The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  “That was a close squeak,” I heard a truck driver along me say.

  “Old bird must be blind,” his mate said. “I saw a guy killed—”

  I didn’t hear any more. It would have been dreadful if A. J. had been killed then, I thought—following so close after Marie Nash’s death in the hospital and the poisoning of Randall Nash. Then I wondered irrelevantly if they’d arrested Iris.

  10

  Several cars were parked in front of the house in Beall Street. I nosed in between a couple and went up the brick steps. The multi-colored Christmas bulbs still decking the dark magnolia trees looked strangely like evening makeup at ten in the morning. I rang the bell, expecting automatically to see Wilkins, and rather taken aback at seeing the square granite bulk of Sergeant Buck framed in the fluted white door posts, regarding me with very fishy eyes.

  “May I see Mrs. Nash?” I asked.

  I think he was about to say no when Colonel Primrose came out of the library with Captain Lamb.

  “Come in,” he said. “Iris was just telephoning you.”

  He opened the drawing room door. Iris was sitting alone in front of the fire. She had a white leather-topped bridge table in front of her with papers on it. She put down her pen and got up, took my hand and squeezed it.

  “Thanks for coming!” she said.

  Her face had got thinner, it seemed to me, and more transparent, so that her finely modelled bones almost showed through. Her eyes were grey; all the green fire had gone out of them. She looked very tired.

  “Would you like me to stay on?” I asked.

  “I’d love it. I didn’t like to ask you.”

  She smiled ironically. “—Not knowing my present status.”

  She turned to Colonel Primrose.

  “I understand from Mr. Doyle that I’m not supposed to talk unless he’s here…”

  There was the trace of a smile on her lips as she twisted her handkerchief in her hands. “But I do want to say this. It probably sounds very odd… but that accusation that I poisoned Lowell’s dog offends me more than… than that I poisoned my husband.”

  I looked up at Colonel Primrose, and as I did my eyes went to the great stone face immediately behind him. Sergeant Buck always, in normal circumstances, stood immediately behind him. It gave the general air of an oddly respectful but protective subordination, the Colonel being in front but the Sergeant standing a whole head and half a neck higher and bulging out at least three inches beyond him on either side— and always appealed to me as having something rather nice about it, someway, and also as being irresistibly comic. I wondered suddenly how Sergeant Buck was taking all this. I remembered Colonel Primrose telling me once that his guard, philosopher and friend had at some time in his life been trussed up by Nature and dipped into a vat of liquid granite… and no one but Colonel Primrose had ever guessed how thin the coating had dried, especially around the heart, or how easy it was for large fissures to gape when the Sergeant was confronted—for instance—with a lovely woman in distress. Knowing everything about the perfidy and untrustworthiness of women as a whole, Sergeant Buck was a pushover for any one in particular—as long as matrimony for Colonel Primrose—or himself—was definitely out.

  So I wondered a little. He was looking down at Iris Nash as I glanced up, and I thought I could detect the molten lava of sentiment welling up in the fishy grey eyes and the rock-ribbed countenance. I wondered suddenly how he was going to manage when he saw Lowell.

  “It was my understanding you didn’t like the dog,” Captain Lamb said stolidly.

  “I loathed the beast. He was old and obese and crochety. But Lowell adored him—she’d had him since he was a satiny little pup—and I understood exactly how she felt. Anyway, I just can’t imagine poisoning a dog—no matter how old and horrible he was.”

  “Lowell maintains,” Colonel Primrose said quietly, “that she saw you feeding him candy. Is——”

  “That’s quite true. I shouldn’t have. But he kept looking up at me, and touching my dress ever so lightly with his paw, and sneezing softly to remind me I was forgetting him, so I… I gave him a piece of chocolate. He and I weren’t really as great enemies as both of us pretended. When Lowell wasn’t here he spent all his time, when he wasn’t sleeping, waddling around after me.”

  She smiled and shrugged her slim dark shoulders.

  “It’s rather paradoxical, but, objecting to him as I did, I’d got sort of attached to him. We understood each other perfectly. He had a nice sense of humor—spaniels do, you know. He knew all about the feud between his mistress and me.”

  “You admit there is one?” Captain Lamb said suddenly.

  “Oh, it’s too obvious to try to conceal.”

  “When did you last see the dog, Iris?” Colonel Primrose asked. Under Sergeant Buck’s grim frozen face he looked pleasantly and amiably tropical, in some way—as if he ought to be wearing a panama and sipping a mint julep.

  “I’ve been trying to remember. I think it was after dinner. Mac and Mr. Donaldson stayed, and the two of them and Lowell went somewhere about nine o’clock. It seems to me I remember hearing Lowell say he wasn’t to go, and Mac bringing him back inside. I was on my way upstairs. Wilkins was coming down; he picked him up, and I thought he put him in here, with my husband and Mrs. St. Martin, who’d come in a few minutes before.”

  “That would be just around nine o’clock?”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t remember seeing him again?”

  “No. I thought I heard him wheezing later that evening here in this room. I remember getting up and looking back there behind the Christmas tree, because he was getting on my nerves. But I didn’t see him. I supposed he was under a chair somewhere. I turned on the radio to drown him out.”

  “And no one else was here that night?”

  I waited… holding my breath. Iris’s grey eyes went a little green, and met Colonel Primrose’s as frankly as the summer dawn.

  “No one,” she said.

  The picture of her and Gilbert St. Martin standing at the foot of the stairs, and her husband leaning over the upstairs bannister, listening, and Gilbert raising her hand to his lips, went through my memory in slow motion.

  “And the servants?” Colonel Primrose inquired.

  “They were all out that night.”

  “You let them off a good deal, Mrs. Nash?” Captain Lamb said.

  “They’re on duty from seven-thirty every morning. Their evenings are their own, except the nights they relieve Wilkins. That’s very seldom; he prefers staying in.”

  I noticed them, as I’d noticed before, that every time she mentioned the butler her eyes sharpened to green and her lips tightened.

  “Ah yes,” Colonel Primrose said. “The butler.”

  He took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  His eyes fixed sharply on her face. The dark pupils of her eyes contracted suddenly as she looked at it.

  “A great deal,” she said quietly.

  “Well… would you mind explaining why you thought it necessary to take the rather unusual step—surely—of having a detective watch Wilkins, Iris?”

  I caught my breath sharply. She nodded. “I suppose it is unusual,” she said steadily. “But… I didn’t understand him, and I didn’t trust him. I tried twice to have my husband discharge him. He refused. I came to the conclusion that Wilkins had some kind of fantastic influence over him, or… or something. So I simply wanted to know what it was.”

  “It was not simply because Wilkins was keeping your husband informed about your own movements?”

  Her eyes blazed green as emeralds. Her pale gold skin went deeper gold.

  A sudden harsh voice, oddly anxious, spoke hastily.

  “You don’t need to talk without that lawyer here, miss!”

  I think we all started, especially Colonel Primrose. He cocked his head down and shot a bright glance up at his rock-visaged Sergeant. It must have been as
near as mutiny had ever come to rearing its ugly head in their long association.

  “Mrs. Nash knows that, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant!” Iris said. Her voice crackled like an electric spark along a naked copper wire. I felt grateful to him myself, almost.

  “I did know Wilkins was following me everywhere I went, Colonel Primrose.”

  She met his gaze squarely.

  “I knew also that my husband never believed me when I told him quite truthfully where I’d been. I gathered from that that Wilkins—or somebody—was giving him false information about me. I hadn’t any proof of it—only a sudden terrible change in his whole mental and emotional outlook.”

  She was leaning forward, and talking, I noticed, to Sergeant Buck, not to Colonel Primrose at all.

  “I didn’t realize what was happening, not even one day when I asked him to get rid of Wilkins and he froze up and said he’d been expecting that. When I asked him what on earth he meant he said he’d become used to having his wishes and rights ignored. I thought at first he simply meant he wanted to hire and fire the servants himself. It seemed so incredible… and then I began to be more and more conscious of a sort of insolence in Wilkins. I asked Randall again to let him go, and it was then I began to realize the full extent of what was going on. That’s when I hired the detective. I met a young man who’s with the Federal Bureau of Investigation at a tea one afternoon. He told me a man to go to. It sounds ridiculous, I suppose, but… I was frightened, Colonel Primrose. Randall kept encouraging me to go out evenings without him; he quit going anywhere himself. Whenever I came back, even from cocktails in the afternoon, I’d hear Wilkins come in a few minutes later and go to the library where Randall was. If I happened to be there too he would stop short at the door, look surprised, say ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ and go. I’d see Randall simply writhing, waiting for me to go so he could hear Wilkins’s report.

  “And that wasn’t the worst of it. Several times at night Wilkins knocked oh my door. When I opened it he’d say ‘Did you ring, madame?’, with a look on his face as if he was surprised at seeing me there. He phoned me once that Molly, one of the maids, was ill in the servants’ quarters and would I come. The girl was perfectly well. When I came back Randall had been in my room. I know he didn’t believe I’d been to see Molly.”

  She threw her cigarette into the fire. Colonel Primrose’s eyes rested steadily on her face.

  “Then recently I’ve been simply terrified. He’s been talking constantly about that horrible vault, and his ancestor who locked a faithless wife with her lover and her maid in it, to die there.”

  She shuddered, her face white and frozen with remembered fear.

  “I’d just got so I couldn’t bear being here alone—I never knew half the time whether the nightmares I had every time I closed my eyes were real or false. I could see myself locked in that vault, under the wall, with Wilkins there… watching me die. I never saw my lover, whoever he was supposed to be. Just Wilkins. And then, when I began to lock my door at night, somebody took the key.”

  Her voice throbbed, passionate with resentment. I glanced at Sergeant Buck. It was impossible to tell about Colonel Primrose, though I thought even he was impressed. But one look at the Sergeant was enough to tell me she’d made one convert, at least.

  “Why did you stay on, Iris?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly.

  She smiled a little.

  “There were two reasons. I don’t expect you to believe either of them. One was that I didn’t want to leave Lowell here. None of this had touched her, but I was afraid it would.—I’ve seen Wilkins look at her at the table. I could see him in the glass over the mantle. Once or twice when she happened to catch him she’d smile, perfectly frank and friendly and unconscious of how really lovely she is. I had the feeling that if I went something might happen to her. He… he so definitely seemed to have an influence over Randall.”

  She leaned forward, took the short cocoa fiber broom mechanically and brushed back a coal that had fallen on the marble hearth.

  “The other reason was my husband. I thought he was being… deluded, and… I got the notion, demented I suppose, that if I could unmask this man…”

  She laughed. “It sounds like fifth-rate melodrama. But that’s what I thought. He might be himself again.”

  Captain Lamb spoke abruptly. “Why didn’t you fire the man first thing this morning?”

  “Oh, it would just have given him a chance to say the obvious thing—I was kicking him out because he knew too much. I should think that’s what he wanted. And then, I’m still afraid of him, but… in a different way, now.”

  Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and looked around at Sergeant Buck. He jerked his thumb toward the door. Sergeant Buck strode out. It’s always curious to me how he manages to give the air of a complicated but decisive military maneuver even to that. You got the impression of a whole line of marching men, on the double quick.

  We sat silently, waiting. Something flickered in Iris’s green eyes. I saw Colonel Primrose watching her. After a moment he looked at his watch, and around at Captain Lamb, who scowled and looked at his own watch. Then we heard Sergeant Buck returning. He had the butler’s black coat and trousers in his hands. “Looks like he’d pulled out, sir.”

  Captain Lamb went out into the hall. I could hear his heavy voice rapping out orders.

  11

  Iris took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. She looked like a woman with an unbearable load taken off her back. She put down the hearth broom and got up. Captain Lamb returned; he and Colonel Primrose went down to the garden windows, talking in low tones.

  Iris looked at the French clock on the mantel, then at the Sergeant. “Do you think Colonel Primrose would like a whiskey and soda?”

  The granite surface of Sergeant Buck’s visage crumbled still more.

  “Sure, miss. I never knew him when he wouldn’t.”

  She pressed the bell at the side of the fireplace, looking up at me. “I suppose one of the maids is there.”

  A door closed somewhere in the back and in another moment we heard steps across the dining room floor. The door opened, and in it stood Wilkins, in mufti… if you can call brown herringbone worsted and bright tan shoes mufti. There was an oddly indefinable expression on his plump white face. I thought he looked more startled and embarrassed than anything else.

  “I’m sorry, madame, but my clothes have…”

  His voice died out as he spotted his black suit and starched white dickey on the chair where the Sergeant had put them. He blinked down at them. Sergeant Buck’s face congealed ten degrees; his great hands closed ominously as he moved a step toward the man. I was greatly relieved when Colonel Primrose, coming quickly from the end of the room, coughed significantly. Sergeant Buck, in spite of some twenty-five years in the Army, is still as rugged as individualists come. Perhaps because of it, having been a top sergeant and a heavyweight champion, and at present owning, so Colonel Primrose told me, by virtue of thrift plus skill at various well-known Army games, sufficient rows of houses, stores and filling stations in California to bring him well into the ranks of the economic royalists. I remembered Colonel Primrose’s telling me once that at the beginning of the depression he’d tried to go into the accounts of their joint household, and that Sergeant Buck had been so deeply offended at what he regarded as conduct unworthy an officer and a gentleman that the Colonel was forced to apologize in the most abject fashion and go on living at a rate he knew he couldn’t possibly afford.

  Sergeant Buck proceeded to the door and planted himself massively in front of it.

  “We were just looking for you, Wilkins,” Colonel Primrose said pleasantly.

  “I stepped out to post a letter, sir. Mr. Nash gave it to me last night, with express instructions that it must be posted at all costs.”

  He cast an almost imperceptible glance at Iris. It was just the sort of thing that Colonel Primrose would catch without looking.

  “With
out anyone knowing about it, sir.”

  “I see.—Who was the letter addressed to, please?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. I am not in the habit of prying into my employer’s affairs.”

  I heard a subdued snarl from the doorway, and Colonel Primrose cleared his throat again, hastily. Not until Wilkins had moved at least a foot nearer Captain Lamb.

  “Very proper,” Colonel Primrose said politely. “Now, there are one or two little questions… You say in your evidence, which I have been reading, that you left the house with Mr. Nash at four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

  My head whirled a little. It seemed so infinitely longer ago than yesterday that all this had begun to happen that I thought at first he must be talking about something else.

  “Yes, sir. I left the house about four. Mr. Nash didn’t keep a regular driver, as Madame and Miss Nash both preferred to drive their own cars.”

  “And you went…”

  “We went at once to Mrs. Lowell Nash’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, sir. I waited in the car while Mr. Nash went in. He was gone twenty-five minutes, and when he came out he got in the car without telling me where to go- I waited a few moments, and asked him. He looked startled and said to drive through the park. I did so. We had just crossed the ford on the other side when he leaned forward and said to go to 2491 P Street.”

  I stared open-mouthed at Colonel Primrose—for that’s his address. His face was inscrutable. The police may have known this, of course, but it was a surprise to me.