Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  “ ‘. . . is promethium, one of the most critical, if not the most—’ ”

  I turned it down quickly.

  “ ‘—of the minor metals needed in the war program today,’ the congressman said on the floor of the House of Representatives this afternoon. ‘Why then,’ he demanded, ‘has no price ceiling been put on this precious metal? Why have no steps been taken to requisition the entire output of this life sinew of war for war use only? Will I-Day—and by I-Day I mean Investigation Day, the Day of Reckoning—show a bleeding nation that somebody has feathered his own nest at the expense of democracy in travail?’ ”

  I turned my head. The man and girl from the car just ahead of me had stopped halfway across the sidewalk. They were standing there perfectly rigid, as if that first blast of sound had frozen them in their tracks. The girl’s face was turned toward me. It was as white as the snowflakes settling down on the shoulders of her long mink coat, and the band of mink around her hat. As the commentator switched to news from the European front the man gave her arm a tug. She turned and followed him mechanically across the sidewalk and up the steps. After a moment I turned off the radio and went along after them.

  The rooms were crowded, but not so densely that you couldn’t distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces. Most of these were unfamiliar, and I heard another old cave dweller with a jet-bead band to hold up her sagging chin say stridently to our hostess, “My dear, where did you find all these attractive people? It’s such a relief from the early New Deal days! They’re almost as attractive as the group in the last war!”

  My host took me by the arm. “There’s an interesting chap over here I want you to talk to,” he said, piloting me toward a corner by the piano.

  “Won’t anybody else talk to him?” I demanded.

  I was trying to spot the man and girl who came in just ahead of me, but they were lost in the crowd. I was also trying to say hello to people I knew as I was being propelled along.

  “Hello, Grace,” somebody said. “Where’s the colonel?”

  I turned to see which familiar face that came from, and answer it. As a result, all I heard above the sound and fury was the young man by the piano saying, “How do you do, Mrs. Latham.” Then my host, having thrust a Martini into my hand, was gone, and the interesting young man was waiting for me to say something. So I said, “Have you been in Washington long?”—which is always safe, if not exciting.

  “Three months,” he said. “I’m at OPM.”

  I said, “Really?” and just then I saw the girl with the mink hat and white face. She was looking over our way. As our eyes met she turned her head quickly, two bright pink spots in her cheeks, and I saw her speak to the man beside her. I could almost hear her “Don’t look now, but over there by the piano—” He seemed to freeze again, the way they both had on the sidewalk, and after a second turned with pretty elaborate casualness and looked toward our corner.

  I looked up at the young man beside me. He was quite tall and had a pleasant, self-possessed and detached kind of air. It wouldn’t have made the least difference to him if nobody had talked to him at all. He’d apparently been quietly enjoying himself from the side line.

  “You don’t happen to know those two people, do you?” I asked.

  “Which two people?”

  “The girl with the yellow wool dress with the topaz necklace and mink hat. And the large young man in the brown striped suit with her.”

  “With the clean collar and his hair combed?”

  I glanced up at him. He grinned and ran his hand over the rather tousled mess on the top of his own head. It wasn’t not combed, it was just that kind of hair. But I saw what he meant. The other young man was almost painfully neat.

  “That’s them,” I answered.

  He shook his head. “Nope. I don’t know them,” he said amiably. “I know their names, if that’s any good to you. It’s socially I don’t know them.” He seemed to be having a very good time, someway. There was an infectious twinkle in his gray eyes that was even a little exasperating.

  “What’s the matter with them?” I asked.

  “Not a thing. They’re impeccable, absolutely. His name is Carey Eaton. He’s with the Board of Economic Warfare. Her name is Mrs. Carey Eaton. Her father’s my boss at OPM. His name is Lawrason Hilyard.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Why the radio announcement about promethium got her so upset.”

  He looked at me oddly. “What about promethium?”

  “A congressman said not enough had been done about it,” I said. “About price control and requisitioning of supplies, and was somebody putting self-interest above defense. You know.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said slowly. “I’ve been wondering—”

  He stopped for an instant.

  “As a matter of fact, Hilyard’s an honest guy. People that say he keeps certain firms from getting supplies are crazy. I sit right under him and check on every application that comes in.” He swallowed a shrimp covered with mayonnaise and grinned. “I hate to have to say this, Mrs. Latham, because I hate his guts.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. “Will you please tell me who you are?” I demanded. “And where you come from? And what you’re doing here?”

  “I’m supposed to be an engineer,” he said good-humoredly. “I come from California. Used to teach metallurgical chemistry, if you know what that is. If you mean what am I doing at this party, I couldn’t tell you, except that our esteemed host is a lawyer, and he has a guest whose name is Duncan Scott. Duncan Scott is also a lawyer, and he’s been hanging around OPM for a week trying to pry loose a couple of hundred pounds of promethium for a client in Ohio. He can’t see Mr. Hilyard, so he decided to see me. And I can’t do anything for him, if it interests you. There just isn’t any promethium.”

  “I see,” I said.

  He looked at me skeptically. “You don’t happen to be a small businessman, do you, Mrs. Latham?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because the reason I’m backed up against the corner behind the piano is to get away from one,” he said. “He doesn’t believe there isn’t any promethium either. He’s retained our host to put on the screws.” His face sobered. “I sound like a bureaucratic goon, don’t I? I’m not, as a matter of fact. I feel sorry for those poor guys cooling their heels down here, trying to get stuff to keep their plants going. I don’t blame them for being fighting mad, if they’d be mad at the right people. Now take my friend Mr. Ira Colton over there.”

  He nodded at a short square man in a gray suit and red tie, talking much too loudly to a bored young man from the Division of Far Eastern Affairs of the State Department whom he’d cornered near the fireplace.

  “He’s got a specialty plant in a small town near Cleveland. He figured out a way to make a one-percent alloy of promethium and low-grade aluminum, and he makes bright shiny gadgets they put cosmetics in. He hires about fifty people, and he’s absolutely washed up. He’s got hold of some aluminum—bootleg, is my guess—but he can’t get his promethium. He’s spending what money he’s got left retaining a lawyer. The lawyer will tell him in a month or so what he got straight from the horse’s mouth two weeks ago—that there just is not any promethium for lipstick containers, or for much else, as a matter of fact.”

  “There really isn’t?” I said.

  “There really isn’t. I know some people are saying Lawrason Hilyard has a lot piled up in his attic, or someplace. That’s baloney. We know the output and we can account for every molecule of it. If Hilyard had a nerve in his body and his hide wasn’t armor plate, he’d get a hole and crawl in it.”

  “You don’t think he’s apt to resign?”

  The young man from California looked down at me and shook his head.

  “Resign? Lady, when Lawrason Hilyard resigns, it’s going to be because the undertaker’s waiting in the next room. He loves it. He’s where his wife can’t ge
t him on the telephone, for once in his life. We’ve got two big signs in our room. One says Time is Short, and the other says, Tell Mrs. Hilyard the Boss is Out.”

  “Have they ever asked you there for tea?” I inquired.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “There’s another daughter. She’s beautiful. Much prettier than”—I looked around for Mrs. Eaton, but she and her husband were gone—”than this one.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he said.

  “Hello, Grace!” someone said behind me, and the first thing I knew I was talking to a lot of other people. When I looked around again for the young man from California, Mr. Ira Colton, maker of bright shiny gadgets, had him buttonholed. I didn’t feel it was my duty to rescue him. He might, I thought, even persuade Mr. Colton that there really wasn’t any promethium, and save him time and money, if not disappointment.

  CHAPTER 4

  I WAS DINING WITH SOME FRIENDS—Elizabeth and Mac Bradley—on Massachusetts Avenue that night. It was a few minutes before eight when I entered their upstairs drawing room, but two other guests whom I knew were already there. My hosts were sitting in front of the fire with them.

  “My dear, we were just scandal-mongering,” Elizabeth said. She drew me down on the sofa beside her. “Have you heard about Stanley Woland?”

  “His name’s Wolanski,” her husband said.

  “I know, but you mustn’t! He has a right to change his name if he wants to. Anyway, my dear, he went around to a woman who used to be very fond of him and borrowed five thousand dollars.”

  “She was a fool to let him have it.”

  “Oh, darling, please let me get on—he’ll be here in a minute. . . . Oh, no, I don’t mean Stanley; I mean the girl’s uncle, Bartlett Folger. Anyway, Stanley told her he’d found this wealthy girl he was sure would marry him, and she was coming here to live and he had to get his car out of hock and put on a decent front, and, my dear, it’s practically in the bag. All of us will be wishing we’d been nicer to Stanley before we’re through.”

  “I won’t,” Mac said.

  “Oh, well, you, darling. Nobody expects you to admit you were wrong about anything. But the point about it is that the Hilyard child—I can’t think of her name—has turned down dozens of really splendid boys, all because she had a silly love affair with a workman in her father’s plant. And now her mother’s so relieved that she’s delighted to have her marry Stanley if she wants to.”

  “I’d rather my daughter would marry the garbage collector,” her husband said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t, frankly. Stanley has beautiful manners.”

  “Are you sure the Hilyard child is going to marry him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how he’ll ever pay back the five thousand dollars if she doesn’t. He hasn’t a penny of his own, and he must have had—”

  My hostess stopped abruptly. “Sh-h—there’s her uncle.”

  She went forward to greet him. “Isn’t this delightful!”

  I watched Bartlett Folger bow to her and shake hands with Mac. I could see what Agnes had meant in her letter. He was very attractive. His face was so suntanned that the other men looked as if they’d spent the winter underground, and his black hair was shot with just enough gray to make the gray look premature. He was rather hard-bitten someway, although he also looked as if he hadn’t done any work for quite a while. I found myself wondering why Mac and Elizabeth were having him there to dinner. If Lawrason Hilyard and his wife had been there, too, I’d have understood it, because Mac was also a dollar-a-year man, acting as a co-ordinator of some kind between economic agencies.

  Just then I heard Bartlett Folger say, “I’m sorry the Hilyards couldn’t come. My brother-in-law can’t get out much. They’re running him ragged these days. I suppose you heard about the attack on him in the House this afternoon.”

  “It probably didn’t bother him,” Mac said.

  Mr. Folger’s jaw hardened. “On the contrary. He’s sacrificed a good deal to come here, and he’s not used to politics. He doesn’t know how to take it.”

  “He’ll learn,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. She introduced him around until she came to me. “And Mrs. Latham . . . Mr. Folger.”

  “I’ve heard a good deal of you, Mrs. Latham,” he said. We shook hands. His was very cold. I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to like me much. I’ve seldom seen such a calmly scrutinizing appraisal of one dinner guest by another. If we’d met in a pawnshop I could have understood it.

  Then suddenly he became amazingly affable.

  “I understand I’m having the pleasure of dining with you Friday, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were going to be here this evening too.”

  I may have been mistaken, but I got the impression that Mr. Folger thought it was rather clever of me to have arranged it all so neatly. I was so annoyed that I felt the color rise in my cheeks—which, from Mr. Folger’s point of view, must have clinched it very nicely. He wouldn’t know, of course, that Sgt. Phineas T. Buck has made me unduly sensitive about eligible bachelors; nor could I tell him, as I should have liked to do, that the dinner at my house was Colonel Primrose’s idea, not mine. I was delighted when dinner was announced. Until I found myself seated next to Mr. Folger, anyway.

  As a matter of fact, the dinner was very pleasant, or was, until somehow—I wasn’t able to figure it out because I was talking to the man on my left when it began—somebody brought Stanley Woland’s name into the conversation.

  I was first aware of it when I heard Bartlett Folger saying calmly, “We’re delighted, of course. Even if it doesn’t last, it means she’s got over a schoolgirl attachment her parents had to break off.”

  In the little silence that ensued, our hostess said brightly, “Well, of course, I always think it’s really a shame—”

  “To destroy love’s young dream?” Mr. Folger interrupted with a smile. “I thought so myself. I was in charge of the mill at the time, and I liked the boy.” He smiled again. “I could see the parents’ point of view. It would have been a little awkward, if you own a town, to have your daughter’s mother-in-law running a roadside filling station and hot-dog stand. At least my sister thought so.” He put his wineglass down, his face becoming serious again. “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been better to have made the best of it. Diane would have come to her senses. Or they might even have made a go of it. It’s always a mistake, in my opinion, to make unnecessary enemies. And they made two very bitter ones.”

  “Who?” I asked. It was none of my business, of course, but I found myself, just then—no doubt quite irrationally—on the side of the woman running the service station.

  “The boy,” Mr. Folger said calmly, “and my niece. Diane has never forgiven her parents, and I don’t believe she ever will.”

  “How did you—I mean, how was it broken up?” someone asked.

  “We paid the boy off,” Mr. Folger said equably. “He was very decent about it. I thought we were going to have trouble. He could have got a lot more if he’d sat tight. But this is just personal history—”

  I, for one, was glad when Elizabeth got up and we went into the drawing room for coffee, leaving the men to their cigars.

  “Of course, the point is,” Elizabeth said calmly, “that the Hilyards have made a tremendous lot of money and the young man certainly knew it. Promethium is in enormous demand, and it sells for thirty-seven dollars a pound. Mac says if they hadn’t spent a lot developing it that they have to get out, they could sell for around eighteen dollars and make a good profit. He had me buy some of their stock over the counter several years ago at three, and he made me sell it last fall at forty-five. It’s around fifty now.”

  It was nearly eleven when we got up to go. Bartlett Folger went down the stairs with me.

  “May I see you home, Mrs. Latham?” he asked.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I have my car.” Then, for fear I’d been a little offhand, I added, “I’m looking forward to seeing you Friday.
”

  “Nothing could keep me away, Mrs. Latham,” he replied.

  I opened my front door, went inside and stopped. Lilac, who’s normally in bed at ten o’clock, came waddling out of the back sitting room. She gave me a non-committal look, opened the basement door and went downstairs. For a moment I thought perhaps Colonel Primrose had dropped by, though he was hardly in the habit of appearing at that time of night. I laid my wrap across the newel post and went along to see. At the door I stopped again, abruptly.

  Diane Hilyard was calmly sitting there on the ottoman in front of the fire, in her stocking feet, drinking a cup of hot chocolate and eating a piece of bread and butter. She had on the same periwinkle sweater and skirt she’d worn that afternoon. Her tan-and-brown saddle shoes were drying on the hearth, her beaver coat and an old brown felt riding hat were lying on the sofa.

  “I hope you don’t mind my being here,” she said. “Your maid said my shoes were wet and made me take them off. She said I was cold, and I guess I was. Would you like some chocolate? I’m sure there’s some left.” She took the lid off the Dresden pot and looked in. “No, I’m afraid I’ve drunk it all. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want any anyway,” I said.

  She finished her chocolate and put the cup and saucer down on the tray.

  “I suppose you’d like to go to bed, wouldn’t you?” she asked, reaching for her shoes.

  “Not particularly,” I said. “It’s early yet.”

  I sat down, looking at her. It was hard to imagine her as a bitter enemy of her parents, or for that matter to imagine her married to Stanley Woland, who’d borrowed five thousand dollars to see him through his courtship. She turned her head and stared silently into the fire.