The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Leslie Ford

“I’m wondering if I could have saved her,” he said. “I think not. She must have been a very stupid woman.”

  He went over to the window and stood looking down on Washington Square.

  “They say it’s greener than any other square because it was Potter’s Field in Revolutionary times,” he said. He was talking about the square, but I knew he wasn’t thinking about it, and he didn’t say anything else for quite a long time. Then he said, “It’s strange the way a very bright man will believe anything a red-headed girl wants to tell him.”

  He turned around.

  “I’m sorry about Elsie Phelps,” he said quietly. “And about her husband. I hope Soapy Sam’s alibi today is as watertight as the one he had yesterday.”

  I was still too shocked to say anything.

  “We’d better go and see your friend Abigail,” he said quietly. “I don’t quite understand that old woman.”

  We went out through the swinging gate. It limped to a stop behind us. There was no one around until we got to the door going out to the elevators, and then a girl came quickly through the partition that closed off the row of editorial offices.

  “Colonel Primrose,” she said, “Mr. Martin would like to see you, if you have time.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded, and we followed her down the cork-floored corridor.

  Pete Martin scrambled up from behind his desk. The ashtray was overflowing with quarter-smoked cigarettes, and his flushed, perspiring face looked strangely unrelated to the picture of himself in his age of innocence, in long dresses with a baby cap on his hairless head, that was propped up on the molding of the wall his desk was against. He didn’t look at all like the star reporter and writer that he is.

  “Why, look, colonel,” he said. “I just stuck that outfit in Fred’s file because the coast was clear down there.” He grinned very sheepishly at us. “It was just a gag. I’m doing Warner Olivier’s Keeping Posted this week while he’s away, and I thought I’d dress up like Benjamin Franklin—as I did recently when I was working on an article on Hollywood make-up technique—and see what they’d do if the founder applied for a job during the manpower shortage. I was going to come up and get dressed, and go back down and tell Malone, but that’s when I found out I’d bled all over the damned coat.” He picked up a pair of paper scissors on his desk. “I did it with these when I was trying to trim the wig around my ears. I mopped it up with my handkerchief, but gee… And the reason I came in through the ninth floor was that I didn’t want to meet any of the gang. I was going to ask for an interview with an editor, to try to sell a treatise on lightning. I sure got all fouled up.”

  Colonel Primrose’s face was grave still, but I could see his shoulders shaking slightly.

  “I supposed you had,” he said very urbanely. “I saw the piece you did on Hollywood make-up. You made a good Franklin.” He smiled then. “There was a sentence at the end of another of your Hollywood articles that all of us should frame and remember. Something about a little ham in all of us? And they hang hams in Pennsylvania. Well, let’s leave it as it is.” He started out and turned. “You saw Kane when you crossed in front of the garden terrace, of course,” he said. “What made you think he was dead?”

  Pete Martin’s large face flushed a little more. “He looked dead,” he said reasonably. “I guess I ought to have yelled then, instead of going around the elevator shaft and coming in and pointing. But—well, I guess that’s what happened to me in Hollywood. But, colonel, I don’t want to get Fred mixed up in this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Colonel Primrose said. At the door he turned back. “When you get the piece on roller skaters done, you’d better send a copy to Captain Malone. He’s under a false impression.”

  15

  “I don’t quite know what to do,” I said unhappily, as we came out through the plate-glass-and-bronze doors of the Curtis Building. “I hate to go back to Mrs. Whitney’s, but I guess I ought to.”

  I might as well have been talking to the double row of stone columns. Colonel Primrose was so deep in his own concerns that mine were less than negligible. He was more profoundly disturbed than I’d ever seen him, and it gave me an increasingly uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d got so used to having complete confidence in him that it frightened me a little, seeing him lose it in himself.

  “I hope to God I’m not making a mistake,” he said, with so much sincerity that my uneasiness quickened to alarm. He looked back at the Curtis Building.

  “You don’t really think it might be somebody there?”

  “No, no, no,” he said impatiently. “There wasn’t the ghost of a motive, from the beginning. The mere fact that Kane was killed in the lobby—” He broke off abruptly. “I’m not worried about that. It’s Toplady I’m thinking about.” He looked toward Chestnut Street for the taxi that was supposed to come and pick us up. “If I’d known about Elsie Phelps, I’d have kept my mouth shut,” he said grimly. “But Toplady would have come in for it sooner or later, or he’d have cracked up. And there’s no time to work it out step by step, and they’d never get a conviction. Toplady would be dead and that would be the end of it.”

  I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but the taxi came around the corner at that moment. If it hadn’t, in another minute I’d have gone back and into the dispensary, and asked Doctor Repplier, the company physician, for a strait jacket.

  He didn’t have to tell me to be quiet this time. I was too disturbed to want to talk.

  “Go on to Mrs. Whitney’s and keep still,” he said as we turned from Walnut Street into 17th. “Above all, don’t say where you’ve been. Do you understand that?”

  I nodded. He got out at the Warwick and disappeared under the green awning, and I went on around to the pink house on 19th Street.

  The butler opened the door. “Madam wants to see you,” he said. He wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t give the squirrel his walnut until I was halfway to the stairs, and then he did it rather surreptitiously and hastily closed the door.

  I didn’t think about the mirror until I’d got beyond it, so I didn’t see Abigail until I was actually in her room.

  “I’m so Glad you’ve come, Dear Child,” she said.

  She was alone and sitting up against the yellow cushions. She seemed very remote and detached, someway, with her battery of radios and telephones, books and flowers on the table beside her.

  “It’s rather horrible about Elsie,” she said. “I’m more Distressed than I can say. I’ve implored her for years to mind her own business. I once gave her a Blue-Back Speller with the story about Tom, the Meddler, marked Very Clearly.”

  “When you and Sam said you had the document, you didn’t, did you?” I asked.

  She looked at me calmly. “I expected to have it and the manuscript this morning by Special Delivery. It was Fate. I’ve Always Believed in it. That’s why I’ve shed very few tears in my life, Dear Child. What is to be, will be. It’s very Silly to let yourself get Emotionally Involved. Nothing but Trouble comes of it.”

  She leaned her orange head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. She looked horribly old and saffron-colored, but still tensely alive.

  “I don’t wish anyone to—to be called to account for the death of either Myron Kane or Elsie Phelps,” she said. Only her lips moved, and her voice was very quiet and clear. “There are various kinds of self-defense. One’s reputation, and honor, and position in society, are more valuable than the mere breath animating a few pounds of water and clay.”

  Her eyes opened, and she looked directly at me.

  “If someone has a knife at your throat and you kill him, it’s justifiable homicide in self-defense. Both Myron Kane and Elsie held a knife, prepared to use it. Their departure was likewise justifiable homicide in self-defense.”

  I suppose it’s a commentary on the kind of moral backbone I possess that when I was within her orbit, and under the influence that she in her pink house and her brother in his brownstone one next door exerted, I fe
lt there was a great deal in what she said. The only very real reservation I had was that I didn’t want little Mr. Toplady also to bite the dust in justifiable homicide. I dare say she wouldn’t regard his departure, if and when it was deemed necessary, as even an extreme length.

  Her blue eyes were fixed on the mirror that reflected her tiny segment of the external world.

  “Your friend, the Colonel, is going into my Brother’s House,” she said. “I regret having been Instrumental in bringing him here. I expect that was Fate, too, however. I didn’t realize that, due to the Peculiar Intensity of Myron’s animosity, matters were out of my hands. Myron was a terrible snob.”

  Her eyes were still on the mirror. Suddenly her fingers clenched and then began beating a soft tattoo on the green silk bedspread, slowly at first, faster, and then slowly again.

  “I seldom smoke,” she said, very quietly, “but I would like a cigarette now. You’ll find one in the box on the table… So Albert Toplady is finally coming to see me.”

  I was getting her a gold-tipped Turkish cigarette out of the silver box when she said that. I turned quickly. She was watching the mirror, intent as a cat, her fingers drumming slowly and irregularly as a cat’s tail twitching.

  I remembered everything Colonel Primrose had told me, but I couldn’t help it. “Do you know Mr. Toplady?” I inquired as casually as I could.

  “At one time I had considerable dealings with him.”

  I don’t know and never shall know why I had to go on. “And you knew he is Myron Kane’s father.”

  She stared at me, her eyes aghast and unbelieving, her face drained suddenly of every vestige of color, her mouth open.

  “I—I thought you knew!” I stammered. “I thought the letter—”

  She straightened up slowly. “There was nothing in the letter,” she said sharply. “It was just fan mail—just what you said it was. The reason we had to—had to see it was we thought Toplady might be trying to sell Myron Kane information, knowing he was doing an article on my brother.”

  She leaned back again against her cushions, her eyes closed, and lay there so still that I thought she might have fainted. Then she opened her eyes. She put her hand out.

  “That makes it very different,” she whispered. “Get my Brother. Tell him to come quickly. I have to see him.” She motioned toward the phone. “Tell him to come alone. Tell him I’m dying. He’ll be Delighted.”

  I started toward the phone, but I didn’t call Judge Whitney. I hadn’t heard the door being answered or seen anyone in the mirror outside, but there in the door was Monk Whitney. He was in uniform and he had an overcoat and bag. He put the bag down and threw the coat on top of it and came over to the foot of the swan bed. He moved slowly, like a man struggling in some inner hell, his eyes haggard.

  “I’ve come to say goodbye, Aunt Abby,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

  Her face was some kind of a mask so far outside my experience that I couldn’t attempt to interpret it.

  She was silent for a long time, just looking at him.

  “I think you should stay,” she said then, calmly.

  He shook his head. “He’ll have Travis and Laurel,” he said. “If he should need me, I’ll come. I’d rather—I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” Her eyes were fixed steadily on him. “Where are they now?”

  “Over at the house, all of them. They just brought Sam over. I never thought I’d see a guy cry like that. He was out looking for her every place. His secretaries were calling up everybody she knew. How much—I mean, did he know what—” He found the going too hard, and stopped.

  “Do you mean,” his aunt said very quietly, “did he know what was in the document Elsie intercepted? No. Unless she got in touch with him and told him. Which I doubt.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m too old to be sure of anything, Dear Boy,” she said. “He was probably merely using his head. It was I who asked him to phone this Dear Child’s house and have her maid forward Myron’s mail. I presume he put two and two together, and knew Elsie had assumed a danger as great as Myron’s.”

  Abigail Whitney was watching him intently, her eyes suddenly brilliant pin points of blue fire, and crafty blue fire. She relaxed suddenly, her frail body sunk back against the cushions, her face as bland as a desiccated Buddha’s.

  “Where is that little creature Albert Toplady?” she asked calmly.

  “At the house,” Monk said. “Well, I guess I’ll shove. Goodbye, Aunt Abby… Goodbye, Grace. Stand by, will you?”

  The appeal in his eyes was eloquent far above and beyond anything he could have said. It was bewildering to me, because it didn’t seem credible that he could believe his father, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, could—

  “They’re coming.” Abigail’s voice was as sharp as a lancet. “Go quickly.”

  The blue eyes were intent and crafty again. I don’t know how or why, but I knew, with a flash of intuitive certainty as clear as lightning against a summer sky, that she was planning, someway, to sell him out.

  “Don’t go, Monk!” The words came out of my mouth before I was aware of even thinking of saying them.

  He stopped short halfway across the room and turned back. He couldn’t have helped catch the malignant glance Abigail Whitney shot me before she settled back in her yellow cushions.

  “It is too late to do anything, Dear Boy,” she said calmly. “They’re here, I’m afraid.”

  I looked quickly in her outside mirror. The street was empty. I looked at her. Her eyes were fixed on the other mirror—the one by the door on the wall. In it I could see the shell recess in the hall outside. The whole shell was moving, swinging open, and as it moved I saw a narrow corridor that was full of men. Judge Whitney’s white head towered above them all. Then they were in the hall, crowding the mirror. In front were Colonel Primrose, Albert Toplady and Judge Whitney. Mr. Toplady was staring around him like a frail awed soul newly admitted through the paradisial gates.

  Abigail Whitney’s fingers drummed silently on the green silk cover and were motionless. Judge Whitney’s deep, grave voice came in from the hall. “He said he was coming over here.”

  Monk stood silently by the window, facing them.

  “He is probably with Mrs. Whitney,” Colonel Primrose said.

  He looked at the door. It seemed to me that his eyes and old Abigail’s met in the mirror and held an instant before he turned away. “Perhaps you’d better see, Malone.”

  Captain Malone’s head showed over Mr. Toplady’s. He came to the door.

  “I’m here, if you want me,” Monk said evenly.

  I heard Colonel Primrose’s voice again from the hall. “All right, Mr. Toplady. Will you wait back there in the library until we’re ready for you?”

  Captain Malone turned in the doorway. “You ought to have somebody wait with him,” he said dryly.

  “If you think so.” I thought Colonel Primrose’s voice sounded a little annoyed. “Will someone—”

  “I will, if you’d like me to.”

  I hadn’t seen Laurel Frazier anywhere, and her voice came as a surprise to me. And to Monk Whitney. He moved abruptly and was motionless again, his face going tight and shuttered.

  “Travis can stay, colonel,” Judge Whitney said.

  “I’ll be glad to, sir,” Travis Elliot said. “If you’ll see they aren’t too rough on Aunt Abby.”

  I glanced at Aunt Abby. A faint smile moved at one corner of her mouth. She settled back for all the world like a cat curling down on a cushion in front of a fire.

  “Very well,” Colonel Primrose said. “You can close the door, Elliot. I want a few words first with Mrs. Whitney.”

  In some way that seemed incredible to me, Abigail had managed to smooth out her face and soften her eyes and look the ultimate in a fragile invalidism that the first rude breath would end forever. If ever I saw a sepulcher so freshly and perfectly whited in my very presence, I can’t recall it.

  Monk glanced at her
and at me, the lift of his eyebrows hardly perceptible. Then they were coming in.

  It’s hard to get what happened then so that it makes factual sense, it all happened so quickly. One minute Abigail was lying back against her yellow cushions, a calm and controlled, if faded, shadow. The next her face was saffron again, the lines in it carved deeply and terribly, all her pretense about not becoming Emotionally Involved lying in wretched tatters about her, a stricken old spider with her web torn apart, useless to protect the only thing she loved. Judge Whitney came in, grave and dignified, and as secure as if he were wearing his judicial robes, and in an instant he was gray and haggard, his hand reaching blindly out for a chair or anything to keep him from utter physical collapse. It happened to all of them except to Laurel Frazier, and that was because she’d come in, her bright copper hair like a flame that had burned all the life from her body, moving erect and taut, her lips parted a little, her eyes dulled and gray, waiting for some blow to fall. And Monk Whitney stood motionless by the window.

  Colonel Primrose came in passing a foot in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction, and went directly to Abigail Whitney’s stately and lovely swan bed. She looked up at him with so much concentrated charm in those vivid cornflower eyes that I wondered for an instant if she’d got herself mixed up with Madame de Sevigne, or whoever it was who still had lovers at ninety. She held out her hand.

  “I am honored, colonel,” she murmured. “I’ve seldom—”

  His hands held hers for a bare instant and moved down to her bedside table. He picked up an ivory-painted radio. Abigail’s hand poised in the air was rigid, her body erect. The limpid eyes, cornflower blue, were black as a cobra’s.

  “The blue dial, colonel,” she said. Her voice was clear and sharp.

  Their eyes met for an instant.

  “I think not, Mrs. Whitney,” he said politely.

  His fingers went to the red dial, and turned it quickly.

  That was when she changed, sooner than the rest, because she knew. And I knew, too, then. I knew how she’d heard everything Myron Kane had said to me, how she knew the carbon copy of the manuscript and the document that Laurel had given him by mistake out of Judge Whitney’s files were at my house in Georgetown, and how she knew I’d called her a scheming, worldly old woman. The red dial tuned her in to every conversation that went on in the house. The blue dial went the other way. It was the one I’d seen her fiddle with when she told me she didn’t want a useful life destroyed. It had let Laurel Frazier hear every word she’d said then, and it had been on the night I’d heard Judge Whitney’s voice in my room for a brief moment before she’d switched it off. That was why no servant ever had to appear upstairs for an order. And I knew now why she wanted the blue dial turned on, and why, when Colonel Primrose turned the red dial, she collapsed back against the cushions, old and saffron and destroyed, even before we heard Travis Elliot’s voice in the library.