by Leslie Ford
She went quickly to the window. I looked out. Bowen Digges was striding across the concrete pavement on the wharf, toward his car. I could see Diane’s face crumple a little as she turned her head quickly to hide it from her uncle. She looked out again. Suddenly her hand tightened on the low back of the easy chair at her side and her body went taut.
A man had come out from behind the small white brick outbuilding there and was coming slowly toward Bowen. It was Mrs. Hilyard’s beggar, Mr. Kalbfus’ solitary lodger. Bowen Digges glanced at him and strode on. The man raised his hand to stop him, and followed slowly along. As Bowen reached his car and opened the door, he glanced back. The man was walking toward him more quickly.
Bartlett Folger had come to the window. “Isn’t that the fellow the police are hunting for?” he asked. “The one that’s been hanging around Prospect Street?”
Neither Diane nor I said anything. He went quickly around the table and reached for the telephone. “What’s the police number, Mrs. Latham?”
“You dial the operator and say, “I want a policeman,’ ” Diane said coolly.
I saw her reach her foot out, press the toe of her shoe on the cord under the table, and jerk the plug sharply out of the socket onto the rug.
“This damned phone’s dead!” Bartlett Folger exclaimed. He jiggled the bar rapidly for a moment, slammed the receiver down and started for the door.
“It’s too late,” Diane said. “He’s gone. Bowen’s gone too. And I’m going. Good-by.” She closed the door behind her.
Mr. Folger stood silently at the corner of the yellow marble hearth for a moment. Then he looked at me.
“I’m sorry you were let in on this, Mrs. Latham.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say. In a sense, I was sorry too.
“Well, it’s all come home to roost,” he continued. “There was no use lying to her in the beginning. And there’s no use now.”
I didn’t understand him for a moment. “You mean you are still doing it?” I asked then.
“I’ve been opposed to it from the beginning,” he said slowly. “There’s never any use trying to save people anything. Let them take it and put up with it. It’s better in the long run.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you saving somebody something?”
As it appeared to me, the only need of saving—or face-saving—was for themselves and their own treachery to Diane and Bowen Digges.
“Diane,” he said. “We’ve been trying to save her another shock.”
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Folger,” I said.
He looked at me for an instant. “If the police don’t find that Lawrason shot himself,” he said deliberately, “they’ll find it was Bowen Digges that did. That’s what we’ve been trying to save Diane … to try to make up for all the rest of it. Lawrason is dead. Nothing can bring him back again.”
I was staring at him with a sick kind of unbelief.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “That’s a terrible thing to say, unless you know.”
“He was on the towing path with him Tuesday night.”
“That doesn’t mean he shot him!” I said sharply.
“Bowen Digges was standing by my brother-in-law earlier that night,” he said coolly, “watching him sign a release he’d brought. The desk drawer was open. The gun Lawrason was shot with was lying in it. Digges picked it up and said, ‘This is a neat little job, Mr. Hilyard. There are some people I’d just as soon use it on, myself.’ There were three people in the room then. None of them saw him put it back. One of them saw him slip it into his pocket.”
“Who … was that?” I managed to ask.
“My niece’s husband, Carey Eaton,” he said.
CHAPTER 15
“YOU’RE ALL WILLING TO PERJURE yourselves, then, just to keep Diane from knowing?” I asked. Somehow, I couldn’t see Carey Eaton, at least, in such a role to save anybody, least of all Diane Hilyard.
Bartlett Folger moved abruptly, as if he wanted to get physically away from that implication. He reached for a cigarette off the coffee table in front of us.
“It sounds unpleasant, put that way. In fact, it’s not pleasant any way you put it. I suppose the least unpleasant way is to say that it’s an atonement.” He stopped and looked at me in surprise. “What’s the matter? Isn’t that a good word?”
“It’s a very good word,” I said. “I was just startled at hearing you use it.”
I looked out of the cabin window. A policeman was standing by the passage through the lower story of the market, talking to a uniformed marine on duty.
The composite picture of Mr. Kalbfus’ lodger couldn’t be out yet, I thought.
“If I talk about atonement, Mrs. Latham, I suppose I ought to say we all sinned in this. My sister was ambitious, so was Joan. The idea of Diane marrying Bowen was a jolt to everybody. You can’t see that now, after what he’s become, but he was pretty callow then. I imagine you know about his family.”
I nodded.
“And Carey was going in the plant. He’s all right now, but he was a snob then if I ever saw one. You wouldn’t recognize him as the same person.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But do go on.”
He hesitated an instant. “I might as well tell you about it, since you’ve stumbled in on it. Everybody was upset. Joan wouldn’t marry Carey if Diane was going to disgrace everybody, and so on. And Diane was only seventeen. Nobody thought she really loved the boy. Lawrason thought of her as a baby, still, and so did I. I didn’t want him kicked out, because he was a good man. And I still don’t know whether Joan and Carey did it as a joke or from malice.”
He got up and looked out of the window.
“They ought to be here any minute. . . . Well, Diane had a typewriter. She’d saved the money out of her allowance to get it. She was teaching herself to type. The idea was to get a job and help Bowen go to college. She had it hidden under her bed. Joan found it, and she and Carey wrote a letter on it.” Mr. Folger shook his head. “With all the stumbling mistakes, and so on. It was pretty cruel.”
“I can imagine so,” I said.
“It was something to the effect that she’d decided it was too hard work learning to type, and that washing dishes and learning how to run a gas pump would be harder. Well, it was . . . pretty bad. They didn’t mean Bowen to see it, I’m sure of that. I suppose they thought it would open Diane’s eyes. Anyway, a maid found it and gave it to my sister. She thought Diane had written it, and Lawrason called Bowen in and gave it to him.”
“How horrible!” I said.
He nodded coolly. “I know. Well, that was where I came in. Bowen was still coming to work. He was puttering around with some experiment. That didn’t work out either, and that was almost as hard on him. What with one and the other, he was going around half stunned. That was when I persuaded Hilyard to call him in and give him enough to get him away. We knew he wouldn’t take it as a gift or a loan, which is where the idea of paying for the filter came in.”
I must have just sat there staring at him, I suppose.
“And do you mean that the Eatons didn’t ever do anything about the letter?”
“You’ve never seen Diane when she’s angry, Mrs. Latham. Or Digges. Or Lawrason Hilyard, for that matter.”
“Did they tell you about it?”
He shook his head. “When Joan had her baby, they didn’t think she’d pull through. She told her mother about it then, and her mother told me. They thought Diane would get over it, and someday they could tell her for their own piece of mind.”
“And-that’s just dandy,” I said. “But it doesn’t help any, does it?”
“No. And you see why they—and all of us—are willing to perjure ourselves, as you call it.”
“To save Carey and Joan Eaton,” I said. “After all, if Bowen knew this, or Diane——”
“God help us,” Bartlett Folger said soberly.
“Did Mr. Hilyard know?”
He shook his head ag
ain. “He was a ruthless fellow, but he was scrupulously honorable in his personal relations. He was really fond of Diane—she was the only thing he did love. He hated dogs, for instance, but he’d take that little beast of hers out. And you can see what a mixup it was. He thought she’d written the letter. Digges pulled out without a word, of course. Diane went around to his mother before she finally picked up and moved the rest of the family. I don’t know what Bowen had told her, but Diane changed completely. She just closed up a large part of herself. Lawrason thought she was being difficult. He didn’t want to tell her, naturally, that they’d read a letter she’d written. One day he got angry with her and pulled out the cancelled check. She just looked at it for a minute and walked out. She was so matter-of-fact about it that he didn’t realize for a long time what it had done to her. Then it was too late.”
“A Hilyard never retracts,” I said.
“A Hilyard, or a Folger, or an Eaton,” he said coolly. “Especially if it’s going to mean discomfort to themselves.”
“So that——”
“Here they come,” he said. “You know, I wanted to tell you this; that’s why I asked you to come early. I wanted you to know something about Diane and her family. You can see why she’s never to know any of this.”
“Yes, I think I can,” I replied. “From her point of view, as well as the rest of the Hilyards and the Folgers and the Eatons.” I didn’t add “the Diggeses.”
“You can also see what I mean by ‘atonement,’ as opposed to the word you used. ‘Perjury,’ wasn’t it?”
I suppose I was looking at Mrs. Hilyard and the Eatons with a new set of eyes that afternoon. I was even prepared to have a kind of dubious sympathy for Carey and Joan. Bartlett Folger’s story being true—and I hadn’t any reason to think it wasn’t—they had played a filthy and unpardonable trick on Diane. But from what I’d seen and heard, I couldn’t imagine they’d put much in the letter that they hadn’t said to her face, one time or another. Moreover, I could believe it was true they hadn’t intended Bowen Digges ever to see it, just because I doubted if either of them would care to run the risk. The thing had backfired, with consequences that neither of them had the courage or the decency to face, and that wasn’t too hard to understand.
Furthermore, it might even be true that they really were trying to atone for it, as Bartlett Folger said, by shielding Bowen Digges. Or thinking they were shielding him, I added to myself. However, I always suspect the shining White Knight rising like a phoenix from the ashes, and, as far as I could see, a new nobility of soul hadn’t improved Mr. Carey Eaton much.
It was easy to see how he had impressed both his wife and her mother, then and now.
He was very good-looking indeed, with black hair and black eyes; broad-shouldered, perfectly groomed, beautifully tailored, and well aware of all of it. I’d seldom seen such a spoiled young man. But of course that might be the fault of circumstances. His wife and mother-in-law certainly contributed their share.
He took the cocktail a servant held out to him and sniffed at it.
“You ought to teach that man of yours to make a decent Martini, Uncle Bart,” he said.
Joan Eaton smiled at him. “We only know two houses in Washington where Carey will touch the Martinis,” she said. “It’s frightfully embarrassing.”
Her expression seemed, to me, to show pride in his connoisseurship rather than anything else. I looked at her curiously. It was hard to believe she was really Diane’s sister. Her eyes and hair were dark brown and her figure stocky compared to Diane’s, and she was carefully and smartly dressed, in one of those little black numbers that cost a lot of money.
Bartlett Folger smiled. “What about you, Mrs. Latham?”
“It tastes fine to me,” I replied. “But of course my standards are Washingtonian and pretty low.”
Carey Eaton raised his glass and got the Martini down without visible gagging.
“Who, is this Colonel Primrose that’s about?” he asked.
Both the question and the manner in which it was asked stopped me for an instant.
“Where’d he get the ‘colonel’?” he went on. “South’n governor’s staff?”
I shook my head. “Regular Army. Last war. He was raised on active duty, and kept his rank.”
He looked at me oddly for an instant. “That’s . . . funny. I called up the War Department and they’d never heard of him.”
“Oh, well,” I said, “there are so many retired colonels around.”
“I had to tell him that when authorized authorities wanted to know my timing and whereabouts Tuesday night, I’ll be happy to tell them.”
It was my turn to look at him oddly.
“I thought he was official,” Bartlett Folger said. “When did you see him?”
“This noon.”
We’d gone in to lunch.
“I did tell him, of course, that we all had dinner here with you, Uncle Bart, and took father home in time for a nine-o’clock appointment. I don’t know what time the rest of you got home.”
“I thought we told you,” Mr. Folger said with a smile.
I was just getting the impression that it was going to be a dull luncheon, when two things happened.
Joan Eaton turned to me. “It was very strange, Mrs. Latham,” she said. “It proves there’s something. It wasn’t a premonition exactly, but we were sitting in there. Mother felt sick, all of a sudden. I looked at the clock, and mentioned it was twenty-five minutes after eleven. I asked mother if she hadn’t better lie down or should we go home. That was just about——”
“It was twenty-five minutes to twelve that it happened,” Mrs. Hilyard said quietly.
“Well, that’s just ten minutes’ difference. I told Carey about it when he came in.”
Mr. Folger was in the process of taking a stuffed squab from the silver platter held down to him. I saw his hands stay motionless for the barest instant.
“I . . . thought you were home, when I left you.”
“I was,” Carey Eaton said. “One of the men on Export Control called me up at eleven-thirty, furthermore, to check on a permit they wanted to issue right away.”
In the hush that had fallen in the room for just an instant, Mr. Folger turned to his sister.
“By the way, Myrtle, that beggar was around here this morning. I called the——” He broke off abruptly. If a bomb had dropped into the center of the table, the effect on Mrs. Hilyard could hardly have been more terrible. Her fork slipped out of her hand and clattered across her plate onto the floor. She stared at her brother, her lips open, her face as white as the luncheon cloth. She was leaning back in her chair in almost abject shock and fear.
Joan got up quickly and went to her.
Mrs. Hilyard struggled to her feet.
“I—— Excuse me, please,” she managed to say.
Carey Eaton helped her to the door, Joan following.
Mr. Folger and I looked at each other.
“Well,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Latham.”
He pushed back his chair and I got up quickly. I’d had plenty—of food and everything else. “I think I’d better go, Mr. Folger. I have an engagement at three, and it’s——”
Carey had come back. “I’ve got to get to the office too,” he said curtly. “Can I drop you anywhere, Mrs. Latham?”
“Thanks, I’ve got my car,” I answered. I had the grim feeling that if Carey Eaton dropped me anywhere just then, it would be down a manhole when my back was turned.
CHAPTER 16
THERE WAS A NOTE ON MY DESK WHEN I got home. “The colonel was here an’ lef’ it,” Lilac said, pointing it out to me.
I opened it. It was hastily scribbled on a sheet of my house paper.
Mrs. Latham: Will you see if you can get hold of B. D. and ask him to come in for a drink this afternoon, late, and keep him here under some pretext—if any is needed—until I come? This is getting serious. I’m trying to avoid publicity as long as I can. His number is Republic 75
00.
J. P.
An added line at the bottom read:
I believe I was right about the family. The wind is shifting.
I read it through again and dropped it into the fire. The last line stood out clear and distinct on the blackened paper before the flames gulped it down. I stood there wondering about it, unable to think of it except in terms of Carey Eaton. He was the one member of the family Colonel Primrose had seen that day, so far as I knew, since he’d talked to me. And all I could think about it was that he’d been very pointed about his alibi, at lunch, and that he was the one who’d seen Bowen Digges pick up the gun there in the Hilyard library Tuesday night.
I dialed Republic 7500. Bowen was pretty well protected at OPM. I had to give my name, tell why I wanted to speak to him, and a good deal more, before I could get hold of him.
When I did, and explained it again, he said, “I’d like to come, if I’m not in jail.” Then he hesitated. “Wait a minute. Is anybody else going to be there?”
“Not unless you’d like me to ask her,” I answered.
He made a sound that could have been mistaken for a laugh, but not very easily.
“No, I’m afraid I couldn’t take it. Not just now.”
It was quarter to six when he came. The evening papers were out, of course, and a kind of perspective had been re-established. Men dying in the Pacific were more important again than the man who’d died in the C. & O. Canal. Only one column on the front page was given to Lawrason Hilyard. POLICE REPORT PROGRESS, REFUSE DETAILS, it said. I looked through it hastily. The chief of the homicide squad, Captain Lamb, stated that several members of the family of the dollar-a-year OPM man had been recalled for questioning. Captain Lamb had refused to comment on the rumor circulating at OPM that a member of the division of which Mr. Hilyard had been chief had been taken to headquarters and grilled for several hours. Lamb said everyone known to have had any association with the dead magnate would be questioned, but refused to name any individual or comment on names suggested by reporters. He admitted that no progress had been made in the police search for a man seen around the Prospect Street mansion.
