False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  I opened my bedroom door and started to tell Jerry as much, somewhat sugar-coated, and stopped short. She was lying across the high old fourposter, her head buried in a pillow. For an instant I thought she was crying. Then I saw she wasn’t, not any longer. She was fast asleep, her smooth ivory cheeks streaked with tears, a great wet patch on the linen slip, her breath coming in uneven little sobs. Her long dark lashes clung to her pale cheeks. Her red mouth drooped at the corners like an unhappy child’s, not in the least like a sleeping Borgia’s.

  I spread the faded chintz eiderdown from the foot of the bed over her, picked up my hat and coat and slipped out, closing the door softly behind me.

  Old William came padding out from the kitchen as I came down the stairs. He must, I thought, have the ears of a lynx. I was tiptoeing as quietly as I could.

  “If you’s goin’ by th’ store, an’ if you don’ min’, Miss Grace,” he said, “will you see if they’s any nice vegetables for dinner? Ah don’ like leave th’ house with people traipsin’ in an’ out.”

  I nodded. “Miss Jerry’s asleep in my room.”

  “Pore baby,” he said. “—But this here’s goin’ take a right heavy load off’n her little shoulders. Miss Karen, pore soul, she wasn’ no help to nobody, not ’ceptin’ herself.”

  In view of his previous comment to my Lilac, it seemed a studied understatement of his true opinion.

  “She’s daid now.” He shook his woolly old head. “They done took her away, pore soul.”

  I could see as I started out that he was relieved that they had. At the door he called after me.

  “Miss Grace, would you leave this here at Jedge’s office on you’ way?”

  He handed me a large old-fashioned key. I nodded and put it in my pocket.

  I drove to the corner of Prince’s and Chatham Streets, turned up from the leaden strip of the Potomac to Royal Street and turned right, looking first for a grocery store and second a place to park in, glad to have something useful to do. There were markets enough, with piles of golden grapefruit, jade-green and white cabbages and dun-colored potatoes, but no parking places that I could see. I crossed King Street with the strange Masonic Memorial towering on the hill at the end of it and went on. At the City Hall across from old Gatsby’s Tavern, where Washington spent so many of the crucial hours of his military life, I spotted a place and a market, and drove in.

  I don’t remember about the vegetables now, but I do remember the pear-shaped bags of Smithfield hams that decorated the posts of the old market like grotesque maypoles. Then I heard a familiar voice say, “You may call them chinee apples, I call them pomegranates.—Oh, good morning, my dear!”

  Miss Isabel Doyle bowed to me across the sawdust aisle.

  “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

  I finished my marketing and she finished hers, so we came out on the street together. I don’t know why, but there was something about Miss Isabel’s aloof detachment that irritated me. After all, a girl she’d known for years, whom she’d wanted her nephew to marry, was dead—murdered, if she was to believe her brother. It didn’t seem human not to discard her purple feather boa at least, and have some film of awareness in her faded eyes.

  I suppose it was all too human for me to set myself up as Miss Isabel’s moral censor. Nevertheless I said, “Poor, Jerry. This has knocked her into a frightful heap.”

  Miss Isabel paused and looked at me as if she hadn’t an idea in the world what I was talking about.

  “About Karen,” I said.

  She touched my arm lightly and glanced around at the motley little assortment of marketing wives and colored people moving along the street.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said softly. “My brother’s being very firm. I’ve been forbidden even to think about it. My brother assures me it’s the only course to follow.”

  She moved her light fingers from my arm.

  “Goodbye, my dear. Remember you’re having tea with me. Goodbye.”

  She was gone, and I stood in the cobblestone trough by my car, looking after her, feeling like an ill-bred gossip-monger. I reached in my pocket for my car keys and felt the old key William had given me. I remembered then I’d told him I’d leave it at Judge Candler’s office. I looked around, and stopped an old colored man.

  “Where is Judge Candler’s office, do you know?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. You go right through here.”

  He pointed to a nearby alley.

  “—An’ down thataway.” He moved his horny old hand toward King Street. “Mah pappy work fo’ ol’ Colonel,” he added with a snag-toothed grin. I suppose that’s why I gave him a quarter instead of a dime.

  I went through the alley into the old market place, empty except for a couple of colored men lounging in front of a fish stall, and gave an involuntary start of surprise. The iron-barred windows at the opposite side of the paved courtyard made a little chill run down my spine . . . and the fact that Colonel Primrose and his Sergeant were in there now with the Captain of Police didn’t make the place at all less alarming. I glanced around. An ancient unlovely alley with several cars parked in it half-way across the market place led into King Street. I picked my way along its icy uneven cobbles and turned left into Fairfax Street. Then I kept on, back around toward the police station again, until I came to a tiny red-brick house with “Peyton R. Candler, Counsellor-at-Law” in black and scaled gold-leaf letters on one of the windows.

  I glanced in. The brown mesh screen over the lower half of the window just cleared the top of my head, concealing the inside of the front room from the street. I opened the white door and stepped in . . . and drew back, unfortunately too late. Through the door into the book-lined back room I could see not only the egg-shaped head and Jacob’s-ladder of grey hair of the tiny Mr. Pepperday, but the lantern-jawed dead pan of the concrete-visaged Sergeant Phineas T. Buck; and I knew that the file-covered wall of the outer office was all that kept me from seeing my friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired. Moreover, they’d seen me—Colonel Primrose if only by reflection in the viscid depths of his sergeant’s fish eyes and in his quietly congealing façade.

  I don’t know why—except that instinct is a property of all the lower animals—I thrust the anonymous iron key I held in my hand back into my pocket, and pretended I’d come for the Judge’s mail.

  For a moment I thought Mr. Pepperday was going to unmask me with a shrill announcement that he’d taken the mail over already and that I knew it. But he didn’t. Instead, after one surreptitious glance, he scrabbled about in the old walnut desk drawers, fished out a couple of unopened circulars from a legal publishing company dated June 3rd of the preceding year, and handed them to me with what I believe is called old-world courtesy, except that here and now it was ludicrously absurd. I put them in my pocket and backed toward the door.

  Colonel Primrose smiled almost as if he’d quite expected me to turn up and that was why he was there.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Latham,” he said. He indicated an old worn leather chair in front of the iron safe in the corner. I couldn’t tell if he did it because he knew I’d be facing a rusty white board hanging on the wall behind him. On it were three rows of substantial hooks, each labelled. Only one hadn’t a key of some kind hanging on it, some old-fashioned and enormous like the one in my pocket, others small and modern.

  The black letters under the empty hook said “Carriage House” . . . and I knew then that that was the key I had. But more bewildering still—how had Mr. Pepperday known it? And what did he know about it that I didn’t? I glanced at him balanced back in Judge Candler’s chair, the tips of his ink-stained fingers—they looked more like a steam-fitter’s than a law clerk’s, in their small way—barely touching as his elbows rested on the worn leather-padded chair arms. His feet, I knew, couldn’t possibly be touching the floor, which was no doubt why the chair wobbled dangerously under him.

  “I was just asking Mr. Pepperday a few questions, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primr
ose said politely. My heart sank as I recognized his very blandest tones.

  “I hope he’s got more sense than to answer them,” I retorted, waspishly.

  “I’m naturally most reluctant to discuss the Judge’s family affairs,” Mr. Pepperday said in his cracked treble. He screwed his face together so that his spectacles returned to their niche on the bridge of his nose.

  “Naturally, Mr. Pepperday,” Colonel Primrose agreed, with a suavity that I found infuriating beyond words but that Mr. Pepperday swallowed as easily as if it had been a juicy fat oyster personally shucked for him . . . as indeed it was, in a sense. “—My only thought was to save the Judge and Miss Candler as much . . . pain as possible under the circumstances.”

  I looked angrily at him.

  “I understand Miss Lunt was the Judge’s ward,” he went on pleasantly.

  “And a very lucky girl,” Mr. Pepperday remarked. “No one else would have kept her in an expensive school when her parents went over a cliff in the ocean. And nobody can tell me her father hadn’t figured on that, or he wouldn’t have kept writing to the Judge forcing promises out of him that no mortal had a right to demand.”

  I looked helplessly at Mr. Pepperday. He was like an irascible little fly determined to get to the flypaper. In his excitement his spectacles had worked off the bridge of his nose again. He screwed them back with his series of amazing facial contortions. Colonel Primrose waited blandly.

  “Why!” The little man’s voice rose half an octave. “He’s spent more money on one year’s schooling for that girl than he did on six of his own daughter’s!”

  I thought helplessly, “If he only keeps off the aircraft stock!”

  “Sacred obligation!” Mr. Pepperday snorted. “Sacred obligations begin at home in my opinion, I think the good Lord holds that too.”

  He looked angrily at all of us, and went rushing on to everybody’s destruction.

  “I regret that I should have been an unwitting instrument in the Divine Plan, but it certainly was not a situation in which I can consider myself at fault.”

  I couldn’t help looking at Colonel Primrose. Even his overpowering composure was shattered a bit. I could see him mentally struggling to unravel the butterfly of sense out of Mr. Pepperday’s elaborate cocoon of verbiage.

  “I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Pepperday,” he said affably. Nothing in his voice would have indicated a sudden intense interest, but his black parrot’s eyes were sparkling and his cigar ash splattered down his grey vest and stayed there.

  Mr. Pepperday was tapping his fingers on the desk exactly as Judge Candler did, only rapidly, like a hungry little bald-headed woodpecker tattooing on a flagpole.

  “It’s simply that when Miss Karen was doing over the old stable she ran out of money before she got the plumber in,” he said. I settled back, not so obviously relieved—I hoped—that Colonel Primrose would notice it, but very much relieved indeed.

  “She begged me very prettily to install the various oddments she’d scavenged, I may say, from friends who were remodelling and modernizing and from junk shops. My father and grandfather were plumbers, and I personally prefer plumbing to the law. Both professions are concerned with drainage. I take pride in both, but if I may say so, I am a better plumber than lawyer. I told Miss Karen it was the one place in the house where she ought not to economize, but she said she had to somewhere and she wasn’t a baby. I pointed out the danger of installing a model without the safety improvements that present-day heaters are equipped with, and that if the pilot light were turned off, or blown out, and the temperature of the tank went down, the gas would go on nevertheless. She said I needn’t worry, she could smell. She’d get a modern one some day, and she’d be very careful.—It’s my opinion that she slammed the door and the pilot light went out. Though I admit that’s difficult, because the local gas pressure is remarkably steady.”

  Colonel Primrose sat for a moment looking absently at him. “Why have you not already told the police about that, Mr. Pepperday?”

  Mr. Pepperday drew a circle on the blotter, enclosed it in a square, and bisected both.

  “Because I am not a licensed gas fitter,” he said at last. “I’ve never appeared before the Board. I am entirely, may I say, an amateur—I had no right doing it for her. Not that I didn’t do it as well as a professional, but you see my dilemma. In fact, I should never have accommodated her except that I wanted to save the Candlers’ money. The judge had no idea how much had already gone into remodelling the stable. I knew they couldn’t very well afford any more.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded, still looking at him. Then he got up abruptly. “Thank you, Mr. Pepperday,” he said. He held out his hand. “Now if you will do one other thing for me?—Phone the house and tell Miss Candler that Mrs. Latham won’t be in to lunch. Thank you. Good day.”

  12

  I am not having lunch with you,” I said, when we’d got outside the tiny building.

  “Oh yes, you are,” he said. “I’ll see you at two, Buck.”

  I suppose Sergeant Buck gave the usual effect of saluting. I didn’t dare look at him.

  “My car’s in Royal Street,” I said coldly. We walked through the market square. Colonel Primrose opened the car door and got in after me.

  “I think the Anchorage in Queen Street is the best place,” he said. It wasn’t till he’d ordered that he relaxed in his chair and said, “Well?”

  “Who have you decided to hang?” I inquired, acidly.

  “No decision so far, my dear.”

  He couldn’t have been more suavely affable.

  “I’d almost decided not to bother. If anything happened to you, I could spend the winters in Honolulu. But I’m not going to let a murderer go scot-free.—My social conscience got the better of my personal comfort.”

  “Have you got one?” I asked. “—A murderer, I mean?”

  He reached in his inside coat pocket and took out a piece of paper.

  “Read that.”

  I took it. It was an ordinary sheet of scratch paper. On it, copied very carefully, was:

  “My dearest dearest—I can’t bear what you said to me tonight, but I can’t bear to live without . . .”

  Even the trailing off of the last letters was copied, and the “t’s” of the last word were uncrossed.

  I handed it back without comment.

  “It doesn’t look like a suicide note, does it?” he said quietly. “If she’d said ‘And I can’t live without you’ it would have been a horse of a different color.”

  He waited until the trim maid put down our food.

  “That letter was written by a woman who was determined to do something in spite of what somebody she was in love with had to say.”

  I ate my chicken to the bone. I knew if I spoke I’d say whatever the most wrong thing happened to be at the moment.

  He looked at me oddly for an instant.

  “Mrs. Latham, there’s an old bit of doggerel about criminal investigation that you’ve probably heard. It goes,

  “What was the crime and who did it,

  When was it done and where,

  How done and with what motive,

  Who in the crime did share?”

  Tentatively applying that to Karen Lunt’s death I think we can say the crime was murder, done by a person or persons unknown. ‘When’ is a large X at the moment, but we know the place. We think we know how it was done. If we go further into it after this afternoon, we’ll send the viscera to the F. B. I. to make sure. With what motive we had no idea, nor do we know who in the deed did share—if anybody.”

  I stirred my coffee slowly.

  “From all I’ve heard about Karen Lunt, suicide is the last thing she’d have dreamed of. And from the list of guests at that party, I think it’s further evident that it hadn’t even crossed her mind. Because you know, Mrs. Latham, as well as I do that it wasn’t the kind of group that Karen ordinarily enjoyed. There were seven men and six women there.—Look at me, please.”


  I looked up.

  “You know Washington well enough to know that guest lists at small parties are made up either for pleasure, in which case congenial people are asked, or for a purpose, in which case you ask useful people. Now, I can’t see what a single person at that party had in common with any other one.”

  “We had a lovely time,” I said.

  He nodded ironically.

  “—Ending with that letter and a dead hostess.”

  I was silent for a moment. “Mightn’t Mr. Pepperday be right?” I asked then. It seemed to me that my voice sounded nauseatingly meek.

  “All that Mr. Pepperday’s remarks indicated to me, Mrs. Latham,” he said, with exasperating calm, “was that he is astonishingly familiar with the mechanics of Karen Lunt’s plumbing system.”

  “Oh, that’s absurd, and unworthy of you!” I said hotly. “He wasn’t within miles of the party!”

  I was astonished to hear myself add, “Anyway, Mr. Pepperday retires at eight o’clock.”

  “I’m not accusing Mr. Pepperday of murder, my dear,” he said peaceably.

  “I certainly hope you never will.”

  “All right, then, I never shall,” he replied.

  He settled himself to a large piece of deepdish apple pie and heavy cream. When he’d finished he looked up with a faint smile.

  “I needn’t tell you, I suppose, that it doesn’t seem to me you’ve been entirely frank, need I?”

  “Is there any reason why I should be?” I asked coolly.

  “Not at all, my dear.”

  I flushed to the roots of my hair.

  “I’m not really trying to be an obstructionist,” I said. “It’s just that . . .” I stopped on the very verge of saying all the things Jerry and Sandy had said about the future of their father’s career.

  “It’s just that murder’s a foul mess and you don’t want any part of it,” he finished for me, with a smile. I noticed, however, that there was a gleam in his black eyes for an instant. He paid the bill and helped me on with my coat.