by Leslie Ford
“When you told me about A. J. going out against the traffic light. There’s no doubt, from that and other things I’ve turned up, that A. J. was red-green color blind, in the ordinary way. Well, they don’t know much about blue-yellow color blindness, but apparently any kind of color blindness is pretty apt to be congenital. It got me to thinking, eventually… Well, let’s see. Oh, the dismantling of your place here. Mac, of course, looking for that letter—and I don’t know whether he found it or not. He won’t speak. Anything else?”
“Yes,” I said. “The poison Lavinia had. Where—”
He chuckled.
“I’ll tell you, some time,” he said calmly. “Well, I’m glad Iris is going along with Lowell and Angus. For Lowell’s sake too—she needs a chance to make up a little for the last few years. Donaldson’s meeting them in France at the end of the summer. He’s a good sort.”
“Iris deserved a break,” I said.
“Yates thinks he’s found the money, by the way. There’s a little over a quarter of a million stowed away in a safety deposit box at the Colonial Trust Company, leased—in Mac’s hand writing—to a T. J. McClelland. They haven’t been able so far to turn up a Mr. McClelland. I imagine that’s Randall’s cache. You know, there’s a certain extenuation, to my mind, in the fact that he didn’t do any of this to cover up just vulgar defalcation. He hadn’t been using the money to play the horses or the market. It was a major operation, a grand coup.”
“You’ve got an odd notion of extenuating circumstances,” I said.
He smiled. “No, I’m merely saying he did it in a big way. The stake was worth so much that obstacles had to be pushed aside, perfectly ruthlessly.”
He smiled at me again, through a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.
“Possibly I’m merely trying to explain my own defense, if anything should happen to—say—-Sergeant Buck. Because you know, my dear…”
That was as far as he got, for at that moment Lilac put her head in the door.
“Mis’ Grace, they’s a lady an’ gennelman at th’ do’ say can they see you? Majo’ an’ Mis’ Albright is th’ name.”
I looked at Colonel Primrose. He shrugged his shoulders, I thought a trifle shortly.
“No friends of mine,” he said.
“Show them in, Lilac,” I said. And they came—Mrs. Albright a fluffy pleasant little woman tripping along, followed by a tall military-looking man with grey eyes and an eagle nose.
“Oh, I do hope I’m not intruding,” Mrs. Albright said. “But an old friend of my husband’s told us you would consider letting your house, and we’re so anxious to get settled! He said you wanted to get away immediately. It would be heavenly…!”
Colonel Primrose looked at me, I looked at him. A little shadow crossed his face.
“Who… is your friend?” he asked.
“I’m not sure you know him, Mrs. Latham, as a matter of fact,” Major Albright said. “He said he was merely a friend of a friend of yours. He’s an old Army sergeant—”
“Named… Phineas T. Buck?” Colonel Primrose asked evenly.
“Then you do know him!” Mrs. Albright said delightedly.
“Oh, very well,” Colonel Primrose said, with a certain ominous calm perceptible only to me.
The Palm Castle pulled out of New York harbor, and I waved goodbye to Colonel Primrose, who’d come up to see me off to resume my interrupted winter in Nassau. When the white ship passed the squat greenish figure of the Statue of Liberty, glistening in the winter sun, I left the rail and went to my stateroom to straighten out the litter of flowers and books and what-not deposited there by kind friends. Tucked in one side of a mammoth basket of fruit and comestibles was a large red folder. I opened it.
Mr. Hofnagel had really outdone himself. Staring up at me on one side, from a dappled grey background, was a highly— and indescribably—tinted portrait of Colonel John Primrose. Facing it—and me—and even more indescribably tinted, was the rockbound granite facade of Sergeant Buck. And there was something in the fishy grey eyes that I couldn’t quite make out. It may have been caused, that look, by the large bottle plainly visible through the open door of Mr. Hofnagel’s closet laboratory that Colonel Primrose had recognized as a legitimate accessory of the photographer’s art and the illegitimate source of the cyanide of potassium that had killed two men and Senator McGilvray. It may have been that, since that was the real reason Colonel Primrose had sent him there the next day to have his picture taken. Or more likely still, it may have been just at that moment that Sergeant Buck thought up the small but decisive expedient by means of which he got me out of Georgetown, and gave his Colonel the chance to elude once more a fate far worse than death.
FIN
About Leslie Ford
Leslie Ford (1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.
Bibliography
The Sound of Footsteps (aka Footsteps on the Stairs) (1931)
Murder in Maryland (1932)
By the Watchman’s Clock (1932)
The Clue of the Judas Tree (1933)
The Strangled Witness (1934)
Burn Forever (aka Mountain Madness) (1935)
Ill Met by Moonlight (1937)
The Simple Way of Poison (1937)
Three Bright Pebbles (1938)
Reno Rendezvous (aka Mr. Cromwell Is Dead) (1939)
False to Any Man (aka Snow-White Murder) (1939)
The Town Cried Murder (1939)
Old Lover’s Ghost (aka A Capital Crime) (1940)
Road to Folly (1940)
The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (1941)
Murder in the OPM (aka Priority Murder) (1942)
Murder with Southern Hospitality (aka Murder Down South) (1942)
Siren in the Night (1943)
All for the Love of a Lady (aka Crack of Dawn) (1944)
The Philadelphia Murder Story (1945)
Honolulu Story (aka Honolulu Murder Story) (aka Honolulu Murders) (1946)
The Woman in Black (1947)
The Devil’s Stronghold (1948)
Date with Death (aka Shot in the Dark) (1949)
Murder Is the Pay-Off (1951)
The Bahamas Murder Case (1952)
Washington Whispers Murder (aka The Lying Jade) (1953)
Invitation to Murder (1954)
Murder Comes to Eden (1955)
The Girl from the Mimosa Club (1957)
Trial by Ambush (aka Trial from Ambush) (1962)
As Brenda Conrad
The Stars Give Warning (1941)
Caribbean Conspiracy (1942)
Girl with a Golden Bar (1944)
As David Frome
The Murder of an Old Man (1929)
In at the Death (1929)
The Hammersmith Murders (1930)
Two Against Scotland Yard (aka The By-Pass Murder) (1931)
The Strange Death of Martin Green (aka The Murder on the Sixth Hole) (1931)
The Man from Scotland Yard (aka Mr. Simpson Finds a Body) (1932)
The Eel Pie Murders (aka Eel Pie Mystery) (1933)
Scotland Yard Can Wait! (aka That’s Your Man, Inspector!) (1933)
Mr. Pinkerton Goes to Scotland Yard (aka Arsenic in Richmond) (1934)
Mr. Pinkerton Finds a Body (aka The Body in the Turf) (1934)
Mr. Pinkerton Grows
a Beard (aka The Body in Bedford Square) (1935)
Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936)
The Black Envelope (aka The Guilt Is Plain) (1937)
Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel (aka Mr. Pinkerton and the Old Angel) (1939)
Homicide House (aka Murder on the Square) (1950)
Table of Contents
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About Leslie Ford
Bibliography
As Brenda Conrad
As David Frome
