by Zenith Brown
She moved abruptly.
“Anyway, let’s not talk about it any more. It’s driving me nuts. Your Colonel was here this morning too. He’s taken away all the records, out of the vault in the cellar. God knows what’s in them and what he’s going to hear. I keep trying to remember things I’ve said going through there. The thing was always on, so he’d know when anyone else was in there. He was so strange. He must have had a very restless and unhappy soul—he was suspicious of everybody. People can’t live that way. But let’s not talk about it. Where did you have lunch?”
I could tell her where but not who with if she wanted to get off the subject, so I told her at the Garfield and about the four women with the cartwheel hats, and about four o’clock I left. The attempt at other conversation had been pretty futile. It was like having a gaunt, grim and terrible spectre draped in black sitting on the parlor sofa while a tea party’s going on, with everybody trying to pretend it wasn’t sitting there. It was in Courtney’s shell-pink room all the time I was. It had been there before I came, and I knew when I went I’d left her alone with it.
I’d been standing a few moments on the curb, trying to decide whether to walk or attempt the bus, when a large car drew up and stopped. Duleep Singh was in the back preparing to get out when he saw me.
“How do you do, Mrs. Latham?”
He took off his hat, got out and bowed.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then let me take you where you are going. It’s a little early anyway, I’m afraid.”
He glanced up at the house, and looked back at me. I wondered whether he was again seeing the black wall with nothing beyond it, which was rather the way I felt at the moment, or whether the sombre examining interest in his eyes was something I was imagining.
“I’d be delighted,” I said.
We got in the car. He gave the driver my address with a readiness that surprised me, not knowing he knew it. He’d been there only once, largely because Lilac has strong prejudices about what Shakespeare’s Prince of Morocco called the shadowed livery of the burnished sun and it’s too difficult to try to educate her.
“How is Mrs. Durbin?” he asked with great kindness.
“She’s bearing up, I guess,” I said, with rather less.
Seeing Duleep Singh had brought that question of hers about Molly back into my mind, and I found myself getting unreasonably annoyed at her, in a sort of delayed reaction. It was probably standing out in the heat that did it.
“She’s an unhappy woman,” he said.
That annoyed me a little too—this whipping out of the crystal bail at the drop of a hat.
“Yes, she told me you said there was a black wall in front of her,” I said. “I didn’t know you were a mystic.”
“I’m not,” he said equably. “But people fascinate me. And I believe they make their own lives by their desires.”
He smiled.
“I’ll admit I’m a charlatan, if you like, Mrs. Latham. And like all charlatans, knowing more of certain people’s background than they know I know, I surprise them, and from then on they’re highly receptive.”
He smiled again.
“It’s amusing to have people assume that because you came from a certain country you must therefore have a special knowledge of the human soul. I find it a great social asset—in a country where women are dominant children.”
“It doesn’t occur to you that you might do considerable harm?” I asked.
His face sobered instantly.
“On the contrary.”
He looked at me thoughtfully.
“I have known a good deal about D. J. Durbin, for the last ten years . . . longer, in fact. I’ve seen him ruin other women’s lives, and throw them out, old and afraid, when they should just begin to live.”
He spoke with a subdued passion that was rather alarming, he was ordinarily so polished and urbane.
“He had some extraordinary fascination for women. I don’t know what it was. But it was hypnotic. Even after his accident he had it, and no matter how cruel he was to them they still crawled to him. And he hated them. When I told Mrs. Durbin there was nothing but a black wall in front of her, I meant it. She wasn’t in love with him . . . then. Some time she would have been. As long as she resisted it because of her love for someone else she was safe. But that wouldn’t have lasted. Durbin loved the chase, and had all too little of it. To that degree she fascinated him. She knew, when we talked that evening, that she was facing a wall. I told her nothing she didn’t know herself. In fact, she told me before I told her.”
“And . . . Mrs. Crane?” I asked. “Did she tell you she knew there was a garden of flowers . . .”
I said it before I really realized what a dreadful thing I was doing. He looked at me with a smile, however, neither annoyed nor embarrassed. Still he didn’t answer right away. I let it go, and didn’t try to finish or undo what I’d said, knowing from long experience how futile it is.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have denied being a mystic,” he said at last. “I can see the inner light that shines from Mrs. Crane. She is of the pure of heart. She has wisdom, and she has faith. If circumstance clouds it momentarily, she will come out richer in wisdom, and still pure of heart. Nothing will spoil her, nothing tarnish her. She will always find happiness, because happiness is in one’s self, Mrs. Latham. It will be wherever she is, because she will take it with her. Mrs. Durbin will never find it, because wherever she goes she must also take herself.”
He turned and looked at me.
“That is my sincere belief. If telling her that, when she needs confidence in herself and in her own standards, is the trick of a charlatan, then I am a base one indeed.”
21
It wasn’t until after I’d gone in the house and Duleep Singh had gone back to Courtney’s house that I began to be disturbed about him again. Just because the future may be going to be a garden of flowers doesn’t mean there isn’t a rocky road on the way to it, especially if one is only twenty-two. It was interesting that Colonel Primrose thought Molly would be a fool while Duleep Singh had so much faith in her wisdom. It may have been their different points of view, I thought. All I could see of her wisdom now seemed to come from Sergeant Buck. I found myself wondering whether he’d told the Colonel about her. But I didn’t have to wonder long.
Lilac came heavily up the stairs from the kitchen as I went into the garden sitting room.
“Mis’ Grace, the Sergeant was over here this mornin’,” she said.
The armed truce that exists between them seemed momentarily less armed.
“He says please to tell you, what th’ Colonel don’ know, don’ hurt him. But I say, I ’spec’ you know that bettern’ what he does.”
She hadn’t got back downstairs again before the door bell rang, and to keep her from having to plod up I went out to answer it. It was Horace Blodgett. If it had been the Bey of Algiers I wouldn’t have been any more surprised. Horace isn’t an afternoon caller. In fact he’d never been at the house, before six and without Corinne, in all the years he’d been coming there to see me and my parents before me.
“Come in,” I said. “How nice . . . or is it?”
I had a sudden sinking feeling he’d come to tell me my affairs were in such a state I’d have to find myself a government job.
“It will be for me,” he said, putting his hat and briefcase on the table. “I allowed myself time to miss a bus and get out here by five-thirty. I made it in five minutes, and that ancient skeletal formation at the Colonel’s won’t let me in until he gets home.”
That was Lafayette, Colonel Primrose’s house man, who’s been there almost as long as the house has.
“So I thought perhaps you’d take me in until it’s time. It’s pretty hot, walking the streets.”
We went back to the sitting room, and I poured him a glass of sherry.
“He wants me to officiate at some affair he’s fixed up,” he said, sniffing cau
tiously at it. “I take it he wants counsel.”
“I imagine ‘he’ is Mr. Austin-Armistead.”
“Yes, he told me.”
He chuckled dryly.
“Under the seal of confidence, unfortunately. It’s a story I would like to be able to tell. I can see Armistead. He’s one of the most meticulously conscientious persons I know.”
“You’re pretty meticulous yourself, aren’t you?” I said. “Courtney’s distressed that you won’t take over her affairs.”
He shook his head. “ ‘Fastidious’ is a better word. I’d made my position clear.”
He sipped his sherry, which relieved me a little. Heaven knows it cost enough to be good.
“What about Mr. Armistead, Horace?” I asked. “Is he as dependable as he sounds? It’s all very mixed up. He says they left around half-past eight, with Mr. Durbin very much alive. Inspector Bigges——”
“If Armistead says that, I would depend on it,” Horace said. “I’ve known him for years. What about Bigges?”
“Courtney says he says it can’t be true. Durbin must have been dead around eight o’clock, from the autopsy. And yet Julie Ross says he called her after nine.”
He smiled at what I suppose was the totally uncomprehending look on my face.
“A reputable lawyer has what must seem to the layman a naive veneration for the courts. Murder is a serious thing. If Sondauer had killed Durbin, Armistead couldn’t afford to be a party to concealment. Moreover, he would never have thought of it. He’d have called a first-rate criminal lawyer first, and the police second, and tried his best to get his client off. He wouldn’t have cut and run.”
He gave me a sort of wintery half-smile.
“You must consider another point. A lawyer lives by litigation. He isn’t interested in having litigants die, especially large ones. It’s most painful to him—unless he is to settle the estate, of course.”
He changed the subject abruptly. “—My chief concern I’m afraid isn’t Durbin. It’s Cass and Molly, Grace. I don’t like to see him in the position he’s in, and I’m concerned about her. I saw her with Duleep Singh today. I don’t mean to suggest I don’t think he’s an honorable man. But he’s too attractive and . . . sympathetic, let’s say. And at the moment Molly is highly vulnerable.”
“I know,” I said. “It disturbs me too. So do Courtney and Cass, frankly.”
Horace shook his head.
“I have confidence in Cass. I think he’s being exceptionally blind. I told him so today, as a matter of fact, and he told me politely to mind my own business. Which of course he had every right to do. I don’t know how serious his affair with Courtney was. She was, and I expect is, in love with him—and she’s a shrewd and calculating woman.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “He has a whole stack of pictures of her, in a portfolio in his suitcase. Poor Molly found them. She showed them to me this morning. She certainly doesn’t think he’s forgotten. And he’s been over at Courtney’s a lot. He was there this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Horace said. “I wish she’d married Randy, and I told her so when she told me she was going to take Cass.”
He shrugged.
“Youth is quixotic, and I suppose I’m getting very old. I understand Randy poked somebody in the nose this morning for suggesting Cass was feathering his own nest.”
He shook his head and looked at his watch. “I must go,” he said, getting up. “I don’t like this business very much.”
I followed him to the door and gave him his hat and briefcase. He stepped outside, hesitated and turned back.
“Actually, Grace,” he said, “the reason I came is that I’d like you to look in on Corinne, some time when you’re over our way. She was pretty much upset last night, the way her swami walked out on her. I think she was hoping for a quiet mystical chat, and she insists he was out of the house before we were.”
He smiled the way one does at the antics of a wayward and unpredictable child, and went down the stairs.
Colonel Primrose was just getting out of a taxi in front of his house. He waved to me and walked up to meet Horace, and they went back together.
I felt rather sorry for Cass Crane as I went back inside. I’d seen Colonel Primrose rig up his so-called traps to clear people before, but I’d never seen anybody come out of them except bound hand and foot with the shadow of the iron bars already falling across them. I found myself hoping it would be Randy and not Duleep Singh whose star was in the ascendant.
It was ten o’clock Saturday morning when Colonel Primrose came over to my house. Molly was coming in later—he’d phoned me to ask her to. He looked very tired, as if the heat had got him completely down and he hadn’t had any sleep for days.
He had a clothbound record book under his arm, which he put down on the table.
“I haven’t a phonograph at my place,” he said. “I thought you’d be interested, and I’d rather Molly would come here than go . . . anywhere else.”
Whether he meant to the Department of Justice, or War, or simply to Headquarters, I didn’t know and thought it better not to ask. He opened the top of the phonograph and started to take a record out of the book. As he did the doorbell rang. He closed the book and looked around.
“That’s probably Bigges,” he said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “I left word I’d be here. I didn’t expect him till later.”
It was Inspector Bigges, and he didn’t look any fitter than the Colonel. He came in, said “Hot, isn’t it,” cast a professional glance around—it was just force of habit, I suppose, but it made me feel a little uncomfortable—sat down and put his hat under his chair. He seemed to think that was the safest place for it. I wasn’t so sure, the way Sheila kept smelling at it.
“Well, those records of Durbin’s, Colonel,” he said. “I’ve been through the lot of ’em. Here’s a list of all the people who come in the picture at all who were on the place that night.”
He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and put on his horn-rimmed spectacles.
“I’ve sort of divided them into three groups. First the ones we heard talk, on those records, before Thursday night. It just means they’d been in the place themselves, any time before. You remember the records break off where Durbin invited Sondauer and Armistead to dinner. Here it is.
“Mrs. Durbin.
“Mrs. Latham.”
He looked over his glasses at me.
“That’s you. The Colonel and I were saying you had the best voice of the lot. It’s low, like. You ought to go on the radio.”
What on earth it was I’d said, some time heaven knows how far back, in D. J. Durbin’s library he didn’t go into, and Colonel Primrose only smiled.
“Cass Crane. Before he went away on this last trip.
“Duleep Singh.
“Sondauer.
“Armistead.
“That’s the lot we know were in that room before the night he was killed, at one time or another. Then you can put in the little driver, Achille, and Flowers. There aren’t any others. Achille’s dead, and Flowers . . .”
He went on without bothering to explain why Flowers needn’t be worried about.
“Then there’s what you could call a group known to be there Thursday night who hadn’t been in the place before. That’s Mr. Blodgett. Also the kid that brought the kitten. I mean, we know they were there, and their voices aren’t in the records.
“The third group is people whose names are mentioned in the records but aren’t known to have been in the library. That’s Mr. Blodgett, and Mrs. Crane.”
I suppose I must have had some kind of look on my face.
“I don’t mean Mrs. Crane was there Thursday night,” Inspector Bigges explained. “She’s connected, and her name came on the records . . . mostly with Mrs. Durbin saying what she thought of her. Mr. Blodgett’s name comes in with Durbin telling Armistead that Blodgett was representing Duleep Singh in some deal and it was too bad he wasn’t representing them in
stead of Armistead, because he was a better lawyer. The guy was sure polite. It’s funny hearing Armistead say he’d be more than happy to retire and let them get Mr. Blodgett. I’ll bet he meant it, from what he says.”
“Have you people been listening to all those records?” I asked.
Colonel Primrose drew a long breath. “Ever since the Durbins took the house. If you’re interested in the way things are done behind the scenes, it’s fascinating but . . . exhausting.”
“And it doesn’t help much,” Bigges added. “The people you’d think had the most reason to kill the man are in Chungking, or Rio, or somewhere. They weren’t in Washington Thursday night when the job was done, as far as we can find.”
He wiped off his perspiring forehead with the sleeve of his seersucker suit.
“Mrs. Ross insists Durbin called her house a little after nine. She’s positive it was him. That bears out Armistead’s statement he was alive when they left. This timing is driving me crazy, Colonel. The medicos swore at first he must have been dead at eight o’clock, or thereabouts. Rigor had begun to set in already, when they did the autopsy. He was in pretty normal shape, except he’d picked up dysentery. He’d lived in the tropics a long time. But I’m inclined to believe Armistead.”
It flashed instantaneously into my mind, just then, that there was something none of them, so far as I knew, had said anything about. But I was a little startled to hear my own voice, as I hadn’t meant to say what I was thinking.
“—How long does it take to get from the Garfield to the Durbins’?”
“It all depends,” Inspector Bigges said. “Why?”
I could feel rather than see Colonel Primrose’s black eyes snapping at me suddenly from across the room.
“I . . . was just wondering,” I said hastily. “It hasn’t anything to do with this.”
“Oh,” Inspector Bigges said. His intonation fully implied it was the kind of interruption you could expect from a woman.
