The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

“What is your idea, Mr. McClean?” Iris asked. She seemed disturbed and on her guard.

  “All Lowell’s family that meant anything to her is… gone,” he went on quietly. “My nephew is the only person left at all close to her. I’m wondering now, Mrs. Nash, if it wouldn’t be a wise thing for them to marry, as soon as possible, and go abroad.”

  Iris’s eyes widened.

  “Is this Mac’s idea?”

  “No, no. It is my own entirely.”

  Iris got up.

  “I’m glad of that.—I’m afraid I can’t approve of it, Mr. McClean, at all. But you know, of course, that I have no influence of any kind over Lowell. She’s entirely her own mistress.”

  A. J. shook his head. “Fortunately or not, Mrs. Nash,” he said deliberately, “that is not the case. Her father’s will specifies that your consent is necessary if she marries before she is twenty-one.”

  Iris looked at him incredulously. “Are you… quite sure of that?”

  A. J. nodded.

  She sat down mechanically, I thought more upset by this than she had been by anything else.

  “There’s another point, incidentally, in his will that you should be prepared for, Mrs. Nash. The settlement made with his first wife at the time of their divorce was that in case he predeceased her she should receive what would have been her dower right had they not separated—one-third of his property. This arrangement was entered into in lieu of alimony. At the time of the divorce, as you may know, Randall was practically bankrupt, and Marie did not want to be a burden to him in his efforts to recover.”

  “Why should she have wanted alimony at all? Wasn’t she a very rich woman?”

  A dry light flickered behind A. J.’s pince-nez.

  “She had a strongly developed money sense,” he said.

  “Did he predecease her?” I asked practically.

  Iris looked surprised. The idea had already occurred to A. J. He nodded with some approval.

  “It’s a vital point,” he said. “I’ve asked the police to help us determine it.—I’m doing this, you understand, Mrs. Nash, in my capacity as executor. Randall felt it would be less irksome to you to have everything taken off your hands.”

  “Out of them” seemed more to the point, I thought.

  “You have of course been very adequately provided for.”

  “Thank you.”

  I thought for a moment A. J. had missed the ironic inflection, but he hadn’t.

  “I think, Mrs. Nash,” he said, a dry barely noticeable hint of reproach in his voice, “that the best policy for all of us at this time is to curb our natural feelings, and work together in at least outward harmony.”

  She smiled quickly. “I’m sure you’re perfectly right, Mr. McClean.”

  “I’ll do my best to impress that fact on Lowell also,” he added.

  I began to realize for the first time at about this point that for Mr. A. J. McClean to come, as he had said, in friendship, had been more of a job than it had appeared, and that no doubt he really had put aside his natural inclination to accept Lowell’s condemnation of her stepmother in an effort to perform his duty to his dead friend. There’s a lot to be said for old-fashioned discipline, and A. J. had it. Maybe it was the Scot in him; or maybe, I thought, just that in the years he’d known Randall Nash he must have got well used to concealing what he called his private feelings. It was just that quality in him, I suppose, that made the Colonial Trust Company like Gibraltar when other banks were crashing all over the place, and made him accept the responsibility of a three-year-old child and carry it out himself when he could have shipped him off to a school and paid somebody else to do it for him. They might theoretically have done it better… but I doubt if Mac would have been any better if Madame Montessori had raised him personally.

  A. J. looked at his watch. “My nephew can leave the bank at noon, if there’s anything you want him to do for you, Mrs. Nash. Otherwise, I thought it was best for him to keep on with his regular routine.”

  The drawing room door opened, and Wilkins appeared.

  “Mrs. St. Martin to see you, madame.”

  A. J. stiffened and got up, wincing as he straightened his knees.

  “I’ll wait upstairs,” he said shortly.

  7

  “Don’t they like each other?” I asked.

  Iris shrugged. “I don’t know about these things.”

  Edith St. Martin had changed in the six months since I’d seen her last. She’d had her face lifted, and her hair dyed black except for two glistening white wings that made a sort of bright coronet above her prominent dark eyes. She’d lost twenty pounds and got herself a lorgnette, and if I hadn’t known she was fifty-one I’d have thought she was in her late thirties. I should have, that is, until I saw her forget the plastic smile she wore, and saw the weary background behind the animated footlight in her eyes.

  “My dear, I’m so sorry—I can’t believe Randall was himself, I really can’t. You mustn’t take it too hard, I’m sure he didn’t blame you, my dear, he was too big a man.”

  Both Iris and I looked so blank that Edith glanced sharply from one of us to the other.

  “Have I said something wrong?—But surely… Gilbert told me he’d… committed suicide—he’d drunk something? You don’t think it was accidental, my dear?”

  There are two schools of thought about Edith St. Martin. One is that she’s a silly, vague and weak-kneed woman, the victim of any persuasive scoundrel, who occasionally by the merest chance does something brilliantly shrewd. The other is that she’s as shrewd as the devil and is vague and weak-kneed by the carefullest possible design. Each school explains Gilbert St. Martin in its own way. Her first husband I’m told belonged to the latter school, and left her in complete charge of a large fortune that’s now larger by half. Her second husband I suspect belonged to the first school when he married her, and now heads the second—though I don’t think he’d ever admit it.

  “I mean… well, it’s hard to see how an accident like that could happen, but then, of course, odd things do happen. My own cousin Admiral Forbes Lawton had a British naval officer visiting him one night and he died the next morning— the British naval officer—and everyone was horribly worried for fear it was the gin and Forbes would die too, but it wasn’t because he’s still alive, as far as that goes. That’s a lovely dress, Iris, and isn’t it nice you’re here, Grace, to sort of stand by as they say in the service. Really, Iris, it’s too dreadful. Now I don’t suppose Lowell will come out this winter, and the cards out and all. It really seems a shame.”

  Edith’s gentle vague patter flowed on and on. If her listeners had to jump like grasshoppers to keep track of what she was saying, the lack of connection was in subject only, never in cadence.

  “You went to the Assembly last night, didn’t you. We didn’t go, poor dear Gilbert had a frightful afternoon with the wife of a new member of some legation, she has the most bizarre taste, and Gilbert’s doing over two rooms for her, and I know the reason he’s there all the time is she’s got the most ravishing daughter I’ve ever seen. Gilbert’s utterly mad about her, I’m sure if I were to die tomorrow he’d marry her before I was cold in my grave… but dear me, I oughtn’t to talk about… Darling, I’m so distressed about poor dear Randall, and to think of Marie going out, just like a candle my dear!”

  We both waited patiently—knowing Edith very well. She inserted a thin Russian cigarette in a long jeweled holder and lighted it.

  “I’m really too upset, to think when I saw her at Count Luigi’s the other evening she was quite well—oh, she said she felt a bit rocky but you know how dear Marie was always feeling worst when she looked most like a fire horse. It just shows, my dear, we should never judge people, and I’m sure she caught cold looking at the night-blooming cereus with old General Ashburton, or maybe they were dancing too long—-I always told Marie a woman of her age simply had to draw the line somewhere. She hadn’t a thing on above the waist, and it’s been cold you know, dear,
it really has. I suppose you’ll go back to New York to live now, Iris darling, Washington must be an awful bore really, when you don’t really belong, and I’m simply making Gilbert take a six months’ vacation, we’re going to the Orient. I’ve been down to see about reservations this morning. Dear Gilbert wants to go immediately, tomorrow—he’s so impulsive when he makes up his mind, nothing can stop him. I know poor dear Randall won’t mind my not going to his funeral.”

  “I’m sure he won’t,” Iris said.

  I wondered vaguely at this flinging of the gauntlet. So she was keeping Gilbert then, even at the expense—which must have been a good deal to Edith—of taking him away for six months at the very beginning of the Season. Still, it wasn’t surprising at all except in view of the astonishing information Lowell had thought she had, that Edith had tried to get Randall to divorce Iris so she and Gilbert could marry. However, that hadn’t made sense from the beginning, so I discarded it promptly for the more realistic statement of her case that Edith had just finished, or at any rate was well into.

  She blew the burned stub of her cigarette out of its jewel-encrusted holder, and put the holder in her bag. She powdered her nose, repaired the slight dent in the thick coating of her lip stick, put her vanity back in her bag and got up.

  “Dear Iris—it’s so marvelous to see you bearing up so wonderfully. You must see she gets out for a little walk, Grace, and a facial, darling; a facial will take that haggard look out of your face, dear, and I don’t think it pays to let yourself go, even in time like these. If dear Gilbert weren’t so rushed I know he’d be glad to take you for a little drive, he’s so wonderful that way, he took my great-aunt Sophie to a movie the other day and she’s so frightfully deaf. I’ll see if I can’t persuade him to come around, dear.”

  “Don’t bother, please, Edith,” Iris said. She got up. “It was sweet of you to come. I know how busy you must be getting ready to leave. I’ll understand your not having time to come in again before you go. Goodbye, my dear.”

  She came back from the door.

  “What is it Mr. McClean says about not letting our private feelings complicate matters? It’s wonderful to have your private feelings so well under your thumb.”

  She walked down to the garden windows and stood looking out. I saw her body stiffen suddenly, and her hand tighten on the looped folds of the gold taffeta curtain. She turned back toward me, and stood there, looking silently at me, her face utterly white.

  I hurried down to her, and looked out. Across the garden, where the snow lay in dirty patches on the sodden grass, were three men. One of them had a spade, and he was digging a hole by the wall. Thrown to one side, trampled in the mud, was a wreath of holly and mistletoe.

  It seemed a strange place to be digging. I looked at Iris, bewildered.

  She stood there very erect and rigid, straightening her shoulders, her face still deathly white, the pupils of her green eyes contracted to pin points in the bright light.

  “It’s the dog,” she whispered. “They’re digging up Senator McGilvray.”

  Her hand tightened until it was white on the curtain.

  “Oh my God, Grace—then he was poisoned… and they know it! How awful! How awful!”

  She stopped abruptly and we both turned at the sound of a voice behind us. Wilkins was standing there. Neither of us had heard him come in.

  “The police are in the garden, madame.”

  His soft voice made my spine curl.

  “Captain Lamb is in the library—will you see him, madame? There’s another gentleman, a Mr. Doyle, with him. He says you expect him. Shall I show him in, madame?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good, madame.—How many will there be to lunch, madame?”

  “Prepare for six, please.”

  He bowed and went out.

  “Why don’t you sack that man?” I demanded.

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “Then I’ll do it for you. He gives me the creeps.”

  She shook her head.

  It happens to be absolutely infuriating to me the way servants and head waiters and hairdressers can and do intimidate women. I couldn’t say definitely what it was about Wilkins that affected me as a snake affects a horse on a country bridle path. It may have been his too steady eyes, his moon-like face and white fat hands, or his silent padded feet. It was something, certainly. I may of course have only fancied there was a veiled insolence in his manner when he spoke to Iris; I can fancy astonishingly unreal things. However, the mere fact that Iris was afraid to fire him was alarming, if all my feeling about him was the result of too little sleep.

  Iris’s cold fingers tightened on my arm.

  “Don’t leave me yet,” she whispered.

  Wilkins opened the door. Captain Lamb came in—tall, lanky, hard blue eyes, long upper lip. Behind him was Belden Doyle, New York criminal lawyer who gets off all his women clients and three-fourths of his men, who prides himself—or so they say—on never having taken a customer he believed was innocent, or cheated the gallows of one he finally believed was guilty. The point, I suppose, being that if he could convince himself he was wrong the jury would be a pushover. I’d known all this, vaguely, but I hadn’t really realized its significance until Belden Doyle came forward silently past Captain Lamb, took Iris’s chin in his hand and looked down penetratingly into her stricken face for a long full moment. It struck me with a horrible sudden clearness that if Colonel Primrose had suggested this man of all possible people, then Iris Nash’s position was just about as dangerous as it was possible for it to be. I think she must have realized it too, just at that moment; she shrank away from him, less in control of herself than I’d yet seen her.

  Doyle turned to Captain Lamb—grave, easy and competent, with his high bulging forehead and huge nose, and the almost hypnotic eyes and long mobile mouth that suggested a supreme actor on a desperate stage.

  “My client understands, Captain, that her husband was poisoned with cyanide of potassium,” he said.

  His voice was mobile too, and even in a sentence like that, spoken with no judge or jury present, evenly and directly and without a sideways glance at anyone, it ranged a whole gamut of theatrical effects, rich and compelling. I couldn’t help but see that stagey as it was, it was awfully, awfully good—for its purpose. But the clear sharp realization of what its purpose was sent a thrill of horror down my spine… for nobody could fail to come to the obvious conclusion, that an innocent person had no need of so superb a defender.

  Iris Nash gasped. I saw her hands grip the arm of the cherry damask wing chair as she steadied herself against it. Captain Lamb could not have seen her, for Belden Doyle was standing just in front of her and very close, quite obviously for the purpose of keeping Captain Lamb from seeing her. And that was a mistake, for unless Iris is a far better actress than I should have thought—or unless Captain Lamb had eyes that could see further into human duplicity than mine—I could have sworn it would have been as obvious to him as to me that that information came to her as a dreadful surprise.

  “It has not as yet been determined—as I understand it— whether that poison was administered by his own hand… or even that it was administered in this house.”

  Doyle moved away, towards Captain Lamb.

  “My client understands of course, Captain, that she will have an opportunity of talking with the District Attorney at the earliest possible moment… as she is of course laboring under the greatest possible anguish in her desire to know what led up to the circumstances of last night. And now, if I may talk to Mrs. Nash in private a few moments…”

  I think Captain Lamb and I were outside in the hall, propelled there with the most extraordinary finesse, before either of us had clearly realized what was about to happen.

  Not, however, before I’d caught the agonized appeal in Iris Nash’s face as she realized she was about to be left alone with him.

  Captain Lamb, outside in the hall, favored me with a brief saturnine grin.


  “Next time they want a gentleman bouncer for the White House…” he said.

  I hardly heard him, for through the open library door I could hear A. J.’s dry precise voice.

  “It’s inconceivable, Mr. Yates. Utterly inconceivable. He was a man of the strongest moral fiber. Oh, I grant you he had a weakness for liquor. That was something apart—like an abscessed limb.”

  It sounded like a convenient sophistry to me. I tried to picture A. J. admitting that a bank robber had fine moral qualities entirely extraneous from his general character as an abscessed limb.

  “He had everything to live for, sir.”

  There was genuine emotion in his voice at that moment. No one, hearing that, could have doubted his devotion to the dead man, or his repugnance at the thought, apparently advanced, that he could have taken his own life.

  My heart sank… and then it sank even lower, for the large and burly figure of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck appeared in the door. The stolid gaze he bent on me was an extraordinary blend of virtually every emotion except the tenderer ones. Disgust, I should think, was paramount, but there was a large dash of resignation and a considerable amount of grim dogged determination. I hadn’t then, and haven’t now, the faintest doubt that Sergeant Buck seriously entertained the notion that I had myself, with my own hand, murdered Randall Nash just for the purpose of having Colonel Primrose in and out of the house when I would be also in and out.

  And to prove that Sergeant Buck’s general air of suspicion was not just my own guilty conscience. Captain Lamb glanced from him to me with blue eyes sharpening warily.

  “I understood you’re a friend of the family, Mrs. …”

  “Latham,” I said.

  “Mrs. Latham?—You were here when they found the body?”

  “Yes.—With Colonel Primrose. I… found it.”

  “You actually found the body?”

  I nodded.

  “But it must have been there for a long time,” I said. “I mean, I really didn’t bring it with me.”

  Sergeant Buck cleared his throat. I don’t know how disapproval could be more effectively expressed. “They’d like to speak to you, ma’am,” he said, of course out of one corner of his mouth.