The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  THE SIMPLE WAY OF POISON..

  A beautiful eighteen-year-old, already wise in the ways of the world, her emotions warped by hatred…

  Her even more beautiful stepmother, desperately pursued by a former lover…

  And a man both women loved and feared, a man who could make each of their lives either a heaven or a hell…

  A man who was now a corpse stretched out upon the floor… the first in a deadly chain of terror…

  “Beautifully plotted… excellently characterized”

  —Saturday Review

  “Leslie Ford deserves high praise… lively… delightful”

  —New York Times

  OTHER LESLIE FORD MYSTERIES YOU’LL WANT TO READ:

  THE CLUE OF THE JUDAS TREE

  THREE BRIGHT PEBBLES

  WASHINGTON WHISPERS MURDER

  FALSE TO ANY MAN

  SIREN IN THE NIGHT

  THE WOMAN IN BLACK

  ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT

  TRIAL BY AMBUSH

  OLD LOVER’S GHOST

  THE TOWN CRIED MURDER

  DATE WITH DEATH

  ALL AVAILABLE IN POPULAR LIBRARY EDITIONS

  All POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the POPULAR LIBRARY Editorial Board and represent titles by the world’s greatest authors.

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright 1937, 1938, by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

  Copyright renewed © 1966 by Zenith Brown

  Published by arrangement with. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  All Rights Reserved

  I love the old way best, the simple way

  Of poison, where we too are strong as men.

  The Medea of Euripedes,

  Gilbert Murray’s Translation

  The Simple Way of Poison

  1

  Never in my life Had I hoped to see Sergeant Phineas T. Buck in a chintz shop—least of all in Gilbert St. Martin’s Ye Olde Colonial Chintz Shoppe in Georgetown on a snowy garland-hung Christmas Eve. And from the sudden congealing behind the fish-eyed, lantern-jawed surface of his granite dead pan I saw he had hoped never to see me again anywhere. However, I knew that already, and of course not all the jolly spirit of a thousand candle-lit Christmas Eves would have helped. For Sergeant Buck (92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired) is convinced that I am trying to marry his Colonel. Sergeant Buck is a literal and stubborn man. Given a widow aged thirty-eight, let her lay eyes on a bachelor—no matter if he is fifty-one, and especially if he’s as engaging as Colonel John Primrose (92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired)—and the answer is as simple as two and two… with a long body of precedent behind it. The Sergeant’s duty is even plainer, though perhaps not quite so simple.

  “Hello, Sergeant Buck,” I said cheerfully, to the loud and equally cheerful jingle of the strap of silver sleigh bells that I put in motion as I banged the door behind me. I deposited my bundles on the rubbed pine taproom table that serves as counter in Gilbert St. Martin’s shoppe, and shook the snow out of my last year’s fur coat. “It’s cold outside.”

  Sergeant Buck touched his hat stiffly, shifted his tall square two hundred and twenty pounds of beef and brawn on the stomach of the Pilgrim Father in the hooked rug underfoot, and cleared his throat uneasily.

  “It was our understanding you were in Nassau, ma’am,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth. The fact that he always speaks that way gives everything he says a slightly sinister quality.

  His eyes narrowed so that all I could see of them was a suspicious grey glint.

  “I was, but I’m back,” I said. I tried to keep an apologetic note out of my voice. After all, I told myself, I’d got as much right to live in Georgetown as he and his wretched Colonel had. But there was something about him—like an Alp trying, desperately, pathetically, to protect the solitary Edelweiss blooming on its frozen bosom—that got me down. “You see,” I found myself adding hurriedly, “my tenant threw up his job in the SEC and took his family back to Chicago—so I had to come home.”

  I was frightfully annoyed because, in spite of myself, I could hear my voice sounding bright and unconvincing, even though it was the truth I was telling.

  Sergeant Buck’s dead pan looked deader and more frozen. He didn’t quite say “Oh yeah?”, but he said “Is that so, ma’am?” so that it amounted to precisely the same thing. I had an almost irresistible desire to say “Yes it is, you big baboon!” which is what my younger son always says under like circumstances. Fortunately I didn’t, for just then the handsome languid figure of Gilbert St. Martin came through the blue resist-print curtain at the rear of the shop with Sergeant Buck’s parcel. He handed it over with the slightly condescending air that male decorators adopt toward unpromising customers, and turned to me.

  “Grace darling! So nice of you to come in!”

  Sergeant Buck touched his hat again.

  “Good day, ma’am,” he said stiffly. The leather strip of silver sleigh bells jingled in false merriment as he closed the door emphatically—without actually banging it—behind him. I saw his broad square back fade, white-spotted, into the night, and realized that neither of us had mentioned Colonel Primrose.

  “I mean, darling, why don’t those awful people go to Woolworth’s? It’s such a bore, and my assistant’s got flu.”

  “Maybe you’re being investigated, Gil,” I said.

  Gilbert St. Martin raised his perfect brows (I know he plucks them), and barely glanced out at where Sergeant Buck’s granite back would have been if it had still been there. “He has got the general air of a dick,” he said. “One of your odd friends, I take it.”

  He held out a thin gold case full of foul dark chocolate-brown cigarettes he gets from Puerto Rico or some place.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He flicked a gold lighter out of his bright cheeked English tweed jacket and held it to the tip of his cigarette. For a moment the tiny yellow flame in the subdued light of the pine-paneled room brought his long handsome face into relief under the perfect lacquer-smooth cap of black hair. I saw his dark eyes fixed intently beyond the flame on mine—so strangely belying the bored, half-humorous, half-cynical indifference of the rest of his face and the elegant nonchalance of the hand holding the long cigarette that I had a curious feeling of uneasiness. As if, for instance, I’d said something nearer the truth than I knew, and he was wondering whether I knew or not; and more than that, as if it was important to him, really important, some way, to know what it was I knew.

  As I look back at it now I realize that this was the first hint I had of the terrible business that was to make Georgetown push its mighty neighbor across Rock Creek completely off the front pages, and make—for a moment anyway—the question of what was happening in the White House unimportant compared to what had happened in the yellow brick house in Beall Street. I don’t actually admit that I believe, just a little, in premonitions, or that I’d recognize one if I had it. I’m perfectly aware that the odd feeling of uneasiness I had there in Gil’s Chintz Shoppe could be explained quite simply by the sudden calculating intentness in a pair of eyes that I’d never seen intent before. A bird no doubt is uneasy if a cat looks at it too pointedly. And while I’m not pretending to have anything in common with a bird. I’m not so sure that Gilbert St. Martin hasn’t a strong strain of cat blood in him.

  And I was uneasy. For a second I had the curious sense of remoteness that one has in a dream of a strange unfamiliar country, or at night alone in an empty house. I caught myself glancing out of the paneled shop with its hooked rugs and hurricane globes and witches’ balls full of tangled multi-colored string at the reassuring fact of two colored women with their noses glued, d
irty grey, to the bottle-glass panes of Gilbert St. Martin’s show window, gazing at the crèche and tiny lighted tree there on the bed of glittering artificial snow.

  He flicked out his lighter and dropped it into his pocket.

  “What makes you think anyone would waste time ‘investigatin’ me?”

  He was still looking at me, but the sharpness was veiled now, and his eyes matched his face, bored a little, and a little amused.

  “I wouldn’t know that,” I said. “It just seems more reasonable that you’d be a subject of investigation than it does for Sergeant Buck to be a buyer of chintz—that’s all.”

  He shrugged.

  “Then there’s always your wife,” I said, with a smile just to show I knew that was pretty absurd but recognized his charm and all that.

  He smiled his bored smile. “My life’s an open book, darling—lived in this goldfish bowl on Wisconsin Avenue.”

  The colored women had moved on, three children with shining eyes had taken their places. The glass was frosted with their warm breath. Above them the light on the falling snow made it look as if they were being showered with dark grey feathers, except where it lodged on their hats and shoulders and became glittering crystalline white.

  He glanced out. “Part of my public now.” He got up from where he sat perched on the end of the table and moved lazily over to the paneled fireplace with the moving imitation flames behind the imitation coals in the iron grate. There he turned and looked steadily at me for a moment.

  “To be perfectly frank with you, Grace—”

  “Don’t,” I said. “I’m not up to it. All I want is three yards of flowered chintz for the upstairs bathroom and a Cape Cod fire lighter to give my aunt.”

  He shrugged again.

  “O. K.—I just thought I ought to tell somebody. I thought you’d be a good person to tell—since you’re a friend of Iris Nash.”

  I caught a sudden glimpse of an alarmed slightly seasick face in the discolored old convex mirror behind him, and realized with a shock that it was my own.

  “Is something wrong with Iris Nash?” I asked, instantly and for many reasons on my guard and determined to be as casual and impersonal about all this as Gilbert St. Martin was being.

  He shrugged his broad perfectly tailored (and no doubt well padded) shoulders, moved a red Staffordshire dog an inch closer to the end of the mantel, and turned, facing me again.

  “Not really, I suppose. Just—this.”

  He put his hand inside his jacket. The checked green and red and yellow and brown cloth moved as his hand felt in his pocket. I watched him, disturbed more than I liked to admit by something indefinable in his manner, telling myself, although I hadn’t seen Iris for some time, that there was nothing wrong, that she was quite free of Gilbert St. Martin and safely married to Randall Nash.

  His hand moved again, and brought out an envelope. He handed it over to me. I took it, trying to be just as casual; but it seems to me now that even before I touched that letter— just in the instant or two it took for it to travel from his hand to mine across the rubbed pine table where my bundles lay—I had a sharp feeling of dread, or horror almost… like the feeling you’re supposed to have when somebody walks over your grave. Or perhaps it was just the draft under the door that made me seem suddenly cold as my fingers touched that envelope.

  It was the ordinary stamped thing, the sort you buy at the post office. The remarkable thing about it was the address. It had Gil’s name and shop number on it, but it was printed; not by hand but with one of those printing sets with block letters and inked pad they sell in toy departments. The ink was purple, the letters all askew, the “W” in Wisconsin upside down.

  I opened it. The paper inside was an ordinary cheap ruled tablet paper, greyish. Printed on it, in the same haphazard purple block letters, was a message, without the formality of a salutation.

  DONT THINK YOURE GETTING AWAY WITH ANYTHING. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHERE YOU TWO WENT LAST TUESDAY. THIS ISNT BLACKMAIL EITHER ITS SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

  A FRIEND.

  It’s strange about anonymous letters. You suddenly realize that somewhere round you are malevolent eyes, watching you, that you’ve never been aware of. Even if it’s somebody you know, their eyes are still strange, because they’re sharpened with malice and venom that you’ve not thought about. It’s like going into a friendly house in the dark and realizing abruptly that something unclean is there that you can’t see but that can see you.

  I put the letter back in the envelope and tossed it down on the table.

  “You’ve got lovely friends,” I said. “What’s it got to do with Iris Nash?”

  He picked it up and looked at it a minute. Then he flicked the wheel of his lighter and held the flame to it, over the large pewter basin in the center of the table.

  “Nothing, really.”

  He dropped the envelope just as the sheet of flame licked up over the purple printed letters to the tips of his carefully tended fingers.

  “Except that last Tuesday I took Iris out to Great Falls to get a maple corner cupboard I knew about.—And this is the second of these sunshine greetings.”

  “Where’s the other one?”

  He pointed to the charred remains writhing and crackling in the pewter dish.

  “What did it say?”

  “Much the same. Plainer. Something about my wife… and Iris’s husband. It came the day after we went to Maryland to get a Sully portrait I’d spotted. Up in Frederick.—It may have been Barbara Frietchie.”

  The clock on the mantel ticked loudly.

  “Does Iris know about these letters?”

  “Don’t be funny, Mrs. Latham.”

  The sharp edge in his voice startled me a little.

  “Or… your wife?”

  He laughed. “That isn’t funny, darling. That’s stupid.”

  “I should have thought both of them ought to know about it immediately.”

  He didn’t say anything. I watched him move the other red dog at the other end of the mantel.

  “Have you any notion who they’re from, Gil?”

  I asked that abruptly, hardly aware what I was thinking until I saw something behind his eyes move sharply.

  “Not the foggiest, darling.”

  “Except possibly who?”

  He had turned away and was looking down into the undulating waves of artificial fire behind the red coals in the grate.

  “It’s too cock-eyed,” he said, changed back completely now to his casual bored self.

  I was wondering. Not about Iris Nash and him but about his wife; and I thought I knew what he was thinking and why he’d burned the letters. Edith St. Martin is sixteen years older than Gilbert, very rich and not very attractive. He was a decorator in New York doing over her apartment when she married him. She opened the Georgetown shop for him when he began to spend his mornings in bed, his afternoons at various bars and his nights at whosever party he happened to fall down and nobody bothered to pick him up and call a taxi. She doesn’t like Iris Nash, and there’s no reason, I suppose, why she should, and several very good possible reasons, anyway, why she shouldn’t.

  I thought of that last line: “This isn’t blackmail either; it’s something different.”

  He looked up. “Can you keep something under your hat, Grace?”

  “I’ve never been known to,” I said.

  “This is your big chance then. I mean—well, it’s all so damn ridiculous. But I’d rather like somebody to know, if it should… well, happen to get so ridiculous as to be embarrassing. You know, you can’t ever tell about this sort of thing.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s have it.”

  “I think it’s Iris Nash’s charming young stepdaughter,” he said coolly.

  The sight of Sergeant Buck buying chintz ought to have inured me to any shock, but apparently it hadn’t. I’m afraid I stared perfectly open-mouthed at Gilbert St. Martin, leaning there elegantly against the pine mantel. But it wasn’t him I w
as seeing. It was young Lowell Nash. I was seeing her as I always see her when she first comes into my mind—taut, stormy-eyed, white-faced, the night she broke into my house as I was dressing to go out to dinner. I still hear her: “Aunt Grace! Father—he’s married her! She’s there!” And she flung herself on my bed in a passion of uncontrollable sobbing. “I hate her! I hate her!”

  That picture faded as it always does into a slim dark curly-haired child of eighteen with a firm pointed little chin and sullen red mouth and fine sensitive nose under wide-set brown eye behind thick black surprised lashes. Which is what one first sees of Lowell Nash.

  “Look, Gil,” I said. “You may be darned good at interiors, but you don’t know much about people.”

  He raised one neat brow.

  “That’s odd, you know. I should have said I know a hell of a lot more about people—women especially—than about decorating.”

  . “I wouldn’t let that get out,” I said. “It might hurt your business.”

  I didn’t mean his wife, of course, but he thought I did, and his lips tightened. That’s one of the bad things about marrying somebody for money. You’re always on the defensive, always thinking people are being purposely objectionable.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “—quite apart from character—if you’d ever been a child, and had one of those printing outfits, you’d know it takes hours to print anything as long as that.”

  We both looked down at the last charred flakes of the letter from a friend.

  “And if you knew Lowell Nash you’d know she’s hardly got time to take a deep breath, much less go into the printing business.”

  He blew the ash off his long brown cigarette. “I’m afraid you’re not a sympathetic audience,” he drawled.

  “I’m afraid not,” I answered shortly. “I’ve known Lowell a long time. I know she’s unbearably spoiled. She’s willful and impudent and difficult. I know Iris hasn’t had an easy job trying to get along with her the last three years, since she married Randall Nash. But I don’t think it’s been so terribly easy for Lowell either.”