by Leslie Ford
Colonel Primrose nodded.
She looked at him without speaking. I could see each name as it went through her mind. Lowell, Angus, Mac, Edith St. Martin, Steve Donaldson, Wilkins.
“—and A. J. himself,” she said softly. “Couldn’t he have done it himself… knowing someone knew where the money was… or had been?”
“Does someone know, Iris?”
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “someone must know.”
He shot me an annoyed glance. She was still standing there, her fingers tips pressed hard against the table, steadying herself, when the door opened and Wilkins’s pale moon face appeared. He paused perceptibly, taking in the scene with motionless eyes. Colonel Primrose noticed it, I think, because he said “What is it?” rather curtly.
“Mr. Belden Doyle has come, madame. He wants to know if he can see you at once.”
The muscles of her throat contracted, her body swayed ever so slightly, her finger tips were white against the velvet patina of the old mahogany. She looked at Colonel Primrose, and then, the color of her eyes changing faintly, at the plump white face of the butler in the doorway.
“I beg pardon, madame. Captain Lamb and Mr. Yates are also here. They wish to see Colonel Primrose.”
Colonel Primrose pushed his chair back. “You have an upstairs sitting room where you can see Doyle, haven’t you?” Iris nodded.
“Take Mr. Doyle upstairs, Wilkins. Tell Captain Lamb and the District Attorney I’ll see them in the library.”
20
He got up and stood aside for Iris to pass Mm. She didn’t move. It seemed almost as if her feet refused to obey. She stood rooted there, pale and helpless. Then without warning her body crumpled and she sank into her chair, her head on her arms thrown across the table, shaken with sobs. Colonel Primrose started, and looked at me helplessly. I motioned him out, and went round the table to Iris and put my arms around her.
“Please, Iris,” I said. “You can’t do this—not now. Wait… please.”
“Oh, I don’t care, Grace,” she whispered. “It’s too terrible. Don’t you see what it means? I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!”
“That’s the funny thing about it, darling,” I said. “You’ve got to bear it. And it’s time to start.”
Her body was quiet a moment. Then she raised her head, and stood up.
“I can bear any of it, except… except that man.”
I thought of course she meant Wilkins.
“Then why don’t you tire him?” I said.
“Can I, do you think?” she asked quickly.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Then I will. I don’t want him to save me, if he has to do it at… at somebody else’s expense—somebody he knows didn’t do it, when he thinks I did.”
I stared at her as it dawned on me it was Belden Doyle she was talking about.
“And… Grace! You must believe me, Grace! I didn’t! I really, really didn’t!”
I went to the sideboard and poured her a stiff drink, brought it back and handed it to her. “Here,” I said. “Drink this, and go up and talk to him. Tell him you didn’t do it.”
She pushed the glass away.
“I don’t want that, and I have told Mm. He just nods, as if he were… John Barrymore, or somebody, and says ‘Of course you didn’t, my dear—but everybody thinks you did.’— And I can’t bear the way he says that ‘thinks’.”
“He probably hadn’t heard about the enteric capsules when you saw him,” I said, more hopefully—I hope—than I felt. “That means any one of half a dozen people could have done it.”
“But they can’t prove Randall was poisoned that way.”
“No,” I admitted. “But they can’t prove he wasn’t. And in view of the two other deaths, the assumption that he was is perfectly good.”
She looked at me for a while.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she said abruptly, “how you can get all tangled up without ever knowing it? For a long time—a year, I guess,—after I married Randall, and he was so marvelous, and all the kinks Gil had left in me were smoothing out, I kept thinking I hadn’t any right to all this. I ought to be punished, some way, for taking it… not loving him…” She drew a long breath and pushed her hair back from her forehead.
“Then that changed, and I realized all of a sudden that I did love him, in a mature, grown-up way. And when men round about who sort of go in for making love to willing ladies made love to me, because I had an older husband, I always thought it was pretty funny and explained they’d made a mistake… I decided perhaps I’d done penance enough in my old life. But I guess I hadn’t. I guess I’m just beginning… all over again. Life has a quaint way of pulling out an extra ace just after you’ve finessed a king.”
“Well,” I said, “you’d better keep Belden Doyle, my dear. He knows more of the local conventions than you do.”
She looked at me and smiled. “I’ll see.” She went out.
I could hear Mr. Doyle somewhere outside asking Wilkins, I suppose, where the hell Mrs. Nash was. He wasn’t used to being kept waiting, I imagine. I sort of wandered about the room aimlessly. I ate a couple of grapes off the elaborate arrangement in an old silver soup tureen on the serving table, and had started to eat another when I saw Wilkins in the door. I hadn’t known that his suety face could express so polite but firm a rebuff for vandalism. That’s the nice thing about colored servants, incidentally; they don’t regard their handiwork as too sacred to touch.
“I beg pardon, madame. Colonel Primrose asks you to join them in the library.”
“All right,” I said. “You might take them some whiskey and soda.”
“Thank you, madame. And madame… if I may be so bold… I shall be free here at the end of the week. I shall be wanting another situation… If you have any need for my services, or any of your friends…”
I nodded.
“I’ll keep it in mind, Wilkins.—I know several people I’d be glad to recommend you to.”
“Thank you, madame.”
“If nobody hangs you first,” I said to myself as I went through the door he held open for me. Then I turned back… just for fun.
“Oh, by the way,” I said. “Captain Lamb had a man watching the house. He saw that letter put under the door, and saw you bring it in. They… have it, now.”
I couldn’t see his face. I heard a slightly choked “Thank you, madame,” and went in to join the police force.
Colonel Primrose held a chair for me in the library there, Captain Lamb looked at me over the top of his horn-rimmed spectacles, Mr. Selman Yates the District Attorney nodded.
“Glad to see you aren’t all torn up, ma’am,” Captain Lamb said. “She was a holy terror till we showed her all her money and let her count it. We’re hanging on to it for a while. There’s any number of people walking around would cave in her skull for a tenth of it.”
“How much was it?” I asked.
“Fifteen hundred and three dollars,” Mr. Yates said. “She says it’s what she’s been saving. There’s more of it somewhere. You could tell that by the way she kept asking if that’s all we’d found.”
“Is she… locked up?”
He shook his head with a smile, seeing, I suppose, what I was thinking.
“A lot of crackpots around write letters, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Most of them send them in to the newspapers. She didn’t, of course. But don’t you worry about it. Lamb’s keeping an eye on her. Ah—there are much more important matters.”
He picked up a sheaf of papers on the desk.
“I’ve just been talking to the Commissioner,” he went on. “He’s interested in this enteric capsule business.”
He smiled suddenly.
“So am I… and so is Belden Doyle.”
He turned to Colonel Primrose.
“As I understand it, if the poison that Randall Nash took in this room was administered as it was to the dog, and to Mr. A. J. McClean, then it’s evident he took it sometime be
tween the time he left this house, yesterday, and the time he came back.”
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“When he left here, he went to his wife’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, to that drug store, to the St. Martins’ place, to McClean’s. If he was given that delayed-action poison, and he did not take it in the house here—and there’d seem to be no point in his doing so—then the obvious people who could have given it to him are Angus Nash, Mr. or Mrs. St. Martin, A. J. McClean, and the butler Wilkins.”
He looked up from the typed notes. Colonel Primrose was looking at me with a quizzical smile. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Thought of something?”
I shook my head. “Just that the St. Martins are leaving in the morning.”
“They’ve changed their plans,” Mr. Yates said.
I said “Oh.”
He went on deliberately.
“We happen to know definitely that A. J. McClean was poisoned by means of enteric capsules. In some cases— Randall Nash’s, unfortunately—it’s not possible to tell; post mortem doesn’t detect. In Mr. McClean’s case, we know. And there’s no getting away from the fact that the obvious persons who could have given him that poison, at the correct time, are those who were here this afternoon at tea. Iris Nash, Lowell Nash, Angus Nash; Mrs. St. Martin; Mr. Trevor (Mac) McClean; Stephen Donaldson; the butler Wilkins.
“Well, it’s like the old game of cancelling names. There are just three people in both lists. Edith St. Martin, Angus Nash, Wilkins.”
He stopped for a moment, staring down at the typed papers on the desk in front of him.
“And that doesn’t make sense, to my mind, Colonel. You get down immediately to Angus Nash. I’d say you could rule out the St. Martin tribe just offhand. Neither of them could keep an idea in his head long enough to follow it around the block. Unless you’re springing another motive on us…”
He looked at the blank Buddha face of Sergeant Buck’s chief. Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“Randall Nash’s cash,” he said. “I see no other motive.”
Yates nodded.
“I agree. And God knows he’d never have trusted that male flyweight with it, or that female flyweight either. That leaves Wilkins, and Randall Nash’s son. And they’re out too, to my mind. We’ve not been able, so far, to find any sign of a connection between Wilkins and Nash prior to a few months ago. It seems just silly to think he would be the illicit custodian of a large sum of money. But Angus Nash is still more out. He and his father fought like wild boars every time they met, which I understand was seldom.”
“That quarrelling could have been a blind,” Captain Lamb said suddenly.
The Assistant District Attorney nodded his head, without much conviction. I couldn’t help shaking mine. If it was a blind, it was the very best blind I’d ever seen.
“So… it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Murder often doesn’t,” Colonel Primrose said. “Well, the alternative then. Let’s assume the enteric capsules were not used in the murder of Randall Nash. The poison was in his whiskey… somehow. He drank it here, when he got back to the house after twelve o’clock last night. He died within a few minutes. You then have other possibilities.”
Yates nodded. “They are more reasonable, furthermore, from the point of view of the money. They are—eliminating Wilkins again, for the same reason—Iris Nash, and Lowell Nash. Lowell Nash could have known about that metal cleaner, of course.”
“There is one other possibility,” Colonel Primrose said placidly. “It doesn’t make much sense if we rest on the money motive. But it’s a very definite possibility. Miss Lavinia Fawcett.”
He glanced around at me and chuckled at the expression on my face.
“Miss Lavinia has been watched, of course. She came here this afternoon, about twenty minutes past four. Edith St. Martin had just come. A. J. left the room and went out to the kitchen. Wilkins says he talked to her, alone, for a few minutes in the back entry. We know also, on Lowell’s word, and I imagine it’s true, that she was here last night.”
“She’d hardly, however, have access to cyanide of potassium?”
Colonel Primrose nodded coolly.
“She’s just the person who seems to have had,” he said. “She had an envelope of it, with a skull and crossbones inked on it, in her medicine cupboard. I’ve sent it along to Kavanaugh to make sure.”
Mr. Selman Yates looked at him intently. “The other stuff, for the enteric capsules—the salol?”
“You can buy it in any drug store. However, A. J. took it for rheumatism. Miss Lavinia worked in his bank, she had the free run of his house.—However, it’s just an idea.”
He turned to me, his black eyes sparkling.
“And this is where you come in, Mrs. Latham.”
I’d never seen him so blandly suave. In fact, it was all so smooth indeed that I should have suspected something long before I did.
“We want you to help us out here. You see, of course, that it’s vitally important to make out, if we can, just how Randall Nash was poisoned. Well, all we’ve got to go on, outside of motive and theory and such abstractions—I suppose you could call them—is what actually happened here.”
He paused an instant, looking at me, and went on cheerfully.
“Now it’s my theory that I slipped up badly, perhaps, last night, on just that point—the point of what happened. I was somewhat mixed up in it myself, I didn’t realize what had occurred, and so on. Now, we’ve got the idea that we might try to reconstruct—go through the business again, from the time you and Iris and Donaldson and I came in the outside door there when we got back from the Assembly.”
Mr. Yates reached under the desk and brought out a black leather satchel. I watched him, understanding about half of this. He opened it, and brought out, to my astonishment, the four objects that had been on that desk the night before, when Iris came into the room, and when Randall Nash lay sprawled lifeless on the rug in the dark periphery of the light cast by the reading lamp: the silver tray, the Waterford decanter, still half-full of Scotch, the amber glass with the silver rim, and the blue patent syphon with the chromium top and the gold band round its shoulder.
“Now then, Mrs. Latham. Will you put them just where they were when Iris came in?”
Mr. Yates had switched off the table lamp between the windows. The only light in the room was the round yellow disk on the desk under the green porcelain shade.
“Surely,” I said. I got up and went to the desk. They stood across from me, watching intently.
I put the tray on the edge of the polished surface, a little outside the light. “As nearly as I can recall,” I said, “this was just here. The decanter was on it, and the syphon.”
I put them in place, and looked at Colonel Primrose. He nodded. And again, looking into those sparkling parrot’s eyes of his, I should have known. And it was all so simple… and so dreadful.
“The syphon was just in the edge of the light. And this”—I took the amber glass—“was lying in the light, like this, on its side, as though it had been knocked over when Randall got up.”
I went to the door and looked back, and nodded. “I think that’s about it.”
I’d kept my eyes steadfastly off the chalked outline of Randall Nash’s body, still visible on the rug. I didn’t, somehow, want to know if Iris should have seen it when she went in there.
“Very good, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said briskly. He came around the desk and across the room. “Now then. I want you to show us exactly what Iris did, and tell us what the rest of us did, when we came in. I’ll go out to the door with you.”
I hesitated.
“Iris could show you a lot better than I can,” I said.
He shook his head. “Doyle won’t let her, in the first place. We don’t want to upset her unnecessarily. Anyway, it’s your evidence we’re taking. Not Iris’s.”
“All right,” I said. We went out into the hall. Captain Lamb and Mr. Yates followed
, standing back by the library door. We went on to the front door.
“You remember when we came in,” I said. “I was just behind Iris. Then you, and Steve Donaldson. We came on down here.”
We walked back up the hall. I stopped just short of the library door. The two men there moved past it, Mr. Yates closing the door three-quarters to. I nodded as he looked at me inquiringly.
“We stopped here,” I said. “Iris a step ahead of me. She saw the light through the door there. She sort of drew herself together, as if she’d got to face something that was pretty hard going.”
I felt, rather than saw from any visible thing, that that sounded quite differently from the way I’d meant it.
“I may have imagined that,” I said hastily. “I wouldn’t swear to it. Anyway, she stepped over to the door, and pushed it farther open.”
I swung the door open and stepped back.
“Just a minute,” Mr. Yates said. The three of them went into the library, and stood there to the left of the desk. “Go ahead, please.”
“I was still just behind her. The two of us looked in, and saw first that Randall wasn’t there, and second that that overturned glass was there on the desk. That’s when she gave a start. I’m sure it was the fact of the liquor being here at all, and the glass of course.”
Mr. Yates nodded. “She then came in… to where, exactly? Please do precisely what she did, do you mind?”
I wasn’t sure that I didn’t mind very much. But of course, I thought, if I did it she wouldn’t have to.
“All right,” I said. It was all as clear in my mind as if it had happened five minutes before.
I turned slowly and looked up the stairs, as she’d done, and turned back to an imaginary three people in the hall. “Please go on in,” I said. “I’ll bring the decanter.”
I walked from the door to the corner of the desk, picked up the glass and put it on the tray, took out my handkerchief and wiped up an imaginary spot on the mahogany surface, took the tray, turned to go back into the hall… and stopped short as three voices spoke almost simultaneously behind me.
I turned back to them. All three of them were staring at me as I’d gone mad. I stared at them the same way, still holding the tray there.