by Leslie Ford
As we came in I heard Larry Villiers’ elegant voice. “What about Barbara, Ruth? Isn’t she coming down?” Larry would have called the Dowager Queen of China by her first name.
“She’s gone to bed, the little wretch,” Ruth answered, laughing. “I’d have loved for you all to meet her. Her mother’s my oldest and most intimate friend.” Which is more than most of us can say about ourselves, I remember thinking with a corner of my mind that wasn’t, like the rest of it, going around in half a dozen indecisive circles.
I didn’t know what to do. The impulse just to blurt out, “Look—somebody’s taken the jeweled stiletto off the table, and maybe one of us is going to get hurt with it, and whichever one of you has it give it up instantly,” was almost overwhelming. My reason kept saying, “Don’t be a hysterical fool. Maybe Ruth brought it in here to show some one while you were upstairs, and it’s on the mantel or on the desk in plain sight. If you call attention to it, everybody will know what’s in your mind, and Larry Villiers will see you never live it down. You don’t call your hostess’s friends potential murderers—or thieves at the best. Lady Alicia might be a kleptomaniac, and her maid will bring the thing back in the morning—you don’t know. You don’t know anything about it.”
My friend Colonel Primrose says a woman ought never to try to reason—she has much more validity acting from intuition. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that I sat over by the window, thinking “I’ve got to say something to somebody,” with a sense of anxiety and even dread that was almost physically painful, trying desperately to determine how much of my alarm was conditioned by Ruth Sherwood’s dismay and Sylvia’s despair—or how much, perhaps, of what I thought was rational was nothing but moral cowardice built up by training in social taboos.
“It is hot in here,” I heard Ruth Sherwood say, as if somebody had complained. “The other rooms are cooler. If you’d like a whiskey and soda in the dining room… or the terrace is pleasant if it isn’t too cold. The moon is lovely.”
It’s always a question in my mind whether one’s senses are sharpened by any kind of nervous agitation, or only more alive to certain stimuli. I was aware, for example, that people began to move about after she said that, but I couldn’t say who moved where. I recall hearing Effie Wharton saying, “—strong opposition,” for the third time, and Corliss Marshall’s contemptuous answer. “Loyal opposition, you mean, Effie. That’s different from personal ambition. You and Sam ought to go home. Ex-congressmen are a dime a dozen in Washington. I know your scheme. It won’t work, I’ll tell you that.”
Sam Wharton, sitting next to me on the window seat, gave me an amused twinkle.
“Effie thinks he’s responsible for my defeat,” he whispered sardonically.
I remember thinking too, though that must have been while everybody was still there in the library, that none of them looked as if he wanted actually to take the life of a fellow human being. Except possibly Kurt Hofmann once. Lady Alicia, with the usual assumption of foreigners that Americans don’t speak any other language, said to him in German, “Have I changed very much, Kurt?”
When he’d replied, “No, my dear lady—not at all, really,” she said, “But you have, my friend. You haven’t met success with humility, as I’d have imagined you would. I’d hoped we might pick up our past again.”
If the quick look he gave her wasn’t murder it was pretty close to it—and so, when I think of it, was Larry’s when Pete Hamilton, answering some question of Ruth Sherwood’s, said, “Oh, that’s in the Soiled Clothes Department—ask Villiers.”
Delvalle had taken Sam Wharton’s place by me.
“Miss Peele doesn’t reciprocate Villiers’ affections, I take it?” he said, with what I thought surprising irrelevance.
“Affections?” I asked. “If that’s what you call them, I should say she does, and very heartily.”
He laughed quietly.
“Do you wish to go into the other rooms? I’m very comfortable here.”
“So am I,” I said.
“You Americans are very blind.” He was apparently going back to something in his own mind.
“How do you mean?”
“About love, for example,” he went on. “You understand boy meets girl, but beyond that—man meets woman, I might say—you don’t understand at all.”
“Really?”
“The relations of hate to love, for instance.” We were alone in the library by then. He lighted my cigarette and smiled. “Also the effect of indifference on love. How long would, say Miss Peele, who’s a very passionately emotional woman—how long will she continue her devotion to Pete Hamilton, do you think? In face of his—shall I say awareness?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But you have thought of it, I see.”
“No, I haven’t at all,” I protested quickly.
“Excuse me, then. I thought from the way you looked that perhaps you had. I thought something seemed to be bothering you. Perhaps I am not as—shall I say psychic—as I thought.”
And that sticks in my mind too.
He got up. “May I bring you something to drink?”
“I’d like a glass of water,” I said. I sat there alone in the library, hearing the voices from the other rooms, a blessed shaft of cool air coming through the door from the terrace, what he’d said about Sylvia intensifying the dull nauseating anxiety in the pit of my stomach. He didn’t come back for a long time, it seemed to me, and when he came the others were coming back too.
It was only a few minutes later that Ruth Sherwood said to somebody, “I must ask Mr. Marshall. We won’t let him get out of it this time.”
She looked around. “Where has he got to?”
“He slipped out, I imagine,” Bliss Thatcher said. “He had some work to do before morning. He didn’t want to break up the party.”
“Oh, dear,” Lady Alicia said. She looked at the watch on Larry Villiers’ wrist. “It is late. I must be off too. I shall walk home, I think. It’s a beautiful night.”
It was Larry, not Mr. Hofmann, who offered himself as an escort. Señor Delvalle looked at me.
Ruth took my arm. “Stay a few minutes,” she whispered.
She held out her hand, smiling, to her other guests. I shook my head at Delvalle. “I live on the next floor,” I said.
“I had hoped it was many miles away, Mrs. Latham.”
Ruth and I followed them out into the long reception room. Sylvia, just in front of us, stopped in the doorway.
“I love these tables, Mrs. Sherwood,” she said lightly. “Only I don’t see how you ever keep them clean. Look at this one.”
She took her handkerchief and polished it briskly.
“Just a busy little housewife at heart, you see.”
She went on, laughing.
“I wish you’d drop over to my place some time, then, Sylvia,” Pete said. “Is that former den of silver foxes over there yours?”
The butler had brought the wraps downstairs.
Sylvia nodded. “Wholesale, from a grateful husband for squelching a story about his wife,” she remarked easily.
I glanced at the table top. It was bright and clean.
Ruth slipped her arm through mine again. It was cold, and I thought it shook a little against mine as Mr. Thatcher said good night. He held her other hand a little longer than was necessary. It seemed to me that whatever doubt there’d been in his mind was gone now, and that he’d have liked to stay on a while, and that she knew it and was preventing it by keeping me.
Lady Alicia and Larry had gone first, the Whartons and Sylvia and Pete following them after a while. Delvalle and Kurt Hofmann waited for Bliss Thatcher. As they went out and the door closed, Ruth’s hand tightened on my arm.
“Thank God!” she whispered. “I thought they’d never go.”
The relief in her voice was unbelievable. She swayed a little.
“Come and sit down. I’ve got to try to explain to you.”
As she turned toward the
library door she stopped abruptly, her hand gripping my arm again, her fingernails sharp as needle points in my flesh.
On the back of the sofa at right angles to the fireplace was a man’s evening overcoat, a black-and-white silk muffler, and a wide-brimmed black velour hat. The hat, as flamboyant as the black ribbon his pince-nez hung on, was as clearly Corliss Marshall’s as if his name had been written on it.
Ruth dropped my arm, took three quick steps to the library and looked in. She turned back toward me, her face blank, her lips parted breathlessly. Then, as she whirled around and looked up the stairs, the most extraordinary change went over her, and with the speed of lightning. It wasn’t anxiety any longer, or fear either—it was a burning furious anger. In an instant she was running up the steps and around the iron rail at the top, like a tigress, not a lovely gracious woman at all. I heard her go swiftly along upstairs and stop, a door open and then close gently, and her steps again.
I stood there motionless. What on earth she could be thinking of I hadn’t the remotest idea. I had no more when she appeared again at the top of the stairs and came quickly down. Her anger was gone. She was still pale, but bewildered again, as she’d been when she hadn’t found him in the library.
“He… couldn’t have gone without his coat, and not realized it,” she said blankly. “Could he?”
“You wouldn’t think so,” I said.
We looked at the dining-room door, and both of us started toward it, with a kind of mutual agreement that he must be there if he wasn’t anywhere else. The silver tray with the half-empty decanters on it stood at the end of the table, the empty glasses doubling themselves in the black mirror surface. Corliss Marshall wasn’t there. The room was quite empty, and without the saving touch of the women’s colored gowns its black-and-white decor made it look cold and rather theatrical. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hadn’t intended to say that when I turned to Ruth. But I didn’t.
She’d stopped dead, the color drained from her face, staring across the table at the white rug in front of the terrace window. I suppose my eyes followed hers automatically, because I was only conscious that I’d gone suddenly taut and staring—aware only of the scarlet mark of a pointed shoe on the white velvet surface of the rug.
We stood there silently. Then Ruth Sherwood moved forward. She stepped around that livid spot on the white ground, reached her hand out in a kind of awful slow motion, and opened the terrace door. I stood where I was.
“Grace!” she said. “—Come here!”
She didn’t really say it, and I didn’t hear it. It was a hoarse vibration that I felt and understood without needing to hear. I went around the end of the table and followed her out.
The moonlight lay over the rooftops and the trees in the park below like a silver coat, and sifted through the ring of pollarded evergreens around the balcony terrace. Ruth’s white figure was like a column frozen there half a dozen feet from the open door. I went quickly along and stopped by her.
A dark mass was lying by the tubs of evergreens. A strayed moonbeam played white and red and green on the diamond and ruby and emerald hilt of the stiletto that lay beside the black inert form, and played another and more dreadful color on the slow viscid pool around it.
I don’t know how long we stood there, or what Ruth Sherwood was thinking, or what I was thinking, or if either of us was thinking at all. I remember feeling her hand on mine a long time after she must have put it there.
“—You’ve got to help me, Grace!” she whispered. “You’ve got to help me again!”
8
“You’ve got to help me, Grace! You’ve got to help me again!”
Ruth Sherwood’s tense whisper and her hand tugging at my arm penetrated through the extraordinary sense of unreality that held me as if in a spell. The dance music from the Willow Room downstairs stopped abruptly. The applause pattered like rain on a hollow wooden box. Corliss Marshall lying there, Ruth Sherwood and I, might have been on another planet… we seemed so far away and so utterly alone in the darkened parabola cast over the terrace by the green-and-white awning. The lighted windows scattered up the concave semi-circle of the Randolph-Lee’s park elevation looked out blankly into the frosted night. The sound of traffic along Connecticut Avenue might have come from miles away. It was so remote from anything that concerned us, caught in the terrible unearthly stillness that grew like some monstrous plant from the silent mass that had been Corliss Marshall.
“Come, quickly, Grace!” Ruth Sherwood whispered. She pulled at my hand.
I nodded and we went back on tiptoe to the open door and into the dining room. The same unearthly stillness had seeped in before us, and lay over the room like a pall. The empty glasses on the black glass table seemed as if they had been there for years, untouched so long that their reflections had taken on substance and form, and would always be buried indelibly in its crystalline surface.
Ruth Sherwood looked back toward the door, her breath catching sharply. I looked too. There were new shadows on the white velvet rug where her feet and mine had been. We hurried through the door. She closed it after us.
“We’ve got to call the police, at once,” I said. My voice was hardly above a whisper.
She didn’t speak. When I turned to look at her she put her hand out and took hold of my arm again.
“I’ll call them,” she said. Her hand tightened. “Grace—I don’t know how to ask you. But you will—please, I know you will—take her to your apartment. Now—before the police and the newspaper people come.”
Her voice had that desperate quality in it again, but it was no longer imagined fear of what might happen. It was realistic now, and stark. “—I can’t explain it to you—I will later. She mustn’t be touched by this. You can understand that, can’t you? You do see, don’t you?”
I saw, very clearly—more clearly, probably, than she did, knowing so well how far blood spatters when once a good sensational reporter catches the scent. And Barbara Shipley had had nothing to do with it. There was no reason I could see not to save her from the consequences of it if I could.
“But everybody knows she was here,” I said.
“I can tell them she left. She can slip away the first thing in the morning.”
“Or I could say she’d gone to my apartment earlier—if worst comes to worst.”
“No, no!” she said quickly. “She mustn’t come into it at all!”
“All right,” I said. I wasn’t so sure, because I’ve learned to have a lot of respect for the police. But there was no use getting her desperate again. “We’ve got to hurry. We can’t put off calling the police any longer. You get her up and explain to her, and I’ll see if the coast is clear.”
Normally the prospect of circumventing the authorities is rather like a heady wine to me. This time it wasn’t. I was a little scared, actually. All I could see—besides the dark huddled figure of Corliss Marshall under the tub of evergreens— was Sylvia Peele wiping off the glass top of the table over there by the library door. All I could hear—besides the awful silence that brooded over the terrace—was the casual lilt of her voice saying, “Just a little housewife at heart.” It couldn’t mean she was deliberately wiping off the fingerprints of whoever had taken the jeweled stiletto, it couldn’t possibly, I kept telling myself—and all the time I knew it could. I knew it couldn’t mean anything else, actually, because whatever Sylvia Peele was at heart it wasn’t a housewife.
I was trying desperately not to put another name to it… and I didn’t want to get mixed up in my loyalties, however dubious they might prove to be. I stood there anxiously, thinking about that, trying not to look at Corliss Marshall’s hat and overcoat and black-and-white muffler with his initials embroidered on it… or at the table top under the lamp by the door. I started for the stairs. I was suddenly so tired I could hardly drag one foot after the other up the soft gray-carpeted steps.
Then I stopped and leaned against the iron rail and looked behind me. The idea that I was still trackin
g the dark stain of Corliss’s blood wherever I trod made me a little sick. I looked at the step just below. Then I looked at my feet. On the thin sole of my right slipper there was a brown spot. The stain had gone in, however, so I wouldn’t leave traces of it along the hall to my apartment and back again, after I’d left Barbara there to go to bed, and to sleep if she could. I went on up the steps, opened the door and looked out. The corridor was empty. I shut the door and waited.
I could hear Ruth talking quietly to Barbara, and then the sound of a suitcase clicking shut. It seemed hours that I stood there, trying now not to look at the telephone on the table against the wall. It seemed to take on some insistent kind of animate quality that made the time drag interminably. I ought to pick it up and call the police myself, I thought— not wait for Ruth. I knew I should do that, and because I didn’t I was becoming with each second more and more acutely jittery.
Suddenly I jumped nearly out of my skin. There was a sharp insistent buzz from the box under the table that was almost like somebody bursting through the door. Ruth Sherwood ran out into the hall and stood there. The phone buzzed again. She nodded at it sharply. I reached out and picked it up, my hand shaking.
I said, “Hello,” I know my voice was high-pitched and unnatural.
A voice said, “Hello. Is this Mrs. Sherwood’s apartment?”
For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to stand up long enough to answer. It was a voice that I knew as well as I know my own. And I knew all the more just how unnatural my own voice must have been if he didn’t recognize it wherever he heard it.
“Oh, Colonel Primrose!” I gasped. “—I’m so glad! Where are you?”
He still didn’t recognize me.
“It’s Grace Latham,” I said.
“Oh, hello, hello, my dear! I’ve been calling you for the last two hours. I got in at ten o’clock. I’m at Corliss Marshall’s now.”