by Zenith Brown
“Where is Mr. Thorp?”
The coroner looked about.
“Go get him, Frank. Will one of you gentlemen go with him to show him the way?”
Jerry Nolan went—glad to get out, I think, because he’d been quite devoted to Sandra the last two summers before he married Charlotte Putnam.
The rest of us still avoided looking at each other. Even Yancy Holland was lined up on the side of the Colony, trying to keep the matter as casual as possible. Now and then somebody glanced apprehensively at Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck. They were the imponderables. The rest of them could be counted on to help old Jim if he needed it. In fact, as it was turning out, the coroner was doing it all for them. Even I could think of forty embarrassing questions that had not been asked or even hinted at. The doors of the garage, for instance. If Sandra had gone to sleep, she couldn’t very well have closed the doors and sealed herself in.
Mr. Shryock was examining a piece of folded note paper he’d got somewhere. He had passed it to Mr. Parran, and Mr. Parran had examined it for a considerable time before he passed it back.
I went out to the kitchen to get some glasses and some beer. I didn’t feel in the mood to set fifteen men up to Scotch and soda. Moreover, I couldn’t in the least understand the coroner’s air. Here obviously was a group of people tremendously upset by what had happened, and he was setting about as if it were an all-night oyster roast.
I had just got back when we heard Jerry Nolan’s voice outside.
“Buck up, Andy—for God’s sake, old man!” he was saying. They came in. Andy Thorp’s face was ghastly. His eyes were bloodshot, he looked altogether as if they’d just swept him out from under a counter. There was a dazed and stricken look on his face and he kept muttering crazily and mumbling something about keys. He was six feet three of complete and total incoherence. He sat down, or rather Jerry Nolan pushed him into a chair. Then, to my surprise, Sergeant Buck was at his side handing him a stiff peg of whisky, and taking the empty glass away.
Andy groaned and dropped his head on his hands. He sat there kneading at his head with convulsive fingers.
“Mr. Thorp, I understand you drove Mrs. Gould and Mr. Barrol home from the dance at the club?”
Andy nodded.
“You dropped Mr. Barrol at The Magnolias. Now if you’ll tell us what happened next, please?”
Andy looked up. I think he was really nearer the point of collapse than any of us realized.
“I drove home and put the car in the garage. We got out and closed the door, and walked up the path to the house. Halfway up Sandra said she’d left something in the car. I always lock it, even in the garage—it’s a habit you get into in New York. I said I’d go back and get it for her, but she said she’d do it, so I gave her the keys and went on home. That’s all I know.—That’s all I know, I tell you!”
His voice rose almost to a scream in that last sudden outburst. We all stared at him. He dropped his head in his hands again, making curious strangled sobs. Jerry Nolan patted him anxiously on the back.
Mr. Shryock looked at him for an instant. Then he nodded soberly and picked up the note on the table in front of him.
“Is there anyone here who can identify Mrs. Alexandra Gould’s handwriting?” he asked.
Jerry Nolan flushed and raised his hand. There were several others, including myself and Andy. Mr. Shryock passed the thin elegant bit of gray note paper to Jerry.
“Do you recognize this as Mrs. Gould’s handwriting?”
Jerry nodded. I thought he rather paled too.
“Will you give it to the next gentleman?”
Bailey Fisher took it and handed it quickly to Frank Gerber, nodding his head.
“That’s her writing, all right,” Frank said. He gave it to me. I looked at it.
“Can you identify that as Mrs. Gould’s writing, Mrs. Latham?”
“I can,” I said in a low voice. I’d seen it—a childish uneducated scrawl—a thousand times. She was always writing notes about something.
I handed it back. My heart was like a lump of ice in the pit of my stomach.
The coroner put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and surveyed us over them for an instant.
“I have here a letter that you have heard identified as positively as possible under the circumstances. I’m going to read it to you and then I shall ask for your verdict, gentlemen.”
He looked down. We waited. I could hear Sheila scratching at the door upstairs. Outside a few early birds were chirping, getting the business of worms under way. The clock on the hall landing struck four-thirty.
My dearest darling Jim,—You must forgive your Sandra and forget her forever. It is wrong and wicked to kill myself, I know, but I have ruined your whole life Jim and you have been so good to me. In my country we are not afraid of death and I am not afraid now. Good-by, Jim. They say it does not hurt very much this way.—SANDRA.
The coroner stopped. All of us sat mute and horror-stricken. To hear Sandra’s childish English in the coroner’s flat nasal Maryland whine seemed unbearably incongruous. After a long time he looked up.
“Mrs. Gould senior found that note on her daughter-in-law’s dressing table tonight. That is why she was out searching for her. I think we know what happened, gentlemen. I await your verdict.”
I waited for it too. And when it came, after the twelve men, ten of us from April Harbor and two outsiders, had adjourned to the dining room, I sat with my head down, my hands shaking so I had to hold them stuck deep down in my pockets to keep them still.
They filed back. Rodman Bishop stood up, white-haired, square-faced, hard-jawed. “The jury finds that Alexandra Gould met her death at her own hands from inhaling carbon monoxide fumes while of an unsound mind,” he said.
Mr. Shryock looked at the State’s Attorney. Mr. Parran nodded sleepily.
“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you,” Mr. Shryock said. He rubbed his hands together and looked about. “I think that will be all. I’ll make my report in longhand, Mr. Parran, my typewriter’s being overhauled.”
I still sat there, my hands steadied against the seams of my pockets. Suddenly I looked up. Colonel Primrose was looking intently at me. My lips were very dry. I tried to moisten them without his seeing me. Surely there was no way of his knowing what was beating in my brain until it was numb with dread! The coroner’s hand stuck down towards me brought me to with a start. I scrambled to my feet and said good night to him and to Mr. Parran. Rodman Bishop patted my shoulder.
“You’d better get a little sleep, Grace,” he said. I thought he was telling me something else too.
I closed the door after them, and stood a moment looking out to the bay, silvery calm in the gray dawn. I knew Colonel Primrose was standing in the middle of the room behind me, waiting. At last I turned around and faced him, my hands behind me holding onto the door-knob to steady me.
Our eyes met, his sparkling black and penetrating, mine trying to hide what was in them. Then he smiled, suddenly and kindly.
“It’s hardly fair, is it? Especially when you didn’t invite me here.”
I took a deep breath.
“Maybe you’ll want to tell me about it in the morning,” he said after a moment. “I don’t mind confessing to you that all this worries me.—You’d better go back to bed.”
I’m afraid I literally fled upstairs. I don’t know what on earth Sergeant Buck thought, because he came in just at that moment—after having put the bottles away and washed up the glasses, I was morally certain. I saw him give the Colonel a pained admonitory look.
“Up to your old tricks, sir!” he said severely, shaking his head.
And I, stupidly, was the one who misunderstood him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By morning, however, I should never have thought of telling him. In fact, until I saw Lilac’s solemn black face above the pink-flowered coffeepot on my breakfast tray, I had almost forgotten Sandra Gould. It’s always seemed to me a curious commentary on the human soul that a
few hours’ sleep and the morning sun can manage to do away with the most horrible forebodings. I thought of that now as I waited for Lilac to prop the pillows behind me.
“Mr. Jim’s wife done away with herself las’ night, Miss Grace,” she said ominously.
“I know,” I said, unfolding the morning paper.
“Don’ seem lak she’d do that, somehow. Seem lak she was too ornery.”
“You can’t tell about people,” I answered philosophically.
“ ’Deed an’ that’s what Annie says, at church this mornin’.”
Annie is the Bishops’ cook, and there’s a community bus that takes all the colored help into April Harbor to church at six Sunday mornings and at eight Sunday evenings.
“Hawkins says the carryin’s on in the garage las’ night sumthin’ to hear.”
“Really?”
“Yas’m.”
I was intent on my paper. I didn’t want to discuss this business with her . . . not just then. She’s been with us fifteen years. There’s not very much she doesn’t know about my friends, and her judgments are shrewd.
She stood, a black mountain of irresolution, at the foot of my bed a moment, then went to the door. There she stopped and turned round.
“Shall Ah keep the Cunnel’s breakfas’ hot, or will he get his breakfas’ while he’s in town?”
I looked up, too startled to conceal anything.
“He done went out, him an’ the Sergeant, ’fore me an’ Julius got back from church. We passed ’em on the bridge, goin’ into town.”
With that she went out and closed the door. The inquiry about their breakfast, of course, was merely a gambit with which I really had nothing whatsoever to do.
I put my paper down and drank my orange juice, definitely disturbed by this move on the part of my guest. I knew from my father and my husband—both of them lawyers—that the most difficult thing for people involved in an unlawful conspiracy to do is to do nothing. Nevertheless, I put my hand out half a dozen times and took up the telephone to call Alice Gould, only to put it down each time.
I was considerably more upset, as a matter of fact, than I liked at all to admit, even to myself. What if Colonel Primrose had decided that Sandra’s death was not suicide at all, and got the State’s Attorney to open an investigation? What, for instance, would I do about the two bits of information that I had that were so damning to people I cared a great deal about—so much that I hardly dared think about them. The fact that they pointed in wholly different directions didn’t seem to matter. Rosemary’s flower clutched in Sandra’s hand—the letter that Alice Gould had found on Sandra’s dressing table. What would I do? Would I commit perjury if I had to?
I wiped the excess lipstick off my mouth with a piece of tissue, looking at myself in the mirror. I knew I would—if I had to. In a sense I’d already done it.
I was on the screened front porch when Colonel Primrose and his sergeant appeared coming around the house. That in itself seemed ominous, as none but the most formal callers bother to come in any way except through the kitchen. His greeting was cheery, but it failed to conceal the look on Sergeant Buck’s face, even more iron-grim than usual. The Sergeant did not come in. He marched down the lawn, dug out a dandelion that I’ve been carefully saving for several years, picked up an empty crumpled cigarette package and a couple of butts and went around the house. You could almost see a garbage can in his mind.
“Good morning, Mrs. Latham. I hope you slept—or did you have time?”
The Colonel smiled and sat down, straightening one rheumatic knee into place with a quite shameless grin to acknowledge the liability of years.
“I’m afraid I was up a bit early. I hope I didn’t disturb you?”
“Not at all. I only heard about it through the normal domestic channels. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
I got up to ring the bell, but he put up his hand.
“I’ve breakfasted—wisely but not too well—at the local undertaker’s.”
“It sounds bad.”
“It was. But sit down, Mrs. Latham. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you something, very frankly. I want you to be equally frank—because it’s quite a serious matter.”
I sat down again, trying to make myself meet his black intent gaze without telling him I was trying.
“I said I’d been to the undertaker’s this morning,” he went on. “I wanted to make sure that Sandra Gould died of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
He looked at me steadily. I waited.
“And she did. There’s no doubt of that.”
I breathed deeply, almost without knowing that I’d been holding my breath while I waited.
“But that’s not all, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly. “There’s a bruise on the back of her head. Only a slight abrasion, but the bruise is fairly extensive.”
“Still . . . she died of monoxide gas,” I said quickly.
“Her legs are scratched too,” he said, disregarding my interruption. “But it’s the bruise that interests me. It would have knocked her completely unconscious—if she wasn’t already dead, and we’ve been able to rule that out quite definitely. The bruise was made before she died.”
I looked at him, not knowing what all this was leading up to.
“In other words, Mrs. Latham, while Sandra Gould was actually killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, her death was not self-inflicted. She did breathe in the fumes that killed her, but she was unconscious while she was doing it. From her own point of view her death was quite unintentional. In other words again, Mrs. Latham . . . Sandra Gould was murdered.”
I stared at him, speechless. Now that my own doubts and fears were put squarely in front of me in the form of fact, I fought them off violently.
“That’s impossible!” I cried. “You can’t know that! The bruises could have been made when she fell against the door handle!”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“That’s what your coroner amicably suggested. But he’s wrong. It’s simple to prove. You see, the blood in the bruised tissue has no trace of carbon monoxide. The rest of her blood is saturated with it.”
He looked at me very earnestly.
“You see, Mrs. Latham, this sort of thing is my business. Buck and I make our living at it . . . keeping people from getting away with murder. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
He hesitated a moment, and chuckled a little.
“Frankly, I’ve already abused your hospitality. I phoned to Washington last night. The Federal Bureau sent down a makeshift sort of laboratory this morning. Dr. Potter and Mr. Shryock helped out. Furthermore, Mrs. Latham, there was no alcohol in the woman’s brain . . . not enough, anyway, to account for the odor in that car. I felt the seat last night, as you may have noticed. The whisky had been spilled on it, for the purpose of misdirection.”
I took a cigarette out of the box on the table and held it as steadily as I could while he lighted it for me.
“You see, that’s the great trouble with murder. Ordinarily, last night would have washed all this up—completely—except that I happened to be here. That’s about the only thing that makes me believe there must be some kind of design in the universe—the number of times that what seems mere coincidence steps in to thwart murder; or murderers, rather. We’ve no way of knowing how many times murder itself is thwarted and doesn’t happen.”
I looked at him for a moment. “When did you decide it was murder?”
“Last night.”
“Why?”
“Why? Perhaps it’s because I’ve got a sort of sixth sense, Mrs. Latham. And that, I suppose, is made up of little fragments of intangible evidence—like, for example, the expression on your face when you saw that suicide note, and the liquor spilled on the car seat. And a pretty strong conviction that a girl like Sandra Gould wouldn’t just throw her hand in when a beautiful rival sits in on the game. Added, my dear Mrs. Latham, to that evening at the clubhouse where at least three women had murder in th
eir eyes, and at least four men weren’t—well, let’s say as detached as they tried to appear.”
“Meaning who?” I asked.
“Nobody that you can’t identify as easily as I can. But that’s not the immediate point, Mrs. Latham. The immediate point is this: what are you going to do about it?”
He looked at me, a little amused and at the same time deadly earnest and calculating.
“I mean, would you like me to go somewhere?”
“Very much indeed, I’m afraid,” I replied as casually as I could. “Addis Ababa, just offhand. Or Perth, Western Australia.”
He smiled.
“I’m sorry. I’m staying in too, you know. I don’t like murder. It’s just an old-fashioned prejudice, and I’m an old-fashioned man. No, I’m only offering—not wholeheartedly, because you’re so extraordinarily central—to go to a hotel if you ask me to. It’s not going to be easy, you know. For you, I mean.”
“I’m afraid I’m rather prejudiced too,” I said. “I shouldn’t like to say I approve of murder as a social pastime—but I think it’s possible for one to be pretty well justified.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“That’s the trouble with you moderns. You’ve got such a hard, polished exterior. Scratch it, and you’re like Sergeant Buck—a mass of sentimental jelly. You don’t like consequences; you’re glad when something comes along and removes them, even if it happens to be a murder. But you’re not going to escape a few consequences of your own.”
I must have looked most astonished.
“Don’t you see, Grace Latham, that you know too much?”
He looked so sober that I was a little alarmed in spite of myself.
“Don’t you see that that’s the bad thing about murder? That’s the chief reason we can’t just let it ride and say, ‘Fair enough and an easy way out.’ Because murderers don’t rest easy in their own minds—and you, my dear Mrs. Latham, are just the person that this murderer is going to worry about, more and more. How much you know . . . how much you saw . . . how much you guessed.”