The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  And then in a blind uncontrollable instant Iris was in Steve Donaldson’s arms, and… I had closed the door.

  Lowell stood rooted to the spot, completely and utterly paralyzed, her mouth open, her eyes fixed rigidly on the solid wood, hardly breathing. It seemed hours, though it couldn’t have been a long moment, I suppose, that she was unconscious of my hand pulling her away. Then she came, still dazed, still uncomprehending. And then suddenly she looked at me, her dark eyes clearing.

  “Why don’t we go back to your place, Grace?” she said steadily.

  23

  She switched on the engine and let in the clutch.

  “I don’t feel like going inside,” she said shortly. “Could we go for a drive?”

  I nodded. I’d much rather have been at home with a witch hazel pad on my head, but it seemed unimportant now. Whether my head ached or didn’t, it could never match the ache in Lowell’s heart. She went through to Wisconsin Avenue and down until we came to the water front, and left until we turned along the parkway to the Lincoln Memorial, glistening white in the sun. We crossed the bridge with Arlington above us, its sturdy Doric columns set in the winter hills, the radio towers like great mosquito legs behind it. We turned then by the Memorial Parkway and went silently along the blue river bank, until we’d left the bridge and airport behind us, and the Capitol dome far to our left, out toward Mount Vernon.

  Lowell said nothing, not one word, during the drive, nor when we turned and came back, the Capitol dome rising on our right now, across the river, and the white marble city beyond it. I didn’t say a word either. I didn’t know what there was to say. I couldn’t say, ‘Well, you ought to have seen it.’ That wouldn’t help any.

  At last, as we came back past the airport and a great transport plane zoomed up and on its way over the Virginia hills, I said “Why don’t we go and see if there’s anything we can do for Mac?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not just… just yet.”

  “All right. Then let’s go back to my house.”

  “Okay.”

  I unlocked my door and we went in. Even before we’d got properly inside I knew Sergeant Buck was back from Mr. Hofnagel’s. I could tell it by the way Lilac and Julius were stepping around, getting things further back in order.

  I heard Colonel Primrose in the dining room. His voice was quite distinct

  “When did you first meet Randall Nash, Donaldson?”

  “Four years ago,” I could hear Steve Donaldson saying calmly. “The firm I was with did quite a bit of business for him. I had charge of some of it.”

  “You knew him fairly well?”

  “Quite well. I went on a couple of fishing parties to Quebec when he was along.”

  I looked at Lowell. She was taking off her coat and hat. She caught my eye in the mirror, and the question in my face, and nodded. “Yes, I knew that,” she said quietly.

  “That’s how you came to renew acquaintance, last fall?”

  “I didn’t renew his acquaintance, exactly, Colonel Primrose. I met his daughter at some party. She asked me for cocktails. I thought at first Mr. Nash didn’t recognize me. I mentioned I hadn’t seen him for two or three years. He said he’d been doing his business elsewhere. He didn’t seem to object to my coming; when we met he was as cordial as he was to anybody.”

  “You wouldn’t remember if he ever gave you any of his property to keep, Donaldson?”

  “If you mean his money, you’re barking up the wrong tree, Colonel.”

  I took off my own things and put them on the chair by Lowell’s. I was worried, badly—worried about the look in Lowell’s eye and the dejected droop of her shoulders as she went along the hall in front of me. I wished Steve Donaldson hadn’t come here just now. And I wondered if Iris had meant not to tell me Steve was an old acquaintance of Randall’s, or if she hadn’t known it. It seemed odd in either case, and odder when I thought about the scene we’d just witnessed, Lowell and I, in the Beall Street house.

  Then the terrible thought shot into my mind that it was Steve Donaldson who’d given Iris the poison metal cleaner.

  I followed Lowell down the short hallway. She hadn’t gone into the living room but on out into the garden. I saw her out there, in the leafless orangery, with a man I didn’t recognize for a moment. Then I saw it was her brother Angus. They were standing face to face, talking earnestly. I saw her shake her head and turn away. He took hold of her arm and pulled her back.

  “Well,” I thought, “just another friendly little row.”

  I pushed open the living room door.

  Mac stopped prowling up and down like a worried executive.

  “Hullo,” he said. “How’s your head? Where’s Lowell?”

  “My head’s fine,” I said. “Lowell’s out there with her brother. Why don’t you join them? Keep them peaceful for a while.”

  Then I remembered.

  “I’m so sorry about your uncle, Mac.”

  We shook hands. He didn’t say anything, for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I’ve got to go back. I just wanted to see Lowell a minute.”

  “Don’t go—there’s nothing you can do,” I said, thinking how desperately empty that big old house must feel now, that always felt empty no matter how many people were in it.

  “Thanks. I guess I’d better.”

  He looked out of the window, like a lonesome child not knowing whether the others would let it play with them, and being afraid to go out and see.

  “Go on out, Mac,” I said. “Don’t be so stupid. Don’t you know the old thing about the nettle? Stings you if you touch it gently, but grasp it like a man of mettle.”

  He gave me a sardonic grin, but he went, and I went to the dining room door and looked in. Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were there, with Mr. Selman Yates. I blinked my eyes, not sure whether I was seeing what I thought I saw or not. On the table in front of them the Sergeant was just finishing unwrapping three patent soda syphons, of the type the Nashes had had. He set them out in a neat row.

  Colonel Primrose’s hat and coat were on the chair by the door. He looked up and smiled briefly. “You’d better sit down, you look shaky. Have a nice drive?”

  “It’s pleasanter in the spring and summer,” I said.

  I glanced at Sergeant Buck, monumentally calm. It’s too bad you couldn’t have been in the Nashes’ hall with us too, my friend, I thought. Then Colonel Primrose wouldn’t be quite so smug about it. But maybe he wasn’t, it occurred to me suddenly when I saw him watching me intently out of the corner of his eye.

  “Where’d they come from, and what are they for?” I asked, pointing to the syphons.

  Colonel Primrose smiled again. “Oh, just a little stunt,” he said calmly. He took a fourth one out of a satchel that Mr. Yates put on the table. I recognized it—I couldn’t have done it any other way—from the police identification label pasted on it as the one that had been on the tray on Randall Nash’s desk, the one that Lowell had given him for Christmas.

  I must have looked even more blank than ever, for Colonel Primrose gave me an amused glance as he set it alongside the others. One of the three was just like it, blue with a gold band around the shoulder. The others were blue too, one with a grey band, one with a light blue band. They all had chromium tops.

  He stood back and looked at them.

  “You see, Mrs. Latham,” he said, “Randall Nash was poisoned at home, not with the enteric capsules but with cyanide in his whiskey and soda. We know the whiskey in the decanter wasn’t poisoned, or we’d all have been dead too, as we drank out of the same decanter. It’s hard to see how the poison could have just been in the glass, unless on the much too simple hypothesis that the butler Wilkins put it there and poured the drink out for Nash himself.”

  “Which wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” I said promptly. “It would me,” he replied dryly. “I can’t think that highly of him. He’s a sneak, not a killer.”

  “You said yourself that cowards and sneaks�
��and women—are just the people who use poison to kill with.”

  Mr. Yates smiled.

  “We’ll see,” Colonel Primrose said patiently… obviously unable, I thought, to think of a comeback. “According to Wilkins, at any rate, the tray was on the desk, he took it away, Nash went and got it back himself. I assume that’s true. With the motive we’ve established we’d be hard put to it to figure out how Wilkins—a butler in Nash’s service not six months, hired through a good agency with a good record in Newport and Long Island—could have persuaded anybody as hard-boiled as Randall Nash to make him the custodian of a large sum of money.”

  “That’s true, I’m afraid,” I said.

  “It’s also true, I dare say—from looking over Wilkins’s bank account—that he made a pretty good thing out of Nash. For value received, I imagine.”

  He moved his row of syphons like a chess player arranging his pieces more evenly in place.

  “I think, however, there’s no doubt that the poison Randall Nash got came from this little engine.”

  He put his hand on the blue syphon with the gold shoulder band and pasted label.

  “The only way you could possibly put poison in it is of course to do it when you fill it with water, before you charge it with the capsule of carbon dioxide.”

  I looked at him, my breath coming more quickly, knowing what had to follow.

  “And Iris admits she filled this syphon before she came over here to go to the Assembly,” he went on. “Well, there are consequently three possible assumptions we can make. The first is this: Iris poisoned the water before she charged it. She had a solution of cyanide of potassium in her possession at the time. She sent Wilkins out of the pantry while she filled and charged the syphon. She took the syphon off the desk in the library, when we came back, after Randall Nash was dead, though we—at least—didn’t know it. She took it out into the kitchen, she let the water run into it for a long time… presumably so that any dregs of poison remaining in it would wash out.”

  He chuckled a little.

  “Very lucky she did, from whatever motive; for the four of us had soda that she then recharged it with. We might all have got a small dose of prussic acid at that, and probably did.— Well, we all know the initial motives. There is the additional one that A. J. apparently believed, firmly, that it is Iris who has Randall Nash’s money in her possession.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It wasn’t Iris who bashed me over the head.”

  “No. It wasn’t. It could, however, Mrs. Latham, conceivably have been the man who gave her the poison in the first place… and who, you may not know, left the Beall Street house a few moments before you did, and asked Buck where you were on his way out.”

  “You mean Steve Donaldson…?” I asked.

  He nodded coolly.

  I lapsed into a sort of dreary trance… thinking of all the other things I knew about Steve.

  Even if you counted Iris out, I thought, you could still have Steve Donaldson… except that he wasn’t around when the syphon was being filled. Almost as if he was answering my unstated objection, Colonel Primrose went on.

  “The second assumption is this. After Iris filled and charged the syphon and put it on the tray, someone came, in, emptied it out, refilled it—including cyanide—and recharged it.”

  “Belden Doyle’s point,” Mr. Yates said quietly. “He says Lowell did that during the twenty minutes she admits she was there, alone with her father. That’s why she was so upset by Lavinia.”

  I looked helplessly at Colonel Primrose.

  “There’s one other assumption. A substitution took place. Another syphon just like this one”—he put one hand on the marked syphon, the other on the one like it that Buck had unpacked—“was poisoned, and substituted for a perfectly harmless syphon, by someone familiar with the family life and possessions of the Nash household.”

  I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.

  “It’s interesting,” he went on, “that Lowell says when she came back from the dance to change her wrap, she found the front door unlocked. Doyle, by the way, asks why Lowell took this night of all nights to come back and change her wrap. Lowell says, quite reasonably, it seems to me, that she was cold, they were driving out to a house in Virginia, and she wanted a heavier wrap.”

  He straightened the battery of syphons again.

  “It opens up a considerable avenue of conjecture,” he said.

  Whether we would have wandered interminably down it or not, if Lowell, Angus, Mac and Steve Donaldson hadn’t been heard in the next room, I don’t know. Colonel Primrose stopped abruptly, and threw a cloth over the things on the table, indicating apparently that the session was closed for the moment. Then he sat there, his head sunk on his chest, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him.

  I got up and wandered back into the living room. Lowell was viewing the remnants of our Christmas tree that I’d got so used to seeing after seven days that I didn’t see it anymore. My last night’s visitor, as a matter of fact, hadn’t left a great deal of it.

  “Grace, why don’t you let us dismantle this sorry object?” she said.

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “You’re going to have to buy a lot of new ornaments next year,” Angus Nash said. “Got a step ladder?”

  “Down in the kitchen,” I said. “And if nobody minds, I’m going to collapse a few minutes.”

  I sank down on the sofa, rested my head on a pillow and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again and watched Lowell.

  “Hello, Colonel Primrose,” she was saying. “Don’t look at me like that. I know Iris’s fancy spellbinder has convinced everybody I did it.—There’s the ladder. Mac, you get up, Angie’ll break his neck if he does.”

  She flashed Mac a gay friendly smile, and he, poor dear, had got so used not to being smiled at that he could only look at her with what my sons call a brook trout expression and do as he was told in an unquestioning haze.

  Steve Donaldson looked on, standing there with his back to the mantel, his hands in his pockets, smoking his pipe, glancing from time to time because his eyes were drawn that way out the windows at the yellow brick house beyond the garden wall. He was waiting for Iris. I wondered if she knew it and would come. Then suddenly, quite like a gift from the gods to him, I heard Angie Nash’s voice from the other side of the tree.

  “Say, Mrs. Latham, why don’t you call Iris and ask her to come over? She must be pretty sunk, over there all alone.—If the baby panda here’ll keep her shirt on.”

  Lowell didn’t look around. “Sure, go on,” she said. “Ask her.”

  But I could see her drawing into herself. I didn’t know then that the drive we had taken, the hour and ten minutes during which she hadn’t opened her mouth or made any sign she was thinking or feeling, had been a long long trek for her through the wilderness of indecision… with all the instruments of revenge lying within her grasp, to seize upon—or to cast away. If I’d known that I still would not have known what path out of her wilderness she had chosen. But I could have guessed easily enough, heaven knows, from the set of her jaw and the tilt of her head, and the steadfast way she avoided Steve’s all unconscious eye and the way she played up to Mac all of a sudden.

  Then Iris came, with a new radiance—subdued but still so electric that everything in the room was instantly keyed up to the most extraordinary degree. She didn’t look at Steve, and I saw the dogged aching look in his eye as he leaned down and knocked out his pipe on the polished fire irons to keep from looking at her. We all sat there, watching Mac and Lowell undeck the Christmas tree, nobody saying much of anything, while Angie fiddled at the radio in the corner. And suddenly I heard Lowell say, “All right, now give me the big blue one, up there,”… and all of a sudden it flashed into my mind with the most astonishing clarity that we’d been through all this before.

  For a moment I confused it with that psychological phenomenon we all experience, in which it seems that one has been in this place, hearing precisel
y this conversation, doing precisely these things, yet knowing of course that it isn’t true, that one has never been there or heard that conversation, no matter how real it may seem. Then I realized that this wasn’t any psychological phenomenon, that we had been in precisely this pattern, all of us, before… except that like Alice Through the Looking Glass it was just backward. It was on my side of the garden wall, not the Nashes’. We were untrimming the Christmas tree, not trimming it. Lowell was asking Mac to hand the blue ball down to her, not to put it up… and I thought suddenly that they realized it too, because she took the gold ball he handed her and they looked at each other, rather surprised.

  In a moment now Mac is going to step back, I thought, and Senator McGilvray’s ghost is going to squeal, and Randall Nash’s ghost is going to come in the door and whisper the story of the vault so that Iris and Steve Donaldson will have to listen to it…

  Then quite suddenly I realized that my head ached and that I was quite giddy, as if I was going to faint, and that it was Colonel Primrose standing in the door, not Randall Nash, and Sergeant Buck there with the two syphons, not Wilkins and me seeing double. Colonel Primrose was looking at Lowell. It came to me abruptly then that he had been watching her all this time; he hadn’t taken his mind or his eyes off her since they had begun to dismantle the tree.

  Just then Lilac came in, and all this oddly backward scene was shattered. “Mis’ St. Mahtin, she’s at the doah—says can she come in?”

  The golden ball in Lowell’s hand dropped to the floor, splintering like the crashing of a thousand dainty silver cymbals. It wasn’t Lowell that spoke, it was Angie. “Can’t somebody give that woman a tent so she can stay in it?”

  Edith came in.

  “Oh Grace, your poor precious head—my dear, does it ache awfully? Hello, everybody, isn’t it funny you’re all over here. I went to see Iris and Wilkins said you were all here.— Iris, I hope you’re not going to be furious with me, but Wilkins is such a pet, he said you were letting him out at the end of the week, I do hope you won’t mind my taking him on.”