The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  I hadn’t known, till then, that they’d set the time for the services.

  “You’ll have to ask the District Attorney, Angus.”

  Lowell spoke flatly from the windows. “I’m not going till I find that letter.”

  Angie shrugged. “O. K., Toots.—Ten minutes ago you were going to marry Mac, or Steve, or somebody, and wash your hands of the whole business. Personally, I’d miss you. I like that. I’ve had a bum tooth for a year and I can’t bear to have it pulled. I’d never get a good night’s sleep.”

  Lowell smiled.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Well, if you don’t mind a small point, I’m going up stairs and wash my face.”

  Her brother grinned ironically after her. “Hurry back, darling, won’t you.”

  He turned to us as she closed the door.

  “I don’t know what in hell’s the matter with that woman. Mac says she’s been like this for a couple of weeks. Only she’s worse now. She was crazy about dad, and all that…”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Well, it’s getting me down. She was all right till noon. Steve phoned to ask if he could do anything and didn’t ask to speak to her. You’d have thought Mac and I put him up to it. I told Mac I wouldn’t marry her if she kidnaped me and took me to Elkton. What he sees in that bad-tempered, wall-eyed little… hussy is beyond me.”

  Angus did not see the iron-surfaced monument of disapproval who had come in and was standing in the door. Colonel Primrose and I both did. He shot me a quick glance of amusement. Sergeant Buck cleared his brass-bound vocal cords.

  “There’s a bird outside wants to know,” he said, very seriously, out of one corner of his mouth, “if they’ve got a list of the pall buriers to give the press for the first Mrs. Nash, sir.”

  Angie’s face paled.

  “Just a second,” he said quickly. “I’ll see him out there.”

  He poured a small drink of whiskey, splashed a good deal of soda in it and poured it down his throat. I could see from the expression, or lack of it, on Sergeant Buck’s grim lantern-jawed face that it was not the correct thing to have done.

  He looked at me significantly as Angie went out.

  “I got a report to make to the Colonel, if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

  I went out hastily and up to my room, the blue guest room overlooking the garden, and sat down. I was just thinking suddenly that I hadn’t told Colonel Primrose a good many things I knew that might very conceivably have a good deal of importance. I hadn’t, for instance, told him about A. J.—nor, I thought suddenly, had I told him about Lavinia and her drunken threats. I hadn’t told him that Gilbert St. Martin had been here—in spite of what Iris had said—on Christmas Eve when Senator McGilvray had been poisoned. And then I remembered that I hadn’t told Iris that Gilbert wanted to see her that night at ten o’clock.

  I heard a door open then, got up and looked out into the hall. If Iris had got up, I thought—and I doubted how well she could sleep at the moment—I would have a chance to talk to her. I went to the door of her room. It was slightly ajar, so I went in. She wasn’t in there. I could hear her voice from her dressing room. She was talking slowly and quietly and very intensely, and every word in her low husky voice came as clear as if she was speaking to me. Before I realized it, and before I could overcome the shocked inertia of my legs, I heard her:

  “And listen, Lowell… I’ve stood more from you in the last three years than I’ve stood from anyone in my entire life. I made the mistake in thinking, when I first came here, that you acted as you did because you resented anyone your father was fond of. And I understood that perfectly. I thought you’d see as you grew up that there are different kinds of affection possible in people’s lives, and eventually we’d understand each other. But I was wrong. And now I’m going to tell you something. Your father didn’t tell me when I married him that he had a sixteen year old daughter. He called you his baby girl, and I thought of you as that. It was as much a shock to me as it was to you when I saw you the night you came.

  “And there’s another thing. I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t or that I did murder your father. You can figure that out for yourself. But there’s one thing I will tell you… and that is, I did not poison your dog. And now this is chiefly what I want to say to you. I haven’t told Colonel Primrose, or Captain Lamb, or Mr. Doyle, or anybody, that you came home from the Assembly last night, and were in this house after I left it… and after Wilkins left your father in the library. And I know you did come, and were here—because you had on your white evening coat when you went out, and when you came in and put on your scene in the library you had on your red velvet coat with the white fox collar.”

  I heard Lowell gasp, and Iris go on.

  “I assume you’ve got your reasons for not wanting it known you were here… and that in some way I don’t understand they include an empty decanter in the cellaret. So far as I’m concerned I shall continue to assume they are good reasons and say nothing about it… and further more I want you to understand I ask nothing of you in return. And I want you to understand this, Lowell…”

  I got out at that point. I’m not sure how I got back to my room.

  13

  Iris’s low taut voice still vibrated in my astonished ears. I sat down on the padded window seat and stared unseeing past the garden wall at my own house. The only thing I was conscious of was the shattering fact that Lowell Nash had been in the house the night her father was killed, and had said nothing about it—Lowell, who whatever her faults I would have bet my last sous was as passionately honest as anyone in all the world. Why? Why? It kept beating in my brain, and I had no answer. The idea that Lowell could have had anything to do with her father’s death by poison was unthinkable… even more unthinkable than for Iris to have had. And yet… My eye fell on the broken spot in the wall between our two gardens. Lowell was still a Nash… a direct descendant of the General Nash on whose immortal soul that dark burden lay.

  “It is not possible!” I said sharply to myself. I got up and turned on the light. Some simple explanation would turn up, I told myself. I powdered my nose and went downstairs.

  Halfway down I heard the sound of Mac’s voice from the drawing room, and stopped dead in my tracks. If Lowell had come to the house, then Mac must have come too. I don’t know why that struck me so forcibly just then, or why it hadn’t occurred to me before. I remembered now that they’d left the dance early.

  I listened again. Someone else was speaking. I recognized Steve Donaldson’s voice. He was saying, “But if they can prove anybody else at all was here Doyle can get her off. He doesn’t even need that if he puts her on the stand.”

  I waited for Mac to say something, but he didn’t. All I heard was the tinkling of ice in a glass, and the crackling of the fire. Not even Colonel Primrose’s voice. I glanced quickly down to where his coat and hat had been when I went upstairs. They were gone.

  I went on down and into the drawing room. Mac and Steve were there alone. They got up, both looking pretty washed-out. Mao for the moment had evidently buried the hatchet, or maybe, I thought, he’d realized by this time that Steve was not trying to cut him out with Lowell.

  “Where’s Angus?” I asked.

  “Somebody called up for Colonel Primrose,” Mac said. “They beat it out of here hell for leather. Angie and that guy with the iron mug.”

  Stephen Donaldson said nothing… but no sky writer ever had a question more plainly written in the air all around him.

  “Iris is holding up marvelously,” I said.

  “Then I guess I’ll go along. Tell her if there’s anything I can do…” he said lamely. When he’d gone I turned to Mac.

  “Didn’t you and Lowell come by the house after the Assembly?” I asked casually.

  “No,” he said… too promptly. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  He got up from where he was sprawling on the sofa and wandered around the room for a minute. Then he came and
sat down again, his head in his hands.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s your story and you’re sticking to it. I’m not interested… except that, as Steve just said to you, if they can show anybody at all was here, Doyle can get Iris off.”

  “They don’t have to prove that,” he said doggedly. “They can’t prove there was poison in that glass she washed up. They can’t prove that’s how he was poisoned.”

  He stared down at the toe of his pebbled leather shoe. Then he said, “Has anybody been saying Lowell was… that we were here, after the Assembly?”

  “Nobody’s told the police.—or Colonel Primrose,” I said. “Maybe somebody ought to—you or Lowell, for instance. I mean, I don’t see why Iris hasn’t got a right to one decent break.”

  “Well—Lowell didn’t do it,” he said abruptly. “She didn’t go in the library. I sat on the bottom step waiting for her to run upstairs. She went straight up, and came straight down again.”

  “Why don’t you tell the police that?”

  “Because the whole business has knocked her cock-eyed already, without having them hounding her out of her wits.”

  “What about yourself?—-Perhaps you went in the library while she was upstairs. Has all this knocked you cock-eyed too?”

  “I’d just as soon tell ’em I did, if it wasn’t for Lowell,” he said dully. “But honest, Mrs. Latham, she’s taken an awful beating, with her mother going out like that, and all.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s a grand thing, being in love. I suppose it’s quite impossible for you to see that somebody else is taking a worse beating.”

  I was about to go on when there was a clatter at the door. Angie looked in, a sort of holy joy on his lean freckled face.

  “Iris!” he shouted. “Where’s Iris?”

  Then I heard him dashing up the stairs three at a time. Mac and I looked blankly at each other, and at Colonel Primrose, who came in alone, rubbing his hands together, a faint ironical smile on his face.

  “What’s happened?” I demanded.

  He looked at us queerly.

  “Nothing for Angus to be quite so happy about,” he said drily. “As he’ll discover when he stops to think.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is Dr. Kavanaugh’s report on Senator McGilvray’s entrails,” he said deliberately. “It… rather changes things.”

  “Then he wasn’t poisoned at all!”

  I think we both blurted it out together.

  Colonel Primrose shook his head.

  “He was poisoned, all right. That’s not the point. He was poisoned in a rather novel way. They found two enteric capsules in his colon.—Dear, dear.”

  He shook his head in some annoyance.

  I looked at Mac, he looked at me.

  “I don’t get the point,” I said.

  “I didn’t either, till Kavanaugh explained it. He’s a consulting pharmacologist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ve been going on the assumption that potassium cyanide is a rapid acting poison, which it is… as soon as the body absorbs it. And that’s where the enteric capsules come in.”

  I was still completely mystified. We waited patiently.

  “An enteric capsule, my dear Mrs. Latham,” he went on slowly, “is a capsule with an enteric coating. And an enteric coating is an alkaline coating that won’t dissolve in the juices of the stomach. It doesn’t dissolve, in other words, until it gets into the colon. It’s the way they take the sting out of castor oil.”

  “They never bothered when they used to give it to me,” Mac said.

  “But they can. It’s also the way they give any medicine taken orally that they don’t want to act till it reaches the colon.—And the point here is simple, of course. You get a delayed action.”

  He looked at us with a grim smile.

  “So that when Lowell’s dog was given cyanide of potassium in enteric capsules, the absorption of the poison into the system was postponed… I wouldn’t know just how long, but very definitely.”

  I tried to think.

  “How does one get enteric capsules?” I asked. “I mean, do you just go to a drug store and buy them?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, but they can be made. Those that Senator McGilvray was poisoned with were made quite simply. A pellet of sweetened bread and cyanide dipped in a melted tablet of salol, which you can get from a drug store as easily as aspirin. It’s used for relief of pain from rheumatism quite commonly, and it melts at a very low heat—over a double boiler, for example.”

  He took his old pipe that had been mended with a silver foot under the bowl, knocked the dottle out in the palm of his hand and tossed it into the fire.

  “The only trouble with enteric capsules,” he went on at last—neither Mac nor I had spoken; my mind was slipping rapidly through the new and startling vistas this had opened— “is that they don’t always dissolve. They may be eliminated, in that case, or they may simply stay undissolved… depending on a number of conditions. That’s what happened with Senator McGilvray. When Kavanaugh opened him, he found three small pellets, about the size of orange pips. He examined them… and that’s how we learned about it. Somebody had fed the animal several of them—four at any rate—apparently in a piece of chocolate candy.”

  The silence in the room for an instant was appalling. In my mind I could hear Iris’s husky voice: “I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t or that I did murder your father… but there’s one thing I will tell you—I did not poison your dog.”

  “The point, however,” Colonel Primrose went on deliberately, “is not Senator McGilvray. Except of course as we have to consider all the people who could possibly have given him that candy.”

  I liked Mac a lot, just then, for not saying what I’m sure he must have been thinking.

  “The point is this: Randall Nash was not necessarily poisoned by the highball he was drinking here last night. We’d assumed that, because of the rapidity with which cyanide acts. But if those enteric capsules were tried out on the dog, and used again… then Randall may have taken that poison into his system at any time in the evening. Or, of course, at any place in the evening. From nine-thirty, say, when he visited his former wife’s house in Massachusetts Avenue, to twelve o’clock or so when he left A. J. at Linthicum Hall.”

  I stared at him, comprehension gradually breaking in on my befogged brain. I think I could have wept. “—Then it doesn’t mean that Iris…?”

  He shook his head.

  “No person who was here that evening necessarily had any hand in it at all.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Mac suddenly dropped his head in his hands. “Gee,” he said, “I…”

  I felt just about as articulate. Colonel Primrose chuckled.

  “Your alibi, incidentally-—if you’d got around to giving it, was O. K.”, he said, looking down at him. “Mr. Chatfield next door vouches that you waited in the car while Lowell went in to change her wrap.”

  Mac glanced guiltily at me, his homely good-looking face flushing.

  “Well,” he said stolidly, “it just goes to show you shouldn’t judge people by appearances.”

  Colonel Primrose chuckled again. I suppose he was thinking, as I did, that it sounded more like one of Sergeant Buck’s moralistic gems than anything else. However, I’d noticed that most young men are very serious—more so at Mac’s age than at any other time in their lives, fortunately. It had always seemed to me a curious example of the mysterious workings of nature that Mac and Lowell should have picked each other out, one vitally needing a balance-wheel, the other the sharp spur of stimulus to urge him on. I knew A. J. had been worried about the spark to set him off for a long time. He tried practically everything, from jerking soda in a corner drug store to playing the saxophone at Ocean City, before he finished a very scattered college course and went into his uncle’s bank so he could marry Lowell. And that, I suppose, explained quite sufficiently A. J.’s desire for him to marry her… quite apart from her money.
A. J. was much too upright a man to think of that very deeply, considering furthermore his own very ample means.

  I was thinking of that when Angie came down.

  Mac got up hastily. “I guess Lowell wouldn’t want to talk to anybody,” he said hopefully.

  “How would she know what she wants?” Angie said cheerfully. “You know her, don’t you? Why don’t you go and talk to her anyway?”

  Mac hesitated, and ambled out, indecision written all over him. We heard him go upstairs and call her name softly.

  “My God, that guy’s a fiend for punishment,” Angie said. “But better him than us. How about a drink?”

  “Just a minute, Angus. There’s a point I’d like to talk about with you.”

  I don’t know whether it was the look in Colonel Primrose’s eyes, or the fact that he interrupted someone offering him a drink; but I do know that my heart tightened as if it had been dipped in a sudden astringent. And for the first time the meaning of what he had said about Angus having no reason to be quite as happy as he was occurred sharply to me.

  His eyes were fixed quietly on Angie’s surprised face.

  “You see, Angus,” he said imperturbably, “we now have to reconsider this whole business in the light of our new information. We’ve got to examine into everything that happened to your father from the time he left the house about twenty minutes past nine to the time he returned to it. If he was given the cyanide in the manner suggested by the examination of Senator McGilvray, then… several new possibilities are brought up.”

  Angie sat down between us. He looked calmly at Colonel Primrose, his freckled face flushed slightly.

  “I begin to… get your idea,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “First: it is almost unthinkable, in that case, that your father and the dog were poisoned by different people. Let’s take, therefore, the people who were in this house Christmas Eve. We have:

  “Randall Nash himself.

  Iris Nash.

  Lowell Nash.

  Mac.

  Stephen Donaldson.