by Zenith Brown
It was still Courtney Durbin that Colonel Primrose was interested in.
“What did you do to your hands, Courtney?”
She glanced quickly at me. “Hasn’t Grace told you?”
I shook my head . . . feeling the tail of the Colonel’s eye resting on me then.
“Mr. Durbin was thrashing his stick at a poor little black kitten some ass sent him, and he hit me instead.”
She looked at her hands.
“The maid taped them for me. I’ll have to have them X-rayed in the morning. They’re rather painful.”
“You should have done it this evening,” Colonel Primrose said gravely. “Why——”
The color showed in her cheeks, and her face hardened a little.
“D. J. was very firm about my not leaving the house and not having a doctor in,” she said quietly. “I . . . it hurt so much when it happened that I couldn’t think clearly enough to know what I was doing. It’s only been about the last half hour that I’ve been able to make any decision that involved . . . doing anything at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Colonel Primrose said.
“You needn’t be. I deserve anything I get.”
She spoke evenly, looking at her hands again.
“Mr. Blodgett told me that in the beginning.—You’ve heard about spiritual pain, but it doesn’t mean very much, not until you’ve felt it. You think you can take a chance on it that you’d never think of taking on being physically hurt. But I don’t know, now.”
She looked at her hands and shook her head. “It’s nothing to the kind of pain you can have in your heart. But we never know that until it’s too late.”
I couldn’t tell whether Colonel Primrose knew what she was talking about or not. Horace may have told him what she’d told me, because they’re old friends. Not many people I know except his Army friends call him by his first name. He was acting now, of course, as if he had the whole background, which meant nothing. If Colonel Primrose had got lost in a vacuum he’d have proceeded as if nature, not he, abhorred it, and he was very much at home.
“Who sent the kitten?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Courtney said shortly. “If D. J. does, he didn’t say. It isn’t the first time. I don’t mean he was sent one before, or he wouldn’t have opened that package. But one was in his car out in front one day, and he nearly went into spasms. He smashed the window glass and almost killed poor Achille. He did kill the kitten.”
“It was black, too?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly.
She nodded.
“He seems to have the most unbelievable superstitious fear of them. It juts doesn’t make sense in a man who hasn’t fear or respect for God, man or the devil. Unless he thinks a black cat is the devil.”
She looked across the hall. It was the first time she’d really showed any of the nervous tension she was under. Before, when she’d looked across toward the library door, it was as if she were waiting for the atmosphere to explode. Now it seemed as if she were disturbed and even frightened, perhaps, because it hadn’t. I remember thinking it was true that women frequently don’t realize a man may behave differently in business and in social contacts, if that observation doesn’t sound too much as if I were plagiarizing Miss Dix.
“—It doesn’t extend to any other——?”
Colonel Primrose never finished that question. The door of the library opened, and Horace Blodgett came out. Or stopped in the doorway, actually, looking across the hall toward us.
“I think you had better come here, John,” he said.
There was a fraction of an instant when nobody moved.
Sitting there half-paralyzed with a kind of instant intuitive apprehension that something, I didn’t know what, must have happened, it flashed into my mind suddenly and incongruously that if it had, Horace Blodgett was then and there being one of the best reasons for the dusty-dry type of lawyer and friend. There was no fuss or emotion. He simply stood there, making that statement quite in his usual tone of voice.
In his hand he held a sheaf of papers with a blue cover folded the way legal papers are.
It was only for a fraction of an instant that we sat there. Colonel Primrose was up and across the room much faster than he normally moves. I saw a sharp spasm of pain shoot across Courtney’s face, and realized that her hands had contracted suddenly on the arms of her chair. Otherwise she sat motionless. Colonel Primrose reached the door, and stopped, just as Horace had stopped when I’d thought he had recognized Mr. Skagerlund—or Mr. Austin. He stood there on the threshold, his head turning slowly from side to side. I knew perfectly well even from where I was that his sparkling black eyes were moving with the precision of a camera lens from one object in the room to another, photographing it all in his mind. And I knew too that something had happened.
Courtney Durbin’s body moved in a futile effort to raise itself from the chair.
“I . . . must go,” she said. “He must be . . . he’s probably had a stroke . . .”
It may be unkind and macabre to say it, but if I’ve ever heard wishful thinking expressed out loud I heard it then.
She leaned forward and managed to get up. I followed her across the room. She moved more steadily and quickly than I’d thought she’d be able to.
We were half-way across the hall before Colonel Primrose, still standing there, turned and saw us.
“—Don’t, Courtney,” he said quietly. “Go back and sit down. It’s . . . too late.”
She stood rigidly still for an instant, then ran forward too quickly for him to stop her. In the doorway her hand went slowly up to her throat and she took a step back, swaying a little. Colonel Primrose motioned sharply to me. I ran up and caught hold of her, trying to steady her shaking body.
He went inside and closed the door. She clung to me for an instant, still shaking. Then suddenly her body went taut, her head snapped up, and she stood there looking at me, her face an extraordinary pattern of shifting emotions.
“—Oh, quick, Grace!” she whispered then. “Quick!”
It was one of the most agonized sounds I’ve ever heard come from anyone, and her face was as tortured as the sound.
“Oh, my God, quick!”
13
She shook off my hands and ran past the staircase toward the back of the house. I followed her without any idea of what it was about, except that it was so desperately urgent that in all the world nothing else mattered for her just then.
She pushed open the door of a room behind the library and switched on the light. I heard a muted whirring, of the sort a phonograph needle makes on a record before the music begins, and then I remembered what she’d told me this afternoon.
There was a large mahogany chest of drawers standing against what would be the library wall, a bust of Voltaire sitting on top of it. That cynical fascinating leer of his was fixed on us, the bronze high-lighted so that he looked alive, as if it were us he meant to be grinning at across the span of two centuries . . . and when Courtney seized him and thrust him into my hands he grinned up at me until I turned him over.
She ripped off the gold brocade he’d been sitting on and released a spring at either end of the top drawer. The top and front of the chest moved up and back, folding against the wall, and left a recording machine in front of us, the mechanism quietly revolving away. It was an automatic arrangement, one arm at that instant in the act of very intelligently shifting a black record under the needle. She raised the arm and lifted off the three top records, and then, as if she couldn’t be sure, took the fourth. She put the needle gently down on the fresh disc, put the top down and the brocade back in place. When she took the Voltaire from me I suppose his expression hadn’t really changed, but it seemed to me his grin was a little more cynical, and I reached up and moved his face around so he’d look at the floor instead of me.
“Come on,” she whispered quickly.
We got back into the drawing room. She stood there with the records in her hand, hesitating, glanced across
the hall and went quickly to the end of the room. Against the wall in the angle of the windows at the front and side of the house was a handsome Chippendale phonograph cabinet. She lifted the lid, took off the record that was on the turntable, slipped the four discs onto it and put the other back on top. She turned around, leaving it open, came back and sank down in her chair again. Her face was so white it was almost green. She let her hands rest in her lap and closed her eyes. I could almost feel the waves of mental relief and of returning physical pain that went through her. She opened her eyes again, and pressed her wrists together tightly, as if to relieve the pain in her hands.
“I don’t think you’re being very wise, Courtney,” I said, uneasily. “You can get yourself in a lot of trouble . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
Then she stared at me, doubt sharpening suddenly to fear, as if the fact that my position in all this might be very different from her own had just that instant flashed into her mind.
“Grace, you won’t tell him! There’s nothing else I could do . . . believe me, nothing!”
It would be foolish for me to attempt to say I’d never tried to help conceal evidence from Colonel Primrose before, nor do I know why the idea should have bothered me then. But it did. I was very uneasy about it. Doing something on the impulse of the moment was one thing. This seemed to me rather different.
“He’s bound to find out about it,” I said uncertainly. “He always does.”
“Then let him,” she said. “But Grace, you’ve got to believe me, there’s——”
The doorbell buzzed urgently somewhere in the silent reaches of the big house. Courtney sat abruptly erect, listening, her lips parted, the pupils of her eyes distended, her breath coming in quick gasps—in the space of a fraction of a second as near sheer panic as I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. If Colonel Primrose had come in then. . . . But he didn’t. He went down the hall from the library to the front door, glancing across at me and shaking his head soberly—telling me, in effect, I supposed, that he was as bewildered about the whole business as I was.
A clock somewhere struck ten. Ten slow softly booming notes can take a long time striking. We sat there listening to them as she relaxed slowly back into her chair, listening to them and to the subdued voices of the men at the door, and to the changing quality of sound as their feet moved from the stone steps outside to the polished hardwood of the hall. The clock struck its last two notes after the library door had closed again.
“ ‘Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,’ ” Courtney Durbin said softly. “What’s the last line?—‘And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’ ”
She sat there silently for a few moments.
“Well,” she said, “—so men live, and so men die. I wonder what they’ll do to me. Hang me, I suppose.”
I looked at her in blank dismay. The emphasis, what there was, was on the “hang” . . . as if she weren’t questioning the accuracy of Justice at all, merely inquiring about the modus. It was a little sickening.
“He was dead,” she said. She stared straight in front of her into the fireplace, her voice an even colorless monotone. “—Strangled, I imagine. His face . . . looked like it. Right in his chair, there at his desk. No wonder the house has been so quiet. It’s always quiet. That’s one of the things I’ve hated about it. Never a sound. All the walls so insulated it was like living in padded cells. You could look out of the window and see children playing and dogs barking—you knew they were barking and the children laughing—but you couldn’t hear it. Sometimes it almost drove me mad. It was like being dead.”
“Stop it, Courtney,” I said. “Don’t. There’s no use now.”
“No, not now,” she said. “You’re right. The less I say the better off I’ll be.”
I had the same creeping chill up my spine I’d had the moment before. Then I had a gruesome and terrible idea, suddenly, and I looked sideways at her hands. But that was out. She couldn’t possibly have used those hands for any such grisly effort.
“Where’s Duleep Singh?” she asked abruptly, without moving.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We left him at the Blodgetts’. Why?”
“He told me once I was facing a black wall. He could see it in front of me. I asked him what was on the other side. He couldn’t see anything there, he said. Nothing but the black wall. That’s all I can see right now.”
She stopped for a moment.
“Do you think people can see those things?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t be silly.”
I wasn’t as positive as I was trying to sound. I was beginning to be a little disturbed about Duleep Singh. People’s lives may be open books, but there’s no use for those who can read them to go around doing it aloud. Unless, of course, there was a reason behind it. I began to wonder. If Duleep Singh could see black walls, perhaps he’d seen the one in front of D. J. Durbin, and that was why he hadn’t showed up.
In any case, there was no use of Courtney’s allowing fear or hope to make her try to escape the reality she was faced with. That was what had happened to Corinne Blodgett. It was hard to imagine Courtney Durbin ever going fey and wearing a coarse linen robe and subsisting on dates and goat’s milk, but it must have been hard for Corinne’s contemporaries to imagine her doing it too, and she hadn’t had anybody as attractive as Duleep around to lead her into it.
Though I still couldn’t see him in his role of Swami. He must have reserved it for very special audiences. The nearest I’d ever come to being part of one was at the Abbotts’ the night before. Even then, the idea of blood on the moon when it’s full and sultry red on the evening horizon isn’t particularly startling or bizarre. Especially if you’ve ever been to Charleston and heard the old blind minstrel on the Battery singing “When the moon goes down in blood and the saints come marching home” it isn’t. On the other hand, Courtney had risen instantly to the bait, if bait there’d been, in his saying it. She may have thought he was speaking in some kind of parable for her especially. And of course, I thought, he may have been.
“I don’t really believe it,” she said. “But it’s odd he should have said it out of a clear sky the way he did. It was the second time he was ever in this house. I didn’t know I was making such a bad job of it. I knew the black wall was in front of me, but I didn’t know anyone else could see it.”
She turned her head and looked across the hall, her face contracted in a spasm of sudden despair.
“Oh, why don’t they come out! What are they doing! I can’t stand it much longer, Grace—I’ll go mad if they don’t come!”
The door opened then and Colonel Primrose did come out, Inspector Bigges and Horace Blodgett with him. Inspector Bigges was speaking, with the air of a man who was giving in but was not convinced.
“—You’re the doctor, Colonel. If you say so it’s all right. I’m not sticking my neck out any more than I have to, and I know Mr. Blodgett’s reputation. But Mr. Blodgett knows as well as I do he didn’t have any right——”
Horace’s voice was dry, steady and patient.
“That document was taken from my office by someone, Inspector. When I heard about this meeting here this evening, I had reason to believe it would be here. When I opened this door and saw what had happened, my first idea—before anything else—was to find it. I did not do it in the interests of a private client, but in the interests of the people of this country, Inspector. I’m perfectly willing to turn it over to any competent authority who I know will keep its contents secret.”
“All right, sir,” Inspector Bigges said, still a little grimly. “You know how the newspapers are on my tail, Colonel. But let’s get going. All set?”
The last was to a short man in a rumpled seersucker suit. I recognized him as Dr. Kettner, the medical examiner who used to come with Captain Lamb before Captain Lamb had the newspapers on his tail to the extent that he decided to go to war for a little peace and quiet. He beckoned to the Inspector, and the two of t
hem went back into the library, Colonel Primrose and Horace watching them. Inspector Bigges came out in a minute, and the three of them came across the hall, together with a middle-aged man with a dictation pad and pencil in his hand.
Colonel Primrose waited until they were in the drawing room, and closed the door. From the way he did it, glancing back at the library, I knew that very shortly now D. J. Durbin would be leaving his house on that last grim journey to the dust. There was a moment’s silence.
“You met Inspector Bigges this afternoon, I think, Mrs. Durbin,” Colonel Primrose said.
From the Inspector’s expression I didn’t know whether he hadn’t connected the Mrs. Durbin at the Cranes’ with this one, or just didn’t recognize her for the same woman.
He nodded. “What is the matter with your hands, Mrs. Durbin?” he asked shortly.
I felt sorry for her. It was so hard to say baldly what had happened. She must have felt a natural reluctance, when the coroner’s men were probably in the very act of taking away the body of the man whose name she had—along with the imposing luxury that surrounded her—to point through the black wall and say, “He did it.”
“She was trying to save the kitten I told you about,” Colonel Primrose said. “That stick in there came down on her hands.”
She looked at him gratefully. Inspector Bigges made no comment.
“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt, I’m afraid, Courtney,” Colonel Primrose said, “that Mr. Durbin was murdered . . . strangled. You must have realized it . . .”
She moved her head in assent. She’d pulled herself together to an extent that would have amazed them if they’d seen her when Inspector Bigges and his men came, and if they didn’t know her as well as I did.
“We don’t want to distress you any——”
“I know, Colonel Primrose. I’m glad to help any way I can. Don’t try to . . . to save my feelings.”
Inspector Bigges looked relieved. He’d probably expected histrionics, if not hysteria . . . and in a sense, I rather thought, he was getting them without recognizing the difference between the dramatic types. Courtney was putting on a better show than he had any notion of, aware as she was—and as he was not—of the four discs on the green felt turntable of the victrola directly in front of his nose.