by Leslie Ford
“It’s just that he can’t bear to see a man in the clutches of a widow,” I said easily, but somehow I didn’t go on with what I’d been going to say. “I guess we’d better go back,” I said instead.
Sergeant Buck’s car spun around in the road and drove in in front of us. He got out, slammed his door, and came over.
“The Colonel wants to see you, ma’am,” he said. He signalled the boy. “—Two cheese on rye.”
He turned back to me. “He says meet him at the Anchorage. Come on, Mr. Candler. You can go back with me after you’ve et.”
I think Sandy was on the point of declining impolitely. I nudged him and said—out of the side of my mouth—“Go on, you idiot!” He got out, scowling, with the hamburgers we’d ordered. I backed out and turned. When I looked around he and Buck were getting in the other car.
Colonel Primrose got up as I came into the lovely old hall of the Anchorage in Queen Street. He smiled in a cheerful and peculiarly offensive way.
“I hope you didn’t mind.”
“A lot of good it would have done me if I did,” I replied amiably. “It does just happen that I don’t care about spending a night in jail, even if they do have sheets for the better class of prisoners.—What if I didn’t qualify?”
He sat down opposite me. “I’ve ordered your lunch.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He smiled. “Don’t be annoyed. I’m sorry about this morning, but you see I had to have those letters. Nobody would tell me anything. I couldn’t just keep on guessing, could I?”
“No—but you could have quit and gone back to Georgetown. We’ve really missed you.”
“If you’d stayed there, I wouldn’t have left in the first place,” he answered, with a faint smile.
“I’ll admit the original error was mine,” I said. “But you could have gone home when I wanted you to.”
“I think now I might have,” he agreed. “I . . . didn’t know what was happening, you see.—Now that I do, I think perhaps I’m sorry I didn’t.”
I stared at him open-mouthed.
“You mean . . . you know——?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, I know.—I’ve often heard people at the F.B.I. say they didn’t care how many gangsters shot each other up, so long as they let laymen alone. I think that applies to people like . . . well, could we say Philander Doyle, anyway?”
“But not Karen Lunt?”
He shrugged.
“She knew what she was doing. Maybe she got pretty much what she deserved. She was ruthless and egocentric and amoral. In any other place in the social scale I’d shudder to think what she could have been. She double-crossed the Candlers, who’d taken care of her since she was a child, she double-crossed Philander Doyle . . . not with any desire to save Judge Candler, just to get what she wanted the quickest and easiest way.”
“You do think she knew what Mr. Doyle was doing?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely. It was his idea, she elaborated on it in her own way. She played a neater game than he did, just because she was a woman and had Candler buffaloed. And they both found out what the whole history of man points out, from time to time—that the worm turns.”
He stopped me before I could speak.
“There’s just one thing I want you to do,” he said seriously. “You can’t help or hinder anything at this point. I’m going to ask you just to take it for granted that I do know who killed those two people. I want you to tell me, in detail, everything you remember about four things. One: the interview you barged in on at the Candlers’ before the party. Two: the party, and everything you noticed at it. Three: the saga of Mrs. Harris the Siamese cat. And four: your interview with Philander Doyle before lunch. I know now, incidentally, about the copy of the Gazette that was shot out of the frame in the iron standard.—He had a pile of photostated copies in his dresser drawer. So begin at the beginning, my dear. I won’t interrupt—or I’ll try not to.”
I hesitated. I wouldn’t, since the business at the post office, have trusted him between me and the gatepost. He gave me a faintly sardonic smile.
“Fox and Buck and I have been busy as a lot of moles, Mrs. Latham. I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t turned up. I’m only asking you to tell me about those things to find out the extenuating circumstances—which I’m sure exist. Believe me, my dear.”
I suppose I was a fool, but I did believe him, some way. I sat there, telling him everything, including even the pad of snow and ice on the drugget inside the garden entry at the Candlers’ house. I told him about Philander Doyle’s 2 A.M. inspection of Karen’s carriage house, and Roger’s watching him from behind the tree.
When I’d finished he nodded soberly. Then, without a word, he pushed his chair back, paid the bill and helped me on with my coat.
“The Judge asked me to come and see him this morning,” he said as we got into my car. “I gather he wanted to tell me he’d been over to see Doyle last night.”
“Not entirely,” I said. “He wanted mostly to tell you he’d seen Roger leave the house before he talked to Mr. Doyle. That was to atone for his calling Captain Fox last night.”
I looked at him as I shifted into high.
“It was the same person, wasn’t it, who . . . killed them?”
He nodded.
“Was it because Mr. Doyle knew who had killed Karen——?”
He shook his head. “No. He was killed for exactly the same reason that Karen Lunt was.”
William opened the door when we got back, his face still greyer, as if the wax had quite dried by now without ever being polished and had left a thick film over the shining mahogany. His hands shook as he took my coat. Colonel Primrose waited for me by the library door. I stopped on the threshold. Mrs. Harris was standing there in front of me, one dainty yellow-tipped paw raised tentatively, looking around. She arched her back and walked in, her tail high, rather like a well-drilled debutante making an entrance, stopped in front of Mr. Pepperday, meowed gently, jumped up into his lap and settled down on his green baize bag. I looked around the room. Roger was there, sitting beside his aunt. Miss Isabel had apparently discarded all of her outlandish rigs, and was quite decently dressed in quite normal clothes.
Judge Candler rose from behind his desk as I came in. Sandy was balanced on a footstool in front of the fire, close to Jerry . . . both of them quite pale, each in a different way. I noticed Sergeant Buck standing there, a menacing cross between the guard of a peculiarly vicious road gang, the beadle of a French cathedral and the Great Pyramid of Cheops if they’d all been run through a grinder and then smelted by Krupp. Captain Fox was not there.
Then I heard William turn the heavy key in the front door and put the chain on. He slipped in behind Colonel Primrose and closed the library door, and stood there until Jerry nodded to a chair. I don’t think his pounding knees would have held him upright very long. My own were pretty watery, certainly, as I sat down by Jerry, and my hand, as she reached for it and held it like a frightened child, was as cold as hers.
Colonel Primrose sat down by Judge Candler’s desk. I saw on it the letters I’d got from Miss Isabel, the stamps uncancelled, that Buck, I supposed, had brought to him. Beside them was another pile. The stamps on them were cancelled, and I could read the red letters of the post office notation: “Return to Sender.”
“I asked you to come here because it seemed simpler this way,” Colonel Primrose said. “What motivated Karen Lunt’s death and Philander Doyle’s is, of course, known to all of you. It was done simply—and entirely—to prevent Judge Candler’s being dragged through the public prints at a moment when his unblemished reputation stood him in greater stead even than his knowledge of the law . . . at a moment when, as we all understand, any allegation, no matter how unjust, could do him a cruel wrong.”
Judge Candler’s fingers beat a soft tattoo on his desk, Mr. Pepperday’s did the same on the arm of his chair.
“I suppose you all realize, too, that the great driving force i
n the life of Philander Doyle was his single-minded desire to . . . get even with his lifelong friend, by fair means or foul. That that had become an obsession with him . . . and that, from Mr. Doyle’s point of view, he was on the eve of his greatest failure, because his friend was on the eve of his greatest success. I am not, of course, telling any of you anything you haven’t been aware of . . . for a longer or shorter time.”
He turned to Sandy.
“You knew, I believe, Mr. Candler, that a plan to ruin your father was on foot? When Miss Lunt was found dead . . .”
“I . . . yes,” Sandy said quietly. “But I . . . I couldn’t figure it out. When I saw that chronometer, and saw it was all set for six o’clock, when the house would be full of gas, that beat me. It seemed to have gone all haywire.”
I gaped at him, remembering so well hearing him through the flimsy boards of the little closet in my room, and Jerry saying, “—So now we have a murder on our hands.” I could remember sitting on the blanket chest there, my head going round in dizzy dreadful circles.
Colonel Primrose looked steadily down at the little man bolt upright in his chair, with his green baize bag and Mrs. Harris in his lap.
“You knew all the circumstances of Karen’s relations with the Candlers, Mr. Pepperday,” he said quietly. “You knew better than anyone else the mechanism of her hot-water system. You had as nearly perfect an alibi as it’s possible to have in your well-known methodical habits. You had access to Karen Lunt’s cottage. You have been a devoted friend to three generations of Candlers. Mrs. Harris the cat follows you in preference to anyone else in this house.—I wish to apologize to you for thinking for some time that you were the man we were looking for.”
Mr. Pepperday blinked, open-mouthed, stroking Mrs. Harris’s café-au-lait back mechanically with trembling fingers, too shocked to speak.
Colonel Primrose turned back to the rest of us.
“Murder was no part, of course, of Philander Doyle’s scheme of action against your father. That was quite another idea altogether. Some other person had planned, at the same time that Philander Doyle was planning, to remove Karen Lunt, and to do it in such a way that it would have all the appearance of an accident.—And in a way, because she upset all that, Mrs. Latham is responsible for Philander Doyle’s death.”
Jerry’s hand on mine steadied it.
“For with Miss Lunt gone, there would have been no one to bring—at just the crucial moment, from Mr. Doyle’s point of view—a quite fictitious suit against Judge Candler. As it turned out, however, Mr. Doyle was left not with a dubious lawsuit that would have needed a good deal of hocus-pocus even to get into court—though to get it into the newspapers was, of course, the primary idea—but with a first-rate murder charge . . . something better than he had ever dreamed of, requiring nothing at all that would compromise him in the least.
“He made, however, as he told Mrs. Latham here, two substantial mistakes. He thought it was the pride that he’d touched in Miss Jerry that had made her decide to give back the aircraft stock——”
“But it wasn’t!” Jerry cried. “It was because I saw I was acting exactly as he’d planned for me to act! I——”
Colonel Primrose smiled a little.
“It didn’t occur to Mr. Doyle,” he said placidly, “that a twenty-one-year-old girl would see through him. And his other mistake was that he hadn’t realized that his son’s desire to protect a girl he loved could be greater than his devotion to him.”
The room was as silent as the grave as he stopped for a moment.
“And that’s why Roger Doyle,” he went on quietly, “went back to the party in the carriage house, after everybody had gone. That’s why he gave Karen Lunt that glass of milk. That’s why he came home, after he’d done it, and——”
Jerry’s hand in mine unclasped slowly, relaxing as a dead hand relaxes. I stared at Colonel Primrose, my heart seemingly quite still inside me, my lips dry.
Then, not suddenly or abruptly at all, but quite normally, as if it were a drawing room gathering where there’s been rather a longer lull in the conversation than was socially desirable, I heard a cool and well-bred and vaguely aloof voice.
“Well, really, Colonel Primrose,” Miss Isabel Doyle said. “It’s absurd to say that Roger killed his father. He did no such thing. I know perfectly well who did it.—Because, don’t you see, I did it myself?”
25
If the men from Mars had dropped into that frozen and speechless room by the millions, utter and complete devastation could not have been more awful. Sitting there by the fire, quite breathless, Jerry’s hand gripping mine with a sudden convulsive tightness, I couldn’t bear to look at a single face. Then my eyes were drawn by some terrible fascination to Roger Doyle’s. He hadn’t moved a muscle; but I could see the cold perspiration standing in beads on his white forehead.
I heard Colonel Primrose’s quiet voice.
“Yes, I know you did, Miss Doyle,” he said, and there was a gentleness and pity in his tone that sent another colder chill to my heart. “You did it because . . . it was the only way you knew to save a man who meant more to you than your brother.”
“Than all the world,” said Miss Doyle.
She hadn’t taken her eyes, quite steady under her slightly-raised brows, from Colonel Primrose. I didn’t dare look at Judge Candler, but I heard his chair creak suddenly as he moved under the impact of that cool, perfectly calm declaration.
“—You wrote those letters,” Colonel Primrose said, pointing to the table in front of Judge Candler. “They were never answered. The others Peyton Candler, a young man, wrote to you. They were returned to the sender . . . so that each of you believed the other was unfaithful. Your brother, as he told Mrs. Latham, in double-crossing his friend, kept him from marrying the woman he loved.”
Miss Isabel Doyle looked vaguely surprised.
“Oh, but I’m quite sure he never thought of if that way Colonel Primrose,” she said quickly. “He thought I’d marry someone in New York, you know. He always had the house quite full of eligible young men.”
Her voice was as aloof and charmingly detached as ever.
“You don’t understand him, really. He was devoted to me. He gave me everything in the world to make up for what he’d done. Really.”
I saw Colonel Primrose’s glance rest for just an instant on her dowdy clothes, her cheap shoes and cheaper bag. She flushed as if he had caught her off guard. I thought of that barren room, of the awful old cast-off garments she wore.
“You see,” she said coolly, “I just never accepted the things he wanted me to have. He wanted me to be stylish and smart. I wouldn’t, just to annoy him. He understood it perfectly. He’d try to bargain with me. If I wanted something, I’d try to hide it from him. Just as I wanted Roger to marry Jerry, but if I’d said so . . . That’s why I pretended I thought it would be lovely if he married Karen. It was all kind of a game.”
I tried to stop the ache in my throat, to move my icy and paralyzed hands, as I stared at her. It was so utterly incredible, her quietly checkmating all his grandeur by simply refusing to be part of it, hiding what she felt under the mask of aloof vacuity so that he couldn’t guess her heart.
“And the framed copy of the Gazette, Miss Doyle?” Colonel Primrose asked. “You’ve broken that often, haven’t you? So that the maid didn’t get up when she heard the crash of glass?”
“Oh, yes,” Miss Isabel said calmly. “But he always had more. He had hundreds of them made.”
“And . . . when you shot him——”
“Oh, but I didn’t want to,” she said quickly. “I was really very fond of him. I implored him to stop. You see, he read me the case he’d constructed against Judge Candler. It was damning, it was horrible, really! You see, he’d been watching, ever since Karen moved into the carriage house. He watched that night. Early in the morning he saw Judge Candler coming in his garden door. He’d seen him come out, and walk down toward her house just before . . . but he could
forget that, he said, to make it look . . . too horrible.”
Judge Candler sat erect, motionless.
“It was you,” Colonel Primrose asked calmly, “that the cat followed to this house?”
Judge Candler nodded.
“Would you mind very much . . . explaining?”
“Perhaps I should have done so earlier,” Judge Candler said. His voice was slow and firm, and controlled with a painful effort. “I woke and saw Karen’s lights still on. I was disturbed, because of the scene earlier in the evening.”
He didn’t look at Roger.
“I got up and went part way down there. I saw the cat at the window, and I saw Karen, sitting as she had been on the sofa. I realized, of course, that she was not a child . . . that she had a right to her private life. I knew she hadn’t the same idea of the conventions that . . . I have—and that four o’clock was not as late to her as it is to me. I came back, without going any closer, not wanting to know—I presume—what might have hurt me very much to know. I knew the cat came with me. I thought she’d go back again for Karen to let her in. I didn’t smell gas, but I haven’t a sensitive nose. And I didn’t go close to the house.”
He hadn’t looked at Miss Isabel, and he sat there now, his head bowed.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “—He read you his case against Judge Candler?”
Miss Isabel’s voice sounded even cooler and more vague, after Judge Candler’s firm tones with their undercurrent of pain.
“I knew of course that nothing could stop him then, not Roger and Jerry, no one. So I told him I’d turned on Karen’s gas, and why. You see, I did that when I went in the kitchen as we were all leaving. I’d already unhooked the icebox and set the chronometer earlier in the evening when I helped cook dinner. I knew she was quite blind and wouldn’t notice. Then I left the water running upstairs when I got my wraps. I went in the kitchen again when I was pretending to look for a cat and flicked the pilot light off.”
