by Zenith Brown
“—You’d better begin at the beginning.”
“Right,” Cass said.
He spoke unhesitatingly and looked Colonel Primrose coolly in the eye.
“The last time I phoned from down town the line was busy, so I figured Molly was home. I caught a cab and dashed out. The light in the back room was on, but she didn’t answer the bell. I was worried, because I knew she wouldn’t go away and leave a light on, in case of a blackout. I didn’t want to break in the front, so I climbed over the back fence. The kitchen window was open. I crawled in and came upstairs. The fellow was sprawled out on the floor there, in front of the desk. He’d pulled the telephone off—it was sounding away there by his head.”
Colonel Primrose’s black eyes were fixed on him with concentrated intensity . . . but it seemed to me, in some curious way, that it was Randy Fleming he was really watching. And it was then I first got the impression that in some way I knew nothing of there was a lot more behind all this than I’d realized.
Randy was standing with one elbow on the mantel. His eyes fixed stolidly on the floor and the downward curve of his mouth gave an odd impression of almost acute bitterness.
“I have plenty of reasons for not wanting Durbin’s leg man found dead in my house,” Cass said coolly. “I explained a few of them to Randy, and he gave me a hand. Those reasons happen to be more important, in my opinion, and to more people, than helping the local gendarmes determine the actual physical spot he passed out on.”
Molly Crane moved then. She hadn’t been looking at Cass. Her eyes were fixed on him now, the pulse in her throat throbbing visibly again.
“I wonder if I could be excused, Colonel Primrose?”
She got abruptly to her feet.
“Surely.”
He watched her curiously as she moved across to the door and upstairs, and turned back to Cass. Randy Fleming stood there motionless, absorbed in whatever it was going on inside himself.
“—The autopsy showed a large amount of nicotine,” Colonel Primrose said. “In Scotch whisky. Where did it come from?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Cass said. “It was in the decanter on that wash stand effect. I almost took a shot of it myself. I started to pour a drink while I was waiting for Randy, but I saw the stopper wasn’t in the decanter. You don’t leave good whisky to evaporate. I looked around and found it under the stand. I figured the little man had probably let it roll there. He didn’t seem to be in too good shape, so I didn’t take any. A friend of mine analyzed it for me this morning.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I dumped all but that much down the sink.”
I didn’t have to look at Randy Fleming. What was slowly and belatedly dawning in my consciousness must have been in his from the minute he’d walked into this house the night before and seen Achille sprawled dead in front of the desk. It wasn’t doubt of Molly. Whatever brief doubt of her I’d had in that ghastly moment before she came in from the hospital had vanished, and I was ashamed of its ever having been—even that briefly in my mind. It was fear for her. Just the faintest breath of suspicion getting out. . . . Someone saying, “—Oh yes, you know, she was terribly upset when she left the Abbotts’ . . . and my dear, isn’t it lucky it was Achille and not Cass who drank the poisoned whisky over there . . . just think how it would have looked.” Wildfire would have been tortoise-slow compared with it. No matter what anybody ever said, or who was proved to have done it—if they could prove anything—there’d always be the residue . . . always somebody to say, “Yes, they hanged so-and-so, but it was strange, wasn’t it . . . ?”
Having seen Molly bring up that decanter, and seen her twisted but nevertheless wistful smile as she said something about the prodigal’s homecoming, Randy knew, as I knew, that there was no poison in the whisky then. When he helped Cass move Achille’s body he was trying, nevertheless, to cut the net that was toiling itself around her feet. It wasn’t Cass or Cass’s reasons that made him do it, and that made him lie—however true the actual words were—to a superior officer. His calling up to find out about Molly at ten minutes past three that morning was of the same piece of cloth.
And it was his mounting anxiety for her that could be drawing the net tighter now, if he only knew it. Colonel Primrose has a perfectly uncanny way of sensing things he has no right to know logically . . . and Randy and I together there in her living room had between us, in our hands, the pieces to make a hangman’s noose that it would be hard to save her from. She’d put the whisky in the decanter, going downstairs to do it. She’d told me she was going to be coldblooded, and not only knew what she was going to do but had already done it. She’d gone to bed without undressing, and she’d slipped out of my house some time before three o’clock, taken the key with her, come back, and pretended she hadn’t left. How could she ever prove to anybody who didn’t know her that she hadn’t slipped out and come over to empty out the damning evidence of what had happened, and return with me as witness she’d gone to bed at twenty minutes to twelve and got up at half-past seven the next morning?
I could see it already across the front pages of the newspapers as clearly as if I held them printed in my hand.
“What was Achille doing here, Cass?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, sir.”
Cass added deliberately, “—Or it’s something I can’t discuss at the moment.”
Colonel Primrose looked around. Courtney Durbin was coming through the screen door.
“Then suppose you come and see me at my house,” he said. “I’ll be there at six.”
Courtney came on in.
“That poor woman was really scared,” she said. “She thinks Achille’s ghost is stalking and that’s what’s wrong with the dog. And you know, it’s a funny thing,” she added. “Achille was terrified of dogs. And I’ve never seen one that didn’t know it. They could smell it.”
Nobody said anything. She looked at Colonel Primrose.
“What shall I tell Mr. Durbin? He was really devoted to Achille.”
“I think I’ll see him, as a matter of fact,” Colonel Primrose said. “Are you going home now?”
She nodded, and smiled at Cass.
“Tell Molly thanks, will you? And you’ll bring her to dinner to-morrow night, won’t you?”
She turned to me. “Grace? It’s awfully spur of the moment. Are you free? Look and call me, will you? I’ve got some roast beef, if that’s a lure. Goodbye, dear.”
She came over, leaned down and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Don’t look so unhappy, darling. Goodbye, Randy.”
Colonel Primrose smiled at me from the doorway.
There was a pretty grim silence in the room as Cass followed them out. He came back, stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looked up for an instant, and then went up, taking them two at a time.
“You know, that guy burns me up,” Randy said. He sounded like it. “I can’t figure him out. If he thinks Durbin’s trying to kill him, what does he go on sticking his neck out for?”
“Durbin?” I said.
“Sure. You don’t suppose this was an accident, do you? Or the little guy was bringing a . . . a loving cup? You know damn well there was nothing but plain Scotch in that decanter before he got here. If the poor little devil had known it was loaded he wouldn’t have slung it into himself. That leaves just one guy, as far as I figure.”
“On account of Courtney?” I asked, after a minute.
I was glad I was right about one thing. No suspicion of Molly had ever entered his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “From where I sit it looks like a lot of people are getting themselves all tied up in the old struggle for power idea. Something’s going on. I don’t know whether a guy’s apter to kill somebody on account of his wife or on account of his bank book. But I’m just a country boy. I can’t figure poisoning a guy for any reason except you hate his guts, personally.”
He was staring grimly down at the empty fireplac
e.
“Jeez, I’d like a drink, but Cass says it isn’t safe and maybe he’s got something.”
He stopped abruptly, looking up at the ceiling. Neither of us could help but hear Molly’s voice.
“I’m not staying here, Cass. I’ve told you I’m not.”
And Cass breaking in: “You are staying. I’ve got a job to do——”
“Let’s get out of here,” Randy said.
I’d already got up and Sheila was straining on her leash. We let the screen door slam behind us.
He didn’t say anything till we’d got out the gate.
“I told her she should have married me,” he said then.
“Maybe, if you just stay around, she will,” I remarked.
He shook his head.
“She’s in love with the guy. She never was with me. And he’s okay, as a matter of fact. I felt sorry as hell for him last night. He kept sort of going around, looking at her things. If he lets Courtney bitch this thing up . . .”
At the corner he glanced back. The look on his face was so queer that I said, “What’s the matter, Randy?”
“I . . . guess I’m scared,” he said slowly. “In fact, I know I am. Scared as hell.”
He stopped. “I’m going back, Grace. I don’t know what’s going on, but . . .”
He hesitated a moment.
“Look. Make Molly come over and stay with you. She can’t stay in that house. If somebody’s spraying bug killer around it’s easy as hell to get the wrong bug.”
“I think you’d better let them alone, myself,” I said. “Nothing can happen with the police around, and everybody on the street watching the place for Achille’s ghost to walk.”
He came along, still looking back. “Maybe that’s it now.”
I glanced back myself. As I did a mangy black cat jumped up out of the overgrown grass in the corner yard, and sat on the Cranes’ steps washing its paw.
“—I do not believe in ghosts, or in black cats either,” I said.
We walked along the parkway to P Street for Randy to get a bus. He was still disturbed, and I think if the bus hadn’t come while I was still standing there talking to him he would have gone back. But it did, and he was on it and half-way to the bridge when I remembered suddenly that I hadn’t told him about Julie Ross’s roomers.
9
I’d meant to tell him, of course, that Mr. Louis Skagerlund, né Lons Sondauer, or whatever, was worried about him and had a gun and to look out for him, but it was too late now. As I went on home I wondered more and more . . . particularly whether Cass’s idea of some kind of global strategy in all this—I took it it was his—was as far-fetched as it seemed. People used to say Piccadilly Circus was the hub of the universe, and if you stood on the corner by the Café Royal long enough everybody in the world would pass by. Now that Piccadilly Circus is rimmed with bombed-out, boarded-up windows, Washington has pretty much taken over, and it seems one doesn’t have to wait long to see the world, in the French sense at least, not pass by but come apparently to stay.
Just in the small group of people that seemed in the last twenty-four hours to have become suddenly concerned with Cass and Molly Crane there was a microcosmic cross-section of this new macrocosm. Until Washington came to be the hub of the universe neither D. J. Durbin nor Achille had been there. Nor had Corinne’s economic swami Duleep Singh, nor Julie’s roomers Mr. Sondauer-Skagerlund and the immaculate, slightly desiccated Mr. Austin. With the possible exception of Austin they had all come from great distances, at a time when travel wasn’t a simple matter of going to a ticket agent and saying, “To-morrow’s plane for Washington, U.S.A., please.” And each of them was in a sense a mysterious figure—I don’t mean to the State Department or the F.B.I., but to the people who’d meet them casually.
Even in the old Washington there were undoubtedly people on secret missions, whose private business no one knew, but it wasn’t a commonplace. One never heard, in those dear dead days, of a hostess inviting a society reporter to a party in order to have it not mentioned. You could hunt a long time, now, before you’d find D. J. Durbin’s name in the papers. In fact, I’ve never seen it there, except when he married Courtney. Or Duleep Singh’s, though I’ve met him constantly at dinners and small parties and the Abbotts’ in the three months he’d been here. Actually, I was thinking, I knew almost nothing about either of them, except, as Randy had said of Sondauer-Skagerlund, that both were as rich as skunks.
Still, it wasn’t inconceivable that however legitimate their present purpose here was they mightn’t have an eye out for what Randy had called the struggle for power. After all, it’s going on, and one doesn’t have to think very far ahead into the post-war world to realize it will be the bitterest struggle known. Cass Crane, flying back from the undeveloped world that’s going to be struggled for, could easily have a better insight into why he had a black cross in front of his name than any of us. It seemed funny, however, to have it all mixed up with Molly and Courtney’s struggle for Cass and Julie Ross’s struggle with her mother-in-law. It didn’t seem to make sense. To think of the poor little troglodyte who was afraid of dogs as a first sacrifice on such an altar seemed as curious as D. J. Durbin, terrified of a black cat’s crossing his path and still willing—perhaps—to poison his wife’s best friend.
However, it was no stranger, any of it, than that I was on my way home to have an impromptu tea for China Relief because that cave dweller of cave dwellers, Horace Blodgett, newt-souled and dry as dust, was furious with his wife because she’d talked out of turn in Mr. Scofield’s grocery store.
It wasn’t, actually, Corinne Blodgett who was there. As I started up the front steps Lilac came scuttling out of the kitchen door in the area.
“Mis’ Grace!”
Her voice was a loud stage whisper.
“Mis’ Blodgett’s man was here. He say she can’t come to no tea for China Relief, so she sen’ a check, an’ would you come over to her house for dinner tonight. They got some po’k chops. The Colonel, he going to be there.—An’ Mis’ Courtney, she waitin’ in th’ sittin’ room.”
I took the envelope she held out. It had a check in it, made out to me, for China Relief. It was for twenty-five dollars, and countersigned, as all Corinne’s checks are, in Horace Blodgett’s precise legal hand. I looked at Lilac.
“Did you tell him——”
“ ’Deed I didn’ tell him,” she interrupted. “I say we’re sorry she ain’ comin’. But I don’ think you ought to say you givin’ teas when you ain’.”
She went back her way, and I went on mine. Then I was aware she’d stopped and was looking at me, trouble in her old eyes, as I put the key in the lock.
“Miss Molly—she stayin’ down at that there place?” she asked through the rails.
I nodded. “Mr. Cass is there.”
“Ain’ no fittin’ place for that chil’ to stay,” she said darkly. “Things goin’ on roun’ there ain’ ought to go on.”
I’d let Sheila go. She bounded down the area steps, and Lilac slammed the door behind her, muttering to herself like some familiar spirit.
I knew, as always, that there was no use stopping then and there and going down to try to find out what she meant. It just added to Randy’s uneasiness, and the black cat on the Cranes’ steps . . . in spite of the fact that I don’t believe in black cats any more than I have a perturbed feeling when the shadow of a buzzard falls across my car on a country road. I don’t really believe in the buzzard’s shadow, though my kids half do because Lilac taught them to when they were babies, and fear has a substratal contagion you can laugh at if you keep your fingers crossed and knock on wood.
I was figuratively doing both as I went inside. Lilac had quite taken the fine edge off the enjoyment I’d ordinarily have had at getting twenty-five dollars out of Horace Blodgett under false pretenses. Horace must, I thought, be definitely slipping, to be caught out twice within twenty-four hours. Still, I couldn’t help wondering why Corinne hadn’t come
, and why Colonel Primrose was going there to eat pork chops that evening . . . whether Horace had invited him or he’d invited himself.
Courtney came to the door of the sitting room.
“Hello, darling. I hope you don’t mind my coming. I’m an awful mess.”
She went back and flopped down again on the sofa.
“God, I wish I were dead instead of Achille!”
She sat there grinding out her cigarette into the ashtray on the table long after all possible heat had gone out of it.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“Every damned thing in the world, if you want to know,” she said wearily, without looking up. “I just can’t stand it. I simply can’t, Grace. And there’s no use saying I’m silly and I’ve got to, because I can’t.”
There was a desperate matter-of-fact finality about the way she said it that made it futile to try to say anything.
“I just can’t stand having that little —— sitting up there as if she owned Cass, lock, stock and barrel. Oh, I wish I hadn’t gone over there in the first place!”
She put her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes, her hands lifeless in her lap. The tears were tangled up in her long dark lashes, not enough of them to escape down her cheeks. Her slight elegant body was as motionless as her hands. She still looked lovely. The delicate velvety peach-blow of her skin, the perfect bone structure under it, her dark hair brushed in an almost Japanese pompadour above her unlined forehead, her eyebrows delicately arched over her violet-veined lids, gave her a fragile exotic loveliness that no inner conflict seemed to mar.
Or I’d always thought so. As I looked at her now I wasn’t too sure. Unhappiness and discontent do something to the most perfect face. It wasn’t only the lost radiance of the last few months. It was more subtle, as if a spark going out had left bitter ashes behind it.
“Well, Courtney,” I said patiently.
This wasn’t the first of these scenes. I hope I never have to go through with anybody another week like the one that followed Cass’s wedding. It was too harrowing. Just the quiet business of her sitting there as she sat now without a tear and no hysterics, just eaten by agony, getting thinner and more fragile every day, everything simply gone out of her life. . . . It was so devastating that I was almost glad when she started being publicly vocal about it, which heaven knows she more than was.