by Zenith Brown
LESLIE FORD
ALL FOR THE
LOVE OF A LADY
All for the Love of a Lady
Copyright © 1943, 1944, renewed 1972
by Zenith Brown. All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
1
If you’ve ever lived in Washington in the summer, you know what a jar of Victory garden tomatoes feels like in a pressure cooker. The pressure would be bad enough at any time, of course, but it’s easier to take when there’s snow on Capitol Hill, and when stewing in one’s own juice is a figurative expression, applied to public heads about to roll back to private life.
The fact that it was July and not January may have had no effect on the end of the Crane-Durbin business, but it had plenty on the beginning. If Molly Crane had been busy thawing out the drain-pipes of their small house in Georgetown, and Courtney Durbin had spent her time at the telephone, as she swore she did, trying to get an extra teacupful of oil from the ration board to heat their large house on Massachusetts Avenue, neither of them would have been at the Abbotts’ pool on that Wednesday night. Of course, better men than I—especially since I’m Grace Latham and a woman . . . widow, actually, on what a kind friend once said was the glamorous side of forty—better men than I have said that “if” is the most bootless word in any language. It’s only a point on the circumference of a vicious circle, or at best the starting place of an endless chain stretching nowhere. If Courtney Durbin had married Cass Crane, as everybody expected her to for years, she wouldn’t have married that singular but very rich newcomer to Washington with the war, Mr. D. J. Durbin. If she’d married Cass, Cass wouldn’t have married Molly. And Molly might have married Randy Fleming, who’d always adored her. And it would have saved a lot of trouble.
Whether Colonel Primrose and his indomitable Sergeant Buck, those partners in experting crime who prowl about the ambiguous periphery where the Intelligence agencies in Washington tend to coordinate, would have been drawn, or wouldn’t have been drawn, into a murder hunt by eight o’clock the next morning, is hard to say. When one part of a pattern is gone, who can tell that any other part of it would ever have existed? Or perhaps the incident at the Abbotts’ pool was itself only part of a pattern already formed, or a chain of circumstances already grimly in motion.
So if nobody at all had been at the Abbotts’ that night it might not have saved any blood . . . though that’s figurative too, for through the whole affair no bright red drop was ever visible, unless on the moon that night. But it would have saved something else.
Furthermore, if enough people know you’d like to commit murder, it might get pretty hard to convince all of them you didn’t. You could never again be sure, meeting a quietly scrutinizing eye before it was turned away, across a table or a room, that that wasn’t the thought behind it. The people who think Duleep Singh is clairvoyant, and there are a lot of them, said it was behind his when he said, “There is blood on that moon.”
He said it to me, because I was sitting next to him on the rim of the Abbotts’ pink marble fountain basin, but it was in one of those moments when everybody suddenly and inexplicably stops talking, and it reached everywhere, against a background of softly, eerily dripping water. Charlie, the Abbotts’ loathsome pet bullfrog, croaked hoarsely from under a lily pad, and when Corinne Blodgett said, “Duleep Singh says there’s blood on the moon,” her voice was more like Charlie’s than Singh’s.
“Whose blood, I wonder?”
Courtney Durbin’s voice was cool and soft like the dripping water.
“—Can you tell us, Mr. Singh?”
“You should know, Mrs. Durbin.”
Corinne Blodgett said he emphasized the “you” ever so slightly, but I didn’t hear it that way.
“—Aren’t men killing each other all over the world, tonight?”
Corinne said he just added that, with a perceptible pause in between, and also that his dark eyes were fixed significantly on Courtney. But Corinne lived a year on dates, nuts and goat’s milk and cheese, and wore sandals only when the chauffeur refused to take her driving with nothing on but a coarse linen robe. Corinne’s an awful fool, in some ways, but a really sweet one, and probably makes more sense in the long run than most women do.
Molly Crane was sitting in one of those elaborate terrace chaise longues with the rubber-tired wheels at the back. Or she had been up to that moment, with Randy Fleming perched on the end of the chaise, his new wings on his shirt, one hand playing with the gay red butterfly bow on her slipper beside him. Just then she wasn’t sitting. At the sound of Courtney Durbin’s voice her body went taut as a bowstring, and her hand holding a long glass of iced lemonade moved slowly out to put it down on the low table at her elbow. Her face in the dusk was a pointed white blur turned toward Courtney, with two spots of liquid flame where her eyes were. The blur was a charged magnetic fluid, and even Duleep Singh’s voice, suavely Oriental in spite of its Oxford accent, seemed to crackle a little as it crossed it. One foot moved from the other. She was like a cat getting ready to spring, and Courtney Durbin knew it, as did everyone else sitting there. There wasn’t only blood on the moon just then. It was in Molly’s eyes, and in Courtney’s, and in Randy Fleming’s, I think. His hand clamped down on Molly’s ankle, pinning it to the yellow leather cushion so sharply that her body quivered for an instant.
She relaxed slowly and raised her glass to her lips again. We all relaxed, politely and unobtrusively, trying not to seem to do so, and Randy took his hand off her ankle. Courtney Durbin dropped her cigarette on the terrace and rubbed it dead with the toe of her shoe. She reached over to the ivory box on the table for another.
“You must be frightfully excited about Cass coming home, Molly,” she said deliberately, glancing at Randy Fleming across the spurt of flame Duleep Singh held to the tip of her cigarette.
Molly sat up abruptly, not like a cat now but like a flash of lightning.
“Cass—coming . . . ?”
Then she gasped. It was a tiny, barely audible sound as she realized, I suppose, that she’d stepped like a day-old lamb into a trap that was yawning for her. But it was too late.
Courtney Durbin gasped too, but it was very different.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Maybe it’s a military secret . . . but, darling, I thought if he sent me word, he’d certainly . . . Oh, I’m frightfully sorry! But after all, he’s your husband, isn’t he? How should I——”
Randy Fleming’s hand closed over Molly’s ankle again.
“He’s sent you word, all right, if he is coming,” he said, in a kind of determined drawl. “It’s just got tangled up in red tape . . .”
“Oh, of course, darling,” Courtney said. She got up. “I must go. I hate to, it’s such fun here.”
She looked around at Duleep Singh. “—Can I take anybody any place on my way? This is a business trip—I just stopped in on my way to the airport.”
She hesitated an instant. “Cass wanted somebody to meet him. Would you like to come and surprise him, Molly?”
Molly Crane was staring ahead of her, past Randy Fleming, at the big red globe of the rising moon. She started a little and turned her head.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Just tell him to be careful. I painted the bathroom this morning, and it probably isn’t dry yet.”
Randy Fleming got up abruptly.
“Let’s go, Molly. It won’t be a surprise. He’s expecting you all right.”
He held out his hand to hoist her up.
She didn’t move or put out her hand.
“I’m staying here, thanks.”
He stood there helplessly for a mome
nt, and sat down at her feet again. It’s where he’d been—practically, I thought—since they were children, except the day she married Cass Crane, less than five months before. He spent that day at various places, which I’ve been assured is one of the reasons the per capita consumption of hard liquor will be higher in Washington than anywhere else in the country this year.
In the silence that followed Courtney’s departure a woman, obviously from the very deep South, said, “Is there a Mr. Durbin?”
There was another silence at that. Whether it was because she hadn’t asked anyone in particular, or whether she was so evidently an outsider, in not knowing that there was indeed a Mr. Durbin, that the pack closed defensively in, I don’t know. Nobody said anything, and it was just as well, for at that moment the screen door in the middle of the long pillared verandah across the back of the house opened. It was the first time I, for one, had ever seen D. J. Durbin at any private house except Courtney’s before she married him, the first autumn of the War, and his own since.
He stood silhouetted against the lighted porch for an instant, a slight almost grotesque figure, leaning on his stick, one shoulder plainly lower than the other in spite of his built-up shoe. I could see him clearly in the dusk, because he’d been sharply etched on my mind from the first day I met him . . . his twisted foot and hippity-hoppity gait, his saffron-yellow complexion and aquiline nose, and the dark hair frosted with gray. His eyes should be icy-gray too, but they’re fine and dark, and his lips full instead of being thin and like a steel trap. Because of that it’s hard to say what made his face the most ruthless one I’d ever seen, but it was. It doesn’t seem to me we used to have people like him around, before the War brought its cross-section of the strange international world to the sprawling city that used to sleep all summer by the Potomac. Or if they came here, they stayed in smoke-filled hotel rooms, and left as quickly as they could, bored with a provincial and isolated puritanism. They may still be bored, now, but they have to stay here, in the new center of the world.
I glanced at Duleep Singh, wondering if the moon and the sound of playing water made his inner ear listen for silver bells on the feet of dancing girls. Apparently not, I thought. The rose-colored light under the fountain spray threw his dark handsome face into a deeper shadow, but the rising moon-glow touched it as it might a bronze Buddha in a shadowy shrine. His gaze was fixed on Molly Crane. It was sombre and profoundly brooding. The contrast between them was so extraordinary that for a moment it was alarming. There’s an experiment they do in the psychology laboratories in a sound-proof chamber, where the noise of people’s pumping hearts slowly becomes audible, deafening, terrifying. In a way that was what was happening with Molly Crane just then. Without an apparent motion there was such a turmoil of revolt and hurt pride there, anger and unhappiness, that she was like a centrifugal churn. And it was only against Duleep Singh’s field of hypnotic calm that it could have showed. There was something extraordinary about it. Up to then I’d thought the women who said, from the day he arrived in Washington on some kind of mission from New Delhi, “My dear, isn’t he fascinating!” were a little silly. But as the moonlight glistened now on the startling whites of his eyes I found myself moving uneasily, and wanting Randy Fleming, or Cass Crane, or somebody, to take Molly away from there. She was too young and too transparent. It wasn’t fair, because within the limits of her own small orbit she was covering up very well. So well, in fact, that Corinne Blodgett, who thinks herself psychic, said later, “If Molly had really cared, my dear, she wouldn’t have just sat there.”
Then the spell broke. Duleep Singh turned his head, got up and bowed as Courtney’s husband came around the pink marble fountain basin to where we were sitting. I was sorry the spell had gone . . . I would have liked to see D. J. Durbin as taansparently revealed as Molly Crane had been.
He stopped and spoke abruptly, barely nodding to any of us.
“Has Mrs. Durbin gone?”
“About five minutes ago.”
It was Randy who answered. And it may have been the pack rallying again. Nobody, not even Molly, said where she’d gone, or that she’d gone to meet Cass Crane. And he couldn’t not know about Cass, not possibly. Even if he’d been deaf as a post he must have heard the gasp that went up when Courtney married him and not Cass. And if he hadn’t heard what Courtney said when Cass suddenly and astonishingly married Molly—and what she was still saying—then he was the only person within a hundred miles who hadn’t. Or perhaps, of course, he didn’t care. He simply turned on his heel, now, and went limping back to the house and out of sight, without saying good night or thank you.
I glanced at Molly. She was looking up at the sky, waiting for Cass’s plane to fly across, I suppose, her small face as pale and empty and inscrutable, now, as the moon-washed bowl above her.
The marble basin rim I was sitting on seemed to get hard and uncomfortable. It wasn’t any hotter than it had been all evening, hut the atmosphere had gone stale, like flat lukewarm champagne. It was dull and oppressive, and something it just seemed better to be out of.
“I think I’ll go home,” I said.
Duleep Singh smiled and bowed. “May I——”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m taking the bus, and it stops at my door. Good night.”
I didn’t go across to the other side of the garden to say goodbye to my host, who was talking to Corinne Blodgett’s husband Horace and some other men in a secluded corner. It’s one of the rules of the house that guests go as they please, without making other people feel it must be getting late. As I stopped at the dressing room at the end of the porch to get my umbrella—wishful thinking of the school that doesn’t believe it’s bound to rain if you don’t take it—I heard the Southern lady checking up again.
“Now, who was that, dear?”
“That’s Grace Latham.”
It was Corinne Blodgett answering, and the next question was obvious.
“No, dear, he’s dead. She just lives here because it happens to be her home. She’s one of us odd people who were born here.”
Even if I could have heard the rest of it I wouldn’t have had to bother. It’s like a record that goes on automatically once the needle’s in place.—No, she’s never married again, and nobody knows why. She has two sons, but they’re no excuse because one’s an air cadet and the other’s away at school. She certainly could have, if for no other reason than because she’s got a house in Georgetown. Just a hall bedroom will get a woman a husband in Washington these days. Yes, she does have men around. Especially Colonel Primrose. Some people say he wants to marry her, but either she won’t or he doesn’t or that granite Sergeant he lives with won’t let him. And so on . . .
I feel sorry for Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers U.S.A. (Retired), sometimes. If ever a man is forced to turn over his ration books to prove publicly that his intentions are not dishonorable, or that he is not a worm under the heel of a Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, also 92nd Engineers, U.S.A., also retired, it will be Colonel Primrose. There really ought to be a Fifth Freedom—For Men Only. Though frankly it’s got to the point where I almost wish he really would ask me to marry him, so I could settle it for everybody . . . one way or the other.
2
I went out through the rose-and-white marble-paved hall, bare of rugs for the summer, and down to the street. In ordinary times the narrow road leading out to Connecticut Avenue would have been lined with cars. There were only two there now. One had a diplomatic marker, and the other was a long sleek black job with a tiny troglodyte of a man leaning against the fender, fanning himself with a panama hat. I looked around, because it was like seeing a shadow without its substance. Then I saw the substance. He was standing by the luminous white board with diagonal black stripes that marks the dead end of the road where it falls sharply off down into the Park. He was leaning on his stick, looking up into the sky . . . as intently, it seemed to me, as Molly Crane had done.
As I got almost to the sidewalk, Achille, th
e little dwarf of a chauffeur, opened the door of the big car and turned on the lights. D. J. Durbin still stood there for a moment as though listening, then started toward the car, the dull thub of his rubber-capped stick punctuating the drag of his lame foot and the staccato clack of his good one on the cobblestones. And suddenly the most weird and extraordinary sound came out of the little creature by the car. I drew back as instinctively as if I’d heard a rattlesnake warning me from the grass. But the warning was not for me. Mr. Durbin halted abruptly, fell back a step and flung up his stick, beating the air wildly with it. Achille leaped forward across the walk. A black cat, blinded by the sudden glare of the headlights, was in the act of jumping off the wall to cross the road. Faced with the thrashing stick and the driver’s waving arms, it turned tail and lit back up through the shrubbery the way it had come.
D. J. Durbin leaned heavily on his stick, pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, and I stood gaping at both of them until I caught myself and hurried on up the street. The motor whirred then, and the car shot past me over the hump toward Connecticut Avenue as if the devil were still after it. Then, as it disappeared, in the empty stillness of the street I heard the heavy drone of a plane overhead. It was still high, its red light looking like an outlaw star, disembodied as if the plane itself had dissolved against the luminous backdrop of the vacant sky.
I know spotters who can tell what a plane is by the sound of its motor, or say they can. Perhaps it’s true, because Sheila, my Irish setter, never disturbs herself, lying in the hall half asleep, for any car hut mine pulling up at the curb. Whether D. J. Durbin or Achille knew what plane that was, before the business of the black cat, I don’t know. It may have had nothing to do with their abrupt departure at all. It certainly had something to do with Molly’s.
I heard her heels clicking up the walk behind me and her voice calling my name. She was running up the narrow pavement, turning from silver into gold as she came out of the phosphorescent moonglow into the murky yellow cone under the old street lamp, and to silver again as she came through it. Randy was pounding along behind her. It seemed to me that all I could see for an instant as she stopped was a couple of hot liquid blobs in her face where people normally have eyes. There were tears in them, and she was batting them back, trying not to let us see them. But in that pale light tears glisten, even when a face is indistinct.