The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  Colonel Primrose bent closer down behind the seat. I saw him gingerly lift a small square of the silk, cut around three sides, where the bayonet had been thrust through.

  He straightened up, looking at Morris Shavin in his personal and private agony beside the door.

  “Are you Shavin?”

  The man could only nod, and fumble with shaking hands into his pockets to bring out his papers to show he had a right to live, because he lived in America, not in his native land. He was speechless with despair. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  “Get a sheet or a blanket and bring it here,” Colonel Primrose said. He turned back as the old man stumbled off. “What happened?”

  He was speaking to Bill, who’d come back—as serious and sober-faced a young man as I’ve ever seen him be.

  “We don’t know what happened, sir, any more than you do now,” he said steadily. “Sheep was here with him, out in the dining-room. They’d been talking. Morry and I came when Eustace was finishing his supper. He sent Morry to get some ice and soda and brought Sheep and me in here. We followed him. He went over, to his regular seat here and sat down, and that was it. We thought he’d had a stroke. We called Morry and got him some of his smelling salts. We tried to move him, but we couldn’t. He kept making gurgling noises we couldn’t understand. Sheep called all the doctors he could around here. One finally said he’d come and to let Eustace alone, but he kept trying to struggle up, and at last the three of us pulled him over. And that’s the way it was. The way you see it… Gee, what a way to go. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was sort of a screwball, but not a bad guy.”

  It was a curious epitaph for Eustace Sype, but as sincere a tribute, I supposed, as he was likely to get.

  “Sheep has gone for a doctor?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  Bill nodded.

  “Where did that come from?”

  Colonel Primrose was pointing to the bloodstained bayonet sticking out of the torn silk. The white down was stained as red as the cherry covering.

  “That’s what sort of got us, sir. It’s one we gave him. We took it off a dead Jap on Okinawa. I told you, Mother, he was a V.I.P. we towed around. He was a souvenir hound, and we got him a lot of stuff. He’s got a collection of it on his wall in there.”

  He jerked his hand toward the door Morry Shavin had gone through.

  “It makes you feel sort of—responsible.”

  “You needn’t,” Colonel Primrose said briefly. He looked back at the inert thing on the floor. “Where’s Shavin gone? I sent him to get a sheet.”

  “I’ll go see, sir.”

  “There’s something burning,” I said. “It’s paper.”

  “The damned fool!” Colonel Primrose said bitterly. He was through the door, Bill at his heels. He must have missed his iron leg-man, I thought. Sergeant Buck had always hovered behind him, ready to give chase so his superior could stay at the center of things.

  It left me alone there, and I moved quickly around to follow them, because I didn’t like being left there with Eustace Sype. I had to pass him, and for an awful instant I saw his face. It must have been a trick of the golden salmon-colored lights, but I was so startled that I stopped, staring down at him. It could have been a trick of my own imagination, growing out of the profound distrust I had for him. I saw then that he wasn’t smiling. What I’d thought was the shadow of one of his self-satisfied, malicious smiles was nothing but the shadow of a face distorted with a paralyzing grimace. It could have been malice, however. Not even death could make Eustace Sype a noble figure. If he’d been one, he would not have been dead. But pity I could feel for him. It seemed the most horrible irony that he’d been defeated, in a way, by his own frustrated and overweening ego. I could almost hear him saying, I couldn’t be the tallest man in the world, so I decided to be the widest. If he’d been content to stay a small man he wouldn’t have died—not this way.

  Colonel Primrose and Bill had gone through the room next to us, a sort of grotesque museum and picture gallery with souvenirs and signed photographs that even whipping through it as fast as I did I could recognize as a Who’s Who of Eustace’s world. They were in the room past it, a library and study, paneled, with solid leather chairs and nothing of a Chinese-Ottoman empire about it. It was a workroom, with filing cabinets behind the pine panels on one side. A door to them was open, one drawer still out. Morris Shavin was there too, by the fireplace. The single gas jet, like a flame-thrower that they use out there to light the fire, was still on, and a mass of charred paper it had consumed was black and powdered under the andirons. Bill had just bent down and was turning the gas off. Shavin was a cowering figure, with Colonel Primrose beside him.

  “What did you do it for, man?”

  Morris Shavin had found his speech. “He told me. He showed me the box. He said if I die, you burn it first thing. I trust you. You burn it. He said so.”

  He kept saying it, pointing to the empty file that had slipped out.

  Exasperation is a mild word, I thought, for the acute and futile annoyance with which Colonel Primrose turned away from him. I’ve seldom heard him swear, and never before under his breath. He went over to the file, pulled it out further and jammed it back in again. Morris Shavin continued an unintelligible babble about Eustace’s orders to him until the Colonel finally silenced him.

  “That’s enough. Try to explain it to the police, with Sype murdered out there. You’ll have to talk faster than you’re talking now… Call the hotel, Bill, and have Rose sent up here as quick as they can get her here. Then take your mother out and leave her in my car.”

  That was me he was talking about. When I started to protest he silenced me as curtly as he had poor Shavin.

  “Do as you’re told, Mrs. Latham. And stay in the car. Don’t get out of it, and don’t go anywhere until somebody goes with you. You’re not in Washington, D.C., and you’re in everybody’s way. Don’t you be a—”

  “You brought her here, Colonel. There’s no use getting sore at her. Come on, Mother.”

  There was a quick flicker of a smile in the glance Colonel Primrose shot me as my son took hold of his parent’s arm to take her out.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Take her out, anyway.”

  Bill took me out. We went through Eustace’s elaborate dining-room. The remnants of his supper were on the long black lacquered table that extended almost the entire length of an otherwise snow-white job of interior decoration. The dirty dishes and half-eaten food gave it an air of broken meats in a mausoleum. His chair was pushed back, his fork had fallen on the floor. It looked like a table from which a diner had departed rather hurriedly. One other chair was pushed back, a wine glass tipped over. If Bill hadn’t been with me I think I would have straightened it up a little. The sense of abrupt departure didn’t look too well, when the finally departed host was so palpably a man who lived to eat. Bill’s story had left that angle of it out. I wondered. He’d made it all sound like a casual affair.

  “Were you very angry when you came up here?” I asked him as he held the door into the hall open for me.

  “I was sore as hell. I got outside after I’d taken your table in, and Lucille was there. She was coming back from getting her overnight bag and she had a flat a couple of hundred yards up the road. She was on her way in to get one of the boys to go change her tire. I don’t know why she couldn’t change it herself—she’s always blowing off about what she did in the Motor Corps during the war. I suppose she didn’t want to get her gloves dirty. She asked me to go change it and I said the hell with it, I was working. That made her sore, and she started taking cracks at Molly for giving Sheep and me the go-by. I was sore too, I guess. I told her she ought to mind her own business, and she said it was time I was finding out who my friends were. She said, ‘Why don’t you ask Mrs. Kersey who told her Molly McShane was born Doreen Shavin?’ ”

  He opened the car door for me. The driver was asleep in the front seat, snoring peacefully. Bill got in beside me and ran up the glass p
anel.

  “I said okay, I would.”

  He pulled the door to quietly and lowered his voice. “And I did. I went down and asked her point-blank. She gave me a lot of business about dear Lucille’s not understanding her interest in her former husband, and all that, and she got sore too. I seem to rub everybody the wrong way tonight. It seems nobody understands Mrs. Kersey either, or how tenderly her heart beats. Anyway, she finally said okay, if we really wanted to know, it was Eustace Sype. She said he—”

  He stopped, listening. “Here they come.”

  He opened the door, leaned over, and gave me a quick kiss on my cheek. “You stay here—please, Mamma. Don’t want you mixed up in this.”

  He hadn’t got the door banged shut before the courtyard on the rim of the Canyon there was a milling carrefour of squad cars and motorcycles and policemen, in uniform and out. It was like the locusts descending. Somewhere in the distance I heard the dogs yap, but only half-heartedly and only a few times, and then the furry little boys and girls were quiet as mice again. Our driver was awake and a startled man, and he was more startled when a uniformed officer got him out of the car and disappeared with him—leaving me alone and completely ignored, with only an occasional bewildered and inquiring face pressed to the window as its owner passed back or forth. If you sit quietly it seems to confuse people. These seemed to take it for granted I had some proper reason for being there, and let it go until Captain Crawford himself came out.

  “The Colonel says you’re to go back to your hotel, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “You’re to go back and go to your own room and stay there.”

  He gave me a bleak smile. “That’s what the man said. You heard. I’ll get your driver for you.”

  And Sheep hadn’t come back. I was thinking of that as we rounded the narrow corner where we’d almost had the head-on collision with him in Bill’s hot rod. He couldn’t have taken so long to find a doctor. Then I wondered again if he’d piled up somewhere, going at the speed he was going when he passed us. It seems strange to say it, but I was aware that I was choosing that as the lesser of two evils, choosing it to keep from having to doubt that my son’s story of Eustace’s death was as simply the truth as it had sounded when he told it.

  If I allowed myself to doubt its truth—but I couldn’t allow myself to. If I did I could never believe my son again. I knew it was the truth he told. He and Sheep had followed Eustace Sype into his bizarre and beautiful room, as Bill had said they had. I could close my eyes and see Eustace’s white hand fluttering them to a seat, while he did some rapid calculation in an attempt to conciliate and to appease. I could see the yapping, tangled mass of ecstatic fur, and Eustace freezing them to immobility—Quiet, boys and girls!—before he flipped out his feet and collapsed into his luxurious cushions— and was transfixed there, helpless to save himself or be saved.

  I believed it for a fact, the way Bill told it—and it occurred to me suddenly that the little dogs were a fantastic sort of witness to the truth of it. There could have been no question of violence. The little dogs wouldn’t have been sitting so expectantly, waiting their release, unless their master had still dominated the atmosphere as he took his final and horrible descent into his cushions. Sheep was either piled up somewhere beside the road or he’d gone a long way for a doctor. I refused to consider another alternative—and I didn’t think of his racing straight to Molly. I’d forgot how important to him she was.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Grim accusations

  I WENT DIRECTLY THROUGH THE LOBBY PERGOLA to the path leading to my room, without stopping to see if there were any messages for me at the desk. If I’d stopped, as I normally would have done, I’d have got the one Lucille left for me, and I’d probably—in spite of what the man had said—have gone to her room to see her. It was unfortunate that I didn’t. But I wasn’t thinking about messages. I went straight along the flagstone path to 102. As I put the key in the lock, George Gannon’s door across the tiled hallway opened abruptly. “Oh, Mrs. Latham!”

  It was the milk-and-honey voice of Mrs. Viola Van Zant Kersey and the last person at the Casa del Rosal that I was in any mood to talk to at the moment.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Mrs. Latham. I’ve just been paying another visit to my former husband. You’d think I’d be more discreet, wouldn’t you?”

  “Or more careful,” I said, and regretted it instantly. If she didn’t remember what had happened the last time she’d paid him a nocturnal visit, it was hardly my business to remind her. She took it very gaily. She apparently didn’t know what had happened to Eustace Sype—and that was definitely not my business to tell her.

  “I shall look at the steps, my dear.”

  She laughed. “I’m prepared tonight.”

  She held out a gold pencil and pressed the end of it. A small but effective ball of white light bobbed about on the floor before she switched it off.

  “And I came up really to see you. I wonder if I might come in? We have so much to talk about, you and I.”

  “Do we, Mrs. Kersey?”

  I couldn’t think what it was, myself. But she apparently could. I didn’t like the way her plump face settled behind its outer layer of peaches and golden cream. I think Viola Kersey is an actress. It was actually someone else who tripped over the cord, wasn’t it? As I heard Colonel Primrose’s voice saying it again, a slight prickling along my spinal column warned me that I really shouldn’t be stupid or a fool.

  I opened the door. One amber-shaded table light was on. And curled up in the bamboo chair, fast asleep, was Molly McShane.

  “Oh, how sweet!” said Mrs. Kersey.

  I looked at her quickly. It was about the phoniest sounding thing I’d heard for a long time, and it struck me, with a not too bright intuitive flash, that Mrs. Kersey already knew Molly was in my room.

  I looked at the patio windows. The curtains were drawn across them more carefully than at any time before, and from the warmth in the room I knew they were closed. I suspected they were securely locked also.

  “Molly,” I said. She stirred and came slowly up out of a really deep slumber before she flashed to sudden wakefulness. She started up, blinking her eyes.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I—”

  It was then she saw Mrs. Kersey by the door.

  “Oh,” she said.

  From a relaxed and sleepy child she turned into something as tightly coiled and tautly held as a steel spring. The black pupils of her eyes contracted to pin points in the hyacinth-blue field around them.

  “Oh,” she said again. “I didn’t know—”

  “I met Mrs. Kersey in the hall, Molly. She wants to talk to me.” I didn’t say “It was her idea,” but I meant to imply it, and hoped I had.

  “I’d better go, then.”

  “I wish you’d stay, dear. I want to talk to you too.”

  Whoever had taught Viola Kersey how to place her voice so that it oozed the syrupy mixture it did, had done a good job, if that is what one likes. Its contrast with the salt and acid quality of Molly’s was extraordinary.

  “I don’t want to hear you talk, Mrs. Kersey.”

  “ ‘Vi,’ you were going to call me, dear. Or ‘Aunt Vi,’ if you’d rather. Remember? Didn’t Eustace say he thought that would be a nice thing for you to call me?”

  Molly’s pointed little face went a shade or two paler.

  “I told him I’d call you Mrs. Kersey. If that doesn’t suit you I can’t help it.”

  “She’s so spirited, isn’t she, Mrs. Latham? I adore spirit in people. It shows such inner fire. Divine fire on the altar of the sold, I sometimes call it.”

  I glanced at Molly, shaking my head. She tossed her shining mane back from her face and picked up her bag.

  “I’m going,” she said curtly.

  Mrs. Kersey blocked the door. Her plump, fine figure garbed in black-and-red-flowered print on white ground looked massive to me—too formidable for even Molly to storm past.

  “I want to talk to you whether you want to or no
t.” She spoke with what I thought an enforced calm. “I am afraid I lost my temper with Bill this afternoon. I’m sorry for it. I’ve intended calling Eustace to tell him I was too hasty, but I’ve been busy.”

  Molly flashed me a startled inquiry. I shook my head again, quickly, this time. I wanted to know what Mrs. Kersey had to say before she became aware that she didn’t have anything to say at all.

  “I felt Eustace had been very unjust to me,” she said earnestly. “I don’t see why I should have to bear the whole brunt of this ingratitude. I came wanting to help. It was Eustace who wrote me that my old servants had come to Hollywood.”

  “But you didn’t want to help them, did you, Mrs. Kersey?” Molly emphasized the “Mrs. Kersey” just enough to make it plain.

  “You didn’t come rushing out to help your old servants, then, did you?”

  “My dear child.” Mrs. Kersey threw her white, glittering hands up in despair. “You don’t understand. I didn’t believe Eustace. He’s so malicious. I thought he was joking.”

  “That isn’t true and you know it, Mrs. Kersey.” The girl was amazingly in control of herself, after the various cyclonic sessions I’d had with her. “Eustace told me that himself, and he has your letters to him to prove it. You waited till you saw my first picture. You wouldn’t believe him when he told you I had a chance of getting somewhere. You said you’d wait, and he was the one that had the picture sent you for a private showing before it was ever released. He told me all this. He told me so I wouldn’t make the mistake of feeling any gratitude toward you. He was afraid I might. He didn’t know me, but he wanted to be sure.”

  “I know,” Viola Kersey said. “He’s a dreadful, wicked wretch, isn’t he?”