False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  Then William came in with my coat in his hand. “Cap’n Fox say if you don’ min’, Miz Latham, would you come ovah to Miss Karen’s house?”

  There was a sudden flash of alarm in Jerry’s eyes. I pushed back my chair, recognizing the not-so-fine hand of my friend Colonel Primrose in this move to get me away from the frightened girl whose guest I was.

  “You’ll come back, Mrs. Latham?” Judge Candler said. “I think Jerry would appreciate your staying with her a day or so.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” I said.

  Sandy held my coat.

  “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes, lady,” he whispered to the back of my head. Food was telling on him too. In spite of that I recognized the earnestness of his entreaty as he glanced at his sister, her eyes fixed on her scarcely-touched plate.

  As I passed through the hall on my way out the garden entry I saw the front door open and the odd little figure of Mr. Pepperday come in. He put his green baize bag on the table and began to unwind the wool muffler that stood out around his neck like a small overblown tire.

  I went out. The little white brick carriage house looked different now that the pale sun was up. Only the trampled snow and the picture of that searchlight from the fire engine engraved on my mind remained of the night, until I got halfway down the leafless crape myrtle path and saw the broken panes of glass strewed about. A sound at my back made me turn quickly. Mrs. Harris was coming with me, lifting her paws gingerly on the cold ground. Across the street through the iron palings the Doyles’ house stood out stark and lovely against the winter scene, its old mauve brick and freshly painted white trim and green shutters making it obviously a munificently restored job compared with its lovely but shabby and time-beaten neighbours.

  I went around the brick walk to Karen’s front door. The smell of gas still filled the room. Except for that and the broken windows, and the sense of appalling emptiness that death leaves in a house, nothing was changed. Captain Fox had seen to that. Two patrolmen at the ends of the street diverted curious traffic, and the people who lived in the block had decently gone about their business. How many eyes watched from behind window curtains of course I didn’t know. It seemed to me I saw a figure move behind the neat Venetian blinds in the Doyles’ house, but it may have been a colored servant.

  Captain Fox and Colonel Primrose were standing in the middle of Karen’s eggshell velvet carpet. They both had on their overcoats and hats, and their reflection in the mirrored walls made the room seem pretty full of overcoats and hats. Sergeant Buck coming down the narrow stairway added still more.

  I hesitated on the threshold. There was something in their faces that made the muscles of my heart contract as if a new dread had gripped it.

  Captain Fox pushed a chair toward me. “Come in, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Tell us about it.” His voice was crisp and staccato but not unfriendly.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” I said. “Miss Lunt’s cat woke me up, crying under my window. I looked out and saw that the lights here were on. I thought she’d got up to let the cat in, but when there wasn’t any sign of life”—I hadn’t meant to say it so literally—“I thought then that she’d probably gone to sleep without putting out the lights.”

  “She had a party,” Captain Fox said tentatively. “Was she . . . ?”

  “She certainly wasn’t,” I replied promptly. “We had a cocktail before dinner, and the men had whiskey and soda afterwards. I don’t recall any of the women having any. I don’t remember seeing Miss Lunt have even a cocktail, for that matter. It was definitely not a drinking party.”

  “Go on, then, please. You heard the cat.”

  “And went down to let it in. It was half frozen.”

  “Is that it there?”

  He nodded toward the door. Mrs. Harris, one foot daintily balanced on the sill, the other raised tentatively, was casting her queer eyes round the room. As Captain Fox bent over and snapped his fingers she backed away and was gone like a shot.

  “She did that just as the last people were leaving,” I said. “I suppose Karen was waiting for her to come in. She’s a rather valuable cat. She has a lot of points, or whatever cats have. If you like cats.”

  Captain Fox was chewing his lower lip, frowning a little.

  “When did she wake you, Mrs. Latham?”

  “It was twenty-five past five,” I said. “I don’t know how long she’d been crying outside my window. Not long, I imagine.”

  I wondered then: how long had the caked patch of snow been on the drugget inside the garden door? I looked over carefully at Colonel Primrose. He was watching me, of course.

  “What time did the party end, Mrs. Latham?” Captain Fox asked.

  “It was twelve-thirty when we got back to the Candlers’.”

  “Did you go directly there?”

  I nodded.

  “Were you the last to go?”

  “Always,” I said.

  Sergeant Buck’s granite visage congealed visibly. He thinks life is grim and should be treated so. I suppose he was right, just then.

  “Who was here, Mrs. Latham?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  I told him, pairing Geoffrey McClure’s name in the middle with the lady wirepuller so that it sounded as if they’d come together. As a matter of fact they hadn’t even left together, because she was going with the Senator and his wife before I went upstairs.

  “The Doyles and the young Candlers and I left together. Judge Candler went earlier with the others.”

  “Did Miss Lunt seem particularly disturbed or excited, Mrs. Latham?”

  “I shouldn’t have thought so,” I replied. “But then I don’t know her very well. She was . . . vivacious, but whether abnormally so or not I haven’t an idea.”

  “Go on with your story, please, Mrs. Latham,” Captain Fox said. “You heard the cat at five-thirty or so?”

  I nodded. It was a little disconcerting, the way he marked my progress.

  “I can’t tell you why I felt there was something wrong,” I said. “Except that it was so quiet here, and all the lights were on and everybody had gone a long time before. I don’t think I could possibly have smelled the gas that far . . . though it was cold, of course, and maybe there was a little breeze that way. I don’t know. I don’t even remember thinking she might be ill. It just seemed odd and unnatural. Every other house was completely dark. If she was waiting up for the cat, why didn’t she let it in?—I suppose that was part of it. Anyway, I came down, and I smelled gas as soon as I came to the end of the path. It seemed to be seeping out everywhere. I called Miss Lunt, but she didn’t answer. Then I saw her through the blinds. She was sitting in that little sofa, perfectly upright. She didn’t seem to hear me when I banged on the window and called. That’s when I picked up the loose brick out of the walk and broke the pane. I reached in and caught her shoulder. I’m afraid I knew she was dead. She just fell over on the floor, the way you found her.”

  “But you pushed her over?”

  I nodded. I could still feel the touch of her velvet dress on my hand, and see her slowly toppling over.

  “Then she hadn’t got up to . . .”

  Captain Fox’s voice trailed off.

  Colonel Primrose waited for him to go on. Then he said, in a moment, “You didn’t hear her call the cat again, Mrs. Latham?”

  “No. But I was inside, so I wouldn’t have.”

  Captain Fox moved about the room.

  “It looks to me as if she let everybody out,” he said, “went upstairs and turned on the water, came down and turned off the pilot light, disconnected the icebox, and just sat and waited.”

  I looked blankly at him, and at Colonel Primrose.

  “The type of gas-hot-water heater she has comes on automatically when the water in the tank gets below a certain temperature,” Colonel Primrose explained. “The pilot light ignites it. The gas burns then until the water reaches the set temperature again. The pilot light was off here and the tap upstairs was runni
ng. The tank would cool off pretty quickly. The oilburner was switched off too, so the gas wouldn’t ignite.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  “I must say, Colonel, it looks pretty straightforward to me,” Captain Fox said.

  I felt Colonel Primrose’s eyes resting on me.

  “And I’d like to have as little stink about it as we can.”

  “I think you’re right, probably,” Colonel Primrose said.

  I went out. I knew he was coming after me, and I would have given my soul to avoid it. As I turned up between the crape myrtles, their bare icy branches glistening in the pale sun, he caught up with me and took my whole elbow.

  “Now tell me all about it,” he said, as if he was speaking to a child who’d just been telling a frightful whopper to avoid punishment for breaking the basement window.

  “I’ve told you,” I said.

  “Look, my dear,” he said gently. “If you’d only made an abortive attempt to rescue that girl, you wouldn’t have called me—and you wouldn’t have gone around not even noticing that arm for an hour and a half. If you hadn’t had some kind of background of fear, you wouldn’t have come flying out in that astonishing costume you had on this morning.”

  “You’ve dealt with crime too long, Colonel Primrose,” I said, as coolly as I could. “You ought to go to Florida for the winter.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve dealt with crime—or maybe just people—too long not to recognize that every one in Judge Candler’s study was waiting for some kind of a blow to fall, Mrs. Latham . . . and that Fox’s suicide note wasn’t it.”

  I stopped and faced him in the middle of the path.

  “Look, Colonel Primrose,” I said earnestly. “I’m frightfully sorry I called you this morning. Can’t you just go back to Georgetown and forget it?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Oh, terribly!” I cried. And I saw instantly, from the little sardonic glint in his sparkling black eyes, that whatever possible doubt he might have had that I hadn’t been—shall I say—entirely straightforward with him was gone. It disappeared instantly, however, leaving him just looking at me soberly, not even very critically.

  “I’m just naturally an alarmist,” I said. “It was probably only my arm hurting that made me jittery, don’t you think?”

  “No,” he said with a smile.

  “But you can see that I’m a guest here, and that guests can’t send the roof crashing down on people’s heads this way. I can’t go on and say, ‘Look, everybody—if it hadn’t been for me and my friend Colonel Primrose, you wouldn’t have made the headlines in every paper in the country—every move you take and every bite you eat is subway fare and dinner table gossip throughout the country, all because of me and my little hatchet’—don’t you see?”

  “I do see, my dear,” he said quietly. “I also see that a successful murderer is the most dangerous enemy society has.”

  “Rot,” I said rudely.

  “And that’s not all.—Whoever did this knows by now, probably, that you did call me . . . and knowing my profession, and making the natural error of thinking you’re rational and intelligent, not completely impulsive, must therefore assume that you had logical grounds for suspecting something. Every night that goes by, he’s going to lie awake wondering just how; much you know—until at last he just can’t stand that hideous uncertainty. And because it was so easy once . . . some morning Lilac’s going to call me up and say, ‘Mis’ Grace, she daid.’ I don’t want to alarm you—unduly—and I know it’s foolish of me to care about it. But I——”

  Behind us at the end of the path Sergeant Buck, a vast cast-iron repetition of Mr. Pepperday, cleared his throat violently.

  “I’m serious about this, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said. “But . . . I’m going to go, if you say so. I don’t want to embarrass you. I see your point—I just know it’s completely wrong.”

  He smiled at me, and lifted his hat.

  “I’m pleased you thought of me, in any case. Goodbye.”

  10

  He went back down the walk. Sergeant Buck, waiting, in effect, at attention, saluted in effect and fell in. I stood there, watching them go along the side of the house to the street, shivering, not so much from the external cold as from some kind of a numbness inside my own brain. Then Sandy opened the garden door.

  “Playing statues?” he asked. “I guess ‘Niobe Weeping For Her Children.’ ”

  I blinked. I hadn’t realized I had tears in my eyes. It was the first time, for one thing, that I’d ever seen Colonel Primrose stop at the threshold of his duty. That he’d done it to keep from embarrassing me somehow made it worse.

  “Wrong,” I said. “It’s The Thinker.’ ”

  “Then quit it, Grace,” he said. “It’s been the ruin of your whole sex. Don’t you know?”

  He closed the door behind me and helped me off with my coat. “How’s the old arm?”

  “Swell. How are the knuckles?”

  He grinned.

  “Your friend Colonel Primrose doesn’t miss much, does he?”

  My heart sank.

  “Where is he, by the way?” he went on.

  “He’s gone back home. Captain Fox says there’s no doubt she turned on the gas herself.”

  “What do you think?”

  I met his dark eyes as candidly as I could.

  “What do you think?”

  He underlined each word so lightly that if I hadn’t known him I wouldn’t have been conscious of it. “I think it was suicide,” he said, his steady gaze unwavering.

  “Then that makes it unanimous,” I replied, as airily as I could.

  He followed me into the Judge’s library.

  “Do you know Mr. Pepperday, Grace?—This is Mrs. Latham, Mr. Pepperday.”

  The little man got up and bowed. He wasn’t so grotesque—quite—as he’d appeared in the emerald light the night before. His seedy black coat and trousers looked too big for him, if anything: His hair combed over his bald egg-shaped dome seemed to cover it more adequately, hence to be quite reasonable. His voice, however, was still high and reedy as he said, “How d’ye do, Mrs. Latham?”

  He settled himself down again on a chair by Judge Candler’s desk.

  “I imagine you don’t need to transfer the stock now, Miss Jeremy,” he said, sorting the papers he’d taken out of his green baize bag.

  Jerry’s hand tightened sharply on the arm of her chair.

  “I’d rather have done it a hundred times than have this happen, Mr. Pepperday,” she said quickly.

  The little man nodded rather sourly. “The Candlers would have been rich now, if they hadn’t been quixotes.”

  His emphasis on the last word gave me, in some way, a curious picture of long lines of Candlers trailing generously to a drunkard’s grave.

  “Oh, please, Mr. Pepperday!” Jerry began, and stopped short as her father appeared in the doorway. Mr. Pepperday screwed his face together to shift his spectacles into position on his small nose.

  When Judge Candler had crossed to his desk I said, “Captain Fox asked me to tell you he’d be around this afternoon.”

  He nodded, looking at me with a rather odd intentness.

  “Has he . . .”

  “He only repeated what he said before,” I answered.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Latham.”

  He turned to the little man.

  “That’s all this morning, Mr. Pepperday. I shan’t be down for several days.”

  Mr. Pepperday gathered up his papers. He went as far as the door, and turned back.

  “I told Miss Karen that hot-water heater was an obsolete type, and that was a dangerous place to scrimp on money,” he said, irritably.

  Judge Candler looked up. “What do you mean, Mr. Pepperday?”

  “She got me to put it in for her, to save money,” the little man replied. His high-pitched voice made him sound more excited than he was, I thought, for he added, with a sort of treble dignity, “I was glad to a
ccommodate her, during my spare time. But I told her it hadn’t the safety device the modern type has. She said she knew it, the people who gave it to her had explained that, but she had to save money somewhere. I told her she had to be careful, in such a small place, that the wind didn’t blow out the pilot light if the gas was low or the air valves needed tightening.”

  Judge Candler’s eyes were burning. “Do you mean,” he said slowly, “that it . . . may have been accidental?”

  Something behind the lines of his stern face seemed to crumple like tissue paper. For a moment he sat there, his head bent again. Then he raised it and said, with deeper feeling than I ever believed a voice could hold, “I’d give anything to believe she didn’t purposely destroy herself. I can’t endure that.”

  I stared at him. Of the two alternatives that had occurred to me, suicide had seemed infinitely the preferable. I must say I hadn’t thought of the possibility of accident.

  “You must wait and see Fox, Mr. Pepperday,” Judge Candler said. “I want you to tell him what you’ve told me.”

  Mr. Pepperday’s face screwed into a series of contortions.

  “No, indeed, sir,” he said promptly, to my surprise. “I couldn’t consider doing any such thing, I assure you I could not.”

  His shrill voice rose almost to a squeal. I gazed at him dumbfounded. He was like an irascible little terrier. If he’d jumped up and down on the floor he couldn’t have been more astonishing. And it wasn’t so much that he was annoyed, I thought, as that he was alarmed.