by Leslie Ford
Colonel Primrose came over to me. There was a very odd expression on his face.
“Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Just where was I, all this time?”
I thought.
“You were out in the hall. You’d just taken my coat.”
He nodded, his black eyes snapping with intense interest. “And… she did that?”
I stared at him.
“She wiped off the table with her handkerchief?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “It’s a natural thing to do. She wiped up the whiskey that was spilled there. You expect things to spill when a glass is knocked over, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly. “It was certainly very stupid of me not to have.”
“Well,” I said. “I must be awfully stupid, but I don’t see…”
Then I went back to the table and put the tray down on it, and sat down abruptly in the chair there. I did see. And I saw that I’d contributed another stone to the terrible edifice of guilt they were raising against Iris Nash. She had washed the glass Randall had drunk out of—they knew that. But she had also wiped up the spilled liquor that would still have shown whether or not the potassium cyanide had been in that glass; and—I could easily hear Colonel Primrose and all of them stating it quite clearly—neither she nor I had mentioned the fact.
“What did she do with that handkerchief, Mrs. Latham?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I said. “She took it out into the pantry with the tray and the syphon, and left it on the shelf over the sink. It was sopping wet.”
“And where would it be now?”
I shrugged. “I suppose it’s in the laund—”
And I stopped dead.
His eyes were fixed calmly on me, waiting, and I knew at once I didn’t dare say I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought quickly enough.
“Where is it, Mrs. Latham?”
“It’s… upstairs,” I said. “In the blue room closet, in the pocket of my evening jacket.”
The two policemen stirred together. “Would you mind getting it, Mrs. Latham?” Mr. Yates said.
“I’ll send Buck,” Colonel Primrose said calmly. He went to the door. I saw the Sergeant there in an instant, his iron mask heavily adorned with court plaster in pastel strips.
“Have Wilkins show you the blue room, that Mrs. Latham was in,” Colonel Primrose said. “Bring down an ivory lace evening gown and jacket hanging there in the closet.”
I’d often wondered what color that gown was.
We waited. If only the maid had gone through the pockets and taken out the soiled handkerchiefs, I thought, the way Lilac does…
Colonel Primrose looked at me.
“You don’t seem to realize,” he said placidly, “that if the liquor in Randall’s glass was not poisoned, you’re clearing Iris of his murder—absolutely?”
There was complete silence in the room.
“I… suppose so,” I said.
Sergeant Buck’s square frame entered the room. He was holding my dress at arm’s length on a blue satin hanger. In the pleated pocket of the short jacket I saw a slight bulge, and knew the handkerchief was there. No maid had taken it to the wash.
Colonel Primrose pulled the crumpled white square out. Sergeant Buck handed my dress through the door to Wilkins, closed the door, and stood firmly planted in front of it.
“Is this Iris’s handkerchief, Mrs. Latham?”
I nodded, watching him fold it carefully, put it in an envelope he got out of the desk, moisten the flap, seal it. It was more than a handkerchief, more than a fragile wisp of lace and lawn. It was a woman’s innocence, her life, her soul… depending on what substance was held there inexorably in its cobweb threads.
“Take this to Dr. Kavanaugh, Buck. Ask him to test it for cyanide of potassium. We’ll wait here.”
We waited, while forty-three leaden minutes dragged by. Colonel Primrose and Mr. Selman Yates talked at first. I couldn’t have told what they were saying if my life depended on it.
There was one odd interlude. It was nearly ten o’clock when the door opened suddenly. We all turned, expecting the Sergeant. But it wasn’t him. It was Lowell.
“So sorry to interrupt,” she said. “I wonder if I…”
She stopped suddenly as her eyes fell on the exhibit on Randall Nash’s desk—the tray, the decanter, the syphon and the glass, there in the single yellow disk of light, almost as they had been the night before, except that the glass was upright now.
“Hullo!” she said.
She walked calmly over to the desk.
“Brilliant,” she said. “Reconstructing the scene—”
Her voice stopped as abruptly as if she had been struck in the face. Her lips parted suddenly, she caught her breath in a quick gasp, staring down as if hypnotized by the glaring spot in the darkened room, her eyes widening, her slim dark little figure shrinking back toward the white door frame. And suddenly she raised her hand to her mouth, turned and ran out of the room.
We all stared after her. I looked at Colonel Primrose. He had an oddly bewildered expression on his face. After a moment he got up and went out into the hall. He came back in a few moments, still troubled and as bewildered as before, I thought. He came in as Lowell had done, stood there a while in front of the desk, looking down at it as if to see, if he could, what she had seen, shook his head and sat down again. He sat there looking straight ahead of him, rubbing his chin until I thought he would wear a hole in it or I would go crazy, one or the other.
Sergeant Buck came in just when I’d decided I’d leave, I couldn’t stand it any longer. He took off his overcoat, laid it on a chair and put his hat on top of it. Then he came over to Colonel Primrose and handed him an envelope he took out of his inside pocket Colonel Primrose handed it to the Assistant District Attorney.
Mr. Selman Yates opened it, read the one short sentence on the sheet of note paper inside, and looked up.
“Mrs. Nash’s handkerchief,” he said quietly, “was saturated with a strong solution of whiskey and cyanide of potassium.” No one spoke. What that meant was perfectly apparent. The whiskey in the decanter had not been poisoned. The cyanide must therefore have been in the patent syphon. And Iris had prepared the syphon herself, before she went to the Assembly; and Iris had rinsed it out and recharged it when she returned.
21
Sergeant Buck followed me out of the library and closed the door. Colonel Primrose was still standing in front of Randall Nash’s desk, staring down intently at the instruments of death gathered there on it… trying, I knew, to penetrate to the heart of whatever had caused Lowell to act as she’d done.
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat.
“Maybe it ain’t as bad as it looks, ma’am,” he said stiffly.
“I hope not,” I said. I put on my hat, picked up my coat that I’d laid across the arm of the cherry damask love seat in the hall, and started to put it on.
He cleared his throat again, in his usual sinister way.
“You planning on going somewheres, ma’am?”
I was planning on going over to my house to tell Gilbert St. Martin that Iris was not keeping his proposed rendezvous. But I wasn’t telling Sergeant Buck.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I added sweetly, “Do you mind, Sergeant?”
I meant, of course, that it was none of his business, but I didn’t quite like to say so. After all, the court plaster striped up and down his face was there so it wouldn’t be on mine. But he understood me perfectly.
He turned the curious molten brassy hue he gets. “It ain’t that I mind what you do, ma’am,” he said, with feeling. “It’s my orders. The Colonel says I’m to watch out nothing happens to you. I just thought I’d tell you in case you might be wondering.”
I took off my hat.
“I don’t suppose you want to go for a walk,” I said.
“No, ma’am. Not just now.”
“Then I’ll go upstairs. You can tell Mrs. Nash if she asks for
me.”
I went up. He stood there in the hall watching me as impersonally and with as evident distaste as if I were a lap dog he’d been given to hold. I went into my room and partly closed the door. I waited by it, listening, until I’d heard him go back into the library. Then I put on my coat and hat again and tiptoed across the hall to the back stairs. It was after ten, and I didn’t want Gilbert St. Martin making a scene on my front steps… or coming here—not if I could head him off.
I’d got across the hall but not quite to the steps when I heard the drawing room door open. Reflected in the darkish tilted panes of the Palladian window I could see Lowell and Steve Donaldson. Steve had his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. The library door opened at that moment, and Sergeant Buck looked out.
“Okay,” he said. “I thought it was Mrs. Latham.”
“Where is she?”
It was Steve’s voice.
“Upstairs,” Sergeant Buck said gruffly.
I slipped down the back steps, grinning to myself. I was half-way down when it occurred to me all of a sudden that if I could see Lowell and Steve reflected in that window, then Randall Nash could have seen Gilbert and Iris there… and undoubtedly had seen them, Christmas Eve when I watched from my bedroom window and saw Gil raise her hand to his lips. “He must have been wild,” I thought.
The kitchen was empty, and the little passage between it and the servants’ wing. I unlatched the back door and crept outside. It was as dark as pitch. The garden wall and my own house loomed dimly, a darker darkness in the starless night. For a moment I hesitated. It was very much nearer across the wall, and I might meet one of Captain Lamb’s men if I tried to get out into Beall Street through the servants’ entrance. On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a climber. Still, the wall was partly broken down, and Lowell had done it.
I glanced back. Whatever I was going to do had better be done quickly, I thought. I scooted across the soggy lawn to the broken-down place above the old Nash vault, stepping warily there for fear I might conceivably cave it in. I’m not quite sure, now, how I got over that wall. I couldn’t possibly have done it in the daylight, when I could see how high it really was. The sharp broken brick cut my hands and tore my stockings to ribbons. However, I made it. My eyes were getting used to the dark now, and it wasn’t too bad, except that everything was strange and unreal. Even the urn on my side of the wall loomed pale and unfamiliar and a little frightening.
I jumped down on the other side, clinging to the bare ropey branches of the trumpet vine, got to my feet and brushed myself off. Suddenly my hands stopped short as something white and ghostly moving beyond my tiny orangery made my blood turn to water and my feet freeze in their muddy tracks. Then I took a deep breath. It wasn’t moving, obviously, being a white fluted marble column, broken at the top, that so far as I know has never done anything but stand there. It shook me, however, because it made me realize how jumpy I was. Perhaps I really needed Sergeant Buck to look out for me after all, I thought.
I let go the trumpet vine that I’d caught hold of again and ran quickly across the grass. And I stopped short a second time. The Venetian blinds in the living room were pulled flat, the velvet hangings were drawn. That was strange, I thought, because Lilac never draws them unless I’m in the house and tell her to. The garden’s completely enclosed, and like another room in the house, as a matter of fact, so there’s no need to, really, except that it is cozier when the fire’s burning to have them drawn.
Then I realized what had happened. Gilbert St. Martin had come, of course—it was after ten—and he’d be just the person who’d want to shut himself in so no one could see him… so he wouldn’t get caught, I thought suddenly, in one of Sergeant Buck’s uncompromising positions.
I went quickly along the narrow herring-bone path to the garden door. I felt in my pocket for my keys, counted them off in the dark till I came to the fourth from the left, and put it in the lock. As I did, the path of light from the living room door across the hall was abruptly blotted out; the place was in utter and total darkness.
I stood stock-still on the threshold, for a long time, my heart a cold lump in my throat. I called “Lilac!” and waited. There was no answer. “Julius!” I called. I waited again, but still there was no answer, no sound of any kind, in all the pitchy blackness, except, from somewhere downstairs, my Irish setter Sheila’s deep-throated bark and her claws scratching against a door.
I stood there with my hand on the brass knob. Somebody was in my house… for what reason I didn’t know, but I did have the most instant and complete conviction that whoever it was it was a murderer, a man—or a woman—on whose hands already lay the blood of Randall Nash and of old A. J. McClean… and that my blood couldn’t dye those hands a great deal redder, or sear the scar on that immortal soul one whit deeper.
For a moment—for one awful moment—I nearly turned tail and ran. But I didn’t. There was no use. There was no place to run to. I’d be trapped there in the garden… I couldn’t possibly get back over the wall, the bricks I’d used as stepping stones were all piled on the other side. And there was another reason. I can’t pretend that I’m brave. I’m a most frightful coward. But even a frightful coward couldn’t go away and leave two old colored people sleeping in that house, as I knew they must be, alone with murder. If I could make a dash, I thought, for the light switch at the end of the hall, or the one by the door leading down to the kitchen—or even the one inside the dining room… The darkness worked two ways. I was as used to it in itself as whoever was inside there, and I was more used to the house.
I reached down and slipped off my soggy shoes. My hands weren’t shaking now, but my knees were. I threw my shoes out on the grass and took a step forward, and another—only my pounding heart would give me away, I thought—and another, my hand running along the wall, past the picture of the red vase of gentians that I could almost see, I knew it so well, and the pembroke table with the terrarium with the lone yellow lady slipper in it, to the door frame. But the door had been closed, closed since the light had been turned off, just while I was standing there… we were so close to each other, this murderer and I. I could hear a sharp intake of breath, or so I thought—whether it was mine or his I couldn’t tell.
I slipped past that door, my heart almost bursting. I knew now that I had to make the switch by the kitchen stairs. I started to run, even in the dark there. It was only a few steps. But I didn’t make it. I could hear the door open behind me, and a quick step, and then a cold kid-gloved hand came over my mouth as I screamed and something crashed against the back of my head, and that was all except for a blinding pyrotechnic flash through all my being…
When I opened my eyes I was moving in great giddy circles in a sort of universal wind tunnel, in which I got nowhere. Through the haze and the roar I could dimly hear someone swearing at me, and it occurred to me crazily that I was in France, then, and hadn’t tipped the driver enough. However, he was swearing in English, and so I closed my eyes again, knowing it was Sergeant Buck and that he had every right to swear as roundly as he chose and in whatever language.
Then I was aware of another voice—cool, bored, drawling. “Good Lord, I nearly broke my neck falling over her. The front door was wide open, all the lights off. I say, they’ve certainly ripped the place up.”
I opened my eyes, with an effort, and tried to raise my pounding beating head.
“Stay where you are, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck growled.
I couldn’t have lifted my head anyway, even if I’d dared to try, but I could roll it to one side and open my bursting eyes. I couldn’t believe they were seeing straight. The living room was torn to bits; pictures down, books on the floor, chairs with the upholstery ripped off, boxes dumped out and left.
I closed my eyes again, and felt Sheila’s wet comforting nose in my face and her feet in the pit of my stomach, and heard Sergeant Buck saying “Get off there, pup,” and then Colonel Primrose was beside me, my hands in his. I knew without cari
ng that the tears were rolling down my cheeks like rain out of a broken eave trough. I knew he’d be angry, and I tried to explain, but he put his hand under my chin and closed my mouth.
“I imagine she wouldn’t have seen who it was,” I heard him say.
“She came in the back, sir, over the garden wall,” the Sergeant’s brassy voice said. “Look at her feet. The house was pitch black. She was laying in the hall with that there ribbon clerk kneeling down by her, holding his cigarette lighter over his head. Scared to go look for anybody, I guess. Good thing she’s got a thick skull or she’d be dead as hell.”
Colonel Primrose’s hands tightened on mine.
“Where are Julius and Lilac?”
“Don’t know, sir. They ain’t around any place I can find.”
“Then keep Mr. St. Martin in the other room. Don’t let him go prowling around the house.”
“Okay, sir.”
“You stay just here for a minute, Mrs. Latham, till we see if you’ve got a fracture. I hope you have if it’ll teach you a little sense… but I’m afraid it won’t so I hope you haven’t.”
Something warm brushed my aching forehead. I thought for a moment he’d kissed me, but I was awfully muddle-headed, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, I was alone with Sheila after that, and Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were with Gilbert St. Martin in the dining room, and all I knew was that somebody thought I had something he wanted very badly… and would much rather kill me than have me know who he was… and that Lilac and Julius hadn’t been found…
The most immediate result of all this was that Headquarters, so to speak, moved from the yellow brick house in Beall Street across the garden wall to my red brick house in P Street.
“You don’t know what it is somebody’s hunting so frantically, I suppose?” Colonel Primrose asked me, the next morning.
My head still hurt, especially when I turned it or tried to open my eyes very wide, and worst of all when I closed my teeth together quickly, all of which I seemed constantly to do.