by Zenith Brown
“Rot,” I said rudely.
“Yes, you do. I’m very much afraid if it hadn’t been for her I shouldn’t ever have got to the roots of this business.”
“And have you?” I asked, sardonically and with a sort of amiable malice, just to hear him admit he hadn’t.
“Yes, I rather think I have, Mrs. Latham.”
I stopped short, my foot on the bottom step of my porch, utterly stupefied.
“You mean . . . you know who . . .”
He nodded.
“How simply ghastly!”
Colonel Primrose nodded again and smiled grimly.
“Ghastlier than you’d think, Mrs. Latham.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I can’t remember spending any other period of my life that was as awful as the next few hours.
If he had only told me! But I’m not sure it would have helped. In fact, as I learned afterwards, he only told Sergeant Buck and Mr. Parran step by step. And of course if he had told me, I probably would have given it all away time after time.
It was nine o’clock when Colonel Primrose, complaining a little because he hadn’t more time and hadn’t more facilities for detection at his disposal, sent Sergeant Buck to the cottage to bring Lucy Lee. Buck found her, he said later, huddled with young Andy in a tear-stained heap fast asleep on the bed where we’d left her—and with the door wide open. Colonel Primrose’s lips tightened a little at that. I gathered he hadn’t been sure she was safe even then, which was why he’d sent Buck over instead of telephoning her. Why he waited to hear from the Sergeant I did not know, but he sat there until the telephone rang from the cottage. I didn’t hear what he said, but after a few moments I heard him cranking my phone and asking the operator for the Goulds’ house. Then he came back to the porch and waited until we saw a flashlight through the trees near the garage and heard Jim calling Hawkins to come down.
The phone rang again, and Colonel Primrose went in as if he’d been expecting it. After a bit I heard him wind the crank to signal, and ask for the Bishops’ place. I heard him say, “Try again, operator, someone must be there.” And I knew he’d been checking up on the clock.
He came back to the porch.
“I think we’ll go inside, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “There are some faces I want to have a look at. Anyway, it might be a little dangerous to sit about in the dark.”
I turned on the lights inside.
Then, while I was still getting in more chairs, people began turning up in a curious way, as if their coming was quite pointless and yet at the same time fraught with some dreadful significance. Mr. Parran came with the coroner, Mr. Shryock. Sergeant Buck came with Lucy Lee, the Goulds came. Oddly enough, I thought, they had brought Hawkins with them. He looked—as he puts it—as if he knew what was going to happen so well he wasn’t worrying. Which wasn’t true of anyone else there. There’s no doubt of it, Anglo-Saxons are worriers. Even the fish-gray eyes in Sergeant Buck’s iron visage were troubled when they rested on Rosemary or Lucy Lee.
Lucy Lee was still pretty much of a mess, or perhaps she only looked it because Rosemary was so immaculately detached and casual and because Alice Gould was delicately and fragilely herself again. I didn’t know then that the blue pinched look around her mouth came from anything more fundamentally wrong than worry over her two children. As Hawkins once remarked, “When you got children these days Ah tell you, Mis’ Grace, you got sumpin’.” I thought that was the trouble with Alice then.
Nathan Kaufman sat beside Rosemary, his jaw thrust out, his face flushed and mottled. It was pretty hot but not that hot. Rodman Bishop, still in his shrunk seersuckers, fuming a little, sat on the other side of Rosemary, and George Barrol fidgeted about until he grounded near the dining-room door by Alice Gould.
And then Colonel Primrose looked us all over, deliberately and quite as detached in his way as Rosemary was in hers.
“I’m taking unfair advantage of all of you,” he said coolly, “for the simple reason that I want to teach you a lesson.”
My eyes rested for a moment on Jim Gould, whose duty to his mother—and also the solid presences of Kaufman and Rodman Bishop, I imagine—kept him from being near Rosemary. He was gazing at her more like a devoted spaniel than a bitter and disillusioned young man who’d married a dance-hall girl destined to violent death.
Colonel Primrose went deliberately on, a bitter irony growing in his voice.
“The trouble with you people is that, desiring something, you can’t imagine not going to the extreme of murder, even, to get it.”
He looked at Jim.
“That’s why it was so simple, apparently, for every person in this room—except one who had better knowledge—to believe that Jim Gould, an honest, honorable and even puritanical young man, could come back to his house after his wife and Rosemary Bishop had had an altercation, strike Sandra Gould over the head and put her in the car in a closed garage with the engine running.”
His level gaze fell on Rosemary.
“You didn’t go out to meet Jim that Saturday night, of course, Miss Bishop. You went out to meet his wife, and you had a meeting with her—which we found out about with so much difficulty—in the course of which she, no doubt, demanded that you leave April Harbor at once, and you, no doubt, declined to do so till you had found out what Sandra Gould’s connection with Mr. Dikranov had been. Possibly you’ll tell us now how this meeting came about?”
“Just a minute,” Jim Gould said quickly. He leaned forward, disregarding Rodman Bishop’s scowl and shaking off Mr. Kaufman’s restraining hand on his arm. “Where is Mr. Dikranov?”
“Mr. Dikranov is in New York. He had business.”
“My brother-in-law had business in New York too.”
“Mr. Gould,” said Colonel Primrose, “you will have to take my word for it at the present that the situations were not the same.—And please do not interrupt me again.”
He stared coldly at Jim for an instant and turned back to Rosemary. She was pale but perfectly self-possessed. It was her father and her lawyer who were disturbed.
“I don’t mind telling you,” she said, in her cool dusky voice. “Paul said you knew already, and there’d be no point in holding anything back.”
I saw Rodman Bishop and Nathan Kaufman exchange uneasy glances.
“I came back from the dance with my father and Paul. It was hot and sultry and I went directly upstairs. I wanted a cigarette before I went to bed. There weren’t any in the box, and I’d left my vanity and cigarette case in Paul’s pocket, so I put on a dressing gown and went down to ask him for it. I heard Dad and Paul on the porch, having a nightcap. Their coats were hanging on the newel post. I put my hand in Paul’s pocket to get my case, and I found the note.”
“A note written, though neither addressed nor signed, by Sandra Gould,” Colonel Primrose said curtly to all of us, “making an assignation in the Goulds’ garage as soon as she got back. Yes, Miss Bishop—you read it.”
“I read it,” Rosemary said.
She shrugged her slim bare shoulders, brown against the pale blue of her cotton evening frock. It was a statement, not an excuse for her conduct.
“After what had been going on all evening I was pretty annoyed. I was hurt too, I suppose, because Paul had denied knowing her. I put the note back in his pocket, went upstairs, slipped my dress back on and went out. I don’t know exactly what I thought I could do. I suppose I was spoiling for a fight with somebody . . . just to get everything off my chest.”
A sudden smile danced in her gray eyes.
“Paul’s coat was gone when I came back in at two. I supposed he’d gone to keep his rendezvous.”
She smiled again, in amusement at herself. “I couldn’t very well object, because I’d been keeping one with Jim. But we weren’t near the garage, Colonel Primrose. We went to a place we used to go to, on the beach, after he’d sent Sandra away. We had a sort of ‘Last Ride Together’ notion, I suppose.”
She paused, and said simply: “We didn’t kill Sandra. It would have killed everything for us, either alone or together, if we had. I did say I wished he’d drowned her when he had the chance, and he said I didn’t, really, because . . . well, things don’t work out when they’re got—that way. And of course I didn’t wish it, really.”
Colonel Primrose smiled faintly. He turned to Rodman Bishop.
“And you, Mr. Bishop?” he said pleasantly. “Where were you when all this was going on?”
“I was in bed asleep,” Rodman Bishop said aggressively, beetling his shaggy brows.
“You didn’t hear Dikranov go out?”
“I didn’t.”
“Did you, Mr. Barrol?”
George looked uncomfortable.
“Well, as a matter of fact, you see I don’t often drink anything after dinner, and what they gave me at the club, and the excitement and the heat and all that sort of knocked me out. So I wasn’t myself exactly.”
“Darling, you were boiled,” Rosemary said amiably. “I accused you of it then and you said you were cold sober.”
“That’s not so, Rosemary. I was sleepy, and my stomach was a little upset.”
“Is that why Paul had to carry you upstairs and put you to bed?”
Everyone smiled, even Sergeant Buck. George blinked.
“I was sober enough to hear Paul go out,” he said stoutly. “At least I supposed it was Paul, if Uncle Rod was in bed. You clump, Rosemary, but not that heavily.”
I thought Rodman Bishop would quietly explode. Instead his face, at first purple with fury as George was talking, turned suddenly gray when Colonel Primrose turned back to him.
“You bottled the wine in the winter kitchen, Mr. Bishop,” he said. “Not in the cellar. And not at eleven o’clock. You were seen at that time in Mrs. Latham’s garden—not long after Mrs. Potter had come here.”
“Just a minute,” Nathan Kaufman said sharply. His red bulbous nose jutted out towards Colonel Primrose. “My client has nothing to say at this time, Colonel.”
“Ah,” Colonel Primrose said politely. “We have at last discovered who your client is?”
He looked placidly at Rodman Bishop, whose tough old face was again inflamed with rage. He shook his head.
“It doesn’t make much difference where you bottled the wine, Mr. Bishop,” he said. “I don’t think the mere fact that like all Americans you mistrust foreigners—especially suave ones—and that your daughter was headed for unhappiness would be enough to make you kill the woman who had prevented her happiness. No, there’s something deeper, and quite different, at the bottom of all this.”
He looked slowly around the circle of motionless faces there in my living room.
“There has been one outstanding problem in this case from the beginning,” he said. “There are always two main problems in every case. Who had the motive to kill? Who had the opportunity? In this case the answer to the second question was almost absurdly simple.”
He hesitated for a moment, still looking slowly from face to face.
“The answer to the question of opportunity was . . . everybody. Jim Gould, Mrs. Gould, Mrs. Thorp, Andy Thorp; Miss Rosemary Bishop, Mr. Bishop, Mr. Dikranov; Dr. Potter, Mr. Barrol here; Mrs. Latham, even Mrs. Potter whose dead body was found in this room Monday morning.
“There was one other person,” he continued, “who also had the opportunity . . . and who, oddly enough, nobody has even thought of.”
I think no one in the room moved, even to look at anyone else.
“Now, when opportunity leads you nowhere, the question of motive in any case becomes very important. In this present case it has been paramount from the beginning. The point has always been, What was the motive from which Mrs. Sandra Gould was murdered? And here again we have an odd situation. For while there are not so many people who could have a motive to commit that act, there are nevertheless far too many. Allow me to point them out to you.
“Mr. Jim Gould. The motive is obvious. He wanted to free himself from a wife who refused him any legal release.
“Miss Bishop. To free the man she obviously is still in love with.
“Mrs. Alice Gould. Again obvious. To free her son.
“Mr. Bishop. Obvious too. To enable his daughter to marry the man she is in love with.
“Mrs. Lucy Lee Thorp. Equally obvious. To free herself from a rival or supposed rival.
“Mr. Dikranov. To free himself of an incumbrance.
“So far these motives have—all of them—one thing in common,” he went on quietly. “They are all calculating. Some of them are selfish, some unselfish. They would all lead, in a greater or less degree, to a planned act of murder. There is another possible murderer of Mrs. Sandra Gould, who could have had both the motive and the opportunity—Andy Thorp. That motive would be blind passion, jealous fury . . . and it would be the only uncalculating motive of the whole lot.”
Colonel Primrose stopped, smiling a little.
“I’ve tried to find a motive for Mr. Barrol,” he said.
George gulped, horrified. “Me?” he gasped. “Oh, my goodness!”
“We can’t presume he was in love with Sandra, when he’d not met her until noon that day. If he had, for some odd reason, suddenly felt impelled to kill her, you’d imagine he would have managed to do it out there in the water, when all he had to do was hold her head under for a while.”
I couldn’t, try as I would, visualize (as Sergeant Buck says) George being consumed by a grand passion. Neither could George, I’m afraid.
“So the problem was always clear,” Colonel Primrose went on. “There was no point in worrying about a motive. The problem has always been to find the motive. The one motive that led directly to Sandra Gould’s murder—just as there was one plain motive that led to Mrs. Potter’s.”
“What was that?” Nathan Kaufman said brusquely.
“Fear. Fear of what she’d come to tell. Panic too. And there was another point about Mrs. Potter’s murder, easy to answer in her case, which must be answered about Sandra’s too. Why was she killed at that particular time? Why not a month before, or a year before, or two weeks later? Mrs. Potter was killed because she had to be stopped at once from communicating with me. Why was Sandra killed when she was?
“Now, we all realize that Miss Rosemary’s return is the obvious answer. It’s the single new thing that happened that could, for instance, bring things to a head. Such things, for example, as the desperate unhappiness in Jim Gould’s soul, in her own certainly, probably in her father’s and in Mrs. Gould’s.”
The room was perfectly silent. I could hear the grandfather clock on the landing going, “Tick, tock, tick, tock,” heavily and evenly. Suddenly it brought into my mind that other clock with its tickety-tick, tickety-tock; tickety-tick, tickety-tock. I tried, desperately, to keep it out of my consciousness.
“A second fusing point was Sandra Gould’s meeting with Mr. Dikranov, the business of the boat was still a third—for Andy Thorp and Lucy Lee Thorp. However, there is another kind of timeliness that crimes can have—they can be psychologically timely, the culmination of a long train of emotional factors. They can be acts performed as a result of the sudden collapse of a person’s endurance of—for instance—continued resentment, or even continued envy or exasperation. No particular sudden act is needed to set such passions in action. They pile up . . . and someday the dam bursts.
“It’s here,” he went on slowly, “that you run into the borderline of passion and ignorance and prejudice that breaks out into hysteria. I told you that one person who had the opportunity to murder Sandra Gould was one that none of us had thought of. That person also had a motive of the sort I’m describing. It’s strange we didn’t think of him . . . because from the beginning he has purposely lied to us, misleading us from the very start.
“When we arrived at the garage, Saturday night, someone was already there, and had been there for some time. When we came here after Mrs. Potter was killed, that person had be
en here. That he was in both places occurred to nobody, it was taken entirely for granted. And this person is the only one, of all the persons in this room, who steadily and openly denounced Sandra Gould, and kept on doing it, steadily and openly, after her death as well as before. He has tried by lying to give Jim Gould and the other Goulds—as well as himself—unbreakable alibis, by lying about the time of the murder and the woman whom he heard quarreling with Sandra in the garage.”
Colonel Primrose turned suddenly to the corner of the room, his voice swelling in the utter silence.
“He is a worshiper of a God, and his God is a God of vengeance, whose hand strikes down the evildoer!”
As Colonel Primrose spoke a strange and blood-chilling thing happened. Old Hawkins rose to his feet, his white kinky head trembling, eyes shining through his gold-rimmed spectacles, lips moving fervently, hands clasped on his breast; and when Colonel Primrose stopped he said, “Amen, Lawd, amen!”
And as Sergeant Buck put one hand on his arm his old voice rolled out again, strong and sonorous: “An’ de city of Babylon was crumbled to dust! Amen, Lawd, amen!”
Mr. Parran followed them out, in a silence such as I trust I shall never hear again.
Then Alice Gould got up. “Not Hawkins?” she cried softly. “How did you know?”
“By many things, Mrs. Gould,” Colonel Primrose said somberly. “Including information left by the hand of the dead. I have just learned that Mrs. Potter spent that last morning in writing, before she came out here to her death. I haven’t seen what she wrote yet—it’s at her house. I’ll get it in the morning. I have no doubt it is her account, as an eyewitness, of the information she possessed that led up to her death.”
He shrugged his shoulders wearily.
“Well,” he said, “I must apologize—”
And just then I couldn’t stand any longer not being able to understand one particular thing.
“But, Colonel Primrose,” I cried, “the—”
The words faltered on my lips as I spoke them. I hadn’t realized what a strain this must have been on him. He raised one hand sharply to his heart, stared at me in speechless pain for an instant, stumbled forward, knocking a large vase of gladiolus winding and crashing to the floor, and then fell back in his chair in a dead faint.