by Leslie Ford
He lighted another cigarette out of his thin gold case.
“She’s a one-man woman—I know that now. I guess we’ve both learned our lesson.—Funny, isn’t it.”
“It seems pretty funny to me,” I said, which was not the truth. “But maybe that’s the way it is. There’s no accounting for tastes.”
He got up and looked out of the windows again toward the Nash house beyond the garden wall.
“I should think tonight about ten would do.”
“For what?”
“To get Iris over.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And by the way, Grace—I wouldn’t mention those letters. There’s no use complicating things.”
He put on his luxurious camel’s hair overcoat and picked up his hat.
“Well, so long. I may be a little late. Edith’s having some stuffed shirt from some minor legation… greasing the Oriental Limited, I imagine.”
I heard him open the front door and close it, and saw Lilac’s disapproving face in the door.
“Colonel Primrose is coming to lunch,” I said.
A momentary light dawned, and faded.
“Mr. Angus, he’s been callin’ up. Wants you come ovah to his mother’s place right away.—’Deed, Mis’ Grace, an’ Ah hopes you ain’ gettin’ mixed up in no mo’ murders. ’Deed, Julius an’ me both hopes you ain’. Not if we got to have trash like that Mistah St. Martin in an’ out of the house all time.”
“There’s something in what you say, Lilac,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to twelve. “Did Mr. Angus say how long he’d be at home?”
“No, ma’am. He jus’ said he wished you’d come as soon as you could. Ah sen’ fo’ the car, case you’d be needin’ it.”
I nodded. She helped me on with my coat and handed me my gloves and car keys.
“ ’Deed an’ Ah hope Mis’ Nash ain’ gone an’ killed that man lak they say. Seems lak a funny way fo’ intelligent people t’ act.—Sendin’ all th’ servants out the house an’ puttin’ pizen in his drink.”
Lilac’s sources of information are unknown to me, but they’re always up to the moment and generally pretty accurate.
“They got plenty money t’ bury him with, an’ that’s one consolation,” she added, opening the door for me. “Seems funny, both of ’em goin’ out same time—lak the Lawd he didn’ have no use fo’ one of ’em ’thout the othah.”
Marie Nash’s house is the ornate Renaissance stone mansion just above Rock Creek Drive on the left hand of Massachusetts Avenue. Its terraced gardens in the back run down into the narrow valley and overlook the opposite hills of Montrose at the upper end of Georgetown where R Street curves into 28th. As the crow flies it’s a short minute from my house in P Street to hers. Not being a crow I had to turn off P Street, drive down under the P and Q Street Bridges along the tiny river and come up into Massachusetts Avenue, which took about six minutes, actually, as I didn’t have to wait for the light at the top of the park drive.
Henry the Japanese butler opened the elaborate iron grilled door and let me in. “Mr. Angus is in the drawing room, madame.”
“I’ll go up,” I said. I gave him my coat and went up the Italian marble staircase with its walls lined with modern French watercolors. At the top I turned into the small elegantly furnished room at the right, with silk paneled walls and carved rose marble fireplace.
Angus was sitting hunched down on the small of his back in a cushioned divan between the windows. There were cigarette ashes all over the gorgeous carpet at his feet. Lowell was lying on her stomach on a long Empire sofa, her chin in her hands. Angus got to his feet and came to meet me. Lowell didn’t move.
“The police have been here,” he said shortly. “They say my father was poisoned.”
“I could have told them that.” Lowell’s voice was strained, hard-surfaced.
“They’re asking a lot of questions about Mother.”
“About your mother?” I demanded.
His lips twitched as he turned quickly away.
“That’s rot,” Lowell said bitterly. “She had flu, she went out in the snow without any clothes on to speak of, and she got pneumonia. She wasn’t poisoned.—The lovely Iris hasn’t been around here, has she?”
Lowell flushed. She sat up quickly. “Or has she?”
“She hasn’t.”
He hesitated, and added deliberately, “Father has. He was here before they took her to the hospital.”
Lowell swung her feet to the floor and sat, her taut body erect, red lips set.
“Can you tell me what that’s got to do with anything?”
Angie Nash whirled toward her, his freckled face white. “Listen,” I said quickly. “When you two young idiots stop jumping down each other’s throats maybe we can make some sense out of all this.”
I downed a maddening desire to poison both of them.
“I know,” Lowell said hotly. “But he’s trying to pretend Father came over here and murdered my mother and went home and killed himself—that’s what he’s doing, and I won’t stand it!”
“Just because you happen to hate Iris, you’re doing your damndest to make everybody believe she did it, just because you’re a spiteful, jealous little rat!”
They stared at each other furiously for an instant, Lowell speechless for one of the few times in her life. Then she rallied.
“You’re in love with her too,” she said. Her voice was dreadful with contempt and hatred. “She makes a fool of every man that comes near her. My father, you and Mac, everybody. Steve Donaldson’s the only one of you that can see through her. He knows she’s nothing but a… a mercenary gold digger. That’s what she is!”
“Well,” I said, “I’m going home.”
She caught me at the door.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Grace! I didn’t mean that… quite. But don’t you see—she must have done it! Nobody else wanted Father out of the way… and if anybody’d poison a dog they’d just as soon poison a person!”
“You don’t know she poisoned your dog!” Angie said. He’d got control of himself. “You don’t even know he was poisoned in the first place.”
I suppose it would have begun all over again if Mac hadn’t come in just then. He went straight over to Lowell. “Gee, I’m sorry about your mother!” He took her hand.
Her face flushed. Suddenly she held out her free hand to Angie. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “I’m… I guess I’m upset.”
She went over to him and put her arms around him. Mac looked on awkwardly, pretty much upset himself. A plain indication of it that must have annoyed his uncle, I thought, was a nice yellow tie he had on with an otherwise quite sober dark blue suit. It gave his troubled earnest face an irresistibly comic air of spurious gaiety.
“Are you two staying here, or are you going over to Beall Street?” I asked practically.
Angie hesitated. Lowell wiped her eyes with her sleeve and blew her nose. “She doesn’t want me over there.”
“Odd of her,” I said. “Considering what a pleasant sweet-tempered little thing you are. Still, she’ll probably put up with you. You can come to my place if you want to.”
Colonel Primrose was waiting in the drawing room when I came in. He was sitting in a straight chair he’d pulled up to the small table in front of the sofa where Gilbert St. Martin had been sitting.
“What is this nonsense about Marie?” I demanded.
He got up, straightening his rheumatic knee with a deprecatory grin.
“No importance. Somebody at Headquarters who doesn’t believe in coincidences figured it was odd that both of them should cash in at the same time. Marie died of acute lobar pneumonia. Nothing in her stomach but calves foot jelly and milk toast. It looks as if she was just put in to make it harder.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. I pressed the bell by the door.
“I told Lilac to make some dry Martinis, by the way. She said you’d gone to see Angus and Lowell. I figured you’d need a bracer
.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I said, and regretted it instantly, of course.
He smiled. Then his face sobered instantly. Lilac set the tray on the table and tiptoed out. Colonel Primrose poured two cocktails, held up his glass and emptied it at a swallow. He set it down.
“The dog, however,” he said deliberately, “—was poisoned.”
I felt for just a moment as if a cold hand was closing in on my heart.
“Not… really?”
He nodded.
“Oh, how awful!”
“And by cyanide of potassium, Mrs. Latham. Given in candy, apparently. They can’t tell exactly yet. They’ve sent the carcass to the laboratory for analysis.”
He poured another cocktail and sipped it.
“In fact, Mrs. Latham—as you can’t help but see too—it all looks peculiarly bad. Captain Lamb’s been very much on the job, of course, and Lowell’s contributed very handsomely. Many choice items out of the daily life of the family.”
“Is everything she blurts out taken as gospel?” I demanded hotly.
“No, no. Lamb’s got a daughter of the same age. However—as I’ve heard at least two dozen times this morning—it shows which way the wind blows. Also which way the cat jumps.”
“I can see it does that—up to a point.”
He nodded very soberly.
“You see, Mrs. Latham, it’s generally known—just to begin with—that Randall Nash went all to pieces suddenly, about something, and took to drink again. When he was drunk he was violent and dangerous. There’s no doubt he made life little short of hell for his second wife. Now all this seems to have started round midsummer—after Iris came back from a month at Cape Cod and began doing the house over. It corresponds closely—which is bad too—with her renewed association with Gilbert St. Martin, who helped to do the house.”
He paused deliberately and surveyed me with placid composure.
“It seems to correspond also with a series of anonymous letters.”
I looked as blank as I could, but it wasn’t blank enough. “Hello!” he said quietly. “You know about them?”
I shook my head quickly. His face went a shade soberer, so I realized I’d been pretty transparent. However, he has X-Ray eyes anyway, as I’ve known for some time.
“Well, there are such letters. They’re printed with a toy printing set. But I see you know all this…”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Not really. I mean, I didn’t know Randall Nash had been getting them… Are there many?”
“About one a week since September,” he said drily. “Maybe before that. The first two or three are crumpled—as if his first impulse had been to tear them up. It would appear to indicate he had destroyed some.”
“What did they say?”
“They suggested—strongly—that she was conducting a clandestine affair with St. Martin. Lamb’s trying to track them down. They were in a manila envelope in the wall safe in Randall’s dressing room—together with a batch of old letters from Iris to St. Martin, written before he married Edith.—He was apparently insanely jealous.”
“I’d gathered that,” I said. I told him about the story of the vault. “It seemed so gratuitous, somehow,” I said. “As if he was warning her… Gilbert wasn’t there, of course, and I don’t suppose it had occurred to him that Steve Donaldson was interested in Iris. He was Lowell’s friend.”
An idea struck me suddenly.
“Listen, Colonel Primrose. Do you suppose he could have killed himself in a jealous rage, just to hurt Iris? That Christmas Eve when he told the story about the vault he talked about refinements of cruelty known only to people in love.”
He poured a watery Martini and looked at it for a long time, shaking his head slowly. “It… would be very hard to prove, Mrs. Latham.”
“Isn’t it going to be hard to prove Iris poisoned him too?”
He downed his cocktail and looked at me steadily, a sardonic glint in his black eyes.
“I… hope so,” he said at last. “I dare say Mr. Belden Doyle is counting on it—together with a beautiful face. But my dear Mrs. Latham—it must be perfectly clear to you that just now it looks as if it’s going to be very simple. In fact it’s so simple that Lamb’s a little puzzled. There’s a chain of circumstantial evidence against her that’s going to take a lot of explaining.”
He went on over the fat juicy Lynhavens Lilac had provided for her favorite guest—while I had my clear soup with a slice of lemon in it.
“Her motive is very plain. Fear, of course, plus the desire to be free to go back to Gilbert St. Martin. Furthermore, she gains handsomely by Randall’s death, financially. She gets a third of his property if he died before Marie, half of it if Marie died first. The point’s not determined yet. Anyway, Randall has paid income tax on $49,900 the last three years. McClean told us that this morning. They lived comparatively simply.”
Lilac came in with country ham steak and spoon bread. I suffered, watching him, while I consumed a vegetable salad and melba toast.
He went on slowly, almost painfully, I thought; and a chill seemed to me to settle down over my dining room as he did.
“That isn’t important, really, Mrs. Latham, compared with what seems actually to have happened last night. They had a scene—reported by both Lowell and Wilkins, who I take it listens at keyholes when he hasn’t anything else to do. Randall, according to the two of them independently, told Iris he’d never give her freeedom as long as he lived. He left the house. We don’t know just where he went yet. He got to A. J.’s house about 10:30. He phoned you, sometime later. He came home after twelve. There was a tray on his desk, with whiskey and soda on it. Wilkins expresses great surprise at Iris for leaving it there. She’d let all the servants go; she was herself the last person to leave the house. Wilkins returned shortly before Randall got in, and saw him make a definite effort to resist drinking—in fact he ordered the tray taken away, and then rang for it to be brought back. Sometime between the time Wilkins returned with the tray and the time we came in, he consumed enough cyanide of potassium to kill him.”
“Couldn’t he have taken it of his own accord?” I asked earnestly.
He nodded.
“It’s possible of course. Consider the rest of Lamb’s case.—Iris went into the library, when we got back; you and I standing there in the hall waiting for her. Donaldson going on into the drawing room. She says she didn’t see Randall’s body lying there—but the fact that she was badly upset when she was in the kitchen with me, a little later, is suggestive. In fact she was upset all the evening—particularly when she first came to your house if you’ll remember.”
I avoided meeting his glance. I remembered it very clearly.
“At any rate, she did go into the library, picked up the glass, put it on the tray and brought the tray, with the whiskey and the soda syphon, out into the hall. She took the glass and syphon out to the kitchen. I went with her. She washed the glass, dried it and put it away. She then rinsed the syphon out, filled it with fresh water and charged it. We came back and joined you two in front of the fire, and Iris spent the next couple of hours having a drink or two out of the decanter she’d taken from Randall’s desk.—The point being sufficiently clear, I take it, that the whiskey in the decanter was not poisoned.”
He stopped for a moment and went on still more gravely, looking at me across the table.
“And that, unfortunately, is not all. Wilkins says he has never known Iris to wash a glass in the evening before. The syphon she had herself prepared earlier—before she came over here. He saw her do that. She sent him into the living room while she was doing it, telling him she was bringing back some guests after the Assembly and to leave a tray for them.”
He took another large helping of spoon bread and watched the enormous golden piece of butter melt slowly on it.
“And Iris doesn’t deny a single one of all these statements, Mrs. Latham. She told Belden Doyle, in my presence, that they are
all true and correct.—And even that, unfortunately, isn’t all. There is no trace of poison in any of Randall’s pockets, or on the skin of his hands, and there is no sign of any around the desk, to point to suicide.”
I stirred uneasily. “And Iris, I suppose,” I inquired caustically, or so I intended, “has large quantities of cyanide all over the place?”
“No,” he said. “Just a small quantity. She had a solution of cyanide of potassium, labelled ‘Metal Cleaner,’ in the medicine chest in her bathroom. Her fingerprints and nobody else’s are on it. They are quite fresh prints, Mrs. Latham.”
He stopped again.
“And moreover, my dear… that bottle with its contents was given to her less than a week ago.-—You’ll be surprised to know, by Mr. Stephen Donaldson.”
9
The picture of Stephen Donaldson, gaunt-eyed and intense, asking me if it was cyanide Randall Nash was poisoned with, flashed into my mind.
“What on earth would he be giving her cyanide of potassium for?” I demanded.
“It’s a point the police are interested in,” Colonel Primrose said.
We had left the lunch table and were back in the sitting room that opens into the garden. Beyond the wall the white-corniced pediment of the Nash house in Beall Street loomed, its slate roof glistening silver in the winter sun.
“Iris says he gave it to her to clean an evening bag made of plaited gold braid that had got badly tarnished.”
“That sounds reasonable enough to me,” I said. “She does have a bag made out of gold braid. Where did Steve Donaldson get it?”
“He’s attorney for a chemical combine that keeps a few smart legal chaps sitting around the Capitol—watching its interests, so to speak. He got it from their Baltimore laboratories. It is used in cleaning, you know.”
I did know, recalling a case at one of the Navy bases. A colored man working in a pressing plant where it was used for cleaning gold decorations on officers’ uniforms got it mixed up with a bottle of gin he had parked near it, and was carried out feet first a minute later.
