The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  I stared at him, literally with my mouth open.

  “But—that’s not possible!” I cried. Marshall Yardley’s words beat like crashing hail on my inner ears: “They’d put pink roach powder all over the back entrances…they’ve got his footprints in moulage…”

  Michael Priddy nodded. “There’s pink powder in the fluff from the carpet sweeper all right, Miss Lucy.”

  He was smiling grimly. He was somebody I’d never seen before in my life.

  “Where is Haines, Miss Lucy?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I whispered. I knew, looking at him, that he didn’t believe a word I’d said. He swung the fluff-covered black silk cord of my reticule between his fingers, that grim half-smile still in his eyes and on his mouth.

  “Tell us about this, Miss Lucy.”

  I shook my head again. “There’s no use. You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

  John Crabtree got up, almost abruptly for him. “Don’t you let Mike get you all upset, Miss Lucy,” he said gently. They moved toward the door. “I’m goin’ to ask you to stay here till I come back, Miss Lucy—hear?” John said.

  I nodded. I heard very well indeed. I also heard them go out, and then through the open window I heard Michael Priddy’s voice: “I’m goin’ back and see what else is in that fireplace, before Miss Lucy sticks a match to it.”

  “Okay, fella—but go easy. No use raisin’ too much stink around here. That guy Seymour wasn’t worth it.”

  All I had time to do was grab a bit of blackened cloth where Faith’s handkerchief hadn’t entirely carbonized, thrust it into the Eskimo’s sock and get back to my chair before Sergeant Priddy came back.

  He gave me an odd look. “’Scuse me, Miss Lucy, but you understand I’ve got my duty to do.”

  “By all means, Michael,” I said stiffly. “I’m glad to see you’ve improved so much.”

  It was astonishing to see what all he got out. Two cigarettes with bright lipstick on them, part of a card that at first I thought triumphantly was Summers Baldwin’s but that was only the one to Mason Seymour’s party I’d thrown there so Bill wouldn’t see it, the coffee spoon that had been missing two weeks, a button off the sleeve of a dress that Community swore I’d lost at the moving pictures. Eventually he wrapped his dreary loot in his handkerchief, picked up my father’s shotgun and said, “Good-bye, Miss Lucy—please don’t do nothing else foolish, hear?” I nodded again as he went out.

  When Community came in to announce lunch I was still sitting there. She looked at the fireplace, and then at me. She said gloomily, “Was roach powder on Mistah Bill’s shoes. Wasn’ none on yours.”

  I nodded. “When did you notice the shotgun last, Community—really?”

  “When Ah took Mistah Bill’s breakfas’ the fust mo’nin’ he here. He was aimin’ out th’ do’ at that moth-eaten ol’ squirrel. Ah says, ‘Yo’ bettah put that ol’ gun down, Mis’ Lucy she don’ lak nobody tech nothin’ don’ belong to ’em.’ He jus’ grinned, but he put it back in th’ press. That’s the las’ Ah seen of it.”

  “Did you tell Sergeant Priddy that?”

  “No ma’am. Ah didn’ tell him nothin’ ceptin’ we don’ have no ol’ cockroaches roun’ this house, an’ ain’ nobody goin’ roun’ say we does.”

  So that, I thought, was how he’d found out we didn’t use pink roach powder. Which was ironic too—because we’ve had a cockroach named General Sherman who has lived in the office wood basket as long as I can remember—or I presume he’s the same one and was still there unless the powder Bill tracked home was too much for him. It would be odd, I thought, if Community’s pride, based on the erroneous assumption that she’s a neat housekeeper, should wind our lodger up behind the bars in England Street.

  I didn’t say anything, and when I went over to the office after lunch she was there, brushing up the hearth after a man who’d come and taken away the fluff from the carpet sweeper and some dust out of the fireplace. They’d gone through Bill’s things too, without attempting to put them back in order.

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s odd how the mere fact that you’re not free to leave a place makes it a kind of prison even though there’s no other place you’d rather be, actually. That’s how my parlor seemed when I went back to it. I thought I’d never be able to stay there all afternoon. Yet when I started roaming around I felt Community’s miserable eyes following me like a yellow hound’s.

  I suppose actually that like a great many other people I’m only law-abiding when it doesn’t conflict with my own sense of freedom. Or maybe it was because, after those two had left, something my father used to say when he was Commonwealth Attorney kept picking at the locks of my mind:

  “Mark you me, Lucy—nobody has ever yet committed a murder without leaving his signature on the deed. The law’s problem is to find it and read it… and read it correctly.”

  And now John Carter Crabtree obviously regarded the pink powder as Bill’s signature… and I knew—no doubt because I wanted so passionately to know—that it was really a bitter unconscious forgery. And whether I thought now that if I went back to Mason Seymour’s I could find that where the others had failed, I don’t know. I do know, however, that I slipped out of the house without a word to Community and made a bee line for the house in Scotland Street.

  I kept thinking how I’d explain my coming if it was Luton I met, hoping it would be one of the colored servants, because it would be simple that way. And when I got there Joe was sweeping the brick walk. He said, “Step right in, Miss Lucy, you’ll find ’em in the library.” And I did—only I didn’t go into the library. I stopped abruptly in the sitting room, and stared, definitely open-mouthed, at the extraordinary scene in the overmantel mirror.

  For an instant it simply didn’t make sense; then I realized that it was not the study, but the reflection of the study in the girandole between the front windows that I saw, and that if he looked, Mr. Talbot Seymour could see me as plainly as 1 saw him. Only he wasn’t looking. He was totally absorbed in going through the contents of the safe, which I’d never known was a safe before, because it looked like any other painted panel of the wall, even to the print of the dashing Colonel Tarleton hanging on it.

  But it wasn’t the fact of the safe that was extraordinary. It was the desperate and furtive haste in every line and every movement of the man’s body, and the way he kept glancing over his shoulder at the other door and at the door into the hall. Even then he missed the exact instant that the figure of his cousin’s man appeared there.

  Luton halted abruptly, stood there for a fraction of a moment, stepped silently back, hidden, and stood, cat and mouse fashion, watching Mr. Talbot Seymour stealthily going through bundles of documents neatly held together with green rubber bands.

  Then, as if he had seen enough, he took a step into the doorway and cleared his throat. Talbot Seymour jumped, recovered himself and turned sharply around, his face dark.

  “I thought I told you to pack and get the hell out of here,” he said evenly. His eyes were dangerous; so was his clipped quiet voice. And so, in fact, in a different way, were Luton’s. He had changed again. There was nothing subdued or respectful or discreet about him, as there had been the first morning I’d seen him after Mason Seymour’s murder, or alarmed and cornered as there’d been at my house. Whether it was that he’d cornered Talbot Seymour, so that in some way he now had the upper hand, or whether something else had happened to give him confidence, I don’t know. He certainly had it.

  “I’m not taking either orders or suggestions from you, Mr. Seymour,” he said quietly. “You’re as much of an outsider here as I am. More, I’d say, until I’ve finished the month I’ve been paid for.”

  They stood for a moment measuring each other with hostile wary appraisal across the mahogany desk where Mason Seymour’s shattered body had sprawled. It was Talbot Seymour who gave way. He raised his
eyebrows, took a cigarette, tapped it for a moment on his gold case, lighted it, and blew a long insolently meditative stream of smoke through his nostrils. He said: “I suggest it’s time we get together, Luton.”

  His voice was quietly suave. “You stand to lose a good deal too, don’t you, Luton?”

  The valet looked at him steadily for an instant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh yes you do,” Talbot Seymour said. “Look here. We’re both in this. If you hadn’t written me, I’d never have known Mason was even thinking of getting married, or about that old Jezebel trying to rope him in.”

  “That was before I’d realized Mr. Mason was so taken with Miss Faith’s fresh charm,” Luton said evenly.

  “Baloney,” Talbot Seymour said. “Taken with her Water-ford lustres and all the other antiques, and the itch to be squire of Yardley Hall and snoot the people who know his money came from a phoney patent medicine. You don’t mean her fresh charm—you mean her decayed ancestors’.”

  Luton said nothing. Talbot Seymour came around the desk up to him.

  “That’s not the point. If that second will holds, you lose what?—twenty-five thousand and a farm in Canada. You get a kick in the pants. You say he was writing a check when he was bumped off. Maybe you can collect it if the gal wants to believe you, and coughs up as a reward to the faithful servant.”

  “You forget Mr. Mason arranged for me to have a position in New York,” Luton said quietly.

  Talbot Seymour laughed.

  “Fifty dollars a week, six days a week, in a New York cellar—when you’ve been your own boss and lived on the fat of the land for fifteen years!—And just how long do you think you’d hang on to a job with Mason dead? You’re too old, you’re too soft. Some clerk would walk off with the petty cash first thing—and who would they pin it on, because he’s got a record? And Mason wouldn’t be around to give you a character.”

  Mr. Seymour laughed again. In the girandole I could see Luton’s eyes resting steadily on him.

  “You’re sunk, and you know it. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have written me to come up and try to break up the match—get the old boy to Paris till he got the spring and the magnolias out of his blood.”

  Talbot Seymour flicked the ash off his cigarette.

  “The same holds for me, Luton. I was figuring on twenty thousand a year myself. I get two thousand and a letter to my congressman saying Mason will appreciate anything nice in the way of a WPA job he can wangle for me.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “I’m just pointing out, Luton, that if accidentally that second will-”

  Mr. Seymour lowered his voice.

  “—should fall in the incinerator with the morning garbage, both our futures would be considerably pleasanter to look forward to…”

  “You’re not suggesting I should destroy Mr. Mason’s second will?” Luton asked coolly.

  Talbot Seymour nodded. “Unless, of course, you’ve done it already.” He added softly, “I don’t think you have. Have you, Luton?”

  “No.”

  Seymour nodded again. “You get the will—I’ll do the trick.”

  “No,” Luton said coldly.

  “You mean you don’t know where it is?—After all you’ve done the last fifteen years for my honored cousin, he didn’t consult you when he made it out?”

  “That’s not what I mean at all,” Luton said. “I merely mean that since I’ve been with Mr. Mason, I’ve gone absolutely straight. I’m not taking any chances on you turning up after you’ve run through your money and saying ‘Luton killed my brother and burned his second will so he’d get twenty-five thousand and a farm instead of a present of twenty-five hundred and a lousy job he knew he couldn’t keep.”

  I could see Talbot Seymour’s body tense.

  “I lived long enough with your cousin,” Luton went on slowly, “to know any Seymour would double-cross his grandmother. And I’ll get along very nicely, thank you. And the idea of your having to work for a living isn’t going to bother me at all.”

  He paused for an instant, and went on very deliberately.

  “On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll tell Crabtree you didn’t know about the second will until you got here.—He might think you shot your cousin thinking the first will was still in effect.”

  Talbot Seymour’s face in the mirror was terrifying.

  “You dirty rat,” he said softly… and I never heard so much sheer hatred in anybody’s voice.

  I shrank back involuntarily toward the hall—but not before I saw Luton’s eyes shift quickly to the mirror opposite the one between the windows, and back again. My heart was as cold as ice as I realized that he’d seen me, he’d known all the time, probably, that I was standing there in the next room, hearing every word. Then he said, as Talbot Seymour must have started to speak, “Sssh—some one’s coming up on the porch.”

  He was out in the hall and to the door just as I got the screen open and myself outside. There wasn’t the flicker of an eyelash in his pale face to suggest he’d even suspected I’d been inside.

  “Will you come in, Miss Randolph? Mr. Talbot Seymour is here.”

  I tried wildly to think of something, and went back. There was nothing else I could do. Talbot Seymour came into the sitting room from the study and closed the door behind him.

  “How do you do, Miss Randolph?”

  He gave me a gleaming smile. Possibly if his face weren’t so suntanned and his hair weren’t so sleek and shiny black, his teeth wouldn’t have looked so white and numerous—or perhaps it was just his extraordinary air of physical well-being that got me down—what with the astonishing scene I’d just listened in on—and made me feel suddenly very grey and drab and definitely not worth having so much sheer brilliance wasted on me.

  “So kind of you to come,” Mr. Talbot Seymour said.

  “I took the liberty of suggesting to Miss Randolph, sir, that she might come and pick out the old books Mr. Mason borrowed from her when we first came,” Luton said.

  I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t. I was frightened. The steady look behind Talbot Seymour’s smiling eyes was frightening too.

  “Perhaps we can have a little chat first, Miss Randolph,” Seymour said. He glanced at Luton. “Just leave the door open as you go out, please.” And after Luton had gone, quiet and respectful as ever, he turned to me with what I presume was meant to be a disarming candor.

  “You know, I don’t think you liked my cousin, did you?” he asked.

  “Not particularly,” I said. “Why?”

  He looked a little dashed. “Because I’d hoped maybe you’d help me find who did this ghastly thing.”

  He leaned forward, his hands folded between his white linen knees, his smiling face suddenly sober, and even troubled, I thought.

  “May I be frank with you, Miss Randolph?”

  I moved uneasily in my chair.

  “I’d rather you’d be frank with Mr. Crabtree, Mr. Seymour.”

  “Oh, I know I’ve no right to ask anything of you, Miss Randolph,” he said, with an odd kind of buoyant chagrin. He hesitated an instant and went on. “You see, there’s no use my pretending Mason and I were like that.”

  He held up two close fingers.

  “Because we weren’t. But after all, blood is thicker than water, or even Scotch for that matter, and Mason couldn’t ever resist giving a good-natured sermon along with a handout. And frankly, Miss Randolph, I was sorry to see him get married.”

  Mr. Seymour glanced very casually at the door that had closed behind Luton’s back.

  “In fact, the chief reason I rolled in at this time was to get on the right side of the lady—so supplies wouldn’t be entirely cut off till I snared some kind of a job.”

  I’m afraid I looked more shocked than I was, rea
lly, having heard what he’d said to Luton. And after all, living off one’s relatives is in the gentleman’s tradition, and Virginians have always been gentlemen.

  “But you see, I can’t very well go to your Mr. Crabtree and say, ‘Hey there, my cousin’s supposed to have made out a new will, making his fiancée his heir and leaving me in the soup, and now he’s dead, and I want it proved that that’s not the reason he’s dead before I shove off to starve.’ Because, you see, Mason always said he’d set up a trust fund, so I couldn’t touch the principal but still wouldn’t have to marry some widow for her yacht.”

  He pulled his thin gold cigarette case out of his pocket and flashed me a fine smile. “I’ll bet a hundred dollars you’ve never smoked a cigarette in your life!”

  “No, thank you,” I said. I was beginning to be awfully annoyed at the obviously designed-to-be-interesting Mr. Talbot Seymour, but it apparently did not occur to him that a middle-aged spinster could have such glamorous changes rung for her without falling.

  Suddenly he was the frank disarming young man again.

  “You see, Miss Randolph, if I went to Mr. Crabtree and said any of this to him, when he finally got around to figuring it out, he’d have me in the stocks up there behind the Capitol—for the murder of my cousin.”

  I looked at him.

  “Don’t you see?” he went on, not realizing that I saw very well indeed. “Here I am. If my cousin marries, I lose an income for life that I’ve been pretty damn well figuring on. Nobody thought old Mason would marry anybody, not at his age, and loving peace and comfort, and…well, say variety, the way he did.”

  “But I understood you didn’t see your cousin last night,” I said. “I mean, that you had a—what do they call it?—a perfect alibi.”

  “I have.”

  Mr. Talbot Seymour’s voice was easy and smooth, but there was a little movement in the pupils of his eyes as if he hadn’t expected me to know about such things as alibis.

  “I was at the Inn. The bell boys can all swear to that.”

  “Then why are you worried about Mr. Crabtree?”