by Zenith Brown
She turned around. “Mr. Scofield, why do you charge twenty-three points for a can of pineapples?—Of course, my dear, I still don’t see what Cass Crane’s coming home had to do with it. Or why Horace had to say he didn’t know Cass was coming, when I distinctly heard him say so when he let the Swami out.—Here, dear, do you mind counting up and seeing if I have enough coupons to buy a can of sardines for the cat.”
She was off, holding out her book to the harassed spinster taking a man’s place behind the counter. She waved to me as I went out with a pound of lamb for stew. Poor Mr. Scofield was trying to add up her points. There’ll have to be a psychiatric hospital for grocers and butchers, before the war is over, and Corinne Blodgett ought to help endow it handsomely.
6
Of course it was a wonderful commentary on Washington, the small town where nobody gets away with anything very long. Horace Blodgett should have known it better than anyone else, if just for the number of Congressional hearings he’s sat at, beside clients who didn’t know that last month’s dinner party they’d kept off the society page would be front page news in a few weeks. Transposing Corinne’s story into reasonable terms, it was perfectly obvious that Horace Blodgett, corporation lawyer and a man of considerable behind-the-scenes importance, newt of soul as he might be, was having a plain business conference with Duleep Singh, member of an accredited economic mission to the United States. Also, that it was very hush-hush. It wasn’t the fuller life Horace was pursuing, but the richer life, for one of his clients and himself, and anyone could safely say it wasn’t God but Mammon presiding. It was a little amusing, as a matter of fact, to see Horace caught in the toils he’d been warning the unwary about for years. I suppose you have to know him to understand it. He’s so meticulous.
I was thinking about them as I went back home. Horace Blodgett came from fine, well-to-do, waste-not want-not Quaker stock, went to a rigorous Quaker college and a law school and stepped into a ready-made place in his father’s firm. His life with one exception was in the same strictly formal pattern. The exception was his marriage to Corinne. I’d always thought that, true to himself and his training, he’d combined wild oats and the primrose path within the letter of the law. Corinne was beautiful, mad as a hatter in a merry way, not as she is now, and nobody could possibly see what she saw in him. I remember seeing them when I was still a child. She was lovely and lots of fun, and he already seemed mummified to me. The next shock was the child they produced. She had violet eyes and milk-white skin and a mass of flaming gold curls that was unbelievable. She was simply dazzling. She couldn’t help being spoiled rotten, because it was like having a child goddess growing up in the house. I remember her well—she was just six years younger than I—and I remember the shock of their coming back without her when they took a trip around the world the year after she came out. They took her because she was besieged with men who wanted to marry her, and Horace was still a Quaker at heart. Just what happened, except that she met a man on a tramp steamer they were on in some out of the way place, and married him two or three days later, I don’t know.
The Blodgetts came home, and nobody saw them out anywhere for quite a while. Horace made a couple of trips out to see her, and on the last one he brought her body back. She’d had some tropical disease and was being taken to the nearest town with an American hospital when the car skidded on a mountain road.
That was fifteen years ago, and it was when Corinne began to change. It was a tragic thing, but in a sense the girl’s actual physical death seemed to make it easier for both of them. Horace went on being dry as dust again, and Corinne developed a kind of amnesia and became what she is now, taking up whatever fad comes along, with Horace watching her with a dry flicker in his eye, never annoyed or bored or even irritated with her, or showing the least concern for her extravagance.
—Or so I’d have thought until I answered the phone just as I finished lunch a few hours later. I didn’t recognize Corinne’s voice for a long instant. She was whispering into the mouthpiece, and I’d never heard Corinne Blodgett whisper before.
“Grace, listen to me?” she said desperately. “You’re not to repeat what I said this morning! Horace is furious at me, he says I’ll ruin him! My dear, he’s almost beside himself. He doesn’t know I told you, and don’t tell a soul, Grace!”
I could hardly believe it was Corinne I was listening to.
“Of course I won’t,” I said quickly. “Don’t be silly. I wouldn’t have thought of it anyway.”
“But you don’t understand. I don’t myself—but I’ve done something terrible!”
She was so upset that she was half crying.
“Nobody else could have heard me, could they, dear?”
Then her voice changed abruptly, and became normal and childishly gay and a little dégagé.
“—Thank you, dear. It’s sweet of you to ask me. I’ll be over about five, dear. If it’s for China Relief you know how interested I am. Goodbye, dear.”
I blinked a little as the phone zinged in my ear. I wouldn’t have thought Corinne capable of so much guile. I could almost see Horace coming into the room behind her . . . but as for seeing him furious or beside himself, throwing her into the state of abject desperation she was in, my mind was a complete blank. And as for nobody else having heard her in the store, I couldn’t imagine that either, unless all Mr. Scofield’s customers that morning were deaf as monoliths.
I sat there trying to recall who, if anybody, we knew, or who might know her, had been there. The faces were all blurred in my mind. I’d been too occupied listening to her myself, and trying to figure my own ration book. The only person I could remember seeing that I knew was Julie Ross. I’d smiled at her as I was waiting at the meat counter, but whether she’d been there when Corinne was talking, or had come in later, I hadn’t noticed.
It was very distressing . . . and also, I thought, rather odd. It was evident that what Corinne had done was important, some way. Horace Blodgett wouldn’t be raising hell, and Corinne wouldn’t have called up as she did if she hadn’t been really terrified. And the crux of the whole thing was obviously Cass Crane. I wondered about that. It threw a new light on Duleep Singh’s absorbed fascination in Molly Crane the night before at the Abbotts’, and what seemed to me now his almost deliberate setting Courtney and Molly at each other’s throat. Unless, I thought, I was—like Corinne—making a swami out of just an extremely shrewd man of the world. The only even figurative blood on the moon had turned out to be the little troglodyte’s, and it seemed hard to believe Duleep Singh would concern himself with such small deer.
It was at that point that I thought of the little driver and D. J. Durbin waiting at the dead end of the road outside the Abbotts’, and his rescuing Mr. Durbin from the black cat. It was himself he should have saved, I thought. Then I remembered D. J. Durbin scanning the skies, and the plane coming over. He must have known Cass was coming back, too. I tried to think of the people at the Abbotts’ who did know, for certain. Courtney, and Duleep Singh, and Horace Blodgett who was on the other side of the garden with Mr. Abbott. In fact, Molly was about the only one who mattered that didn’t know, it seemed to me.
Lilac was taking my lunch tray downstairs.
“Did anyone call Miss Molly while I was out this morning?” I asked.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Her husban’ didn’t call her, if that’s what you’re askin’,” she said darkly. “Ain’ nobody call her, ’cept Mis’ Courtney. She call her. I said she weren’t here an’ I ain’ seen her. What’s she call up for? She still hungerin’ after that child’s husband?”
I’m afraid there aren’t many things going on that Lilac doesn’t know about. The grapevine in the basement is much more efficient, some way, than the telephone. I ignored the question, wondering myself why Courtney Durbin had called Molly, and how she knew she was there.
“Have you heard anything about the man they found down there this morning?” I asked.
“You mean the man that was daid?”
I nodded.
“Ain’ heard nothin’,” Lilac said, calmly. “ ’Ceptin’ he was daid when Mr. Randy put him in there.”
I turned around.
“Lilac—what are you saying?”
“I ain’ sayin’ nothin’ more,” she said flatly, and plodded downstairs, mumbling to herself.
Well, I just don’t know. To say I sat there speechless is not even understatement. It doesn’t make any sense. I was stunned, literally, as Corinne would say. The room seemed to be going in circles around me. And I knew I couldn’t go down to the kitchen and ask Lilac what in heaven’s name she meant, because she’d said it as plainly as anybody could. She’d also said she wasn’t saying nothin’ more, and I knew what that meant. It meant she wasn’t saying anything, and I knew there wasn’t any use trying to make her.
I just sat there. The mere question of what Randy, who lives in Chevy Chase, was doing on 26th and Beall Streets after two or three o’clock in the morning, which was when Colonel Primrose had said the little man died, was hard enough. But moving a dead body into an empty house . . . And I couldn’t tell myself it wasn’t true. If Lilac said it, she said it knowing it was so. I could have doubted the coffee table in front of me with more sense.
Some kind of answers kept sifting into my consciousness. Randy Fleming was in love with Molly, everybody knew that. And he’d gone back to the house. But it wasn’t the little man he’d gone back to see, it was Cass Crane. The little man had somehow got in the way . . .
I got up and moved across the room and sat down again. I didn’t believe that, really. Not of Randy. He just wasn’t that kind. He could have hit Cass in the jaw and knocked him down, and his head might have hit a fender, but he wouldn’t conceivably have set out cold-bloodedly . . .
I stopped abruptly and sat there suddenly quiet, a pretty ghastly hollow in the pit of my stomach. “—I’ve already done it . . . I’ll show them both I can be as cold-blooded as they are . . .”
Hearing those words echo back from the night before drowned out any other sound. I thought for a moment it was something I was projecting out of myself that just seemed to be Molly Crane standing in the hall doorway, her blue nurse’s aide uniform rumpled as if she’d been working in it all morning, the smile on her face fading to a puzzled question, her red lips parted a little, her amber eyes still widening.
“Grace—what’s the matter?” she said quickly. “Don’t you feel well? Eat some salt, quick.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“I’m all right.”
She took a step forward.
“You haven’t heard from . . . Cass, have you?”
I think that wasn’t what she started to say, but maybe it was. I shook my head.
“No, I haven’t. Have you?”
“Yes.”
She turned her head away a little so I couldn’t see her face for an instant.
“He called up the hospital this morning. He’s having lunch with Courtney this noon.”
“He what?” I demanded blankly. “Molly, what on earth goes on? I mean——”
“Oh, she asked me too. Sweet, wasn’t it. Cass said he had to go. He wanted to come out to the hospital and get me, but I had to help with an operation at half-past twelve. He had to report this morning to the BEW and the War Department. So he was tied up till then. He said it was business, and I’m . . . I’m trying to believe him. He said he tried to find me last night, but nobody knew where I was.”
“Did he say why he didn’t let you know he was coming?” I asked gently.
She shook her head. “He said Courtney told him I was at the Abbotts’ with Randy but . . . he called Randy, and Randy said he didn’t know where I was. I made him promise not to tell. I was . . . I mean, I was terribly hurt . . .”
“I know,” I said.
“He was sort of stiff about it, as if it was my fault.”
“Look, Molly,” I said. “Did you tell him you didn’t know he was coming?”
She shook her head again.
“No, because . . .”
I must have sounded a little grim, I’m afraid.
“Molly . . . aren’t you being a stiff-necked little fool, if you’ll let me say so? Because you didn’t want him to think you cared that much . . .”
“Maybe I am,” she said quickly. “But if he could let her know, he could let me. And she wasn’t the only one. Julie Ross knew. Mrs. Blodgett knew. She said at supper she knew I’d be glad when he got home, but I thought she just meant generally, because she thinks I see too much of Randy. You know how vague she is. So he could have let me know if he’d wanted to.”
I looked at her, trying to believe there was nothing deeper on her mind than this. If I hadn’t known she’d been out at ten minutes past three that morning, it would have been different. I wondered for an instant if she’d seen Cass, but I didn’t think so. And she couldn’t have seen Randy, or he wouldn’t have called me up. Unless . . . he’d seen her, and thought she was back, and was trying—it was in my mind so I might as well admit it—to establish an alibi for her. But that was pretty far-fetched. I suppose I should have had courage to ask her frankly, but I didn’t.
“Courtney phoned and asked me to come to lunch,” she was saying evenly. “She said it was absurd for me and Cass to be quarrelling, and stupid of me to be jealous of their friendship.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said thanks, I thought it was frightfully sweet of her, and if I could possibly get around I’d adore to, and I was dreadfully sorry to read in the paper that Achille was dead—which is true, I am—and that’s all. Sometimes I think she’s just trying to make me quarrel with her. I’ve got a stinking temper, and I’d say a lot of things I shouldn’t say. She’s got the advantage . . . but I’m not going to give anybody the satisfaction of knowing I can’t take it on the chin if I have to.”
“She hasn’t got the advantage, darling,” I said calmly. “You’ve got it. Every woman married to a man has it, if she’s even half-way bright.”
She shook her head.
“Not me. Maybe I could make him forget her for a little while if I tried to, but that isn’t the point. I want all or nothing—freely or not at all. If it was war hysteria I want to know it, now. And I’m not going to put a shawl on my head and be the little woman weeping and saying Darling, how could you forget! You can call it . . . stubbornness, or anything you like, but that’s the way it is. I just don’t want him ever to know how like broken-up jelly I feel inside.”
She stared up at the ceilling for an instant, her eyes very wide open. Then she took a quick deep breath and looked back at me with an effort to smile and brush it off as inconsequential.
“Do you mind going over to the house with me? I have to get a dress, and I’d better show, I think. Your friend Colonel Primrose asked me if I could be there at three o’clock.”
“Oh, dear,” I thought. I said, “Why don’t you go by yourself? Maybe Cass will be there, and you’ll have a chance to get this straightened out.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Grace,” she answered calmly. “I can say all this, hut I know if he touched me, even once, I’d . . . I’d crawl back, the way women always do. And I’d hate myself. Don’t look at me that way, Grace . . . I know I sound childish. But if he could make me as blind as . . . I seem to have been, then I’d always doubt any happiness I had. I’d never be sure.”
She smiled. “—Please come. What is it they used to say . . . save me from myself.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll save you from yourself. But I think you’d be a lot wiser if you’d let yourself go. You don’t mind if I take Sheila, do you? She doesn’t get out much, with the rabies quarantine.”
I put the muzzle and leash on Sheila while Molly went upstairs and changed into the tan cotton dress she’d worn over the night before. As I waited for her the business of Randy Fleming came back with a kind of benumbing impact
. It was so unbelievable. And there was one thing I thought she ought to know . . .
“Do you know Colonel Primrose?” I asked, approaching it obliquely, as we went along P Street to the corner.
“Just barely. Cass knows him.”
She added, “I suppose he’s looking into Achille’s . . . death, isn’t he?”
For a second my blood chilled. Her hesitation before she didn’t say “murder” was almost as disturbing as anything that had gone before.
“The paper said he drank some poisoned liquor,” she added. “It seems a curious thing to have around.—Hello, Julie.”
We were going down 28th Street. I glanced around. Julie Ross was out on her front porch with a broom sweeping off the steps.
“Hello, Molly. Hello, Grace,” she said. “Come on in.”
“Can’t, darling, we’re going over to my place. We’re being investigated by the Gestapo. See you later.”
Julie Ross looked back into the house, her big dark eyes suddenly changing. She came down toward us.
“Come on in—just a second,” she said urgently. “Please—for God’s sake. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m almost out of my mind.”
7
We hesitated for a moment.
“Gosh, everybody seems to be in trouble today,” Molly said with sudden feeling. “It must be sun spots. Hurry up, darling, we’ve really got to go.”
We went up into the long double room. It’s a lovely room, all lime-yellow and dusty pinkish gray and white, and a perfect background for Julie Ross’s almost Latin type.
“Just a second,” she said. “I’ve got to——”
She ran up to the head of the stairs and stood for an instant, listening. Then she came back down.
“—You know those two men I had over at Molly’s last night?”
