Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  It went on with a résumé of the case on an inside page. When I turned it I started violently. Bowen Digges’ picture covered several columns above it. The implication didn’t need to be stated.

  LONG MENTIONED TO REPLACE DEAD OPM CHIEF, it said at the top. Under that I read in boldface type:

  It was disclosed today that Bowen Digges, assistant chief of the Promethium Division of OPM, has taken charge until a successor can be appointed. It is also stated that Carey Eaton, the dead promethium magnate’s son-in-law, may be called in to head the division. He has been connected with the Promethium Corporation for the last five years and is familiar with both defense needs and the available supply.

  It also became known today that Digges, the acting head, was at one time employed in a minor position in the plant of the dead man whose position he now holds. An ill-fated romance, it is said, was responsible for his breaking his connection with the corporation several years ago. No confirmation of this could be secured. The dead division chief had two daughters. One is Mrs. Carey Eaton, whose husband may succeed her father. The other is Miss Diane Hilyard, whose name has been romantically connected, recently, with Stanley Woland, the former Count Stanislaus Wolanski.

  I’d just finished reading it when Bowen came in.

  “Hullo,” he said. “Nice of you to ask me.” He glanced at the paper lying on the sofa. “I’m beginning to think I ought to carry a little bell around. The leper’s spots are beginning to show. Or am I mixed up?” He held his hands out to the fire. “If they don’t put me in jail pretty soon, I’m going to have to buy another overcoat.”

  “If they wait, you’ll die of pneumonia, and save the taxpayers’ money.”

  “The Diggeses are tough,” he said. “You’d be surprised.” He looked at the paper again. “But not tough enough. I guess they couldn’t keep it out any longer.”

  “I suppose not,” I agreed.

  He slumped down in the wing chair by the corner of the hearth and sat there silently. His face had sobered into hard clean lines. There wasn’t a flaccid muscle or drooping line in it. It wasn’t handsome, as Carey Eaton’s was, but it was better. It had strength and character. It was the fundamental difference between them, just as it was between Diane and her sister Joan.

  I mixed him a Scotch and soda and took it over to him.

  “You didn’t shoot Mr. Hilyard, did you, Mr. Digges?” I asked, going back and sitting down again.

  He grinned irrepressibly then. ”I’ll shoot you if you call me Mr. Digges again, Mrs. Latham.”

  “All right,” I said. “But you didn’t, did you?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “Shoot Hilyard?”

  I nodded.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t. But if I’d known what Folger told me this noon, I certainly would have.”

  “I’d shut up about it, in that case.”

  “Why? If they’re going to hang me anyway, I might as well get it off my chest while I’m still here. I don’t expect to meet any of them on the other side. I may go to hell, but I won’t be in the bottom pit.”

  “You’re just going to sit around and let them hang you, I take it.”

  “Not on your life,” he said evenly. “Not if I can help it, I’m not. But it’s beginning to look as if there’s not so much I can do about it.”

  “You can explain where you got all that blood on your clothes, for one thing,” I said. “Have you got some quixotic idea of saving somebody, or something?”

  “Just myself,” he said calmly. “No, that’s one satisfaction I won’t give them.”

  There was a bitterness in his voice that surprised me.

  “Give who?”

  “The Hilyards.”

  He leaned forward, looking down into the fire.

  “It’s a funny thing,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Ever since I was a kid, the Hilyards have dominated my life, in one way or another. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never lived in a one-family town. Everything was by the grace of the Hilyards—politics, jobs, everything. My father worked in the plant. He was killed there. I worked there; one of my brothers. My mother never wanted to stay, but she had to. Well, I never wanted to leave. And then, later, I never wanted to see or hear of one of them again.” He picked up his glass and put it down again. “I was free of them for five years. Except for one. And that was the bitterest of the lot.”

  I hadn’t realized how deep that wound had been, how sore and sensitive it still was. He’d covered up, the three times I’d seen them together. It wasn’t covered up now.

  “In a way, it was all right, I guess. I worked like the devil to try to forget it, and to—to show them. I took a lot of exams and got in Tech as a special student. My mother’d been a school-teacher, and the work in the plant laboratory helped a lot. I worked nights in a service station for six months. Then things picked up. I made it in two years, and the last three I’ve been teaching and working in metallurgy. If you work hard enough, and long enough hours, you can forget . . . almost anything.” He gave me a kind of a grin. “How’d I get on this subject? Anyway, when they asked me to come here in the minor metals, I went to a lot of pains to make sure none of the Hilyards were going to be around. Then in a couple of months I was transferred to promethium and Hilyard showed UD as a dollar-a-year man.”

  He stopped a moment.

  “It was a funny thing. I was going to resign and get out. Then I ran into him accidentally. We’d both changed. He was a pretty big frog, of course, but this pond’s huge, and he was jittery. Well, I found I didn’t care any more. The job was too big. We were doing two important sides of it. And we got along all right. It was absolutely impersonal; you’d never have known we’d ever met before.”

  I deliberately said, “Did you know when Diane came?”

  “I heard him talk to her on the phone one day. She was waiting in her car to meet him one day when I came out. Well, it wasn’t so easy after that. I realized it wasn’t the family; it was just old . . . hurt. . . . I guess I’m being a bloody fool.” He finished his drink. “Anyway, I’ve got to be going. I’m boring the socks off you.”

  I looked desperately at the clock. It was well after six, and no sign of Colonel Primrose.

  “You haven’t told me what you are going to do to keep from being hanged,” I said.

  I wanted very much to tell him about Diane and that letter, but I didn’t dare.

  “I didn’t shoot Hilyard,” he said. “He was alive when I left him. And he certainly didn’t give me the impression he had any idea of killing himself. That’s rot. Somebody did it—and I can think of a lot of people, and a lot of reasons. I’ve gone on saying I hated his guts—I said that to you—but, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t true any longer. It was just force of habit.” He shook his head. “I wish to God I knew who did it. It’s got me wondering, sometimes, if I went crazy and did it myself.”

  There was a kind of pain in his voice that frightened me. Otherwise I don’t think I’d have said what I did.

  “What about that old man, Bowen?”

  He looked up at me. “What old man?”

  “The one the police are hunting for. He was hanging around Prospect Street. Mrs. Hilyard told me he’s a beggar. But there’s something queer about that. He’s been living over at an antique-repair shop back off Wisconsin Avenue, Mrs. Kalbfus’ place, and Mr. Kalbfus told me he won’t even take money for the work he does. He distributes leaflets about the end of the world.”

  Bowen shook his head. “I read about him in the papers. I know the type, and I know the place, but I don’t know him. He doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I thought you recognized him today,” I said.

  He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Down on the wharf. When you left the boat. He came out—”

  I didn’t get any further. The slowly changing expression on his face stopped me. It shifted gradually, as he sat there staring at me, from surprise to incomprehensi
on to a sudden understanding, and then to something else that I couldn’t name. And then Mr. Bowen Digges leaped to his feet

  “Magnussen!” he shouted. “I thought I knew that fellow!”

  He was across the room before I could catch my breath. At the door he whirled around. “Bless you, Mrs. Latham!”

  I heard the front door slam.

  CHAPTER 17

  I WAITED TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES from the time Bowen Digges hurtled out, slamming the door, till Colonel Primrose, in his usual quiet and deliberate way, sort of hurtled in, slamming the door. He clearly expected Bowen to be there.

  “He did come, but he left,” I explained calmly. “Mrs. Hilyard’s beggar is named Magnussen, and Bowen knows him. I told him where he’d been staying. He dashed out before I could move, much less stop him.”

  He stood there staring at me. Then he took a deep, steadying breath. I think he would have been very glad to throttle me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me instead?”

  “I tried to. You were out and I couldn’t get hold of you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Magnussen? He’s been staying with Mr. Kalbfus, where I take my furniture to be repaired. Do you want me to show you?” I was getting a little frightened.

  “Quickly,” he answered.

  “It’s quicker to walk,” I said.

  We set out. I guess I don’t know him very well, because I’d never thought I’d have to lope, practically, to keep up with him.

  “Now let’s have it,” he said.

  The sidewalk was uneven and icy, and I stumbled along, trying to tell him, as briefly as I could, about going into Mr. Kalbfus’ and seeing the chair and the leaflets. I told him about what Mr. Kalbfus had said, and about my seeing the old man at the wharf, and Bowen’s not recognizing him until I mentioned him half an hour before.

  “There’s more of it; I’ll tell you,” I said. “It’s just down there.”

  We were on the broader main drag of Georgetown, crossing over through the home-coming traffic behind a line of streetcars waiting at the switch. It seemed more congested than usual. And I felt Colonel Primrose’s hand on my arm tighten sharply.

  Ahead of us at the passage was a crowd of people, of all gradations between solid black and deathly white, and the deathliest white was my friend, Mr. Kalbfus, half standing and half supported by two outsize policemen.

  I was shocked and frightened. “Oh, do something, quick!” I said. “That’s Mr. Kalbfus; he’s an angel!”

  “I wish you’d thought of that sooner,” he said. He hurried along.

  Mr. Kalbfus gave me a sick, pleading look as we went by.

  A policeman at the dark narrow tunnel between the houses pushed people away. “Get back there. Let the colonel in.”

  A garbage can had been knocked over in the passage. I followed Colonel Primrose through the mess, pushing the can out of the way and stumbling over the top, back into the open yard. The shed was lighted. The feeble yellow glow coming through the windows elongated the dark figures of men milling about in the littered garden.

  A policeman came to meet us. “No place for a lady, sir,” he said grimly.

  The hysterical thought flashed into my head that Colonel Primrose was going to say, “That ain’t no lady, and it ain’t my wife.”

  Instead, he said, “Wait here,” and went quickly to the door. The men inside moved away, and I saw him. I knew already, of course, so it shouldn’t have been the awful shock it was. It must have just happened. His body was still lying, motionless and limp, across Mr. Kalbfus’ workbench, the old rocking chair he’d been sitting in kicked over on its side. His spectacles were hanging on one ear, his Bible had fallen face down on the dirty floor, some of its thin leaves curled under. The whole back of his skull was a terrible crushed mass.

  I saw Colonel Primrose looking down at the iron weight lying on the floor, stained dark and still moist. But that wasn’t all I saw. Bowen was standing at the end of the table, his face drawn and greenish-gray. He was holding on to a chair. It struck me as horribly ironic in some way that it was my chair—the one Mr. Kalbfus had said he’d do right away, on the tacit agreement that I wouldn’t tell the police the old man was there. A policeman was standing there, too, close to him.

  Colonel Primrose spoke, crisp and hard: “Who found him?”

  “This fellow. . . . What’s your name, mister?”

  “My name’s Digges. . . . I found him, colonel. Just the way you see him.”

  “Clear out, all of you,” Colonel Primrose said. . . . “You stay, Digges. . . . When’s Lamb coming?”

  “He’s on his way, sir.”

  “Keep all this place clean. And put in a call to my place for Sergeant Buck.”

  That was unnecessary. The top of the garbage can came flying out of the passage, a soggy orange peel spotted with coffee grounds rolled at my feet. Sergeant Buck came into the yard in a hurry.

  “I’ll be a son of a——”

  He came to an abrupt halt, vocally and physically. As he saw me—which is always a pleasure to both of us—he turned a sort of dark black with a yellow ocher and light red mixed in.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” He got those words out of the corner of his mouth with difficulty, and strode into the shed. Inside he came to a sort of attention. “Something off color here, sir?”

  Colonel Primrose, standing in front of Magnussen’s pathetic body, moved aside a little.

  Sergeant Buck took a step forward. “Nice work, sir,” he said. I think he meant that Colonel Primrose was already on the job.

  A young reporter edged over to me. “You’re with the colonel, aren’t you?”.

  I nodded.

  “That’s the old guy they’ve been hunting?”

  I nodded again.

  He shook his head. “That’s bad, you know. If he’d sat tight he’d probably have got away with it. I mean the other one.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “Lady, you wouldn’t fool me, would you?” he asked reproachfully. “I mean Hilyard. The colonel and Lamb both know it too. They’ve been trying to keep it out of the papers, and keep this guy out of jail as long as they can. Pressure, lady. He knows more about the promethium business than anybody in the country.”

  “You may know,” I said.

  “They put Digges through the line-up and that oysterman picked him—like that. It was one of those old grudges. You know—they die, but nobody buries ’em.”

  I could feel my heart beginning to sink a little.

  “I was over on Volta Place when this call came in,” he said. “I dashed over with the cops. He was right here with that cop by him. He said he came in and found the old guy like that. Couldn’t have been dead five minutes even then.”

  “I don’t see, in that case, why he didn’t just walk out,” I said.

  “Head of the class for you, lady. That’s just what he was going to do, and he ran smack into the frontispiece of the law, coming in to check a rumor that an old guy looking like the one they’d been hunting for was staying here at night.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I answered.

  “Okay. The cop does, and that’s plenty.”

  The smell of the yard and the garbage—or something—was making me sick and my knees unsteady. The big policeman by me took hold of my arm.

  “Here’s a box you can sit on, lady,” he said.

  I was still sitting there, thinking I must look even worse than I thought, when Captain Lamb and Colonel Primrose came out of the shed. They talked quietly by the door for a few minutes. Then Colonel Primrose came over to me.

  “Don’t do this unless you feel up to it,” he said. “It would help if you could identify this man as the one you saw on Prospect Street. I’d rather not call in any of the Hilyards just now. Can you?”

  I hesitated. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. I had a primitive upsurge of sheer brutality for an instant. I wanted Mrs. Hilyard to be confronted with this thing. It was her fau
lt even more than it was mine. I didn’t see why she should be allowed to escape everything.

  “There’s a reason,” he said, “or I wouldn’t ask you.”

  I got up.

  “Thank you, my dear. As soon as the photographers are through.”

  We waited a few moments. It seemed endless. The coroner had come, and a battery of technicians of all kinds. I could hear the subdued siren of the ambulance out on Wisconsin Avenue.

  I went into the shed with Colonel Primrose. They had partly covered his head and were raising him to a cleared place on Mr. Kalbfus’ worktable. As they moved him, something that had been held there by the weight of his body rolled off the bench. We all stood there staring at it for an instant until Sergeant Buck bent down, picked it up carefully and handed it to the colonel.

  It was a thick roll of bills secured by a rubber band. I could see the denomination of the outside one; it was a fifty. Colonel Primrose held them for a moment, his black eyes snapping, and handed them to Captain Lamb. He took the band off gingerly and peeled the bills off one by one. There were twenty of them, all fifties, and all except the outside two as crisp and fresh as the day they’d come from the Bureau of Engraving on Fourteenth Street.

  “One thousand dollars,” Captain Lamb said. “Beggar, my foot! The old psalm-singing devil!” He turned to Colonel Primrose. “Blackmail?”

  I looked down at the dead face on the table. It was as calm as a summer’s dawn. There was a kind of quiet strength in it, but no guile or cunning, nor any fear or dread of God’s great judgment seat.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bowen Digges said shortly, and I heard my own voice say, “I don’t either.”

  The men looked from one of us to the other without comment.

  “You’ve seen this man before, Mrs. Latham?” Captain Lamb asked.

  I nodded.

  I’d seen him. It was a face that no one could ever forget.

  “Where?”

  “On Prospect Street, last Monday between five and six o’clock. He crossed the avenue to speak to Mr. Hilyard. Mr. Hilyard drove away, leaving him standing in the street. I also——”