by Zenith Brown
“We can hardly call it this column’s scoop, because it’s what everybody’s been saying since they caught their breath again. But unless our crystal ball is cloudy with the heat, we see a low pressure area reaching as far west as Reno. Some people say he forgot to tell her he was coming back last night, but he looked cheerful enough when we saw him being met by one of the Capital’s coolest looking lovelies . . . who may, of course, just have happened along. You know how airports are, these days. You’re apt to run into most anybody.”
I turned the page and took up my orange juice, half listening to the commercial reporter announcing that the Snow White Laundry was discontinuing pickup and delivery and would take no more new customers, and Fur Storage Inc. had no room for more furs or woolens. You know how it is . . . the radio goes on, and your inner ears are partly closed. Then mine were abruptly open.
“. . . corner of 26th and Beall Streets in Georgetown this morning,” the voice was saying.
I put my glass down and sat up, trying to grope back into the lost ether for what had gone before.
“—The police were called by a paper carrier who noticed the front door standing open and looked inside. The body was taken to the Gallinger Hospital, where the cause of death will be determined. Officers of the Homicide Squad said there was no evidence of violence, but the circumstances surrounding the case were such that an investigation will be made. If you are unable to find your usual supply of Mullher’s Five-X Beer at your dealer’s . . .”
I switched off the dial and sat there, staring blankly in front of me. I couldn’t bring back the words I’d missed . . . but I could hear Randy Fleming as plain as if he were in the room speaking to me. And I could hear the tone of his voice. “Yeah . . . In fact, I’ve seen him . . .”
“—Mis’ Grace?”
I looked around with a start. Lilac was in the doorway.
“Mis’ Grace—Colonel Primrose, he downstairs. He says, don’ you hurry yourself none, but he want to see you if it ain’ inconvenient.”
5
There have been times when I’ve been glad to see Colonel Primrose, and no doubt there will be again . . . but this was not one of them.
Normally, I have no reluctance about murder, but the more the details of the night before reconstructed themselves in my mind the less I found myself wanting to be in anyway involved with anything that might have happened on 26th and Beall Streets. As I came into the sitting room and looked out into the garden, however, and saw his solid, slightly rotund figure in white linen, he looked so much more like the county agent inspecting the tomato vines than a sub rosa policeman that it occurred to me suddenly that might not be why he was here at all.
He came to the back hall door and inside, smiling as if the idea of murder had never been remotely in his mind.
“What kind of a spray are you using, if any, Mrs. Latham?” he asked amiably.
“Nicotine, I think, was the last one,” I said.
I looked at the perforated leaf he had in his hand. The tip was curled down with some kind of blight, and the whole thing looked pretty discouraging, frankly. I changed the subject.
“Anyway, I thought you were out of town,” I said. Then I said, “But look at you! What have you been doing . . . haunting a house?”
The shoulder of his white linen suit had a great black cobweb streaked over it, and there was another down the side of his trousers leg, which also had a jagged tear in it.
He cocked his head down and around—he can’t turn it normally because of a bullet he stopped in the last war—and looked at himself.
“I’ve just been in one,” he said. “If it wasn’t haunted before, it ought to be now. You know that empty hovel on the corner next to the Cass Cranes’?”
I stood looking at him blankly. “. . . the corner of 26th and Beall Streets,” the radio reporter had said. But that wasn’t the Cranes’ house at all. It was the empty tumble-down shack next door to them. And if it wasn’t the Cranes’ house, it obviously wasn’t Cass they’d found in it. I walked to a chair and sat down abruptly, so relieved that I don’t think my knees would have continued to support me!
He was looking at me with a quizzical but rather perturbed interest. “—Do you know something about this business, Mrs. Latham?”
“I don’t even know what business you’re talking about,” I said. “I just heard the end of a broadcast this morning, and I thought something unpleasant had happened at the Cranes’, is all.”
“Why did you think that?”
“No reason—except the location.”
“Then you don’t know whose body was found there?”
He was looking at me with odd intentness.
I shook my head.
“Do you know who this is?”
He reached in his inside coat pocket, took out a small oblong leather folder and handed it to me. It was a public vehicle driver’s identification, issued in New York City . . . the kind you see in taxicabs, with a usually unrecognizable picture on it of the man sitting in the front. I looked at it, and at Colonel Primrose.
“—This is that queer little creature who drives for Mr. Durbin, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“It was his body found in the house next to the Cranes’.”
It may have been wrong of me, but it seemed a little strange, somehow, that Colonel Primrose should have been so disturbed, as he patently was, about such an odd little creature. After all, when the papers say we’ve lost two Flying Fortresses it can hardly mean anything except that twenty of our best have probably gone. We seem to think so little in terms of individual lives any more, and Colonel Primrose had been where better men than this died by the thousands, in the last war.
I handed it back to him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened, do you know?”
He hesitated for just an instant.
“The body was carried in there. He died somewhere else.”
“How do you know——”
He smiled patiently.
“The dust on those floors is a quarter of an inch thick, Mrs. Latham. The body didn’t move after it was put down. The footprints from the front door were made by a man with feet twice the size of his. And in stocking feet. He caught his foot on a nail on the floor and left a thread of his sock. The police have it. Furthermore, the little man had been drinking whisky . . . with a strong base of nicotine. Enough to kill him about fifty times.”
He raised the leaf from my tomato plant to his nose and sniffed at it. I stared at him with my mouth open, and I mean it literally.
“Why, Colonel Primrose!” I gasped. “You don’t mean you think——”
He smiled a little wryly.
“Think you poisoned him? No, my dear. I don’t think you did. But I think somebody with a Victory garden in the back yard could have . . . and there’s quite a nice one at the Cranes’, next door. I saw it over the fence.”
I sat there pretty stunned for a moment or two. But it seemed so preposterous.
“Why in heaven’s name would any of them want to kill that little man?” I demanded. “It’s . . . it’s absurd!”
“I’m wondering if it is,” he said calmly. He got up and went over to the fireplace where I keep the big parlor matches, and was lighting a cigar. It seemed to take a very long time. When he turned around his face was soberer than I’d ever seen it.
“I want you to do something for me, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly. “I want you to go upstairs and pack your bag, and leave Washington . . . without telling anybody but me where you’re going. I’ll have Buck drive you to Baltimore to take a train.”
It must have been-one of my blanker mornings, because it seemed to me all I’d done since I woke up was stare at somebody like an idiot child.
“Why on earth . . . ?” I demanded.
“Because I don’t want you hurt,” he said.
He hesitated a moment.
“I don’t know as much about this as I’d like to, my dear . . . but it look
s serious. And it looks as if you’ve stepped right into it. I’m afraid you probably don’t know anything about it on the one hand, and may know altogether too much on the other. Won’t you, just for once, believe what I’m telling you, and believe that if you didn’t mean as much to me as——”
“Is this what brought you over here this morning, Colonel?” I asked. It seemed a little early in the morning for all this, and I do have my duty toward Sergeant Buck. “—Or why did you come?”
He drew a deep breath.
“I had some idea, Mrs. Latham, of finding out what a man whose body was dumped in a hovel in Beall Street was doing on your doorstep at twenty minutes to twelve last night.”
“My doorstep?”
He nodded.
“A police patrol car keeping an eye on my house saw him. He ran when you turned on the light. His car was just down the street, and he got in and drove away. You came out on the porch a minute later.”
He smiled rather grimly.
“You probably know that. They got his number, and stood by here in case he came back. Then they picked up the car, parked on O Street near 26th, at four-fifteen this morning. He was dead—as far as they can figure in this weather—between two and three. Not later, anyway.”
He stopped and looked at me intently. “I’d like to know why he was here.”
“I wish I could tell you,” I said, truthfully. “But I haven’t the foggiest idea in the world. Unless—you’ll find this out if you don’t already know, so I may as well tell you—it was because Molly Crane spent the night here. And I don’t——”
“Is that Cass Crane’s wife?”
I nodded.
His black parrot’s eyes sparkled. “Why was she staying here?”
He asked it so curtly that I wondered if he’d got himself mixed up with Sergeant Buck. Buck is the really military member of the family.
“Something happened,” I said. “Cass didn’t let her know he was coming home, or something. She was hurt, and mad, so she . . .”
I broke off abruptly. “And now you’ll decide Molly was trying to poison Cass. Do you know, Colonel Primrose, that much as I enjoy knowing you, sometimes I wish I didn’t?”
Whatever he would have said to that was stopped by Lilac’s appearance.
“—Mr. Gofiel says he got some meat in, but he won’ have none long if you ’spect to get any. Here’s your book.”
“All right,” I said. I took the ration book.
“And don’ you stop and talk all day and get there late. He ain’ goin’ to save nothin’ past ten o’clock.”
She gave Colonel Primrose an unfriendly glance and waddled back down to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” I said. “Murder’s one thing, but lamb chops are another. So if you don’t mind . . .”
I picked up my hat and bag.
“There’s one thing, however. I don’t know what you’re talking about, about my having got into something . . . but I’m not going away. If my child should get leave before he goes across somewhere, he’ll want to come home and I want to be here.”
I looked at my dog-eared ration book. “And I’ve got to go.”
I left him standing in front of the house, still smoking his cigar, annoyed and more worried about the death of Mr. Durbin’s troglodyte handy man than seemed to me to make much sense. If he had, as I did, to feed two people on one ration book, he’d have something to be concerned about, I thought as I headed for the market on Wisconsin Avenue. Lilac’s books, as pristine and untouched as the unclipped coupons in millionaires’ safety deposit vaults, lie in a box on the bureau, with her insurance policies, her marriage license, and the deed to the cemetery plot. No efforts of mine to explain that the $10,000 fine mentioned on the back of them is not for their use but their misuse have had the slightest effect. She’s only threatened to leave me twice. The first time was when I tried to insist she use her coupons, the second was when I tried to get her to take mine to the store. And since I’d rather eat chicken till I fly and fish till I swim, and go after both, there was no real problem involved.
As I turned the corner toward Mr. Scofield’s, I saw it was not to be without its compensations. When, otherwise, would I ever have seen Corinne Blodgett’s ample white derriere backing down the steps of a street car as if they were a fireman’s ladder, dropping her string shopping bag and holding up what little traffic there was while she rescued a one-point red coupon that had fluttered out of the sheaf of ration books she was holding tightly between her teeth? The marines landing on New Georgia never had the beaming consciousness of triumph that Corinne had, finally making the curb in front of Mr. Scofield’s dingy-looking market. But most of the marines, probably, hadn’t spent their lives in broadcloth-upholstered limousines.
“My dear, I’m enchanted!” Corinne cried. She got her various appendages together, straightened her big white straw hat and mopped her streaming face. “The man couldn’t have been nicer. He gave me a pass for a dollar and a quarter and told me I could ride free, on any bus or street car I wanted to, for a week! Now my dear, you know that’s a lot cheaper than keeping a car and paying that awful man I had a hundred dollars a month just to drive around and open doors. You know it is, Grace, and feeding him too. My dear, I tell you I think we’re all going to learn of lots of things. And my dear, I sat next to the loveliest little woman! She says if you buy a piece of beef and cook it with okra and tomatoes, and things, and put it in jars, you have vegetable soup all winter. And my dear——”
She stopped abruptly half inside the door. It was not unlike the Queen Mary deciding to reverse engines in the middle of the Potomac Basin.
“—Have you heard about that poor little creature that drives for Mr. Durbin? My dear, he’s dead! It’s the most extraordinary thing. Why, do you know——”
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
A delivery boy with a box of groceries on his shoulder was waiting patiently to get out.
“Oh, I’m being a bottle-neck!” Corinne laughed. She went on full sail into the store. “I was saying, my dear, literally nobody can understand it. Mr. Durbin was so dependent on him, and everybody thought he was really devoted to him, in his way. And I must remember to tell him about the streetcars. But, my dear, there it is. Nobody can imagine why he ever did it. Do you suppose this is any good?”
I stared at her past the head of lettuce she was holding up.
“—Did what, Corinne?” I demanded.
“Oh, my dear, don’t you know? He killed himself. Courtney says poor Mr. Durbin was so cut up about it. She thinks it was because he’d been drinking quite a lot. Mr. Durbin had said he was going to have him deported, or something, but it was just to make him pull himself together.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You didn’t think I meant Mr. Durbin had done it? But that’s just silly, dear, because a good driver is practically impossible to replace, these days.—Of course, it didn’t surprise me, Grace, because the Swami said there was blood on the moon, and he looked straight at Courtney . . .”
“Swami?” I protested feebly. If there’s anybody who doesn’t look like my idea of a swami—gleaned, I admit, from hawk-nosed people with turbans and crystal balls in tea rooms—it’s Duleep Singh. And I hadn’t noticed he was looking at Courtney, though he had been at Molly Crane.
“Well, I don’t know whether he’s a swami or not,” Corinne said. “But you can’t call him ‘Mahatma’ because he wears clothes. I think ‘Mr. Singh’ sounds absurd, and he certainly knows things ordinary people don’t know. Just take last night. He knew something was going to happen and it did. The first time he came to our house I’d been telling Horace about him, and you know how Horace is. Dry as dust, and so literal you can’t even say it looks like rain.”
She gathered up a half dozen yellow squash and put them in her basket.
“Horace hates squash,” she remarked. “But he needs yellow food. Anyway, that night, my dear, he said to Duleep Singh, ‘My wife says you can read th
e future.’ My dear, I could have killed him. But Duleep Singh just said, ‘May I suggest you look carefully before you go into the venture you were considering as I came into the room.’ ”
Corinne was carefully picking out a couple of yellow cucumbers from under the pile of fresh green ones. She turned back to me.
“My dear, I can’t tell you. Horace was undone. He literally was. If the Chief Justice had turned a handspring Horace couldn’t have been more reduced. There have been times when I’ve thought Horace was the reincarnation of something fed on papyrus, but really . . .”
She wiped a tear of laughter out of one eye.
“That was less than two months ago, and Horace still isn’t the same. Of course, he never tells me anything about his business, so I don’t know what it was, but, my dear . . .”
Most people lower their voices when they are about to impart the climax of a story in the grocery store, but not Corinne.
“—Yesterday, he had a séance with the Swami. Horace Blodgett! Would you ever have believed it?”
She stopped and waited, not without drama.
“No, I really wouldn’t,” I said.
“Nor would I,” she said firmly. “But he did, and he’d die if he knew I knew it. He told me he was bringing his sister to tea, because he knows that’s the one way to get me out of the house. But he didn’t know she’d gone to Middleburg and didn’t tell him because he doesn’t approve of anyone using gas for pleasure-driving. But her cook told mine. And then, my dear, he sneaked in the back way, and let the Swami in himself. Then, afterwards, he sneaked out again and came in the front door, pretending he’d just got home and his sister couldn’t come. So I pretended I’d just come in too.”
She straightened her hat that had got knocked awry as she fished around under some sacks hunting for potatoes.
“And of course, Grace, I don’t mind. I’ve so often thought Horace’s soul was like a newt’s, a nice newt’s, not really developed yet, and if he feels finally that he needs help he can make the house a rat race if he likes. I’m just too glad to think he’s at last embracing the fuller life.”