by Zenith Brown
“Those records, Courtney,” Colonel Primrose said. “I want them, immediately.”
“—Oh, Colonel, I’m so sorry!”
She got to her feet.
“The most dreadful thing happened. I dropped them. They’re broken simply to bits. They’re here, in the basket.”
She picked up the tole lily-shaped basket beside the desk and handed it to him.
When she said they were broken to bits she was speaking literally indeed. If she’d put them in a mortar and used a pestle on them they couldn’t, in fact, have been broken into smaller bits.
Colonel Primrose held the ridiculous waste basket in his hands for a moment, looking down on the black ground-up mess in the bottom of it. His voice was controlled and quiet when he spoke, but his black eyes snapped with a look that would have shrivelled an armadillo’s hide.
“You’re going to regret this bitterly, Courtney,” he said.
His steady tones stung like a cat-o’-nine-tails. I moved away a little, myself.
“It was the stupidest thing you could have done. It was criminally stupid. The only possible assumption anyone can make is that you know who murdered your husband, and you know his voice was recorded there. If you had set out deliberately to hang anyone, you couldn’t have done a better job of it. Now go to bed . . . and if you know how to pray, pray God that someone can undo the harm you’ve done.”
Courtney stood steadying herself against the desk, her face gray-green. At the door he turned.
“There’ll be a guard downstairs tonight. You’re to stay in this room until you’re allowed to leave it. I’d like you to do a little quick serious thinking. There’s such a thing as an accessory after the fact, and there are a lot of them serving terms in the women’s penitentiaries.—Come along, Mrs. Latham. I’m going to take you home.”
I guess it wasn’t a black wall Duleep Singh had been seeing in front of me. It was just a long, long flight of stairs. I thought I’d never get to the bottom of it, with Colonel Primrose and Inspector Bigges clumping down behind me, and if I’d been walking up with a gallows’ rope dangling at the top I couldn’t have been unhappier. And I guess too that I was being allowed to do a little quiet thinking myself, because after Cass and Duleep Singh and Horace left the house together, he and the Inspector went back into the library and closed the door. If I hadn’t been in the luxurious dog house of a drawing room he’d probably have let me be in there with them. But I’d been reduced to the ranks, in as summary a court-martial as anybody ever got.
I don’t know how long I sat there, pretty shattered, trying to bind up my wounded vanity. It seemed a long time, but maybe it wasn’t. It was very gradually, anyway, that I became aware there was somebody else somewhere fairly close to me. I could feel another presence as definitely as if I could see it. I sat there motionless, not daring to look round, chill creeping things moving along my spine. The place was so damned quiet. I couldn’t hear a sound except my own heart, and all I could feel was a sharp terror at being alone and yet knowing that something else . . . I could hear it then, behind me toward the dining room, and I got to my feet and turned around, getting my hand to my mouth just in time to stifle what I know would have been a blood-curdling scream.
There was someone in the door. That wasn’t just a product of overwrought nerves. But it was Molly Crane . . . and she looked a lot scareder than I was. Her eyes were like dark amber saucers and her face was so white and strained that it’s a wonder I recognized her as quickly as I did. I looked frantically across the hall. The library door was still closed.
“What on earth are you doing here?” I whispered. “How did you get in?”
I went as close to her as I could and still keep an eye on the door. She crept in softly, keeping out of the line of it.
“—I’ve been here for hours,” she whispered desperately. “I came the back way, and I can’t get out. There’s a policeman out there. What’ll I do? I’ve got to get out—I’ve simply got to, before anybody finds me. Oh, Grace, think of something, quick!”
I suppose I must have just stood there staring at her.
“Grace, please! I’ve got to get out!”
Trying to think of something quick when the place was surrounded by policemen, and when I expected the library door to open any instant and Colonel Primrose walk out and see us, wasn’t as easy as it may sound. The only people who could hope to get out would be the colored servants. It seems to me now I wasted hours trying to think of how she could black her face and pretend she was a maid. There was still her yellow hair and nothing plausible to tie around it, and anyway it was too fantastic.
I looked down at my dinner dress. If I could get her into that, I thought. But I’m taller than she is and even if I’d had very much under it, which I hadn’t, Colonel Primrose would probably have noticed it. Then it occurred to me suddenly. The only possible thing to do was the obvious thing, and it had worked once that evening. It might again.
“Look, Molly,” I said. “This is a chance, but you’ve got to take it. Go right to the front door and open it and walk out. Be quick, and as casual as you can. They can’t hear from the library. They don’t know outside who’s here. And listen—don’t close the door clear shut. Remember. And go quick!”
I didn’t blame her for feeling her feet were glued to the floor, though I didn’t know how really desperate her need for getting out was, except as I could see it in the pulse beating madly in her throat.
“If they stop you say you’re the nurse. Anything. But go quick, darling.”
She nodded, and the next minute she was going down the hall. I saw her body straighten as if she were bracing herself, and I didn’t look at her again. My eyes were on the library door and my heart was in my mouth. I waited . . . a long time, it seemed to me, trying in my mind to see her reach the gate and then the sidewalk and turn and go down Massachusetts Avenue—almost to 22nd Street, I hoped she’d be, before I crossed the room and went out into the hall.
The door was almost closed, but not quite. I listened a moment. There was no sound except the policeman at the gate whistling. I pushed the door to.
Almost instantly the library door opened and Colonel Primrose looked out. His expression changed from inquiry to suspicion when he saw it was I.
“I thought I’d like a little air,” I said.
He didn’t smile.
“You go and sit down, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “I’ll take you home in about five minutes.”
“I’d rather go now,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, but stood watching me until I went back to the drawing room. Then he left the library door ajar. I gathered that however tightly Mr. Durbin had insulated himself against noise, he still knew when anyone entered or left his house—from the front anyway. How Molly had got in, why she’d come, where she’d been all the time, how long she actually meant by “hours,” . . . a dozen questions raced around in my mind as I sat down again to wait. There was only one thing I could be so completely sure of I didn’t have to question it at all . . . and that was that even presuming she could possibly have strangled D. J. Durbin, she was the one person in the world who wouldn’t want to. I wondered whether she’d been there long enough to hear Inspector Bigges say Courtney was as free as air, with a wad of dough . . . or hear Cass say he’d come to see if Mrs. Durbin was . . . all right.
It couldn’t have been five minutes, actually, that I sat there going over it in my mind. Colonel Primrose and the Inspector came out, Bigges finishing something he’d started to say on the other side of the door.
“—case against Sondauer. I wonder if he had anything else in mind, Colonel. They say in the Army the best defensive is a mighty powerful offensive.”
“We’ll have to see,” Colonel Primrose said. “Meanwhile, I’m going home. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He came to the drawing room door. “If you’re ready, Mrs. Latham,” he said without warmth.
17
It’s invariably the obvio
us things you never gave a thought to that rise up and smite you. It’s like taking elaborate precautions against cracking up in a helicopter and breaking your neck because you forgot there was ice on the front steps.
We were half-way down Courtney’s front steps when Colonel Primrose said, “I wonder where Buck is?”
If I didn’t trip and break my neck it was only because I was so dumfounded I couldn’t.
“Buck?” I said.
He looked at me as if he thought the heat was responsible.
“Certainly.”
I hadn’t thought of Sergeant Buck. When I sent Molly out the front way he never so much as crossed my mind. I suppose because he hadn’t been visible at the Blodgetts’ or standing by there inside Courtney’s house, the wish was probably father to the thought that he’d somehow been permanently congealed and immobilized. If I’d stopped to think in rational terms I’d have known that an oyster doesn’t go far without his shell or a shell without his oyster. Though the figure isn’t apt except in the sense of common indispensability . . . even if Colonel Primrose, very unlike himself, had kept a pretty oyster-like silence through the whole evening, except for his lashing of Courtney and its implied extension to me.
I was worried about Molly. Sergeant Buck would have recognized her, of course. Knowing Cass had come and left without her he’d naturally wonder what went on, and take matters in his own hands to find out. He’d also tell Colonel Primrose. Then there’d be more trouble.
“Well, we might as well walk,” Colonel Primrose said, after looking around again. “If you’re up to it.”
“I could even run,” I said.
As a matter of fact, I’d have liked to. There was a full-page advertisement in the papers that morning that had “Beware the Fury of a Patient Man” plastered across the top of it. It was in my mind then. To have to walk clear to Georgetown with him was not something I looked forward to.
We went about a block in complete silence. Then he took hold of my arm.
“Look, my dear,” he said. “I’m sorry I was angry with you. But you know you’re the most irritating woman I’ve ever known.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We both sounded contrite, although I was aware that under the newest circumstances my contrition reeked a little of the whited sepulchre.
“In fact, sometimes you’re maddening. Let me tell you just one thing you helped do tonight. Cass Crane made the statement that Durbin tried to buy him off. It happens—for various reasons that are damned important—that that lies at the very heart of this affair. And Courtney Durbin destroyed the only actual positive evidence that that offer was made and rejected.”
“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about, really,” I said.
“If you’ll be quiet I’ll tell you. Please, Mrs. Latham . . .”
He lapsed into a patient silence for a moment.
“Try to use your head just once, will you?” he said then, rather more like himself. “You know, if I wasn’t very much in love with you, I’d think sometimes you have the I. Q. of a . . .”
He stopped again, fortunately. I don’t know how low I could have stood for its being put, just then.
“Cass says he stopped by the Durbins’ last night to call Molly. But we know Courtney met him at the airport. We know he’d let her and not his wife know he was coming in. He says himself that he was the one man who could put an okay or a rejection on this scheme of Durbin’s. The thing they’re dealing with happens to be of immense importance, Mrs. Latham. Well, the assumption could easily be—and you know Washington at the moment—that Cass Crane went straight to Durbin’s to sell his goods. He gets fifty-six hundred a year. Durbin . . .”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But don’t be absurd, Colonel,” I protested hotly. “You know very——”
“I asked you to be quiet, Mrs. Latham. Let’s say this is Inspector Bigges’ point of view—and he’s not a fool by any means. Cass had the chance, last night, of taking charge of some of Durbin’s interests and being an enormously wealthy man in a few years. Do you think he’d boggle at a small matter of simply keeping his mouth shut, because he’s a gentleman and a friend of yours?”
“But . . . you said it was Durbin who was trying to kill Cass . . .”
He was silent for a moment.
“All right. Suppose, meanwhile, Cass had seen Courtney again, and saw she was more than willing to marry him if she could get free. It doesn’t take much to see that. This is Bigges again.—It wasn’t Durbin trying to poison Cass. It was Cass trying to poison Durbin. Durbin was at Cass’s house last night, for one thing.”
“How do you know he was there?” I demanded. “Nobody has——”
“By using my eyes. Next time you go to the Cranes’ look at the floor, from where I looked sitting by the window. It takes a long time for shellac to dry in weather like this. You can see the marks of Durbin’s stick straight down the middle of the room.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Furthermore, I saw Durbin at five o’clock this afternoon. He didn’t say in so many words that he thought Cass was trying to give him a poisoned highball. He intimated he thought it was strange he’d call up a friend of his wife’s to help him hide a body he wasn’t responsible for. And he said, ‘Of course you’re aware of Crane’s very personal interest in my wife.’ ”
We’d come to the Q Street bridge, with the grotesque buffaloes charging down at us from their pedestals. In the absence of traffic we could hear the burbling of Rock Creek coming up from below. It’s been years since I was conscious of hearing it, very pleasant and uncity like. But Colonel Primrose wasn’t interested in pastoral effects.
“Durbin’s death,” he went on deliberately, “—his murder—is all that’s saved Cass Crane from complete ruin, as a matter of fact. The affair is that serious. Whether Cass is guilty or innocent, or Durbin guilty or innocent, Cass was going to get it. In another week he’d have been so smeared he couldn’t have got along in this town. Whether he wrecked Durbin’s plans, or Durbin was jealous about Courtney, or the unsavory shoe was on Cass’s foot to begin with is no matter. Durbin had nothing to lose in terms that are understandable to us. His reputation was already what it was. He didn’t need money. The whole power game was just a game. But it was one he was willing to stake other people’s lives on. He was a ruthless man, in a sense that it’s hard for a civilized human being to conceive.”
“I’m afraid I don’t really see quite what you’re saying, Colonel,” I said. “Maybe it’s my I. Q., but——”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not really saying anything. I’m just talking, my dear. Trying to clear it up in my own mind.”
He hesitated, looking at me rather oddly.
“It happens I’m not primarily interested in murder, this time. Neither in Achille’s nor in Durbin’s. They’re entirely incidental. I’m sorry for Achille, but so far as I’m concerned Mr. D. J. Durbin can rot in hell.”
I looked at him blankly. It wasn’t his language, though I’d never heard him say he didn’t like someone quite so forcefully. But I certainly never expected to hear him say murder was incidental.
He took my arm again. “Do you think you could keep something to yourself?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a delusion I’ve abandoned, and I’m the only one who ever had it.”
He chuckled.
“You can try, just once. If you can’t bring yourself to help me you can at least stop trying to hinder me.”
“All right,” I said. “—Beginning as of now.”
He looked sideways at me, a little doubtfully. But the advantage of being known to have a low I. Q. is that people don’t think you really know what it is you’re saying.
“The sole thing I’m concerned with is Cass Crane. And the answer was right there in those records . . . that you and Courtney were so helpful about.”
“I wish,” I said, “that you’d come right out and say what you mean. In words I can understand.
I’m so tired of——”
“There have been a lot of rumors,” he said quietly, “beginning about a month ago. They’re either malicious, or true. They tend to discredit Crane completely. Nobody paid much attention to them until a story appeared in one of the gossip columns. It was to the effect that you could expect to see some of the bright young men who’ve investigated raw material sources coming out as post-war robber baronets, if they bothered to wait that long. It went on to say that if an ambitious young man was sent out to see whether the government should put a large sum of money at the disposal of a private group, or a foreign government, for the development of needed strategic materials, it could be a great temptation—as well as a very easy matter—for him to look out for his own interests. There were strong hints tying the thing down to one man particularly.”
He stopped for an instant, and went on.
“That’s when I was called in, Mrs. Latham. I’ve been through Cass Crane’s life since he got out of three-cornered pants . . . and through all his family ramifications.”
“And so . . . ?” I asked.
“And so what?”
He shook his head.
“He got me out in the hall to ask if he could take over Durbin’s records, before anyone else got to them. I thought he meant files, before he explained about Durbin’s machine that recorded everything spoken in the library. Well, it could mean his conscience was clear and he was just on the job. It could also mean he was pretty anxious to get hold of them for his own purposes.”
Courtney Durbin’s terror when she suddenly thought of the machine came back to me. The new meaning it could have wasn’t consoling.
“You assume,” he said evenly, “that because a man’s able, and a nice fellow, comes from your social group and is married to a friend of yours, that he’s honest. I don’t. And Bigges, who’s trying to find out who killed those two people, doesn’t either.”
