by Zenith Brown
“Oh, rot,” I said. “Why don’t you pull yourself together and do something about it. Molly’s probably feeling exactly the same way.”
He just shook his head. “You don’t know Molly. She’s wonderful, when she opens up her heart and . . . and gives it to you. If you tried to take it all you’d get would be a frozen rock. I know—I tried it. She’s got strength, and . . . and honor.”
It’s very seldom that I’ve put myself on the side of the angels, as it were, and feared to tread any place. I was born a rusher-in. But I had a feeling that this was very tenuous and special ground. It was something they had to understand themselves, without any well-meaning bystanders trying to explain it was all a mistake. They had to know, and not to be persuaded—otherwise there’d always be a residue of doubt in the bottom of their hearts and minds. But how they were going to know was beyond me.
23
It was still an undigested mass in the pit of my stomach and a sour-sweet taste on my tongue when Colonel Primrose came over to the house a little before three o’clock.
He looked at me with a flicker of anxiety in his eyes. “—What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. I smiled. “You look better than you did yesterday. Don’t tell me it’s all settled. Was it Sondauer or did the messenger boy turn out to be another international spider, disguised of course?”
He came on into the sitting room without saying anything. Then he said, “Why did you ask how long it takes to get from the Garfield to the Durbins’?”
“Have you ever had a sandwich at the Garfield?” I asked.
He smiled a little.
“It takes anywhere up to an hour and forty minutes, these days. And Mr. Armistead said he got one, not being as choosy as——”
“Sometimes I think your I. Q. is a little higher than I’ve given it credit for being,” he said blandly. “Or maybe it’s just a low female cunning. I’m getting some advice from Horace about a . . . rather unusual legal point involved here. Do you want to come along? Buck said you could drive his car if you’re out of gas. Which is practically a sign of unconditional surrender . . .”
“I’ll be sure to wreck it,” I said. “What’s he doing?”
He chuckled.
“You’d be surprised. He’s going out to get Molly at her hospital, to take her to Walter Reed. Ostensibly, she’s to help cheer up an old side-kick of his. I suspect he’s trying to keep her away from Singh. Buck has strong feelings about foreigners.”
“Maybe he’ll persuade her to go back to Cass.”
“Maybe. Randy’s in uniform, of course. It’s hard to tell Buck anybody who’s not is doing anything useful.”
If I’d been driving a golden coach I couldn’t have been more ill at ease than I was at the wheel of that car. Fortunately the streets were totally empty, so I couldn’t have hit anything but a bus. There was one in front of me as I drove up Massachusetts Avenue, and I gave it all the room it wanted. That’s how we happened to be behind it as it stopped across the street from Courtney’s, and how when it started up again we saw it was Cass Crane who’d got out. He was at the iron gate—open now that there was no one inside who was afraid of retribution—by the time we went by to turn right toward the Blodgetts. The taste on my tongue was all sour, and the undigested dough in my stomach a heavier and more sodden lump.
“Well, that’s the way she’ll get him,” I said unhappily. “Isn’t there some way those two could find out for themselves that there’s been a mistake? If only Molly could know Cass was bitterly disappointed she wasn’t at the airport, and he could know she didn’t know he was coming . . .”
I forgot all about its being Sergeant Buck’s car I was driving. When I stopped in front of the Blodgetts’ I was still telling him the whole business of my morning’s visit, including even the cops and robbers stuff Cass had said not to tell him. It seemed so much a part of the dismal picture of the little house that I couldn’t leave it out. We sat there a few minutes while I finished.
“It is too bad,” he said, getting out. “And you’re right. It’s the one way Courtney can get him. The old-fashioned method’s best after all . . . a knock-down drag-out row, getting everything out of your system, with a few tears before the lights go out. If Cass had only said ‘Why the hell didn’t you meet me?’ and she’d said ‘Why the hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?’ everything might have been fine.”
He shook his head.
“Well, I always find it best to keep an ace in the hole, Mrs. Latham. We’ll see.”
Horace opened the door for us. Corinne, it seemed, was at a meeting about How the Power of Thought Will Silence the Guns.
“—I believe they stick thought pins in Hitler’s image,” Horace said with his dry smile as he led us into the air-cooled silence of the library.
“I miss her when she’s out,” he added. “There may be something in all this. The house is alive and sentient, if slightly crazy, when she’s in it. It’s curious how it draws a sane man back at the end of a day with a constant sense of anticipation, at just what new aspect of moderate lunacy will meet him. We’ve abandoned the yellow vegetables, however, I’m glad to say. What can I do for you, John?”
“It’s probably a very simple matter,” Colonel Primrose said, “—about evidence. I don’t know enough law to know whether I have a case or not. I thought you’d tell me.”
“I know very little about criminal law,” Horace said. “But there’s an axiom that it is not so important for a lawyer to know the law as to know where to find the law. Perhaps we could look it up.”
I looked around at the calf-lined shelves on three sides of the room. There were certainly enough books there. The portrait over the fireplace was in the only fiat space not covered by them.
He turned his chair to face Colonel Primrose, and held out a box of cigars. There’s something so pleasant and male and civilized about the fresh aroma of a cigar, if it’s a good one.
“This concerns the Durbin case, of course,” Colonel Primrose said. “In the theory of criminal detection, we say that when all possible explanations of certain sets of circumstances have to be abandoned, because they conflict with known facts, and you have only the impossible left, then your solution must lie there. What you took to be impossible was . . . not. Now I’ve got several impossibilities here.”
He paused as if wanting to be sure he’d say it is an exact way.
“The first is Duleep Singh. I’ve found out quite a lot about him, going back some years. He’s a man of very superior intelligence . . . and I doubt if anyone could have an intense and passionate a loathing as he had for Durbin, and with reason. But, as you know, we went from here to Durbin’s house, Thursday night, and we found Durbin dead. It was impossible that Duleep Singh could have got there, and killed Durbin, before we got there.
“The next is Sondauer. Armistead, I believe, was telling the truth in saying that Durbin was alive when they left at eight-thirty. But they went down to the Garfield, Armistead got a sandwich—as Mrs. Latham has pointed out to me—and Sondauer was out of Armistead’s sight, phoning Mrs. Ross’s maid and waiting for her, as he said, for some twenty minutes. Barring any additional information, he could conceivably have got back to Durbin’s house and killed him. Unfortunately—from one point of view—the cigar stand girl at the Garfield says he spent most of that time talking to her. It must therefore be put down as impossible that Sondauer could have returned to Durbin’s house.”
Horace nodded, and waited. Colonel Primrose went on deliberately.
“There is a third apparent impossibility, that seems to complicate matters a good deal. But I think perhaps I can offer a legally tenable explanation of it. Mrs. Ross claims Durbin telephoned her after nine o’clock. The police surgeons maintain he must have been dead as early as eight o’clock. Rigor had not only set in by the time they performed the autopsy, shortly after he was taken away . . . it was fairly well advanced. I’m offering two possible explanations for that, with the
object of showing that the surgeons are absolutely unable to state the time of death. First: the autopsy showed that Durbin had dysentery. You remember that curiously sallow complexion of his. He probably also had malaria, and virtually all the diseases one picks up in the tropics and the Far East. But the dysentery alone would cause rigor mortis to set in with extreme rapidity.
“But another point. Rigor also sets in with extreme rapidity when people die under great emotional stress. The classic example, in all the books, is that at the battle of Antietam the bodies of soldiers were found rigid in the very act of charging over a fence, their rifles still in position. If, for example, with his curious aelurophobia, Durbin had been confronted by a cat at the time he was killed, rigor would have begun to set in almost instantaneously.”
“—Is there any reason to believe he was confronted by a cat?” Horace asked.
“None at all,” Colonel Primrose said.
He hesitated again for a moment.
“I think, however, that he was confronted by someone whose being there, in that way, carried with it a very powerful emotional supercharge—let’s say—to his heart and brain and nervous system . . . to his whole being. I’m getting here to what I want your opinion about, because—to get back to my two impossibles again—it’s precisely the effect that Duleep Singh, or Sondauer either, could have had, with their past relationships with him.”
“—Have you any evidence about their past relationships with him?”
“No,” Colonel Primrose said. “If there wasn’t a war, Bigges could get out to Burma, China and India and spend the taxpayers’ money digging them up. All the digging we can do is here at home. And that’s why I’ve come to you.”
He stopped to light his cigar again.
“I want to state a purely hypothetical case to you,” he said quietly. “And I want your opinion. My guess is that what lies at the bottom of this whole business is D. J. Durbin’s attitude toward . . . women. Now, Duleep Singh and Sondauer are both strongly emotional and passionate men. Let’s say that one of them had a wife . . . or we’ll say any woman to whom he was deeply attached, who fell in love with Durbin. And let’s say that Durbin treated her with a . . . a refinement of cruelty that we as Anglo-Saxons can’t understand. Suppose, for instance, that she met her death largely as a result of that cruelty.”
He knocked off the small dark ash at the end of his cigar.
“Suppose he ran into Durbin in Washington here, having planned his death for . . . many years, perhaps, but never before having a chance to do anything about it—not knowing where Durbin was, perhaps, or not being able to get close to him, or perhaps again merely biding his time. Then, on Thursday, the picture suddenly changes. Durbin was about to be arrested for manslaughter and for attempted murder, It had become later than he thought. The opportunity for private . . . justice, perhaps, rather than revenge, would be gone before that night was gone.
“Well, Bigges said something with clear insight. Durbin was killed by somebody who hated him, who couldn’t stand it to see him going on living any longer. And time could never be more of the essence. We were actually on our way there, Thursday night, you remember, in effect to put Durbin beyond any private reach.”
“—But . . . Sondauer wouldn’t know that,” I said.
Colonel Primrose looked at me.
“No. He wouldn’t. Duleep Singh, however, would.”
“But he wouldn’t,” I said quickly. “Because when you said why you were going over there, when we were here Thursday night, he’d gone upstairs with Corinne, to telephone. There was only you and . . .”
I heard the sound of my voice faltering, trailing away, stopping. For a moment there was the most utter silence in that room. Colonel Primrose was looking down intently at the end of his cigar. Horace’s eyes were still fixed on him, with the same focussed careful attentiveness.
I sat there blankly, the silence pounding like thunder in my ears.
24
Colonel Primrose still was silent. When Horace Blodgett spoke his voice was as calm and dry as it’s always been. The gray cylinder of ash was intact on the end of his cigar, and his hands were infinitely steadier than mine. I thought there was even a kind of dry amusement, of a sort, in his eyes for an instant as Colonel Primrose looked up at him.
“—Without prejudice, John,” he said, “let me take up your hypothetical case.”
“That being the lawyer’s way,” Colonel Primrose asked quietly, “of saying that what he is about to say cannot be used in evidence?”
Horace moved his head in assent.
“And first let me, without prejudice, put myself in the position you have . . . suggested.”
He looked for one instant at that vivid lovely face smiling down at us from over the mantel.
“If the man who stole away my daughter—for instance—should ever come to Washington, I would kill him . . . and I would do it with a pleasure that it would shock you to know.”
There was no change at all in his unemotional tones.
“That man did not marry my daughter, as we gave out when we returned home. But that in itself is no longer important, or reason enough in itself to kill him. Mrs. Durbin’s hands were bruised when I saw her. It is an interesting thing that the man I speak of was also afraid of cats. He carried a stick too, though he was not at that time lame. When I saw my child, more than her hands were bruised, and more than her body. Her soul was more than bruised too. It was broken.”
He stopped for an instant.
“My daughter was already dying when she was being taken to a hospital and the car went off the road. Fortunately, she was killed. He broke a few bones, including a hip.”
The two men’s eyes met steadily.
“I don’t know about Duleep Singh and Durbin, John. But I rather think that if the man I’m talking about were in Washington, and over a period of time had been lulled into a feeling of security, let us say, because I had never to his knowledge seen him here, or made any attempt that he knew to communicate with him, so that he would perhaps put me down as spineless or afraid—I think if that man saw me walk into his library, he would have known at once that death was walking in with me. And I think he would be in such a state that—as you have said—rigor would set in very soon. . . .”
For a moment the room was silent again. Not one of the three of us had so much as moved.
“The man I am talking about,” Horace Blodgett said steadily, “turned my daughter, in a few short years, from this . . . to this.”
He pointed to the portrait over the mantel, then opened a drawer in his desk, took out a picture and handed it silently to Colonel Primrose. I looked at it across the space between us. It was the picture that had been in Cass’s bag, with the pictures of Courtney. I’d thought it looked familiar to me, the morning Molly had taken them out. It was hard to see any resemblance now between this woman, who looked forty-five and was still in her early twenties when her father brought her body back to Washington, and the flame-like creature in the painting above us.
“. . . In a few short years,” Horace said again. “And turned my wife from a lovely, gay and happy woman into one I love perhaps even more, that I can’t tell, but one who makes me want to weep as I laugh, at the courage with which she picked up the pieces of her broken heart, knowing, no matter how I tried to conceal it, that the child she worshipped was worse than dead.”
He took the picture of his daughter from Colonel Primrose. He got up, went to the fireplace, struck a match and held it to one corner. As the flames stole up over the faded tragic features on the paper he dropped it onto the hearth. He watched it curl up and die, and went back to his chair.
He sat there silently for a moment, picked up his cigar and broke off the ash against the side of the tray.
“To continue our hypothetical case, John . . . again on the assumption that I should myself be in the position you’ve stated. If that man had come to Washington, if he had offered me, through a third party, large amounts t
o take his legal business, if the woman he was marrying—at last—came to me with a contract he’d so much as touched . . . I would have driven his representative and the woman out of my office. If I’d known he was about to escape me—let us say I had talked to a man he had tried to murder, and I knew that a friend was in charge of the case who seldom makes a mistake or fails to get his man—then let me tell you what I would have done.
“I would have invited a few friends to dinner . . . and on that Thursday night. I would have opened a bottle of champagne. I would have raised my glass in a silent toast to a lady I loved as dearly as a father ever loved a daughter, and again to a lady who has been child and wife and everything a man could desire. I would have repeated the profoundly solemn vow I had made to myself for both of them . . . and for myself. And after I had drunk to them, I would have gone in and eaten my yellow vegetables . . . and I would have taken the first opportunity that came to go to that man’s house, and, before his wealth could perhaps subvert the law, to make him pay his debt to me. If I were fortunate, I would have found him alone in his library, where he was always to be found. I would have taken the precaution of stopping for an instant in the doorway as I went in, so that anyone who saw me might think, later, that I had then seen his dead body in his chair. It would have taken me a very short time to put an end to his horrible life . . . and to explain that time, I would have taken with me from this house a paper that I would have said I was hunting for in his room.”
He looked at Colonel Primrose almost apologetically, as if only at long last getting to the point that had been raised.
“But the matter of evidence,” he said. “And whether, if this had happened, you would have had a case. Let us suppose that I had done all this. I would sit probably where I sit now, and say to my friend who doesn’t make many mistakes—and who I would be certain I could not deceive, ‘If you have the legal evidence, admissible and incontrovertible in a court of law, to make me hang, I will hang with pleasure. Your duty is clear, and I know well that you have never failed it. You have no choice but to take your case to the public prosecutor. You have asked my opinion, and it is this. The public prosecutor is an honest man. He is also an able lawyer. He will ask for evidence before he brings this case to trial. As you know, a man may not be made to testify against himself. As a lawyer, I do not believe you have evidence enough to make him feel that he can present this case.’ ”
