by Leslie Ford
“What about lunch?” he said. “I’m free unless the bookkeeper from the Quaker Trust shows up later. He hasn’t come in yet, and—”
I’d known, of course, that the association of ideas can work two ways, but before I could stop I heard, with repentant horror, my voice saying, “Not Mr. Albert Toplady, by any chance?”
There was the shortest silence at the other end.
“Yes,” Colonel Primrose said, very affably. “How did you know?”
If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, I thought; if thy tongue offend thee, tear it out. I would gladly have got rid of mine any way I could just then.
“We used to have an account there,” I said lamely. “The name stuck, I guess.”
“He’s been there for years,” Colonel Primrose said. “I’ll pick you up at noon, then. I’m going over to Curtis to see Hibbs now.”
I put down the phone and sat there unhappily, remembering Monk shaking his head at me when Travis was trying to remember who I’d said had given me the letter for Myron. And here I was, two minutes after I’d told myself I must be careful. It seems very strange to me, at this point, that it never so much as crossed my mind just then that there was anything odd in what Colonel Primrose had told me. That there might be any connection between Albert Toplady’s not showing up at the bank that morning and the letter I’d failed to deliver for him, or Myron’s not coming home the night before, just never occurred to me. I simply sat there, acutely unhappy about not keeping my mouth shut when Colonel Primrose called.
And that wasn’t because I thought I’d done anything irreparable as much as it was a grim warning of what I could expect I’d say on the impulse of the moment sometime when Judge Whitney’s name came up, or Abigail Whitney’s—or Douglas Elliot’s. I could already hear myself: “Oh, you mean Travis Elliot’s father, the man Judge Whitney killed. And you know, the judge’s sister Abigail isn’t bedridden at all.”
I decided then that Washington, D. C., was the place for me, where we have so many murders of our own that no one’s interested in imported ones, and where if more people stayed at home pretending they were bedridden it would be wonderful.
But that was before I took a bath and dressed and met Myron Kane on the stairs coming up to his room. He looked awful. He had black circles under his eyes and he hadn’t shaved. All the starched, immaculate grooming that made him look as if he were the combined London tailors’ contribution to Allied amity was so gone that it was hard to believe he had on the same clothes he’d had on the day before.
“Come in here, Grace; I want to talk to you,” he said peremptorily.
He closed the door of his room behind me and sat down on his bed without even taking off his overcoat. Then he got up, went to his typewriter, pulled out the piece of paper in it and looked at it.
“Somebody’s been in here again, damn it,” he said. He turned to me. “Look, Grace. I’m being persecuted around here.”
When I said “Oh,” my voice, I suppose, must have sounded a little like Charlie McCarthy’s.
“I want to see Primrose. Where is he?”
“He’s at the Post, I believe,” I said. And when I went on, I knew what I was saying this time. “He was at the Quaker Trust Company, but your admirer, Mr. Toplady, didn’t show. So he’s free. I’m having lunch with him.”
He looked at me sharply. I had the feeling he already knew about that or at least knew why Colonel Primrose was at the bank. He was speculating, I thought, as to whether I knew.
“I’m getting pretty sore,” he said. “I’m getting out of here today. Let me tell you something. I happened across something that will knock somebody around here sky-west. I wasn’t going to use it, but now I am going to. Nobody’s treating me like dirt. I’m a lot smarter than these people are, and I can hurt them worse than they can hurt me.”
“Myron,” I said, “why don’t you give back that—document, whatever it is, that you’ve got, and let them give you back your letter, and call it off?”
He looked at me intently again. “They don’t need proof to ruin me,” he said curtly. “I need proof. And I’m keeping it— for a while—even if I do get my letter.”
“But your manuscript? You’ve turned that in to the Post, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “Some days ago, in fact. I didn’t tell them that. But I’m getting it back today. I’ll play ball if they will.” He looked morosely around the room. “You can tell them they needn’t go through my stuff anymore. I’m not ass enough to leave anything here. And look, Grace. I want you to do something for me.”
“No indeed,” I said. I shook my head firmly. “I’m having no part in this, Myron.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’ll run this show myself. But I’ve sent some of my mail to your house. It’s the only private Washington address I could remember. Will you hang on to it till I give you a forwarding address?”
“Myron,” I said, “did you send that—”
“I sent a copy of my profile of Judge Whitney, because people here keep sticking their snoots into my stuff.”
“Which you started, didn’t you?”
He nodded coolly. “And am going to finish.” Then he gave me an angry glare. “And I might have known whose side you’d be on. If you’ll scram, I’d like to get a bath and pack.” He opened the door for me. “And look. When you see Primrose, just shut up. I’ll handle this business my own way.”
I went out. Abigail Whitney’s door was closed, which was just as well, I thought. Myron’s voice was high-pitched and strident, and if she’d overheard me calling her a scheming, worldly old woman she couldn’t very well have helped hearing his uncomplimentary allusion to her nose.
Her door hadn’t opened and Myron hadn’t come down when Colonel Primrose called for me shortly before noon. When I got down, he was waiting in the first-floor front room. It was a formal, rather lovely room in pale old-gold Louis Quinze and gray, but lifeless, as rooms are that are never used. Colonel Primrose was looking around it with more interest than he usually shows in interior decoration, his black eyes as alert as a terrier’s by a rat hole.
“Well,” I said, “Mrs. Whitney’s changed her mind about you. She thought at first she wanted you to help her, but now she doesn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d like to meet her.”
“She’s an extraordinary woman.” I could certainly say that much truthfully, I thought. “What about the Hibbs burglary?”
“His brief case was left at the Sansom Street entrance to the Curtis Building, sometime early this morning. Nothing gone. One of the watchmen found it. The police are fingerprinting it.”
“Were there fingerprints at the house?”
He shook his head. “Footprints, but the sun’s melted them. It was a big man. Can’t tell you anymore. Not a professional, but quiet.”
I asked, as casually as I could, “Have they any idea what he was looking for?”
“Not the foggiest. They’ve run several pieces on some pretty shady setups, like the one Jack Alexander did on Atlantic City, but nothing like that’s scheduled at the moment. Some crackpot, probably—though most of them make a personal call at the office. We’ll go around after lunch and see if anything’s happened.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was being honest or cagey, and I didn’t dare try to find out. Then it occurred to me that obviously, if that manuscript of the profile of Judge Whitney had been in as long as Myron had said it had, it wouldn’t have been among those in Ben Hibbs’ brief case last night.
“What brought you up here?” he asked, as we were going down the front steps. “You seemed to be just a little incoherent over the telephone.”
There’s nothing military about Colonel Primrose’s slightly rotund figure; he leaves all that to his sergeant. Except for the bullet wound in his neck that makes him cock his head down and around when he looks sideways, and his black eyes that contract like an old parrot’s, the Army doesn’t seem to have left many traces on him. I’m so acc
ustomed to his polite urbanity and to the affable and slightly amused attitude of a man who’s lived a full and exciting life and reserves judgment on it that I’m never quite sure whether he’s more or less deceptive than he appears.
“I came up because Mrs. Whitney asked me to,” I answered casually. “And of course Washington isn’t the same when you’re away.”
He cocked his head down then and shot me an amused and quite unbelieving glance.
“And what are you doing up here?” I asked.
“I’m trailing some income-tax figures.” He chuckled a little. “A rather well-known New Yorker. He had a fire, rather fortunately, and all his records were burned. Unfortunately, he didn’t know all the banks he uses have had a microfilm recording system for the last fifteen years, so all his checks have had their pictures taken. That’s what I was doing at the Quaker Trust. Odd you should have remembered Toplady’s name. He’s in charge of their records.”
A bright and lovely fight began to dawn in my mind. “Is it Myron’s income tax, by any chance?” I asked. “Myron Kane’s?”
He looked around at me again. “Good Lord, no! It’s somebody you’ve met in Washington. He has no connection with Myron. Why?”
And I suppose I should add that he really hadn’t, and that the job Colonel Primrose was on, furthermore, had nothing whatever to do with any of the Whitneys.
“I just wondered,” I said. “When I said I was coming up, you seemed awfully interested in Myron.”
“I am. Because of that profile of Whitney he’s doing. The daughter and son-in-law are up in arms. I happened to see Ben Hibbs after they’d been in. Then I saw Myron. That was about a week ago. He certainly looked like Mark Twain’s calmly confident Christian with four aces. I’ve been wondering.”
“Do you know Judge Whitney well?” I asked.
We’d got to the Warwick Room. It was already crowded, as Philadelphians eat lunch earlier than any other people in the world.
He nodded. “And I’d hate to see Myron do one of his more malicious jobs on him. Most newspapermen have a sort of ethics, but Myron’s haven’t ever been visible to me.”
It was a meatless day, but when the omelets came, they were very good.
“Myron’s always seemed to me to have a chip on his shoulder, for some reason,” Colonel Primrose said. “Inferiority complex is a more hackneyed way of saying it. I don’t see why he has it. The Press Who’s Who says he was born in Virginia and educated by tutors and in private schools abroad. Universities, London and the Sorbonne. His father was a judge and his mother a Randolph of Virginia. With that background, he oughtn’t to be such a damned snob. He’s made a lot of money and he knows the best people, and yet he delights in sideswiping everybody with any social standing. I wonder what he’s doing to the Whitneys. Do you know?”
I shook my head and went on with my lunch. When I glanced up, he was looking at me with a politely amused smile on his face.
“You know what you remind me of?”
“No,” I said. “And I’d just as soon not.”
“Did you ever see a sooty grouse fluttering around, pretending to have a broken wing, when you get too near her covey?” he asked. “Myron hasn’t been appealing to your better nature, has he? Or is it Mrs. Whitney?” He looked at me then in that oddly appraising way of his. “Who broke into Ben Hibbs’ place last night, Mrs. Latham?” he asked deliberately.
I could feel my cheeks flush warmly. There’s something very irritating about being an open book.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.
He paid his bill and got up. “I think you’d better come over to the Post with me. Unless you have some reason for not wanting to.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’d love to.”
That wasn’t true, of course; I didn’t want to go at all, and I wish now I hadn’t.
It was the first time I’d ever been there. The taxi went skidding down Spruce Street. It was almost two o’clock. The gray brick between the car tracks was a shimmering gun-metal ribbon down the center of the old street, with its line of leafless sycamores on either side and its mellow, lovely old houses. We turned into Washington Square, across Walnut into 7th Street and to the right, weaving a perilous way through the enormous trucks unloading prodigious rolls of paper in the narrow alley of Sansom Street alongside the Curtis Building. Independence Square was just ahead of us, and the old State House, the cradle of liberty, where the bell is that rang out to all mankind, was on our left as we turned—so beautiful, and with so much dignity and meaning in its time-stained brick and slender, gleaming cupola, that I never see it without a sudden quickening of my heart. Men and women in uniform hurrying by gave it a sharpened meaning just then and as we turned right into 6th Street in front of the Curtis Building, the sun caught the great service flag hanging in front of the weather-stained double columns of the facade. The number “947” was on the single blue star in its radiant white red-bordered field.
We got out and went up the steps. It didn’t at once seem strange to me that a policeman was standing behind the long plate-glass window at the left of the door or that Sgt. Phineas T. Buck’s large, square and granite form was standing there with him. I’ve seen both Sergeant Buck and policemen in unexpected places everywhere. But Colonel Primrose, I thought, quickened his pace and pushed open the heavy bronze-trimmed door a little hastily. We stepped into the vestibule, and Colonel Primrose opened the plate-glass door at the left.
I knew, when we went in, that something was wrong, knew it the instant Sergeant Buck stepped forward, even before I saw the group of people there in the lobby. I’d seen groups of people look like that before, and heard the same sort of voice say, “Get back there, everybody. Get ’em back. Get ’em out of the way.”
They were across the lobby in front of a raised terrace between square marble columns. Behind the terrace was the great glass mosaic, lustrous, softly glowing, the purple shadows creeping up among opalescent flowers around the brilliant waterfall at the base of a mountain to the glorious glow of the sunset and the dark mystery of gnarled and romantic trees. Then the soft musical trickle of water stopped abruptly. Someone was moving the ornamental shrubs around the front and side of the terrace. I saw a great terracotta oil jar, like Ali Baba’s, being pushed away, and heard the voice again, “Get back. Get ’em back… Here, doctor.”
There was a movement in the tightly packed group. They parted to let a white-coated man through. I saw him then. He was lying, his face wet, at the side of a shallow, oblong pool. His black hair was clinging to his pallid face, and there were bits of green pond scum matted on it like grotesque vine leaves of the grave. It was Myron Kane, and he was quite dead.
“I guess he fainted and drowned,” someone said.
I knew that wasn’t so. Myron Kane had never for an instant fainted and drowned, not in the soft glow of the alabaster lights in front of the opalescent and green-and-gold mural—not anywhere. Myron’s hold on life had been too ruthless and too canny to let it go so easily.
There was a sudden commotion at the side of the pool. A man thrust his hand into it and brought it up again.
“Don’t look like he fainted to me,” he said.
He was holding up a knife. It looked like a butcher knife from some kitchen of cutthroats, sharp-pointed as a poniard, razor-edged. The handle was wrapped in some faintly gleaming gunmetal-gray material.
A tall, stoop-shouldered man spoke.
“That’s a cutting-down knife,” he said. “From Electrotyping, on the ninth floor.”
A quiet, fatherly-looking man in a dark gray suit walked over toward him. He could have been a member of the Rotary Club in good standing, a lawyer or an executive of The Curtis Publishing Company—anything except what I soon learned he was—the captain of the Philadelphia homicide squad.
Colonel Primrose went over, too, and spoke to him.
“I know this man,” he said. He nodded toward the tall, stoop-shouldered man. “This is Erd Brandt. He
was a colonel in the Seventh Regiment. He’s one of the editors here.”
“Yes?” the fatherly-looking man said. “He looks to me like a Number One suspect. How does an editor know what kind of a knife it is and where it comes from? I suppose Benjamin Franklin had it in his pocket.”
Colonel Primrose looked at him. “Benjamin-—”
“That’s the story.” He jerked a finger at a man sitting white-faced behind the marble desk at the side of the lobby near the elevator. “He’s been sitting there since one o’clock. He says the last person he saw in here was Benjamin Franklin. My name’s Francis X. Malone, and I’m captain of the homicide squad, and I’m Irish, and I’ve seen a lot of fairies, but Benjamin Franklin’s dead. Maybe he founded this magazine, but he’s still dead.”
I had the grotesque thought that if it was Benjamin Franklin, it wasn’t Monk, it wasn’t anybody in Rittenhouse Square.
Captain Malone beckoned. The man at the desk got up and came over. He was white-faced and his knees were not steady, but he was in deadly earnest.
“I’m not kidding, captain,” he said. “I saw him. I tell you I saw him with my own eyes. I mean, I know him. Look. I look at him all day.” He pointed to the white marble bust of the great gazetteer looking placidly down from his pedestal. “He walked right across here. I saw him. He had on white stockings and a brown coat and short pants with buckles at the knees. I’m not crazy. I tell you I saw him twice.”
A tall young man with blue eyes and glasses, quiet, calm and unhurried, had come over to the table in front of the pool terrace where we were.
“I tell you, Mr. Hibbs, I saw him—I saw Benjamin Franklin,” the man from the desk said. And I had no possible doubt of the conviction of truth in his own mind. “I just tell you I saw him,” he added patiently.
“All right, you saw him,” Captain Malone said. “Just take it easy.” He turned to Ben Hibbs. “Did all the members of your staff know this man Kane, Mr. Hibbs?”
Ben Hibbs nodded. “Yes. We all knew him.”