by Leslie Ford
“I think it’s only fair to you,” he said as we went down the stairs and across the brick walk to the street, “to let you know there are a number of things in connection with Karen’s death, none of them conclusive in itself, that point away from suicide. Would you like to hear them?”
I nodded.
“First, then,” he said slowly. “If Karen wanted to kill herself, it’s almost inconceivable she wouldn’t have just simply opened a fresh bottle of sleeping tablets that she had in the medicine chest upstairs. A handful of them would kill a horse.”
I sat behind the wheel, making no move to turn on the ignition.
“Second. Assuming she did decide on the method that was used—why didn’t she turn on the tap in the kitchen sink? Why choose the bathtub tap, and why pull the shower curtain across to hide it? And third: why did she leave an order under her milk bottle on the front step for an extra quart of milk? And fourth: why did she leave a note for the maid saying not to wake her till noon, and make cream of mushroom soup with part of that extra quart of milk, for lunch for two?”
I stared straight ahead up the street. Piles of blackened snow lay in the gutters. The brick walls were as clean as if they’d been scoured.
“And there’s another point I’d like to know about,” he went on. “If you won’t think I’m accusing Mr. Pepperday of murder, I’d like to know why the only key missing on the board on the office wall is the one to the carriage house—which in spite of Mr. Pepperday’s calling it the stable is the house Karen lived in.”
My hand, thrust deep in my pocket, closed mechanically on the hard shaft of the old key.
“If you can answer those questions, Mrs. Latham, I’ll go back home and forget it,” he said quietly.
“Where do you want to go—back to the police station?” I asked. I couldn’t answer any one of them, much less all.
“I’m really sorry!” he said. We were both silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’m meeting Fox at Karen’s house. If you’ll drop me there . . .”
I’d liked to have dropped him in an ice hole in the river, but since I had only myself to blame I merely started the car and turned back. We got to Chatham Street. The patrolman on duty recognized Colonel Primrose and let us through. I stopped in front of the Candlers’ house and switched off my motor.
“By the way,” I said, “Jeremy Candler asked me to call you back. She very sensibly feels that there ought to be no possible doubt to rise up later . . . if the verdict is suicide.”
He looked at me with a quick smile.
“I can see it might be important—if what I hear around Washington is true.”
He nodded to the little oblong plate that said “Press” above the District license of the coupé in front of us. “That’s the problem at the moment, not the police.”
He opened the door and held it while I slid out across the seat. “Will you come along?”
I hesitated. My duty as a guest waged an internal tug-of-war in conflict with my curiosity as a woman.
“Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” he said with a smile. I saw his sharp black eyes come back from the upper window of the house across the street.
“Just so I’m not hanged for anything else,” I remarked. I went along with him, leaving my duty as guest to crawl from the field as best it could.
Captain Fox was in the mirrored room, talking to a couple of men who may not have had eyes like ferrets at all, though it looked to me as if there wasn’t a crack or cranny they weren’t creeping into. A young man in a brown suit and soft hat came down from upstairs, following in the large square wake of Sergeant Buck, who had to stoop to clear the ceiling as he came.
“Nothing doing in the bathroom, Captain,” the young man said. He crossed the room, knelt down and opened up a black case. He looked around the mirrored walls. “This is going to be a honey,” he added tersely.
Colonel Primrose pushed a chair over to the door, I sat down.
“I think I’d begin in the kitchen,” he said to Captain Fox. The young man looked at his chief and said, “Okay.” He started back.
“The panel first,” Captain Fox said.
Sergeant Buck gripped the sliding glass section gingerly and moved it out. From my place at the door I saw a fine dusty cloud rise like grey smoke. I tried to think whose fingerprints they were going to find there. Karen’s, Miss Isabel’s and mine, I knew for sure. The servants, of course, who’d helped out the evening before . . . William, Miss Isabel’s maid, Karen’s own girl. Sandy’s and Roger’s, probably, since they’d dispensed whiskey and soda to the men after dinner.
“That won’t help much,” Colonel Primrose said. “It’s the pilot light and the oil-burner switch I’m interested in. And the plug to the icebox.”
The young man in the brown suit edged through the narrow opening into the kitchen, Sergeant Buck following with considerable difficulty. Captain Fox stayed behind. He was apparently his own camera man. I watched him and Colonel Primrose at the job of recording the elaborate smudges in the film of grey powder that covered the glass like a summer’s mildew. Even before they were through I heard the detective’s voice from the kitchen.
“Nothing on the pilot, Captain.”
I saw Captain Fox look at Colonel Primrose, his face more troubled and grimmer than I’d seen it even in the white glare of the searchlights from the fire engine the night before. He put down his camera and edged into the little kitchen. Colonel Primrose looked around at me. In the mirrored wall I could see my own reflection, grinning like a slightly sick Cheshire cat.
“It’s the absence of prints that’s so damning, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly.
I heard the detective from the kitchen again. “Here we are, sir. On the power switch. It’s a honey!”
Colonel Primrose crowded in through the panel. There was a moment’s silence, then Captain Fox’s voice. “That’ll be mine, I had to feel around to cut the oil burner off.”
Silence again; and then I heard Colonel Primrose’s voice, as suavely polite and quiet as ever but so charged with intent and dramatic meaning that I caught my breath sharply.
“Where is the chronometer, Buck?”
Without knowing why, I felt my breath coming rapidly through my startled lips.
“Right here by the cupboard, sir.”
“Read it.”
“Off at twelve, on at six, sir.”
There was another silence in the kitchen, almost electric. I sat there. Colonel Primrose came back, Captain Fox and the others following. No one so much as glanced at me.
“Well,” Colonel Primrose said, his voice so deadly calm that my blood froze, “That’s plain enough. The idea was that no one would ever find Karen Lunt dead of gas. The burner was to go on at six . . . when there was enough gas in the house to blow it all to hell.”
Captain Fox didn’t move or speak, but his eyes were cold and hard as blue steel.
“If it hadn’t been for the cat’s waking Mrs. Latham, and her waking up the neighborhood, you’d have entered an accidental explosion on your books—one life lost. And if you hadn’t been on the job, and cut off that power switch when you came in, you’d have had the same thing with the loss of fifty lives . . . your own, and Mrs. Latham’s, and all the people standing around here. You’re dealing with somebody as shrewd as sin, Fox—somebody too dangerous to have loose.”
Captain Fox nodded grimly. “It was three minutes to six when I cut that oil burner off,” he said shortly. “—And all those people out there.”
“And all very simple,” Colonel Primrose added.
Captain Fox nodded again.
“We’d better get going,” he said.
I’m not sure how I got going back to the Candlers’. My knees shook so that I had to lean against the iron porch rail a moment for support before I could open the door and go inside the cold hall.
13
Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the idea that the kindest—perhaps even the most important—thing
for me to do was go at once to Judge Candler and tell him what I’d just learned. I even had a vague conviction that that was what Colonel Primrose meant me to do, so that when the official juggernaut started moving he’d be unofficially prepared for it. There was definitely no doubt in my mind that Colonel Primrose was official, and that any consideration he might give the Candlers as friends of mine would be by way of casual suggestion through me.
I glanced at the closed library door and hesitated as I noticed a man’s neatly folded overcoat and a black derby hat lying on the old needlepoint bench against the wall between the white door frames of the library and drawing room. The grandfather clock on the landing struck three as I stood there. The low murmuring of voices from the library went steadily on, with no sign that the conversation in there was drawing to a close. As I obviously couldn’t stand around waiting, I went upstairs. I hadn’t meant to go quietly at all, but there’s something about a very quiet house, I suppose, that makes ordinary movements sound as if a herd of buffaloes were clattering about, and sort of forces one to creep involuntarily. I got to my room and closed the door behind me.
The fire was still burning in the grate, the quilt I’d laid over Jerry was pushed aside, the impression of her slim body still on the old-fashioned fringed counterpane. I took off my coat and moved across the big black and red and faded yellow rag rug to the shallow closet to hang it up. I opened the flimsy door and stopped. From the next room I heard, quite plainly,
“It just didn’t work. It was all set. Something went haywire.”
And it was Sandy Candler speaking.
I stood utterly petrified, too appalled, too completely horrified, to move or close the door and put my frozen hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear Jerry’s calm dead voice reply:
“So now we have a murder on our hands instead.”
In the silence that beat through the flimsy wall board— I think even at that moment I realized it had been put there to make a closet by blocking up what had been a deep door between the two front rooms—I struggled back across the room, suddenly too ill to think, and sank down on the pine blanket chest at the end of the high bed, out of range of the quiet voices of Judge Candler’s son and daughter. In the dark silvered mirror of the Adam girandole over the bow-front chest of drawers I could see my face, drawn and grey-green, my lipstick a grotesque red line that had no relation to my mouth. I sat there a little longer and got up. As I picked up my coat to put it back on, the pocket struck against the blanket chest with a subdued knock. My heart sank again. It was the key to the old door of March Wind’s stall that was now Karen’s converted kitchen. In it, at this moment, stood all the simple domestic equipment that had been arranged to blow Karen, the house and every scrap of evidence that could conceivably have pointed to murder to the sky at six o’clock in the morning.
Sandy’s voice was saying, “It just didn’t work. It was all set. Something went haywire,” stood out in my numbed brain like the after image of a flash of ghastly light on the retina. Then I remembered: “So now we have a murder on our hands instead”; and I saw again the cake of ice and snow on the drugget inside the garden door, and the cat that had followed the footsteps that had left it there. I closed my eyes. The face I could see wasn’t Jerry’s face. It hadn’t her delicate piquant loveliness, ivory-toned under her copper hair. It was the face of the woman over the mantel in the shabby beautiful room downstairs, with the Borgia smile tucked away in the corner of her full ripe mouth.
I put on my coat, my icy fingers touching the key deep in my pocket and drawing back as quickly as if it were white-hot. I didn’t take it out. What could I do with it, I thought desperately, if I did? I couldn’t take it to Mr. Pepperday—Colonel Primrose had seen the empty space where it had been. If he saw it returned . . . Still, I thought, Mr. Pepperday knew I had it. William knew; probably, by this time, Sandy and Jerry knew too. As I stood there, my loyalties seemed suddenly to get all mixed up. I tried to think of Jerry, and all I could think of was the face over the mantel. I tried to think of Sandy, cheerful and grinning, and all I could see was his hard eyes fixed steadily on mine as he said, “I think it’s suicide,” and all I could hear was his grim voice through the flimsy wallboard of the makeshift closet. —Against that was Colonel Primrose, saying, more grimly than I’d ever heard him speak, “You’re dealing with somebody as shrewd as sin—somebody too dangerous to have loose.”
I tiptoed to the door, slipped out into the hall and down the first step, my hand clinging to the stair rail. I suppose I stepped on a weak old board. A loud creak rent the air and my nerves. I heard a door open behind me, and whirled around as Sandy came out in the upper hall. His face underwent a lightning change, but not to a smile—far from it.
He said, “Oh, it’s you. Just coming in?”
My voice sounded choked and ghastly to me as I said, “Yes,” and forced my protesting feet back up the stairs as normally as I could.
“Come on in,” he said. He hadn’t taken his dark eyes off my face, and he didn’t as he held the door open for me to pass him.
I’m not sure, quite, how I did it, and I’m not sure whether I really expected him to fell me with a crack across the skull. He didn’t, anyway, and I stepped into a room very like my own, with a higher fourposter with fringed and balled tester curtains and needlepoint steps. It was a more comfortable room than mine, with a deep leather chair by the empty fireplace with its heavy unpolished brass andirons, and its simple pine mantel crowded with signed portraits of half the Hall of Fame. In the recessed seat in the front window Jerry was sitting, shielded from outside view by the long snowy muslin curtains.
She looked up as I came in, and I started in spite of myself. It wasn’t the woman downstairs in the over-mantel at all. It was the pale pointed-faced girl with frank wide autumn-hued eyes and burnished copper curls and sweet serious mouth, young and fresh, and there was definitely no Borgia smile tucked in its slightly drooping corners. Her eyes raised to mine were full of questioning anxiety.
“Did you see Colonel Primrose?” she asked.
I nodded. “Apparently Captain Fox has drafted him in the present emergency,” I said, trying to be as casual as I could.
“What does he think?” Sandy asked. I thought he was trying to be the same.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, entirely. They all looked pretty grim.”
“Oh, please, Grace!” Jerry cried. “Don’t try to . . . to save us anything. Tell us what’s happened. It’s so horrible, just sitting here, waiting . . .”
“What’s the use of having an amateur gumshoer in the house if we have to wait for the evening papers?” Sandy said sardonically. “Let’s have it. We can take it.”
As I looked at Jerry, all the last few days came crowding back to me. Her distress, the way they’d bludgeoned her to give up the first security she’d felt for years, for her father and for her younger brother, probably playing basketball that very minute with my own kids; the awful blow to her proud little spirit when Philander Doyle said Roger wouldn’t let his wife accept a sacrifice from her, the poignant little sacrifice she had made—to the half-frozen sparrows in my back garden; her hopes for her father, her fears that she’d hoped too high. Karen had been the stumbling block then. I wondered suddenly if now that she was dead, the stumbling block hadn’t become a mountain instead of a molehill.
Anyway, looking at her pale upturned face, her lips parted a little, her gold-tinted eyes wide with unspoken alarm, I felt all the old desire to save her if I could . . . even from the consequences of murder. I sat down in the deep window seat beside her. Outside, the dirty soot-streaked streets and clean-washed brick walls were empty except for my car and a large limousine waiting in front of the Doyles’.
“Well, here it is, then,” I said. “It seems Karen made elaborate preparations for today—notes to the milkman and the maid. She was expecting somebody for lunch, and was having mushroom soup and mixed grill for two. They can’t see why she did all that if she didn’t expe
ct to wake up; or why she went to the rather involved business of gassing herself when she had enough sleeping pills upstairs to do it much more pleasantly and neatly. Colonel Primrose doesn’t think that note sounds like despair and suicide; he thinks it sounds like a woman still determined to do what a man she was in love with had told her was a dishonorable thing to do.”
I realized instantly that I’d given Colonel Primrose the dubious benefit of my own special knowledge, in saying much more than he’d said.
Jerry’s eyes dropped to her folded hands.
“Not Roger,” I said. She looked at me quickly.
“How do you know?”
“Because Roger didn’t give a damn about Karen,” I answered, thinking with a kind of mild amusement that first I’d put my own words in Colonel Primrose’s mouth, and now I was quoting what Roger had said as if it were my own.
“How do you know?” she asked, softly.
“What do you care, precious, anyhow?” Sandy demanded grimly.
“I don’t.”
“Then let’s skip it.”
I looked around at him. His face was set, and his eyes were burning with a kind of smoldering resentment that was definitely disquieting.
“I’m sorry,” Jerry murmured. She turned away and stared out the window.
“You wouldn’t think, you two,” I said, “that maybe you’re being a little hard on Roger?”
“I said let’s skip it,” Sandy replied shortly.
“Don’t be an ass, Sandy,” I retorted, forgetting that less than ten minutes ago I’d sat quaking in my boots, thinking he was a cunning fiend.
“You just don’t know, Grace,” Jerry put in quickly.
“I do know,” I said. “I saw the guy with the bandaged face go in the house, and I saw Roger come out with him. That doesn’t necessarily mean . . .”
“Yeah?” Sandy cut in. “You think he just went in for a cup of tea with Miss Isabel? Look here, Grace—that bird was hired by somebody that knew all about Jerry’s aircraft stock, and——”
