All for the Love of a Lady

by Zenith Brown

  We’d turned down 29th Street and were passing his yellow brick house to cross over to my red brick one.

  “It’s Molly, as a matter of fact, I feel sorry for, right now,” he said.

  “Do you think Cass is in love with Courtney?” I asked abruptly.

  He didn’t answer right away—not until we’d stopped at my front door.

  “Courtney’s a fascinating woman,” he said quietly. “She’s a very rich one, and she’s very smart. Molly’s different. It’s like expecting a cocker spaniel to beat a greyhound in a race for the butcher’s cart. I . . . like the spaniel, myself. But Molly will be a fool, because she’s young and in love and insecure. I don’t know.”

  He added slowly, “I’m glad she’s got Randy to fall back on. He’s good goods, and so is she. Well, good night, my dear. I’m sorry—again.”

  He bent forward a little. I thought he was going to kiss me, and I still think he was. The lights of a car standing in front of the next house went on abruptly, the door opened, and a large man got out. There was no mistaking those massive shoulders outlined against the night. Sergeant Buck did not, however, turn his head and spit, and I thought it was rather sweet of him. He just came around the front of the car and opened the other door for Colonel Primrose.

  “Figured I’d catch you here, sir.”

  He always talks out of one corner of his armor-plated mouth anyway, so it sounded more sinister and accusing than he meant it to . . . I hope.

  Colonel Primrose smiled at me. “Good night, Mrs. Latham,” he said.

  Some day maybe Sergeant Buck will decide he should beware the fury of a patient man, to say nothing of the fury of an impatient woman. I add that to keep kind friends from adding it for me.

  18

  As a matter of fact, I was too concerned with other people’s affairs just then to have more than a passing interest in my own.

  If I’d been able to tell what Colonel Primrose really thought, what he meant by saying he was glad Molly had Randy to fall back on—and how far back she was going to have to fall—my mind wouldn’t have been the rats’ maze it was even after I got to sleep. I had one of those ghastly dreams that pick up all the undigested trifles of the day and make them into nightmare reality. I dreamed I was on a huge green felt turntable going round and around. Courtney and Cass, Inspector Bigges and Randy were on it with me, and Duleep Singh’s eyes—just his eyes—were off to one side watching us. Corinne Blodgett kept coming in and out with her ration book in the form of yellow squash, hunting for Horace and Molly, getting everything confused just as it seemed to be on the point of becoming completely clear. I was glad when morning came.

  At least I was till I looked at the paper. The front page screamed with the murder of D. J. Durbin, man of mystery and romance, and with his young and beautiful socialite wife, stricken by this terrible blow from the hand of the assassin. Where they’d unearthed the pictures of Courtney—child, debutante and bride—and of the house before, after and during D. J. Durbin’s alterations of it, I’ll never know. So far, and I was thankful for it, Cass’s name didn’t appear, or Molly’s. The police were hunting the two men who were known to have been guests at dinner. There was a picture of Horace Blodgett, taken I’m sure from his college yearbook. He had found the body, and he was stricken too, it seemed. In fact everybody was at least stricken dumb, according to the reporters trying to explain why nobody would talk. One of them who’d called the Blodgett house said she’d talked to Mrs. Horace Blodgett, who’d said that of course her husband had never been a criminal lawyer so there must be some mistake. There was a picture of Inspector Bigges, a complete rehash of the reorganization of the detective bureau, and an account of how Inspector Bigges had got some Embassy’s parrot out of a tree in Sheridan Square on New Year’s Night.

  Reading it over carefully a second time, I saw it boiled down to a simple statement that Horace Blodgett had found the dead body of D. J. Durbin, who was the husband of Courtney Durbin, that a Mr. Skagerlund and a Mr. Austin had been there to dinner, and that Inspector Bigges was in charge of the case. The rest of it was highly embroidered background to give the sweltering capital a little diversion from the war and the thermometer.

  The only really interesting thing that I could see was a small box at the bottom of the front page. “Will the messenger boy who delivered the black kitten to a house on Massachusetts Avenue at seven o’clock last night please communicate with the police, for information only.” It was the first real knowledge I had that either Colonel Primrose or Inspector Bigges, each working, apparently, on his own job, thought the kitten was genuinely relevant. And I might just as well say here that all they learned was that the kitten came from a pet shop on G. Street. It had been with four other various-colored animals in the box in the window with a “$2 Each” over it. On Wednesday morning when the proprietor opened the shop there was an envelope under the door. It had a five-dollar bill in it, and a note typed on a sheet of hotel stationery. The note asked him to send the black kitten in a shoe box to Mr. D. J. Durbin the next evening around seven o’clock, by hand, as a surprise, and to see that the messenger delivered it to Mr. Durbin himself. The extra three dollars was for the boy who took it. The proprietor had made a note of the address, thrown the original note in the waste paper basket and put the five dollars in the cash register. It was good business, because his first idea had been to drown the kittens, whose parents had obviously met in the alley behind the shop when the mother should have been catching mice inside.

  And that was as far as that part of the investigation of the black kitten episode ever got. The alley itself couldn’t have had a deader end. It took a whole day of a detective’s time, and Colonel Primrose, as I learned, was the only person who thought it worth the trouble. And he, or so he’d said, was only incidentally interested in murder.

  It was just on the stroke of eight when the phone by my bed rang. It was Molly.

  “Grace,” she said. Her voice sounded colorless and a little dead . . . very different from the frantic urgency that I’d heard in it last night.

  “If you’re not very busy this morning, would you come around? I’m going to be here. Cass has gone over to Courtney’s.”

  I don’t know why it struck me as being as incredible as it did. He’d said he was going to. But it seemed to me he ought to have more sense . . . or something. With what had happened, and particularly with all the gossip apparently going around, there’d be reporters and photographers sitting in the trees and under every stone you could turn over. My silence must have been obvious.

  “It’s all right, Grace,” she said quickly. “You know they’re very old friends. She . . . she really needs a man around to see to things. She hasn’t any brothers.”

  “Well . . . of course, darling,” I said hastily. “I think it’s wonderful, and I’ll be along after a while. Goodbye.”

  She was in the front room when I got there a little after half-past nine. She was sitting in the chair Courtney had sat in the day before. A small tray with half a grapefruit, a couple of pieces of toast and a cup of coffee was on a table by her. The cream had made a scum across the top of the coffee and the toast and grapefruit were untouched. She was slumped down on the middle of her spine, staring in front of her.

  “Buck up, sweetie,” I said.

  I found myself looking quickly at the floor, and wondering how I’d been so blind. Even in the morning light the round marks of D. J. Durbin’s cane were more than evident. In the afternoon I don’t see how I could have missed them. I looked back at her. She seemed thinner, her cheek bones high and pale so that her eyes seemed even larger and brighter. Her lips were scarlet and unsmiling. In such almost static repose she was prettier than I’d ever thought she was. Her light hair was brushed up in curls on the top of her head, with a red bow in them matching the belt of her white dress and the red suede nonsense she had on her feet for shoes. She did look very young, and if she was going to dress up so gaily and then sit here and mope I was afr
aid Colonel Primrose was right in saying she would be a fool.

  “Well,” she said, straightening up and looking at me, “Mr. Buck brought me home last night.”

  It was an abrupt out-of-the-blue statement. Whether she realized its implications or not I didn’t know.

  “Which means Colonel Primrose knows it now,” I said. “Has he been here yet?”

  She shook her head.

  “Mr. Buck was sweet,” she Went on. “We stayed out in the car and talked a long time. He said I didn’t have to worry about . . . about Cass and . . . Courtney, even if Mr. Durbin is dead and she has a lot of money, because . . . he says Cass isn’t that kind of a person.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. It was out before I realized it. One of the axioms of Colonel Primrose’s procedure is that if he can find out who Sergeant Buck and I think is innocent, he can then and there signal to the hangman to make ready.

  She looked at me, her face blank and immobile.

  “Why? Is he always wrong?”

  I didn’t like to say, “Well, he’s not always right.” In fact there was very little I could say.

  “He’s wrong this time, anyway,” she went on.

  “You’re sure, darling?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “You know I said I didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for me, Grace. And I still don’t. I think it’s really wonderful that . . . that now she’s free and she’s got everything and they can begin all over again. Not many people have a second chance until they’re too old to care. And all this sort of thing . . .”

  She looked around at the paint job she’d done and the simple inexpensive antiques she’d glued together and scraped and rubbed down herself, not seeing now, I suppose, the charm they really had.

  “. . . It simply bores the pants off Cass, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. I want him to have the other.”

  She got up and put the tray with her untasted breakfast on the table by the back room door.

  “He’s been in love with her much longer than I knew,” she said calmly. “I keep feeling I’ve got to make you understand that I . . . I think that’s important. If I loved anybody that much I’d want to be with him, and I’d get so I hated anybody who’d . . . who’d sidetracked me for very long. So I’m sort of saving myself something too.”

  She came over to me.

  “I know Cass is in an awful spot, Grace. You don’t know how bad a spot it is—and I wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for Mr. Buck. People tell you the little mean things they hear but they never tell you the important big things.”

  There was a sudden bitterness in her eyes that I wouldn’t have thought she was old enough to know.

  “You see, Cass doesn’t know, and it’s the kind of thing I can’t tell him. It’s too terrible. Courtney could tell him, but I couldn’t. That’s why she’ll always be better for him than I will.”

  I wasn’t sure. It seemed to me that perhaps the fewer bitter truths wives tell their husbands the better off they both are. It also seemed to me that this was one I could keep to myself just then.

  “You see, Mr. Buck told me last night that I held Cass’s future, and Courtney’s, both in the hollow of my hand,” she said quietly.

  Hearing Sergeant Buck called “Mister” in the first place was startling enough, but hearing of him in that role was astounding. I could imagine Duleep Singh as a swami without much trouble if I had to, in fact with the mere addition of a jewelled turban. Swami Buck was a concept that was far beyond me.

  Molly must have interpreted my surprise as something else.

  “I wasn’t coming back here when I left the Durbins’ last night, Grace. I just wasn’t ever coming here again. But Mr. Buck brought me here. He said if I left the house now it would make it look as if everything was . . . was true, and Cass wouldn’t have a chance. He said if I didn’t act like I believed in him, nobody else would either. If I wanted to go later he said I could, but right now he said I had to go around and act like I thought it was fine for Cass to stand by and help Courtney out, and not let on to anybody that I cared or was upset or hurt.”

  “It makes a lot of sense,” I said.

  There was something rather moving in the picture of the grim-visaged, fishy-eyed man sitting outside in the car, talking out of the corner of his lantern jaw, telling Molly the simple truths that probably nobody else could have made her take so like a trusting child.

  “Of course he doesn’t know . . . some of it,” she said, looking away again. “He doesn’t know why I was at the Durbins’. Or . . . about this.”

  She bent down and pulled a leather gladstone bag out from under the sofa, and opened it.

  “When he says Cass isn’t that kind of a person he doesn’t understand it’s just that Courtney means more to him than . . . anybody else does. Just as . . . I’ll probably always mean more to Randy than anybody else.—He’s been so sweet.”

  Her eyes softened for an instant. The smile in them faded as she turned back a narrow flap in the bottom of the bag and pulled a fastener that held it down. She lifted the flap up.

  “I was unpacking his things yesterday,” she said. “I shouldn’t have opened this, maybe, but I’m glad I did. I . . . understand better, now.”

  She took out a dark green leather portfolio with a border of gold tooled leaves.

  “This was my father’s—I gave it to Cass.”

  She opened it. There was a picture of Courtney inside. It was an unmounted photograph, fairly large, and very lovely. Under it were five or six other pictures of her, cut from the Washington newspapers, some of them going back to the time he’d first met her about six years ago. Molly took them up and looked at them, and put them back again. There was one other picture, of another woman, that had something vaguely familiar about it.

  “That’s his sister, the one who died,” she said. “They look a little alike, don’t they, except for the coloring.”

  She put it down and closed the flap again.

  “She and Courtney I guess are the only women he’ll ever really love.”

  She closed the bag, pushed it back under the sofa and got up.

  “I just wish he hadn’t used the folder I gave him to . . . to carry them around in. That’s all I really mind. It’s funny, isn’t it, how little things seem more important than big ones, sometimes.”

  She stood there looking around the room as if it had suddenly become strange and unfamiliar to her.

  “Look, Molly,” I said. “Why don’t you come over to my house and have lunch? You oughtn’t to stay here alone and think about things. It doesn’t do any good.”

  “I know it doesn’t—and thanks. But I’m going down town to lunch. I’m going with Duleep Singh.”

  I don’t know why that disturbed me, but it did.

  “You know, Grace, he’s really wonderful,” she said with sudden warmth. “I could fall in love with him. He understands everything without your having to tell him. And he can see my life, he said. It’s like a garden . . . a flower garden in the spring. Grace, he’s really wonderful.”

  Her eyes were shining the way they should have shone for Cass . . . or even Randy. I’m afraid as I left the house mine were dull and glazed. I was worried. I was much more worried about her now than I had been when I saw her bed was empty at three o’clock on the morning little Achille was poisoned in her house.

  19

  I don’t know whether rumor travels faster in Washington than it does anywhere else in the world, or only seems to. Or if there really is something in the excessive humidity here that makes the dragon’s tooth, once planted, grow faster than the bean stalk in the fairy tale. By the time I left the Red Cross about quarter to one, at any rate, I began to wonder whether it wouldn’t be wise to go directly to the ration board and apply for enough gasoline to get me out to St. Elizabeth’s for a nice quiet rest.

  Of course everybody was simply goggle-eyed to begin with. And when one woman said Molly Crane was leaving town—she’d called up her daugh
ter and asked her to substitute as nurse’s aide for her that morning—it was like that spontaneous roar that goes up at the race track when they’re off. Though women’s tongues, and I dare say men’s, can run faster than Whirlaway’s backers ever hoped he could in their most sanguine moods. One woman said she’d always thought D. J. Durbin was an Axis agent, and now she was sure of it. Somebody else said Horace Blodgett had collapsed and had to be taken out, and somebody else had heard it was Courtney and not Horace. A woman I don’t know said Courtney had been to the doctor’s office at ten that morning and she was beaten black and blue from her head to her heels. She’d got that from the sister of a girl the receptionist had telephoned to tell about it.

  Opinion seemed to be divided into two definite and mutually exclusive camps. One was that a fellow spy had done it, and the other implied rather than stated that Courtney Durbin knew a great deal more than she was telling the police. The story of Courtney and Molly’s brief passage at the Abbotts’ was common currency, magnified to a point unrecognizable to me. Molly was on her way to Reno and was going to marry Randy in six weeks and one day. Cass had lost his job as of that morning. I don’t recall who it was who said that, but she had it straight from the Pentagon.

  Those were just a few of the hush-hush bits that were going the rounds with the speed of light. I was rather surprised that no one I heard even inquired who the dinner guests were, or seemed to think it odd that they had departed silently into nowhere and hadn’t turned up again.

  Or that’s what I’d thought about them until I went down Connecticut Avenue with three friends to have lunch in the air-cooled cocktail lounge at the Garfield Hotel. As we went in the lobby I saw Colonel Primrose standing under the clock, looking at his watch. He glanced up and smiled, and when we got to him he stopped us, and it ended with my staying to have lunch with him.

  “—You’ll be particularly interested,” he said, after the other women had gone on in. “I’m waiting for Mr. Austin.”