The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  “Did Iris know it was poison?”

  He shrugged. “She says not. That oddly repulsive butler— Wilkins?—says he was in the drawing room taking away the tea tray when Donaldson gave it to her. He heard him say very distinctly ‘Be careful of this, it’s a deadly poison.’ ”

  “So that the oddly repulsive Wilkins,” I observed, “knew it was in the house too—and also knew it was poison.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded.

  “That fact, you’ll be surprised to hear, has not entirely escaped the keen eye of the law,” he said with a chuckle. He put his coffee cup on the tray and sat down, fixing his sharp old parrot’s eyes on me.

  “However, Mrs. Latham… let’s clear up one important point before we get on to the matter of the anonymous letters.”

  “Very well,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Just the little matter of where you stand in all this… business.”

  He waved a hand in the air.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said. It occurred to me then, as it’s done several times before, that I really had to learn to knit. It would have been most convenient to have something to look at and study intently just then, instead of having either to face him down, as it were, or gaze shifty-eyed about the room.

  “Then I’d better make myself clearer.”

  He exhaled a full fragrant cloud of cigar smoke.

  “There’s no doubt, Mrs. Latham, that Randall Nash was murdered. There’s equally no doubt that—at present— everything points to Iris Nash as the poisoner.”

  “I don’t believe it, Colonel Primrose,” I said. “It’s too easy, for one thing.”

  He looked at me with a quizzical smile.

  “That’s one of the surprising things about detective work, Mrs. Latham. It usually is too easy. The lay idea that people who commit murders are clever is entirely erroneous. If you’re clever you can work out your problems without resorting to murder. I don’t suppose there’s more than one murder out of a hundred that the police don’t solve.—The proof is harder sometimes, of course. And usually, my dear, it’s the person with the strongest motive, emotional and pecuniary, and with the best opportunity—in other words, the obvious person— who does the job.”

  “Have you examined,” I asked, “into the motives that anybody else may conceivably had had for wanting Randall Nash out of the way?”

  “You mean, I presume, that if we figure Iris wanted to marry someone else badly enough to murder Randall, then it’s possible that that someone else may have wanted to marry her—with a fortune—badly enough to have done it himself.”

  “That’s rather involved,” I said, “but roughly correct.”

  He smiled.

  “It’s evading my question, however.—I want to know just how far I can count on you. Are you, in this instance—in other words—hunting with the hounds, Mrs. Latham, or… running with the hare?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said, “that I’m constitutionally on the side of the hare. Especially when the pack’s in full cry.”

  “But if the pack happens to be not after the hare, but after the wolf in hare’s clothing, so to speak…?”

  He went on when I didn’t say anything.

  “I have some sympathy for anybody who gets to the end of his tether and picks up a fire iron and bashes somebody over the head. Or even takes a knife or gun to them. Sometimes the primitive instincts boil over, and drown all the civilized things we’ve learned. That doesn’t explain the poisoner, Mrs. Latham. Poison is a furtive, cowardly, evil thing.”

  “Wherein woman is as strong as man,” I said, remembering Euripides, and Medea’s passionate cry.

  “Exactly,” he said, looking steadily into my eyes.

  I looked down. He always manages to make me feel rather self-conscious, as if he was reminding me some way that there were a lot of things between us we hadn’t settled yet.

  “Then maybe I’d better tell you how I feel about Iris Nash,” I said.

  “I wish you would. I’d really like to know.”

  “Well, in the first place then, and in spite of all your anonymous letters, and in spite of Edith St. Martin’s obvious fears, I don’t really, honestly, believe Iris is any longer in love with Gilbert St. Martin. He’s really nothing, of course, but a crashing bounder!”

  He chuckled.

  “No doubt, Mrs. Latham.—He was that, you know, all the years before he married Edith. Iris was in love with him then.”

  “I know,” I admitted ruefully. “But that was before she married Randall, and had a chance to orientate herself. Randall knew all about Gil from the beginning—it was his faith in her that enabled Iris to forget Gil. Oh, I’m sure—just as sure as I can be, Colonel Primrose—that she’s played the game fairly and squarely with Randall, and that Gil wasn’t nearly as hard to get over as she’d thought he was going to be.”

  “Then why has she gone back to him?”

  “Are you sure she has?”

  He shrugged.

  “There are two possible explanations, besides that one,” I said. “One is that she’s merely taken up a casual friendly relation with a man she was once in business with and who’s certainly in a position to give her a lot of help doing over her house… and it’s just that series of jaundiced letters that’s given everybody a totally wrong slant. It’s just what anybody who’d write an anonymous letter would think, without having any real truth to go on.”

  He smiled dubiously.

  “What’s the other one?” he asked.

  “The other one is what I think is true, and it explains everything.—I may be naive, and maybe the wool is pulled an inch thick over my eyes, but there it is.”

  “What?”

  “It’s that Gilbert St. Martin has made his bed and he doesn’t want to lie in it.—I’m speaking in the most figurative sense, Colonel Primrose. He married Edith and came down here, and found he hadn’t been quite as smart as he thought he was. Edith wasn’t just handing him the purse strings, or even letting him touch them. Then along comes Iris, and knocks everybody’s eye out, and dear Gilbert has the nauseating pleasure of finding himself the base Indian who’s thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe.”

  Colonel Primrose smiled gently.

  “In Gil’s business it’s like trading a dusty tarnished vase you’ve had stuck away on a back shelf for a fine piece of 1880 decalcomania and then seeing it in somebody else’s window, a genuine Cellini worth a quarter of a million… and all the painted roses are flaking off your piece.”

  “I don’t think Edith would like that,” he said, chuckling. “Maybe not,” I admitted. “But it’s true. I’m not pretending I’m so naive I don’t know there are black spots all over the place. I just don’t think Iris is one of them.”

  I put my coffee cup down on the tray.

  “Even at that, Colonel Primrose—and I suppose this just shows how perverse and contradictory a woman is-—Iris has had a pretty rotten time, with Randall drinking, and Lowell constantly sinking depth bombs around her, in addition to all the aerial sniping she’s had time for. I’m not sure I’d blame Iris for falling for anybody who’s making a big play for her. I’m not saying she has. I’m saying that if my house were as much of a shambles as hers was Christmas Eve I’d take up with anybody who came along, just to keep sane. I like Iris. I think she’s as good as they come, and so much better than Randall or Lowell deserves that it isn’t funny.”

  “So that if she murdered the lot of them it’s all right with you?”

  I laughed.

  “I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to go that far.”

  I was about to meet that when Lilac’s shining black face in the door cut me short.

  “Th’ Sergeant at th’ telephone, Colonel,” she said. “He wants t’know, is you comin’ t’ Mis’ Nash’s, or is you not?”

  Colonel Primrose looked at me.

  “Tell him I’m coming right away,” he said to Lilac.

  He put his cigar in the
ashtray and looked at me with an inscrutable smile. “There’s only one thing I have to say to all this, my dear.—When I murder Sergeant Buck, I do hope you’ll be on my side.”

  “Oh, you can definitely count on it,” I said.

  He got up.

  “Now tell me about those letters. Has Iris been getting them?”

  “I don’t know it if she has,” I said. “And I’m not free just now to tell you anything I do know.”

  “Then I’ll be getting back before Buck sends Captain Lamb for me.”

  He turned at the door, came back and took my hand.

  “Just one thing I’d like you to remember,” he said seriously. “People murder people for a number of reasons. One of them is to keep incriminating information from getting out. Don’t forget you may have information you don’t know you’ve got. And—annoying as you are—I’d hate to see anything happen to you, and I haven’t time just now to look after you.—And Buck wouldn’t, you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said.

  He chuckled suddenly, then looked at me very seriously again.

  “Then think it over… and don’t be a sentimental fool, my dear. Goodbye—thanks for lunch.”

  At the corner he turned and waved to me with a smile. I waved back and closed the door, hearing Lilac’s jungle giggle as she took the coffee tray.

  I had to take a Biedermeier chair down to a shop on M Street that afternoon to have the back glued together—it had got mixed up somehow in one of the boys’ scuffles. I was just pulling it out of the back of the car when I saw Lavinia Fawcett across the street, coming out of A. J. McClean’s bank. She spotted me at the same time and started over. Fortunately the light changed just then and the flow of traffic blocked her while I escaped into Mr. Myers’s shop, with its smell of hot glue and varnish remover and old musty furniture. It was a relief, even though I knew it wouldn’t be for long.

  I hadn’t seen Lavinia since I came home. I’d only heard her out in the hall, leaving Randall Nash’s house on Christmas Eve—the event, I remembered suddenly, that precipitated that first big scene, with Iris’s remark about the grace of God and Lowell’s stingingly cruel inquiry if Iris thought about the grace of God when she saw Edith St. Martin. I thought suddenly too, waiting for Mr. Myers, how much more pointed and significant everything that had happened that afternoon was than I’d known. Through the arrow window I could see the traffic stopping again on M Street. Lavinia would be crossing now, I thought, and looked for the back door. Then I thought “There but for the grace of God go I,” and stayed.

  Most old towns have their Lavinia Fawcett, I suppose. Lavinia’s father had been a prominent merchant of Georgetown in the middle years of the last century. As a young man he was so close-fisted that each morning before he went to business he measured out the coal his family could use for the day, people said, with a tablespoon. His wife and elder daughter died of malnutrition, his son ran away at eighteen, his younger daughter Lavinia lived on in the house in Corcoran Street, doing the work. One day a spellbinder with a new fanatical religion got hold of Eleazer Fawcett and persuaded him for his sins that a rich man could not enter the kingdom of Heaven… and all of a sudden Eleazer Fawcett started throwing his money to the four winds, supporting odd sects, giving large amounts to the most unlikely people, until one morning when they dragged his body out of the C. and O. Canal just below M and Wisconsin they found he hadn’t a penny to his name.

  Randall Nash and A. J. McClean had both worked for him at one time, and Randall—or so Lilac, who’s an old Georgetonian, tells me—was supposed to have been engaged to Lavinia. He may of course have had a weather eye out from the beginning. At any rate, he didn’t marry her. At first she lived, a shadowy wraith, in the old house. Then the mortgage was foreclosed and Lavinia got odd jobs around the shops, and giving music lessons, and at last helping in the kitchen at parties. Then she got sick and spent a couple of years in a charity hospital. When she got out she couldn’t get anything to do… and somewhere in the course of her career she’d taken to tippling. The people who’d helped her out with odd jobs did their best to keep her fed and decently clothed. Mr. Hofnagel the photographer gave her a room over his studio until she nearly burned the place down one night. After that the Ladies Guild of St. Timothy’s got her a room over another store, and arranged with Randall and A. J. to give her enough for her food each week, so she didn’t have to cook there. She still cleaned Mr. Hofnagel’s studio every morning, and a doctor’s office in Wisconsin Avenue, and after hours she cleaned A. J.’s bank.

  The chief trouble with Lavinia was that along with her tippling she’d become a general moocher. She had also forgotten pretty largely that soap and water existed except for floors and doorsteps. In fact, to put it bluntly, she was by now a most obnoxious and unpleasant person, and one to be avoided as you would the devil—except that it’s virtually impossible to go on M Street without running into her. I could see her ragged figure now, coming in the door, and was torn, as I’m always torn, between sympathy and disgust. She came up to me with a breath that would sway the Washington Monument.

  “Mrs. Latham,” she said, in her sing-song whine, “—they won’t let me in to see poor Mr. Nash.”

  “I don’t think he’s there now, Miss Lavinia,” I said.

  “But you could find out how much he left me.”

  She leered up at me with furtive toothless cunning and babbled on.

  “I wouldn’t want to make any trouble for anybody, only he always said he’d do the right thing. You could tell her I don’t want to make trouble if she’ll do like he always said, and do the right thing.”

  The first time I ever saw Lavinia Fawcett came into my mind. She was working in Mr. Hofnagel’s Studio of Expert Photography… a receptionist, I suppose we’d call it today. Pale and thin and pathetically shy. “I geep her,” Mr. Hofnagel said to me one day when I went there to get a passport picture taken, “becoss… veil, becoss she remind me off a brown doe dot in the forest near München vass, dot by the hunters killed vass.” He looked at me with his big melting eyes. I hoped he’d marry her, not knowing then that he had a wife and fine child that in the forest near München were.

  That was the year before the War. Things didn’t go well for Mr. Hofnagel in the next years—he was a German and a photographer near the Capitol—and Lavinia got other jobs until she was sick and went away.

  She was a long way from a brown doe now, as she leered at me there in Mr. Myers’s shop, bleating about Randall Nash doing the right thing.

  “I wouldn’t want to make trouble for her if I could help it,” she repeated, in that dreadful whine, fixing my eye and fastening her claws on my arm.

  I don’t know why it hadn’t registered the first time she said it. It hadn’t—but it did now.

  “What do you mean by not making trouble, Miss Lavinia?” I asked.

  “She understands what I mean. That’s why she gave orders to them not to let me in. Mr. Nash found it out and made them stop persecuting me. Now I’m afraid she won’t let them give me the money he left me.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry,” I said.

  “It won’t be me that’ll do the worrying.”

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and was suddenly ingratiating. “All I want is her to do the right thing. Well, you just tell her that.”

  She sidled out of the shop in her curious bent shuffle and closed the door, giving me a backward leer that made me shudder, it had so much drunken cunning in it.

  Mr. Myers came up, shaking his head. “They’ll have to do something about her. It isn’t right for poor Hofnagel to have all the care of her.”

  He wiped his dusty paint-smeared hands on his leather apron.

  “Is it true Randall Nash once courted her?” I asked. Mr. Myers has lived in Georgetown, repairing old mahogany and rosewood lovingly, for seventy years.

  He nodded his white bushy head.

  “When she had plenty of money, before her pa went crazy. I
t’s right pitiful these cold mornings, seeing her in her rags. But they say she’s got trunks full of warm clothes the ladies give her. Sometimes she sells ’em to buy her brandy.”

  He picked up my chair and looked at it frowning. “You can have it Friday, ma’am.” He rubbed his hand caressingly over the slender polished frame.

  “I’ll be in toward evening then,” I said.

  I went on out. Miss Lavinia was waiting along the block, huddled in a dingy Georgian doorway. I got into my car and closed the door. Just as I’d switched on the ignition I heard my name. Mr. Hofnagel, with his black handlebar mustaches, bald dome of a head and prominent abject eyes, came scurrying out of his shop next door to Mr. Myers, in his high wing collar and alpaca coat frayed at the elbows. I opened the window and leaned over.

  “Could you for a few minutes gome in, ma’am?” he said. “I’ve got the droubles to talk aboud.”

  I found myself starting instinctively to say I had the troubles of my own, but that sounded pretty specious, my troubles being practically non-existent. On the other hand, I knew from years of experience that a few minutes of Mr. Hofnagel’s troubles stretched into hours, usually, and always ended with my having a lot of pictures taken that later piled up in the attic, collecting dust, or landed on the wall in Lilac and Julius’s room, which is at present virtually papered with them.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Hofnagel. I’m late now, or I’d be more than glad to.”

  “Then vill you tomorrow maybe gome in, for sure, ma’am?”

  He was so earnest about it, his big sad eyes so pleading, that I almost broke down then and there. But I didn’t. “Tomorrow morning, for sure, Mr. Hofnagel,” I said.

  “Tank you, tank you!” He bobbed his head up and down, tears in his eyes. I started off—more than a little puzzled at all this. I saw Miss Lavina scuttle out from her doorway and scoot down the street, with the speed almost, if not the grace, of the brown doe in the forest. She obviously hadn’t liked the idea of her benefactor talking to me. I was glad for an instant that I hadn’t gone in.

  I threw in my clutch and put up my hand to straighten the mirror over the windshield, which had got knocked awry. Quite suddenly I saw A. J. in it, hurrying out of the bank. He glanced up at the lights and made a dash for the street just as traffic started against him. I closed my eyes and held my breath. The loud screech of grinding brakes tore at my eardrums, people shouted, a policeman’s whistle blew. I opened my eyes again to see A. J. back on the sidewalk, standing, not hurt. A policeman was holding his arm, a few people had gathered around him. Out in the street was the car that had nearly run him down, a man in it staring Angrily out the window and mopping his forehead.