The Murder of a Fifth Columnist

by Leslie Ford

  He settled back in his chair. I saw his eyes move to our hostess, and something a little strange happen in them, as if he wasn’t quite so sure of something as he’d been before.

  Corliss leaned forward. His movement had a studied carelessness in it that was betrayed, I thought, by the swift sharp movement in his brilliant eyes and the sudden down-pull of his long upper lip. I had an instant feeling that he’d been waiting for just this opportunity… though it was a long time before I understood the significance of what he was about to say.

  “Do any of you remember a newspaperman named Gordon Lacey?”

  He asked it casually, but he emphasized the name by speaking it slowly and distinctly.

  “Yes,” Sylvia said. “He used to be on The Chronicle. What did they call him?”

  “Frog Face,” Pete said. “He was at school with me. We had a teacher that got us interested in Pepys, only instead of reading him Frog Face and I worked like dogs inventing ourselves a system of shorthand. Where is he now?”

  “He’s in Panama now,” Corliss Marshall said. “Or he was three weeks ago. I ran into him at Kelly’s Ritz.”

  “Not sober—don’t tell me?” Sylvia said.

  “No. I take it he isn’t often.”

  “He was a good man,” Pete said.

  Corliss shrugged. “Gordon Lacey,” he said deliberately, “is working—or was going to work—for a South American press association. Have you met him, Delvalle?”

  “Casually,” Senor Delvalle said. “He applied to me for a job. I wrote to one of my editors.”

  “He didn’t say who he was with,” Corliss went on. “He wasn’t in a hurry to start. He had money. I take it he’s one of those chaps who doesn’t work so long as he can eat—and drink—without it.”

  His eyes met Pete’s for an instant.

  “I’ve got three hundred dollars in the bank, Marshall,” Pete said amiably. “Don’t look at me.”

  “And when does the racing season open, Pete?” Sylvia inquired.

  He grinned at her across the table. Her smile that was usually so many other things was unaffected and natural, with that vague almost wistfully tender quality her voice had when she spoke his name first that evening on the stairs. I saw Larry Villiers watching her.

  “What you need, Pete, is a rich wife,” he said evenly.

  “I’ve asked you to find me one.”

  Corliss Marshall looked over at Kurt Hofmann. “This Gordon Lacey, Hofmann,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “He told me he was largely responsible for your writing Terror Unleashed.”

  Kurt Hofmann’s face showed his surprise.

  “He interviewed you in Prague, and convinced you that a book like it would sell enormously here. He said he helped you outline the thing.”

  “I remember him,” Hofmann said coolly. “He had a face like a frog.”

  “Which is why he is called Frog Face,” Pete remarked. “He did give me some help. I paid him at the time for it. He was stranded in Prague.”

  “He has the idea,” Corliss said, “that you were to go fifty-fifty on the royalties. You’d better check up on it. Not that he’ll bother you unless he happens to need money some time. I gather he’s indifferent where his money comes from.”

  There was a curious little silence around the table again. It may have been, this time, because of the plain implication that Mr. Gordon Lacey’s money came by dubious means from dubious sources. Pete Hamilton’s jaw hardened a little.

  “You’re not saying anything about a friend of ours, are you, Marshall?” he inquired.

  “A friend of yours, did you say, Hamilton?”

  Corliss laughed, not very pleasantly.

  “If you regard him as a friend I’ll be glad to take back what I said. I’m sure his funds come from the most righteous of sources.”

  “Oh, Pete, for Heaven’s sake!” Sylvia said sharply. “You know Gordon Lacey’s gone all to pieces. There’s no use trying to defend him. You didn’t see him the last time he was in town. He was mooching from everybody at the Press Club bar. Maybe he’ll start off again down there.—I hope you’ll see that your people give him a chance, Senor Delvalle. He’s a good man, when he’s sober, and better than a lot when he’s not.”

  Senor Delvalle bowed. “Your wish is my command, always, Miss Peele,” he said smiling.

  I looked at Pete. He’d quieted down. People said it was Sylvia who made him keep his head, and that he ought to marry her for that alone, but this was the first instance I’d seen of it.

  Ruth Sherwood pushed back her chair and glanced at Lady Alicia Wrenn.

  “Will you join us when you’re ready, gentlemen?”

  She smiled at Bliss Thatcher, shaking her head just a little, as if it was up to him to keep the peace in the absence of the refining influence of the ladies.

  If, I thought, that was what it possibly could be called. It was a desperate relief to get out of that room and hear the door close behind us. I don’t remember a dinner in Washington, ever, where the crosscurrents were quite so crossed, the drawn swords quite so naked. I remember all of it, now, with shocked incredulity. Two of the men we left in there at the table, smoking their cigars, are dead now, and another man; and the woman who was just ahead of me as we crossed in front of the ornamental staircase to the library is dead too. And at the time I understood nothing. When Colonel Primrose said, “Why couldn’t you have told me, in Heaven’s name?” there was nothing I could say, except that I’d missed everything, and above all that I hadn’t realized at any point that it was Murder, not the girl upstairs, who was the thirteenth guest at Ruth Sherwood’s table.

  6

  As we came to the library Ruth hesitated. “Would any of you like to go up?”

  Lady Alicia said no and Effie Wharton shook her head. Sylvia took hold of my arm.

  “I should,” she said. “Come with me, Grace.”

  We started up. From the dining room came an abrupt burst of hearty laughter—the first of the entire evening, I realized grimly.

  “You certainly put your foot in it,” I said as we turned at the top of the stairs.

  “You mean her ladyship?” she asked indifferently. “It’s not my fault if her conscience bothers her. And it’s nothing to what Larry’s going to do to her in the public prints—just wait and see. If she’d come here and kept quiet I wouldn’t care. Or Kurt Hofmann either. It’s these people seeking sanctuary and telling us how we ought to run things that make my D. A. R. blood boil. And what makes a gin and tonic civilized and a good dry Martini vulgar is beyond me.”

  “Why Corliss didn’t pitch into her is what’s beyond me,” I said.

  Every ounce of aid to Britain had been a pound of Corliss’s own flesh, from the sound of his column. I didn’t know whether he’d changed after his sojourn in South America.

  Sylvia didn’t say anything. We went into Ruth Sherwood’s bedroom. I took out my lipstick and bent down in front of the dressing table. Then I stood there like that for an instant. In the mirror I could see Sylvia. She’d closed the door and was standing there, her hands behind her, holding on to the knob, her head thrown back resting against the white wood, her eyes closed. She looked desperately ill. I turned sharply.

  “Sylvia! What is it?” I cried.

  She moved her head from side to side, her lower lip caught in her teeth. “Oh, nothing, nothing!”

  I stood staring at her. She opened her eyes suddenly and gave her head a violent shake. “Oh, I can’t stand it, Grace! I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it! Nothing will make me believe it!”

  I sat down slowly on the bench in front of the dressing table, literally open-mouthed.

  “Believe what?” I demanded.

  “That Pete’s writing that thing.”

  I still stared at her.

  “Oh, don’t you see?” she said passionately. “That newsletter. That’s what it’s all about. Bliss Thatcher’s trying to trap him. But it’s Corliss doing it. He hates Pete, h
e’s always hated him.”

  I managed to speak. “You mean Corliss Marshall is writing ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ himself?”

  “Oh no, I don’t mean that. He couldn’t. He doesn’t write—he pontificates. I mean he’s blaming it on Pete. Can’t you see? His coming back right now after he’s seen Lacey—even if I don’t know what that means—and his cracks at Pete about needing money… Of course he needs money. He always will. He gives it away the minute he gets it. But he wouldn’t do this, not for a million dollars! Even if Corliss’s never been known to make a mistake about a fact, he’s made one this time!”

  She went over to the window and stood there with her back to me, looking out, more moved than I could have imagined her, her body quivering as if she had a violent chill. I sat there, watching her, remembering what she’d said about the group of people gathered in Ruth Sherwood’s library, trying to understand what all this was about.

  “—She knows he does write it—”

  Something inside me, and yet in some odd way completely apart, said that, with the utmost clarity. “—Or if she doesn’t know it, she believes it, and she’s trying desperately to deny it.”

  “I’ll have to look into ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ ” I said, as calmly as I could. “I throw it in the waste basket mostly, along with ‘Peace Through Tolerance’ and all the rest of the obvious propaganda. I must say I don’t see what all the furore’s about all of a sudden.”

  She turned slowly, her brown eyes that didn’t quite track fixed on me.

  “You don’t? Ask your Colonel next time you see him. He’ll tell you.”

  Her gaze wandered off beyond me into space. With most people you can tell pretty much what they’re thinking about, but not with Sylvia Peele. Or I couldn’t, because what she said the next minute came as a shock to me.

  “Corliss Marshall’s not going to the F. B. I. tomorrow, Grace,” she said softly. Her face was shuttered behind that blank waxen mask of hers. “He’s not going to ruin Pete. I won’t let him. Pete’s too good—in every way… for me, or… for Bliss Thatcher, or anybody else.”

  I watched her silently for a moment. There wasn’t any doubt she meant it—every word of it.

  “How are you going to stop him from going?” I asked then.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to—if it costs me my job, and everything else.”

  She turned her head away. “Not because I’m in love with Pete. That doesn’t matter. He isn’t in love with me and I know it. There’s no reason why he should be. I’m just a society gossip writer—like Larry. The only reason he comes around is he hasn’t got a comfortable chair in his room.”

  . Maybe she believed it, I thought, and maybe it was true. It was hard to tell about a person like Pete Hamilton. He was amusing and volatile, with a devil-may-care if slightly sardonic surface that nobody who knew him ever thought was more than surface. His jaw and the steady gaze behind the twinkle in his rather comic slate-blue eyes with their odd whitish lashes—and also the place he’d made for himself at the not advanced age of thirty-three—were proof enough of a pretty solid interior. The temper that went with his sandy-red hair was the only thing I’d ever heard against him. I knew he’d been a fairly stout drinker when he first came to town, but he’d quit—as he said, he talked too much and gave away stuff he’d planned to use himself, and some wise guy took the credit for it. Altogether, however, that the idea of marrying anybody and settling down to an even domestic keel had ever seriously occurred to him seemed highly unlikely.

  I glanced back at Sylvia. She was still standing by the window, but her eyes had moved to the door as if she’d heard someone coming. Her face emptied the way it does and smoothed out to her meaningless blank. I turned. The door opened softly. It was Barbara Shipley.

  “Oh, I’m—I’m sorry. I thought you were—”

  She hesitated.

  “I—left my book in here.”

  Her face flushed. She went across to the low glass table by the chaise longue and reached down for a book that was lying there. On the table was a photograph in a silver frame. Her hand, almost to the book, stopped and moved to the photograph instead. She picked it up and looked at it a moment. Then she turned to Sylvia.

  “Isn’t this one of the men downstairs?”

  Sylvia nodded. “That’s Bliss Thatcher. He’s on the Defense Council.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said. She looked at it again and put it slowly back on the table. “How long do parties last, down here?” she asked seriously.

  “Maybe if we go down, this one won’t last so long,” Sylvia said. “Are you ready, Grace?”

  I got up and we went out, leaving the girl standing there looking down at Bliss Thatcher’s photograph. At the corner of the iron stair rail, Sylvia turned and looked back. Then she looked rather oddly at me.

  “If her name’s Barbara, why does she have ‘E. A. S.’ on her belt buckle instead of ‘B. A. S.,’ do you suppose, darling?” she asked calmly.

  I didn’t say anything for an instant. Ruth Sherwood had made a mistake. On the spur of the moment, with her guests lined up behind her in the hall, she’d taken the “B” of Betty instead of the “E” of Elizabeth. I suddenly remembered Colonel Primrose telling me once an axiom of the famous German, Grolz, one of the first scientific criminologists—in taking an alias the criminal almost invariably keeps his own initials.

  “Maybe she borrowed the buckle,” I said.

  “And why doesn’t she like Bliss Thatcher’s portrait on the table by the chaise longue?” Sylvia inquired sweetly. “And why did she pretend she’d left a book in there? That same book was in the same spot before she came.”

  “You’d better exert your powers on Corliss Marshall, Mrs. Holmes,” I remarked. “There he is now.”

  We went on down the stairs.

  “Just forget what I told you, will you?” Sylvia said coolly. “I must have been upset.”

  I wanted to say, “Yes—if you’ll forget about the ‘E. A. S.’ and Bliss Thatcher’s picture,” but I didn’t dare make it seem that important. I said, “Surely. I’ll be glad to.”

  The men were straggling across from the dining room, Delvalle and Larry Villiers in front. Pete and Kurt Hofmann came after them, turning to exchange some remark with Sam Wharton. Bliss Thatcher and Corliss Marshall were still back by the dining-room door, standing there talking quietly. I could feel Sylvia’s quick glance, in odd contrast with her cool request that I forget what she’d said.

  Corliss’s front gave one a totally different impression from his back. His face was suave and moonlike, and below his sharp hawk’s nose and extraordinarily long, almost pendulous upper lip the folds of flesh from years of excellent dining-out fitted in his wing collar as if it were a cradle. If anyone had to put a single word to the quality of that face I should think arrogance would be it. It wasn’t for nothing that his column so frequently started with “I, Corliss Marshall…” and that his favorite method of conducting it was in imaginary dialogues in which Corliss Marshall practically took the dialectical pants off his opponents. Nevertheless, I thought suddenly—arrogance or no arrogance—Corliss Marshall had never been known to make a mistake about a fact. I wondered if it was just possible that his hatred of Pete… But of course I had no way of knowing.

  We met the others in a cluster in front of the library door. I heard Sylvia say something gay and trivial about the glass feathers on top of the lamp shades, and dropped back to join Corliss and Mr. Thatcher. The rest of them moved into the library.

  “I haven’t told you how much I’m enjoying your house, Mrs. Latham,” Bliss Thatcher said.

  I remember that very clearly, just as the three of us came to the door between the two glass tables.

  “Hello,” he said. “Here’s a copy of that thing.”

  He reached under the lamp and picked up the folded salmon-yellow oblong of paper, looked at it an instant and handed it to Corliss.

  “It’s a good sample
,” he said. “I wish I could analyze the technique. There’s nothing here I can say definitely is not true—and yet the impression of futility and hopelessness of our ever getting the job we’ve set out to do done is extraordinary. I know that the Army and Navy are not riddled with incompetency and inefficiency… and yet, when I get through reading a couple of these things, I find myself beginning to doubt it and find myself wondering what the hell’s the use of struggling. Let ’em take the whole world, us included, if they want it.”

  Corliss put on his pince-nez that hung around his neck on a slightly flamboyant black ribbon, looked it over and nodded silently, and handed it back to Bliss Thatcher. Mr. Thatcher turned to put it down. I had a vague sense that something was different about the glass table there, the way you have in your own home when an object that’s brightened a particular spot has been moved in dusting and not put back. Then, as I looked down at the table again, it came into my mind instantly. The leather sheath with the jeweled stiletto hilt protruding from it that had sparkled brilliantly under the glass lamp was gone.

  7

  I realized that with a little start of dismay, even. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something, but Bliss Thatcher was speaking.

  “If you’ll stop in tomorrow, Marshall, I’ll give you the figures. I’d be glad to see a piece about it.”

  He’d taken my elbow and was propelling me politely through the library door, and the moment for calling their attention to it casually, without seeming to make a scene, was gone. Corliss was saying, “I’ll get away early tonight. I’ll be in first thing in the morning.—My God, it’s hot in here,” he added.