Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  “She said just those words?”

  Andy nodded. “Just them.”

  “Have you got any idea of what the woman looked like?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Andy spoke rather hesitatingly. “I got the idea she was sort of old, from what I could see. I just looked at her for a second. She was standing outside the light at the side of the door there.”

  “And that was just before midnight?”

  Andy nodded.

  “Sandra didn’t tell you what she wanted with the car?”

  Lucy Lee moved a little, and Andy’s face flushed still darker.

  “I thought she had a date she wanted to keep.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the floor.

  “You don’t know who with?”

  “I guess you could ask Rosemary’s dago friend if you wanted to find out. Personally I wouldn’t know.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded politely. “And you didn’t see her again . . . after you left this house at half past twelve?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Sure about it?”

  “Why?” Andy said. He stared at Colonel Primrose aggressively, his chin out a little. “Aren’t you?”

  Colonel Primrose got up. “Thank you,” he said suavely.

  The telephone out in the hall rang: one long, three short. Colonel Primrose glanced at me.

  “That’s mine,” I said. I felt a queer little sensation along my spine. “May I answer it, Alice?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Colonel Primrose said calmly, “I’ll answer it myself.”

  He hesitated a moment, standing there, looking from one of us to the other, and added, “I’ve got an idea it’s the woman Mr. Thorp saw Saturday night.”

  He chuckled a little at the expressions on our faces and went out.

  The door closed behind him. But when he came back his face was a dead giveaway.

  “It wasn’t?” I asked.

  “It was Sergeant Buck. He’s back from the village. I think we might be getting along, Mrs. Latham?”

  I glanced at Alice Gould, trying to let her know I’d do my best. She nodded imperceptibly. I followed Colonel Primrose out. We walked down the flagstone path past the Thorps’ cottage, and stopped in front of the door.

  “There’s a path to your place from here,” he said with a smile. “Where is it?”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because one of my men lost you somewhere in here this morning.”

  “Lost me?”

  “Yes. You’re being escorted places, after last night. I don’t want you killed, you know. After all, my hostess . . .”

  He chuckled. I was quite touched—until he added, “You’re much too good a decoy.”

  He chuckled again. I took him down to the break in the hedge. There was obviously no point in not doing it. I saw his eyes sharpen as he spotted the broken spear of crape myrtle. On my side I glanced down at the plantain leaf that concealed the brass jacket of the shell, and started in spite of myself. It was gone. It had been there less than an hour before.

  “There’s another matter, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose was saying, just behind me. “When young Andy was hunting his father, and his father denied being out of the house, he was seen by one of the colored boys from the club. He was going to the Bishops’, along the lane from the club. The boy says Mr. Thorp looked as if he didn’t want to be seen. He told Buck that this morning.”

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “Buck has a great way of getting information,” he said. “I can’t say I always approve of his methods. The queer thing here is that the boy also says he saw you and Miss Bishop leaning on the fence there. So it would seem you’d seen Andy too.”

  “Is that why we’re going down this way?” I asked.

  “Don’t tell me you thought we were taking a morning stroll.”

  “No,” I said. “I thought maybe you were turning my house inside out, and wanted me out of the way for a while.”

  I was thinking, desperately fast. Andy had hidden something under the bank. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that it was something that connected him very closely with the death of Sandra Gould.

  “I don’t suppose,” Colonel Primrose said placidly, “that your duty as a citizen . . .”

  “Rodman Bishop says the trouble with the world is that too many people are dashing about doing their duty—and getting everybody else in trouble,” I said.

  “May be something in it,” he admitted cheerfully. “In this case it just happens you don’t have to do yours. There’s Buck I’ve no doubt he’s done it for you.”

  The Sergeant’s massive figure was there ahead of us in the lane. He had taken off his coat and was in his vest, with two fancy pink ribbon armbands holding up his shirt sleeves. He was peering over the bank, not far from where Andy had gone down. It must have looked as if an army had gone over, I thought, remembering the rocks we had heard crashing to the beach. I took a deep breath, hoping for the best. It was about all there was left to do.

  I followed the Colonel through the wicket into the lane, and peered over the edge. Sergeant Buck was leaning forward, burrowing into the bank like an otter with his great hands. His face hadn’t the slightest expression, not even when he abruptly stopped burrowing and reached into the hole he’d made. Colonel Primrose and I watched him pull out—of all things under the sun—a pair of tiny stained rose-satin slippers.

  He held them up towards Colonel Primrose. Then he peered inside them, and pulled out of the toe of one of them a crumpled bunch of blue velvet flowers.

  I stared. The slippers were Lucy Lee’s . . . but why should Andy have hidden them, and still more why should he have hidden Rosemary’s flowers? It was beyond me. I think it even puzzled Colonel Primrose. He took them from Buck, who scaled the bank with the most astonishing agility, and turned them over in his hand.

  The slippers were a mess. The thin soles were sodden as if they had tramped miles in wet grass, and the brown stain covered the scratched torn toes.

  Colonel Primrose examined them intently. The thing that seemed to hold him longest was the black grease spotted on the toes and heels. Finally, without saying a word, he handed them to Sergeant Buck and took the bunch of blue posies. After a moment he gave that to the Sergeant too, and smiled at me. He shook his head a little.

  “I think that cleans up one little matter,” he said calmly.

  He turned to Buck. “You can run me into the village. Have you got the car?”

  “It’s along at the clubhouse, sir.”

  “You can pick me up at Mrs. Latham’s.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sergeant Buck passed me with a fish-eyed stare, giving at the same time the general appearance of a snappy salute, and turned on his large heel. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he wished the bullet or bullets—one or both—had got me squarely in the back Indeed I wasn’t at all sure, now that I came to think of it, that it wasn’t Sergeant Buck firing them.

  Colonel Primrose held the wicket and I went through.

  “You probably thought I was extremely rude last night, by the way,” he said.

  “Last night?”

  He chuckled.

  “In the middle of the night, when you were on the phone I just wanted you to hang up I didn’t want our listener to suspect we knew he was there. And the caller had already hung up.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then they are different.”

  “Yes. They are.”

  We walked on a moment. Then he said, “The call last night came from the same place. The same party line.”

  “You mean the St John’s vestry room?”

  “That’s one party.”

  “Who’s the other?”

  “The other,” he said deliberately, and looking queerly at me, “I think is the ‘crazy woman’ Sandra Gould talked to—and of course later had her quarrel with.”

  I stared at him in perfect astonishment.

  “It’s quite impossib
le,” he said soberly. “However, as Sherlock Holmes says, when all the possible things have failed, the impossible must be true That’s where I am now, Mrs. Latham. I’m going to the village to try to prove it By the way, this gossip about Dr. Potter—did you know the village is full of it? He and Jim Gould had a sort of mild run-in in the club bar just before dinner Saturday night.”

  “Oh, that’s nonsense!” I said warmly. “Though I don’t see how you could blame Adam Potter really, with Sandra always acting like Circe on her pillar.”

  “Island,” Colonel Primrose said. There was a little twinkle in his eyes. “Not a pillar. Aeaea, it was called. Nice name.”

  “Island, then. And poor Maggie!”

  “I know,” he said. “An invalid, isn’t she. For a long time?” “Years. It’s perfectly foul.”

  We had come the length of the garden, and stopped there a moment, looking back.

  Colonel Primrose pointed to the hedge.

  “Someone shot at you from there last night, Mrs. Latham,” he said very seriously. “Will you stay indoors till I get back?”

  I shook my head. “No. But I’ll go over to the Bishops’.”

  “All right.”

  He hesitated a moment.

  “While you’re there you might tell Rosemary that if she lures Jim Gould out again when there happens to be trouble brewing, just about once more, she’ll succeed in hanging him where Parran may fail.”

  A horn sounded in the back drive as I nodded.

  “There’s Buck. We’ll take you as far as the Bishops’.”

  We went around the side walk and Julius, seeing me through the window over the sink, called out: “Mis’ Grace! Oh, Mis’ Grace! They’s a lady here to see you. She’s in the livin’ room. She wants to see somebody, Ah couldn’t quite make out.”

  “Maybe it’s you, Colonel,” I said. “Come and see.”

  Sergeant Buck had jumped out of the car and was standing at attention on the other side.

  “Just a minute, Buck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We went in through the kitchen. Lilac was making watermelon pickles and singing about a sycamine tree and the River Jordan. I got a drink of water at the sink and gave Colonel Primrose one. We went through the pantry into the hall.

  It seems odd to me now that I had no intuition about the other side of the living room door. It hardly seems possible. There was no preparation, no foreshadowing, nothing to let us know, in any way, of what was there waiting quietly for us.

  I pushed the door open, as I do a thousand times a day, and walked in . . . and stopped, utterly and horribly aghast.

  On the sofa in front of the fireplace was a woman I had not seen for years. She had on old-fashioned clothes, and her face was sallow and drawn and unlovely.

  My hand dropped slowly to my side and my head swirled. Colonel Primrose steadied me quickly with an arm around my shoulders. We stood there, silent, stupefied, for one terrible instant.

  “Who is it?” Colonel Primrose said.

  “It’s Maggie Potter!” I whispered.

  “Good God!” he said.

  Maggie Potter was dead. Even from there I could see the crushed and blackened, blood-and-hair-matted spot on the base of her skull where she had been murderously struck.

  I caught myself with a terrible effort.

  “But she can’t walk!” I said. “She hasn’t been out of the house for seven years!”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head.

  “She was out Saturday night,” he said quietly. “And she’s been trying to tell us about it ever since.”

  “Over the phone?” I whispered.

  He nodded, and looked at me steadily.

  “We’ve got to find that clock soon, Mrs. Latham,” he said “It belongs to a murderer.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Colonel Primrose stepped quickly across the room and touched the painted doorstop lightly with the tip of his brown and white shoes. I kept my gaze riveted to it, trying not to see the lumpy protruding feet in their house-worn black strap slippers, the bony legs in streaked gunmetal stockings, that ghastly head. It was all so unbearably, hideously grotesque. The gaunt sallow figure in the mousy old-fashioned clothes that hadn’t been in the sun for seven years—and on the floor in its usual place the white-painted iron basket full of gay red and blue and yellow and white iron posies . . . splotched and splattered with blood.

  I stared at it, trying desperately to keep from being sick. It was Colonel Primrose who saved me. He shook my arm, and I came to sharply, out of the dark swirling fog.

  “Mrs. Latham! Get Buck, send him in here; phone Parran, and watch that telephone! And get hold of a doctor! Is there anyone else in town—any other doctor?”

  I shook my head mechanically.

  “Get him then. Poor devil! But hurry—don’t just stand there!”

  I went back through the door into the hall and called Julius.

  “Wha’s the matter with you, Mis’ Grace?” he exclaimed.

  “Nothing, Julius. Just tell Sergeant Buck to come quickly, and you stay in the kitchen,” I said.

  I let the door swing to and took down the telephone. For an instant I almost heard the tickety-tick, tickety-tock, tickety-tick, tickety-tock, but it must have been in my own head, because what I really heard was Elsie Carter’s voice saying, “Creamed chicken and peas in patty shells is always nice, and the men enjoy it.”

  A thousand church suppers rolled over my head. I gripped myself firmly to keep from screaming.

  “Elsie,” I said. “This is Grace Latham. Would you mind letting me have the line? I have to get Dr. Potter, immediately.”

  There was an instant’s startled silence, then Elsie’s avid voice. “Is somebody sick, Grace?”

  “No,” I said. “Please, darling.”

  “I’ll call you later, Mary.—If there’s anything I can do, Grace . . .”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up the phone and cranked to signal the operator.

  “Mr. Parran, please.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Latham—he’s just gone to his office,” the operator said, with the friendly helpfulness of the village exchange. Which was also the reason that I just told Mr. Parran, when I’d got him, that there had been an accident and Colonel Primrose wanted him immediately.

  Then I tried to get Dr. Potter. He was out. I could hear the phone ring again and again.

  “Mrs. Potter must be upstairs, Mrs. Latham,” the operator said. She’s a village girl whose mother mends for me. “I’ll keep on ringing.”

  “Don’t bother, Mabel,” I said. “But if you hear where he is, tell him to come to my house as quick as ever he can.”

  I hung up, knowing she would find him before I could. Then I took down the phone again and listened to see if I’d missed the tickety-tick, tickety-tock, or if it really had not been there. But it wasn’t. Only Elsie, saying, “Are you through, Grace? I just saw Dr. Potter leaving the Goulds’—he’s gone in to see Annie Kellogg now, she cut her knee on an oyster shell. Shall I tell him you want him?”

  “Please—and tell him it’s urgent,” I said. I knew she’d break her neck to do it, and anyway she wouldn’t let me have the wire in peace again.

  I went back to the living room. Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were standing at the door. Buck was more like a piece of artillery than a human being, or so I’d imagine, having only the faintest notion of what artillery is. All I mean is that he seemed ready to go into instant action when his chief gave the word.

  He said, “It’s all in the cards, sir, but who’d have guessed it.”

  “I should have guessed something, anyway,” Colonel Primrose said shortly. “When Potter left here.”

  He looked around at me.

  “Mr. Parran’s coming,” I reported. “Mrs. Carter said she just saw Dr. Potter leaving the Goulds’. He’s at the Kelloggs’ now. She’s getting him.”

  If I had dropped a minor bomb shell, or even a major one, into the middle of my living roo
m, I don’t think Colonel Primrose would have jerked about so quickly.

  “Just left the Goulds’!” he repeated.

  I didn’t even then see what to them was the appalling significance of the fact, because it would never have occurred to me—even if I’d not been very well acquainted with Adam Potter for many years—that a doctor would kill his wife that way with so many other easier ways at hand. I forgot entirely Elsie Carter’s theory that he’d been killing her by degrees for seven long years. It wasn’t till later even that I remembered the Saturday morning in Church Street in front of Mr. Toplady’s store.

  “No telling what they’ll do when they’re jealous,” Sergeant Buck said. It occurred to me suddenly and incongruously that one of his gifts I’d not yet noticed was the gift of sententious remark.

  “I wish to God I’d used my head,” Colonel Primrose said bitterly.

  Sergeant Buck shook his, with the utmost conviction. “It wouldn’t have done no good if you had, sir,” he said. He drew his wide hard mouth down at the corners, shaking his head back and forth like one of those loose-headed toy policemen children have. I don’t know why the two of them—Sergeant Buck about a foot behind, and towering at least a foot above and projecting a good deal to each side of the stocky gray-haired man in the tan poplin suit—should have seemed so utterly incongruous just then. They looked much more as if they should be inspecting the beer at the canteen than viewing the ghastly figure of Maggie Potter, sprawled feet out and dreadfully motionless on the sofa in front of them.

  “Neat at that, sir,” Sergeant Buck said.

  I could see that it was. I knew that room so well—and except for Maggie Potter and the blood-spattered iron pot of painted flowers, there was nothing out of place that I could see, and nothing that wasn’t always there. No convenient bits of upholsterer’s twine or ends of cigarettes with orange lipstick on them.

  Colonel Primrose nodded slowly.

  “That’s the confounded part of it,” he said. “Somebody walked in, and walked out again. A hundred to one nobody would ever notice him.”