The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Leslie Ford

  He was speaking very quietly, but his voice came with a horrible and ghastly clarity. “… a break I really didn’t expect, Mr. Toplady. I’m playing in luck these days, it seems.”

  The calm, confident voice, tinged with amused arrogance, came out of the ivory box so perfectly that I found myself not hearing it, but seeing Travis Elliot standing there, poised and entirely controlled, as he’d been standing when I came into this room the first time.

  “Where are they, Mr. Toplady? You brought them, didn’t you?” His voice sharpened for an instant. “Good. And let’s be quick about it. You’re sure they’re all here?”

  There was a long silence—in both rooms.

  The voice came out of the ivory box again. “It’s too bad I can’t see for myself, Mr. Toplady. But I don’t think you’d have the guts to pull a fast one—not when you’re in for the five thousand Abigail gave you to protect my father’s good name. It’s funny I never thought about this. Not till today, when the good colonel spilled it at the table. So he saw the records of the Elliot steal, did he? And you didn’t talk, did you, Mr. Toplady?”

  When the little man’s voice came out of the ivory box for the first time, the contrast to Travis Elliot’s cool, articulate confidence was so frightening that I felt a cold dread around my heart. And yet, shaking and hardly audible as it was, it had a kind of dignity and courage—I suppose of a man who knew he was utterly lost.

  “He saw them. I—I couldn’t help it. They were on the same film he was looking at.”

  “He couldn’t tell anything,” the coolly amused voice said.

  “Yes, he could. If he knew about signatures.”

  Travis’ voice sharpened again instantly. “What do you mean, Mr. Toplady?”

  “I mean because of your father’s heart. You can see it—it shows in a person’s signature. Bookkeepers can tell lots of times before a man suspects it himself or the doctor does. That’s how I knew it wasn’t your father signing the checks against Miss Frazier’s money. The signature looked the same but for that. I found out you’d opened a Number Two Account in his name. You presented a letter he was supposed to have signed. But it wasn’t his signature. It was yours—you had no heart condition. I didn’t know what to do. It would have raised such a scandal at the company. So—so I went to him and told him about it myself.”

  There was a silence again.

  “Well, it won’t matter now, will it, Mr. Toplady?” the cool voice said. “Here they go, and they burn nicely, don’t they? Much better than paper, Mr. Toplady.”

  Then there was a sudden gasp, and a small cry like the cry of some terrified little animal.

  “I don’t want to do this, Mr. Toplady,” Travis Elliot said, “but there’s nothing else I can do. The walls are thick and the doors closed. Primrose and Malone are busy in there. Primrose has been getting his dope from the charming Mrs. Latham, and she and Monk and my future wife all think it was the judge. Because—thanks to Aunt Abby—they all think he murdered my father. And Malone doesn’t know I was an office boy at the Post one summer, the year they got out the medals for the two-hundredth anniversary. And part of my job was taking manuscripts up to the composing room when the pneumatic tubes got clogged. It’s too bad I can’t tie you up with the Post, too, Mr. Toplady. I’m afraid you’ll just have to be a suicide. The powder marks will show the gun was close to your forehead, and your prints will be on it. Nothing against you personally, Mr. Toplady, but I didn’t have anything against Kane. Or Elsie, except she was so damned officious. Even calling me up to tell me—”

  His voice changed suddenly into a snarl that was nothing human. I stood there perfectly paralyzed and frozen-hearted, and I remember turning with a kind of despair to Colonel Primrose.

  “Oh, can’t you do something?” I cried.

  Then Sam Phelps was running toward the door, his face convulsed, and Captain Malone caught him and held him, wrestling with him, just as the gunshot cracked and we heard a crash and a sound like brass fire irons clanging on a brick hearth. Monk started toward the door and stopped as Colonel Primrose shook his head.

  And Colonel Primrose stood there, imperturbable and undisturbed, and reached down and turned on the blue dial.

  “Well, Buck?” he said.

  And I could have wept as I heard that composed granite voice coming out of the little ivory box. “Everything as ordered, sir,” Sergeant Buck said. Then there was a tinge of something like apology in his sinister tones, as if it wasn’t quite as ordered, after all.

  “I had to knock the son of a—the fellow out. Little man’s okay. Shot missed him, winged the looking glass. Captain Malone can—”

  Colonel Primrose switched off the red dial. The room was suddenly silent, except for Captain Malone’s swift strides and the metallic clink of the handcuffs against the doorknob and the door banging shut after him.

  Laurel Frazier hadn’t moved since she came into the room. The color was coming slowly back into her cheeks and the blue was deepening the gray of her eyes again. Monk was looking at her, his face full of a compassion and tenderness that was very moving. He went over to her slowly and put both hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Coppertop,” he said gently.

  She looked up at him silently for a moment. Then she said, “I was just—just afraid it—maybe it was you. Oh, Monk, don’t be horrid to me anymore!”

  She was in his arms then, her burnished head by those starred ribbons, and he was holding her close to him. And I turned away just in time to see Colonel Primrose going out into the hall. I followed him, and saw the two of them coming from the library. I’ve forgotten who it was—Moses, I imagine—who brought water out of the solid rock. Miracles, I suppose, like history, repeat themselves, because Sergeant Buck was actually mopping his granite forehead with his sleeve. His other huge arm was round Mr. Albert Toplady’s frail shoulders.

  I turned back. Monk held Laurel’s arms in his hands and bent down and kissed her. He went over then to his father and put his hand on his shoulder. Judge Whitney raised his head. They didn’t say anything. After a moment, Judge Whitney got slowly to his feet and looked across the room at his sister.

  “Well, Abigail?” he said quietly.

  Colonel Primrose came back into the room. Outside in the hall I heard the tread of heavy feet, and I turned away quickly. Colonel Primrose closed the door, looking from Judge Whitney to his sister.

  Abigail Whitney straightened up against her yellow cushions, but her blue eyes were old and tired. The alchemy was there no longer.

  “You did kill Douglas Elliot,” she said, her voice slow and painful. “When you came to me to borrow the money to make up the loss--Oh, if you had only told me it was for him, not for you! You said you needed it; you didn’t say Douglas needed it. If you’d said it was for Douglas I would have given it willingly, and then he would never have had to take his own life. He’d never have had to make the sacrifice he did to shield his son. It was morally you that killed him, Nathaniel, even though the gun was in his own hand.”

  “You wouldn’t have lent this money to your own brother?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly.

  The blue fire blazed up in her eyes. “Never! If it had not been for my brother I would have married Douglas Elliot, and Travis would have been my child. Money was all I ever got out of marriage. I would have died before I let my brother profit by a single dollar of it.”

  “I would have told you,” Judge Whitney said slowly, “if I had known he was going to take his life. I would have broken my word to him. He made me swear solemnly that I would not tell you it was for him. I didn’t realize that it was his last resort and there was no other way out. I—it may be that I was wrong in not letting him marry you. Money seemed to be all you ever wanted, and you would have ruined him in making him get it for you… What was this document that Myron Kane got?”

  A touch of her old manner came back to her. She sat up straighter.

  “It’s most Unfortunate,” she said. “It was a letter Douglas wrote to y
ou. He posted it before he… killed himself. It came the morning after. I—I did what Elsie did. I signed for it and I read it. I should have burned it, but it was his last word, and I—I never dared.” She closed her eyes for a moment, the tears rolling down her wasted yellow cheeks. “It said the envelope enclosed in it was being entrusted to you. You were to look after Travis. If he was ever in trouble of his own making, you were to open it. I opened it then—like Elsie. It said he was taking the blame for the loss of Laurel’s money. He wanted to save his son from disgrace and give him another chance. It was the only way he knew. He was doing it because he loved him, and it may have been his fault for giving him responsibility beyond his years. He said he had told Travis he was leaving a statement of the truth with someone, not telling him who, so Travis would never go wrong again. He said the man Toplady would know. All he was trying to do was protect Travis against temptation again.”

  “And you put the letter in my files?” Judge Whitney asked.

  “I put it there. I was afraid not to. I thought you would take it out to Whitemarsh and nobody would ever disturb it until we were dead. I’ve left all my property to Travis, and I left word for him where to find the letter when I’m gone. He’s all I’ve… ever had.” Abigail Whitney’s eyes closed again.

  “You knew he was going to kill Myron Kane?” Colonel Primrose asked deliberately.

  She opened her eyes quickly. “No, no. I was trying to save him, just as I tried to save Elsie. I didn’t want their blood on his hands. But afterward there was nothing I could do. And now, please go, all of you. I am Very Tired.”

  16

  I didn’t see Abigail Whitney again, and I didn’t want to. I did see Monk and Laurel, because they were married at Judge Whitney’s, and she’s like a lot of other people now, living in a tourist cabin near a marine station, waiting for Monk to go across again before she goes back to her job with his father. It wasn’t till after the marriage that she told Colonel Primrose she really had tried to get a job at the Post, thinking she might be able to get hold of the manuscript. It was all she could think of to do to try to save Judge Whitney. And it was Sergeant Buck who’d found her in the telephone booth and got her out.

  I didn’t see the people at The Saturday Evening Post again, either, but it seems Colonel Primrose did. We were going down to Washington on the train.

  “I don’t like to admit it, of course,” I said, “but I owe you a real apology. I didn’t for a minute realize you were deliberately bringing up the Douglas steal at Judge Whitney’s luncheon.”

  Colonel Primrose smiled a little.

  “And how did you know about Abigail’s communication system?”

  “I spotted the vent in the molding in that downstairs reception room the day I called for you,” he said placidly. “Buck followed up via the butler and the maid and the electrician who installed it. It was very simple.”

  “Maybe,” I said dubiously. “There’s another thing that may be simple to you, but not to me. That’s how Travis ever got Myron murdered and stuck in the pool. He said he’d worked at the Post, but—”

  Colonel Primrose had a wry half-smile on one side of his face. “That’s the trouble of being off the home field,” he said. “In Washington I’d have known everything Captain Lamb knew. Malone wasn’t playing it that way. I’d never got to first base if I hadn’t met up with Mr. Toplady. Malone, on the other hand, had Travis pretty well traced down, except he didn’t know it was Travis. He was still trying to pin it on somebody at the Post—or on Monk, at the end. Travis was still cocky enough when they got him to headquarters to correct Malone on a few minor points, but, in the main, Malone was right.

  “What happened was that Travis had an appointment to meet Myron in the lobby at two-thirty. Myron was to get the script and give it to him. But Myron, as you remember, hadn’t got it—Bob Fuoss told him to wait for the proof. But Travis knew the ropes. It was he who called up Composition in the morning, said he was W. Thornton Martin, and was told the manuscript had gone to the monotype keyboard. He knew the place would be deserted at noon, when they all went to lunch. He walked in the lobby and across to the second-register elevator, went up to the fifth floor and through to the manufacturing side, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and went up on the elevator to the ninth floor. He says he didn’t have any idea of doing anything but get the script, and settle with Myron later, but when he went through the foundry, he saw the cutting-down knife lying where Albert Hesington had left it when he went to lunch.

  “He says he didn’t plan at that point to stay in the building, but people started to come back. So he calmly went into that phone booth—you remember, where we went along with Mr. Trayser to get to the runway from Manufacturing to the lunchroom on the editorial side on the ninth floor. Every time anybody came along, he was busy apparently making phone calls. He waited until time to meet Myron, picked up his coat and hat, that he’d left on the fifth floor, and went on down. He says that even then he didn’t plan to kill Myron there. But Myron was standing up on the terrace, looking at the mosaic, and they were hidden from the desk by the pillars and the shrubbery. The lobby was empty and the elevators had both just gone up, and he recognized it was a natural. Myron turned to face him and he just let him have it. The knife was pointed and razor-sharp. He left it in and lowered Myron’s body into the pool, face down, and walked off.”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head.

  “He didn’t realize, until he was outside, how neatly he’d laid it all on the Post’s doorstep. It seemed to amuse him considerably. And he was civil enough to say he hoped Pete Martin wouldn’t hold it against him; he’d used his name because he’d just read one of his articles. The fact that his initials and Monk’s were the same was pure coincidence.” Colonel Primrose was silent for a moment. “And by the way,” he went on, “I had lunch with Marion Turner and Hibbs and Erd Brandt. They tell me a good many of their readers think this has gone far enough. They think you ought to marry me and get it over with.”

  I picked up a copy or the Post the man next to me had left in his seat when he went to dinner, and opened it. Sergeant Buck, fortunately, was a dozen seats away at the end of the car.

  Colonel Primrose looked at me and smiled. “Well?” he said.

  FIN

  About Leslie Ford

  Leslie Ford (1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.

  Bibliography

  The Sound of Footsteps (aka Footsteps on the Stairs) (1931)

  Murder in Maryland (1932)

  By the Watchman’s Clock (1932)

  The Clue of the Judas Tree (1933)

  The Strangled Witness (1934)

  Burn Forever (aka Mountain Madness) (1935)

  Ill Met by Moonlight (1937)

  The Simple Way of Poison (1937)

  Three Bright Pebbles (1938)

  Reno Rendezvous (aka Mr. Cromwell Is Dead) (1939)

  False to Any Man (aka Snow-White Murder) (1939)

  The Town Cried Murder (1939)

  Old Lover’s Ghost (aka A Capital Crime) (1940)

  Road to Folly (1940)

  The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (1941)

  Murder in the OPM (aka Priority Murder) (1942)

  Murder with Southern Hospitality (aka Murder Down South) (1942)

  Siren in the Night (
1943)

  All for the Love of a Lady (aka Crack of Dawn) (1944)

  The Philadelphia Murder Story (1945)

  Honolulu Story (aka Honolulu Murder Story) (aka Honolulu Murders) (1946)

  The Woman in Black (1947)

  The Devil’s Stronghold (1948)

  Date with Death (aka Shot in the Dark) (1949)

  Murder Is the Pay-Off (1951)

  The Bahamas Murder Case (1952)

  Washington Whispers Murder (aka The Lying Jade) (1953)

  Invitation to Murder (1954)

  Murder Comes to Eden (1955)

  The Girl from the Mimosa Club (1957)

  Trial by Ambush (aka Trial from Ambush) (1962)

  As Brenda Conrad

  The Stars Give Warning (1941)

  Caribbean Conspiracy (1942)

  Girl with a Golden Bar (1944)

  As David Frome

  The Murder of an Old Man (1929)

  In at the Death (1929)