” I said. “I broke a shoulder strap when Jerry told Karen she was giving her the stock.”
“Surprised, I take it?” he said.
“No, not terribly—not at that. If you’d seen her after Mr. Doyle threw the paper in the fire you’d have known something like it was going to happen. It was just that Miss Isabel, who hadn’t seen her then, and who evidently—from what she told me today—didn’t think the stock was very important, dropped her fork and a potato ball. Somebody else picked up the fork, and I reached down too abruptly to rescue the potato ball from its niche in a purple-velvet bowknot on her skirt. As soon as people started moving about so I could get upstairs without too much publicity, I slipped up. I was in the bathroom, and that’s when I heard him saying it was dishonorable, that he adored her and what not, but he had his family and his job and his future, and so on.”
Colonel Primrose took another cigar out of his vest pocket and unwrapped its cellophane jacket. He bit the end off and sat there, looking meditatively into the fireplace.
“Yes?” I inquired politely, after I’d sat waiting three minutes by the alarm clock on top of the piano.
“I’m just trying to put it together,” he said. “I shouldn’t have thought the stock business disturbed him. That scene may have continued later.”
“He went home before we did,” I said.
“He could have come back, I suppose?”
I hadn’t thought of that. There was certainly nothing to stop him.
“Oh well,” Colonel Primrose said, “we’ll see.”
I started to get up.
“One other point, Mrs. Latham. Did Jerry, or Sandy, or you, recognize the man with the battered face?”
I shook my head.
“Sandy traced him through my taxi driver to a hotel in Vermont Street. His name was Samuel Smith in block letters from New York. He left hurriedly at ten o’clock.”
“Would the papers have had the story then, I wonder?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
He got up.
“There are several other things we’ve got to find out. The laboratory across the river, by the way, reports that Karen was pretty full of codeine. The sleeping pills upstairs are one of the barbiturates.”
I stopped halfway to the door. “You mean, she was——”
“Oh no. She was just sound asleep when the gas went on.”
I stood stock still. Gradually I became aware of myself in the hall mirror, my mouth slightly open, looking as blank as the opposite wall. Colonel Primrose’s snapping black eyes were fixed intently on my face.
“Come clean, Mrs. Latham,” he said.
“It just struck me,” I answered slowly. “She drank a big glass of milk while she was showing me her kitchen. It was on the sink on a little silver salver. She said it was her tonic and downed it like a man. She could have taken most anything in it then, without knowing it.”
He looked at me thoughtfully.
“So that she probably then sat up waiting for the cat to come in—or waiting too for the hesitant Mr. McClure—and dozed off,” he said. “Neat, if you ask me.”
We went on out and down the steps and across to my car. Sergeant Buck, having delivered his message apparently, was doing sentry up and down the block. Hearing the door close he came back, his enormous square bulk shrinking a little as the headlights of my car reduced his looming wooden figure to reality.
“Good night,” Colonel Primrose said through the window. “Tell your brother, Miss Jerry,
that I’ll be around to see him in the morning.”
I switched on the motor. My tires whirred around in the icy shallow gutter, gripped finally, and we moved off.
“Let’s go somewhere and get a cup of coffee,” Jerry said, her voice muffled there in the dark. “We won’t see anybody we know at Pete’s in Royal Street.”
That wasn’t, as it turned out, precisely the case. We went in there and sat at a clean white-enamelled-top table in a golden-oak booth festooned with fly-specked paper flowers, with paper napkins in a patent container and a sugar bowl that picked up a lump as you raised the lid, and ordered coffee. The Greek proprietor, apparently an old friend of Jerry’s, brought it himself.
“How’s the Judge, ma’am?” he inquired.
“Fine, thanks,” Jerry smiled wanly. “How’re the youngsters?”
“Okay,” he beamed. “Okay. My little kid in school now. Doin’ fine.”
He went back behind the counter, where the mirrored wall was stocked with cartons of appalling cakes and pies and festooned packages of salted nuts.
Jerry, looking like a pale ghost under the are lights glaring overhead, sat staring down at her coffee cup, watching the cream form a tight film on the top. After a moment she took her spoon, skimmed it off slowly, looked at it and put it down on the table.
“Is that . . . Roger?” I inquired.
She looked up at me, a twisted little smile on her lips.
“As far as I’m concerned, I guess.”
“What is it now?” I asked, not as patiently as I might have.
“Nothing. It’s just that it all came to me while I was talking to Colonel Primrose. And afterwards, sitting out there in the dark in the car.”
“Not, I trust, that Roger had any hand in all this,” I said.
She picked up the thick cup, sipped at it and put it down again.