by Zenith Brown
Jonas gave her a quick sidelong glance. She was going calmly on, unconscious of the startling statement she’d made.
“If you believe in the psychology of frustration, that is. It’s born in people. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Miss Olive clipped it out of a paper. It has something to do with your brain cells. But God help anybody who marries one of them. The Darrells, I mean. I used to wonder why some smart gal hadn’t copped off Grandpa and the Blanton-Darrell House—when I first came. Not now. It wouldn’t be worth it, having to put up with all their foul tantrums.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jonas said. Until she said it he had virtually come to the same conclusion.
“Okay. Let’s skip it. Isn’t this sweet?”
They were coming out of the foot of Cornhill Street into the Market Space. The fishing boats were crowded together side by side in the small rectangular basin between the two arms of the Square. Above the disfiguring signs and garish lights of pool halls and taverns, the roof lines of the Eighteenth Century were still pure, of simple dignified charm.
“There used to be an old slave block here, and the Space was open. I don’t know why the City Fathers thought Ye Olde Colonial Type comfort stations were more important, except that City Fathers never recognize historical treasures until it’s too late. However, I suppose honky-tonks and comfort stations are the stigmata of our age.”
Off Compromise Street the Yacht Basin was as crowded as the harbor. Philippa and Jonas walked along the cinder road to the Club House, four great colonial mansions within fewer blocks of them, enclosed in their quiet twilit gardens, a contrast in peace and lost tranquility with the roving restlessness all around them.
“Oh,” Philippa said. She stopped abruptly inside the door of the Club. “I made a mistake. It isn’t tonight. It’s tomorrow. The dining room’s closed tonight.”
She nodded at the sign over the passage entrance leading to the dining room door. Jonas looked at her. Her mouth had tightened. For the first time he saw something in her face that was unguarded and very like chagrin.
“I’m terribly sorry. It was stupid of me. But let’s go up and have a drink and then I’ll feed you somewhere, just to make up for it.”
“—You didn’t really have a dinner date—either tonight or tomorrow, did you?” Jonas asked pleasantly.
They were seated on the long covered gallery looking out over the rippling water. The yachts below them were a beehive of music and laughter, people calling and visiting back and forth. Cars whipped by, going and coming over the hunchbacked bridge over Spa Creek from the foot of Duke of Gloucester Street to the Eastport side. The corner of the gallery was cool and quiet, strangely remote for all the noise and restlessness around them. Jonas sipped his Tom Collins and looked at her with a lift of his brows.
“Come clean. Why did you do it? You’re not this fond of my company.”
For a moment Philippa sat in silence, looking out at the liquid carpet of moving light and shadow in the open channel.
“Perhaps I am,” she said at last. “Or maybe it’s just my maternal instinct trying to keep you from making a fool of yourself. You’re quite right. I didn’t have a date. I thought it up on the spur of the moment after I stopped in Gregory’s to get some cigarettes and saw Elizabeth and Jenny in there eating their dinner. Maybe it’s a form of jealousy. Maybe I can’t bear to see the only intelligent and attractive man I’ve met down here prefer somebody else to me. Which is a mistake, isn’t it?”
“I’d say it might be.”
“Oh, you make me tired!” Philippa struck a match sharply, held it to her cigarette and threw it down on the deck. “Why anybody like you wants to bury himself down here, and fall for the first pair of blue eyes he meets…”
She relaxed suddenly against the yellow woven plastic back of her deck chair. “Dear me. That’s really none of my business, is it? You don’t think I’m falling in love with you, do you? It certainly sounds like it. Maybe that’s really it.”
“Oh, nuts,” Jonas said. He smiled back at her.
“Or maybe I wanted to ask your advice about something.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about my husband and my brother-in-law,” Philippa said. The smile died out of her eyes. “You might as well know it now as later.”
Jonas waited silently. The moisture dripped from the cold glass in his hand. He waited a long time. Philippa sat smoking her cigarette, her head bent forward, her knees crossed, one foot absently beating time to the music from a radio coming up from one of the yachts in the Basin.
“Jonas,” she said at last. “You were out there. Do you think they killed him? I’ve got to know about that. It’s terribly important for me to know… for lots of reasons.”
“Who do you mean by ‘they,’ Philippa?”
It took him some little time before he finally asked it.
“My brother-in-law and that girl, Agatha Reed.”
“Agatha says not. So did he, didn’t he, at Miss Olive’s on Sunday?”
“That’s not much help, is it?” Her voice had sharpened. “When all I’m trying to do is be decent about things.” She got abruptly to her feet and shook herself as if she would like to tear everything to pieces. “This is driving me crazy. But let’s skip it. Let’s go get something to eat and go home. I’m a wreck. I’ve had what we call a gruelling day. And I think I’d like to see Sergeant Digges. Will you go over to see him with me?”
“He’s in Baltimore.”
“Okay, in the morning will do. Come on, I’m hungry. I’ll go powder my nose first.”
When she met him at the top of the steps to go down and out of the Yacht Club she was smiling again.
“I’m sorry I was irritable,” she said lightly. “I keep forgetting Agatha Reed is an old friend of yours.”
Jonas smiled back at her. He glanced at her chin.
She laughed. “That’s not powder. That’s just one of my mosquito bites. They even get me down here. I guess they know I’m a city girl, born and bred.”
It was nearly quarter to twelve when they walked back from a restaurant on lower Main Street, across the Market Space around the rectangular basin of small boats nosed into the quay like fat obedient ducks waddling gently with the motion of the water.
Philippa slipped her hand into his arm and slowed his pace down.
“—Do you see who I see?”
They were coming up Prince George Street from its dead end at the water’s edge. It was silent and empty, the rockers on the small wooden front porches of the painted frame houses deserted for the night. It was not entirely empty. Jonas had not seen the dark figure slipping rapidly along ahead of them. He saw it then, not recognizing it, and admitting his eyes would never be as sharply seeing in the external world of persons and places as the shrewdly observant and highly trained eyes of Philippa Van Holt.
“Who is it?”
“Tom Darrell,” she whispered. “I saw his face when he turned just then under the street light. I’m sure it’s him. It’s his size and shape, and the midshipmen’s gait. He must have come out around the end of the wharf. What on earth do you suppose for?”
She spoke softly, glancing behind them. “I don’t see any jimmylegs on his trail. I guess he’s got smarter with experience.”
Jonas was watching the boy ahead of them. He saw him glance around, duck between two parked cars and disappear on the other side of the street.
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Philippa said. “My father told me once that nobody ever went any place without somebody he knew or who knew him seeing him. He said it wasn’t coincidence, it was an established rule of fate.—Or have I lived with Miss Olive too long so I’m beginning to quote my Papa too?”
“He seems to have been right in this case,” Jonas said soberly.
“I don’t suppose it matters much, with Tom, I mean. He’s ou
t flat on his rear anyway. I guess he figures he can’t be any outer or flatter. I was talking to one of the executive officers at Bancroft, one of the Commandant’s assistants. He says they’d give him a break if they could but they can’t. He’s a striper and a Navy Junior, and they’ve got to be tough or somebody’d start yelling favoritism. I gather Tom isn’t doing much to cooperate.”
Jonas was silent, all the way up Prince George Street and along College Avenue, silent and disturbed. If Tom Darrell frenched out of the Yard a second time, when he was confined to his room under a kind of technical arrest, it was a very serious matter—if he got caught. It was serious if he did not, serious on another level. There was no doubt in Jonas’s mind that his frenching out the second time was the net result of his conference with Elizabeth in Bancroft Hall before noon meal formation. What he hoped to gain by it was hard to see, except to talk to his sister again, if as Elizabeth had said he was still determined to carry on the way they had started.
“Don’t be so glum, Jonas.”
They were coming up to the small yellow house covered with silver moon roses in St. John’s Street.
“If he wants to be a fool, it’s not your problem. Don’t take it so heavily to heart, dear.”
“I take any kid’s wrecking his whole career pretty much to heart, if you want to call it that,” Jonas said quietly. “Especially when it’s not necessary.”
“How do you know it isn’t necessary?” Philippa asked easily.
He felt the slow flush that came up from under his collar and spread over his face. He looked at her intently, wondering how much he had given away. Her shrewd bright eyes were fixed on him. He shrugged and turned to open Miss Olive’s gate for her.
“Nothing’s that necessary.”
He opened the screen door. “Do you want me to go in with you? Or have you got used to Papa’s ghost?”
“Oh, we’re great friends,” Philippa said calmly. “But he’s a little worried about Miss Olive. He doesn’t believe maiden ladies should sleep in strange beds. He doesn’t think it’s nice for her to keep the Death Watch on poor old Professor Darrell.”
The Death Watch.… The words lingered unpleasantly in Jonas’s mind as he switched on the light on the desk in his consulting room. He gave a start of surprise at the object, or objects, he saw in the middle of his blotter. It was a bowl of water there, with two startled goldfish in it, and by its side a note in a spidery lady-like Spencerian hand.
“My dear Dr. Smith,” it said. “Martha tells me you often plan to dine on the terrace. As your window was open, I took the liberty of placing my small gift of welcome inside, although the fish will not be harmed by the warm summer nights. The article I clipped from a paper and am leaving with you tells you about fish, and their proper feeding and care. Cordially, (Miss) Olive Oliphant.”
“—For the love of all the saints,” Jonas Smith thought. He put the note carefully down on the desk and picked up the bowl. His first impulse was to hurl it fish and all through the open window onto the terrace, let the chips fall and the fish flounder where they might. He thought better of it. Maybe Martha would like them. He took the bowl out through the pantry, put it on the kitchen sink and came back into the room. Roddy, lying sleeping on the cool brick hearth, opened one eye, gave his tail a tentative wag and went back to sleep.
“What’s the matter? The heat got you?”
Jonas put his foot out and stroked the dog’s back before he took out his pipe and filled it absently as he moved restlessly back and forth across the room, morosely trying to make up his mind as to what he ought to do. He wanted to see Tom Darrell. What good it would do he didn’t know, but after a few moments of indecision he made up his mind, strode across the room and out the wicket across the garden.
He stopped and looked up at the Blanton-Darrell House. It was dark except for one light in the upper hall and the dim glow through the fanlight over the door to the back porch. If Tom Darrell was home, he and Elizabeth were taking care not to have him seen by inquisitive eyes prying through the shutter slats. Nor was it his business to pry. It was some time before he came to that quite simple and rational conclusion. It was practical, furthermore, he reflected, so far as tactics were concerned. In his white linen suit with the moonlight full on him he had probably been seen already, and with a front door handy Tom was no doubt well on his way back over the Naval Academy wall.
It was one of the times that it occurred to Jonas Smith he might not. be as bright as he thought he was. He looked up at the house, a slightly ironic grin at his own expense on his face, and gave it an airy salute before he strolled back across the garden to his own place and sat down at his desk.
“What,” he thought, “am I getting all steamed up about? Why don’t I try minding my own business for a change?”
He had plenty of it to mind, including the report he had to have done before morning on the afternoon clinic at the St. Margaret’s Health Center. He opened the desk drawer and took out his papers. Miss Olive’s letter and the clipping were still in front of him. He picked them up, glanced through the letter again and ran his eyes down the clipping. Fish, it seemed, were extremely useful people to have around—if you liked fish and liked having them around, which Jonas Smith did not. He tossed the letter and clipping toward the wastebasket, missed it and leaned over the arm of his chair to pick them off the floor.
He heard simultaneously the crash of the shot, the shattering of the pane of window glass, the rip of lead into metal as the bullet tore through the lamp on his desk. The room was in staggering darkness then, and with an unconscious reflex he reached his hand up to his left shoulder where the bullet had seared its way through the pad under the white linen a quarter of an inch from his flesh and bone. It all happened at once, in a flashing simultaneous instant that but for the guardian angel standing by him could have spelled another and deeper darkness than that in the room, the infinite and eternal darkness. He held his breath, his heart pounding, the cold sweat in living moving beads on his forehead, crawling through the hair on the back of his hands and clammy in his palms. The shattered light was a blinding after-image still in his retina in the intensified blackness the room had been pitched violently into. As Jonas blinked to erase it, he was seized with a sudden fury that drove all fear and shock out of him.
“The bastard, the little son of a—”
He jumped up to his feet and ducked down again as a flash of instinctive caution warned him not to let his broad white linen back be a shadowy second target for a murderous young fool. He shoved his chair back, crouched down and moved around the desk, straightening to his feet behind the solid brick wall. The whole thing had a fantastic kind of clarity that was almost as much of a shock as the hot lead ripping past him into the desk lamp. If he had read one more line about the ways and uses of goldfish it would have ripped through the base of his brain instead. But Jonas was not thinking of that. He was thinking of the pattern that it was to have been the finish of, and that he ought to have seen when he saw Tom Darrell slipping up Prince George Street. It had a kind of hideous rationale, hideous in the profound simplicity and ease that it must have presented itself with to anybody with so much at stake and so little to lose.
One Jonas Smith was the solitary witness against them. He was nothing to Tom Darrell, nothing to Elizabeth Darrell but a source of terror and danger, as against Jenny’s honor and reputation and freedom. With Tom’s distorted code, no sacrifice was too great. And he could not have been safer. If he got back in the Yard and back in his room at Bancroft Hall he had an alibi as unimpeachable as the prestige and dignity of the United States Navy. It was as perfect a set-up as any human being could demand. Especially as Elizabeth could pass Sergeant Digges’s message on, that he’d be in Baltimore and not prowling around to disturb him.
Jonas took a step toward the desk and stood in the shadowy darkness, his brows drawn together, trying to look at this on somebody else�
��s terms, somebody like a member of the Darrell family… passionate, violent-tempered, ruthlessly protective of their own, young, terribly torn, emotionally, from the strange unhappy life they’d been decreed as wards of their grandfather and buffers between him and the dark elfin child he couldn’t abide. He touched his shoulder again, exploring the bullet track through the freshly ironed linen, listening with intent ears to the silence around him. Roddy was snoring undisturbed, which was a little strange, and no one in the Blanton-Darrell House seemed to have heard, or cared to come out if they had heard. Jonas grunted an ironic and amused laugh, reached over and pulled the telephone to the corner of the desk. He counted the numbers with his fingertip from One at the top and dialled the Darrells’ number in the dark.
He heard the ringing signal once, and once again, before he heard her voice say “Hello.” She could not have been far from the phone, and there was no tangled mesh of sleepiness in her voice that he could detect.
“Miss Darrell, this is Jonas Smith,” he said.
He heard her draw her breath in and let it out, in what seemed to him otherwise might be called a pregnant silence, which he was the one who broke.
“I’d like to speak to your brother Tom,” he said deliberately.
Her breath was caught this time in a quick gasp. “Tom? I…I don’t understand you, Dr. Smith. Tom isn’t here. He’s in the Yard.”
For an instant Jonas hesitated. She sounded sincere, perfectly truthful… surprised, of course, but surprised at the idea of Tom’s being there and his asking for him. And it might be so. It suddenly occurred to him that it probably was true… that she would be the last person Tom Darrell would tell he was frenching out to kill someone, and make her thereby a second time accessory after the fact. But he wasn’t sure. It was axiomatic that the fairy gift laid in every female crib is the gift of lying with a straight face, calm voice and not the slightest sense of guilt.
“Okay,” he said casually. “I’ll just call him there. It’s 2611, isn’t it? What’s the Bancroft Hall extension number?”