False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  I said, “Probably,” and pushed open my door. Jerry was gone. I turned back to Sandy.

  “Look, darling,” I said. “—Whatever you think of Roger Doyle, Jerry’s head over heels in love with him. It doesn’t matter to her, at the moment, if he’s one of Miss Isabel’s lepers, or is hanged, drawn and quartered in the market place tomorrow. She loves him . . . and that’s the kind of girl she is. Now for heaven’s sake quit chucking your weight about, and try to give her some sort of break!”

  He stood there, glowering and resentful, his ugly red-thatched face a field of the most conflicting emotions. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  “Okay, lady.”

  He turned and went along the hall. I saw him stop a moment, tap on her door and push it open. I heard him say “Come on, snap out of it, honey chile,” as the door closed.

  The tall clock in the entrance hall of the house across the street struck one as the maid opened the door.

  “Mr. Doyle’s in the library, miss,” she said, taking my coat and galoshes. She pointed to the polished mahogany door at the end of the handsome panelled hall. It opened as I approached and Philander Doyle held out his big warm hand, booming cordially.

  “This is a pleasure, my dear young lady. Come in. Will you have a cocktail or sherry?”

  “Sherry, thanks,” I said. He took a crystal decanter off the lowboy by the door and poured a glass of pale amber liquid. I sat down in a green leather Williamsburg wing chair by the fire. Mr. Doyle crossed the deep-piled Sarouk rug and handed the glass to me, his twinkling blue eyes on mine.

  Mr. Philander Doyle’s library, I reflected, was the kind of place I’d give my head to have, if I didn’t also have to have the neat rows of elegantly matched, handsomely bound, gold-tooled sets that I’m sure no one ever took down except to dust. Their color, however, I had to admit, was perfect, in their mahogany cases reaching almost to the high ceiling. In the carved overmantel hung a Trumbull of the first Chief Justice, flanked by a pair of heavy silver candlesticks that looked as if they’d come from the Hearst Collection. At one side of the square room, facing the door, so that when he sat there Philander Doyle was against a magnificently panelled wall under a fur-collared portrait of Thomas Jefferson, was a broad walnut desk. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t, in one way or another, a collector’s piece, from the Queen Anne walnut chairs to the heavy gold curtains looped up at windows, overlooking the walled garden that had at one time stretched down to the Candlers’ tobacco warehouse and wharf on the Potomac.

  Mr. Doyle’s imposing bulk moved back across the heavenly wines and blues and yellows of the old rug to the door. He smiled at me as he turned the big key in the shining brass lock.

  “Privacy, my dear lady, is practically the only thing in the world you can’t buy,” he said. “Certainly not in this house.”

  He came back and sat down behind his desk, and drew up another chair. “You’re too far away,” he said, waving to it.

  I came over and sat down, putting my glass on the desk.

  He leaned back and drew open a long drawer in front of him. I started a little in spite of myself. Besides the papers in it were two things, one of which I certainly shouldn’t have expected to see there. It was a small cylindrical green bottle about an inch in diameter and three inches long, with a black composition screw cap. It was empty . . . but it had typed on its white label “Codeine—one or two tablets when necessary.” Below that was the familiar printed druggist’s label: “Not to be refilled without prescription.”

  The other object I wasn’t so surprised at, or so interested in, except as an indication of the kind of shadow a man with Philander Doyle’s clientele must constantly walk in. It was a small blue-steel revolver, and it had an ugly cylinder fixed to its muzzle that even I, knowing as little of firearms as I do, recognized must be a silencer. After all, Colonel Primrose hadn’t taken me through Mr. Hoover’s museum at the Department of Justice quite for nothing.

  Mr. Doyle shuffled it off a little sheaf of papers, took them out, and closed the drawer.

  “Now then,” he remarked, putting them on the green-tooled leather blotting pad in front of him. “I was talking to your friend the Colonel last night. He told me a number of things that I found extraordinarily interesting.”

  I glanced at the papers on the pad. At the top of the top one was written in large dramatic hand, “Judge Candler.” Below it I could see five sub-headings. The first, which was the only one I had a chance to see, said one word: “Motive.”

  I picked up my glass and took the last sip of smooth dry wine, and set it down again. I tried to keep my breath from coming more rapidly as I wondered if Mr. Philander Doyle’s intentions weren’t rapidly becoming plain.

  “Planning to hang Judge Candler?” I asked, knowing he knew I must have seen it, and thinking he probably had wanted me to.

  “No—not hang him,” he said coolly. “Not by the neck, at least.”

  “You don’t really like him at all, do you?” I said, as casually as I could.

  He looked at me, a curious smile in his big very handsome face.

  “You know, it’s an odd thing, Mrs. Latham,” he replied slowly—“—and interesting too . . . to me, anyway, knowing people as I do, and not having many illusions, I’m afraid, about Homo sapiens, and none at all about Philander Doyle.—But Peyton Candler has had me down since the day I first met him.”

  He was looking very steadily at me, across the corner of the walnut desk, something moving curiously in those extraordinary and—I saw now—very cold blue eyes.

  “He was five, and I was six. He had on a white broadcloth sailor suit and a straw hat. I had on a ragged cap and a pair of somebody’s cast-off knickerbockers with the knee torn out and the seat patched. He was with a colored nurse on his way to Sunday school. I was with my gang of tunnel town toughs on my way to wash the glasses in my father’s saloon on lower King Street. I knocked him and his white suit and his sailor hat into a mud puddle. He got up. He didn’t cry; he picked up his hat and tried to brush the mud out of his eyes, and went back home and got cleaned up and went on to Sunday school. I stood looking after him a minute. Then I chased the gang home and went to the saloon, knowing I’d been licked. That’s the whole story.”

  I looked at him, sitting there in his fabulous room, one of the most successful men in the world in his field, and took a deep breath.

  “In college I had all the money I needed,” he went on, with the most good-humored urbanity. “He didn’t have a nickel. He belonged to the best clubs—I didn’t. I had the better brain. I gave the valedictory. He made whatever oration it was by popular vote. Girls took everything I gave them, and they’d cut a date with me to go for a walk and eat a bag of peanuts with him. Then my turn came. He fell in love, and I double-crossed him . . . and then he married the only girl, not that I’d been in love with, but that I wanted to marry. I made money hand over fist, he didn’t have enough to keep the rain out of the attic—and the first thing I knew he was a judge in the state’s highest court. I was invited to talk to conventions in Atlantic City, he addressed the bar associations. I had a son; he had two sons and a daughter and Karen. I came back here. I bought his old family home and his antique furniture, and the Walpole Club dined across the street. I pay the best wages in town, and there isn’t a nigger who wouldn’t leave me and go work for him for nothing. Today a chorus girl murders an angel and runs to me, and the Sunday supplements have my picture plastered all over them . . . and when they look for a man in Washington they go to Peyton Candler.”

  He looked at me with a smile compounded of whimsical and ironic deprecation.

  “And the truth is, Mrs. Latham, that I can’t take it.”

  “I see,” I said. “Is that why you . . . persuaded poor Karen to sue him for her stock?”

  “Poor Karen, as you call her, couldn’t take it either,” he said pleasantly.

  “Did she know why she was doing it?”

  He looked at me as if a
little surprised at my innocence.

  “She was doing it for a good fat roll, my dear—so she could marry her Englishman,” he said. “—She didn’t really believe Jerry’d give the stock up, and she knew she hadn’t any legal grounds for demanding it.”

  “And . . . when Jerry decided to give it Up, she double-crossed you, I suppose?”

  “I’m afraid she . . . would have,” he answered.

  “But surely, even if you’d sued . . .”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to sue. I was to . . .”

  He stopped, looking steadily at me again.

  “—I was to defend.”

  I stared at him in complete horror, utterly staggered. The opportunity he’d have had, I thought!

  “And we’d have won, obviously. But the . . .”

  He shrugged his shoulders, his blue eyes twinkling very engagingly.

  “The damage would have been done?” I said.

  He laughed.

  I sat there, just staring at him for a moment. Then I looked down at the paper in front of him. “And now that that’s failed?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve lost again,” he said. There was a kind of frank expansive charm in his whole manner. “You see, my dear Mrs. Latham, I have just one moral principle—never deceive yourself. I’ve watched Philander Doyle year after year, literally appalled at what is and has been the motivating force in everything he’s done since the Sunday morning he shoved Peyton Candler in his white monkey suit in the mud in Cameron Street.—Unto thine own self be true, Mrs. Latham . . . and thou canst then be false to any man.”

  I suppose it shows a definite weakening of my own moral fibre that I didn’t get up, excoriate Mr. Philander Doyle with indignant wrath and sail out. But I didn’t. I was completely fascinated, and when, just then, the luncheon gong sounded musically through the house, I was quite ready and even eager to go and eat his tainted food.

  He got up, went to the door and unlocked it. I saw, behind him against the bookshelves, a delicate wrought-iron standard holding a double panel of glass in which was framed a sheet of an old yellow crumble-edged newspaper.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He smiled. “That, my dear lady, is just more of the same.”

  I looked as puzzled, I suppose, as I felt. He stepped aside and pulled it out where I could read it. It was the Alexandria Gazette for November, 1798, and it had nothing in it that I could see but lists of sales of Negroes and ship ladings from the mother country. Then I saw a marked paragraph. It was headed “Sheriff’s Sale.”

  “By virtue of the writ of fieri facias issued for the Court of Common Pleas for the County of Fairfax directed and delivered to me, I have levied and taken the goods and chattels and tenements of Ramsay Candler which I shall expose to sale as the law directs on Saturday the 10th day of February at 10 o’clock in the forenoon in the town of Alexandria. December 10th 1798. John P. Doyle, Sheriff.”

  I stared at it, and then at Philander Doyle. I’d known, of course, that there were a lot of Irish in early Alexandria, but I hadn’t known . . .

  As he laughed his great booming laugh my blood fairly curdled.

  “A cavalier gentleman’s debts of honor, Mrs. Latham. . . . Oddly enough, I don’t think any of the Candlers have ever been particularly amused by that.”

  “It is odd, isn’t it?” I said.

  He laughed again. “What about some lunch?”

  He took my elbow in his warm big hand. I really needed steering. The cumulative effect of his urbanity, covering, as it had covered for years, his hatred and envy of the man across the street, literally staggered me.

  We crossed the hall to the elegantly appointed dining room where the suddenly gay winter sun shone on the small center portion of a gorgeous Chippendale banquet table. The end pieces were against the panelled walls on either side of the door, two vast silver punch bowls filled with yellow mimosa on their waxed and polished tops. The table was set for four. As we stood there the slim colored girl in burgundy silk uniform and frilled coffee-dipped cap and apron came in with a tall silver pitcher and stood waiting in the doorway.

  “Is my sister coming down?” Mr. Doyle said.

  “Yes, of course, my dear.” Miss Isabel’s voice floated down the stairway outside, and then she came in, in a green rig too antiquated even for Red Cross flood relief. “My dear—this is so nice! I do hope I’m not late, Philander.”

  Her brother, who I thought had stared a little in spite of himself as she came in, smiled affectionately.

  “No later than usual, Isabel.—Where’s Roger?”

  “Oh,” Miss Isabel said. “Didn’t Rosie tell you?—Or didn’t I tell Rosie?” she added vaguely. “Captain Fox called him up. He’s down at the police station.”

  Philander Doyle’s polished urbanity disappeared so abruptly that I caught my breath.

  “What for, Isabel?” he demanded curtly. “For God’s sake, try to pull yourself together! When did he go?”

  “Oh, it’s been half an hour, anyway . . . or maybe that was when a man named Smith called. He wanted to talk to you. Anyway, my dear, he left. I mean Roger left, or rather Mr. Smith. And said not to worry you.”

  Her brother’s hand gripped the ladder back of the leather upholstered Chippendale chair.

  “For God’s sake, Isabel!” he began angrily. He controlled himself and broke off, as I just stared openly at him. “Ring the bell!” he ordered curtly.

  Miss Isabel fished around with her foot under the table and found it at last. The maid appeared in the doorway.

  “Have the boy get my car over here, Rosie,” Mr. Doyle said. “As quick as possible. Tell him I mean quick!”

  She ran out.

  “I think you’re being absurd, dear,” Miss Isabel said, still in her coolly detached tones. “You know your heart can’t stand these violent scenes, and your soup’s getting stone cold.”

  Mr. Doyle gave her one glance and turned to me, more disturbed than I could ever have imagined he could be.

  “Excuse me, please, Mrs. Latham,” he said shortly, and hurried out of the room.

  “Don’t forget your overcoat,” Miss Isabel called. The front door slammed immediately afterward, so violently that the ice in the glasses clinked, and the silver handle-rings of the punch bowls. Miss Isabel took a sip of her soup and put down her spoon.

  “I’m sure Roger has nothing to fear from the police,” she remarked. “Just because my brother spends most of his time with people he says the police use rubber hose on, he thinks it can happen in a civilized community. Please, my dear—your soup.”

  I picked up my spoon. It clattered against the rim of the fine porcelain in spite of all the control I was trying to exercise.

  “Are you going to the services for Karen?” she asked sociably.

  “I’d rather not. It depends on Jerry,” I said.

  “Jerry’s a very sweet girl, I’ve always thought,” she observed. “Poor Karen. 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. Don’t you?”

  “Unless we could stop it by knowing,” I said.

  “Oh, of course,” she replied vaguely.

  “Did you really want Roger to marry her, Miss Doyle?” I asked.

  She looked at me with her aloof slightly raised eyebrow manner and said, “Well, of course, you know Karen was a very worldly woman. I think perhaps she’d have been very good for Roger . . . for a while. I don’t, of course, think divorce is the most pleasant thing in the world. But my brother could have arranged it without any difficulty, and he’s always paid very liberally for Roger’s education. I think it would have been . . . well, perhaps experience is the word I’m looking for.”

  It seemed to me perhaps a very worldly view of marriage. I think that was the word I was looking for.

  “Of course,” Miss Isabel said, “I’m really a very formal person. I find Jerry a little too impulsive. It’s true she comes of very nice people. Karen’s mother, I believe, ca
me from rather plain people.”

  This, I thought, from the sister of the little boy who’d shoved Peyton Candler’s monkey suit into the mud. I took a leg off the baby broiled chicken on my plate and separated the tender meat from the bone.

  “Was Roger in love with Karen, Miss Doyle?” I asked.

  “I think it’s awfully difficult to say about young men, my dear. Possibly Roger is too like his father to fall very deeply in love with anyone. Tell me about your trip abroad last summer, won’t you?”

  As I hadn’t been abroad last summer, it was a little difficult, but the implication was clear enough. I said, “Your house is lovely, Miss Doyle.”

  She looked at me, and then glanced about at the simply priceless objects so beautifully arranged against the panelled walls, exactly as if she’d not really noticed them before.

  “Oh, yes . . . of course,” she said vaguely. “But, you know, I don’t care much for it. I always think it belongs to the Candlers, really. Are you interested in the work the Leper Guild is doing?”

  We managed some way to finish lunch without mentioning the late unpleasantness again. After lunch we went across to the drawing room for coffee. I glanced up at the Ming vase under the mirror on the carved mantelpiece. Miss Doyle handed me a tiny eggshell cup of coffee and poured herself one. As she put down the silver pot the maid Rosie appeared in the doorway.

  “You said you wanted to speak to th’ laundryman, Mis’ Isabel,” she said.

  Miss Doyle looked a little startled. “Oh, did I, Rosie?”

  “Yes, ma’am. ’Bout Mist’ Doyle’s shirt that didn’ come back.”

  “Oh, of course. Excuse me a moment” Mrs. Latham.”

  I waited until her footsteps had faded. Then I put down my coffee cup and got up quickly. With these present complications, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was complicate them any more. If the key was found in Roger’s house now that his fingerprints were no doubt in the files of the F. B. I. it wouldn’t, to put it mildly, be a point in his favor.