The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  I said nothing. I didn’t know anything to say. I’d never seen Lowell Nash like this. She hadn’t moved since she’d come into the room. All the Christmas trappings, the vine cedar and mistletoe, the crazy presents we’d been laughing at, and the bright litter of hastily torn-off wrappings that Lilac hadn’t cleaned up yet, seemed frivolous suddenly and a little unreal.

  “I wanted to tell you, because I’m going to get even with her someday. And I don’t want you to think I’m just mean and vindictive. She’s been asking for it a long time.”

  My hand was still closed tightly on the mantel, I was still staring stupidly at the wet spot on the floor, long after I heard the garden door slam shut. Lilac’s black face and saucer-wide eyes peering at me from the dining room brought me to my senses.

  “Law, Mis’ Grace, what all’s the mattuh with that chil’, come bussin’ in lak that, lookin’ lak death on a pale horse?”

  “Her dog died last night,” I said.

  “ ’Deed an’ it’s time,” Lilac observed practically. She padded back downstairs to the kitchen to tell Julius, who’s her husband. At least I think he is. We have burned biscuits and the furnace fire goes out when they’re having one of their divorces, and the house was quite warm when I got home from Nassau.

  If the telephone hadn’t rung just then, things might have turned out very differently. I might have gone to Iris’s that afternoon. I might have seen Colonel Primrose that evening and told him about the poisoned dog. More important, probably, I should have seen Randall Nash when he came to my house on the late afternoon of the 29th. As it was, I saw none of them, and whatever might have happened didn’t happen. Which is foolish, of course, for in my heart I’m sure I believe that what is to happen pretty much does happen. The telephone ringing when it did was as much a part of the Destiny that had us all by the scruff of the neck as the poison that put Senator McGilvray’s feathered liver-and-white fourth foot in the grave.

  Anyway, the phone did ring. It was Mary Lucas on long distance from somewhere this side of Los Angeles, and would I for mercy’s sake go with my kids that afternoon to Virginia and pinch hit as chaperone at young Mary’s house party, because her plane had been held up and she’d be late, and little Mary would be so disappointed, and anyway it was too late to call it off now because most of the youngsters were coming from New York and New England and would be yammering at the door with nobody to chaperone them. It wasn’t her fault California’s weather had gone mad, she really had expected to be home in time.

  And she did arrive, but not till the afternoon of the 29th— and I got home not half an hour after Randall Nash had come and waited twenty minutes, pacing up and down the living room, so Lilac said, and then finally had gone. The empty glass and half-empty decanter were still on the table.

  “That theah was full to the top when Ah took it in, Mis’ Grace,” Lilac said.

  I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Iris called up and said Randall had decided not to go to the Assembly that night, but that Colonel Primrose and Stephen Donaldson were taking the two of us, and we’d meet Lowell and Mac there at Linthicum Hall. The three of them would come, if I didn’t mind, to my house around eleven. I gathered she preferred we didn’t meet at her house, even though we’d have to pass it going from my place in P Street to Linthicum Hall in O—Beall Street cutting a wedge-shaped section, as it does, from Wisconsin Avenue to 29th.

  Steve Donaldson was the first to come. He looked remarkably well in tails and white tie, said something noncommittal about the weather, admitted he thought Lowell was being pretty dramatic about it when I asked him how the Nashes were making out with the passing of Senator McGilvray, and kept looking at his watch and moving about the room. I watched him with considerable interest, after a couple more desultory attempts at conversation had quietly died on my hands. When the doorbell rang he came to life, and slumped again when it was only Colonel Primrose.

  As for myself, I was surprised at how glad I was to see the short, grey-haired, somewhat rotund figure of Sergeant Buck’s chief in the door, with Lilac’s polished face shining over his shoulder like a full black moon.

  “It’s grand to see you—how are you? Do you know Mr. Donaldson?”

  The two men shook hands. Colonel Primrose, who has a slightly stiff neck from stopping a bullet in the Argonne, cocked his head down and looked up with his bright parrot eyes. “Randall Nash was speaking of you this evening,” he said.

  But Steve Donaldson was listening to Lilac opening the door again. I doubt if he even heard what Colonel Primrose said. I saw the quick change in his face when Iris came in and his eyes detected before mine did the too bright quality of her greeting.

  “It’s nice of you to go along with us.” She toned to him after she’d spoken to me and Colonel Primrose. “Mac put his foot down. He said if Lowell stood him up again he’d join the Foreign Legion, so she had to go with him.”

  She toned back to me.

  “I hope I’m not terribly late; I was waiting for Randall. He went out and hadn’t got back yet. Angie’s mother got up and went out to a party last night, and today they took her to the Emergency Hospital. I think she’s very sick. I thought maybe Lowell ought to stand by, but Randall said her holiday had been ruined already by her dog’s dying, and her mother was probably just putting on anyway, just to spoil Christmas for everybody.”

  She shrugged unhappily.

  “Result is, Lowell doesn’t know her mother’s ill again.— Not that she’d care very much.”

  She bit her lower lip suddenly. “Oh what am I saying! I didn’t mean that—please forgive me!”

  Colonel Primrose’s thumb on the trigger of the soda syphon released its pressure sharply. He cocked his head down and looked around at her with intent sparkling black eyes. Then he pressed the trigger again. The charged water swirled into the amber whisky in the tall glass.

  The Christmas Assembly, perhaps I should explain, is a traditional Georgetown function, dating from pre-Revolutionary days. The youth and beauty of the Colonies danced at it, George Washington attended it in a tavern in Bridge Street, Dolly Madison and her husband danced at it before the British burned Washington in 1814, the belles of the Forties flirted there. It was discontinued during the Civil War and revived under the gas lights in the smilax-wreathed hall that Mr. Linthicum built in l878 for the education of poor white boys of Georgetown. There are still two gas standards in the corners of the little gallery, but they aren’t lighted now, and the gallery is used chiefly for a surreptitious drink out of a bottle—paper cups for ladies—by a generation very alien, somehow, to the shining-pated old gentlemen with their ladies who sit along the wall under the evergreens downstairs, watching the strange gait of the modern dance.

  Iris and I pushed through the mob on the staircase into the ladies’ room, and then back through the corridor into the gallery. It was empty for the moment except for a young man already finding it difficult to move. Colonel Primrose and Steve Donaldson joined us and we stood looking down on the crowded floor. At the opposite end of the room was the Victorian portrait of the Victorian gentleman who gave the hall. Under it sat Lowell Nash.

  “Oh dear!” I said. “That means she’s going to be an old maid.”

  “Which shows,” Colonel Primrose observed, “how tradition—even in Georgetown—is garbled in seventy years. It used to mean you simply didn’t get any partners for the evening.”

  “I expect Lowell isn’t worrying about either,” Iris said, smiling suddenly at Steve.

  “Not about the partner end of it,” he agreed with a grin. There were at least eight young men standing around her, with Mac, as usual, glowering in a corner.

  “Shall we dance?” I heard Steve say. In a moment we saw them below us on the crowded floor.

  “I take it,” Colonel Primrose remarked casually, “Mr. Donaldson is head over heels in love with the beautiful Iris. And Iris either thinks or pretends to think it’s Lowell.”

  “Why pretends?”

&nbs
p; “Surely, Mrs. Latham, a woman knows when a man’s in love with her.”

  I suppose it was because of Sergeant Buck and Lilac that I avoided looking at him.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “She may be too caught up in general complications to sort things out very clearly.”

  He smiled. “Not to change the subject at all—why didn’t you let me know you were home?”

  “Didn’t Sergeant Buck tell you?—I met him in Gilbert St. Martin’s shop.”

  “He didn’t. But I saw something had soured him. And there’s no use being a detective of sorts if you can’t deduce things to your own advantage from time to time.”

  “That couldn’t have taken a lot of detecting,” I said. “Meaning Buck’s damnably transparent?”

  “He is, rather, isn’t he?” I answered. Then I added, quite on the impulse of the moment and because it had to be said sooner or later, “I only wish he’d get it out of his head that I want to marry you.”

  Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and looked around at me the way he does.

  “You don’t want to, I take it.”

  “No-you’re quite safe, Colonel.”

  “I’ve been afraid that was what you were going to say,” he said with a quick smile.

  “And rather relieved on the whole?”

  “What do you think?”

  He asked it so seriously that I changed the subject, out of sheer sympathy for Sergeant Buck.

  “Have you seen much of the Nashes recently?”

  He smiled again.

  “From time to time.”

  “I feel terribly sorry for Iris,” I said.

  “Do you really,” he said shortly. I looked at him, a little surprised. He got up abruptly. “Let’s dance.”

  I thought “Oh dear!” And yet, of course, I could have known he’d be stuffy.

  It was half-past one when we left Linthicum Hall. I hadn’t seen much of Lowell, except to say Hello and find out that she was pretty mad at Angie for not showing up.

  “I suppose he’s brooding about that silly dust-up with dad Christmas Eve,” she said impatiently.

  If she had learned that her mother was seriously ill there was no evidence of it. She and Mac were going, they said, as soon as they’d made a long enough showing to satisfy Mac’s uncle, who’s by way of being a local big shot—banker and what not. Iris and Steve had joined a crowd of young married people in one corner, Colonel Primrose and I got stymied by a doddering old gentleman who’d attended the ball in 1882 with a famous beauty I’d never heard of and had a duel with her husband out by the Chain Bridge the next day. We’d still be there talking to him if Steve hadn’t come and said Iris wanted to go home.

  She was in the dressing room getting her white ermine cape when I came in. Her face was almost the color of the fur. She looked desperately unhappy. It occurred to me that she’d probably been having an encounter with her stepdaughter. Heaven knows why I chose that moment to remark casually that I hadn’t seen the St. Martins; it came out of my mouth before I was even conscious of thinking it. She gave a sharp hysterical little laugh. I looked quickly at her; she was steadying herself against the end of the cloak rack. “I’m going to be sick,” she whispered. “Get me some water.”

  I got it. Her hands were cold as ice. She stood there a moment with her eyes closed, then gave me a quick sardonic smile as she handed back the cup. “You’d think I had scenes enough at home without staging one in public all by myself.” The Christmas lights were still gleaming in the giant magnolias outside the Nash house. The light in the hall glimmered softly through the elliptical Adam fanlight over the door.

  “Why don’t you all come in and have a drink?” Iris said. “That’s an excellent idea,” Colonel Primrose said promptly, so promptly that I couldn’t really say no.

  I still wonder what difference it might have made in the days that followed if I’d not been so spineless and had gone home as I should have done. It’s impossible to tell, of course, and anyway we did go in. The door into the library, at the foot of the stairs to the right, was half open. The room was dark except for the small circle of white light thrown by the glass-shaded reading lamp on the dark green and gold leather pad on Randall Nash’s broad flat mahogany desk at the far side, between the windows. In the circle of light was an open book. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay on it, the ear bows extended as if they had just been put there.

  But that was not all, nor did any of it explain the sudden, almost imperceptible stiffening in the muscles of Iris’s smooth bare back as Steve Donaldson took her ermine cape and she glanced in through the half-open door. On the desk beside the pad, just out of the circle of light, was a round silver tray, with a decanter of whisky and a soda syphon. Beside the tray an amber highball glass with a silver rim lay on the desk, on its side.

  Iris glanced from the spot of light and the overturned glass up the stairs ahead of us, and took a deep controlled breath. I saw Colonel Primrose cock his head down and follow her gaze with his bright sharp black eyes. I thought he shook his head a little.

  It took only a second or two, all this, before Iris said, quite normally—and if I hadn’t known the danger signals I’d never have noticed anything not perfectly normal about any of this—“Please go in by the fire. I’ll bring the decanter.”

  Colonel Primrose had just taken my coat. He was still standing with it over his arm. We all stood there a moment. Iris went into the library, picked up the glass and put it on the tray, wiped up the spot on the polished mahogany with her handkerchief, and came out again with the tray in her hands.

  She handed it to me. “Take it in, Grace, will you? I’ll just put this in the kitchen.”

  She took the glass. I started into the drawing room with the tray.

  “Wait a second,” she said. “Is there any soda?”

  She came back, put the glass under the syphon and pressed the trigger. A hissing spurt of the gas brought out a couple of drops of charged water.

  “I’ll fill it,” she said. She took the syphon and glass, and went out with Colonel Primrose to the kitchen.

  I went on into the drawing room where Steve Donaldson was standing in front of the fire, staring down into it. He glanced up, the expectant light in his eyes dying when he saw it was only me. I took a potato chip out of the silver bowl on the low Chippendale table in front of the fire and scooped a little of the fresh caviar from the block of ice in the thermos tub. We didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, and were content not to try to make anything up. So we just sat there until Iris and Colonel Primrose came back with the syphon, one of those patent arrangements with cartridges for carbonating your own tap water.

  After that it was very pleasant, and when I suddenly looked at the French clock on the mantel it was after three o’clock. I remembered my children.

  “Don’t go,” Iris said.

  “I must. They’re at the age when they don’t approve of me being out after two-thirty.”

  “Why don’t you phone and see if they’re in?—My child ought to be in in a moment,” she added with a smile at Steve Donaldson. “There’s a phone in the library.”

  I hesitated.

  “Nobody wants to go home, Mrs. Latham,” Steve said with a grin.

  I glanced at Colonel Primrose and got up. He came with me into the hall. The green shaded lamp on the library desk was still on. I pulled up the chair behind the desk and dialed my number. Then, as I waited, my eyes got used to the dark outer rim of the light. And as the book-lined walls and the mahogany mantel became visible, something else became visible too… just as I heard Lilac’s sleepy voice at the other end. I put the telephone down without speaking, staring in silent terror at the thing on the floor.

  When I said “Colonel Primrose!” the first time I couldn’t have more than whispered it, for he didn’t come. The second time he came quickly. I saw him in the door, saw the alarmed anxious expression on his face as he stopped abruptly and stood looking down at me. I pointed to the floor,
my throat too paralyzed to speak. In an instant he was there, down on one knee, his hand on Randall Nash’s limp wrist, then moving under his coat to his heart.

  Then I realized that that second time I must have screamed, for Iris Nash was there in the room, with Steve Donaldson behind her. I saw Steve reach back to the switch beside the door, and the room was full of light. Colonel Primrose got to his feet, his head cocked down, his bright black eyes moving intently about the room. It seemed an incredible time to me before they came to Iris Nash, staring down in horror at the prone figure, its dead glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling, its teeth bared in a sardonic grin, as if the last laugh was Randall Nash’s… and a bitter one too.

  Steve Donaldson was behind her, holding both her arms close to her, steadying her, giving her his own strength. She seemed unaware of him or of us—only of the dreadful grinning figure of her husband on the floor.

  Colonel Primrose came to the desk and took up the telephone.

  “I’m going to call the police, Iris,” he said gently.

  She looked silently at him, her wide-set green eyes dazed and uncomprehending. It was almost as if she had not heard him speaking at all.

  Colonel Primrose put the telephone down. He hesitated a moment, and turned toward her again.

  “Where is the glass he was drinking from, Iris?” he asked quietly.

  Something sharp and sudden cut through the blank dazed expression in her eyes and caught the breath in her bare throat. The words were scarcely audible as her blanched lips moved: “I… washed it, and put it away.”

  5

  I can’t believe that any of us then—except perhaps Colonel Primrose, used to this sort of thing and prejudiced against Iris Nash from the beginning—realized the full appalling significance of what she had said. If her voice sounded like a death knell in the horrible silence of that room there was reason enough, Heaven knows, in Randall Nash’s lifeless figure lying there on the oriental carpet, grinning glassy-eyed into eternity.