by Leslie Ford
It was Steve Donaldson, knowing about the law, who saw the potential danger of her position quicker by far than I did. He released his hold on her arms slowly, looking at Colonel Primrose, his eyes sharpened with a sort of vigilant wariness, his lean jaw set. We all stood there silently for a moment, Colonel Primrose’s black parrot eyes deliberately—I thought—not meeting Iris’s.
And it was Iris, oddly enough, who broke the silence at last. She raised one hand to her forehead and smoothed back her copper-colored hair, looking frail and tired suddenly, like a hothouse tiger lily exposed too long to the sun.
“What do I do?” she asked, in a dazed unreal voice.
“You don’t do anything,” Steve Donaldson said brusquely. He started to go on, and stopped. He had not taken his eyes off Colonel Primrose, still standing by the telephone. I saw something flicker in the bright black eyes Colonel Primrose turned to him.
“The fewer conclusions anybody jumps at the better, Mr. Donaldson,” he said, with a restrained suavity that I’m sure must have taken some effort.
Steve Donaldson flushed darkly. He took a step closer to Iris. He was behind her, so she could not know, I thought suddenly, how much like a sword and shield he looked, looming there, in spite of his white tie and tails. Nor could Colonel Primrose have known how much to the point what he had just said was going to be.
Outside the sound of a car stopping, followed by heavy feet stamping off the snow on the porch, brought us all sharply to attention. Colonel Primrose went to the door and opened it. I heard a low rumble of voices, and in a moment there were four sober-faced keen-eyed men in the room, two of whom we were to see a lot of before we were through with Randall Nash. I had never seen any of them, so I knew they weren’t from the Seventh Precinct Headquarters in Volta Place. They all seemed to know Colonel Primrose.
One of them, the surgeon obviously, came forward with his black bag and knelt beside Randall Nash. He straightened up in a minute, put his stethoscope back in his inside pocket and glanced up at Colonel Primrose, drawing his thin lower lip under his long teeth with an odd sucking sound.
At that point, I suppose, the die was cast already, and nothing could have saved us from any part of the fate that seemed to be hanging on the footsteps of everyone who entered the yellow brick house on Beall Street, dogging it as relentlessly as if the awful crime of that long dead Nash had laid on it a curse for which only blood could atone. And yet… I have nothing but admiration and respect for the District of Columbia police. I doubt if anywhere in the world any group of men handed the job that Captain Lamb and his men were handed that night would have done it better, or with more devotion not only to duty but to decency. But if they were human, they couldn’t possibly have failed to be affected by the sudden and appallingly dramatic entrance on the scene that happened at the very moment Dr. Maxton folded his stethoscope and looked up, sucking in his lower lip.
We were all so shocked at what was going on in front of us that none of us—except, I suppose, Colonel Primrose, who always notices everything, and perhaps Captain Lamb—heard the front door open and saw Lowell Nash come in. And I doubt if even they saw Mac there behind her. She must have stood in the doorway for a long moment, taking in the dreadful significance of what was going on for instants, before she shot forward, dropping her red velvet evening coat off her shoulders to the floor as she came, sure and swift and razor-sharp, her dark eyes burning and all the color drained from her cheeks, facing her stepmother.
Her voice came out low and hard and cruel: “Then you did poison him… and you’ve poisoned my father too!”
Even Colonel Primrose caught his breath sharply. I didn’t dare look at any of the others. I couldn’t blame them for thinking anything. The searing icy hatred in Lowell Nash’s voice was enough to curdle anyone’s blood. And she was almost unbelievably lovely to look at, in a low-cut flame-colored dance frock with a skirt of yards and yards of crisp net swirling about her young body as she moved, and above it each black curl sculptured close to her small elegant head like the locks of a young Medusa. That’s what she seemed too, just then: a young Medusa, not knowing her power, turning every one of us to stone.
Then as suddenly she broke away and flung herself down beside her father.
“Dad! Dad! Oh, it’s Lowell! Answer me—answer me, daddy!”
She burst into a torrent of weeping, her dark head on the stiff starched bosom of his shirt.
It was then, I think, that we all became aware of Mac. He came forward, knelt down beside her and put his arm around her gently.
“Don’t, Lowell. Please don’t. Please, honey!”
He looked up helplessly as she shook passionately away from him. Colonel Primrose took a step forward. Suddenly Iris said, in a voice nearly as cool and detached as it had been two hours before, “You take her upstairs, Steve. Grace will show you the way.”
Which should, I suppose, have shown that Iris Nash had a surer insight into the complex and I think quite unconscious springs of her stepdaughter’s soul than anyone else had. Steve Donaldson picked her up bodily, unresisting, and carried her up the broad stairs. We stood there in her room for a moment, looking down at her, sobbing quietly on the high four-poster bed, her head in her arms.
“Poor little kid!” Steve said gently. He smoothed her dark silky curls. “Buck up, old chap!” he said.
I turned on the light by the mahogany table by the windows and switched off the light by her bed. Steve was still standing there, one of her limp hands in his.
I shook my head involuntarily. “You’ve given yourself a pretty tough assignment, my friend,” I thought… not seeing how anybody could possibly be a friend of Lowell and Iris Nash at the same time. It seems to be a characteristic of the Nash difficulties. You’ve got to be on one side or the other. It was true with Randall and Marie’s divorce, it was true of the two children, it seemed to be almost nauseatingly true of Iris Nash and her stepdaughter, though of Iris only because Lowell forced it to be that way.
I was glad when the door opened and the doctor came in.
“This’ll quiet her,” he said. “Severe shock.”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
He jerked his head over his shoulder in the direction of the stair well.
“Other one’s holding up all right.”
There was a sardonic inflection in his voice that should have told me more than it did. But it seemed to me then that it must have been perfectly apparent to all of them that Iris Nash was going on her nerve… and on the sure knowledge that everybody in the place couldn’t indulge in the luxury of cracking up and sleeping off the first frightful hours of this with a shot in the arm. That’s being rather hard on Lowell, I suppose; but I really didn’t feel that her virulent attack on her stepmother before the assembled police had any justification in shock or nerves or anything else. If she’d thought what she said, and I suppose she really did, she should never have said it. This flying to bits every time anything didn’t please her was more like her mother, really, than like Lowell. Marie Nash’s life with Randall, I knew, had been one stormy scene after another, with a ninety mile gale raging at the drop of a hat. Lowell’s scenes had hitherto been like her father’s—the product of a carefully designed plan of action that could seize an opportunity and make the most of it, as Randall Nash had done on Christmas Eve when he’d told the story of the Nash vault. The business downstairs fitted in so perfectly with what had gone on at my house after the dog was found dead that I was really alarmed. If Lowell had set out to get even with Iris, she had certainly scored a strike with her first ball. There was no doubt of that.
However, there was also no use wasting moral indignation on anyone so completely and outrageously pagan as a modern eighteen-year-old. The interesting thing to me was seeing how my sympathy, that had been with Lowell since she was four and swiped the funeral wreath, had changed since the Christmas Eve scenes, and veered completely to Iris with her final attack a few minutes before. After all, you don’t jus
t go about accusing people you happen to dislike because they married your father of poisoning your dog, much less of poisoning your father. No matter how richly it’s deserved— either the poison or the accusation.
And that of course was the point things had got to downstairs—not in so many words, as the men down there were all being strictly non-committal. They had put Iris and Mac out of the library and had closed the door. I could hear their voices as Steve Donaldson and I came down the stairs after the doctor had left and Lowell was asleep, a yellow satin coverlet thrown over her exotic red figure on the white curtained bed.
Iris and Mac were in the drawing room, Iris sitting erect and detached on the gold damask sofa by the fire, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like someone finding herself alone suddenly in a terrible wasted land, drawing into herself, building up an impenetrable wall, remote and untouchable. Mac on the other hand was pacing back and forth like a caged animal, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, his black tie slightly cock-eyed, distressed and a little sore too. He gave Steve what my younger kid would call a dirty look, and so should I for want of a better word, and looked appealingly at me. I nodded reassuringly. He blew his nose hard, picked up the decanter and poured himself a drink. Just as he put his thumb on the trigger of the syphon Captain Lamb appeared in the door.
He came quickly across the room as he saw what Mac was doing.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have to take that along. Is this the setup your husband had on the desk when you came in, Mrs. Nash?”
“Except that the syphon was empty,” Iris said calmly. “I rinsed it out, as much as you can do without taking it apart. I filled it with water from the pantry faucet and recharged it.”
Captain Lamb picked it up. It was one of those patent arrangements—dark blue with a yellow stripe round its shoulder, chromium cap and trigger. Iris was looking at it. Her eyes shifted to the decanter on the low table. Captain Lamb picked it up, took Mac’s drink out of his hands and poured it back into the decanter.
“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”
Mac looked startled. “You—”
“All the rest of us have been drinking it,” Steve Donaldson said evenly. “It seems to me you fellows are jumping to some pretty quick conclusions.”
He was repeating, curiously enough, Colonel Primrose’s exact admonition to him.
Captain Lamb looked at him steadily. “We aren’t jumping to any conclusions. We are following our regular routine in cases where the cause of death is unknown.”
It sounded like a sentence from the Coroner’s Act, or something.
“Look,” Mac said suddenly. “He’s been acting darned queer lately, if you ask me. Maybe he… killed himself. He—”
Captain Lamb nodded. “That’s one of the possibilities we have to consider.”
“I think you can save yourselves that trouble,” Iris said quietly. “My husband wouldn’t possibly have committed suicide.—But the doctors have told him for years that he would kill himself if he didn’t stop drinking. Dr. Clem Lewis at Johns Hopkins told him so again last month. I advise you to see him.”
Captain Lamb nodded and wrote the name down in his notebook. He took the decanter and syphon. Mac and Steve and I watched him cross the room and go out into the hall, closing the door behind him. Iris was staring into the fire, her hands clenching the edge of the sofa until her knuckles stood out shiny white. Suddenly she got up and stood facing us, her face white and drawn under the burnished copper of her bright hair. She wanted to speak. I thought she was going to, but she didn’t. She looked first at Mac, then at Stephen Donaldson, and turned back to the fire. I looked at Steve. His face was drawn. He was staring at her back as she stood there, the flames licking up the dry log on either side of her, lighting up the cloth of gold tissue of her slim sheathed body, bare to the waist in back, her smooth skin only a paler gold than her gown.
“Iris,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to alarm you, but—”
She turned, a quick smile in her green eyes.
“I know. You think I ought to get a lawyer.”
The smile spread to her red lips. “—A first-rate criminal lawyer,” she added coolly.
Steve’s face darkened.
“I’m only—”
She interrupted him. “I know, Steve—thanks! You’re probably right. I can see, thanks to—”
She paused. She was going to say “Lowell,” I thought, but she changed it.
“Thanks to Captain Lamb—that I’m going to need one. And now, if you don’t mind… and if it’s all right with the police… I’d like to be alone.—Except you, Grace,—do you mind staying?”
Steve flushed again, started to speak, turned brusquely and went out. Mac came over and held out his hand.
“Gee, Iris,” he said lamely. “—If there’s anything I can do…”
She smiled.
“Thanks, Mac. You sort of stand by—Lowell will want you, a little later.”
He looked grateful, and moistened his lips. But after all there wasn’t very much that anybody a great deal more articulate than Mac could have said. I followed him over to the door and held it while he went out. One of Lamb’s men was coming down the stairs. He had a small brown bottle in his hand. I don’t think he liked my looks, for some reason, for he put the bottle behind him quickly, narrowing his eyes the way Sergeant Buck does when he looks at me, and kept his gaze fixed on me until I’d closed the drawing room door. I had a numb cold feeling in the pit of my stomach as I turned back to Iris.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Turn off the lights on that tree, will you?” she said suddenly. Her voice sounded like tearing silk. “They’ll drive me out of my mind.”
I hadn’t noticed they were on. I unscrewed two or three so they all went out.
“You’d better hang on to it,” I said. “You’re going to need it.”
“I know I am.” She laughed with sudden bitterness. “Where do you get first-rate criminal lawyers?” she asked, in a caught strangled voice.
“I wouldn’t know. Why didn’t you ask Steve?”
She shook her head. “No, darling.”
Her green eyes met mine squarely. “He thinks I poisoned Randall.—Do you, Grace?”
“I’d rather wait and see if he was poisoned, first,” I said, in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage. “And I’ll tell you.”
She nodded calmly. Then we were quiet. Out in the hall we could hear the slow labored tread of men carrying a heavy load. I glanced quickly at her. She was standing there in front of the fire, her eyes widened, lips parted. She bent her head and held it there until the door closed and we heard a motor start, whirring in the silent night. I saw the tears on her face as she turned and buried her head in her arms on the carved mantel, her bare pale gold shoulders quivering. I put my handkerchief in her hand, remembering that she had wiped up the spot on the mahogany surface of the desk with hers.
The front door opened and closed again, and the door behind us opened. Colonel Primrose came in. He stood there a moment, his hand on the silver knob, looking at Iris. At the first sound of the opening door she had raised her head and dried her eyes. When she turned she was in complete control of herself again. I saw the guarded admiration in Colonel Primrose’s eyes as he hesitated, changing his tack, plainly, now that he saw her away from Lowell and the rest of them.
“Sit down, Iris,” he said quietly. “You too, Mrs. Latham. I want to talk to you both.”
I sat down. Iris did not move. Colonel Primrose glanced up at her, cocking his head down and around with a quizzical flicker in his eyes.
“I’m not entirely unofficial, Iris,” he said steadily.
She nodded.
“I know you’re not—and that’s precisely the point, Colonel Primrose. I’ve been advised this evening to get a first-rate criminal lawyer. I think—if you don’t mind—that’s what I’ll do. And… before I talk to anyone—e
ven remotely official.”
Colonel Primrose sat down. He looked up at her with sharp steady appraisal.
“It’s entirely up to you, my dear.—I hadn’t, somehow, expected you to take that attitude.”
Their eyes met evenly.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.”
He sat down, leaning back in the cherry damask fireside chair without taking his eyes off hers.
“Possibly I’m not quite clear. I’d assumed that if, by any change, Randall’s death should turn out not to be natural, you’d be the first person who’d want it properly settled.”
He hesitated an instant and went coolly on.
“I know, of course, it’s the fashion to assume the police are not only fools, but scoundrels who try to hang the first person they lay eyes on.”
Iris moved abruptly, her face suddenly hard.
“That’s quite false,” Colonel Primrose went on placidly. “When they do happen to hang the first person they lay eyes on, it’s because that person is guilty. However.”
He got up.
“I want to tell you—for your own information—what the situation appears to be, on the face of it. You’d better count on the fact that Randall was poisoned. They’ll know definitely in the morning.”
He hesitated a moment, looking steadily at her, and went calmly on.
“You were presumably the last person in the house this evening. When we came back you went into the library, and destroyed what was probably direct evidence as to the means of Randall’s death. Those are two very serious points that you’ll be called on to answer when the District Attorney’s office gets around to it.”
He moved toward the door.
“If there’s anything I can do to help you at all, I hope you’ll call on me.”
He glanced at me. “I assume you’re staying here until morning, Mrs. Latham.”
I nodded furiously. I had never heard anything so brutal in my life… or seen anything so marvelous as the way Iris Nash took it squarely on the chin without a quiver.
