All for the Love of a Lady

by Zenith Brown

  Horace Blodgett paused. When he spoke again his voice was clear and strong with profound conviction.

  “But suppose, in such a case, that you or Bigges found evidence that enabled the prosecutor to bring me into court. I would have faith in a jury of twelve of my countrymen. And if they said, You may go, I would go . . . and if they said, You are convicted, and must hang by the neck until you are dead, I would accept that with only a natural and momentary regret. I would have no wish to subvert the law. I would stand, with a good heart, wherever it is to place me.”

  He looked steadily across his desk at Colonel Primrose.

  I suppose I must have breathed, while he was talking, but I don’t remember it. And Colonel Primrose certainly took a deep breath before he spoke.

  “—Thank you, Horace,” he said.

  I don’t ever remember seeing him so quietly urbane.

  “I . . . had some idea that that’s what you would tell me. I think your analysis included everything. And I suppose your opinion is right. My duty is clear, of course.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “It’s unfortunate—or fortunate—that medical science is not able to say, accurately, when a man has died. And of course it’s very much one or the other that Courtney broke up the record that was on Durbin’s machine shortly after we got there. And under the circumstances it really is fortunate that no charge can be brought against either Duleep Singh or Sondauer. It actually was impossible for either of them to have done it.”

  Horace Blodgett nodded.

  “No person may be placed in jeopardy of his life because of the act of another person. The moral law——”

  He stopped and listened, that odd half-smile of his on his face. I listened too, and heard the mild commotion at the front door that undoubtedly marked the return of the lady of the house. And in an instant Corinne sailed in, her hat awry, her face beaming.

  “My dear Horace!—Oh, hello, Grace, my dear. Hello, John. I’m so glad to see you. My dears, do you know I’ve just met the most delightful man. He works in the Bureau of Engraving. It’s simply fascinating. I was waiting for a bus, and he said, ‘Lady, do you want a lift?’ My dear, he brought me right to the corner. You see, Horace, it is the Power of Thought, because I’ve never hitch-hiked in my life before. The man was so nice. I can’t tell you. Only, Horace, he said he didn’t think the Power of Thought worked against people like the Nazis. He said he thought you had to . . . what word did he use?—implement it, with bombs, he said, and I dare say he’s right. We really ought to know more people, Horace.”

  She flurried around, beaming and fussing with the odds and ends of books on the table. She settled down at last, and smiled at everybody.

  And then a very strange thing happened.

  “And now tell me what you’ve been doing,” she said, and went straight on without waiting for anyone to answer. “John, you probably don’t believe in the Power of Thought. But it works. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody, and I shall never speak of it again. It was the Power of Thought that killed Mr. Durbin. I know it’s true, because from the day I first met him at Courtney’s I’ve thought that he must die. And now that he’s dead I shall try to find somebody to pray for him. Of course I couldn’t possibly do it myself, but I dare say somebody will.”

  And then she actually said, “I’ll give them my meat coupons, and I dare say they’ll be glad to.”

  The look on Colonel Primrose’s face I couldn’t describe, and it was the first time, before or since, that I’ve ever seen Horace Blodgett look startled.

  “Do you . . . did you know who Durbin was, Corinne?” he asked.

  “Oh, of course, my dear!” she answered, so gently. “How could I forget him? I hoped you’d never know!”

  And she added, quite in her own manner again, “But when you were so high and mighty about Courtney’s marriage settlement, I knew you did. We’d have been in the poorhouse if you’d always been so particular.”

  She went over to him, bent down and kissed him. There were tears in her eyes, and I thought in Horace Blodgett’s, but I wouldn’t know.

  “There, my dear,” she said softly. “Now we must forget.”

  25

  Colonel Primrose and I got in Sergeant Buck’s car.

  “What . . . will you do?” I asked.

  He sat there silently for quite a little while. Then he looked around at me. “What will I do? Just what Horace said.”

  “You’ll take it to the prosecutor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Couldn’t you just . . . hush and say nothing about it?” I asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. “You and Buck again. What Horace said is not a legal confession and can never be used. I doubt if legally there’s evidence enough to justify taking the case to trial. However, that’s for the District Attorney to decide. If he does so decide, then it’s up to Horace to say what his plea shall be, and finally it’s up to a jury of his peers. All that lies beyond the point where the investigator has written ‘Finis,’ Mrs. Latham.

  “It’s an odd thing,” he went on after a long pause. “In every murder I’ve investigated there’s always been some unexpected circumstance no one could have foreseen reasonably. Fate always seems to step in. This is the only case I’ve been on where Fate favored the opposition. Normally it’s the unexpected unforeseen thing that hangs a man. The reverse seems to be true here. No one could have known that it would be impossible for the coroner to say with any degree of accuracy at what time Durbin died. No one could have guessed that his last words, if he spoke any, were being recorded in the next room, or that they’d be destroyed by a woman thinking it was someone else she was saving. It almost looks as if this time Fate had taken a beneficent interest in shielding the agent she used to destroy a wicked man. And she seems to have done it pretty effectively. I have complete confidence that whatever is done, it will be done with honor. But it’s out of my province. And I’m not a swami—I can’t tell you what will happen.”

  “You can tell me how you knew,” I said.

  “He was the only person who could possibly have done it, as things developed,” he said. “I knew Cass didn’t. He might have gone in there and busted him on the jaw, and accidentally broken his neck. If he had he’d have gone to the nearest police station. He wouldn’t have strangled him. But . . . I thought almost at the time it could have happened that way—when we were all there in the drawing room. Then it all sort of pieced together, after that. I knew about the Blodgett girl.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “It was the anniversary of her death, of course. Then there were all sorts of other things. Horace’s fury when Courtney wanted him to draw up her marriage contract with Durbin. That seemed to take some explanation. And at that dinner at their house Thursday night. I’ve never known him to serve champagne—and in the library, under the girl’s picture. And you remember when we were talking about the pathological fear of cats. Horace began to say he’d known a young man who had it, and Corinne stopped him. Fear of cats isn’t uncommon, but in a really morbid form you aren’t likely to run into it personally twice in a lifetime. And Durbin had been here less than a year—this was the first anniversary of her death when he’d been around.”

  We’d passed Courtney’s house. Even though Cass was probably still there it looked lonely and empty, I thought, rather like the big houses along Massachusetts Avenue before the war that used to be all boarded up, with agents’ signs on them. The boards and the signs weren’t there, but it seemed to me as if I could see their shadows already.

  As we crossed the buffalo bridge to get to Georgetown he said, “I’ve invited a couple of people to your house this afternoon. I phoned while you and Corinne were upstairs. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No.” I said. “Of course not. Who are they?”

  “We’ll see, if they turn up. I want you to meet Sondauer, if he hasn’t gone to New York—or Brazil.”

 
But it wasn’t Mr. Sondauer, whom I still have to meet if he ever comes to Washington again. It was Molly and Cass. She’d got there already, when we went into the sitting room, and she and Sergeant Buck were out looking at the tomatoes. Just looking at him through the windows I could see that his opinion of me as a gardener was no higher than as anything else. Of course, I can’t help it if the tomato worms drop out of a clear sky, and if he and Lilac both think my garden is funny who am I to say it isn’t? I could hear him saying something about it, and Lilac’s high-pitched cackle, as he went down to the kitchen when Molly came in.

  “Hello!” she said. “Mr. Buck and I’ve been out to Walter Reed.”

  I began to see a strange light through all this. It seemed an odd way to entertain a young lady until you were ready for her, but I don’t suppose Sergeant Buck ever goes to the movies. I looked at Colonel Primrose.

  “I’m expecting Cass here, in a few minutes,” he said.

  “Cass? What . . . for?” Molly asked quickly. The pale glow that was in her cheeks as a result of an afternoon of good deeds with that lantern-jawed Boy Scout down in my kitchen—and eating my ham, no doubt—faded instantly, and her eyes widened unhappily.

  “Because I think that . . . well, that you two people are off on the wrong track, both of you.”

  The color flashed into her cheeks again. Her eyes darkened like smouldering coals.

  “I wish you’d mind your own business, Colonel Primrose!” she said. “I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need your—Oh, Grace, I can’t, I tell you!”

  The doorbell had rung, and he’d gone to answer it.

  “I don’t want to see him again, Grace—please!”

  It was rather difficult, she was so shaken all of a sudden just at the sound of his voice. It didn’t sound very reassuring to me as he said, “Well, here I am. I don’t know what you want,” to Colonel Primrose in the hall. It looked to me very much as if we were going to have a first-rate blow-up on our hands instead of anything else, and I was sure of it as I looked at Molly and saw her stiffening as if she’d been infected with a little of the congealing fluid that Sergeant Buck uses to try to hide his jelly-like interior. He’s not a diamond in the rough, as I’ve heard him called—he’s the custard center of a granite eclair. But while Molly looked like frozen marble her eyes were volcanic enough, and so were Cass’s as he came in and saw her, and tightened up himself when the look in his eyes brought no response from hers.

  There was certainly nothing in the atmosphere that could by any stretch of the imagination have led either of them to think the other cared a hang. I began to wonder whether I’d made up all the things they’d said to me, and I think even Colonel Primrose was a little discomfited. I looked at him anxiously.

  He had his record book again, which Sergeant Buck must have brought over, and he took the top one out.

  “This came off the D. J. Durbin production line a week ago Saturday,” he said. “It was sorted away among those he apparently wasn’t going to keep. It’s rather interesting, though.”

  “I thought we were through with all that,” Molly said quietly, and Cass said, “I don’t like amateur performances, Colonel—would you mind playing something else?”

  “I’m going to play this,” Colonel Primrose said equably, “—and you two are going to listen to it, very carefully.”

  He put it on the turntable and switched the key. And again, as in the Crane-Armistead-Sondauer record we’d heard, I had the odd sensation of being moved instantly to another place, except that this wasn’t just a room in a hotel but that very library where so much had happened.

  At first there were just sounds of someone in a room, moving chairs and whistling softly. It was exactly like an overture at the theatre before the curtain rises. Then I heard Flowers’ voice saying, “Oh, my laws.” Then Courtney’s voice and another, out of focus, and Courtney’s voice then becoming quite clear.

  “That’s all right, Flowers—finish it later. Come on in, Dick. It’s swell seeing you. I didn’t know you were back. Let’s go outside, it’s cooler. How was Cass?”

  How Molly, sitting beside me, could have stiffened any tighter I don’t know, but she seemed to. I could feel it as she sat there bolt upright.

  Then a man’s voice.

  “Sorry, I can’t stay. I’ve got a car outside—have to get a plane for Dallas in half an hour. Cass is fine. He’s coming home.”

  “Oh, how wonderful!”

  “The point is, he doesn’t know just when he gets in, and it’s secret so he couldn’t cable or write. He asked me to tell Molly he was coming. She isn’t home and I don’t know how to get in touch with her. So I thought you were their best friend and you’d tell her. I couldn’t leave a note lying around. So tell her he’s due in Wednesday or Thursday, and for her to call Two-two at the War Department and they’ll tell her when the plane’s landing. Will you do that, and keep it absolutely under your hat?”

  And caught and preserved in that record was just the slight shade that came into Courtney Durbin’s voice, as if she knew very well, at that moment, that she was never going to.

  “Oh, of course, I’ll be glad to.”

  “Well, I’ve got to shove. Be sure. Cass would kill me if I let him down. He’s crazy about that gal. absolutely . . .”

  The voice faded out, and the record ran on in silence, until I heard the closing of a door.

  Molly sat by me perfectly still, hardly so much as breathing, and Cass stood there blankly, his cigarette burning almost to his fingers. Colonel Primrose switched off the record, without saying anything, and carefully closed the top of the phonograph.

  “—Then . . . then you did want me to know?”

  Molly’s voice sounded very small, like a child’s, and far away.

  He looked at her, still speechless. Then he said, “Wasn’t it you that . . . called up the War Department?”

  “Why . . . no . . . I never knew, nobody ever told me,” Molly said.

  “Oh, honey!” he said then, and he was across the room, and they were in each other’s arms, half laughing and half crying, both of them, and Cass saying, “Oh, gosh, Molly, I love you so much!”

  Colonel Primrose went over and carefully picked up the cigarette Cass had dropped on the floor, and he and I went out to look for some more tomato worms. But they look awfully like the leaves, and that’s probably why I couldn’t see any. There were a lot of them there, apparently.

  “What you need is some real nicotine,” Colonel Primrose said. “I’ll give you the bottle that was in Durbin’s desk drawer, when the police get through with it, if you promise just to use it out here.—Well, that’s that,” he went on. “I was afraid it wasn’t going to work, for a moment. I feel sorry for Cass. It’s a little hard for a man to tell a woman he loves her when he doesn’t get any encouragement.”

  He looked at me and smiled again.

  “It must be,” I said. “And one thing—I want to know why Achille came to my door that night. Do you remember?”

  He nodded. “Durbin wanted to make sure Molly was out of the house. He knew Cass would kill him if anything happened to her. There was one thing he was even more afraid of than he was of cats, I think. And that was death. I’ve never seen a gangster more safeguarded with warning devices.”

  “And the kitten?” I asked.

  He looked around just to make sure.

  “Horace’s offices are in the building the pet shop’s in.”

  He shrugged. “Armistead says Sondauer was never away from him long enough to get to a pet shop, when he came to think about it. Again, there is no proof.”

  We went back toward the house.

  “And there’s something I’d like to know,” he said, “though there isn’t much doubt about it. We’ll ask her.”

  They were still sitting hand in hand on the sofa when we came in, and I’ve never seen two more radiant faces.

  “We want to know something,” Colonel Primrose said. “What were you doing the night you were
supposed to be in bed here, when Achille was poisoned?”

  Her eyes opened wider.

  “I was going back home.” Her hand tightened on Cass’s. “And I saw Randy bringing something out and Cass opening the door of the shack on the corner. And the colored woman across the street made me go in her house. She said . . . she said the devil had just been there a little while before, she’d seen him limping down the steps. She told me I mustn’t go in the house until the sun came up. I didn’t really believe it . . . but I thought if I did she wouldn’t tell anybody. So I came hack here then. I . . . knew Randy and Cass hadn’t . . . done anything, but I thought they’d he happier if they didn’t know I’d been there. Did she—tell you?”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head. “I just supposed you were there,” he said. “I think your neighbors like you.”

  It was Lilac who said the final words. I think. Molly and Cass had gone home, and Sergeant Buck, and after supper Colonel Primrose went. Lilac came upstairs.

  “Well,” she said, “Mis’ Courtney’s got all the money she want—if that what she does want. But Miss Molly, she got Mr. Cass. They was over-rejoice, I reckon. Rejoicin’ in that house tonight, I reckon. I jus’ hope it stays rejoicin’, but I ’spec’ it will. Miss Molly’s a nice chil’. She a well-riz chil’. An’ Mr. Cass, he’s a nice person.”