Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  “So I couldn’t go out! So I couldn’t marry Diane!” He was almost sobbing. “She didn’t have a headache. That isn’t why we came back early from the ball. She was angry at him. She’d just seen him the night before. She thought he was probably married to the girl he was with. She was unhappy—so unhappy! And so angry! I persuaded her to run away with me and get married right away. I was eloquent and comforting. We had to come home and change. I took her home. Digges was there with her father and that Eaton person. She marched in and told them, the three of them, to their faces, what she was going to do. Oh, it was so foolish!”

  He put his battered face down in his hands, shaking with remembered anguish. I didn’t for a minute doubt that it was very genuine.

  “Her father was in a rage. He ordered her upstairs. She went like a child. He went and locked her door—like a father in the old country. When he came back, he talked to me like a madman. I went out. Diane threw me down a piece of paper, outside. It said to come at half past twelve; she’d get out.” His head went down again. “But I must have dropped it! This Digges knew! He came at twelve. I was getting ready to go. She was waiting. He came here. He broke the chain off the door! He came upstairs! He stood in my door, and he said, ‘This hurts me worse than it does you, you louse!’ He called me a louse!”

  “You’ve been called that before, Stanley,” I said.

  “But not the same!” he groaned. “He said, ‘I’m going to fix that mug of yours so she can’t marry you tonight or next week. When she’s had time to think about it, it’s her business.’ And then——”

  “Oh, don’t go on,” I said. “I can guess the rest of it.”

  He was really sobbing now, with pain and humiliation and futile, frustrated rage.

  “Why don’t you sue him?” I asked.

  His head shot up. “No! That’s what I’m telling you, Grace! The publicity! Don’t you see? That’s the point! Unless the police understand it’s not Hilyard’s blood before the trial—don’t you see? He’ll keep quiet as long as he can—not for me, for Diane—but when he sees the noose he’ll tell. And then—” His hands spread wide in an eloquent gesture. “I will be laughed at everywhere. All over the world. I cannot stand it!” He broke down again, his face in his hands, shaking convulsively.

  “I can see that,” I agreed. Then I thought of something. “Stanley, did you see him take Mr. Hilyard’s gun?”

  He nodded. “It was me he was going to kill,” he said wretchedly. “I wish he had. I could have died easier than I can face my friends if this is known. He put the gun in his pocket and he said, ‘If you marry Diane tonight, I’ll blow your brains out.’ ”

  “So that was it. What did you say? Didn’t you get a word in at all?”

  He shook his head. “Not then. When he came here I was angry too. I laughed at him. I said, ‘What right have you to talk? They paid you twenty-five hundred dollars to get out of town so you couldn’t marry her. You accepted. You have no right to speak now!’ Oh, that was such a mistake! That was what Eaton told me; I didn’t know it was a lie.”

  “You do now, I guess,” I said. “It was a mistake in any case. What do you want me to do?”

  “Make Colonel Primrose understand!” He was almost on his knees. “You must do it, Grace! No one else can do it for me! I would die of shame!”

  “You still haven’t told me what you were prowling around my garbage cans for last night,” I said.

  “I can’t go out in the daytime, Grace. A man came just as I got there. I had to wait. You see, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I see,” I said. I reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Primrose’s number.

  “Look, colonel,” I said. “I’ve got some information that will interest you. Can you meet me at my house pretty soon? You might bring Bowen if he’s still with you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THEY WERE GOING IN THE DOOR JUST AS I GOT home. Colonel Primrose apparently hadn’t told Bowen where I’d been. He couldn’t have looked as unconcerned as he did, holding the door for me. He didn’t look very unconcerned a moment later as he followed me and the colonel into my living room. And it wasn’t the sight of his hat, still lying on the table, because he didn’t even see that. It was Diane Hilyard, on the ottoman in front of the fire.

  She got up quickly. “I’d better go,” she said. She reached for her coat. “I didn’t know you were busy.”

  “No. I think you’d better stay,” Colonel Primrose said urbanely. “It’s time you two were getting straightened out a little. . . . This is your hat, isn’t it, Digges?”

  “I guess so,” Bowen said. His voice was carefully controlled. “If it’s got my name in it. I don’t wear one often enough to tell it from anybody else’s.” He looked inside it and handed it back. “That’s mine.”

  “When did you have it last?”

  “Tuesday night when I left the Hilyards’. That’s the last I remember.”

  “All right,” Colonel Primrose said. “Sit down, you two.”

  “Colonel, I don’t know,” I said uneasily, “whether Diane’s going to like——”

  “It doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether she likes it or not,” he said calmly. “It’s time she was hearing the truth, and it’s time Digges was telling it. I’m sure she can take it, whatever it is.”

  She shot him a quick, radiant smile. “Thanks, colonel!” she said. She settled back into her chair with the dignity of a very young and very sweet goddess. Bowen reached for a cigarette and started to light it, getting a shade more like a thundercloud.

  “Very well, then,” I said. “Here goes, but don’t blame me. Stanley doesn’t want it to come out in court that the blood on Bowen’s overcoat is his, because it will ruin his career.”

  The match in Bowen’s fingers burned down until he dropped it.

  “Look here, colonel,” he began angrily.

  “Sit down, Digges,” Colonel Primrose said. “You’ve been a fool long enough. . . . Go on, Mrs. Latham.”

  I went on from there to the bitter end.

  I could see Diane all the time. Her face was an extraordinary kaleidoscope of a dozen emotions, from distress to chagrin to quick amusement and all the way back again. And Bowen just sat glowering, sunk down in the corner of the sofa, his face a dull brick red, his eyes fixed on a point on the floor—midway between a couple of circles of hell.

  Only at one point did anybody interrupt me. That was when I got to the episode of Diane’s marching in, as Stanley had described, and telling them all what she was going to do.

  And it was Diane who interrupted. She got up quickly, her cheeks flaming scarlet.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried passionately. “I didn’t know what I was doing! I was——Oh, I don’t know why I was such a horrid pig!”

  It was the only time that Bowen looked up, so far as I know. If he could have seen himself just then, he’d have known that not even the letter, even if she had written it, made any real difference to him.

  “I’m going home,” Diane whispered. “I can’t bear it.”

  “In a minute or two,” Colonel Primrose said.

  She sat down, and didn’t move again; nor did Bowen Digges, until I got to the gun. The movement then was a sort of deepened silence, and it lasted to the end.

  For a moment nobody said anything, Diane sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking down at them, tears beading her long lashes.

  “Well, let’s hear about that gun, Digges,” Colonel Primrose said patiently.

  “I took it, all right. I guess I was going to kill him. And I would have if I’d had it, but I didn’t.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Mr, Hilyard and I were there in the library. Woland had gone, and so had Eaton. Mr. Hilyard was so sore he couldn’t stand still, but even then he had more sense than I had. He asked me to take a walk with him; he had to cool off, and he had something to tell me. I said okay. He called the dog, and then he said, ‘You’d better give me that gun. No use having a we
apon on you when you feel like using it.’ He put it back in the drawer, and that’s the last I saw of it.”

  “Go on,” Colonel Primrose said.

  “When we got outside I saw a crumpled piece of paper by the steps that wasn’t there when I came in, and I picked it up. I didn’t want to tell Mr. Hilyard, because I thought he’d make it unpleasant for her. He wanted to go down and walk on the towing path. We went down to Thirty-fourth and M in my car. A little ways along Prospect I saw Woland’s car. I guessed he was waiting to go back, and said so. Mr. Hilyard said Diane was locked in, and she couldn’t get out anyway unless Mrs. Hilyard let her out. He said if she did, and encouraged her to go with Woland, that would bring Diane to her senses quicker than anything else, because Mrs. Hilyard was a fool and Diane knew it.”

  Diane was still looking down, the spots on her cheeks hotter and darker.

  “We walked about a mile. I was in a hurry by that time. It was half past eleven. We started back, but the spaniel wouldn’t come. Mr. Hilyard might as well have whistled for the wind. I left him a couple of hundred yards from the bridge, still whistling. I was running, because I didn’t want to be too late where I was going. And that’s the last I saw of him, standing there on the towing path, whistling. He said for me to go on; he might be there an hour. Diane had never taught the dog to obey any better than she’d been taught herself.”

  He looked over at her and grinned in spite of himself; and she laughed a little, then put her handkerchief quickly up to her face. “Poor dad,” she whispered.

  Bowen moved unhappily.

  “What was it he wanted to talk to you about?” Colonel Primrose asked,

  “Hey never got to it. He —— I got the idea it was something that was hard for him to say. All he talked about was what a yellow-bellied son of heaven Carey Eaton had turned out to be, and what he thought of Stanley Woland and Mrs. Hilyard’s match-making. He talked about his son too. He talked about him quite a long time. I knew him, you know. I kept thinking it was promethium he was going to talk about, or I’d have left sooner. But he never did.”

  All the time he was saying this he was looking across at Diane. I don’t think he was conscious of it, or that he could have helped it if he had been.

  “Did you see anyone as you crossed the bridge to M Street?”

  “What?”

  Colonel Primrose repeated.

  “No.”

  “Did Mr. Hilyard have a hat?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” He got to his feet abruptly.

  “ Yes, he had a hat. He handed me mine and said he got neuralgia if he didn’t wear one.”

  He took a step across the room, pulled by something stronger than himself that wiped out all the bitterness and frustration of the years past. Diane raised her head and looked up at him, her face remote and unaware. He stood there, so controlled by heartbreaking effort that I don’t think Diane knew what had almost happened.

  He turned and went over to the window. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t seem to be much help.”

  More to break the silence than anything, I said, “Then I don’t see how Mr. Hilyard could have died at eleven thirty-five. Could his watch have stopped?”

  “Not by itself,” Colonel Primrose answered. “Mr. Hilyard was shot and killed. His watch was stopped and the hands moved back from whatever time it was. It was put back into his pocket and his body put in the canal. And that was done deliberately and with malice by the same person or persons who took Digges’ hat out of his car on M Street and left it on the towing path—to point in one direction, and one only.”

  He got to his feet. What he said at first I didn’t understand for some time.

  “Thank God the human memory is not infallible. We’ll go down and see Lamb, Digges.” He started for the door and turned back. “Certain people have been informed, rather indirectly, that there is a bloody fingerprint on the band of Mr. Digges’ hat,” he said gravely. “That is supposed to be the reason Diane concealed it. Pm telling you that particularly, Mrs. Latham, because I’m putting the hat on the hall table here—the one nearest the door. Pd like you to go in and out as normally as you can all day. We’ll take care of the rest of it. If you have callers, act as you always do. Don’t take anything for granted, or jump to conclusions, and, above all, don’t act on your own. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “All right, then, Digges.”

  Diane got up, and as Bowen came from the window she took a step forward. “Bowen,” she said. Her face raised to his was very pale, her eyes blue as the Caribbean. She was simple and straightforward and without dramatics of any kind.

  He stopped, looking down at her. “Yes, Diane.”

  “Will you … forgive … all of us?”

  She put out hejvhand, still not sure he would take it.

  For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to. Then he put out his. I suppose it was some such simple physical contact they both needed, for in an instant the whole room was electric. I saw his grip tighten and his body tense. Her eyes were wide, and her lips parted.

  “Diane!”

  It was a command and an appeal both at the same time, from the deepest part of him to the depths of her. He drew her to him, not gently but with a controlled violence of power that shattered all the barriers between them in a liberating surge that was as poignant as it was passionate. Then, with a sob, she was in his arms.

  “Oh, Bowen, I love you!”

  “Diane!” he said. It was all he could say, and he kept saying it again and again, as if it was all he needed, because it said everything there was.

  Out in the hall, Colonel Primrose was smiling his urbane smile as he put Bowen’s hat on the table.

  “Do you have to take him away?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so. I wish it could have waited. He’s not out of it by any means. Still, he’s got something to live for now. It’s hard to defend a man who doesn’t give a damn.”

  I saw he was right when Bowen left—a new man in a brave new world. The staggering difference in him almost made up for the disturbing gravity of Colonel Primrose’s face.

  And Diane stood lost in a radiant fog until the door closed behind them and I came back into the room. She was so beautiful that I almost felt frightened. She closed her eyes and stood there. I suddenly realized that the tears were pouring from under her lashes in streams without her ever making a sound. “Darling!” I said.

  She buried her head in my shoulder, crying, I suppose, for the first time in the whole long five years. It was Lilac who finally came and took her upstairs.

  I stood looking out of the window at the bleak bare garden and the high brick wall at the end of it. I was badly worried. I don’t know when anything that should have been so lovely and inspiriting had seemed so dark and ominous. I was still there when Lilac came down.

  “Now she can res’. She can res’ to her content,” she said. “She sleepin’ like a baby. . . . That ol’ debbil!”

  Which old devil she meant I wasn’t sure. I suspected it was Colonel Primrose, but I thought it best not to inquire.

  CHAPTER 23

  IF I WERE TO BE ALLOWED TO LIVE CERTAIN days of my life over again, that day would not be one of the ones I’d choose. Trying to act normally made life suddenly seem frightfully dull, and made me realize what a lot of time I wasted. Each time I went out and came back I looked at the hat, still there on the table. Lilac would come tiptoeing up from the kitchen with the phone calls and messages. Bowen had called Diane twice, but she was still asleep and Lilac wouldn’t wake her. Stanley had called me once, and wanted me to call back when I came in.

  Otherwise there was just the usual sort of thing. I went out to lunch, came home, went to War Relief and came home from that about four o’clock. Mrs. Hilyard had phoned to see if Diane was there. They were frantic, she told Lilac. I suppose Lilac was acting under instructions, because she said Diane was not there—which is more than I can get her to do for me. It was I who finally i
nsisted Diane call her mother.

  She’d met some old school friends, she said, and had lunched with them and was staying downtown for tea and dinner. She’d probably be home late. The new lilt to her Voice must have surprised her mother into believing anything. Until she thought it over, at any rate—for ten minutes later Joan Eaton called and asked for Diane, as if she knew she was there. And Lilac lied as blandly as before.

  I skipped a tea I’d been going to go to, and I was sorry I had. As the time wore on and the edge of expectancy Diane had waked with wore off, she became so quiet and still, sitting in the corner of the old sofa in the boys’ room upstairs, that I found myself getting as jittery as Stanley had been in the morning. As the winter dusk settled into darkness and the street lights and lights on cars came on, she got up and knelt down on the cushion, staring out the window into the bare forlorn branches of the trees, like a lonely child waiting for someone who could never come again.

  Once she said, “Grace, you don’t thmk, do you——I mean, nothing can happen to him, can it? Why don’t they come?” But she didn’t cry any more. In a way, it might have been easier.

  There was a brief moment just before Lilac came up with some sandwiches and salad on a tray for us. Colonel Primrose called. We were to stay upstairs, he said. He didn’t sound hopeful. We were to go to bed at the usual time. He didn’t want Diane to leave the house if she hadn’t left already. When I said she hadn’t, he let Bowen talk to her a few minutes. That didn’t last long. It seemed even to sink her deeper into silence and despair.

  “If we only knew something,” she whispered once. She’d given up all pretense at reading after her eyes had been glued to the same spot on the same page for half an hour.

  It was exactly eight-thirty when Sheila raised her head and growled softly.

  Diane’s body went taut. She sprang up as if she knew what she was supposed to do, switched off the light and opened the door a few inches. The light in the upstairs hall was already off. Only the lights on the tables in the hall downstairs were on.