Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

I could hear Lilac come up, grumbling heavily, and pad along in her felt bedroom slippers.

  There was a silence as she opened the door. Then I heard her say, “No’m. She ain’ home. She gone out to the movies.”

  I couldn’t make out who it was at the door.

  “Yes’m. You can wait. She won’ be gone long.”

  I slipped off my shoes as Diane had done, crept cautiously over to the door and out to the mahogany rail at the head of the stair well. Diane was there ahead of me. I saw her raise her hand to her mouth, her other hand clutching the rail. We could see just a small part of the lower hall—only that reflected in the mirror on the paneled wall beside the door leading to the kitchen. But it reflected the opposite wall and the table that Bowen’s hat was on, and just then it reflected the image of the woman who was walking past it into the living-room door. It was Mrs. Hilyard.

  I caught Diane’s trembling arm and shook my head, though my own face must have been as white as hers. Colonel Primrose had said we weren’t to jump to conclusions. Mrs. Hilyard hadn’t even glanced at the hat. She went directly on into the living room. Lilac closed the door and padded across the hall to her kitchen door.

  Diane didn’t move. It didn’t seem to me that she was even breathing any more. Then suddenly I felt her body go as taut as a bowstring. The living-room door was opening, so slowly and silently that for an instant I could have thought it was opening by itself. Then a hand came slowly out. It grasped the white fluted wood of the frame and held it. The door still opened. My heart went very cold. Those hands! I’d noticed them the first day I called in Prospect Street—strong, purposeful, determined.

  So silently that it didn’t seem possible to me that a human being could move that way, Mrs. Hilyard came out into the hall. She stood there, still holding to the doorframe, listening intently. I could faintly hear the rumba coming cheerfully from Lilac’s radio downstairs. Mrs. Hilyard went with quick noiseless steps to the kitchen door and bent down, listening. She came back, as quickly and as silently, to the hall table, raised her head to listen again for an instant, and seized the hat. She turned quickly, held it in the light and looked inside it. Her hands were steady as iron.

  She gave one quick sideways glance at the kitchen door, folded the hat with two unhurried motions, and before I could be sure I’d really seen the unbelievable and terrifying smile of triumph on her pale face reflected in the mirror, she was gone. The front door closed as quietly as the other one had opened.

  I left Diane standing there, ran back into the boys’ study and pulled back one edge of the window curtain. I could see her distinctly. She was just stepping off the bottom step onto the sidewalk. She gave one glance to the left and right and walked coolly across the sidewalk to her car. And my heart sank. Colonel Primrose had slipped up, for, except for her, there was no one in the street.

  Then I caught my breath. Ten yards farther down, a man stepped out of the shadows. His hat was pulled over his forehead, his overcoat collar turned up, his hands in his pockets. He took three quick steps along the sidewalk, looked quickly back over his shoulder, and then, just as my heart gave a kind of primitive, savage thrill at the idea that Mrs. Hilyard wasn’t going to get away with it after all, he leaped at her with a kind of animal savagery just in the movement of his body. Mrs. Hilyard swung round, and I saw his hand rise and fall, and I screamed as she crumpled to the ground. He leaned over her, picked up the hat and stuffed it into his pocket with one swift motion, turned and ran down the street. Mrs. Hilyard lay there motionless.

  It was so swift and deadly that I couldn’t believe it at all, and then Diane was there, shaking me.

  “what is it Grace? What is it?”

  I pointed down to the street. Men were running up now, and bending over her.

  “Oh, Grace, it’s mother! They’ve killed her too!”

  It wasn’t Diane’s mother I was thinking about; it was the man with his hat pulled down on his face and his coat collar up, creeping up in the street behind Mrs. Hilyard and striking her down, and I realized with a sudden thrill of horror that, impossible as it was, the man was Stanley Woland. And it was I myself who’d let him know the hat was at my house, and who’d warned him that Colonel Primrose knew it. That was why he hadn’t come. It was all so desperately clear. And I knew now why he didn’t want the bloodstains on Bowen’s coat to point to him.

  I went slowly across the room and slipped my shoes on. Downstairs I could hear voices already, and the tramping of feet. They were bringing Mrs. Hilyard in. I got halfway down the stairs and stopped. Colonel Primrose was coming in. Bowen Digges with him. Two men I’d never seen were carrying Mrs. Hilyard into the living room. Diane slipped past me and ran down the stairs; Bowen went quickly to meet her.

  Colonel Primrose stopped at the newel post, waiting for me. His face was so grave that my heart sank deeper.

  “Did he … get away?”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head. “By no means,” he said. His voice was as urbane as ever, but there was a grimness to it that I hadn’t often heard. “He didn’t get away, the sneaking scoundrel. He almost added a third to the list.”

  “Mrs. Hilyard,” I said quickly. “Is she—”

  “She’ll live.”

  Outside the open door I heard the scraping of feet then, and heavy voices. A car door opened. They were crossing the sidewalk then and coming up the steps. I ran quickly down. Colonel Primrose went with me to the door. I’ve never seen his face so cold with anger and contempt before.

  Captain Lamb was standing by the open door of the car in front. Sgt. Phineas T. Buck was coming up the sidewalk and, beside him, his hat still down, walking along with one wrist shackled to Sergeant Buck’s, was Stanley. They went straight to the car. I watched them breathlessly, with a kind of cold horror. And then, as Stanley started to get in the car, he struck his head against the top of the door, and his hat was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. He bent down to get it, turning toward me, and in the light from my windows I saw him clearly. The strong jaw and hard mouth, the black hair shot with gray, the dark sun-tanned face.

  I turned slowly to Colonel Primrose. “Bartlett Folger!”

  He nodded coolly and closed the door. “The wicked was spreading himself like a green bay tree,” he said.

  “But, colonel!”

  “But, Mrs. Latham! You told me so yourself.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “I DON’T THINK HE MEANT TO KILL YOU, Mrs. Hilyard,” Colonel Primrose said. It was as damning faint praise as I ever hope to hear. “The doctor says you are able to answer a few questions. I’d like to get things cleared up now.”

  His manner was not sympathetic—as I hadn’t expected it would be—and it occurred to me that he wanted to ask his questions before she had time to think things over.

  And I’m happy to say that for just once I was right.

  It was just after midnight. Mrs. Hilyard was propped up on my sofa. Captain Lamb had come back. Diane was sitting by her mother, and Bowen Digges was across the room, watching every move she made and every breath she took.

  “I think you’ve been almost criminally foolish. I’m giving you a chance now to make up for it a little.”

  Mrs. Hilyard’s thin lips tightened. She closed her eyes.

  “You knew Magnussen was not a beggar, and you knew why he was here. Your brother paid him a thousand dollars, five years ago. It was that thousand dollars he had been saving to pay back since he got religion at Ira Colton’s plant. That was three years ago. He told Colton there was plenty of promethium to be had. Colton thought you people were hoarding it. You weren’t. I’d gone into that story, and so had about every other intelligence officer. Colton had it wrong, and Magnussen didn’t explain because he was involved. When did Mr. Hilyard learn what was going on?”

  “Not until a short time ago,” Mrs. Hilyard said quietly.

  “Which is when he decided to resign,” Colonel Primrose went on. “That’s why he was upset and unhappy, and thought he was r
esponsible for the death of his own son and of other people’s sons, on Sunday, December seventh, 1941. He thought that he was responsible for the scarcity of promethium—and if we’d been able to experiment with it and use it the last three years, that and other things might not have happened.”

  Mrs. Hilyard looked at him silently.

  “He was not responsible, however. It was your brother, Folger. And yourself, Mrs. Hilyard, and the Eatons.”

  “We didn’t know until a year ago,” she said painfully. “My brother told me then. I talked to Carey. We all agreed not to tell my husband. It would ruin us. It was my money. I didn’t want to lose it.”

  “I understand that perfectly,” Colonel Primrose said. There was a shade of dryness in his voice that I’d seldom heard either.

  Diane moved on the sofa. “What are you talking about?”

  “We are talking about a process for extracting promethium,” Colonel Primrose said deliberately, “that was pigeonholed by Bartlett Folger, who was manager of the Promethium Corporation’s plant, because it would increase the available supply of promethium I don’t know how many hundredfold.”

  Bowen Digges got slowly to his feet, staring at him.

  “It would bring the price of promethium from thirty-eight dollars a pound to about seventy-five cents a pound. It was a process that a young employee worked out at your plant five years ago. His name was Bowen Digges, and that process of his was the real reason that he was paid twenty-five hundred dollars to leave town.”

  Bowen took a step forward. “You’re wrong about that, colonel,” he said, very slowly. “That process went bad. I happen to know that.”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head calmly. “No,” he said. “It didn’t. The same being the entire point of all this business. You thought it went bad. When you left your electric furnace on the last night, Magnussen was paid one thousand dollars by Bartlett Folger to turn off the heat for three hours, and turn it on then, so that you knew nothing about it. Mr. Carey Eaton was kind enough to tell me that, this evening at six o’clock—to keep himself from going to jail. . . . That is correct, Mrs. Hilyard?”

  Her face was as white as the towel over the ice pack on her head. Bowen Digges stood there, his face hard and white with anger. Diane got up slowly and moved away from her mother to the arm of my chair. She didn’t say anything or look at Bowen. I took her hand, icy and inert.

  “Digges was half out of his mind because he thought Diane had let him down,” Colonel Primrose went on evenly. “As Mr. Folger told Mrs. Latham, he went around as if he’d been stunned. When this experiment of his went bad, it was another blow. And that’s why you didn’t want Diane to marry Bowen Digges. That and the fact that you were snobs.”

  “But we’d have been ruined!” Mrs. Hilyard cried. “We put all my money into it! You don’t——”

  “As a matter of fact,” Colonel Primrose said politely, “in the present situation you’d have made a great deal more money. You couldn’t foresee it, of course. Well your husband was the only one of you with the courage, or the patriotism, to put his country above private gain. That was the reason Folger killed him. And he wasn’t content to kill one man or two. He tried to destroy a third, deliberately and wickedly. As long as Bowen Digges lived and was in a strong position in the promethium world, there was always the danger that he’d work on his old experiment again. For you hadn’t patented his process. You couldn’t.”

  Diane drew a chair up and sat down by me. All the vision and the dream of that day was gone. It had gone for Bowen too. He was tight and hard again, and the old bitterness that I hadn’t recognized until it was gone had come back.

  “There’s your motive,” said Colonel Primrose. “I’ll tell you what happened. You and Mrs. Eaton left the Samarkand with Folger at twenty minutes to twelve. You got home. Mrs. Eaton stayed in the car. Your brother went inside with you. Carey Eaton was there. He told you what had happened about Diane and Stanley Woland. He stayed with you, Mrs. Hilyard, while Bartlett Folger took Mrs. Eaton home. Carey Eaton hated Digges, too, for the simple reason that he’d played a cruel trick on him. He didn’t see Mr. Hilyard take the gun from Bowen. My guess is that he didn’t see Folger take the gun from the desk. I don’t think that Folger would have trusted him that far. He did get it, however.

  “He then took Mrs. Eaton home and went down to the canal, where he knew Hilyard walked Diane’s dog. He found Bowen Digges’ car parked there and took his hat. That was a stroke of luck; all the rest of it was carefully prearranged. He waited until Bowen left Hilyard whistling for the dog. Then he showed. This is reconstruction, but I think it’s accurate. He proposed to Hilyard that they drive along until they saw the dog on the towing path. They drove down the road, on this side of the canal, to where a boat was tied, and crossed over to find the dog. That would take only a minute. They walked along the towing path, and there, in as lonely a spot as you’ll find in the district, Bartlett Folger shot his brother-in-law. He stopped the watch, set the hands back to the time Bowen had been there, and put the body in the water. He then took Hilyard’s hat and left Digges’, and crossed the canal again in the skiff.

  “And on that skiff he left three bloody fingerprints. I’d thought they were left by the police who brought the body across the canal, until Folger made one very bad blunder when he was talking to Mrs. Latham on the Samarkand.” He looked over at me with a faint smile. “He told her that Digges was on the towing path with Mr. Hilyard that night. It’s about the one time his memory failed him. For the only people who knew that, were Digges, Captain Lamb, Diane, Mrs. Latham, Buck, myself, and the murderer. And none of those people had told Folger. He could only have known it by being there himself.

  “Well, I think you thought it was suicide at first, Mrs. Hilyard, and you thought later it was your son-in-law. Mr. Carey Eaton thought it was you, but it didn’t make much difference to him, one way or the other. He was interested always in Mr. Carey Eaton. He was quite willing to have Digges take the blame.”

  Diane moved painfully.

  “There were several other things pointing to Folger,” Colonel Primrose said. “A patrol car saw Mrs. Hilyard leave her house at two o’clock in the morning. It followed her to the Samarkand. When Mrs. Latham told me Mrs. Hilyard had been talking to Magnussen in the garden that night, it was obvious she’d gone to tell her brother. And when Folger pretended he thought the man was a beggar, I knew he was lying. He knew, of course, that the man had come to see him.

  “Magnussen was a simple man. He didn’t want to harm anyone, not even the people who had caused him to sin. He wanted a personal atonement. And when Folger used that word ‘atonement,’ talking to Mrs. Latham, it was evidence in itself. I don’t suppose he’d ever used it in his life before. He will now learn what it means.”

  He looked at Captain Lamb.

  “Will you call your men? I think the Carey Eatons are expecting Mrs. Hilyard. I should like to say also that my first interest was to check the rumor that there was promethium somewhere. My second was to keep Bowen Digges for use in his present job, and not smirched by as cowardly and malignant a conspiracy as I’ve run into.”

  Mrs. Hilyard got painfully to her feet. She looked at Diane.

  “I’m sorry, mother. I can’t come now. I’ll come . . . later.”

  Mrs. Hilyard steadied herself, tried for an instant to speak, and went out with Captain Lamb.

  Diane got up and went over to Colonel Primrose. “Thank you so much,” she said. “Good night, Grace. And good-by, Bowen. I haven’t anything to say. You must hate us all—oh, terribly.”

  Bowen looked at her. “Sit down, Miss Hilyard,” he said, his face slowly breaking into a grin. “With promethium down to seventy-five cents a pound, you’re going to need somebody to support you.”

  She looked at him, her face blank and unhappy. He came over and put his arms around her.

  “There, there, honey child. Come on, let’s walk around the block. Mrs. Latham won’t care if you get in late, an
d tomorrow I’m going to marry you.”

  “There’s a fire upstairs in the boys’ study,” I said. “Just turn out the porch light when you leave.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s that, then.”

  Colonel Primrose smiled.

  “Yes. And I still haven’t got around to asking you to marry me.”

  “Then why don’t we leave it till another time?” I said.

  I hadn’t realized, though I should have, that Sgt. Phineas T. Buck had come back with Captain Lamb, and taken a guard duty in the hall. Or perhaps the doors and windows were all open and the thermostat set at zero. It was awfully cold, all of a sudden. And the noise like a Gargantuan jeep crossing a cast-iron bridge was Sergeant Buck clearing his throat.

  “Good night, colonel,” I said.

  “Good night, my dear. And thanks; I couldn’t get along without you.”