Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  “I really don’t know,” I said, though it was fairly obvious. “First you get both of us in a mess trying to save him, then you confirm the only unattractive thing anybody has to say about him. Whatever made you come out, in the first place?”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. “I … had to see him, to … tell him something,” she said uncertainly. “And I wanted to tell him he’s got to be careful, but he—he doesn’t have to worry about his hat.”

  I agreed wryly. “No. It’s us that have to worry about that.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “In my pocket, darling,” I said. “Colonel Primrose hasn’t let me out of his sight. He’s an awful lot smarter than he looks, and it’s just as well not to forget it.”

  “We’ve got to get rid of it,” she answered quickly. “Can’t you do it? I don’t dare take it home, not with Carey Eaton always snooping around.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  After a moment she said, “Grace.”

  “Yes?”

  “Where did all that . . . blood on Bowen’s coat come from?”

  “Look, Diane,” I said, more abruptly than I’d meant to. “I don’t know. But I know this—and you ought to face it: Bowen Digges is in a bad spot. Your father’s watch stopped at eleven thirty-five. Bowen doesn’t know it, and Colonel Primrose didn’t tell him. And Bowen said he was with your father, down on the towing path, until midnight or later. That’s practically enough to hang him, without anything else at all.”

  “He didn’t do it,” she said calmly.

  “How do you know he didn’t?”

  “Because.”

  So far as I know, there’s never since Eve been a better way to end an argument, and perhaps it’s just as well. We crossed the bridge to Georgetown in two separate and distinct spheres of silence. I was wondering about Colonel Primrose again, and Diane was doing a little quiet thinking of her own.

  “Grace,” she said slowly, “maybe—maybe father did do it, himself. Maybe mother’s right. She says nobody can ever prove he didn’t.”

  I glanced around at her. It was pathetically unconvincing. More than that, it was an unconsciously but definitely alarming picture of her mother. And what happened that night didn’t relieve it any.

  The evening editions were pretty ghastly. The bodies of thousands of men piled up on the war fronts in a single afternoon were pushed to the inside pages to make space for that single body in the C. & O. Canal. The headlines in themselves were bad enough: POLICE PROBE “SUICIDE OF OPM CHIEF. HINT FOUL PLAY IN CANAL MYSTERY. POLICE SEARCH CANAL FOR MISSING HAT. DEAD DOLLAR-A-YEAR MAN MADE MILLIONS IN NEW METAL. CITIZENS DEMAND POLICE SHAKE-UP. CANAL HAS COLORFUL HISTORY. CLUBWOMAN DEMANDS DRAINING OF CANAL.

  The pictures were worse. There was a full page of diagrams of the canal, with Lawrason Hilyard’s body drawn in, apparently by the editor’s three-year-old child. Pages of all the papers were devoted to pictures of Diane running along the retaining wall and down the stairs, crossing the canal, and standing there for that moment with Sergeant Buck holding her. There was a picture of Sheila bringing me that hat. There were pictures of the Hilyards’ house, here and back home; Joan Eaton’s picture in her wedding gown, her and Carey’s house in Georgetown. There was a picture of Bartlett Folger’s yacht, the Samarkand, moored in the Potomac Basin. All of them were appropriately and sensationally titled. If publicity was what Joan and Carey Eaton had wanted to avoid, I knew there’d be trouble in the house on Prospect Street. And when I saw my own picture there on the canal, with my name as that of an old friend of the family who’d come with Diane on her tragic pilgrimage, I canceled a supper engagement and stayed at home.

  It was half past nine, and I was writing a letter to Agnes Philips, back in the Hilyards’ home town, when the phone rang. My mind flew instantly to the missing hat, safely parked now in the chest-on-chest in the upstairs hall, under a long damask tablecloth that we use only on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was still expecting Colonel Primrose to catch up with me momentarily.

  It was Diane, however, and she was frightened. I knew that before she said it.

  “Grace, can you come over?” Her voice had a definite quality of fear. “I’m so scared. I’m all alone. I hate to ask you. The servants were afraid to stay, so mother let them go home to sleep. She’s out, too, and the house is so—so quiet.”

  I’m not very brave myself. It’s only when someone else is hysterically less so that I can put on a kind of front and believe in it for a few minutes. But I went. Diane was waiting at the sitting-room window where I’d sat with her mother the day I called. The street had never seemed so forlorn or deserted before, or so full of deep shadowy places where things could lurk and creep silently out. It was getting a little warmer. A soft misty fog was beginning to settle down, giving everything a vague, luminous sort of Whistler quality, so that nothing seemed very real or solid.

  Diane opened the door with a little half sob of relief. Her hands were cold and she was trembling fitfully.

  “I’m just a coward,” she said. “I never knew I was before. I guess I’ve never been alone in a house in all my life. It’s all so—so——” She shivered convulsively. “I keep hearing things.”

  “I know,” I said. “Where’s your mother?”

  “She went over to the Eatons’. I didn’t go. Did you see the papers?”

  I nodded.

  “Joan and Carey are in a state. I shouldn’t have gone down there, I guess. Come on in the library; there’s a fire. … Come on, boy.”

  It was the first time I’d seen their spaniel. He was frightened, too—staying as close to her heels as he could get, his long ears drooping, as scared as if he expected a savage rabbit to leap out of a corner at him. He settled down at her feet in front of the fire, trembling all over his silky little body.

  “He makes me more frightened than I really am,” Diane said. “He keeps going upstairs to father’s door and crying as if he thought he’d come back. This afternoon he started howling. That’s when Boston and Annie got frightened and wouldn’t stay after dark.”

  The spaniel whined. A dry branch scraped against the window and a shutter rattled somewhere. There wasn’t a radio in the room, and if there had been we’d probably have tuned in exactly on the latest police report about Lawrason Hilyard’s death.

  “When did you first know Bowen, Diane?” I asked. Maybe it wasn’t too tactful, but I thought if I could get her mind on the distant past it would help a little.

  She stared into the fire. “Since I was a kid. He delivered papers. That was before his father died. Bo was in high school. His father was a technician in the plant. They got some kind of employees’ compensation. That’s when his mother bought the little store. She’d been a schoolteacher, but she wasn’t well enough to go with that, and the children could do lots of things to help. She even took care of the gas and oil when the children were at school. I thought she had a lot of—of courage.”

  The spaniel woke up with a start, growling. The hair on his back stood up. He barked sharply.

  “Hush,” Diane said.

  She had straightened up herself and was listening, and so was I. From somewhere there came the low grating sound of a rusty hinge. The dog stiffened, growled again, ran to the back windows and began pawing at the heavy drawn curtains.

  Diane got up slowly. “Somebody must be out in the garden,” she whispered. “Here, Peter. Lie down.”

  The dog was shaking again, sensing the sudden alarm in her voice.

  I reached for the telephone. “I’m going to call the police,” I said, being practical for once in my life.

  She shook her head quickly. “No, I’d rather not. I wanted to ask them tonight to—to sort of stay around, but mother wouldn’t let me. She doesn’t want any more publicity than we’ve had.”

  I got up, went over to the window, drew the curtain back, stepped inside it and pulled it behind me so the light wouldn’t shine out. Down below, the lights from the bridge twinkle
d through the long shroud of fog along the line of the river. The garden was on the level of the basement rooms, and sloped down in broad planes about half a block to the retaining wall above M Street. It looked like a ghost garden in the vague luminous mist. The snow had melted or been swept from the brick wall. Three wooden chairs stood out ghastly white through the bare leprous-spotted branches of the big sycamore tree on the second terrace. I looked at the wooden gate in the ivy-covered wall along 37th Street. It was closed, and the whole garden was as silent and motionless as a graveyard.

  Then suddenly my heart was in my throat and my spine was crawling, cold as ice. A tall black-shrouded figure appeared out of the shadow of a great burlap-covered box bush and moved slowly, as slowly as a sleep-walker, across the terrace to the chairs under the silver-splotched tree, and returned as slowly, stopping every few feet to look back at the gate in the wall, and then move on again.

  Diane grasped at my arm. I hadn’t realized she’d moved in with me behind the curtain. Her breath made a sharp sibilant sound in her throat.

  “It’s mother!” she whispered.

  Neither of us moved. Mrs. Hilyard reached the end of the terrace and came back again. I could see her face for an instant, gleaming white under the black shawl she wore around her head. I couldn’t see it plainly, but it gave an impression of age, and of something else I couldn’t define, and still can’t.

  She went back along the terrace, stopped and looked at the wooden gate again. She raised her left hand, pushed up her sleeve and held her hand up as if trying to see the time in the frail light through the hazy mist. Then she sat down slowly, a terrible figure, black against the gleaming whiteness of the garden chair. It made the two others emptier and hideously gaunt. She was like one of the Weird Sisters waiting for the two others at the rendezvous on the blasted heath.

  I don’t know how long she sat there. It seemed very long to me, and must have seemed longer to Diane. “What do you suppose——” she whispered.

  I shook my head.

  The dog growled again. I heard that same grating of a rusty hinge. The garden gate opened slowly, and closed. Out of the shadow a man came. He was tall and thin and wasted. He stood for a moment looking around him. Mrs. Hilyard got up slowly. The man saw her, and came to meet her by the terrace steps. He took off his hat. She motioned with her hand toward the chairs.

  As he turned his head the light caught his face for just an instant. It was the man who’d stood across the street, the man she’d said was a beggar. He was the man the police were searching all Washington to find—who had talked about the devil until Boston was afraid to take the dog out for a walk after night had fallen.

  CHAPTER 12

  DIANE AND I MOVED AWAY FROM THE window and let the heavy cherry-red curtain slip back into place. Neither of us spoke. She went slowly across the room to the sofa and sat down, staring ahead of her into nothing, her face white. The dog watched her anxiously, made that soft little sound that spaniels do, and touched her knee with his paw. She put her hand down automatically and rubbed his ears.

  The silence crept out of the corners and lay like a pall over the house. A log burned through in the middle slipped down from the andirons. I jumped as if a tree had fallen there. The spaniel raised his head, growling softly.

  Diane looked at me and looked away again.

  “I think I’d better go,” I said. I started to get up.

  “No, please!” she said quickly. “Wait. I—I couldn’t—”

  She didn’t finish it, but I knew what she meant. She was afraid to be there alone when her mother came in. It seemed a terrible thing, but I, for one, certainly didn’t blame her. I was waiting there, too, for the door to open and Mrs. Hilyard to come in, with a kind of cold dread paralyzing my will to talk and to seem casual and natural when she did come.

  The spaniel made a rush for the door, suddenly, barking. I heard a key turn in the lock and the door open.

  “Hello, Peter. Down, Peter. Don’t jump.” Mrs. Hilyard’s voice was short, and it sounded tired—or weary rather than tired, weary and strained.

  “Diane?” she called, as if she weren’t sure the girl would be there.

  Diane took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a second. “Yes, mother,” she said. It was spoken so naturally I could hardly believe it was the same girl. Then, as if preparing her, she added, “Grace is here, mother.”

  There was a short silence. Then Mrs. Hilyard came across the hall to the library door. It was a little startling, seeing her there—not because she looked startling, but because she didn’t. Her long black covered-up dinner dress, the black Persian-lamb coat draped around her shoulders, the black lace scarf she carried in her hand had none of the sinister robed quality they’d had when she was pacing so slowly along the terrace. She looked as any bereaved woman would look, coming in from dining quietly with her married daughter, stopping in to speak before she went up to her room. Her face was very pale, with tired lines around the mouth and eyes, which was natural enough. There were only two things that weren’t right. One was the red lipstick, freshly and hastily put on with a not very steady hand. The other was a kind of inner conflict that seemed to go beyond the plain ordinary irritation that showed as she came into the room and that all her casualness couldn’t quite conceal.

  “I’m so glad you came,” she said. The muscles of her face moved in the orthodox pattern of a social smile. “I was worried about Diane being here by herself. Did you just decide to come?”

  “I called her up and asked her,” Diane answered for me. “And I did call Stanley. You see, I am an obedient child. He thinks it’s mumps he’s got. The doctor’s got him incommunicado.”

  “I didn’t insist on your calling him,” her mother said a little curtly. “I thought it would be a nice thing for you to do, when he’s been so thoughtful.”

  Diane, it was plain, didn’t know what had happened to her one-time count. I couldn’t tell whether Mrs. Hilyard did or not, though I rather doubted it. It struck me, too, that this was the first time Diane had mentioned him all day. He certainly didn’t seem to occupy much of her mind.

  I realized just then that Mrs. Hilyard was looking across Diane’s head at the window. Her hand moved quickly as she steadied herself against the edge of the table by her.

  “What have you two been doing?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Just talking,” Diane said. “How are Mr. and Mrs. Eaton?”

  Mrs. Hilyard flared up like a piece of oiled paper with a match touched to it. “Diane! I’ve asked you a hundred times to stop calling them that, and I want you to do it! You act as if they were no relation to you whatever! And get that dog off the sofa! I’m sick and tired of——”

  She stopped abruptly, gripping the side of the table. Her hand in the half circle of light under the green shade impressed me again as it had that first day. It was almost shockingly determined. She dropped it to her side again and took a deep breath. Diane was looking at her calmly and without surprise.

  “I beg your pardon, both of you,” Mrs. Hilyard said unsteadily. “I’m … nervous and upset. I think I’d better go upstairs. . . . You’ll excuse me, please, Mrs. Latham.”

  “I didn’t mean to irritate you, mother,” Diane said. “I just call them that for fun. . . . You get down, Peter.”

  She gave the dog a little push off the sofa.

  “Well, stop it, please,” her mother said shortly. . . . “Good night, Mrs. Latham.”

  I heard her heels clicking sharply on the stairs, and her door close. Peter, the dog, jumped up on the sofa again and settled down.

  Diane stood up suddenly and stood there looking down at a small wadded piece of paper lying on the floor by the table where her mother had been standing. She must have had it in her hand and dropped it when she became aware of the window so abruptly. Diane went over and picked it up. I watched her unravel it. She looked at it for a minute and handed it to me.

  It was a cheaply printed leaflet, of the sort that are som
etimes left in mailboxes by wandering sectarians who believe the Day of Judgment is at hand. This one was on that subject, with verses from the Old Testament and Revelation to prove it. “Who is that man, Diane?” I asked.

  She went to the door, listened for a moment and came back. “Mother said we weren’t to talk about him,” she said slowly. “I don’t know why. He never tried to talk to me. Once he handed me one of those things, about the wicked flourishing like a green bay tree or something. I suppose he’s sort of cracked. I came in one night, and mother and father were having an awful row about him. I didn’t ask anything and they didn’t tell me.”

  She stood there looking down into the fire. I got up and put my coat on. She watched me unhappily.

  “I hate to leave you,” I said.

  “Not so much as I hate being left.” She smiled suddenly. “I’ll be all right. I just wish I didn’t have to go to bed. Maybe I won’t.”

  “You go to bed, and go to sleep,” I said.

  She picked the spaniel up and carried him in her arms to the door with me. I waved back at them as I started down the street. They looked almost unbearably alone and pathetic, standing there under the fanlight in that silent shadowy street. If they’d really been alone I don’t think I should have been as unhappy about leaving them there.

  It took me hours to get to sleep. Every time I dropped off I waked with a start. A tall black figure kept walking slowly across some kind of ghostly corridor of my dreams. I could open my eyes and still see those three white chairs, empty and motionless, in a bleak and distorted garden that was half my own and half a terrifying wasteland with water all around it.

  Suddenly I woke again, the telephone buzzing in my ear. I reached for it quickly.

  “Grace, it’s Diane. She’s gone out again—mother, I mean. I heard her go down the stairs and close the front door. She changed her dress, but she hasn’t been in bed at all. What can I do?”

  Her voice was so sharp with alarm, and I was in such a state myself that I’d have completely misunderstood her if she hadn’t gone on. “Grace! What if something happens to her?”