Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  Colonel Primrose chuckled again. “It’s not flattering.”

  I shook my head. I had no remote idea.

  “Why, he mistook you for me, Mrs. Latham. We were both wearing white. It was quite dark. He fired, panic-stricken, at a white blur walking up towards the house. It was easy enough to be smoking one of Dikranov’s cigarettes.”

  “Well,” I said philosophically, “it’s occurred to me before that I really ought to diet.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “You don’t need it . . . and I’m too old to worry about my figure. Well, Barrol was really a coward, nervous, panicky, frightened constantly—as well he might be. That’s why he spied on Potter leaving after his interview with me, that’s why he spotted Maggie Potter coming to your place. And when he saw her, the hysterical idea he’d formed that she might have seen him kill Sandra—why else should a bedridden woman actually struggle out there, after being too frightened to talk over the telephone?—sprang instantly into his mind. And he acted instantly on it. He had to, from his point of view.”

  I nodded. “He saw her from the winter kitchen, of course.”

  “My dear Mrs. Latham, so far as I know he was never in the winter kitchen in his life. Rodman Bishop, to save himself from having to admit that he’d seen his daughter leaving his house, definitely upset, and presumably after Mrs. Potter had been killed, just plain lied about where he was. He was outside in your garden. So, in giving himself an out, he struck on the idea of bottling the wine . . . and in quite accidentally picking a witness he gave George Barrol an alibi too. He knew George wouldn’t dare not support him. And not supporting him was the last thing in the world George would want to do. It was providential for him.

  “However, the minute that clock turned out to be in the Bishops’ house—and I couldn’t myself find out where it was without running the risk of giving the whole show away—it was perfectly evident that it pointed to one of the four people there. And with everything else pointing to George already . . .”

  Colonel Primrose shrugged.

  “I framed my little trap. I’d worked out the business of Sandra. You may remember my pointing out early in the evening that there must always be a reason for a crime taking place at a specific time. Well, there was a supremely good reason of that sort here. George Barrol, drowning out there in the bay, in that storm, utterly terrified, paralyzed with fear, confessed his murder of Chapin Bishop to Sandra . . . and he had to close her mouth at the earliest possible moment. It all worked out.”

  He shook his head a little, regretfully.

  “I made one mistake,” he said.

  “Dear me,” I said. “Sergeant Buck told me—”

  “Oh, it wasn’t serious. In fact it was just as good as not being one. And it was very ironical. I thought George killed Mrs. Potter because she knew about Chapin—but it was because he thought she knew about Sandra. He had no idea, really, that she knew about his first murder seven years ago. I didn’t realize that until I heard that sheer gasp of horror he gave when he read Mrs. Potter’s memoirs.”

  He touched the little mass of papers.

  “And how do you know she did, really?” I asked.

  Colonel Primrose smiled.

  “Deduction, Mrs. Latham, greatly aided by your friend Elsie Carter. I told you you’d underestimated her. She was convinced that Chapin Bishop had been murdered. Not by George, of course. By Dr. Potter.”

  “By Adam Potter?” I gasped.

  “According to Mrs. Carter, Maggie Potter, seven years ago, was carrying on—in one degree or another, it doesn’t matter—with Chapin Bishop, who was considerably younger than she was. She’d gone to meet him clandestinely at the inlet, Potter had followed and killed him. Since then Mrs. Potter lived in a borderline state of compounded hysteria and a sense of guilt and what not.”

  He shook his head soberly.

  “The dreadful trouble about people like Elsie Carter is that they’re often half right. And she was—you saw what happened when George was suddenly confronted with her story.”

  “With your story,” I said.

  “With my correct story. There’s no doubt that’s exactly what was the matter with Maggie Potter. She wasn’t sick, as Potter told us himself. If she had been, she couldn’t have got out here. And she couldn’t tell anybody about it—not because her husband had done it and had her terrified, as Elsie Carter thought—but because she was doing a clandestine act that she didn’t dare admit. Until, of course, the murder of Sandra with its precisely similar details, as I found in the coroner’s report and as Mrs. Potter read in the papers. That was too much, and she tried hysterically to get in touch with me.

  “Well, I wasn’t interested in Potter as Chapin Bishop’s murderer. It was simple enough to see that a person who I already thought had killed Sandra profited enormously by Chapin’s death. I take it a quarter of a million was enormous, even before nineteen-twenty-nine. And that was our friend George. The rest of it followed as the night the day. It wasn’t too sharp and exact—it took some reconstruction. But it was good enough. It was all true.”

  We were silent a moment there in the little room.

  “And poor Hawkins!” I said.

  Colonel Primrose chuckled quite callously.

  “My dear Mrs. Latham, that was the supreme moment of his life. He probably actually thought, at that moment, that he’d really done it. I had to do it that way, you see. There was no evidence against Barrol that a shrewd fellow like Nathan Kaufman couldn’t have torn to bits in front of a jury. I had to make George think the case was closed—he was in no danger at all, except from one thing, which he could forestall. But that danger was terrific. I don’t know whether you’ve realized how very subtle my statement of the case against Hawkins was. As I stated the criminal’s motive, it was a precise statement of George’s, in the abstract and leaving out the details framed around Hawkins—the motive no one suspected and so on. Hence the infallibility of the trap baited with Maggie Potter’s papers. George couldn’t help but see that he was just on the very verge of detection, that it was a pure miracle I’d picked on Hawkins. He wouldn’t dare not take the risk of getting those papers. He simply had to get them. The least little shred of evidence and he was done for.

  “Well, you nearly ruined everything by starting to ask me about the clock, which would have given it all away. I imagine you were just about to remind me also that of course Mrs. Potter really wasn’t an eyewitness. Fortunately I have a very bad heart. The shock was too much for me.”

  “You nearly scared the wits out of me,” I said.

  “That was the idea. I’d thought of doing something of the kind anyway. It served the very useful purposes of letting George know Potter would be out of his house and I confined to yours. But imagine my real shock, Mrs. Latham, when you turned up here! We thought for a moment you’d come after the papers yourself.”

  I stared at the pleasant gray-haired rotund little man placidly lighting a cigar.

  “Then you . . . you expected him to kill himself!”

  “That was certainly my hope, Mrs. Latham,” he said cheerfully. “After all, he was a gentleman. And, by the way, I’ll be glad to get you another vase.”

  “That was my great-grandmother’s!” I said weakly.

  “I’ll give you one of my greaf-great-grandmother’s.”

  I left my car in the kitchen drive and went into the house. There was a curious empty feeling inside me, and the house seemed strangely silent and forlorn, like a stage after the last curtain has fallen and gone up again on a deserted theater. I picked up a little piece of glass that had landed under the pleated edge of the chintz slip cover in the living room and put it in an ash tray. Then I sat down and closed my eyes, utterly and unbelievably weary.

  I opened them again when I heard someone coming in the porch door. It was Jim.

  He dropped into a chair and sat there, staring down between his knees at the rug, as completely dejected a figure as I’ve ever seen.

  “Well,” I
said, “it’s all pretty foul.”

  He nodded.

  “When did he come back?” he asked.

  “George?”

  “Dikranov.”

  “Oh. He never went. He was helping Colonel Primrose to keep an eye on George. I take it Mr. Dikranov’s something pretty swell in his country.”

  “Thanks,” Jim said.

  I sat up . . . with an effort.

  “Jim, what’s the matter?”

  He laughed, bitterly. “Nothing. I guess I’m just all wet. And nineteen kinds of a jackass. Anybody not a conceited swine could have seen she’d got way out past me.”

  I felt even worse than I’d felt during that dreadful scene in Maggie Potter’s sitting room.

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I said, “Do you want a drink?”

  “No.”

  He got up, stood there for a moment and went wretchedly to the door and on out.

  I don’t know how long I stood miserably there, watching the dark spot in the night where I’d lost sight of him. One thing was good, I thought. There wasn’t a Palais de Danse about, where he could go and get potted and marry another Sandra. Not that night anyway.

  Then the kitchen door slammed, and I heard somebody calling me, and the hall door flew open, and then the front door, and Rosemary burst through it.

  “Grace!” she said. “Where’s Jim?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I’d leave him alone, darling. He’s feeling rotten enough.”

  All the fire and life went out of her suddenly. She sat down on the porch chair.

  “Then he really did love her, didn’t he?”

  I think I glared at her.

  “My God,” I said, “somebody’s raving mad around here, and it can’t be me. Are you going to marry Paul?”

  “Oh, no!” she gasped. “That’s all out! It has been for days!”

  “Then go and find your Jim before he casts himself into the sea!”

  I pushed her down the porch steps. A flying wisp of blue was the last I saw of Rosemary that night. Alice Gould, coming up the flagged walk, watched her go too, and smiled.

  “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings,” she said.

  We stood for a moment looking out into the night where Rosemary had gone.

  “Andy’s home,” Alice said. “So is Lucy Lee. I feel rather lonely, just now. I think I’ll go over and see Rodman. He was fond of George.”

  I went back into the house and through to the kitchen.

  Colonel Primrose was just coming in, his sergeant behind him. I had just started to say anything—I don’t know what—when Sergeant Buck cleared his throat.

  “Could I speak to you, alone, ma’am?” he asked stiffly.

  “Surely,” I said.

  Colonel Primrose looked puzzled, hesitated a moment, and went on into the living room. Sergeant Buck’s hard lined lantern-jawed face turned slowly to a dull brick-red.

  “I just wanted to say, ma’am,” he began doggedly, “that the Colonel seems to think pretty well of you.”

  I was more than a little surprised, for certainly I’d had no idea of it. Sergeant Buck cleared his throat again.

  “I wanted to say that . . . if the Colonel should ask you to marry him, ma’am, I’d regard it as a personal favor if you’d say nothing doing.”

  I suppose I must have looked still more surprised, for he swallowed hard and turned still redder.

  “The Colonel’s had a hard life—no offense intended, ma’am—and you see, we ain’t marryin’ men.”

  There was a loud bang on the pantry door, and Colonel Primrose then pushed it open.

  “Buck,” he demanded, “what the devil are you up to?”

  He looked at us with a suspicious frown.

  “Not anything, sir,” Sergeant Buck said promptly.

  “He’s just warning me about the primrose path,” I said. “Who’d like a drink?”