Dram of Poison

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Lee Coffey analyzed the situation aloud. He held his head down; his eyes were roving; he spoke like a conspirator. “Her place will be on this side of Allen. Or around a corner from this side. She waits for the light on this side of Allen … see? If she had to cross, she’d cross at the Boulevard, see what I mean?”

  Mr. Gibson, on the edge of the seat, nodded solemnly. At the same time he felt a little childish pleasure, as if this were a game.

  “Now,” said Lee, “the first block was all duplexes. Five- and six-room places. But these are private houses, old enough and big enough for taking in roomers.” He was right. This second block was an old block. The houses stood up off the ground. Their roofs were up in the tree-tops and the trees were high—conditions not always present in the bursting newness of a California town. “I don’t think she’s got a lot of dough,” he went on, “and I do think she lives by herself. If she had a family, somebody would have a car.” This was true in California, U.S.A. “And they’d work it so she wouldn’t have to take the bus as much as she does. I get a pretty good idea who rides with me, you know.”

  “But what can we do,” said Paul, “when you don’t know her name?”

  “What are we going to do, Lee?” asked Rosemary confidently, eagerly. She was on the edge of the seat too.

  “This is what we are going to do. We ring doorbells. We take one block at a time. Each of you ask for a blond young lady, not very tall, who is some kind of nurse. Why I say that … I’ve seen her wear white stockings. And, while lots of jobs will take a white uniform, there ain’t a female on earth wears white stocking unless she has to. Now, if you find her, or any news of her, give a yell, make a noise to the rest of us. Ask if they’ve seen her walking by, and if so, which way she turns. But don’t tell why you’re asking.” His eye caught Mr. Gibson’s wince. “Because it would take too long,” the bus driver said. “O.K.?”

  This all seemed very logical and clear to everyone. All four of them tumbled out and were deployed. Rosemary ran back along the sidewalk to start at the beginning of the block. Paul went striding far to the left to begin at the end. Lee Coffey started where he was, his nostrils seeming to quiver. He had some reason, Mr. Gibson guessed, to suspect this spot, a certain house. A reason he could not or would not explain. Lee Coffey was to work to the left. Mr. Gibson took the next door and would work to the right and meet Rosemary.

  He limped up the front walk of the house assigned to him and rang the bell. Nobody answered it; nobody seemed to be at home. Mr. Gibson stood on the strange stoop and rang and rang in a dream. (He was Mr. Gibson of the English Department. No. He was crazy. No, but he was a criminal. Or he was a man in a desperate plight who had friends to fight fate for him. How could he let them down? or let them know that they were doomed? Mr. Gibson, half dead, half born, was not sure about anything.)

  He had just pulled himself together to abandon here and proceed to ring another when he heard a shrill whistle, looked, and saw Lee Coffey beckoning with huge gestures of his long arms.

  Mr. Gibson’s heart leaped up. He was pleased that Lee Coffey should be the one of the four of them to find the scent. He was pleased with the magic of it. It was almost enough to make you dream a man could put intelligence and intuition against odds and make progress. Which was romantic and naïve, but he liked it. As he limped leftward, Rosemary was running to catch up with him and he saw Paul hurrying back.

  They flocked up upon the gray porch of a neat gray frame house that made one think of New England. There was even a lilac bush … an exotic and difficult plant here in the West—growing beside the porch railing. In the door stood a small blond girl at whom Lee Coffey looked down with hidden eyes.

  She was wearing a long wrapper of blue cotton. Her hair was tousled, as if it had just left a pillow. Her face was broad at the eyes and curved quickly into a small chin. It was an attractive little face, not conventionally pretty. The skin was smooth and fine. The mouth was serious. The gray eyes were serene. The only thing “blonde” about her, in Ethel’s sense, was the color of her hair.

  “And here she is,” said Lee, like the Little Bear in the story.

  “What is it, please?” the girl said in a self-assured voice. She wasn’t a person easily surprised, one could tell. For a slim little girl, she seemed very strong.

  Lee blurted, “We aren’t here to accuse you, ma’am. But did you find a bottle of olive oil on a bus today? And did you bring it home?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said the blonde quietly.

  The atmosphere of excited triumphant hope swirled and began to die down.

  “Did you see,” said Rosemary doggedly, “my husband … this man …” she put her hand on Mr. Gibson, “on the bus?”

  “No, I didn’t” said the blonde. Her eyes traveled from face to face. “Something is wrong? I remember you,” she said, coming to Lee Coffey. “Aren’t you the driver?” Her eyes were very clear and steady.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mr. Gibson found himself waiting for Lee to tell whose blonde she was, but his sandy lashes were discreet.

  She wrinkled her fair brow. “Will one of you please tell me what’s the matter?”

  Rosemary was the one of them who told her. When she was a quarter of the way into the exposition, the small blonde, by gestures only, brought them all inside the house. As if trouble as bad as this better not stand where the breeze might blow and communicate it. So they all sat down in the parlor, on edges of stiff sofas and chairs, while Rosemary went on.

  This small blonde female had an air of calm and precision about her. She listened without making noises of alarm or even appreciation. But you knew she did appreciate and was alarmed.

  “Then Lee … Mr. Coffey, here … remembered you,” finished Rosemary, “and so we came. Hoping you had it. Or had seen something.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken it, I’m sorry, even if I’d seen it. It wouldn’t have occurred to me.” The blonde’s immaculate ringless hands clasped her knee. “I didn’t see anything of a paper bag or a bottle.” This serene little person had never been in danger from the missing poison. But now there was no way to continue. They had come to an end. Magic had found the bus driver’s blonde, but not the poison. It was not here.

  Mr. Gibson squirmed. He found himself incorrigibly on the side of the magic. “You must tell us your name,” he said impulsively. He wanted the bus driver to learn her name.

  She said her name was Virginia Severson. It suited her. She looked very virginal, and clean, calm, cool in a Scandinavian sort of way. Rosemary rallied and told her all their names. Once again, the civilized ceremony of mutual introduction seemed to relax Paul Townsend. He was charming.

  But all this was only delay. The stiff, shabby, spotless parlor seemed airless and stagnant.

  Miss Severson said, “I sat pretty well forward in the bus. You must have been sitting behind me.” Her grave eyes examined Mr. Gibson. “I’m sorry.” She turned her face to Lee Coffey. “You were clever to find me,” she said.

  “One day,” said Lee, “I saw you breathing through a lilac …”

  “Are you from the East, too?” she said warmly, “that you noticed a lilac?”

  “I’ll tell you another time,” said the bus driver softly, “how come I noticed the lilac.”

  The blond girl let her lashes down. “I wish I could have helped you,” she murmured.

  Paul twitched. “Say, if the police have been broadcasting a warning all this time, maybe we should call …?”

  “Call,” said Rosemary with her hands clenched.

  Virginia Severson showed Paul the telephone. Mr. Gibson surrendered himself to his chair; hope faded. All the magic belonged to the bus driver. The poison was still lost, still threatening.

  The girl came back, biting her lips. “I am a nurse, you know,” she said to them. “This … well, it shocks me.”

  “A man has his reasons,” said Lee Coffey, gently. “It’s easy to say he was crazy. It’s also lazy.”

  Virginia Severson ti
lted her head and shot him a glance that was suddenly alert. “His reasons aren’t the question, right now, are they?” she said. “I meant unlabeled poison, Mr. Coffey. Floating around. That’s shocking! I’m trained to be careful with drugs.”

  “We’d like to find it, Miss Severson. We’d mighty like to find it,” he drawled. His intent gaze was challenging.

  “Of course, you would,” she said. “I would, too.” She seemed to feel the force of his challenge. “Let me try to think …” she said soberly and sat down, pulling the long blue around her pretty feet.

  Paul came back and spoke reluctantly to Rosemary’s yearning face. “Nothing.” He looked nervous and defeated. “Not a word. It’s three thirty. Where is that stuff?”

  “It’s somewhere,” said Rosemary with a little gasp. “Somewhere!”

  Mr. Gibson found himself pushing his imagination, too, trying to picture the bottle in the green bag … somewhere. But where?

  “Rosie, this is too tough,” said Paul. “I don’t think we’re accomplishing anything.”

  “Yes, we are. Be quiet,” said Lee Coffey reverently, “Virginia is thinking.” The nurse smiled at him. She had a lovely smile, and the bus driver let his face look fond.

  “Lee …” said Rosemary, her voice ready to break, “Miss … Virginia. It’s no time for …”

  “We’re not,” said the bus driver quickly.

  Mr. Gibson understood perfectly. But Paul Townsend didn’t. His tall frame remained in the archway and his handsome face wore a lost expression as if to say, But what are you all talking about? Virginia had understood too, Mr. Gibson guessed, as her lids went down again. And Virginia agreed.

  How remarkably quickly, thought Mr. Gibson, things can be communicated. Lee Coffey has told this girl he’s long noticed her, has liked her looks, likes her now, and expects a good deal of her. And she has told him she is … not offended. She would even like to deserve his good opinion. She already knows this is an interesting man. Yet both of them resolve that they will not pursue this enchantment … that, first, they will help me if they can. A bus driver, he thought. A blonde. His eyes stung suddenly.

  Nobody spoke. Until the little nurse said, at last, in her quiet unexcited voice, “There was somebody I know, on the bus. Would that help?”

  “Oh yes, it might,” cried Rosemary, jumping up. “Oh yes! Oh, good for you!”

  “You see?” said Lee Coffey.

  “Mrs. Boatright was on that bus,” the nurse told them, getting to her feet. “Mrs. Boatright. I remember now, wondering how three or four cars could all be unavailable, at once. She had a heap of packages, too. On the bus. It seemed strange. She’s so very wealthy … at least her husband is. She lives in a huge place on the hill. I’m sure it was she. I once met her at Red Cross headquarters.”

  “Walter Boatright …” Lee Coffey sprang up and dove into the hallway and came back with the phone book.

  “But I’m afraid she’d have an unlisted number,” Virginia said. “In fact, I know she has.”

  “Not what the number is?” The bus driver lowered the book.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Do you know the house?”

  “Yes, but not the street number, either.”

  “Can’t we go there?” Rosemary cried. And Paul half groaned and the bus driver looked at his blonde.

  “You all start,” Virginia said. She was already at a plain white door the far side of the room. “Don’t wait. I’ll catch you at the car.”

  Lee Coffey grinned and glanced at his watch, and then took Mr. Gibson by one wing. “Is she a blonde?” he murmured, almost carrying Mr. Gibson down the porch steps past the lilac bush. “Do you blame me?”

  “She’s a lovely blonde,” said Mr. Gibson, overwhelmed. “This is so good of you.”

  “And all for money, too,” said Rosemary tartly. “All for material advantage.” Mr. Gibson looked at his wife, who had his other arm. Her blue eyes were bright.

  “Listen, we got our teeth in it now,” said Lee with enormous gusto.

  “We’re going to find it,” said Rosemary.

  Mr. Gibson could almost believe this.

  Chapter XVII

  THEY STUFFED HIM into the tonneau and Rosemary sprang in, too. She shoved over, and Lee Coffey, using nothing but an air of expectancy, stuffed Paul Town-send in at the other side of Rosemary. Then he slipped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The motor caught. The door of the house opened. Virginia skipped down the walk, wearing a brown jumper over a white blouse, brown pumps on her bare feet; her blond hair was neat and shining. The bus driver grinned and let the car move just as she slipped in beside him. He had not waited even one-tenth of a second. She had not failed him either.

  Paul said admiringly, “That was a quick change!”

  Nobody paid any attention to him. It would have been better not to have commented.

  As the car moved, the little nurse began to describe the location of the house they were seeking, and Lee sent them spinning around the block, across the Boulevard, and on north. They were heading for a swelling slope in the northwest section of the town where lawns grew wider and houses larger as they stood higher on the hill. Mrs. Boatright’s house, she said, would be close to the top, on a short street, where there were only three or four houses, and hers had vast lawns behind a wall.

  “The higher the fewer, I guess,” said Paul.

  Virginia turned to look back. “Is there an antidote to this poison, Mr. Townsend?” she said in a professional kind of way.

  “Paul,” he suggested.

  She smiled at him. “What ought to be done … in case …?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know of any antidote,” Paul confessed, sliding forward in the seat, the other side of Rosemary. “Of course I’m no doctor. All we understand, in our business, is what the danger is. We’re trained to be careful, too.”

  “How did he ever get hold of it?” the nurse frowned.

  Paul told her. As Mr. Gibson listened, he began to know that Paul Townsend was projecting himself somehow and being quite skillfully charming to this most attractive little person. Mr. Gibson found himself curiously affronted.

  He looked at Rosemary, dear Rosemary, who sat still between them with her hands clenched … whose resolution was their strength, who had begun this fight and fired them all from her own spirit and collected these valiant lieutenants.

  He said, “What a fighter you are, Rosemary!”

  “I am a rabbit,” she said bitterly. “I was always a rabbit. I should have begun to fight long, long ago.”

  Paul turned and covered her tense hands with one of his. “Now, now, Rosie … try to take it easy. You’ll make yourself sick. Worry doesn’t help any, does it, Virginia?”

  The nurse did not answer. The bus driver said, “She’s getting a lot of mileage out of her worry. Hey, Rosemary?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Rosemary, rather forlornly, collapsing a little from her rigidity. Paul took his hand away. “I’m worrying now,” she said, “trying to imagine a wealthy woman picking up a strange package on a public bus. I don’t suppose she would.”

  “She might,” said the nurse brightly. “By mistake, you see? Suppose she gathered it up with the other packages she was carrying. I didn’t see her get off. I got off first. But who can say? And suppose she had things to eat in her own packages? She might dump them all in the kitchen. And she surely has servants. Her cook, for instance, wouldn’t know. Her cook might think Mrs. Boat-right had meant to bring home some olive oil.”

  “A little bottle?” said Rosemary pathetically. “A very small quantity? What time is it?”

  “Three thirty-seven,” Paul told her.

  “It’s still early, anyhow,” said Rosemary, with a desperate smile.

  But Mr. Gibson thought, It’s late. He thought of time gone by. Time enough for someone to have died already and very mysteriously, too. So that the news of the result might not yet have caught up with the cause. This fight might already
have been lost, for all they knew.

  “The Boatright kids are in their teens,” said the nurse thoughtfully. “They certainly wouldn’t be fed their supper this early.”

  “Olive oil?” said Rosemary. “What would a cook do with it?”

  The nurse said, “Salad? Oh … to moisten a sandwich filling … possibly for a snack …”

  “Don’t say that!” said Paul.

  The nurse said, “I guess I’m helping her worry.”

  “… Resembles thought,” muttered the bus driver.

  But Mr. Gibson was appalled. A child! Oh, if a child were to get the poison! He said aloud, “All of you ought to leave me. You are very good to trouble yourselves—”

  “No trouble,” said Virginia. Mr. Gibson discovered that he believed her. “I believe you,” he said to her in surprise and she smiled.

  “Don’t worry,” Paul began.

  “Stop saying that,” said Rosemary quietly. “It doesn’t help, Paul.”

  “I told you, Rosie,” he said rather crossly, “you ought to have talked to him, laid things on the line …”

  “You did. You told me. You were right,” said Rosemary, looking straight ahead. “Yes, Paul.” Her hands twitched.

  “You musta seen something brewing, Rosemary,” the bus driver said sympathetically, not quite understanding. He hadn’t the background. “A man doesn’t decide in a day.”

  (But I did, mused Mr. Gibson, wonderingly. In a night. I seemed to.)

  “Have you been ill, Mr. Gibson?” the nurse asked, “or taking drugs for pain? I see you limping.”

  Mr. Gibson was bewildered. (His heart hurt. He wasn’t dead at all.) “A broken bone or two,” he murmured. “Just an accident.” Rosemary turned her face to look at his. He looked away.

  “I only wondered,” said Virginia gently. “There are illnesses that can be very depressing. And some drugs, too.”