Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  She moved uncertainly a few steps toward her car, stopped and turned back to the cottage where death had come to Gordon Darcy Grymes, her eyes filled with indecision. It was as if she wanted to go but couldn’t bear to leave. She looked again at Sergeant Digges.

  “You asked me if he had any enemies. I said no. I’ve been trying to think if there’s anybody, but I can’t. I can’t think of anybody who wasn’t charmed by him—even the men he knew, except a few who were jealous. Because all he had to do was look at a woman once. But there was no one around here he was interested in particularly, anyone married or engaged, with a husband or fiancé to get upset. But of course this is the South. It may be different here.”

  Jonas waited. If she brought brothers in, he was thinking, that would tear it. The sharp image of Tom Darrell and Elizabeth watching him and Sergeant Digges from behind the window curtains flashed into his mind. But she left it at that. She stopped talking and moved slowly away.

  “You wouldn’t say there was any real hard feeling between him and Mr. Franklin Grymes, would you, Miss Van Holt?” Sergeant Digges asked.

  “No, Sergeant. Not really. But you know how close identical twins are. I suppose if something sours between them it’s bound to go deeper than it would in an ordinary brother relationship. But I’m sure they patched things up at dinner last night. When my husband talked to me before he went to bed—or said he was going to bed, I mean—he sounded very cheerful. He said they’d had the best time they’d had together for a long time. I’m sure things were all right between them. I think they particularly wanted to get things settled now because Franklin’s engaged to marry a perfectly charming girl—as Dr. Smith here can tell you.”

  Sergeant Digges’s glance at Jonas indicated doubt if Dr. Smith could even tell him when to take an aspirin tablet. He turned back to Philippa.

  “What had been the trouble between your husband and his brother?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair for me to say anything until you’ve talked to Franklin. He can tell you much more about it than I can. I’ve never got it very straight. My husband had an intense sort of loyalty to his brother.”

  She spoke quietly and with dignity. Remembering the scene between her and Franklin Grymes in Miss Olive Oliphant’s study, Jonas wondered for an instant whether he had dreamed that up, or was now dreaming this. Still, it could be that the earlier flare-up was an emotional reaction at seeing him just after she had heard of her husband’s death. Her tone had changed even from her first mention of him as they were talking now, as if she was trying to undo any injustice her first impulsive statement about him could have done him in Sergeant Digges’s mind.

  She moved slowly away. Sergeant Digges watched her with a compassionate look on his rugged face until she reached her car and got inside. When he turned to Jonas there was nothing remotely compassionate about his expression.

  “You heard what she said, doctor. We know there was a girl here. Here and over at your place. So come on, doctor. You and I’ll go inside with Edgerton here, and he’ll take down any statement you want to make.”

  He motioned to one of the uniformed officers. “Come on, Bob. Come on, doctor.”

  “Okay,” Jonas said. “But it’s going to be a tough job to get it all in, Sergeant. According to you I must have been pretty busy between eighteen past one and twenty past two when I put in my call to you people… getting dressed and over here, and on friendly enough terms with a guy I never saw before to shoot him—and take his girl. You may think I’m a fast worker, Sergeant, but I’m not that fast.”

  “I’m figuring you could have been here already when he got here, doctor. You say eighteen minutes past one is when you were waked up by a shot. Maybe so. Something brought him steaming out there mighty fast. It’s a funny thing about a guy that’s in the habit of taking other fellows’ women. They’re the kind get maddest when another fellow takes theirs.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sergeant.”

  “Okay. All I’m saying is there’s a girl mixed up in this some place, and somebody’s going to tell me who the hell she is, doctor. It’s not likely she’s somebody nobody ever saw before. She wouldn’t be a perfect stranger now, would she? A fellow doesn’t go out on a limb and do his damndest to saw it off on account of some dame he isn’t pretty far gone on.”

  Sergeant Digges started leisurely around the end of the cottage toward the door.

  “And who’s this Miss Van Holt was talking about,? This girl friend of her brother-in-laws?”

  He glanced back sharply. Jonas Smith’s reaction-time was slow enough, at that question, to allow him to read anything he liked in it, from perfectly ordinary stupidity to fear and guilt. Actually it was a simple matter of semantics. Calling Agatha Reed anybody’s girl friend was a shock that it took a little time to absorb. Even lady friend, so applied, would have startled Jonas.

  “You mean Miss Reed. Miss Agatha Reed.”

  “You know her?”

  “She’s an old friend of mine.”

  “I see.”

  “And through a glass darkly, Sergeant, if you think there’s any tie-up around here with Miss Reed.”

  Jonas realized he was speaking with more warmth than the facts called for, but there was something in Sergeant Digges’s eyes that was a mote to be yanked out before it obscured the whole landscape.

  “We were engaged once. It’s all called off, so don’t let it worry you, my friend.”

  “Who called it off, doctor? You or the lady?”

  “The lady, Sergeant.”

  “Why?”

  “That is her business.”

  Jonas grinned suddenly. “As Mr. Franklin Grymes said this morning, please leave Miss Reed out of this.” It was a feeble joke, so feeble that Sergeant Digges failed to recognize it. It was also a mistake, as Jonas realized instantly.

  “So you’ve been talking to him about the lady this morning, have you, doctor?”

  Jonas groaned again. “No, Sergeant. No. And skip it, will you? I just haven’t got the strength to go into it now. Miss Reed was home in bed. I swear it. Miss Reed is always at home, and always in bed, at the correct hour. So leave us not get all hot and bothered about Miss Reed.”

  “Okay. You’re the doctor.”

  Sergeant Digges chuckled at his own joke, as feeble as Jonas’s.

  “We’ll skip Miss Agatha Reed… for the time being. Now let’s see. You wanted to make a statement, I believe. Do you want to go inside, or stay out?”

  “Either one, Sergeant. It’s your show. I’m cooperating. The scene of the crime has no terrors for me.”

  “I’m glad to hear you call it a crime.” Sergeant Digge’s’ eyes rested thoughtfully on his. “I’ve been wondering why, if you just saw a guy on the floor with a gun in his hand and nothing else, you didn’t just take it for granted he’d done it himself. That’d seem a sort of logical conclusion, wouldn’t it?”

  Jonas would have liked a moment in which to think. Having none, and with the Sergeant’s level gaze fixed on him, he said coolly, “Not the way you’ve been talking about it. Also the expression on his face. I doubt if he would have looked quite so surprised if it was his own idea.”

  Something almost imperceptibly like a smile twitched one corner of Sergeant Digges’s mouth.

  “I’m interested to hear you say that, doctor. Now if you’ll just step right over to where you say you saw him.”

  Jonas went across the room to where the dark stain was viscid-dried on the green-tiled floor and the white string rug was dyed a dirty brown.

  “—About there, you’d say?”

  “Right.”

  “So you could see him through the kitchen window?”

  Jonas turned and looked through the open door at the window over the sink. He turned back, nodding.

  Sergeant Digges’s eyes rested steadily on him. He said, “Looking straigh
t at you, wasn’t he, doctor? That’s how you got him… straight through the heart, the second he turned around. Come on, doctor—quit stalling. You’re licked, doctor. You shot him. What did you shoot him for?”

  CHAPTER 12

  For a dazed instant Jonas Smith heard not believing he had heard, staggered by the direct assault out of the blue and by the impact of what he saw, with a flash of mental clarity, was the most extraordinary and implacable logic. He was facing the window. The ledge was on a direct level with his heart. A gun there, aimed easily at him as he stood now, would do to him precisely what it had done to Gordon Darcy Grymes held in the hands of an hysterical girl facing him from the other direction, across the wide room from the porch door. The angle would be the same, the difference in her height and his made up by the foundation of the cottage. The distance even, between killer and killed, was not greatly different, across the room where Jenny Darrell would have been standing, and from the window in the kitchen where he himself had stood, to where Gordon Darcy Grymes had stood. It was logic. All it didn’t have was the truth.

  Jonas looked from the window to Sergeant Digges.

  “No,” he said calmly. “He wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t see him standing up. He was lying on the floor. That stuff was all bright red and still wet. I see what you mean, Sergeant… but it just happens I wasn’t the guy that did it.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me the truth, doctor?”

  “I’ve told you the truth.”

  “Not all of it. Not the whole truth.”

  Jonas shook his head. “Sergeant, I don’t know the whole truth—about anything. In my profession that’s the first thing they try to teach you. Now if you want that statement you’ve been talking about, I’ll be glad to make it. Or is it the local can? Make up your mind, will you?”

  Thinking it over, some minutes later, he was wondering why Sergeant Digges had made up his mind the way he had. He was still not in jail. Or not yet. Up to the last minute, there in the Milnors’ cottage, he hadn’t been sure the Sergeant wasn’t going to spring it on him in good earnest, as a means if not an end in itself. Behind his hardly veiled exasperation and annoyance Jonas could see him weighing the obvious advantages of locking him up against the whole flock of imponderables that made up the less obvious disadvantages of it. It had been touch and go, and Jonas had guarded his tongue for fear he might say something that could be construed as a wise crack sufficient to tilt the balance and land him behind the bars. Even when he set out with Roddy to walk back over to the Fergusons’ house, he was not entirely sure the offered lift into town wasn’t actually intended as one leg up in the direction of the jail.

  However, he was at the Fergusons’, not the jail, and as he called a taxi and put down the phone his hand lingered on it, the impulse to pick it up again and call Elizabeth Darrell so strong that he tore himself away by force and went barging out onto the terrace, to get away from the temptation and try to examine himself with some degree of ordinary sanity. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to hear her voice, to be sure again she was real and not a dream. The excuse of calling to ask about her grandfather that kept popping back into his mind every couple of seconds was plausible, but not really valid. Until Dr. Pardee formally invited him back he had no standing in the case.

  “Gee, I want to see her! I’ve got to see her!”

  He flopped down in the Gibson Island chair on the terrace, took out his pipe and knocked it out on the arms of the chair. He was acting like a damned fool, and he knew it. Everything that had happened since he had looked at her, standing on the other side of her grandfather’s bed in the darkened room, was driven out of his mind. The creek, its shining waters girdled with young green and gold with the reflection of the trees on the banks around it, and serenely blue from the cloudless sky above, the creek and the white herons wading the marsh, the rustling leaves of the oaks, the croaking of the frogs, all of it mingled into something warm and lovely, making him forget Sergeant Digges, and Gordon Darcy Grymes, and remember only a smooth golden head and fringed wisteria eyes and a moving velvety voice.

  He moved abruptly. “I keep forgetting she doesn’t think I’m so hot.” He got up and put his pipe back in his pocket. “Oh well, the hell with it.” There was an old poem about What care I how fair she be if she is not fair to me. At his age, with his experience, he ought to start making some kind of emotional sense, not going around having mystical visions and practically landing in the jail-house through his own unaided efforts.

  He whistled to the dog, busy at a snake hole on the bank, and sat down again. He couldn’t go until his taxi came, and it didn’t hurt him to think about her… especially when he couldn’t help it. He looked down at Roddy, obediently there beside him, gazing up into his eyes. He reached down and rubbed the drooping damp ears.

  “It’s the first time I’ve really been in love, boy.” He grinned. “Don’t look so bloody doleful. It’s not you it hurts.”

  He straightened abruptly. The phone was ringing. He sprang to his feet. It was Her. You couldn’t want anybody so intensely without communicating it some way. He dashed to the door, yanked it open, and stopped half-way to the table. It wasn’t her. He was crazy. It was Van Holt, or somebody… somebody he didn’t care whether he ever talked to again or not. He went the rest of the way soberly, picked the instrument up and said “Hello” so brusquely it surprised him.

  Then he held his breath, his heart beating so fast it almost choked him. He sat down in the chair by the table, smiling happily like a love-sick zany.

  “Excuse me for calling you, Dr. Smith, but I was… worried,” Elizabeth Darrell was saying. “Philippa Van Holt was just here. She said she was afraid the police were… were…”

  “They haven’t yet,” Jonas said cheerfully. “But thanks for worrying. How is your grandfather? Is the nurse there?” “Yes. There’s no change.”

  “I’m on my way in town. If you want me for anything—”

  “Thank you.”

  Her voice cooled abruptly.

  “I don’t see anything to be so cheerful about. Anyway, Dr. Pardee’s coming back. I think we’ll do very nicely. That wasn’t why I called. I just didn’t want you to be in any trouble on our account. Good-bye.”

  Jonas held the phone for a moment, still smiling. Her rebuke was no doubt deserved. He didn’t mind. She was worried about him, she’d called him up… those were twin baskets of rubies and fine pearls tossed into the empty hands of a beggar in the streets. He bounded up, whistling, treading the golden mountain top, reprieved from the slough of dismal despond. The taxi’s honking in the drive was the song of the morning lark in his ears.

  “Come on, Roddy! Let’s go!”

  His delirium was brief. Its first set-back was the last words coming from the radio in the taxi before the boy switched it off to hear where Jonas wanted to go.

  “—mystery woman believed to have been with the dead man at that time. Keep tuned to this station for late developments. It is now five-fifteen Eastern Daylight Time.”

  The second was in town when he was eating a thick steak at Gregory’s on Maryland Avenue. In the bright blue-and-red leather booth in front of him were four young St. John’s students talking about Aristotle. Three girls in the booth behind him were talking about Gordon Darcy Grymes and Elizabeth Darrell.

  “—Hubris is the pride and arrogance that leads the gods to strike you down,” said one booth. “It’s Nemesis that pursues you and does the—”

  “—make any difference to Liz if Gordon was married,” the other booth was saying. “She can’t ever marry anybody while that horrid old man’s alive. Especially if he’s going to be paralyzed. He’s always managed to get rid of every boy Liz ever even started to like. She’ll end up just like poor old Cousin Olive. The Commodore told me once she had all kinds of beaux but she couldn’t leave Papa. At least he left her a little money to live on. All Liz’ll gets is that
white elephant of a house and she’ll end up renting rooms and taking boarders. I just don’t get it.”

  “Liz is super,” one of the other girls said.

  The third one giggled. “You know what Miss Olive said? She said she didn’t see why we thought her generation was so repressed. She said they didn’t have cars to park in but she couldn’t see what could happen in a car that didn’t use to happen at coon hunts when she was a girl. Papa never did approve of coon hunts.”

  “I guess they didn’t have ticks with spotted fever in the woods in those days,” the first girl said. “Anyway, I’d like to know who the mystery woman is somebody saw in Gordon’s car. Mother and Dad were coming home from a party around one. Gordon was just getting in his car, but he didn’t recognize them, he was in such a hurry, and Mother didn’t recognize the girl. But she was so busy holding Dad up I guess she didn’t have a chance. I don’t know why people drink so much.”

  Jonas drained his beer glass, got up and paid his bill. He glanced back from the counter. The three girls had their bright little heads together. He couldn’t see their faces. But it didn’t matter. He’d heard enough. The mystery woman was not Jenny Darrell, as he’d assumed hearing the tail end of the radio broad-cast. It was whoever was waiting for Franklin Grymes when he came whipping out of his brother’s hotel room at a quarter to one o’clock.

  He left the restaurant and hurried down toward Prince George Street to Blanton-Darrell Court. Just so it didn’t turn out to be Agatha Reed, he thought. It was one of those grim and preposterous ideas that he wished devoutly had never occurred to him, and that stuck like a tack in the heel of his shoe, more uncomfortable with every step he took. Having assured Sergeant Digges that Miss Agatha Reed was home and in bed, it would be funny as hell if Miss Reed had turned over a new leaf and taken to tearing around the country-side in the middle of the night. It would be so funny, in fact, that Jonas Smith groaned inwardly. The old eight-ball in front of him was looming to planetary proportions.