Ill Met by Moonlight

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Ill Met by Moonlight Page 9

by Zenith Brown


  It was then that I had my first vague feeling that we were not yet through with murder here. It was more than a vague feeling. It was almost a sudden primitive instinct, shocked out of the complacent safety of the summer afternoon, that death here was not satisfied . . . and that it was the more ruthless and terrible because it would wear a friendly face.

  I looked around at the people there. “But I know them,” I kept telling myself. I’d known them all my life . . . Jim and little Rosemary, Alice Gould, George and Rodman. Then I remembered that after all Rosemary had been away seven years, and so had George Barrol and Rodman Bishop. Jim had been through hell; Alice had been through hell for him. I had no way of even remotely knowing what was going on underneath the faces they showed to the world. A verse my father used to recite came into my head:

  Since all alone, so heaven has willed, we die,

  Nor even the tenderest heart and next our own

  Knows half the measures why we smile and sigh.

  Certainly none knows why we kill.

  “And you, Mrs. Gould?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  “I got home with my daughter Mrs. Thorp at half past eleven,” Alice Gould said quietly. “My son came at a few minutes before one. I didn’t hear Sandra come in with him. I glanced in her room. She wasn’t there. About half past two, when she still hadn’t come in, I went to her room to see if she could have come without my hearing her. That’s when I turned on the light and saw the note on her dressing table. I read it. Then I went out to look for her.”

  “You didn’t wake your son?”

  “No . . . for a number of reasons. My daughter-in-law was given to melodrama, a little. I thought I’d find her somewhere in the grounds, waiting for my son to take a gun out of her hands in the nick of time. I’d planned to give her a piece of my mind.”

  “Did you hear the car when you passed the garage?”

  Alice Gould paused.

  “I didn’t pass the garage, Colonel Primrose. I went down past my daughter’s cottage and around that way. I thought I heard someone in Mrs. Latham’s garden, and I rather thought it might be Sandra. She wasn’t always as careful of appearances as I might have liked. I thought possibly she’d gone back to the clubhouse to dance, and just returned. They dance till three.”

  She pleated the hem of her handkerchief with delicate jeweled fingers.

  “When I didn’t see anyone in the garden, I called up at Grace Latham’s window. I was a little worried by that time. I thought she might help me find Sandra. I’ve come to depend a great deal on Grace.”

  She smiled charmingly at me. There was too much underlying significance in that gracious tribute to make me altogether happy, but I smiled as well as I could.

  “She happened to be up already. It was she who heard the engine. My hearing isn’t as keen as it once was.”

  Colonel Primrose turned to me.

  “What were you doing up then, Mrs. Latham? You presumably went to bed at one o’clock.”

  “Sheila, my dog, heard someone in the garden and woke me up,” I said.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “I’m afraid I did,” I said with a wry smile. “I’m sorry, but it was you I thought I saw, Mr. Dikranov.”

  If I’d shot off a cannon I couldn’t have surprised them more. Except Mr. Dikranov.

  He bowed.

  “I wondered if you had seen me, Mrs. Latham,” he said calmly. “Please don’t look so alarmed, my friends. I was out—walking—because I could not sleep. I mistook Mrs. Latham’s house for Mr. Bishop’s from the lane, and did not see my mistake until I was close to it. I should have spoken to Mrs. Latham but I wasn’t sure that she had seen me, and I did not want to alarm her.”

  He bowed to me again. The story seemed to me certainly to have a ring of very suave truth. I looked at Colonel Primrose. His head was cocked down and his black eyes contracted intently. He was not looking at Paul Dikranov or at me, but at Rosemary.

  Her face had suddenly turned as white as a sheet, her gray eyes were fixed on her fiancé. Rosemary was afraid—that was all I could think of just then. She was white with fear. Jim Gould took a sudden step forward, his face flushed. I don’t know what might have happened if there had not been a sudden diversion, so startling in its implication that we forgot Rosemary and Paul Dikranov and Jim.

  Sergeant Buck’s iron visage appeared in the door.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said.

  Colonel Primrose got up quickly. “What is it, Buck?”

  “I found this, sir.”

  He held out something wrapped in a brightly colored comic section. Colonel Primrose took it gingerly and opened it.

  It was the new monkey wrench that Jim Gould had bought the morning before at Mr. Toplady’s general store, and that I had seen in his hand there.

  Sergeant Buck pointed down at the end with a large thumb.

  “That’s what she was hit with, sir. It’s got blood and hair on it. I found it stuck up on a shelf under some paper. It’s got a woman’s fingerprints on it.”

  I stared at it, horror-stricken. And I knew, of course, that the fingerprints were mine.

  Colonel Primrose stood staring a long time at the brown matted blur on the bright iron. Everyone’s eyes were glued there in the hushed room. I tried to open my mouth to say, “Those prints are mine,” but my throat was too dry. It was as if somebody had written the single word “Murder” in glaring red letters across the white plaster wall of Alice Gould’s room.

  “We’ve compared the hair, and the size of the wound, sir,” Sergeant Buck said.

  Colonel Primrose looked around the room. He said later that each face there stood out quite apart from bodies or clothes—seven separate and complete portraits—and in not one of them was there surprise, or anything like it. “I knew very well you all knew Sandra Gould had been murdered . . . and that you’d all known it from the first.”

  The thought, I suppose, that was uppermost in each mind at that moment was that the best card in the game we were playing against the plump little man and his granite-faced bodyguard—his guard, philosopher and friend, he once called him, though Sergeant Buck spoke of himself as the Colonel’s functotum—had been played, and trumped.

  Rodman Bishop drew his eyes away from that wrench. He stared stubbornly at the Colonel.

  “You still can’t explain away Sandra’s own statement that she was determined to end her life, and was going to do so, Colonel Primrose,” he said doggedly. “Also, I think practically everybody who might conceivably have a motive for murdering Sandra Gould has a perfectly satisfactory alibi.”

  He turned to his daughter.

  “I’m right in saying you went to your room when you came in at half past twelve?”

  Rosemary nodded mechanically.

  “I had a nightcap with Dikranov,” Mr. Bishop went on, “and left him at his door about a quarter to one. That’s the lot,” he added. “And there you are.”

  It wasn’t the lot, of course, as I thought instantly. It didn’t include Andy Thorp or Lucy Lee Thorp. It didn’t include a dozen other people who might have murdered Sandra Gould.

  But there was another thing about it that was still worse. And Colonel Primrose saw it at once.

  He wrapped the comic section around the wrench and handed it to Sergeant Buck.

  “I’m interested to hear you speak of the people who might have conceivably had a motive for killing Mrs. Sandra Gould,” he said slowly, “and so tacitly include all of yourselves here. May I ask what motive you yourself—for example—could have? Or Dikranov, for instance?”

  Rodman Bishop’s square face flushed angrily. He was silent, and Colonel Primrose did not press his advantage. He got up, shook hands with Alice Gould and Jim, and went out with his sergeant. I would have gone with him, but Sergeant Buck’s square, large and impassive back was not encouraging.

  I did go, however, soon after that. Rosemary left with me. Neither of us said anything as we went slowly down the path towards the ga
p in the hedge. It’s hard to talk to anyone you’ve known very well when you aren’t sure any more how they feel about important things. Women must grow apart more quickly than men. Not that Rosemary was very different. It was merely, I think, that someone I’d always connected with Jim was pointed towards another man—and a definitely unusual man at that. I couldn’t believe she cared deeply for Paul Dikranov. Yet she was fascinated by him . . . and she was afraid of him. I was sure of that; I didn’t see how Rodman Bishop could help seeing it either.

  As a matter of fact, if I could only have asked Rosemary about the crumpled petals Sandra had torn from her dress, I think the invisible barrier between us would have disappeared. But I couldn’t, of course. Not any more than I could have spoken to Alice Gould about the suicide note that Sandra had written.

  Rosemary caught my arm suddenly.

  We had just come in sight of the garage. Sergeant Buck was there with Hawkins. The old man was protesting volubly as he preceded Buck up the outside stairs that led to his room over the garage. At the same moment Colonel Primrose came out. He saw us and beckoned.

  “Would you mind going upstairs, Mrs. Latham? I’m trying a little experiment. You might go too, Miss Bishop. Hurry, will you?”

  He looked at his watch. “Quickly, please.”

  We ran upstairs. Buck opened the door.

  “Hurry if you’re coming,” he said impassively.

  We went in. Almost immediately, from below at a point just under Hawkins’s iron bed, came the muffled sound of a man’s voice. “It is exactly five o’clock,” it said, perfectly audibly. “This is Station WFBO, Columbus. Jim Sanderson your announcer. It is five o’clock, Central Standard Time.” And then a clock chimed: one, two, three, four, five.

  Old Hawkins’s face turned the color of putty.

  “Fo’ the love of Gawd!” he quavered. “That’s Mr. Jim, that’s him . . . he gone crazy!”

  Even before he spoke the little clock on his bureau struck the hour . . . except, of course, that the hour it struck was not five. It was six o’clock, Eastern Standard Time.

  Colonel Primrose stood in the door. He looked gravely at Rosemary Bishop, shaking his head a little. The two of us stood there utterly silent.

  “I thought there was something odd about a man’s announcing the time he’s committing a murder,” he said. “He knew he’d have a witness upstairs here—if he made enough noise—and he knew he would have an alibi for twelve o’clock. Well—it’s his one-o’clock alibi we want now.”

  He hesitated a moment. “You said Mr. Jim Gould left your house at ten minutes to one, Mrs. Latham?”

  I felt Rosemary’s fingers tighten on my arm.

  “Jim was with me at one o’clock, Colonel Primrose,” she said. Her voice was perfectly cool.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A bluebottle buzzed in through the open window of Hawkins’s little room under the roof over the Goulds’ two-car garage, and out through the door. I stood there, staring from Rosemary Bishop to the plump little man with the sparkling black eyes. Whether Rosemary expected that her simple statement that she had been with Jim Gould at one o’clock would be sufficient to clear him of the murder of his wife I don’t know. I do know that the only person in the hot stuffy little room over the garage who was particularly surprised was Sergeant Buck. He made an audible “Tch, tch!”

  Colonel Primrose looked rather as if he had been expecting just something of the sort.

  “Then . . . you both perjured yourselves?” he inquired casually.

  “If you want to call it that.”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head with a sort of kindly impatience.

  “It isn’t what I want to call it, Miss Bishop,” he said. “It’s what the State’s Attorney will instantly see it is. You see, that makes it right up his alley.”

  He hesitated a moment, looking at her queerly, and went on.

  “Not so much that Jim Gould was with you when his wife was murdered—but that you both were with her. If you can’t prove most satisfactorily that you weren’t with her, I’m very much afraid you’ll be charged with murder.”

  Rosemary’s fingers tightened on my arm.

  “You sure got yourself out on a limb, miss!” Sergeant Buck’s harsh worried voice before he snapped back to rigid attention was curiously comforting. I didn’t look at Colonel Primrose. He’d already said that Sergeant Buck under his granite lantern-jawed exterior was a sentimental jelly that only needed a beautiful maiden in distress to make him fairly quiver. There was certainly no comfort or sympathy in his own voice. “It’s always a good plan, Miss Bishop, either to tell the truth in the beginning, or keep it to yourself to the very end. It depends on your position—in relation to the crime, of course. As it is now, I’m afraid Buck’s quite right. You’re definitely out on a limb, and Jim Gould’s out there with you.”

  “In which case I’d better climb back before somebody saws it off,” Rosemary replied coolly.

  “By all means, if you can, Miss Bishop,” Colonel Primrose said.

  I didn’t look back at the window over the closed garage doors as Rosemary and I crossed through the hedge to my garden. I knew nevertheless that both men were watching us and that so far as Rosemary was concerned the limb they were on was already as good as crashing to the ground. I wondered, too, what Colonel Primrose thought when we didn’t go to the house but walked on slowly, down to the lane running along the top of the bank above the beach. Both of us, Rosemary and I, I think, wanted to be somewhere where nobody could listen through walls or from behind closed doors . . . and neither of us trusted Colonel Primrose or Mr. Parran the State’s Attorney further than we could see them, if indeed so far.

  “I’m afraid I’m not very bright,” Rosemary said.

  Her face was set and she was looking straight ahead of her, walking automatically, quite unaware, I think, of where she was going.

  “As if it wasn’t foul enough for Jim already.—And it was me that made him swear he’d never tell anybody . . . just because I was . . .”

  She didn’t finish. She stopped suddenly. “Oh, I’ve got to see him!” she broke out. “I’ve got to, Grace—now!”

  Her dark eyes were almost wild with all sorts of mixed-up passionate emotions that I couldn’t begin to make out. But I did know very well that she couldn’t see Jim, just then; not without cutting off the limb with her own hands, so to speak.

  “Look here, my dear,” I said. “From all I can see you’ve made a bad enough mess as it is without rushing to Jim and making it worse. If he goes off the deep end, you’ll sink—both of you. I take it you were with him last night.”

  She nodded.

  “I—”

  But this time I stopped her myself.

  “Look, darling. If you don’t tell me, I won’t know anything. And therefore I won’t have to tell Colonel Primrose anything. Because if I do know it, he’ll get it out of me whether I want to tell it or not.”

  I suppose I was thinking all the time about the petals clutched in Sandra Gould’s dead fingers.

  She shook her head. “Then he’ll figure out that the reason I didn’t tell you is that I’m trying to hide something. I think I’d rather tell you, so . . . so you can tell him.”

  We had reached the white rail fence at the end of my land and were leaning against it, looking out over the blue Chesapeake. Suddenly Rosemary turned away.

  “I don’t know why we came back . . . this place is so full of ghosts.”

  I realized then what I’d forgotten through years of being so close to it. We were looking down at the inlet where they’d found Chapin Bishop one Sunday morning seven years before.

  “I might be dead, walking back through all my life that’s worth remembering,” Rosemary said.

  I saw then that it wasn’t Chapin she’d been thinking of, but something else that I wouldn’t know about. Something connected with Jim, and days of lost ecstasy.

  “Just wait till George blurts out that last night I said I’d probably k
ill Sandra before I left here,” she said suddenly. Then she smiled a little. I stared at her. “I don’t know what it is about George that won’t let him keep his mouth shut. If it was just other people he got into a mess, you could understand it, but it’s mostly himself.”

  I started to ask her if she had really said that, and changed my mind. If Rosemary didn’t want to talk about Sandra and Jim, I was glad enough—in spite of a certain natural curiosity.

  “He hasn’t changed much, has he?” I asked.

  “No. We thought after he got enough to live on he’d set up a bachelor establishment, but he didn’t. You know, he’s not very well. He’s got something that ought to come out, appendix or something—but somebody told him people act frightfully odd when they’re under ether or avertin and he actually won’t risk it. Now if that were Paul . . .”

  She laughed, not very convincingly, and I realized that this was the point we were finally getting at.

  “Do you suppose that if we gave Paul ether he’d tell us what he knows about Sandra?”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?” I said.

  Rosemary stared at the small white handkerchief she’d tied into a string of hard knots. “I did,” she said shortly.

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t know her. That was yesterday when we were coming back from the club before dinner. I was going to let it go at that, because . . . well, after all, I couldn’t say, ‘That’s odd, because she certainly recognized you.’ But George could, of course. And did.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded, smiling a little in spite of herself.

  “He said, ‘Isn’t that funny, because I could have sworn she recognized you when you first came in—don’t you remember, Paul?”

  “What did Paul do?”

  “Paul looked like a war cloud over the Bosporus. And George, having put his foot in it beautifully, tried to get it out.”

  “And made it worse?”

  “Much. He giggled and said but of course Sandra wasn’t the sort of girl a man would be likely to forget if he’d once even seen her, and Paul said, on the contrary, she was an extremely common type in the East, you saw them in every café and Palais de Danse in Asia. And so George, to help matters again, said wasn’t that funny, because that’s where Jim met her.”

 

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