False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  We crossed the Memorial bridge less than half an hour later. Arlington gleamed like a Grecian temple in its dark snow-patched niche in the hills in front of us. In the mirror over my windshield the Lincoln Memorial receded and was gone as we turned left along the highway. Across the river, blue as the sky, Washington lay in the sun, a fabulous city of white, the Monument and the Capitol dome gleaming brilliantly. Jerry didn’t speak at all as we went the eight miles to Alexandria at considerably more than the allotted fifty-five miles an hour. We turned off at the post office and sped down to Chatham Street, the patrolman on the corner waving us through, and drew up in front of the Candlers’ house. The melting snow dripped from the eaves and the leafless branches of the trees in a hurrying alarming obligato to fear. Across the street the Doyle house stood out clean and lovely for a moment . . . until the cars and the black-overcoated men coming in and out made it horrible, some way; a house without a soul.

  Jerry hesitated.

  “You better go in and see Sandy,” I said. “I’ll be in in a moment.”

  She nodded, got out and ran up the stairs. I went across the street. Sergeant Buck was standing in the doorway. He turned his viscid fish-grey eyes on me and said, out of the corner of that wide slit in his granite façade, “Captain Fox wants to see you, ma’am.—Let her come in,” he added to the detective on the steps.

  “Is Roger here?” I asked, stopping on the threshold.

  Sergeant Buck turned his head and spat neatly over the brass-tipped railing.

  “In the jug,” he said.

  I don’t know why things said out of the corner of the human mouth—if Sergeant Buck’s can really be called that—sound so dreadfully more sinister than if said normally. The impression I got was that Roger not only was there but had every possible chance of rotting there . . . which I believe is the accepted opinion of the process that goes on in jails. I hurried along the panelled hall to where I saw Colonel Primrose with Captain Fox and two men I hadn’t seen before.

  From out in the kitchen I could hear Rosie and somebody else wailing loudly.

  “Somebody go turn those damn yowling niggers off,” Captain Fox rapped out, and one of the men started out and stopped when Sergeant Buck got to the dining room door first.

  Colonel Primrose’s face was very grim, and his eyes as he looked at me were snapping black. I stepped over beside him, and caught one glimpse, before I turned away, of the library, and the blood-spattered desk in front of Philander Doyle’s empty chair under the fur-collared portrait of Thomas Jefferson.

  On the desk still, on the side away from the chair, as if whoever had shot him as he sat there had just laid the gun down and walked off, leaving it smoking there, was the revolver I’d seen in his drawer the day before. As my eyes moved away in sick horror, they saw, strewed over that magnificent rug, literally thousands of bits of broken glass. Then I saw that the doors of the mahogany bookcase were shattered, jagged pieces left hanging down and jutting up like grotesque transparent stalactites and stalagmites. The green tooled binding of one book was ripped where the bullet had struck and buried itself. In front of the bookcase, still standing there but empty except for jagged bits of glass still holding in its iron rim, was the stand that had held the glassed page from the Alexandria Gazette of December 10, 1798. Otherwise, as far as I could tell, the room was undisturbed.

  As I turned away I saw that Colonel Primrose was looking intently. I turned still farther toward the drawing room. My mouth tasted as if I’d drunk a tremendous draft of water from the Dismal Swamp . . . but something inside of me had quickened in spite of it. For it wasn’t Roger Doyle, I was perfectly certain, who’d destroyed the framed fragment of the old newsprint. I could have sworn to that, just as a matter of common sense. For he might not have thought it was amusing as his father did, and he might easily have been ashamed of having it there; but he was certainly used to it by now. It wouldn’t have had any significance to him . . . not enough, anyway, to risk rousing the neighborhood to destroy.

  Colonel Primrose followed me into the drawing room and stood there, looking out across the street through the tilted slats of the blinds.

  “It must have made a fearful clatter,” I remarked.

  He nodded.

  “What happened? And when?”

  “What you saw there, in the first place,” he said. “He was killed between ten and eleven last night.”

  Roger, I thought, had left my place around half-past nine. From the last part of our conversation, and I supposed from the burned note to Jerry, he’d certainly been coming straight back to his father.

  “He wasn’t found till this morning, however,” Colonel Primrose said. “The maid found the key to the library door thrown out in the snow at the side of the service walk. It’s been melting rapidly since midnight, which is how she happened to see it. She thought Doyle had dropped it. She picked it up and unlocked the library door, planning to dust in there first thing. She called Roger and he called the police.”

  “Why did you arrest him?”

  He shook his head. “That was Fox.”

  He looked at me with a sardonic twist to his lips. “Judge Candler called Fox last night. After Roger saw Jerry.”

  “Oh,” I said. “How did he find it out?”

  “He heard William telling him where she was. He then heard William and your Lilac congratulating each other over the phone . . . on true love finding a way. So he called Fox.”

  “You already knew, I suppose,” I said.

  “Fox didn’t know Karen had lived in fear of the boy.”

  “Baloney,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Why, Mrs. Latham! You surprise me.”

  “Well, isn’t it?” I demanded.

  “I’d think so,” he said seriously. “But Karen never batted her eyes at me. She was completely astigmatic, you know, but she wouldn’t wear glasses to spoil her looks. That’s what gave her that beautiful blank stare.”

  I reflected that it was also why she hadn’t seen me the day she came triumphantly flicking her palms together out of Judge Candler’s library.

  “Which might explain why, even if she’d gone into the kitchen,” he went on, “she wouldn’t have noticed the pilot light off or the chronometer reading changed or the plug out of the ice-box.”

  “But about Roger,” I insisted.

  “Well, this business of his going home and standing on the doorstep looking at his watch, and the business of none of the Doyles appearing across the street until after the deadline for the explosion, is going to take some explaining.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Doyle said it was because they couldn’t find the keys to any of the outside doors in time.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Nobody seemed to know but Mr. Doyle. He found them after Roger had climbed out a back window . . . or so he said.”

  “Wasn’t he there till after six?”

  Colonel Primrose shrugged.

  “Nobody was checking on them with a stopwatch, in what William calls ‘excitement times.’ I doubt if we’d have noticed it, probably, except that Mr. Doyle seemed to feel it needed explanation.”

  “And last night?” I asked.

  “Roger came home. The maid who sleeps in heard him and his father having a violent row. She also heard the crash of glass, but she was too scared to take her head out from under the covers. She didn’t hear a shot. The revolver was equipped with a silencer, however. She wouldn’t hear it through these walls.”

  “What does Roger say?”

  “He admits the quarrel. He went out immediately afterward and went down to the wharf at the foot of Prince Street, and just sat there throwing stones in the Potomac. When he came back he went to the library door to talk to his father again, but it was locked, as it frequently is, apparently, and his father didn’t answer. He assumed either Doyle didn’t want to talk to him or had gone out. He went upstairs and waited a while, and finally decided to turn in and sleep on it. He didn’t h
ear anything.”

  “And Miss Isabel?”

  “She’s upstairs—you might go up in a while and talk to her. She’s so upset about her brother they haven’t told her about Roger yet.”

  “Didn’t she hear the glass breaking?”

  “She was at a meeting of the Leper Guild of her church,” Colonel Primrose said. “She didn’t get home till late. She found the front door open and thought they’d had a burglary until she’d spent half an hour looking in closets and drawers. She waked the maid, who told her Roger and his father had had a quarrel. She then assumed her brother had locked himself in the library or gone out, leaving the door unlocked, or that Roger, who’d never had a quarrel with his father before, had been so upset that he left it open.”

  “She admitted they’d quarrelled?”

  He shook his head with a quick chuckle.

  “Heavens, no. Even when Fox told her the maid had told him about it, she said, ‘But, Captain Fox, you know what colored people are!’ She said Roger always left doors open and so did her brother. As a matter of fact, the door was open. A neighbor noticed it. He’s in the oil business, so I suppose he thought it wouldn’t hurt if the burner had to work a little to keep up with the thermostat. It also happens he doesn’t like Miss Doyle. His chickens kept getting over her fence, she gave him three notices and had them flung back the fourth time with their necks wrung. Doyle paid up but there was still hard feeling. Miss Isabel insisted on going to jail instead.”

  He chuckled again.

  “Miss Isabel, by the way, electrified—I put it mildly—the members of the Leper Guild last night by remarking, not entirely out of a clear sky because they were all buzzing about it, that she knew quite well who murdered Karen Lunt, but that her brother considered it an improper subject for discussion.”

  I gasped. “Have you asked her——”

  There was a little flicker in his sparkling black eyes.

  “Fox did. His wife was at the meeting. She looked quite surprised, he said, and asked him if he had to depend on women to do his police work for him. She’d definitely regarded it as not her duty, especially since he’d acted in the extraordinary way he had about the chickens next door. Anyway, she realized now she’d made a mistake.”

  “In other words, she’d thought it was her brother?”

  “Fox asked her that too. She said she thought that under the circumstances it was a question nobody with any breeding could ask, and she’d always thought his wife a very charming little woman. She’d only met her casually, but that was her impression.”

  All I could think of was that it really sounded exactly like her. “So . . . where are you now?” I asked.

  “I’m chiefly interested, personally,” he said, “in a sheaf of papers that were flung into the fire there in the library last night and weren’t entirely burned.—Doyle apparently spent his last evening making out cases against everybody in town.”

  I looked at him too quickly.

  “You know about that?”

  “Only . . . one,” I said. “Were there others?”

  He nodded. “Only the tops where they were clipped together weren’t burned. There were apparently statements of a case against Sandy, Jerry, William, Pepperday, McClure, and a fellow named Smith in quotation marks. Their names and ‘I. Motive’ were all we rescued.”

  “Wasn’t there—” I stopped abruptly.

  “Wasn’t there what?” he asked, after waiting for me to go on.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You mean, wasn’t Judge Candler’s name there?” he asked, with a smile. “The answer is No. Which, as you haven’t said, is very strange, because everything the man said, without saying it at all, pointed that way.”

  He didn’t need those black X-ray eyes of his to read the question that flashed through my mind. Had Judge Candler himself . . .

  “I think it’s unlikely he would have left anything at all, if he’d taken it,” he said quite calmly, as if I’d really asked it. “It’s a possibility, of course. On the other hand, whoever put the lot of them in the fire undoubtedly expected them to burn completely. The Judge’s statement may still be around somewhere—waiting future use. I expect it would be the most patiently worked out of the lot, It might be exceedingly damning.”

  I looked intently at him. “Don’t be absurd, Colonel Primrose,” I said. “You can’t believe . . .”

  “My dear, I can believe anything.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “Unfortunately,” he said with a smile.

  “But you surely don’t think Roger did it?”

  “I think he’s in a tight spot,” he said soberly. “I have great respect for Judge Candler. That doesn’t blind me to the fact that he could be an implacable enemy. He’s taken a lot from Philander Doyle. He adored Karen. I think he’s even more deeply devoted to his daughter. If he were convinced—and I think he is—that Roger killed Karen . . . then I think Roger will need more than his father, even if he wasn’t dead and could defend, to get him off. The fact that he’s in love with Jerry of course makes it worse, if anything.”

  “I didn’t ask you that,” I protested. “I know all that as well as you do. I asked you if you think he’s guilty.”

  He stood looking at the ash on his cigar.

  “No,” he said, absently. “I don’t think so.”

  Then he looked up at me intently.

  “There’s one thing that interests me very much, Mrs. Latham.”

  “What’s that?” I asked . . . too eagerly, I’m afraid, because he smiled faintly.

  “That cat,” he said.

  I stopped to think a minute. “What’s she done now?”

  “She came across the street, last night, into the hall. You can see her tracks if you look at that waxed floor in the right light. She came in as far as the library door, and she went back again.—In other words, it’s quite probable that she followed a friend over, and back. She’s not a familiar in this house, and she’s lonesome.”

  He was watching me with a veiled scrutiny that wasn’t particularly comforting, since I couldn’t keep the other morning, or the other evening, out of my mind.

  “It’s even occurred to me, Mrs. Latham,” he went on calmly, “that she may have been following someone the other morning—the morning you let her in—to the Candler house. She was cold, she couldn’t get in her own house, and she recognized some friend.”

  My heart sank inside me.

  “Well,” he said, dismissing that abruptly, “I just throw it out. I see it’s occurred to you too. Why don’t you go up and see Miss Isabel?”

  I nodded. “Shall I tell her Roger’s in jail?”

  “Let’s see if I can’t get him out, first,” he said, and smiled as he saw my face brighten. “Don’t count heavily on it. By the way—do you know what was in that glass in the wrought-iron frame in there?”

  I nodded.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” I said. “And anyway, I’ve always thought your wife was a very charming little woman.”

  He smiled again, and I left instantly as I saw Sergeant Buck’s own wrought-iron frame miraculously in the doorway.

  23

  Miss Isabel Doyle’s room was oddly bare, compared with the rest of that house. It had a few pieces of old furniture in it, but not the same kind that were downstairs by any manner of means. Nor were there any pictures like the ones downstairs. There were a couple of undistinguished water colors, and a pencil sketch of herself when she was a really very lovely young girl. Otherwise nothing but photographs, rather absurd looking now that hair styles for women and collar and hair styles for men have changed so much.

  Miss Isabel herself was sitting in an old hickory rocker staring into the empty fireplace. She’d been writing, and she put down her pen as I came in and looked up. There was a little stack of letters on the table at her elbow, stamped with the old pink two-cent Washington stamp. Even the paper of the envelopes looked old, like the clothe
s she always wore. She looked up at me with a haggard dreadful face.

  “They’ve arrested Roger, haven’t they?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “They wouldn’t tell me, but I heard it over the radio.”

  She pointed to the little set on a table by the window.

  “Oh, they can’t think he did anything so dreadful!” she whispered. “He loved his father, and my brother worshipped him. He was so worried, that’s all. He thought they were going to accuse Roger. Oh, why did I go out last night! It’s all so useless! I told him I didn’t want to go, but he made me.”

  “Why, Miss Doyle?” I asked.

  “He was expecting someone to come. He didn’t want me here for fear I’d say something.”

  “Who . . . was it?” I knew it really wasn’t my place to be asking her such questions, but I couldn’t help it.

  “It doesn’t matter, my dear,” she replied, with a return of her usual vague manner.

  “I should think it mattered a lot, for Roger,” I said.

  “Oh, no, no. It’s too absurd for them to do this. They can’t keep Roger. Captain Fox is a very nice man. I know his wife. She’s a lovely woman.”

  “But that isn’t going to help Roger, Miss Doyle,” I protested gently.

  “But Roger is in love with Jeremy, my dear—you don’t understand.”

  I said, “I certainly don’t,” after some thought.

  “Well, you will eventually,” she said. “I know Roger would rather have me leave him there than . . . do anything to hurt her.”

  Then she did relapse, entirely, into her social manner.

  “And anyway, you know, my dear, the cells at the police station are really quite nice. Captain Fox showed them to the Women’s Club one day. They keep sheets, even, for the better class of prisoners, if they think they won’t tear them up, and I’m sure Roger wouldn’t think of it, he’s always been used to sheets.”

  There was a tap on the door. Miss Isabel jumped. The little stack of letters on the edge of the table fell off onto the floor. I started to reach down for them. She stopped me quickly.