The Simple Way of Poison

by Leslie Ford

  He nodded.

  We walked along a couple of blocks.

  “On the right, sir,” Sergeant Buck said menacingly. “There’s Frelson by the plug.”

  I followed the direction of their eyes. A man smoking a cigarette by the fire plug under the street lamp in front of a saddle store tossed it into the gutter and ambled over to a dingy doorway with carved fluted pillars, painted dark brown so it was hard to see how lovely they were. The exquisite tracery of the fan light was brown too. A tattered sign nailed to the slender columns said “Rooms by the Day or Week.”

  The door was open. A mangy fox terrier sat blinking in it, up beyond him yawned a dark ill-smelling stairway lit by a single naked bulb, its delicate rail grimy with dirt and lumpy with wads of chewing gum.

  I followed Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck. They trod softly on the creaking stairs. The fox terrier yapped halfheartedly a couple of times and gave it up, obviously not really caring who came or went out of that dismal place. I had realized, of course, that we were coming to see Lavinia Fawcett. I don’t know just when it dawned on me, or why it hadn’t sooner, after what I’d told Colonel Primrose when Lowell left us. But then I realized that this expedition had nothing to do with what I’d told him. It didn’t take half an eye to see, for one thing, that Mr. Frelson had been leaning on that fire plug for years—or so you’d think, he looked so much a part of it. So it was apparent then that even before I’d told him, Colonel Primrose, and no doubt Captain Lamb, had seen that Lavinia was in some way mixed up in this. I was vaguely disturbed, for some reason. Possibly it was a sort of conceit; I didn’t like to think Colonel Primrose had a whole body of information he wasn’t hinting at to me. If I had known then how much information he really had, and that I could have had too if I’d been as clever as I thought—or rather that I really did have without knowing it—I probably would have been more than disturbed, I’d have been definitely chagrined.

  At the last step before the first landing they stopped, and I stopped too. And then I saw, somewhat to my dismay, that they hadn’t brought me along because they liked the color of my hair at all. I, it appeared, was to be a sort of copper’s nark. That was apparent the moment Sergeant Buck stood ominously aside so I could see Colonel Primrose’s beckoning finger and respond to it.

  “I Want you to go in and talk to her,” he said quietly. “Try to get her to go out with you if you can. You may not be able to do it. But find out anything you can. Keep your eyes open. We’ll be right here.”

  “Say, listen!” I said, in the exact idiom of my younger son. Then I saw the fishy eyes of Sergeant Buck on me, and gave in. “Oh, all right,” I said. “Thank you for the—”

  “It’s the second door back,” Mr. Frelson said. I hadn’t noticed till then that he’d followed us up. He talked out of the corner of his mouth too, but I saw that was possibly because he had a scar painted on it. Heaven only knew why they thought poor old Lavinia was worth all that artistry. I’m afraid I still didn’t see, in spite of the fact that two men had died of poison, that this was a ghastly and terrible crime we were dealing with, and that the stake was high enough, the criminal bold enough—and desperate enough by this time—to stop at nothing. If later no one of us that was left ever put a bite of food in his mouth, for some time at least, without sending up a prayer on swift small wings, it wasn’t because we were cowards as because we’d learned the lesson that Colonel Primrose had been patiently trying to teach me since the night I found Randall Nash lying grinning-dead on the floor of the house in Beall Street.

  I went down the dark evil-smelling hall, damp with the mists from the Potomac and black with the smoke and coal dust of half a century. A single drop light with a fly-specked bulb hung in the center. I tapped on the next to the last door and waited. A little of what a terrified ten-year-old girl must have felt, shaking there in the dim cold passage, came over me. I thought how strange it would seem to Randall Nash if he could know that sending his child on an errand of mercy to salve his own troubled conscience had stained a thin sharp wedge of her life so deeply and terribly that she’d never in all her days be free of it… so that he who loved her probably more than anyone ever would again had hurt her the most.

  I was thinking that, and hearing at the same time behind the dark brown, grease-spotted door the curious shuffling that I associated with Lavinia and a pair of snakes my older son used to keep in a box by the garden wall. I never worked in the rock garden by the little pool without hearing them slithering back and forth, and feeling sorry for the birds who came to drink and flew away after one short cool sip had trickled down their throbbing feathered throats. I could hear her plainly now, inside there, slithering about, sniffling. I guessed she must be putting something away—her bottle, probably, thinking it might be a lady from St. Timothy’s. It seemed a very long time that I stood there. It may not have been; time is such a subjective thing. At last I knew she was close to me, just on the other side. I stepped back a little. In the dim strip of light under the door I could see her shadow. She must have been bending down, listening.

  “It’s Mrs. Latham, Miss Lavinia,” I called.

  The shadow at the bottom disappeared. I could hear her shuffle away. I tapped again. I heard a door close, and wondered about it; I’d thought she had only one room. It might be a cupboard, of course. I tapped again, and then I heard her voice. “I’m coming, as fast as I can.” She was at the door again. I heard a key rattle in the lock, the loose brown crockery handle turned, and the door opened, about an inch.

  “What do you want?” she asked suspiciously.

  For a moment I couldn’t think of anything at all to say, not wanting anything, and furthermore being so used to the fawning ingratiating manner she’d always had when we met on the street.

  “I just wanted to see you,” I said, scrabbling desperately in my mind to think of something. “—About Mrs. Nash. What would you like her to do for you?”

  She was peering out at me through the crack between door and trim, for all the world like a Cyclops just returned from the witches’ Sabbath. But in that single eye I saw I’d hit the proper note.

  “So she sent you, did she?” Miss Lavinia whined. She opened the door. “Come in. It’s always a pleasure to see people that’d be my friends if I’d had my rights.”

  I stepped inside.

  “I thought she’d come back herself. She can’t expect me to stay here waiting on her. She said she’d come back at half-past four, but she didn’t. She must have come when I was out.”

  I must have looked as astonished as I felt. She grinned cunningly. “She didn’t tell you she’d been here. She’s too fine to let people know, is she. Well, what does she say?—She thinks nobody’ll take care of me now Mr. A. J.’s dead. But she’s wrong about that.”

  “Oh dear!” I thought dismally. What on earth could Iris Nash, cool, lovely and detached, have to do here? I looked about the room. It was cleaner than I’d thought it would be, except that every available place was piled with old clothes. I recognized a tweed coat I’d got in Edinburgh just after the war, and a print dress I’d spilled ink on so that the color came out when it was cleaned. I recognized lots of my friends’ clothes too. None of them obviously had ever been worn by Lavinia. In fact the room looked exactly like a private rummage sale.

  “Sit down,” she said. She started to clear a chair.

  “Don’t bother, I’ll sit here.”

  I perched on the edge of the table, covered with a white oilcloth and quite clean under the drop light with its red fringed shade.

  “I thought you might like to go out and go over to see Mrs. Nash with me,” I said, rather craftily. I told myself there wasn’t much more harm I could do at this point, and I might get her away and intercept Iris before she came back here and ran into the grim triumvirate on the stairs.

  She looked at me more craftily still.

  “Is that what she wants?”

  I couldn’t look her squarely in the face. She was standing th
ere, her back to a medicine chest nailed crookedly over a cheap white wash stand with a hole where the hot water tap should have been. I looked down and started to say “Yes.”

  And just as I did my eye caught a mark on the white oil cloth, and the word froze on my lips. Staring at me from that table was a blur of purple ink, and in it I saw “Wis—”, printed in block letters… the “W” upside down.

  I looked up, open-mouthed. Lavinia’s eyes had followed mine; they were fixed there on the telltale letters on the white oil cloth; and I could see dawning slowly in her drink-befogged mind the awful meaning they had for me. We were motionless there for a moment in that little room with the clothes piled about everywhere… and then, while I sat there petrified, staring at her, unable to move or speak, she screamed hideously and darted across the room and leaped at me, frantically, scratching, snarling, clawing. I hadn’t been able to get down from the table, and it was probably a good thing, for just in the most involuntary self-defense I raised my foot and gave her a lunge in the stomach that sent her winding, off balance, against a chair covered with clothes.

  I couldn’t scream or shout. My throat seemed to be tied in paralyzed knots. I’d got halfway to the door when she was up again. She picked up the chair and raised it, her face contorted with horrible fury. I dodged as the chair came hurtling across the room. It struck the door with a splintering crash, and after it Lavinia came, shuffling like some obscene beast in the jungle stalking its prey. As I look back on it now I wasn’t terrified really as much as nauseated. Then I could hear steps pounding toward me—they couldn’t help but hear—and then they were in the room just as Miss Lavinia was on me again, and I saw Sergeant Buck’s great ham-like hands close on her arms as she kicked and scratched at him.

  I closed my eyes and turned my head away, just next to being very sick. I knew without looking that it was Colonel Primrose’s shoulder my head was buried against, and he was saying, “My dear, my dear! I’m so terribly sorry! Please forgive me!” and there was an intensity in his voice that I hadn’t heard there before. I felt very secure—too secure, I’m afraid, for Sergeant Buck’s good. So I raised my head promptly and smiled.

  “Oh, it’s quite all right! Anytime I can do anything else for you…”

  Colonel Primrose looked at me very earnestly, and shook his head. “Please don’t!” he said.

  “Oh, I’m only doing it for Sergeant Buck,” I answered— quite truthfully, I’m afraid.

  We were alone in Miss Lavinia’s room. I could still hear her screeching and kicking outside as they took her down the stairs.

  Colonel Primrose still looked at me. “I am terribly sorry, my dear,” he said. “I… I didn’t want her to know she was being watched. That’s why I thought you could help us. I never dreamed… What happened?”

  “It would have been all right except for that,” I said. “I couldn’t help letting her know I’d seen it.”

  I led him over to the table and pointed to the purple smudge and the printed letters on the white oil cloth. I saw his sparkling black eyes rest on them.

  “You’ve probably never had children printing with one of those toy sets,” I said, “or you’d know that odd letters turn up in the strangest places. On the bathroom walls, usually, and the backs of books. If they’re doing a whole newspaper you get the notion you’re living in a bowl of alphabet soup. She probably was trying out the letters to see if they were right side foremost.”

  He nodded, and looked around the ill-furnished little room with a puzzled expression on his face.

  “I thought she was putting something away,” I said. “It took her so long to let me in. It sounded as if she was closing a door.”

  I went over and turned the handle of the tinny white medicine chest and opened the flimsy door. An envelope fell out into the bowl in front of me. I was conscious of all the rest of the familiar paraphernalia of a toy hand printing set inside on the shelves: the tin box with the inked pad, the little stamping block, the piece of wood with the rubber letters fitted in grooves in it to keep them straight. They were all there, piled in a jumbled heap in the crowded chest. But it was the envelope that had fallen out that my eyes were fixed on. I knew with a cold feeling in my stomach that it contained the letter Lavinia had rushed back from A. J.’s house to print, and that I’d interrupted her printing it. What it would say I dared not guess. I only knew that it must be about Iris. I reached my hand down to pick it up, knowing of course that I oughtn’t to do it, that what I was about to do was obstructing the police and all the rest of it. I didn’t care. I also didn’t remember what I’ve often observed, that Colonel Primrose has eyes in the back of his head.

  He turned from a pile of clothes at the other end of the room. “Don’t do it, Mrs. Latham,” he said pleasantly. He was beside me in an instant, and took the envelope out of my hand.

  “My mistake,” I said.

  He opened it and took out the familiar cheap grey lined paper, took one look at it, and shook his head. “It was my mistake,” he said.

  He handed it to me. My heart rose as I saw there were only two full words printed on an otherwise blank sheet.

  WHY DID M

  That was all.

  “I didn’t give her enough tine,” Colonel Primrose said. He took it back and kept looking at it, frowning a little. I turned away so he wouldn’t see the expression of heartfelt relief on ray face.

  My tweed coat was lying on one of the chairs that had got knocked over in our free-for-all. I looked at it with the affection one has for old clothes bought in temps perdus. I’d got it one cold summer after the war in Edinburgh, when my husband and I had gone up with some friends who’d taken a grouse moor for the 12th, and the air crash that ended all those days was still years ahead of us. I picked it up, wishing I hadn’t given it to the friend who’d said poor Lavinia had got to have a warm coat, and put my hand in the side pocket, not for any reason—I mean I didn’t think I’d left the Star of India or anything in it—but just because I’d always liked the feel of those pockets… rough tweed on the back of my hand, satin on my palm.

  But there was something in the pocket now. I knew Lavinia had never had it on, probably, so my curiosity was more pardonable than it usually is. I drew my hand out, and stood there looking at what was in it.

  “For mercy’s sake!” I gasped. “Look!”

  Colonel Primrose turned away from his examination of the medicine chest and came to where I stood with my hand out. In it was a rolled wad of bills, bound tightly together with a thick white rubber band. He took it and opened it, and spread out three ten dollar bills. I reached into the other side pocket. There was another roll there, containing two very ancient one dollar bills. The inside breast pocket produced five dollars.

  Colonel Primrose stood there for a moment, chewing his lower lip. He picked up another garment off the pile, a tan sports jacket that once belonged to a near neighbor of mine, and went quickly through its pockets, netting two tight little wads amounting to eighteen dollars.

  “Is there money in all these pockets?” I demanded.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ll leave that to the Sergeant. I hear him coming.”

  The heavy square-toed boots pounded briskly along the hall, and Sergeant Buck entered. We both stared at him. His jaw, which I’d always thought was granite at least, was practically in ribbons.

  “Good God, Buck,” Colonel Primrose said.

  Sergeant Buck patted his bloody face with his handkerchief, and looked at the blotched white cloth with great composure.

  “She’s worse than Little Mamie, out in Honolulu,” he said, out of one bleeding corner of his mouth.

  “Why didn’t you crack her over the head?”

  “You said to make as little stink as possible, sir.”

  Sergeant Buck shook his head. Then his eye fell on the little pile of wadded and unwadded bank notes. He glanced at the Colonel.

  “Is something off color, sir?”

  Colonel Primrose chuckled. Serg
eant Buck’s use of idiom has strong personal variations. He wasn’t, I knew, implying at all that anyone had committed a breach of good taste.

  “Decidedly, I suspect,” Colonel Primrose said. “We’ve found this much in two coats. Go through the room, will you, and clean up on this.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “If you’ll wait outside on the landing, Mrs. Latham, I’ll join you in just a minute, and get you to drive me to the Nashes’.” The gratified smirk on Sergeant Buck’s bloody face at my being shut out of their private conference should have been compensation for a year’s exile.

  19

  We didn’t go at once to the Nashes’, however, we stopped at a Greek restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, and settled ourselves at a cold marble-topped table with a large bouquet of fly-speckled red and yellow paper roses on it, with festoons of more paper roses over the grey unflattering mirror on the wall beside us. I couldn’t, I thought, look as bad as all that, but perhaps I did. I thought suddenly of how much worse I could have looked if it had been my face instead of Sergeant Buck’s that Miss Lavinia had clawed to shreds.

  “Did you know Lavinia was writing those letters?” I demanded, when we’d ordered him and eggs and coffee.

  “What do you think the police are for, Mrs. Latham?” he asked dryly. “I assure you Lamb has been on the job for twenty-four hours without closing his eyes.”

  “How did you know about her?”

  He smiled.

  “The police depend to a large degree, Mrs. Latham, on certain knowledge of a lot of fundamental norms that practically all human beings conform to… with individual variations, of course.”

  “That,” I said, “sounds as if you’re planning a fifteen-minute talk to our radio neighbors, on the cause and cure of crime. All I want to know about is Lavinia.”

  “Like a woman,” he said with a chuckle. “No patience with the larger life. No interest in abstract ideas.”

  “All right,” I said. “Go on. I’ll listen.”