Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  Colonel Primrose’s hand closed on my arm. I stopped short.

  “What were you going to say, Mrs. Latham?”

  “I started to say I saw him a little later on Thirty-third Street,” I went on, with half the truth. “He was waiting to cross the street, I thought. But he turned and went back along Prospect Street toward Thirty-seventh.”

  I looked again at the table. It’s strange, but now that all sign of violence was gone, there was nothing terrible, only something deeply moving, about the man lying there. His face was like the face of the spirit in the Blake drawing of the Death of the Good Old Man. I suppose it was because no one there felt any personal bereavement; or possibly in a world where there is no peace, the profundity of the peace and dignity he had achieved seemed a kind of miracle.

  Sergeant Buck bent down again, picked up the Bible lying on the floor, keeping it open as it had fallen, and looked at the page the old man had been reading. Then, to my surprise, as I hadn’t really thought he could do it, he read, very slowly and after clearing that iron throat of his with a resounding crash:

  “ ‘I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

  “ ‘Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not; yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.’ ”

  There was a little silence.

  “He had it marked there,” Buck said.

  Colonel Primrose took the Bible from the sergeant’s hands and stood looking down at it for a long time before he handed it to a detective and got on with his job.

  How he got Bowen Digges off—I mean even in the most temporary way—I wouldn’t know. They took down his story. It was the way the reporter had given it to me; except that he only said he’d heard Magnussen was staying there and wanted to see him. I thought Colonel Primrose started to ask something at that point, and stopped. As far as I knew, it was a straightforward story, beginning with seeing Magnussen and not recognizing him on the wharf. When he got to Mr. Kalbfus’ shop, Magnussen was lying just as they found him.

  When he had finished his account, Colonel Primrose and Captain Lamb had a long and earnest conversation and Bowen was handed over as the colonel’s personal responsibility. And I assumed, with a lifting of my heart, that Colonel Primrose didn’t think Bowen had killed either Lawrason Hilyard or the old man. If he had thought so he’d never have sent him home with me, I hoped. I didn’t know at the time that he sent Sergeant Buck along behind us. If I had known it I’d have assumed he thought Bowen and I were in a conspiracy, both tarred with the same bloody brush.

  “I’ll be along shortly,” he said.

  I don’t think Bowen and I said ten words on the way home, or before dinner, or during it, or after. He had plenty to think about, heaven knew, and so did I. He sat by the fire with Sheila curled up at his feet. He didn’t smoke and he wouldn’t drink. He just sat staring into the fire. At dinner he did eat, first because Lilac told him to, and after that because he was hungry. He was sitting by the fire again when Colonel Primrose came in. It was nearly nine o’clock.

  Colonel Primrose came over to the fire. “Did either you or the patrolman look around that place at all?” he asked shortly.

  Bowen shook his head. “I dashed out to put in a call, and met him head on in the passage. I wanted to stay, but he hauled me along to the call box.”

  “Someone was standing behind the tree in the back yard,” Colonel Primrose said. “Probably when you and that dumb ox were there. He tracked garbage back, and there’s plenty of evidence of uneasy waiting.”

  “Oh, God!” Bowen said. “If I’d looked around——”

  Colonel Primrose nodded. “It’s not really important,” he said urbanely, “but you might have been killed too. The important thing——” He stopped for a moment. “I’d like to talk to Mrs. Latham. . . . Can Digges go upstairs, or somewhere?”

  “The boys’ sitting room in front,” I said. “Right at the end of the hall. There’s a radio and a lot of books.”

  Bowen got up without a word.

  “Just one question first. What did you want to see Magnussen about?”

  I’d got, it seemed to me, so I could tell when Mr. Digges was, in effect, saying, “That’s my business too.” He didn’t exactly now. He stopped, hesitated, and said, “He was an old acquaintance. I used to be his helper at the plant.”

  “Thank you,” Colonel Primrose said.

  When Bowen had gone, he came over and sat down by me.

  “Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Latham,” he said seriously. “Don’t leave anything out. If I can’t prove something I only guess at now, Digges goes to jail at midnight. I’ll turn him over. Unless——” He drew a deep breath. “I don’t think the boy’s guilty, of course. The evidence convicts him—and there’s more of it than you know. But the pattern is too——” He stopped again.

  “There’s more of it than you know,” I said. “Carey Eaton saw him pick up Mr. Hilyard’s gun and put it in his pocket.”

  “So Eaton told me this noon—with great reluctance.”

  “Was that what you meant in your note, about its being more serious?”

  He nodded. “Partly. That isn’t all. I know, officially, that it was Digges’ hat your setter found on the canal bank. I can’t keep it to myself much longer.”

  I stared at him, open-mouthed.

  “How . . . do you know it?” I managed to say. “Who told you?”

  “Diane,” he said calmly.

  “Diane Hilyard?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Diane Hilyard.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IT,” I SAID. “I simply can’t. It just doesn’t make any possible kind of sense.”

  “It makes a great deal,” he said. “If only I could manage to get you to be indiscreet at the right time instead of the wrong time.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Me?” I asked. Then I began to understand him a little. “You don’t think it would have made any difference if I hadn’t told Bowen——”

  I was horribly distressed.

  “Not to Magnussen,” he said. “I’m not certain it would have made any difference to him if you’d got hold of me this morning. It would have made a difference to Digges. But that’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  He chuckled a little at the look on my face.

  “Diane Hilyard,” he said, very seriously, “was doing an extraordinarily intelligent thing.”

  “Intelligent?”

  He nodded. “The bravest and most intelligent thing she could have done, Mrs. Latham.”

  I just sat there staring at him.

  “Diane jumped to a probably right conclusion,” he said. “Intuitively, not rationally. Then she proceeded to act on it as a rational person. And if you’d told her I suspected the two of you of concealing that hat, and that I was waiting for developments, it would have been damned disloyal of you and I’d never have dared trust you again.” He smiled again. “But if you had, it would certainly have saved the immediate situation.”

  “This is too paradoxical, or something, for me,” I said wearily. “You’ll just have to use words of one syllable.”

  “There was a sisterly row, in the first place. Diane still balked at the suicide theory. Her sister, Mrs. Eaton, in a final devastating attempt to bring her around, told her that Carey Eaton had seen Digges put the gun in his pocket. Also that he’d been keeping it to himself because he wanted to spare her.”

  “I heard about that,” I said.

  “Well, it didn’t sound plausible to Diane. And she came—suddenly, I gather—to a terrible conclusion—that Digges was being made the victim of a gigantic fraud, either to save someone else or deliberately destroy him. ‘Framed’ is the technical word. And she decided that every shred of evidence that had been planted against him—her conclusion being true—ought to be exposed, so the truth could come out. I think it took great courage to come to that decision.”

  “I do, too,” I said slowly. “
Both on account of Bowen Digges and of her family.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “But how horrible!” I said.

  “I know. There are people like that. Well, that’s how it happened. I think, by the way, that Diane’s mistaken about the primary motive here. Somebody wanted to get rid of Hilyard in the worst possible way—for what reason I have only a general idea. Magnussen might possibly have told us.”

  He stopped for a moment, looking at me. “I’m not sure he didn’t tell us. Anyway, if it could be passed off as suicide, fine. If not, let Digges take the rap. And he would have, if it hadn’t just happened that I’d been interested in Hilyard already.” He stopped again, looking at me seriously. “I want you to report, my dear. Let me do the interpreting. I don’t want to hear what you think, I want to hear what you know. And don’t forget that Digges is a complicated human being. And don’t leave anything out.”

  I reported, beginning at the beginning, I even got out Agnes Philips’ letter again and gave it to him. I told him about the quarrel Mr. and Mrs. Hilyard were having when I went into their house Monday evening, and about her rapping on the window when Magnussen was crossing the street toward Mr. Hilyard’s car. It was all terribly clear. The conversations I’d had with them or had heard them having, the graphic scenes—the Eatons stopping when my radio was blaring out that congressional attack on the promethium setup; Mrs. Hilyard, black-shrouded, waiting for Magnussen on the terrace, her collapse at lunch on the Samarkand—were acutely vivid in my mind.

  I kept seeing Mrs. Hilyard’s hands too; and although telling about that seemed a feline kind of comment to make about another woman, I made it. My conversations with her, and with Diane and Bowen, Carey Eaton and Joan and Bartlett Folger, Mr. Kalbfus and Lilac, I could quote almost word for word. I told him about Diane’s typewriter and the letter, and the business of atonement as Bartlett Folger had told it to me. It seemed trivial to mention the lock on the tilt-top table that Magnussen had helped Mr. Kalbfus with, but I did. I didn’t leave anything out that I’d seen or heard.

  Stanley Woland I barely brought in at all, except as Diane had talked about him. Poor Stanley seemed to have dropped down a drain, really. Anyway, he had no motive at all for framing Bowen Digges, even if he had one for killing Lawrason Hilyard; and he certainly wouldn’t have risked exposing himself to the public eye by going to Mr. Kalbfus’ to crush the old man’s head in. In fact, he was the only person in the crowd that I could give a perfectly clean bill of health to. Joan Eaton no doubt was well pleased that her husband had been at home after all, with an iron-clad and incontrovertible alibi, but it was Stanley who was really lucky. It seemed amusing, when nothing else had a glimmer of amusement in it, that what Stanley would regard as the greatest conceivable misfortune should be an extraordinary stroke of fool’s luck.

  “I’m afraid none of it’s much help,” I said.

  I looked at the clock. In an hour and a quarter Bowen Digges would be turned over to Captain Lamb, and the newspapers would start pouring out enough ink to blacken him for the rest of his life, even if by a miracle he escaped the final penalty.

  “Did you ever talk to Ira Colton?” Colonel Primrose asked, after a minute.

  He seemed to come back from a long voyage into space. So did Ira Colton. I’d been so involved with emotional and immediate factors and people that I’d pretty much forgotten him.

  “I never talked to him,” I said. “I saw him, and I heard about his visit with that lawyer, Duncan Scott, to the Hilyards’ Tuesday night.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I’d forgotten that. He broke a chair there, Boston said. I guess he was pretty mad. Scott seems to have taken it better, but lawyers usually can take their clients’ losses with fortitude. And it seems to have been the two of them who saw Bowen pick up the gun. They wouldn’t have any connection with Magnussen, would they?”

  Colonel Primrose looked around at me for a brief instant. Then he got to his feet abruptly. He didn’t leap up as Bowen Digges had done, but the movement had the same kind of sudden recognition. He went over to the telephone and dialed a number. I watched him blankly.

  “Primrose speaking; Captain Lamb, please,” he said. He waited. “Hello, Lamb. I want twenty-four hours more. I know who did it. . . . Yes, I tell you I do. . . . Yes, I’ve got to have it. Send a man out to the Randolph-Lee and have him take Ira Colton and Duncan Scott out to Gallinger. Don’t tell them why they’re going. I want them to see Magnussen’s body, and I want to be there when they do it. I’ll be along in half an hour. . . . What? . . . Yes, I know they were in the Randolph-Lee bar at eleven thirty-five. . . .”

  He listened. Captain Lamb’s voice was harsh and excited.

  “I know all that,” Colonel Primrose said patiently. “I’ve told you from the beginning that this had a defense angle. And one thing more: Have them bring that skiff in—the one they used to carry Hilyard’s body across the canal. I want to see it tonight.” He put the phone down.

  “What in the world is it?” I demanded. To say that I was in a complete, bewildering fog isn’t enough. “What have I just said?”

  He chuckled suddenly. “You’ve just said who murdered Lawrason Hilyard. I’m very grateful to you, my dear. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night. I’ll take Digges with me.”

  “And I can’t come?”

  “You can’t come. You stay right here, and don’t go out till I say you can. You’re the custodian of the hat. Take your job seriously.”

  I sat there trying to make a little intelligible sense out of it. The whole thing, as far as I was concerned, had tumbled apart like a deck of cards. Unconsciously, or rather subconsciously, I’d worked up half a dozen cases against the Hilyards; chiefly, I suppose, because of their suicide pact and their “shielding” of Bowen Digges and Mrs. Hilyard’s strange carryings-on with the dead man, Magnussen. That, I still couldn’t understand. Why should she have made denial after denial that she knew him, when she not only did know him but knew where he could be found? And what did the thousand dollars that rolled from under his body on Mr. Kalbfus’ bench mean except that somebody—if not Mrs. Hilyard definitely—had given it to him in payment for something?

  Then something came into my mind like a flash of light in the dark. Mrs. Hilyard had given it to him, perhaps, for his mission, expecting that he’d go away, wanting him to go, for some reason not known to me. That would explain how he could be persuaded to take the money, and also why she collapsed at lunch on the Samarkand when Bartlett Folger said he had just seen him on the wharf.

  But it left so much unexplained: Why he’d come, in the first place. What he’d been doing. Why they wanted him out of the way. It seemed always to come back to “they”—the triumvirate of Mrs. Hilyard, her daughter Joan, her son-in-law Carey Eaton. Except, I thought suddenly, that it was Diane Hilyard who had prevented Bartlett Folger from calling the police and having the old man arrested. He might still be alive if she hadn’t pulled out that telephone connection. She and I might be as responsible for his death as the person who murdered him.

  I gave it all up, reached over to the end of the sofa and picked up the paper. I hadn’t had a chance to read much of it before Bowen came. His face looked up at me from the page, clean-cut and straightforward. I read the heavy newsprint again. If Carey Eaton should manage to get his place—

  The spectacle of Sergeant Buck reading the marked passage in the old man’s Bible flashed back into my mind. I tried to remember how it went, and finally got up and looked it up in the Psalms.

  “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

  “Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not; yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.”

  I tried desperately to think what it was in there that had kept Colonel Primrose staring down at it so long. Magnussen had sought Lawrason Hilyard, and Hilyard could not be found—in a sense, I supposed. He had also passed away, and he was not. But that didn’t seem very h
elpful, somehow.

  CHAPTER 19

  I TOOK THE NEWSPAPER UP AGAIN and glanced down the page. Near the bottom was an item I hadn’t noticed. It said, DEMOCRACY AT WORK. Under it was SMALL BUSINESSMAN INTERVIEWS OPM HEADS. It said:

  The story of how a small businessman made himself heard was revealed today. Mr. Ira B. Colton, president and manager of the Colton Novelty Company, proposed Carey Eaton, now with the Board of Economic Warfare, to succeed his late father-in-law, Lawrason Hilyard, as promethium chief. The police are still investigating Mr. Hilyard’s alleged suicide. Colton claimed that a young man actively connected with the industry was urgently needed to head the promethium division of OPM.

  Asked if he opposed the appointment of Bowen Digges, present acting head, Colton said he had nothing against Digges personally, and that he was undoubtedly an able metallurgist. The crying need at the present moment, however, was for a man who knows the industrial end of the problem confronting the nation in times like these. His attempts to negotiate with both Hilyard and Digges, Colton stated, had been marked with shilly-shallying and delay, of a sort that would ruin thousands of small businesses unless a change of policy and personnel was effected at once. He told reporters the men he talked with at OPM were interested in his suggestion.

  Colton spoke highly of Eaton as a hard-boiled, two-fisted businessman who knows promethium from the practical angle.

  Well, I thought.

  Until Sheila looked up and thumped her tail on the floor, I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud. She got up, started over to me and stopped, pricking up her ears and looking out into the hall. I sat up, listening. The house was silent. She growled and gave a sharp little bark. I heard a fumbling noise at the door, and the bell rang.

  I looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past eleven. For a moment I thought I wouldn’t answer, and then I thought it might be Diane, or Bowen coming back. I went out into the hall, turned on the ceiling light and opened the door. Then I took a step backward from sheer surprise. It was Mr. Kalbfus.