The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  It was just as I turned and looked for her there in the window that it happened. It was as sudden and as positive an awareness of truth as if she actually was there and was actually on her Bible oath telling it to me. I knew George Gannon was lying. The girl from Seattle had never been on his patio. She came from Mrs. Ansell’s to mine, stayed there asleep on the chaise longue until Sheep left and I opened the window. George Gannon was not telling the truth. He was making up a story because Viola Kersey knew there was a woman in his room and he didn’t want the population from Maine to Florida to know about it.

  And I suppose I should go on and say that as that truth was communicated to me I heard the sweetly far-off crash of fairy cymbals and sudden laughter coming from the wings. But that would be false. All I heard was the ringing of the telephone, and I picked it up to take my Washington call.

  “Hello,” I said, and yanked the receiver from my ear. The far-off crash of fairy cymbals indeed—it was the ear-splitting crash of those iron-bound lungs on P Street in Georgetown. It was the first time I’d ever talked to Sergeant Phineas T. Buck long distance, and apparently he hadn’t yet heard of the invention of sound conduction via rubber-insulated copper wire. I could have heard him without it.

  “This is Grace Latham, Sergeant Buck,” I said quietly. “May I speak to Colonel Primrose?”

  “The Colonel ain’t in, ma’am.”

  I could see the lantern jaw, and the words coming out of one side of that fissure in the granite fastness.

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “Where is he? I need him.”

  It was a humiliating admission to have to make to Sergeant Buck. I could also practically see him turn from the phone and spit over his shoulder, or figuratively, anyway, because I believe he is adequately house-broken and wouldn’t think of defiling the Colonel’s premises no matter what the provocation. He’d wait, no doubt, till he’d hung up the phone and gone out to the back yard.

  “I’ll tell the Colonel, ma’am.”

  It had an effect as depressing as one of Sergeant Buck’s own pall-buriers—to use an expression of his—and as I hung up I had no slightest conviction he’d even so much as mention it to the Colonel. And even if by any remote chance he’d let Colonel Primrose come to me, he’d probably rather see him dead than on the loose in Hollywood. I’ve often felt that not even Sergeant Buck could have developed such an ingrained habit of protection without a lot of background of experience. I’m afraid Colonel Primrose must once have been a rake of the first water. Nevertheless, I’d have liked to talk to him. It’s one of the encouraging things about rakes. After they’ve sowed and garnered their last crop of wild oats they have a storehouse full of experience—in some cases—that’s denied to the more circumspect of mortals, and the wisdom that comes from it. I could have used some of Colonel Primrose’s, just then.

  I turned away from the phone, pretty low in my mind. The sound of buoyant footsteps and the tinkling of ice and silver outside that announced the arrival of the waiter, my son, did little to raise it.

  He wasn’t alone. Sheep Clarke was with him. I could hear Sheep’s voice as they stopped outside the door, talking in low excited tones.

  I thought, They’ve got the news. Sheep wouldn’t have cut his lab and come from Pasadena as early as this for a conference with Bill unless something important had happened. And I was right about that—right, and also very wrong. It was evident the minute they appeared inside the door. The world was theirs and they were on the tipmost top of it. They were beaming, Sheep’s freckled face creased in a veritable cobweb of delight, Bill’s stretched in a grin that reached from one Happy ear to the other.

  “Oh, boy! Oh, baby! Oh, Ma!” He put his tray down and whirled me around. “Oh, boy! We’ve hit it! We’ve hit the jackpot, Ma!”

  Then he and Sheep began to pummel one another and spar, in the inexplicable fashion of the young extrovert male, and bear cubs, and half-brown dogs, going through the motions of combat to show how pleased they are with themselves and each other.

  “We’ve got good news, Mrs. Latham,” Sheep said, subsiding first. “Our agent’s come through. The dream-boat’s on her way. He’s pulled off a deal.”

  “You—don’t mean Eustace Sype, do you?” I asked. “Right. He called me up. He’s as excited as we are. He’s—”

  “What’s the deal he’s pulled off, Sheep?”

  I must have sounded like the skeleton in armor, or at the least a bucket of ice water, but they were too elated to pay any attention to their elders and betters.

  “He didn’t go into it—he didn’t have time. But he says it’s a honey, just what we’ve been waiting for. He’s going to tell us tonight. He says it’s the works. And he’s our boy. He’s all hopped up about it, so, baby, it must be good. Come on, Bill—let’s go find Moll.”

  Their exuberance was such that nothing I could have said to dampen it would have had much effect. They wouldn’t have listened, or have believed if they had listened. They didn’t stop long enough to listen anyway; they were off and away. The young are blind, Mrs. Kersey had said. These were deaf as well as blind. And pretty dumb, I thought. But it was their problem, not mine. I told myself that, aware that I was merely condoning my own cowardice. I could have made them listen if I’d wanted to. It was cowardice, not wanting to see them when they got their jolt, not wanting to be the one that gave it to them—or even not wanting to sow any seeds that Eustace Sype could take and feed and water into a flourishing garden of resentment against maternal interference in their lives and plans.

  Let Molly tell them, I thought. They’d believe her. If they ever decide to combine Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and make it Parents’ Day, Cassandra is made to order for the patron saint. Whoever wrote first about her, no doubt got the idea for her at his mother’s knee.

  Chapter Fifteen: frantic wife

  THE ROOM SEEMED SUDDENLY OPPRESSIVE, and I unlatched the screen and stepped out onto the patio. It was cool and quiet and pleasant there, with the last shafts of sunlight shooting luminous, filmy planes across the rim of the Canyon above me. I stood looking up at the rugged wall that formed a shadowy, friendly fortress around us.

  A clicking sound like the one a hedge clipper makes came from the terrace below me, and I moved over to the rail to look down. Along the path that made the back entrance to my patio, Mrs. Ansell’s, and George Gannon’s, was a brilliant border of yellow and bronze chrysanthemums against a mass of some heavy-leafed vine that covered the low retaining wall down to the next level. A woman with a basket was cutting flowers. It was the sound of her shears that I’d heard. She was bending over, absorbed in her task. It was the way she turned her head that caught my attention just as I started to go back inside. I didn’t go. I stayed and watched her.

  The woman was Rose Shavin, the night maid of the Casa del Rosal, Molly McShane’s mother, and her gaunt figure bending over, cutting the yellow and bronze sprays, was engaged in a deceptively simple way. She was cutting flowers, but she was cutting something else. It was the stout hemp string staked in front of the chrysanthemums to hold them up. She snipped it off, let it lie on the ground until she reached the next stake, snipped again, drew the slack quickly into a ball and dropped it into her basket. She worked quietly and fast. When she reached the end of the border it was not apparent that anything in particular had happened. The plants still stood fairly erect.

  There was only one section where they had dropped and were falling over under the weight of the golden heads that nobody had cut before their supporting cord had been removed. That was a section at the foot of George Gannon’s staircase. It was just about long enough to reach across another stone staircase, with plenty of loop around two iron rails, tied tightly for someone who had to go down that way returning to 31-B.

  I watched Rose disappear at the end of the border. I thought she’d gone, but she came back. She had a ball of used dirty white cord in her hand, and she was looping it from stake to stake, quickly and skillfully and with no pretense of doi
ng anything else. She got to the end by George Gannon’s steps where the top-heavy plants had fallen forward. She bound them up, looped the string back and tied it. Then she straightened up and stood looking back at the job she’d done. She wasn’t more than ten feet down, and maybe as much farther toward George Gannon’s steps, and I could hear her breathe. It was slow, long-drawn, asthmatic, drawn and released and drawn again—the breathing of a woman laboring under tense nervous strain as well as physical exertion. It was a breath I’d heard before, at the end of an otherwise silent telephone wire—when Rose Shavin and Molly McShane thought I was Mrs. Viola Van Zant Kersey.

  It had seemed a sinister sound to me then. Now? I didn’t know. It was hard to say, because I could also see her gaunt, forceful body and rigid, determined shoulders that had borne their heavy burdens. They were moving now, up and down as she drew her breath and exhaled it again. Then she shifted her basket of flowers to her right arm and plodded patiently and without haste back the way she had come. She was a gaunt, dour woman. She was patient and plodding. Somehow I didn’t think Rose Shavin was through with Viola Kersey yet.

  I heard a car at the end gate. The engine started up, coughed and died, and started up again. The car rattled off, its tinny echo lasting several moments. I looked down at the border of the chrysanthemums. The dirty white cord was hidden under the lush foliage and golden blooms. No one could have guessed, looking at them, that they were any different from what they had been.

  I turned and went back into my room. It sounds strange, I suppose, but I was glad I hadn’t got hold of Colonel John Primrose. In fact, I was very glad. Remembering the woman ruthlessly and relentlessly saying to her child, “You must go,” I still remembered her trembling hands, and I was glad, now, that I couldn’t get Colonel Primrose.

  As I crossed the room to see what sort of stuff it was on the tray my waiter-son had left me, the phone rang. I answered it.

  “Hello, Mrs. Latham.”

  My heart skipped a beat—or maybe two. And he was aware of it, across a whole continent. I heard his warm amused laugh.

  “Buck’s a lying scoundrel, of course—but he tells me you’ve finally admitted you need me. I didn’t take much stock in it but I thought I’d better check to make sure.”

  “It—was a moment of weakness, Colonel Primrose,” I said. “I’m all over it now. Everything’s fine. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  I had the impression that he sounded dubious—which he promptly confirmed.

  “I was afraid I did have to worry. In fact, I’m not sure I don’t, Mrs. Latham. So what about having dinner with me tonight?”

  I caught my breath. “Colonel Primrose—your Sergeant didn’t tell you. I’m in Los Angeles, California.”

  “So am I.” Colonel Primrose was amused again. “I knew you’d get into something. So, dinner, in about an hour. It’ll take me that long to get out from the Sheriff’s office. I’ve just been discussing you with Captain Crawford. Will an hour do?”

  There was silence from Mrs. Latham. Complete silence.

  “One of the pleasant things about you,” he went on, patiently and with a kind of devastating evenness, “is that you’re entirely predictable simply because you never learn. I’ve told you before, and I’m telling you again, that people who murder other people are dangerous to be around. You’re a charming woman, my dear, and sometimes you act like an awful fool. Someday it’ll be you that doesn’t wake up at the foot of some stone steps. Those are terms a first-grader ought to be able to understand—won’t you try to see what you can make of them? I’ll be out in about an hour. Please don’t do anything stupid till I get there. Is that quite clear?”

  It was clear, and I told him so. I suppose if I’d had any proper pride I’d have told him a great deal more. As he merely shared what seems to be a fairly universal opinion among my friends and well-wishers, there wasn’t much point in arguing it, with Captain Crawford undoubtedly sitting a couple of feet from him in his office in the Hall of Justice. I couldn’t see that I’d been particularly or unusually stupid, but of course he hadn’t accused me of that. I was just running true to predictable form. And I had no idea what he thought there was stupid for me to do. Anyway, I didn’t have the chance to find out. There was a tap on the door, and Lucille Gannon came in.

  “I’m going out of my mind, Grace. I want to see him and he won’t see me. I don’t see why he won’t see me. He says he’s got too much on his mind.”

  She was a woman who was distraught and hag-ridden and trying desperately to conceal it. And it was so obvious what she was thinking.

  “I tell you, Grace, he’s always been devoted to her. But even if he hated her—the idea of somebody—of somebody—you know. I mean, it’s all so incredible. It’s so awful— doing it that way. I mean—”

  “Oh, stop it, Lucille,” I said. “Stop it. It’s no good. You’re just working yourself into something horrible. He couldn’t have done it, sweetie. He couldn’t possibly. Quit worrying.”

  I wondered if I was being stupid, saying that. It did relieve her, a little. She sat down, leaned her head on her hand, and closed her eyes.

  “I wish I’d stayed in Palm Springs. I know he’s worried about this deal she’s discussing with him. But he’s discussed deals before. That can’t be the reason he’s so disturbed.”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Not if he can eat stuffed squab and crepes suzette.”

  She raised her head and looked at me for an instant. Then she broke into the only genuine laughter I’d heard from her that day.

  “That I don’t believe, Grace. If he ate squab and crepes suzette I know he tried to murder her. Or if he didn’t he’s going to. You don’t know my Gee Gee. The stuff he eats would make a rabbit feel like a carnivore.”

  The merriment faded out of her eyes and voice as suddenly as it had come in.

  “But I do wish he’d see me. Grace. There’s something on his mind.” She got up abruptly. “They’d have to prove it, wouldn’t they? It wouldn’t be enough if just somebody like—well, say like Eustace for instance— If Eustace said he saw him, that—that wouldn’t be enough, would it?… Oh, don’t, Grace! Don’t look like that! What on earth’s the matter?”

  I suppose I did look as horrified as I truly felt.

  “Don’t you see, Lucille? Don’t you see what you’re saying? You’re practically accusing—”

  “Oh, not me, Grace—it’s Eustace that might. That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve been trying to get hold of him all afternoon. I’m frantic about it. I’ve phoned the house a hundred times and nobody answers. What’s he doing! Is he with the police, or—”

  She broke off with a little gesture of despair. I didn’t feel it was my job to tell her that Eustace couldn’t answer the phone because he was out somewhere with Molly—and still less that one of his servants couldn’t answer it because she was at the Casa del Rosal clipping the string off the chrysanthemums that bordered the path to George Gannon’s secluded patio.

  “It’s all so dreadful. If Eustace—”

  “Lucille,” I said. “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “But just to you, Grace. You’re the only friend I’ve got that I can talk to. You wouldn’t repeat anything.”

  “Not on purpose, of course,” I said. “But Colonel Primrose is coming—”

  “Colonel Primrose? Oh, good. That’s fine. I know him. I’ve known him all my life. He’d never let me down.”

  Which proved—and I could have told her that—how little she knew Colonel Primrose.

  “You just leave him to me.”

  She turned quickly to the door. There was someone outside, in the hall. Her hand Hew to her throat as she caught her breath and held it for a moment.

  “My God!” she whispered. “You don’t—you don’t think anybody heard—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “These walls are awfully thin. Maybe we’d better see.”

  I went over t
o the door and opened it. There was no one there. The hall between my room and George Gannon’s was empty. It may have been only a trick of the fading light, or of my own disordered imagination, that made me think I saw the last silent movement of George Gannon’s door closing. I turned back to Lucille. She was gray as putty, her hand still clutching at her throat.

  Chapter Sixteen: Sold out

  “IF HE HEARD ME, GRACE!”

  George Gannon couldn’t have heard that, anyway, because I could scarcely hear it myself. She reached forward and steadied herself against the back of a chair.

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “I don’t think the average man would like it very much, whether it was true or false. And if Mrs. Ansell’s at home and her closet door is open, she’s heard it all too. Doesn’t one of the local papers pay one hundred dollars for a hot news tip?”

  “Oh, please don’t— I can’t stand it!”

  It wasn’t either Mrs. Ansell or the paper getting a hot tip that made her so desperate. She didn’t even turn to look at Mrs. Ansell’s door when I pointed to it. She was focused entirely across the hall.

  “I’m frightened, Grace. That house—it’s so big, the grounds are so big—the servants are out over the garage. If he heard me—”

  I could see what she meant again. And I didn’t blame her. If she truly thought her husband had tried to murder Viola Kersey and whether he had or not, she could very reasonably feel alarmed at being alone in a big house that he had equal access to. Guilty or not guilty, I don’t know which would be the worse state from which to hear your wife telling a friend she thought you were. I could imagine the impulse to strangle her being strong in either case. Indeed, if George Gannon was guilty, which I found it difficult to believe, it would seem to me Lucille might easily have signed her own death warrant—and Eustace Sype’s.