by Zenith Brown
It was me she was speaking to. I nodded. “Mr. Austin and Mr. Sondauer.”
“No, no, his name’s Skagerlund, Louis Skagerlund. Anyway, a friend of mine called up last week and said two old friends of hers were trying to find a quiet place with a garden, not a hotel, and I had a lot of room and would I take them. She’d told them it would be around three hundred a month for the two—room, bath and breakfast—and would I?”
She put her hands out in a quick nervous gesture.
“Well, I’d take the devil himself for half that. I moved myself and the kids over into the servants’ rooms over the kitchen and gave them the second floor. Yesterday Spud’s mother came and simply raised hell. I was bringing degradation to the fair name of Ross, and they’d never approved of their son’s marrying a divorced woman, and the minute he went to bleed and die for his country the mother of his defenseless little ones had to open a boarding house!”
She stepped over to the front windows, looked up and down the street, and sat down there where she could still keep her eye out.
“Anyway, last night some people dropped in, and they came home and I asked them to come out and have a drink. That’s when somebody mentioned Cass, and either they knew him or they wanted to know him. That’s how we got around to your house. Mr. Austin said he didn’t think we ought to say we knew he was home. It was a little cockeyed, but so many things are these days. When we got back it was so damned hot I turned out the lights and went out on the terrace after they went up. I sat there thinking about Spud, and things, and all of a sudden I heard Skagerlund say, ‘He would not recognize me, my friend.’ His voice is sort of thick and rumbling. I realized they were just behind me, coming into the garden. I didn’t know what to do, so I just closed my eyes and sat.”
She glanced out of the window again, and moistened her lips with a quick movement of her tongue.
“Austin said, ‘He’s nobody’s fool,’ and Skagerlund laughed. It was a funny, short laugh. He said, ‘But neither am I—I am always prepared.’ Then somebody said ‘Ssh!’ and I heard a piece of glass crumble, and I knew they were right beside me, because somebody in that chair had dropped one earlier. And just then a dog barked, and I pretended to wake up. They came over and said it was hot, and I got some ice water. Then Mr. Skagerlund began asking all sorts of questions, about Washington, and people, and finally got around to Randy. Where he lived, and what he was doing at your house with you, Molly, and who you were, Grace.”
“Well,” Molly said practically, “what did you tell him?”
“I thought the best thing was to pretend I hated Randy and didn’t know where he lived, and didn’t want to know, and whatever he was doing at your house he was up to no good. Anyway, this morning when I made up his bed there was an automatic on the dresser. When he came in this noon I told him I’d seen it and asked him not to leave it where one of the kids could get it. He said, ‘Perhaps Madame regrets having us here—would she prefer we move?’ I would, of course, but I paid a lot of bills with the three hundred dollars, so I’m stuck. I said no, I loved having them—I felt so safe having a man with a gun in the house. But I don’t! There’s something screwy going on, and I don’t know what it is—and I’m scared. Every time the phone rings they listen on the extension, and—oh gosh, here they come!”
She got up quickly. “Go out the service door, will you? Please, quick!”
A taxi had pulled up in front of the house. Molly and Sheila and I got around through the dining room and the kitchen to the service gate. We waited there until the cab had gone, and a few minutes longer, before we went out into the street and on down toward Dumbarton.
We didn’t speak for a minute.
“I think there’s something else she didn’t tell us,” Molly said then, deliberately. “But I wonder whose friends they are?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Did Randy recognize him?” she asked.
“Yes. He said his name is Lons Sondauer. He’d met him in Cairo.”
We turned into Beall Street off 27th, and we both stopped short for an instant. It was usually swarming with children, and women fanning themselves on the doorsteps. Now it was empty except for two little boys hanging curiously on the broken-down gate across from the Cranes’. That in itself must have told Colonel Primrose a silent story, I thought. I glanced up at the bedroom window of the house of a friend of Lilac’s who helps us out occasionally, and saw the stringy lace curtain move as someone stepped away from it. There were probably a hundred eyes silently watching us as we went down the street. I’d expected that, and Randy should have known it the night before. But there’s no static along the grapevine. He’d probably thought there were no eyes to see him because he himself could see none.
A police car was standing in front of Molly’s house, and a uniformed officer was leaning on the derelict fence of the house on the corner, where the body had been found. Our steps slowed down a little as we came along, across the street, toward the cars parked there.
“Well, my nurse used to say, ‘I’d rather take a dose of castor oil,’ ” Molly said.
The effort at lightness in her voice wasn’t very successful, and the radiance had gone out from under her sun tan, leaving her face a matte-dulled brown. I could have counted her heart beats, watching the pulse in her slim throat.
As we went across, the little colored boy swinging on the gate jumped off onto the sidewalk.
“I’ll run your dog for a nickel, Miss,” he said, grinning. “See, out there.” He pointed to the open field above the Rock Creek drive. “You’ll be over there, I guess. I know her.” He pointed to Molly.
“Fine,” I said. I handed him Sheila’s leash and the two of them bounded off together.
I didn’t see Sergeant Phineas T. Buck until we came around the patrol car and started up Molly’s iron steps. He was standing in the open doorway of the dilapidated house on the corner. He looked very much as if he were supporting the whole works . . . Atlas in a banker’s gray business suit, though I don’t remember in any of the accounts I’ve read of Atlas’s pausing to spit, as Sergeant Buck did then into the tangled grass beside the rotten steps. If everybody I know evinced the same pleasure in seeing me that was on his seamy façade just then, I’d go quietly and cut my throat. His viscid fish-gray eyes rested on me as if he wished I would, though I imagine when his lips moved sideways in his lantern jaw he was saying, “Howdedo, Ma’am,” because he’s always—so far—been polite to me.
“There . . . seems to be quite a crowd,” Molly said calmly.
It didn’t seem to have occurred to me until just then that for the police and Colonel Primrose to be inside the Cranes’ house someone must have been there to let them in . . . a man’s house still being his own even in Washington. So that Cass must be there. I looked quickly at Molly. Two bright spots were burning in her cheeks as she opened the screen door and stepped inside. It wouldn’t have been more than three or four feet from there to the door of the double living room, but it seemed a long way and a difficult one until she was there in it.
“Hello, everybody. Hello, Cass.”
Cass Crane was standing in the door between the front and back rooms. He didn’t move, but just stood looking at her. A psychologist I knew once did an elaborate series of tests to show that people’s eyes don’t, in themselves, have any expression of joy or sadness, and if the rest of the face is obliterated no one could ever tell what emotion there is behind them. I’ve never believed it, and I still don’t, though I can’t say what the emotion was in his eyes just then. Except that there was an almost brooding intensity in them, questioning, trying to understand her—or himself, who knows?—that melted into tenderness as he smiled and came across the room.
“Hello, Molly,” he said quietly.
He took hold of her arms, pinioning them tightly to her sides. I could see the white knuckles on his strong sun-blackened hands. He bent his head and kissed her gently on the mouth, and raised his head again, shaking it a little at
her, smiling. Then he released her arms and stepped back, and smiled at me across her shoulder.
There were four other people in the room. Only two of them were brazen enough not to have turned their heads. One was Colonel Primrose, and the other was Courtney Durbin. The police detective there was looking at his notes, and Randy Fleming was scraping a blob of paint off the hearth with the toe of his shoe. He looked up at Molly then. She’d put out her hand, steadying herself a little against the door frame. It wasn’t noticeable, and she looked as if she’d been completely unresponsive. I suppose Randy knew. He looked away again, quickly, and not very happily. But just seeing him there in the flesh had a heartening effect on me . . . his tan uniform, his sandy hair and clean-cut sunburned face and his blue eyes and firm jaw. Lilac could be wrong, I thought. The grapevine can’t necessarily be infallible.
Cass stood beside him at the other end of the fireplace.
“You know Colonel Primrose, Molly,” he said. “This is Inspector Bigges. Mrs. Crane, Inspector, and Mrs. Latham. And you know Courtney.”
The color in Molly’s cheeks had gone. She spoke to Colonel Primrose and the Inspector, and turned to Courtney, sitting in a long bamboo chair with places in the arms for books and pipes that Cass had brought from his bachelor quarters. She looked cool and detached and slightly amused.
“I hope you don’t mind my being here, Molly,” she said. “It’s not my fault. D. J. thought one of us ought to come over next door, and Colonel Primrose brought me in here.”
“Oh,” Molly said. She turned to Colonel Primrose. “Why? I don’t mean why did you bring Mrs. Durbin in, but why are you here yourself? What have we got to do with it?”
It was a pleasure to me to see Colonel Primrose even slightly taken aback by a perfectly direct inquiry.
“It’s chiefly that you’re next door, Mrs. Crane,” he answered pleasantly. “And your husband is an old friend of mine. I thought perhaps you’d let me presume on that.”
It seemed to me there were four small separate wells of silence receiving those words . . . “Mrs. Crane” and “your husband,” . . . and that Colonel Primrose had emphasized them ever so slightly. Courtney’s face didn’t change, it still had its cool petal-like loveliness; but her long dark lashes lowered, I thought, to conceal the spark that flickered an instant in her gray, faintly slanting eyes.
“I’m sorry, Colonel Primrose,” Molly said quickly. “I didn’t mean I’m not very happy you’re here.”
Sometimes I think Colonel Primrose is a very wise man and a very kind one. He’d said a simple thing, but it suddenly made Molly the mistress of her own house, and at home in it, which she hadn’t been still standing there in the doorway.
She went over to the sofa.
“Sit down, won’t you?”
She looked from Colonel Primrose to Inspector Bigges.
“All of us will be glad to tell you anything we know.”
“Well, that’s the whole thing,” Colonel Primrose said.
It always worries me when he acts so urbanely. When butter won’t melt in his mouth it’s a bad sign.
He looked at Cass now. Cass Crane is a very attractive man, tall and rather quiet. His hair is dark and crisp, his eyes a frosty-gray with smile wrinkles around them, and his mouth big and pleasant. At the moment it was hard to see the picture he always brought to my mind, because the half-smile in one corner of his mouth is so much a part of it, and it was noticeably not there now.
“—This is simply because you happen to be next door to where the body was found,” Colonel Primrose said. “What time did you get in, Cass?”
“I got here a little after one,” Cass said promptly. “I left the Durbins’ around twelve, went down town and phoned around to see if I could locate my wife.”
He was looking at Colonel Primrose, but it was Molly he was talking to.
“I came out here, thinking I could get in a window. Which I did. I’d been trying to get hold of Fleming because they told me at the Abbotts’ he and Molly had left together. I got him from here. He came around and we had a drink and chewed the fat until about three-thirty. He went home, and I went to bed. I didn’t hear anything going on outside. I was dead tired.”
“And you, Mrs. Crane?” Colonel Primrose asked.
Molly looked at him with a startled expression on her face.
“Oh, I wasn’t here. I stayed all night with Mrs. Latham. She wasn’t feeling very well and I didn’t think she ought to stay alone.”
I must say it was a great tribute. I’ve seen people drop my great-grandmother’s Crown Derby teacups without a flicker, I’d thought . . . but I’d never imagined anyone else had given me credit for a pan as dead—I hoped just then—as Sergeant Buck’s itself. It almost broke, however, when Colonel Primrose, caught off guard for a moment, glanced at me a little anxiously, almost as if he believed I hadn’t told the truth about why Molly had stayed all night.
Courtney Durbin raised one delicate brow slightly. “Do you feel better now, dear?”
“I feel fine, thanks.”
I turned to Molly.
“Why don’t you tell Colonel Primrose the truth? He’ll find it out if he doesn’t already know.”
Her face flamed scarlet.
“All right. I stayed at Mrs. Latham’s because I didn’t want to stay here, put I wasn’t here, so I didn’t hear anything. And I don’t know anything about the body next door.”
Courtney stifled a yawn with the scarlet tips of her fingers.
Colonel Primrose nodded politely. “And you, Randy?” “I walked around to Mrs. Latham’s with her and Molly. I stayed a few minutes and went home. Then Cass called and I came here. I left about three-thirty, I guess, and went back home again. Cass and I were here from about one-thirty on. The little guy certainly didn’t come near this house while I was here. I never heard a sound outside.”
Colonel Primrose spoke very deliberately. “You’d swear to that, Lieutenant Fleming?”
I caught my breath. This was something new. It was a ranking officer speaking as such, and Randy couldn’t do anything but tell the truth . . . on his honor he could not. The silence in the room showed that I was not the only one thinking that.
“Certainly, sir,” Randy said calmly. “I’ll swear to every word of it.”
The silence that followed again was broken so quickly that I didn’t even have time to relax and say, “Thank God—Lilac is wrong.” There was a shouting and a mad scramble outside and then on the steps, the screen door was pushed open and Sheila burst in, dragging her leash, her muzzle to the floor, the hair bristling on her shoulders. She came in a little way and back through the hall, all of us staring at her open-mouthed. Her nails scratched on the bare wood floor as she rounded the corner into the back room.
“Mad dog!” a voice shouted outside. “Mad dog!”
Courtney Durbin’s scream was high-pitched and terrifying.
I jumped to my feet, but Colonel Primrose was ahead of me and thrust me back.
“Don’t move—anybody,” he said curtly.
Randy and Cass stopped short. He went to the double doorway. Sheila sniffed up and down the floor, in front of the bar and back across to the desk, growling savagely. Then suddenly she sat down on her red haunches and raised her head, and that long, desperately eerie howl came out of her throat, and again.
Colonel Primrose crossed the room, picked up her leash and drew her away. He patted her and brought her to me. The hair on her head was still disordered, and she was still trembling.
“The dog isn’t mad,” he said quietly. “Go out, Bigges, and tell them so out there. She’s muzzled anyway.”
He turned to Courtney. “—Will you go too, please, Mrs. Durbin, across the street and explain to the woman whose child we saw take the dog that there’s nothing wrong with her?”
“I’ll be glad to, Colonel,” Courtney said. She got up and followed Inspector Bigges out.
I was talking to Sheila, trying to quiet her, when something in the room m
ade me look up. Colonel Primrose was standing there looking at Cass and Randy, his face as set as theirs, his eyes hardened to snapping black points.
“D. J. Durbin’s driver, whose body was found next door this morning, couldn’t have staggered ten feet, with that jolt of poison he had in him,” he said slowly. “The dog has just told us he was in this house . . . in the hall, by the desk, by the bar over there. It’s precisely the way she acted when the dead man, for some reason unknown to me, was on Mrs. Latham’s front porch last night.”
He turned to Randy Fleming.
“Which of you carried his dead body over next door I don’t know. But you snagged your foot on a rusty nail over there, Fleming . . . and you reported to the Army dispensary for a tetanus shot at 10.20 this morning. I’d like to know what you have to say. Either one, or both of you.”
I looked silently at Molly. She was sitting there so still that not even the movement of the pulse in her throat showed even faintly.
8
Colonel Primrose looked from Randy Fleming to Cass Crane, and waited. Molly sat beside me as motionless as a living thing can be. The atmosphere of the room was electric with suspended tension. Each of them—Cass, Molly and Randy—seemed a separate magnetic pole, each holding tight within his own field. Then Cass spoke.
“You can count Randy out of this, Colonel.”
His voice was perfectly matter-of-fact.
“What he said is true. The little man didn’t come while he was here and nothing happened outside while he was here. The little man was here when he came, and he was dead as a door nail. That’s why I called him. I . . . had to get that body out of this house. We were going to put him in his car, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to stow him over in the Park but some people were there, and we had to put him next door in a hurry.”
It seemed to me on the face of it about as cold-blooded a recital as I’d heard . . . calling in a friend to help stow away a dead body as if it were a sack of potatoes. I imagine Colonel Primrose, in his grimly urbane way, must have thought so too.
