by Leslie Ford
I went through it a second time. It seemed to me one of the most ironic commentaries I’d ever read. The man that Lawrason Hilyard didn’t think was good enough to marry his daughter was being credited with the success of her father’s job and spoken of as his successor. The fact that his mother had run a roadside store and service station was a factor of no importance.
I put the paper down. What if—but that didn’t make sense. Lawrason Hilyard wouldn’t conceivably go out and kill himself because Bowen Digges was going to supersede him. It might be hard to take, but not that hard.
I glanced on through the paper until I came to the pictures on the back page. SOCIETY DANCES FOR SAVE THE CHILDREN, I read. The middle picture showed Diane Hilyard in a white lace ballerina frock and silver-fox jacket, laughing up at Stanley Woland, resplendent in white tie and tails with a topper in his hand. Under it was the head, WEDDING BELLS?
“Neither the former Count Stanislaus Wolanski, who recently dropped his title, nor the glamorous newcomer to Capitol society, Diane Hilyard, would deny or confirm it,” it went on. “They are seen here arriving at the ball. Miss Hilyard is the younger daughter of Lawrason Hilyard, OPM executive.”
I looked intently at Diane’s radiant face, incredibly lovely even in the startling flare of the flashlight photograph. There was nothing in it by which I could recognize the stunned stricken child who had stumbled past her father into the hall on Monday night. Certainly not the dazzling laughter in it, I thought, and arriving at benefit balls in Washington hotels isn’t that much fun—not with a man you aren’t in love with, anyway.
I put the paper down and finished my cold coffee and toast. Sheila, my Irish setter, raised her head from her paws and growled just then, just before the doorbell rang and Lilac came padding up the steps to answer it. In a moment Colonel Primrose came in.
I saw at once, from the look on his face, that there wasn’t any doubt the man they’d found in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was Lawrason Hilyard. Boston was right.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “Bartlett Folger identified him.”
“Was it suicide?”
“It looks that way. Folger doesn’t believe it. He chucked his weight about a good deal. Hilyard wasn’t the sort to do away with himself, in the first place, and if he’d decided to shoot himself——”
“Shoot himself?” I said. “My paper didn’t——”
“I know. The police phoned the papers. There weren’t any reporters around when he was brought in. But shot he was. Folger thinks if he was going to shoot himself he’d have done it at home, or in a hotel room, not tramp two miles to do it in the snow on the bank of a canal. There’s something in it.”
“Then he thinks——”
I stopped. After the conversation at dinner Monday night, it was fairly obvious what Mr. Bartlett Folger must have thought.
“He hasn’t said it in so many words—the implication is clear enough,” Colonel Primrose answered. “And it’s going to be hard to prove, with half of Precinct Seven tramping over the ground. They found his gun there by the body.”
“Will the police do anything about it?”
He smiled wryly. “Very much so. Folger made it perfectly plain. It has to be thoroughly cleared up or else.”
“Or else what?”
“He’d get somebody down from New York on his own. After all the missiles the police have had thrown at them the last six months, they’ll do all they can. You remember Lamb, don’t you?”
I nodded. I remembered Captain Lamb very well. He is chief of the Homicide Squad, and an able man.
“He was on hand this morning. I phoned him as soon as you called. He’s gone down to the canal now, and I’m joining him. If you’d like to come along——”
I suppose I shouldn’t have jumped up as eagerly as I did, because he gave me a sardonic smile.
“What’s your interest in this, Mrs. Latham?” he inquired placidly. “I think you’d better tell me about your call Monday afternoon. I tried to get hold of you all day yesterday.”
“They were coming to dinner Friday,” I said. “All of them. I’ll go get my coat.”
“You’d better change your shoes too. We’re going to do some walking. It’s a couple of miles from the Thirty-sixth Street Bridge.”
I put on some heavy walking shoes and wool socks and came downstairs again. Sheila, spotting my shoes and knowing that meant she was going for a walk, went to the front door and began to paw it impatiently.
“You can’t go, miss,” I said.
Her face fell. She looked up at Colonel Primrose.
“Why don’t we take her?” he said. “She can have a good run before we get there.”
She was out with a bound, when I opened the door, and over to the car.
“Where’s Sergeant Buck?” I asked. The icy bricks of the sidewalk must have reminded me of him.
“Down there with Lamb,” Colonel Primrose said. “I wish you two got along better.”
“If you’d just explain to him that I’m not trying to marry you, we’d get along fine,” I said.
“But think what a blow that would be to my ego.”
“Then let’s skip it, by all means. Did you hear about the man who’s been hanging around the Hilyards’ house?”
He shook his head. “Tell me.”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll find out about it yourself, without involving me in it,” I said.
“Considering that I’ve wasted the greater part of the last few years trying to keep you from involving yourself in trouble of various kinds,” Colonel Primrose said blandly, “it’s a pleasure to have you have such an idea. Go on. I want the whole thing, Mrs. Latham.”
CHAPTER 6
WE’D COME, BY THE TIME I’D TOLD HIM, to the iron bridge across the canal at the end of the old Arlington Aqueduct below the Key Bridge, in front of the big red-brick building of the traction company on M Street.
Sheila bounded out of the car as soon as I parked, and shot past the policeman on guard and down the steps to the towing path. Colonel Primrose showed his card, and we crossed over after her.
I’d better explain that the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal is about eighty feet wide, with a retaining wall along M Street and Canal Road as far as the Chain Bridge. The towing path, about ten feet wide, is on the river side, and there’s quite a stretch of land, including a railroad track and fishing and boating places, between it and the Potomac.
The canal took the place of an earlier one that George Washington was interested in, and was begun in 1828. It was the water route to Cumberland from the point in Georgetown where the river became non-navigable because of rocks and falls and shallows. It was given up, eventually, for better modes of transportation, and fell into ruin until the National Park Service took it over a few years ago. Now it’s a delightful place, very beautiful along the banks of the river, and the pleasantest place in the world to take a dog to run. Sheila knows every molehill and every rabbit hole along it.
The ground along the .towing path was frozen now, with a few late violets still sticking their pale frozen faces out from under sheltering leaves. Colonel Primrose and I followed Sheila along. I told him as much of what I knew about the Hilyards as I thought I had to and that he’d find out from somebody else anyway and know I’d purposely held back. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything about Mr. Bartlett Folger’s conversation at dinner Monday night. I left out most of my conversation with Bowen Digges at the cocktail party, except to say there’d been one and that I liked Bowen Digges even before I knew who he was. I also left out most of what Diane had said, except that the household had been pretty much upset that night.
“I suppose Carey and Joan Eaton recognized Digges, and that’s what the trouble was about,” Colonel Primrose remarked.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that myself, but I hadn’t, somehow. It explained, of course, why Joan Eaton had stared at the two of us, in the corner there by the piano, and why her husband had taken such elaborate care not
to be seen looking at us. I’d still connected that vaguely with the radio incident outside the front door. And it meant, of course, that they hadn’t known he was in her father’s office either.
“I’d like to know about Bowen Digges,” I said. “How do you suppose he got from washer-up in the plant laboratory—isn’t that what Agnes said he was?—to runner-up for Mr. Hilyard’s job as OPM branch chief in five years?”
“It would be interesting to find out,” he said. His voice came from a curious angle. I looked around. He was no longer directly behind me on the path; he’d stopped and was bending down to look at something in the tangled vines to our left. Monday’s snow was still fairly heavy on the ground among the roots, but it had melted off the upper layer of leafless runners, now shaggy white with hoarfrost from the night before.
He straightened up, holding an empty cigarette packet between his thumb and forefinger by the torn blue revenue label. Whoever had tossed it away had apparently given it a twist in the midde first. It was covered with frost too. Colonel Primrose unbuttoned his overcoat and dropped it into his suit-coat pocket.
“Now, really, Colonel Primrose!” I said.
He chuckled. “You can’t ever tell,” he said calmly.
We’d come along the towing path a little more than a mile––we measured it later on my speedometer on the Canal Road, across the canal beyond the stone retaining wall. The twisted cigarette pack was directly across from the broken place in the wall just past Clark Place Road, and exactly a mile and one tenth from the green iron bridge at the foot of the long flight of cement steps from Prospect Street down to M Street. And it was three quarters of a mile farther along, that Lawrason Hilyard’s body had been found.
We came in sight of the place in a few minutes, around a long even bend of the canal. A crowd of dark-coated figures were milling about. Somebody had built a fire, and the smoke made a lovely mauve haze above them.
“They must have put half the force on the job,” I said.
Colonel Primrose groaned audibly. “Everything will be churned to mush,” he said.
We went on. There were a lot of cars up on the road across the canal. A battery of cameramen were sitting or standing on the retaining wall. One was weaving up a big bare overhanging sycamore like a monkey. I could hear the shrill blast of a police whistle farther along, where a policeman was diverting traffic from the Virginia shore up the Chain Bridge Road. The identity of the dead man was pretty obviously known by now, and the press was out in full cry.
Colonel Primrose took my arm. We quickened our pace.
“You think he was murdered, don’t you?” I asked.
He looked around at me. “I don’t know, Mrs. Latham. If he was, I’d like to know why. And if it’s suicide, I’d still like to know why. I was a fool to let Lamb get here ahead of me. The trouble with the Washington police just now is that they’re scared to death of the press. They’re like a lot of prima donnas.”
He was certainly right in part. The whole bank of the canal, as we got up to the milling crowd there, was trampled to liquid mud. A couple of reporters spotted him and came running to meet us.
“Hi, colonel! What’s the dope?”
“You tell me. I’ve just come.”
“Tell us another, colonel. What’s Captain Lamb doing here? And your man Friday?”
Colonel Primrose’s man Friday made the weather seem much warmer all of a sudden. He was standing there, his back to the canal, a frozen colossus athwart the one piece of untrodden ground visible. I looked down at it as we came up. Between his feet a dark brown scum oozed through the dead water irises and stained the snow on the bank.
“Stand back,” Captain Lamb said. “Get back, all you fellows. . . . His feet were up here,” he went on as Colonel Primrose came to a stop there. “His body was in up to the waist.”
He pointed out into the fringe of brown-stained water plants. The water was still muddy. The shallow rim of ice along the canal bank was broken and slowly forming again.
Captain Lamb motioned to a shivering, unattractive little man in an old trench coat. “Come out here, you, and tell the colonel what you told me. . . . This is the fellow that found him, colonel. . . . And what were you doing down here?”
The little man came forward serenely.
“It’s a national park, ain’t it? I’ve got a right to go on a picnic, like anybody else?”
“Get on with it, please,” Colonel Primrose said.
“Okay. My name’s Andrews. I spent the night in that shack down there. I didn’t break in—the door wasn’t locked. I was waked up by a pistol shot. It was dark and I don’t know what time it was—I left my watch in my other pants. A dog was barking up here. He barked and howled till I thought I’d get up and see what was going on. There was a flashlight in the cupboard. I came up here, and first thing I saw this guy in the water with a little dog tugging at his leg. I had to chase it off before I could get hold of him and pull him out. First I thought I’d yell when a car came along, and then I figured the first thing they’d do would be nab me. Anyway, the guy was dead, and he wouldn’t be any colder layin’ here than on a slab in the morgue. So I just left him where he was. I went to Georgetown and got a cup of coffee. I sat there gassin’ with the Greek that runs the place till I got feelin’ sorry for the guy out here. I went to the call box and waited for the cop to come.”
Colonel Primrose nodded. “All right. . . . Lamb, get everybody out of here, onto the other side. I want to have a look. . . . Sorry, boys.”
The newspapermen were good-natured about it. It was a long trek back and around, I was thinking, but they were smarter than that. They went up the canal about fifty feet to a skiff moored to the bank. It was tied by two long ropes, one fast to a cement pile in the back, the other to the foot of a short flight of steps down to the water across the canal, by an iron gate in the wall, so that the boat could be pulled back and forth to either side. In a moment Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck, Captain Lamb, the little tramp, a policeman, a detective and I were the only ones left on the towing path.
“Where was his gun?” Colonel Primrose asked.
The little tramp pointed down. “Just here. Left of the body. He was lying on his face. I turned him over when I pulled him out, to see if his heart was beating. His face was all covered with mud. That’s why I didn’t see that he had a hole in his head.”
Colonel Primrose turned to the uniformed policeman. “You took the body up?”
“Yes, sir. I put in a call for the wagon and came down here with this man. I spotted that boat up there and carried the body up and put it in, and the boys on the other side pulled it across and took it away.”
Just at that moment the low wail of a siren came through the air like the call of a lost banshee. The policeman stopped short, we all looked around. A motorcycle escorting a green coupé swept up Canal Road from Georgetown and came to a dramatic stop under the naked ghost-white sycamores beyond the wall. A door opened and slammed shut.
The next instant I saw the group of men up there on the road fall apart and a sudden spot of gold light the bleak landscape.
Diane Hilyard ran to the wall. Her face, as she stood a moment poised above the wall, her hands gripping the gray stone, looking across at the towing path, was so white that it didn’t look real. The men there stood sort of paralyzed for an instant. Then there was a shout of recognition, and a dozen cameras were whipped up and began to click like mad.
Colonel Primrose glanced at me. I nodded.
“It’s Miss Hilyard, Lamb,” he said curtly. “Bring her across. Get her away from those fools.”
Diane had seen the steps down and the boat. She ran past the policeman there, her bright bob pushed back, her beaver coat open. The policeman stood aside as Captain Lamb bellowed something. She ran down the rickety wooden steps and stumbled into the skiff. It was Sergeant Buck who strode up to the mooring and pulled her across. I ran along the path to her just as he was practically lifting her out.
I could forgive Sergeant Buck everything in the past, I thought, for the genuine compassion in that lantern-jawed dead pan of his just then. He was patting her shoulder awkwardly.
“There, there, miss. There, there, now.” It was a hoarse croak, coming out of the corner of his brass-bound mouth, but it sounded unbelievably sweet. “Now, now, miss; it’ll be all right.”
He shot me a look of almost pathetic appeal, and nodded at the skiff. I looked down at it. It was a horrible sickening mess, with the stained, awful water sloshing about the flat, uneven bottom around the cleats. It was the boat, of course, I realized, in which they’d taken Lawrason Hilyard’s body across.
I took hold of her arm. “Come along, Diane,” I said gently.
She turned to me. Her face was completely bloodless. Her scarlet lipstick stood out as if it were painted on white linen. Her eyes were perfectly dry and as blue as cobalt if cobalt could be made to feel. Her whole body was quivering.
“It was my father, Grace,” she whispered, as if she didn’t know I knew.
“I know, darling,” I said.
“But, Grace! How could it happen?”
“I don’t know, Diane,” I said. “But why did you come? Why don’t you go back home?”
She seemed to straighten up, and her hand in mine stopped trembling. “I had to. Boston came back. He said he’d been at your house, and you’d come here with somebody called Colonel Primrose.”
I nodded.
