False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  “He couldn’t have helped knowing, Grace. He’s in his father’s office, and he lives at home. He’s no baby. Why was he so bent on my giving back the stock if he didn’t?”

  “Suppose he did, Jerry!” I said. “Assuming the very worst—after all, Philander Doyle is his father, and a very good one to him as far as I can see. He’s devoted to him. He’s given him everything in the world. No matter what he did, wouldn’t you expect Roger to be loyal to him? He might try to get around him, because he’s in love with you—but you’d hardly expect him to denounce his father to the housetops, would you?”

  “Why not—if he was doing something horrible?” Her eyes caught fire from her voice.

  “Oh, don’t be a child, Jerry,” I said. “What if it was Sandy, or—I’ll admit it’s preposterous, but just for example—your father, or even William, who turned off Karen’s pilot light, and you knew it—would you have told Colonel Primrose tonight?”

  “Of course not,” she breathed.

  Then I saw her eyes go blank and the color that had come into her face drain out again. She was staring past me at the mirror behind the soda fountain near the door. I turned around. A man was sitting hunched up on a high stool there, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his overcoat collar turned up around his neck. I didn’t recognize him, not till my own eyes moved from his back to the mirror. Even then I don’t think I recognized the white haggard face and burning eyes as Roger Doyle’s for at least ten seconds.

  18

  The waitress pushed a glass across the counter. He raised it, and as he did his eyes met Jerry’s in the mirrored wall. He stared, shook his head like a man in a daze, and looked again. Then he put his glass down, turned around slowly, slid down off the stool and came toward us. I looked at Jerry. Her wide-open eyes were glued to his face, moving as he moved.

  I slid over in the booth. “Sit down, Roger,” I said.

  He put his hat on the table and sat down, looking across at Jerry. “If this were only some place else,” I thought. A less suitable site for a meeting of the sort I could hardly imagine.

  “Look, Jerry,” he said at last, his voice grating like wind in the cornhusks. “I’m . . . I’m sorry about everything. I know it sounds phony, but I’d . . . like you to know I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t really expect you to believe it. I don’t suppose you’ll believe I meant everything I said yesterday morning. But that’s true too, every word of it and a lot more. I can’t say. Honestly, Jerry!”

  Her face, that had opened with a sort of anguished tenderness, looking at his haggard face, closed up again.

  “Then why did you try to make me do as she wanted?” she asked. The sparks kindled in her eyes again. “You did know . . . something!”

  He looked around at me despairingly, and back at her. “I thought that would end it, Jerry. There wasn’t anything else I could do . . . except marry her. I’d even have done that, to save all this.”

  Her eyes really flashed fire then.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me—instead of sending that man around?”

  “I didn’t send him around, Jerry. I’m telling you I didn’t know anything about him. My God, do you think I’m a—”

  “Yes, I do!” Jerry cried.

  Somebody put a nickel in the electric phonograph, and its merciful blaring proceeded to drown out all thought or other sound within a mile. Two youthful jitterbugs performing in front of it absorbed the proprietor and his black-eyed waitress, drawing them and a couple of taxi-drivers away from our end of the narrow restaurant.

  “We saw you—Sandy and Grace and I—coming out of your house with him, just last night!”

  His jaw relaxed drunkenly as if she’d slapped his face.

  “Deny that if you can!”

  “Perhaps if you’d give him a chance to explain,” I remarked peaceably—with the usual lot of the peacemaker. Jerry turned on me instantly. “—You’ve always been on his side!”

  “Glad somebody is,” Roger put in. He’d got hold of himself again at a moment when I thought his Irish was up and he was going to pick up his hat and walk out, telling her to go to the devil.

  “Listen, Jerry—if you’ll keep your shirt on a minute,” he said earnestly. “He came to see my father. I didn’t know he was the guy. He said he’d slipped and got hit by a taxi. He’s done a lot of . . .”

  I thought he was going to say “dirty work,” and I think he was, at first, because He hesitated and said, “—work for my father in the past. I didn’t know he was in on this—not till you just said so. I thought he was just mooching. I gave him a ten-spot and told him to scram, we were going to a party.”

  While he was talking I could see something working behind his voice . . . something quite different going on in his mind.

  Jerry came back, womanlike, to her point.

  “But you knew . . . all the time you were . . . talking to me yesterday and knew your father was pitting me against Karen, so she could . . . so she could ruin my father!”

  His lean jaw hardened.

  “You could have told me! You could have said, ‘You’ve got to outwit them,’ instead of pretending it was because you loved me and the money didn’t matter! It was your father you were trying to save, not me! It didn’t matter about me! Well, you can just go back and see what you can do to save him now!”

  He stared at her, white-lipped and taut, and got up, his fingers clenched in his hat brim to keep from shaking. “Good night,” he said shortly.

  As he strode out I heard the waitress say, “Hey—you forgot to . . .”

  “Okay, Okay,” the Greek proprietor said. “You shut up.”

  I looked at Jerry. Her face was as white as death.

  “Oh, Grace!” she whispered. “I didn’t mean it—I didn’t, really!”

  “It’s too bad,” I said. “Because nobody could possibly have guessed it. Let’s go.”

  I signalled the waitress. “How much was his drink? I’ll pay for it.”

  “A nickel,” she said. “Fifteen cents altogether.”

  We didn’t speak on the way back to Chatham Street. Jerry sat huddled in a silent miserable little heap in the corner of the seat. I had to give her a poke when we stopped in front of her house. I looked across the street at the other house. The windows of the first two stories were lighted behind their drawn Venetian blinds. Karen’s house lay dark and still, white against the trampled dirt-stained snow. It didn’t seem credible that twenty-four hours ago it had been lighted up like a Christmas tree, as my taxi driver had said, and full of gaiety and warmth . . . and with death standing unseen at the door, his grim invisible reflection looking back with all the others from the mirrored walls.

  We went up the steps and opened the door quietly. Sandy and his father were in the library. I could hear their voices through the closed door. Jerry didn’t stop. She went quickly up the stairs, I following, on tiptoe not to disturb them and bring Sandy out to read in one swift glance at her stricken face something quite erroneous. At the top of the stairs Jerry stopped and put her hand on my arm.

  “Call him up, Grace. I want to . . . to talk to him,” she whispered.

  We went into her father’s room. I looked in the phone book and gave the operator the number.

  It was Philander Doyle’s rich prismatic voice at the other end.

  “Is Roger there?” I asked. “It’s Mrs. Latham, Mr. Doyle.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, my dear lady,” he boomed pleasantly “Roger isn’t here. Won’t I do? I’m much more entertaining than he is, right now.”

  “I’m sure of that,” I said.

  “Then what about lunch with me tomorrow? We can compare notes.”

  I thought quickly.

  “All right,” I said.

  “In town, then. Do you like shrimps?”

  “Love them,” I lied. “—Especially with curry.”

  “Shall we meet at”—he named a well-known seafood place on Connecticut Avenue. “—At one, shall we say?”<
br />
  I put down the phone. Jerry was sitting on the steps beside the high old bed, looking at me, all the misery in the world in her proud pale-ivory little face.

  “I guess I’ll go to bed,” she said. “Good night.”

  I couldn’t, somehow, bear to tell her I’d heard Roger’s voice perfectly distinct, saying, “I’m not here, if it’s for me, Dad.”

  I undressed in front of the fire in my room and climbed up onto the four-poster and put out my light. I wouldn’t, I’m afraid, have made a very good Spartan, even if I’d escaped being left, as a female infant, in the mountains for the wolves to devour. I couldn’t bring myself, in the pleasant warmth of the room, to put up a window and let the cold sub-freezing air inside—especially as I knew I’d lie awake for hours, the last twenty-four of them trampling sleep to bits as they went back and forth through my mind, a minute by minute kaleidoscope of doubt and suspicion.

  I must have been more exhausted, however, than I’d realized, for when I was aware again, the fire had died, the house was as silent as the grave and the grandfather clock on the stairs boomed once, twice and was still. The room was stuffy now too. I lay there in the pitch darkness, trying to decide whether after all fresh air wasn’t just a doctor’s racket to make people get pneumonia. Nevertheless, I pushed back the covers, slipped out of my warm bed onto the needlepoint steps and groped over to the window. And I stopped dead.

  Through the stark black branches of the trees Karen’s little house lay like a pale ghost. For a moment I thought I must be tenanting it with one, because the round disc of light I’d seen moving in it was gone. Then I saw it again, this time in the kitchen, through the little window where Mrs. Harris had sat, the gas seeping out into her mottled fur pressed against the tiny triangular hole in one pane. Then it moved, the disc of yellow light, up the wall across the refrigerator and on, so that without seeing it I could remember that next it must hit the storage tank and the hot-water heater beneath it, and then the pilot light.

  I could see it in my mind’s eye rest there, and move again to the power switch, and then across the open panel to the chronometer by the door . . . and it wasn’t entirely in my mind, because the white paint of the opposite wall reflected the glow, and moved as the light moved. I stood there breathlessly a long time. The light moved back into the mirrored front room and disappeared, and reappeared upstairs, first in the front room and then in the bath. Then it came out again and down . . . and I saw the kitchen door open slowly.

  I closed my eyes. If whoever it was came up the crape myrtle path to the house, I didn’t want to see him. If he passed through to the front, on the other hand, I did. I moved back a step so that the door and the path were blocked from my sight, leaving only the front part of the little building. Then I waited, hours it seemed to me, my heart quite still, knowing that in a moment I would hear steps downstairs.

  And then quite abruptly a dark figure appeared against the window I’d broken with the brick from the path, and came on toward the front, shadowy in the darkness. I lost it for a moment; then I heard a faint meow and saw the ball of light strike the ground out in the cobblestone gutter. The little black figure of Mrs. Harris was galvanized in it for an instant; then I saw the light shift and something—a piece of ice, I thought—strike her. She let out one yowl and fled back to the house. I slipped to the front window. The ball of light struck the Doyles’ steps and went out . . . and framed for an instant against the white door I saw Philander Doyle. Then the door closed quietly behind him.

  There were no lights in his house, not even in the elliptical fanlight over the door.

  I stood at the window for a moment, my breath caught in my throat. And then I saw another figure move out from behind a tree in front of the Doyle house, and stand there, quite motionless, for a long time. It went up the steps too, then, and for a moment Roger Doyle’s lean frame was silhouetted against the white door as his father’s had been. As he went in the fanlight gleamed brightly for an instant.

  I stared out there for a moment, wondering, my breath coming too quickly, why Roger Doyle had been watching his father. Then I raised the window a little and crept back into bed.

  19

  We were just finishing breakfast the next morning when William announced Colonel Primrose to see Mr. Sandy.

  Sandy’s coffee cup half-way to the table stopped so abruptly that it slopped a little, and spattered on his empty plate. Judge Candler glanced at him with a surprise that wasn’t, I thought, as mild as it seemed.

  “It’s my fault,” Jerry said. “I was supposed to prepare you.”

  Sandy folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.

  “Excuse me, sir?” he said.

  His father nodded. Sandy’s pleasant ugly face was disturbed. He looked across the table at his sister. They hadn’t, I decided, had a chance for a post mortem on her interview with Colonel Primrose at Captain Fox’s house. Her sleepless eyes must therefore have been rather more alarming to him than they might have been if he’d known about the later session at the Greek’s. He crossed the dining room to the door.

  “Tell the Colonel I’d like to see him before he goes, Sandy,” Judge Candler said. “And close the door, please.”

  He waited until Sandy had gone out, and then, without turning his head, he said “William.”

  The old darkey behind him jumped practically a foot. “Yes, suh.” he said. His old eyes rolled around like a couple of apoplectic billiard balls, and his face was suddenly more like dirty putty than polished ebony. I couldn’t tell whether it was the tone of his master’s voice or a conscience streaked with guilt, but William obviously smelled trouble in the air.

  “Yes, suh, Jedge,” he said. There was an ingratiating softness in his voice as he came reluctantly around and stood a little back, between Judge Candler’s chair and Jerry’s. The noise I heard may not have been his knees quaking together, but it certainly sounded like it.

  “William,” Judge Candler said, still without looking up. “The key to the carriage house is missing from the board in my office.”

  “ ‘Deed, suh? Tch, tch, tch!” William said sympathetically.

  Judge Candler turned then and looked steadily at him.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  Williams eyes bulged.

  “ ‘Deed an’ Ah don’ know, suh, an’ that’s the Lawd’s truth. Did you as’ Mr. Pepperday, suh?”

  His old frame was bent forward, his voice as gentle as sunshine.

  “Mr. Pepperday doesn’t know either,” Judge Candler said calmly. He looked at the old darkey steadily from under his white tufted brows. “You were over at Miss Karen’s all that afternoon?”

  “ ’Deed an’ Ah was, suh . . . but Ah nevah touch none of th’ apparatux. Ah cook th’ ham ovah heah. Ah dished up, Ah wash th’ dishes an’ put ’em away. Ah give Miz’ Harris her milk in her saucer, Ah fix Miz’ Karen’s milk an’ lef it on the sink, an’ Ah come home an’ said mah prayers an’ went to bed. An’ moreovah, suh, Ah don’ know th’ whereabouts of that ol’ key.”

  Judge Candler turned back to his plate.

  “I want that key on my table by noon today, William,” he said quietly. “—Is that clear?”

  “It certainly is clear, jedge,” William said, with a pleased smile. “Clear an’ plain. But Ah got to re-peat mahself, suh. Ah don’ know th’ whereabouts where it is.”

  “Then I’ll expect you to find out before noon,” Judge Candler said evenly. “That’s all.”

  “Yas, suh.”

  When the door closed behind him Judge Candler turned to Jerry.

  “Do you know where that key is, Jeremy?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” she said. “And I’m sure William hasn’t got it. There’s one hanging over the kitchen sink, if he wanted it. We had three made when we had March Wind. I gave Karen one. We kept one here, and there’s one in the office.”

  I just sat there. It seemed a bit awkward to speak up and say, “I wonder if that could possibly be the key I
planted in the Ming vase on the Doyles’ mantel,” so I held my peace. It was rather dubious ethically, no doubt, but sound socially, and possibly a stroke of genius criminologically.

  Judge Candler pushed back his chair and got up, standing there tall and distinguished, his eyes sombre and alive . . . an impressive figure, but vaguely terrifying, in some way. I seemed to sense, all of a sudden, the same feeling of trouble brewing that I thought William had done. And Jerry sensed it too. I felt, without seeing it happen, that she’d gone quite still, as if to protect herself, the way a little lizard does when danger is near him on a sun-baked wall. And then it came. As Judge Candler cleared his throat I recognized Mr. Pepperday’s great original.

  “I’m going to make a very special request of you, Jeremy,” he said. His sombre eyes turned to his daughter.

  “Yes, Dad,” she said softly.

  “I shan’t explain. I shan’t, as you know, make any attempt to check on you. I shall merely ask you to give me your word, in front of Mrs. Latham, so she will understand and not unwittingly lead you to break it, that you will not again, under any circumstances, whatsoever, see Roger Doyle.”

  She sat as still as alabaster, and as pale, her eyes fixed on her father’s. Then they moved slowly to mine. Only her pulse in her throat betrayed her. Her face was as expressionless as a death mask. She looked back at her father.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said at last, and very calmly. “I can’t promise that, because I’m going to see him the first moment I can . . . to tell him that I do want to marry him—if he still wants me.”

  Her autumn eyes raised to her father’s were frank and unflinching. Judge Candler looked down at her, a strange spasm of pain contracting the muscles of his lean jaw as she spoke. He hadn’t, I’m sure, the least idea that things had gone so far.

  For a moment he stood there in a sort of stunned silence. I picked up my cup and took a sobering sip of stone-cold coffee, and put it down again, wondering dismally how long this extraordinary calm would hold before the storm broke. Knowing Jerry and suspecting her father, it already seemed superhuman.