by Leslie Ford
“I think it’s fine,” Iris said.
Lowell turned around for an instant. “Do you need him to keep an eye on dear Gilbert?” she asked sweetly. “They say he’s awfully good at that sort of thing.”
She looked across at Iris. Iris smiled. And Lowell smiled too, quite suddenly, and then, for some utterly incredible and incomprehensible reason, they both laughed… for the first time I’d heard either of them laugh, except with dreadful bitterness, since I’d come home from Nassau.
24
Then Lowell looked away, and her eyes happened on Steve Donaldson, watching Iris like a hungry dog watching a bone he knows he can’t have, and the magic moment was gone. Her hard brittle little mask slipped back into place. She turned back to the tree and started singing, perversely, to the effect that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one, and stopped abruptly when Angie said to shut up for cripe’s sake.
Through all this Colonel Primrose was standing in the doorway, with Sergeant Buck behind him, something in the expression in his sharp black eyes so horribly, grimly depressing that I thought I couldn’t endure it another second. I saw Sergeant Buck looking at Iris. Colonel Primrose said, “Iris, where is Belden Doyle?”
She took a quick breath.
“He’s gone back to New York… for good,” she said. “He… still thinks I murdered my husband.”
“I thought so too,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “It’s what we were meant to think, from the beginning. I happen to know now that you didn’t. That I happen to know that is the oddest and sheerest chance.”
He looked around the silent room, and went on slowly.
“And yet I know that’s not true. It isn’t chance that brings the murderer to book. It isn’t chance, those infinitesimal things that ninety-nine murderers out of a hundred do that trip them up. Call it God, Fate, Necessity… something… whatever it was that made the lime eat every shred of the pajamas that Dr. Crippen wrapped the body of his poisoned wife in, except the tiny merchant’s label that sent him to the gallows.”
We sat there rigidly silent, not daring to look at each other, not knowing where to look. In the periphery of my awareness I knew that Lowell had moved, that she was holding on to the back of the chair she’d been piling the Christmas ornaments in, her hands ivory-white against the dark wood.
“Something of that sort was working in this case… something the murderer of these people knew, and in another sense could never know… not to be sure of.”
Angus Nash had turned away from the radio. He was still sitting there on the floor, marking the design in my great-grandmother’s aubusson carpet with his thumb nail, apparently absorbed in the process.
“Last night, when three women were together in that house across there, one watching the other two, I realized the possibility that we had what might be called a conspiracy on our hands. I take it you all know that Randall Nash hated his first wife with bitter intensity, compounded out of outraged pride and terrible resentment of a woman’s demanding a pound of flesh she had no need of. That feeling was superposed on a temperament that had to throw back only a century and a half to come to an ancestor who could bury three people to die a slow anguished death in an underground vault. So Randall Nash could hate, and hate he did… though he could hardly do more than see that Marie Nash would never get a penny of his money, and bring his daughter up to hate her too. He failed in that, because his daughter turned to her mother, and I suppose found a sort of comfort there that nature allows all human beings, no matter how shallow the source.”
Lowell’s eyes rested steadily on the brightly colored ornaments in the chair.
“So Randall Nash put his money where Marie could not get it. Marie died… and the custodian of that money had come to the simple decision that he did not care to return it. Randall Nash died, in a sense because he had tempted another human being too far, even though he had figured out, very carefully, that he was not tempting anyone. Which was the second mistake he made about his daughter.”
Angus Nash had quit marking out the pattern in the carpet, but he had not raised his eyes.
“Randall Nash had taken one step to protect himself. He had written a letter, or obtained a receipt, that stated, naturally, who the person was who held his money for him. I held that letter for three years. He got it from me on the evening of the 28th—it was a demented thing for him to do, of course, till he’d got the money, but he was arrogant and cocksure and had no suspicions—and came on to this house. There was a possibility, in the mind of someone, that he had left it here.— So it occurred to me last night, with those three women together there, in the Nash drawing room, that perhaps one of them was keeping an eye on the other two… so that a man could be free to come here, and try desperately to find that letter, left here perhaps by Randall Nash, that put the finger on him. If it was here, if he did find it—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Chance, if you will, or Fate, or God, had already put the finger on him.
“I’m not going to show you how each of you in turn came up, and how we rejected each of you. Each, I suppose, in his own mind, has done that for all the others. I don’t know how much information you may have… such for instance as that next to A. J. McClean, to whom Randall Nash went originally with his proposition, the person whose financial sense he had the most respect for—in spite of the smoke screen she puts up constantly—was Edith St. Martin.”
I looked at Edith. Her face was drawn and haggard. The thin line around her throat where the plastic surgeon had done his job was livid red… almost, I thought with a shudder, as if the hangman’s rope had already bitten there.
“He did not, however, have the same respect for her sense of human values—rightly or wrongly. And, of course, he was laboring under the bitter delusion that his wife was in love with Edith St. Martin’s husband. That delusion was fostered and fed by the mad letters of a jealous half-mad woman, and the dishonest spying and reporting of an unscrupulous and complaisant tool. I think you all understand that Iris Nash was an innocent victim in all this.”
Then why, I thought painfully, had she gone to Lavinia?
Colonel Primrose looked at me, smiling faintly, and turned to the doorway then as if he had read my mind.
“You have something to give Mrs. Nash, I believe, Sergeant?”
It was the only time in my life I had ever seen such great fissures rent in the solid granite front of Sergeant Buck’s frozen pan. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and turned a slow dull red.
“Let’s have it, Sergeant.”
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. He reached silently in his pocket, brought out a stamped envelope, and handed it to Colonel Primrose. Colonel Primrose crossed the room and gave it to Iris.
“I don’t know whether you’d care to say what’s in this,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to.”
She opened it, and took out three ragged filthy envelopes. She got up and went to the fire place, paused there and tinned toward Lowell and Angus.
“It’s very simple,” she said. “A reporter who covers M Street found out that Lavinia had… what he thought was a swell human interest story. For a couple of years he’s been trying to get these letters from her. They are letters your father wrote Lavinia when she was young… and he was young. She wouldn’t give them up, but when Randall… died, he offered her what was a lot of money, to her, for them, and she telephoned me she was selling them, unless I came to terms. I tried to get them, twice, and here they are. I thought that he—and you and I, Lowell, who cared the most for him—and you, Angus, wouldn’t want them-glaring out from the pages of a Sunday supplement.”
She tossed them down into the flames, and turned to Sergeant Buck. “Thank you!” she said softly.
Sergeant Buck turned a still deeper brick-red. “Okay, miss,” he said.
Colonel Primrose smiled a little.
“To get back to the night of the 29th, when Randall Nash was poisoned. The custodian of his money had seen, as soon as
he knew how desperately ill Marie Nash was, that the financial arrangement was through. He had made up his mind before, possibly a long time before, that he was not going to return Randall Nash’s money, and he had no doubt planned Randall Nash’s death, carefully and… with a kind of cold, shrewd cunning. From Christmas day, perhaps even earlier, he had planned it exactly, and in detail.—The first step in his plan was to kill Lowell’s dog. It had two reasons. The first: to point the subsequent murder of Randall—with Lowell’s expert and ungrudging assistance—to Iris Nash. The second: to try out the salol, which could be used if it turned out to be the best way of doing that crime to bring it to Iris’s door.
“The night of the Assembly, the 29th, it was put directly up to him. He had, I am sure, talked with Randall; he knew, I’m also sure, that Randall had got that letter from me. He knew Marie Nash was dying. He knew Randall Nash could not help but drink if liquor was near him. He knew that on that night everybody was to be away from the house. He knew Randall would probably be in no mood, or in no condition, to go to the Assembly himself.”
Colonel Primrose paused, looking from face to face in the silent room with a kind of grim urbanity.
“He knew one other thing, too. He knew that Lowell had given Randall a patent soda syphon as a Christmas present.”
My eyes were drawn irresistibly to the two that Sergeant Buck was again holding in his two great hands.
Colonel Primrose glanced around at them himself.
“They’re made by thousands, of course, in a few simple patterns, and those in each pattern are identical. And on the night of the 29th the murderer came to the house with a syphon he had already prepared, containing a small amount of charged water and a fatal amount of cyanide of potassium, and calmly substituted it for the one that Iris had prepared for her guests. He put it on a tray on Randall Nash’s desk, with a glass and a decanter, knowing that Randall could not resist it. And he went away, taking the other syphon with him, leaving the door unlocked because he could not afford to be seen going down those steps and he did not dare to stop outside there, even for so short a time.”
I looked at Lowell. She was hardly breathing, still staring down at the chair, her face bloodless and set, not with fear so much as with a sense of inexorable inevitability.
“Well, it was a terrible set-up… for Iris, of course, as it was planned to be. As you all know, it pointed—everything pointed—directly to her. She admitted, freely—and erroneously, as it happened—that she had charged that syphon herself; and with her actions when we came back from the Assembly that night, perfectly natural but fitting with deadly preciseness into a pattern of apparent overwhelming guilt, it appeared irresistibly that she had poisoned Randall Nash. If it had not been for a blunder of the most unusual sort on the part of the actual poisoner, a blunder that only one person out of ten thousand could make… that the poisoner does not yet even know he did make… then Iris’s act of sending Belden Doyle back to New York might easily have been a folly that would have convicted her of the murder of her husband and A. J. McClean.—Fortunately for her, and for all of us, that blunder was made.”
He turned deliberately to Sergeant Buck and took the blue syphon with the lighter blue band around its shoulder.
“The poisoner found a syphon of this kind, in the Nashes’ house—the syphon that Lowell had given her father for Christmas, and that Iris had charged before she left the house that night. And he took that syphon away with him.”
He turned back to Sergeant Buck, gave the syphon to him, and took the other one held out in the Sergeant’s great left hand.
“Iris had seen that syphon only a few times,” he went on calmly. “When she returned to the house that night, after the Assembly, she did not notice that the syphon on Randall Nash’s desk was… not the one that she had charged. But when, last night as we were trying to reconstruct just what had happened, and had this syphon on the desk there, Lowell Nash came into the library, and saw it for the first time, she… knew. The murderer of Randall Nash had substituted a poisoned syphon that was identical with the other… as far as he knew. But the murderer of Randall Nash is… color blind, in a very unusual way. He does not have the ordinary and very common red-green color blindness at all. He has the extremely rare form of color blindness that cannot distinguish between blue and yellow. To his eyes they are both grey.”
I looked for just one instant at the blue syphon with the gold band, as he held the two of them out together, and closed my eyes.
“For Randall Nash had entrusted his money to the man whom he thought would have the greatest interest in preserving it… for his own interest as well as Lowell’s. But that man had realized that Lowell Nash was not in love with him, and was not going to marry him. He is furthermore the man who would know most quickly that A. J. McClean had guessed the truth of it; he is the man who is in charge of the safety deposit boxes in his uncle’s bank, and had the safest and most effective means of concealing the money.—As Lowell has realized… for some time before she asked him, just now, to hand her the blue ball from the top of the tree.”
I had opened my eyes and was staring, as I suppose we all were, at Mac, standing there by himself at the foot of the step ladder, his eyes resting dumbly, helplessly, on the two syphons, his face so dreadfully white… and I suppose we were all trying, as I was, to readjust the meaning of his strong, determined, inarticulate face, and realizing, with a cold shocked thrill of horror, that we had never known him, really, at all… never known the turbulent complex man under the boy we had always known…
It was Lowell we looked at, a few minutes later. Mac had dropped through our lives with such cataclysmic force that we were too numb to think of him. She stood there, white and rigid, in front of the denuded Christmas tree, the broken ball at her feet, still holding to the back of the chair. Her eyes had not raised until she spoke now.
“It’s my father’s fault. He killed himself and A. J… and Mac. Mac never knew this would happen to him when he took that money to keep. I know he didn’t.”
“I’m sure he didn’t, Lowell,” Colonel Primrose said.
No one else spoke, not even Edith St. Martin. And then she did the one tactful thing I’ve ever seen her do; she picked up her mink coat and went out, without a word. And after a little time Iris, who had been standing by the garden window, the sun on her hair making it like another sun in the room, turned to Angus.
“Let’s go home, Angie,” she said.
I saw the startled look in Lowell’s eyes as she turned to where Steve Donaldson stood in front of the fireplace, his cold pipe gripped between his teeth until white ridges stood out in his lean sun-tanned cheeks, not moving.
Angie got up off the floor and stood there, looking quietly at his sister, waiting.
Lowell raised a hand to her forehead and pushed back her short black curls.
“Angie can’t go, Iris,” she said. “He… he just bet me we couldn’t go around the world together without having a single row… and if I win he’s… he’s going to give me half the money mother left him.”
Angie Nash took two steps to her side, put his arm around her and grinned at everybody.
“This is the one bet I’ve ever made,” he said cheerfully, “that’s really foolproof. I can’t lose. Honey, you couldn’t be decent twenty-four hours to save your neck. The only thing I don’t see is what I want to go off to… to China for to find it out.”
Lowell was still looking at Iris.
“We’re going alone,” she said. “—Unless you and Steve would come with us. To… to keep him from ditching me in the desert of Tibet.”
And Iris looked at her, her face suddenly quite pale, and started to speak. But Lowell had gone to her.
“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “Steve never knew I was on earth, and I’ll be just as mad about him for a stepfather, anyway. And… you told me yourself I oughtn’t to marry till I’d had some fun, and seen more than one man… and I know it… and please, Iris, don’t think I’m as
bad as…”
But the rest of that sentence was lost in her stepmother’s arms that bridged, in one brief instant, the gap of those bitter years. The tears streamed down Iris’s face. She held out her hand to Steve Donaldson.
“My God,” said Angie Nash, “the little armadillo’s cast her shell!”
“You shut up!” Lowell said.
“You see? And I’m going to China with that!”
Lowell raised her head and wiped her nose. “It doesn’t count till we get on the boat, does it, Iris?”
They laughed at each other. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my eyes, for some reason, and Colonel Primrose was smiling that quiet placid smile of his, and Sergeant Buck was beaming like the great stone face with the morning sun on it.
25
It was after lunch a couple of days later that Colonel Primrose and I were having coffee in my living room overlooking the garden. He was tying up a few loose ends for me—such as Mac’s having Lowell’s keys, and how easy it was for him to slip away unnoticed from the Assembly, before he and Lowell went back to the Beall Street house together. I remembered our discussion in the little gallery of Linthicum Hall, when Lowell was sitting under Mr. Linthicum’s portrait, surrounded by young men, with Mac completely crowded out. And I told Colonel Primrose about Mac’s obviously not distinguishing the blue Christmas ornaments from the yellow when they were doing the tree there Christmas Eve—obviously, that is, when you got to thinking about it—and showing up at Marie Nash’s home on Massachusetts Avenue the morning I went there to see Angus and Lowell in a dark blue suit and yellow tie.
“I put it down to his being distraught and upset over what poor Lowell was going through.”
“You know,” he said, “it was you who put me on to that, originally.”
“I did?” It was a mystery to me.