The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Zenith Brown

  He stopped as if waiting for someone to hand it over. When no one moved or spoke, he settled back in his chair.

  “I appreciate your motive in all this,” he said patiently. “I don’t appreciate the attitude you all seem to take that I must be protected, against myself or against Kane.” A faint smile flickered for an instant in his eyes. “I can only tell you that this letter will make matters infinitely worse. It will do irreparable harm, and no good whatsoever. It won’t get the manuscript for you, because it’s already in. Kane delivered it to the Post some time ago.”

  There was a suspended silence in the room when he stopped. No one looked at Travis, who’d been so sure the letter was all that was needed to stop Myron Kane’s article from ever going to the Post or to get back the document Laurel had given him in the judge’s file.

  “I may also say that blackmail, in any form, is never justifiable,” Judge Whitney said quietly. “That letter belongs to Kane. It was taken by some one of you at my sister’s house this evening.”

  He turned to his son. “Have you got it, Monk?”

  “No, sir,” Monk said. “I have not.”

  “Travis?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Laurel?”

  “I didn’t know about it, even, till a few minutes ago, sir.”

  He looked at me. I shook my head.

  Laurel spoke calmly. “What about Elsie? Has anyone asked her?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Sam said sharply. “Of course I haven’t asked her.”

  “Why don’t you phone and do it now?”

  “She’s not at home; she’s at a meeting. I’m sure she would have told me——”

  Judge Whitney rose. “I am disappointed,” he said quietly. “I won’t believe one of you would have deliberately told me a falsehood, from whatever motive, until I’m forced to do so. . . . Have Elsie phone me as soon as she gets home, Sam.” He turned back at the door. “I beg you, as earnestly as I know how,” he said, “to believe me when I say that whoever has that letter of Myron Kane’s is doing a wantonly cruel and inhuman thing. I feel that very intensely and very personally. I want it returned to me tonight. I’ll wait up for it. Good night to all of you.”

  Nobody moved, even to help him on with his coat. He went slowly down the stairs, the door closed behind him.

  “You’ve got that letter, Monk,” Sam Phelps said abruptly.

  Monk Whitney grinned. “Why don’t you go, Sam?” he asked. “Why don’t you and Elsie take a trip to the Argentine? Why don’t you leave tonight, before we all disgrace you?”

  Sam flushed, started to say something, changed his mind, nodded curtly to us and went out.

  Laurel looked at Monk. Her face was quite pale. “You have got it, Monk. I don’t see how you can lie to him!”

  He was looking at her, one eyebrow raised sardonically, and turned at Travis Elliot’s triumphant exclamation, “Toplady! That’s the fellow’s name! I knew I’d——”

  “Then forget it,” Monk said curtly. He strode over and picked up my coat. “Coming?”

  Laurel took a step forward. “Where are you going?”

  “That’s my business, Coppertop.”

  He was holding my coat out to me.

  She looked at him for an instant, turned quickly, picked up the telephone at the end of the library table and spun the dial around swiftly.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “That’s my business!” Laurel said hotly, “But if you want to know, I’m calling Myron Kane! There’s one way to settle this, and if I have to marry him to get that——”

  He was across the room in two swift strides, jerked the telephone out of her hand and slammed it down on the cradle.

  “No, you’re not,” he said quietly. “We don’t need a woman to save our necks.”

  They stood there facing each other, both of them furious, leaving Travis Elliot and myself practically stupefied. He turned suddenly and came back, stopping at the door.

  “If you want to marry Kane, Coppertop, that’s your business . . . and Trav’s. But don’t pull that martyr stuff on us. . . . Are you ready, Mrs. Latham?”

  6

  He slammed the front door shut and struggled into his overcoat.

  “Careful of the ice,” he said shortly.

  At the bottom of the steps, he stopped, looking at me oddly.

  “My God,” he said, with a kind of suppressed groan, “you’d think I gave a damn who she married, wouldn’t you? Well, I don’t. Just so she doesn’t do it thinking she’s Joan of Arc.”

  He took my arm and steered me along the slippery sidewalk.

  “Look,” he said. “Would you know what happens to manuscripts that go to the Post?”

  We crossed the narrow opening of Manning Street toward the square.

  “Well,” I said, “the Post——”

  “You don’t need to tell me about the Post. I know all about that. I used to go on a tour through the plant with a couple of hundred other kids every week. If you stacked one issue, it would be more than twenty-five times as high as the Empire State Building and the paper rolled out would reach more than ten times the distance from New York to Chicago. It takes over two hundred miles of wire to make staples to bind it and forty tons of ink a week and more than seventy presses running twenty-four hours a day to print it. Or that’s what it used to be. I was going to be a printer once myself—like Benjamin Franklin. I even used to know the number of pieces of glass they baked to make that Maxfield Parrish Dream Garden in the lobby. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, what happens to Myron’s manuscript? Who’s got it now? Where is it?”

  “All I know is what Mark Childs told me when he did the profile of Colonel Primrose,” I said. “He gave it to Bob Fuoss at lunchtime. Two of the associate editors—I think Jack Alexander was one of them—read it that afternoon, and Ben Hibbs took it home that night. He has to read everything that goes in the magazine. Ben Hibbs probably has this now. They read so fast, people glue pages together to make sure they read it all, they tell me.”

  “If Mr. Hibbs okays it tonight, what happens?”

  “I suppose they might edit it in the morning and send it up to Composition right away,” I said. “If it’s timely. Or it might stay around a while. I don’t know, really. Why?”

  “I just wondered. If Elsie and Sam hadn’t chucked their weight about so, I’d go and talk to Hibbs in the morning. As a matter of fact, I guess I’ll just go now.”

  “He lives out on the Main Line,” I said. “They say he’s very nice, but he has one curious eccentricity. He goes to bed at night. It’s a grass-root habit that he picked up as a child in Kansas. He’s supposed to be mild, but I believe that’s at nine-thirty in the morning.”

  “Okay, Dear Child,” he said imperturbably. “I get it.”

  We were cutting across the jog in 19th Street to Mrs. Whitney’s house. The lights were still on in her room, and in the windows in her brother’s house next door. It seemed incredible to think they’d lived so close to each other and yet been so remote for so many years.

  “You know,” I said, “I wish somebody would ask me what I think about all this.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “I think you’re a lot of dopes. Now that I’ve met your father, I don’t believe for one instant that Myron Kane would have the courage to offend him, even if he wanted to. I think everything in that profile is there with your father’s knowledge and consent. At least everything about himself. Myron might take pot shots at you and Elsie and Sam, but that won’t hurt anybody. You know the business about present fears being less than horrible imaginings.”

  He didn’t say anything until we’d reached his aunt’s doorway. “It’s funny, you know, Grace,” he said then, “but I never realized till I was out there that I must have been an awful pain in the neck to him. Or how much I—well, I guess worshiped him is what I mean.” He looked at me and grinned suddenly. “I guess it’s a little too much below freezing to make you stand out here and
listen to the story of my life,” he said. “What I mean is, if I could save him a half second’s worry——”

  “You could give him Myron Kane’s letter,” I said.

  His jaw hardened. He stood there silently.

  “And look. You don’t seriously think your father ever—— I mean, that there’s anything in his life—— He seems so——” I hesitated, and so did he.

  “He wasn’t always as judicial as he is now,” he said then. “Well, anyhow, good night. I’ll see you tomorrow. Wait, I’ll let you in; I’ve got a key. I guess I’ll go up and say good night to the old gal. Quiet; she may be asleep.”

  The grilled door moved noiselessly and we slipped in onto the thick beige carpet of the dimly lit lower hall. We started up the curving marble staircase. He gripped my arm suddenly, almost throwing me off balance. I caught myself, staring at him. He was standing there, rigid and motionless, his eyes fixed in a kind of incredulous, thunderstruck amazement on the mirrored panel in the wall.

  In it was an oblong of light, brilliant in the dim glow of the hall. I could see Abigail Whitney. She was talking to her brother. Judge Whitney stood there, his head bowed a little. The unbelievable thing was that she was standing too. Her face was half turned from us, her back was straight as an arrow, and she moved back and forth, not even a cane in her hand, as able to walk as Monk or I. Her voice was clear as a bell in the silent house, and vibrant with intensity.

  “You killed Douglas Elliot, Nathaniel. There’s no use trying to evade it. The document Laurel gave Myron Kane——”

  Monk Whitney caught my arm in a tighter hold and drew me out of the focus of the mirror and down the stairs. The blood was beating in my ears; I couldn’t have heard any more, even if anyone had needed to hear more. We got outside. He stood holding the doorknob, letting it slip softly to. Then he leaned unsteadily for a moment against the stone frame, his face quite white. It seemed from ages to infinity before either of us moved, and then we just looked at each other.

  “I can’t ask you not to say anything,” he said. The words were twisted and tortured.

  “Oh, I won’t,” I whispered. “I promise I won’t, ever.”

  He held out his hand and grasped mine. Then he turned and pressed the doorbell. He was gone when the butler came. I hadn’t even seen him go. He’d gone as quickly and as quietly as if he’d been slipping through some South Pacific jungle.

  I went upstairs slowly. It was as quiet as the grave. Mrs. Whitney’s door was open and her lights were on. I could see her lying on the yellow cushions, her bright sharp eyes watching me intently in the mirror.

  “Come in, Dear Child,” she called as I passed the door.

  I think it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever have anything so hard to do again. I rubbed my face with my hands to get a little color back, steadied my shaking knees and went in.

  “Where on Earth have you Been, Dear Child? I was Alarmed about you. Your Policeman telephoned three times. But don’t tell me now, I am very Tired. Good night. Dear Myron isn’t in yet Either. You keep such odd hours in Washington, Dear Child.”

  I got out and went upstairs. I hadn’t seen Judge Whitney. It seemed odd to think of his hiding in a closet somewhere, waiting for me to close my door, so he could slip out and home. It was more than odd, it was ghastly, and so was the whole thing. I shut my door and sat down on the side of the bed. I couldn’t stop shaking enough to get my coat off, and for hours after I got into bed I lay there, freezing and unable to get warm.

  Why had Abigail Whitney pretended for all those years that she was bedridden? What had kept her there, lying all day on her yellow cushions, watching in her mirrors, getting up at night, so her muscles wouldn’t atrophy, and—who could tell?—perhaps even slipping out and wandering alone in the empty darkness of the square?

  I lay there listening. Myron Kane still hadn’t come in. I wondered where he could have gone, and then I wondered what could be in the letter Albert Toplady had given me in the taxi that was ruinous enough for Myron to be willing to barter the knowledge he had of Judge Whitney for it. And incredible as it must seem, it struck me then, for the first time, that the reason Myron had gone to Travis Elliot was not that Travis was a lawyer, but that he was the son of the man Judge Whitney had killed. And Travis Elliot didn’t know it. Myron hadn’t told him what he was going to see the district attorney for. I was sure of that. If he had, Travis could never have received Judge Whitney as warmly as he had done—not in his father’s own house, not so soon after he had learned anything so ghastly. It seemed suddenly to take on a kind of tragic irony. They were all appealing to Travis to help them protect his father’s murderer. And Judge Whitney’s demand that Albert Toplady’s letter to Myron be returned to him—he’d wait up for it, he’d said—had a new and astonishing significance. It was not to save Myron, as I’d thought it was, that he’d come. It was to save himself. “A Useful Life,” Abigail Whitney had said. “Let the Dead Past stay Buried.”

  In the shadowy silence of the room, it seemed to me in some way, bewildered as I was, to begin to fit together and make sense. If I could only see Colonel Primrose, I thought, and then I remembered. I’d promised Monk, and though I’d never been very good at keeping knowledge from Colonel Primrose, this was different. If I could tell him, he might be able to help, but I knew he wouldn’t. Behind the urbane humor with which he regards human frailty, I knew there was a rigid and uncompromising sense of justice and honor that neither friendship nor affection would make him deviate from by a hair’s breadth. I knew perfectly well that if the occasion rose he would hang both me and Sergeant Buck to the nearing sycamore tree without batting more than half an eye.

  I was so absorbed in what seemed to me the issuing of some kind of clarity out of everything, and in my determination to keep one secret in my life, that I’d finally got warm without knowing it. I looked at my traveling watch on the table. It was almost three o’clock. I got up reluctantly to open a window to let in a little air, and stood for a moment looking out. Seeing other buildings and lighted streets brought a sense of some kind of perspective to my distracted mind. Abigail Whitney, even if she was at this moment moving stealthily about the house, wasn’t so terrifying when I was looking out on a sleeping world where other people were sane and normal.

  I put my hand out to lift the sash and stopped. A dark figure was coming rapidly across the square, zigzagging a course over the intercepting paths that led toward 19th Street. There was something familiar about it, which is why I stood watching until it got to the curb and started across the street. It was Monk Whitney. Even in the shadowy darkness I recognized him, before I saw him head for his father’s house next door. I opened the window after a moment and went back to bed, and for several minutes I kept a disturbing after-image of a man moving quickly, not just coming home, but coming home from something.

  And next morning at nine-thirty I didn’t have much doubt about what it was. The deaf butler brought my breakfast, aided by a gaunt, stiffly starched maid as old or older, whose “The mistress wishes good morning to you, ma’am,” was as thick and Irish as a peat bog. The butler went back into the hall and returned with an ivory-lacquered telephone that he plugged in beside the bed and handed me.

  “It’s a message for you, ma’am, it is,” the woman said. She began picking up my clothes, left pretty much where I’d got out of them the night before.

  I must be careful, I thought. I knew it was Colonel Primrose before I heard his voice, and the night before flashed vividly back, like life in a drowning man’s memory: “I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”

  “Hello,” he said. “I tried to get you last night. Have you heard the news?”

  I thought it was the war he meant, but it wasn’t.

  “Ben Hibbs’ house was broken into last night.”

  I caught my breath sharply and tried to cover the mouthpiece with my hand, but it was too late.

  “What’s the matter?”
he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “You just made me spill some hot coffee.” I could hardly hope it would deceive him. “I hope they didn’t take much,” I said. It sounded silly, but at least more natural than asking “Who?”

  “Just his brief case, oddly enough,” Colonel Primrose said. He was as placid as ever. “It was full of manuscripts he’d taken home to read last night. I just talked to him. They got in his study window, sometime around two. Some crank, apparently. A neighbor saw a car there.”

  I wanted to ask a dozen other questions, but I didn’t dare. I knew from experience that the association of ideas in my mind would present no problem to him. And I was trying to remember if Monk Whitney had been carrying a brief case when he’d hurried across the street in the early hours of the morning.

  “What about lunch?” he said. “I’m free unless the bookkeeper from the Quaker Trust shows up later. He hasn’t come in yet, and——”

  I’d known, of course, that the association of ideas can work two ways, but before I could stop I heard, with repentant horror, my voice saying, “Not Mr. Albert Toplady, by any chance?”

  There was the shortest silence at the other end.

  “Yes,” Colonel Primrose said, very affably. “How did you know?”

  If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, I thought; if thy tongue offend thee, tear it out. I would gladly have got rid of mine any way I could just then.

  “We used to have an account there,” I said lamely. “The name stuck, I guess.”

  “He’s been there for years,” Colonel Primrose said. “I’ll pick you up at noon, then. I’m going over to Curtis to see Hibbs now.”

  I put down the phone and sat there unhappily, remembering Monk shaking his head at me when Travis was trying to remember who I’d said had given me the letter for Myron. And here I was, two minutes after I’d told myself I must be careful. It seems very strange to me, at this point, that it never so much as crossed my mind just then that there was anything odd in what Colonel Primrose had told me. That there might be any connection between Albert Toplady’s not showing up at the bank that morning and the letter I’d failed to deliver for him, or Myron’s not coming home the night before, just never occurred to me. I simply sat there, acutely unhappy about not keeping my mouth shut when Colonel Primrose called.