by Leslie Ford
He looked at me with a sardonic glint in his eyes, shaking his head a little. “However, my dear Mrs. Latham, I don’t—”
The telephone rang sharply. I thought from the alacrity with which he answered that he had probably been waiting for it. I watched him, listening calmly; and as I saw his eyes harden suddenly and his face become intensely serious my heart was strangely heavy, so that it pounded when it beat.
“Right,” he said quietly. “I’ll bring him along.”
He put the phone down.
“What… is it?” I said.
“Something I haven’t expected,” he answered slowly. He was looking straight down at the phone still. I waited until I couldn’t bear it any longer.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Captain Lamb,” he said. “They’ve… discovered that A. J. is accustomed to take salol tablets. For his rheumatism.”
I stared, hardly understanding what he was saying. “And that means-?”
He shook his head quickly.
“It may not mean anything, my dear.—Beyond the fact that Lowell’s dog was definitely poisoned with potassium cyanide coated with salol… and that Randall Nash spent almost an hour at A. J.’s home last night and came here and died.”
He crossed the room and opened the door. Sergeant Buck was in the hall, talking with Wilkins—whose face seemed to me unusually waxen.
“Tell Mr. McClean I’d like to speak to him.”
As the sergeant opened the drawing room door across the hall I could see the group gathered round the tea table: Angus and Steve and Mac, and Iris behind it, green-eyed and taut but smiling and outwardly entirely calm. Edith St. Martin was sitting on the sofa, her Pekinese in her lap, that fixed lifted smile on her face under her black dyed hair with the two white wings, but not in her eyes. A. J. was not there, neither was Lowell.
“Mr. McClean, ma’am?” I heard Sergeant Buck say, and I heard Angie’s answer: “He’s gone home. My sister drove him.”
When Sergeant Buck came back to the hall Colonel Primrose nodded curtly before he spoke. “Go tell Captain Lamb I’ve gone out to Foxall Road. Bring him out.”
He turned to me. “Have you got your car here?”
I nodded.
“Can you drive me out to McClean’s?”
“Surely.”
I glanced surreptitiously at Sergeant Buck. He was not beaming with satisfaction… since I’m apparently going in for understatement.
It was dark outside. Colonel Primrose got in the car beside me and I started the engine. I crossed Wisconsin Avenue into Reservoir Road, passed the High School and the Medical School, and turned down Foxall Road and into A. J. McClean’s graveled driveway at just the instant that the tail-lights of Lowell’s blue roadster disappeared down the hill, making at least sixty miles an hour.
“Oh,” I said, “—I should have given you this before, by the way.”
I stopped the car in front of the two stone dogs that guard A. J.’s Victorian dwelling and put on the brake. I reached under my fur coat and fished the letter Wilkins had given me out of my pocket. I suppose it was remembering the sight of Sergeant Buck talking to Wilkins in the hall that must have made me think suddenly that of course it was bound to come out sooner or later. At any rate, I gave it to him. He opened it under the light on the dash.
“You’re very annoying,” he said seriously, putting it in his pocket. “And this, I should say, is just about one of the silliest things you’ve ever done.”
He got out of the car and hurried up the steps. I followed meekly.
“You’d better stay here,” he said. He pressed the bell and pressed it again, hardly waiting until the far-off buzz had died out of our ears. He turned the knob. The door was locked. He looked at me for an instant, sharply and very queerly. I stood there beside him, stupidly I’m afraid. I have never seen him like this before.
Then somewhere in the house I could hear a door open and close. We waited, Colonel Primrose pressing the bell again and again. At last I saw a door open at the top of the stairs, visible through the glass in front of us, and a light swinging, pendulum-fashion, back and forth across it—now light, now dark. An old colored woman came hobbling down the stairs. It seemed ten minutes before she got to the bottom and across the hall to let us in.
“Good evenin’, Cunnel—’deed it’s mighty nice t’ see you all.—Mistuh A. J. he ain’ home.”
“Didn’t he just come?” Colonel Primrose asked sharply.
“ Deed he might have. Ah’s gettin’ a little deaf. Ah don’t heah lak Ah use’ to.”
We went on in. Colonel Primrose stood for a second in the hall, and went directly across it and through the parlor to the room that A. J. always called his den. I followed him, and got to the door just after he’d opened it. A. J.’s chair behind his desk was empty. Colonel Primrose stepped into the room, and I saw him start suddenly and stand there, frozen rigid.
I took two quick steps and looked past him. A. J. McClean was lying on his leather buttoned couch, his head rolled to one side. On his’ face was the same ghastly bitter grin that I had already seen, only last night, on the dead face of Randall Nash.
17
We both stood there, Colonel Primrose and I, in the dark little Victorian room, speechless, all motion frozen in our limbs, staring at that dreadful grin on A. J. McClean’s grey lifeless face. It was so hideously ironic that death should make him do that, when life had never got more than a cold smile from him, and that seldom. But of course it was not his own. We had both seen that grimace before, on Randall Nash’s face, and there was no mistaking it.
It was I who spoke first, oddly enough—or so I thought till I realized that Colonel Primrose was struck silent not so much with A. J.’s death as with the fear that he might have been able to prevent it. Whether he could have done I’m not sure now, nor is he. He thought so then.
“Is it suicide?” I whispered. My voice reverberated in the unearthly silence of the room. I saw him shake his head slowly, and I saw rather than heard him say, “No. It’s murder.”
“Then it wasn’t—”
He shook his head impatiently. “No, no.”
In the silence I could hear a queer shuffling sound somewhere behind me. I must have felt it long before I heard it, for I had a curious cold prickling sensation along my spine—a vestigial remnant, I suppose, of the reaction that makes the hair on a dog’s back stand when he senses an unfriendly presence. I turned around slowly, as if a magnet was drawing me against my own will.
Standing in the dim half-light of the parlor, decked in rags, rubbing her nose with the back of her dirty toil-worn hand, was Miss Lavinia, blinking, peering bleary-eyed, with her terrible drooping lips, past me into the room where A. J. lay, endlessly grinning.
I think for a moment I didn’t actually think of it as being Lavinia Fawcett, but rather as some incredibly repulsive witch-like being, profaning the corridors of death where a bewildered soul was learning its first new steps.
She shuffled closer, her mouth working.
I lost control of myself completely. “Go away!” I cried. “Oh, go away!”
I recoiled with sudden unbearable revulsion, and then stood simply aghast at my hysteria. I was shaking like a leaf.
Colonel Primrose whirled around, the astonishment on his face changing to dismay as he saw her there.
Lavinia stared at me uncomprehendingly, with that brandy-drugged stare of hers, and started shuffling backward, blinking her watery colorless eyes, moving her mouth but making no sound, casting furtive glances past us into A. J.’s room.
Colonel Primrose took a step toward her. “What are you doing here, Lavinia?” he asked quietly. She stopped, almost to the door. She had hardly seemed to me to be moving, yet the distance between us had grown perceptibly.
She shook her head and began edging backward again.
“Where’s the servant?” Colonel Primrose snapped.
“I guess she went upstairs again,” I said. I’d recover
ed. I was almost ashamed to look at him, knowing how he disliked women who go to pieces at the drop of a hat.
“Get her,” he said curtly. “Have her keep Lavinia in the kitchen until I talk to her. How long have you been here, Lavinia?”
“I just came, sir, I came to see Mr. McClean. I ain’t doing anybody any harm. All I want’s my rights, Colonel Primrose…”
I heard her old sing-song whine, punctuated by sniffles, going along as I hurried upstairs to find Annie. She was in a little room at the back of the third floor, reading the comic section we’d no doubt interrupted her at. Not many people came to that house; none in the daytime. Most people thought of it as being empty all day. Old Annie seldom came out of her room, except to get breakfast. Her nephew came in around five to get dinner if A. J. was to be at home.
She looked up.
“Listen, Annie,” I said. “Old Miss Lavinia’s downstairs. You take her in the kitchen and give her something to eat and some strong coffee, and keep her there. And now listen to this in particular, Annie, so you’ll understand what I’m saying. You’re not to start carrying on till later, because we need you now—do you hear? Mr. A. J. is dead.”
She dropped the brightly colored paper and blinked at me. I didn’t know whether I’d made any impression on her, or whether she’d start wailing and weeping then and there. Very slowly her black old face went putty-grey. “Lawd a’ mercy!” she breathed at last. “Oh, Lawd a’ mercy!” Then she wet her lips suddenly. “An’ Ah been up heah alone all th’ time!” she added, terror overcoming her piety.
“Go down and make some coffee for Miss Lavinia,” I said sharply. “She’s waiting.”
She nodded, dazed and grey, and hobbled out. As I heard her go heavily down the back stairs I drew a deep breath of fervent relief. I hadn’t dared to hope it would be so simple, for even if I’d been able to keep her from instantaneous and protracted mourning, I hadn’t been at all sure I could get her to go and make coffee for Lavinia Fawcett. Her own respectability would come in there. Perhaps she hadn’t understood me, I thought, and waited, half expecting to hear her hobbling back upstairs. Then, after a bit, I heard water running, and heard her call “Miss Lavinny!” and I knew it was all right.
I hurried down. Colonel Primrose was in the den, waiting, the telephone in his hand, his face set. I didn’t find out who he was trying to call, for just as I heard his sharp “Hello!” a car drew up out in the drive. I heard a door bang, and another, and running feet in the gravel driveway, and a frantic key in the lock. Then the front door flung open and Lowell Nash burst into the hall, and stopped dead, her body contracted like a steel spring, her face white and taut, staring wild-eyed at me. Behind her I saw a tall grey-haired man, a hat two sizes too small perched on the top of his head, an overcoat three sizes too big slipped on over a surgeon’s white uniform. I stared at them and they at me. Lowell’s lips moved.
“Are we… too late?” she whispered.
I nodded. Her red mouth drooped, she closed her eyes, her body sagged like a young plant in the noonday sun.
“It’s too late,” she said in a dull voice. She was speaking without turning to the man behind her. “I was afraid we’d be too late. I’m sorry I dragged you out. He’s… in there.”
She pointed past me to the den. He came forward, slipping off his overcoat. I took it from him as he passed me and put it on the table, picked up his hat and put it there too. Lowell came into the room and sat down on the horsehair chair by the door, staring at the floor. After a moment she raised her hand in a slow dazed gesture, peeled the peaked suede cap off her short black curls and dropped it beside her on the worn flowered Brussels carpet.
“Isn’t it ever going to end, Grace?” she whispered. “It’s so… so horrible!”
Colonel Primrose and the doctor came out of the den.
“It looks like cyanide. The risus sardonicus. Have to be a post mortem to tell conclusively. I can’t understand how it could take so long. The young lady said he was all right at first, then started feeling bad, but she hadn’t seen him take anything. Cyanide acts very quickly, you know.”
Colonel Primrose nodded. “I know,” he said grimly. “I’ve called the police. They’ll be here in a moment.”
He turned to Lowell.
“What happened?”
“I drove him here, from tea,” she said, in a broken little voice. “He wouldn’t stay to dinner. He knew she didn’t want him. I said I’d drive him, because I… I wanted to talk to him, alone. I wouldn’t let Mac come, either.”
“When did you leave, Lowell?”
“About quarter past five.”
“You came directly here?”
She shook her head.
“He had to stop at Hofnagel’s. He didn’t say what for. He was only there a few minutes.”
I looked at Colonel Primrose. It seemed to me all of a sudden as if I could feel the sinister squalid figure of Lavinia Fawcett crouching in the shadows of the lives of both these men who had been murdered.
“You came here then?”
“No. He asked me to stop in Gil St. Martin’s shop. There wasn’t any place to park there, so I drove around the block twice. The second time he was waiting. Then we came here. He let us in and we sat down in there to have a talk.”
She looked toward the door of the little room.
“I must have been thinking about something and not looking at him, because all of a sudden I did look, and he was staring straight ahead of him, looking perfectly dreadful. His face was grey and he had perspiration all over his forehead, and his eyes were terrible—just as if he knew he was being… killed, just like my father. I jumped up and helped him to the sofa. He was dreadfully ill. I grabbed the phone, but I knew I could never get a doctor in time. I dashed out and drove to the Medical School in Reservoir Road.”
She nodded at the doctor.
“He came with me.—I don’t know his name.”
A smile flickered faintly for an instant in the doctor’s dark intelligent eyes. I didn’t know then that his name was very well known indeed, that he was one of the leading abdominal surgeons in the United States, or that Lowell had literally hijacked him in the hospital corridor on his way to the operating theatre and rushed him into her car. The overcoat and hat that she’d grabbed for him belonged to a couple of his students.
She put her hand into the pocket of her beaver coat and took out her car keys. She handed them to him.
“I don’t feel like driving you back,” she said simply. “You can just leave them at the office there. I’ll get the car tonight. Thanks, very much, for coming with me.”
There was a glint of admiration in his eyes as he took the keys. He nodded, put on the overcoat, looked at the hat with a sudden whimsical smile that was gone again immediately, and followed Colonel Primrose to the door. I heard them talking for a moment, and Colonel Primrose saying, “Thank you, I’ll be in touch with you,” and the door closed. He came back into the room.
“She must have put it in his tea,” Lowell said with a quiet dreadful bitterness. Colonel Primrose’s glance cut short what I was on the point of saying hotly. I closed my mouth, with an effort. Lowell was staring straight in front of her, her dark brooding eyes burning in her white face. I gazed at her, an aching wonder in my heart at so much bitter hate; and as I did her face changed slowly. Her lips parted, she shrank back in the tufted horsehair chair, her eyes sharpening to pinpoints of terror as she stared directly in front of her. Suddenly she threw her arm up in front of her face, protecting herself from some dreadful sight.
I whirled about, my blood curdling. The window next to the fireplace was in the direct line of her vision… and my eyes were riveted on it as I stared at the leering thing there, brought into ghastly relief against the night, its face pressed gray against the glass, its claws raised, making hurried frantic signs. For an instant I couldn’t move. Then I ran to the window. It was gone. I ran to the door and out onto the porch, and saw it streaking across the lawn toward the
gate.
Behind me I heard Colonel Primrose coming out of the kitchen hall.
“I thought I asked you to tell Annie to keep Lavinia here until I could talk to her, Mrs. Latham?” he was saying curtly.
I rallied myself from that sight.
“I did,” I said. “I don’t suppose Annie could keep her if she didn’t want to stay. She’s just gone.”
I went back into the parlor. Lowell was still crouching in her chair, staring ahead of her again, unseeing and bewildered. Colonel Primrose glanced at me with sharp interrogation in his eyes.
“Lowell and I both got a nasty jolt, seeing Lavinia peering through that window under the curtain, like a… malevolent scarecrow,” I said, as casually as I could. My heart was still beating like a triphammer. The crafty-eyed, loose-lipped face of Lavinia Fawcett was more than just a face; it had become a symbol of something violent and horrible that was tracking the lives of people I knew.
I gave an involuntary shudder. Colonel Primrose put his hand on mine and steadied it. His grip was warm and reassuring and confident… more confident than the troubled questioning smile he backed it up with.
I managed a sorry grin.
“I’m getting nervy, I guess.”
“Don’t,” he said gently.
He looked at Lowell again. She had moved like somebody coming out of a trance. She rubbed her hand over her forehead, pushing her dark hair back the way she did when she was troubled or angry—the difference showing only in the tempo of the gesture. She looked like someone going through a hard struggle, though no sign of any showed, really, in her blank pointed little face with its flaming lipstick and wide clear forehead. Then she stood up, swift and straight, looking first at me and then at Colonel Primrose.
“I told you I wasn’t at home last night. But that’s not true. I was.”
She looked squarely at Colonel Primrose and waited, a little defiant, expecting obviously that some sort of a minor cataclysm was to come.