by Leslie Ford
THE POISON PEN…
To millions of loyal readers, Myron Kane was a great man, a genius, a truth-teller.
But to everyone who knew him personally, Myron Kane was a man with the touch of death, whose razor-edged pen could destroy a reputation, a life, a soul—and never hesitated to do so.
It was no surprise, then, that somebody decided to prove once and for all that a knife, if buried in human flesh, could be far deadlier than a pen…
“Leslie Ford’s reputation as one of the best mystery writers will be made even more secure”
—LOUISVILLE COURIER JOURNAL
All POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the POPULAR LIBRARY Editorial Board and represent titles by the world’s greatest authors.
POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright, 1944, 1945 by Leslie Ford
Copyright, 1944, by The Curtis Publishing Company
Published by arrangement with Charles Scribner’s Sons
Charles Scribner’s Sons edition published in March, 1945
Three printings
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
1
The editors of The Saturday Evening Post have finally overcome what I think I may call their natural reluctance about telling the full story of the body they found in the goldfish pool in the entrance lobby of The Curtis Publishing Com-any Building on Independence Square, in Philadelphia, last winter. The ribald cries that went up in the New York columns about sweeping out the editorial offices and finding more bodies, including illustrators and fiction writers, had nothing to do, they insist, with that decision.
If there was pressure on the editors to tell the story, in fact, it was probably brought by the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Country Gentleman, who’d got tired of trying to explain that it had nothing to do with them—though neither, I’m told, has ever admitted the authorship of that interoffice memorandum entitled “Bring Out Your Dead” that was put up on the Post doors on the sixth floor.
This may all seem a little heartless now, but, as they said at the time, no one can go around asking for murder and expect tears to be shed when he gets it. I was, and in telling the story of what happened I still am, a little afraid that the people who write to the editors saying it must be Grace Latham who murders the victims herself, will now accuse them of wanting to get rid of this victim and calling me in to do it for them. It does seem obvious that a widow on what someone once kindly called the glamorous side of forty, living in Georgetown, District of Columbia, should not, in the ordinary nature of things, be constantly stumbling over corpses. On the other hand, it seems only fair to say I never did, until Col. John Primrose and Sgt. Phineas T. Buck became a Hydra-headed figure in my life. If people are suspicious of me, I can truthfully say there are times when I’ve been a little suspicious of Colonel Primrose and his sergeant.
I’ve sometimes thought that when they retired from the Army (92nd Engineers) and started doing private inquiry for various governmental agencies, they set out to find what I hope it’s all right to call a fall guy, and found me living right across from them on P Street. It seems I was pretty much of a natural, or at least I certainly was in the business of the body in the pool and The Saturday Evening Post. And as for people constantly demanding why I don’t marry Colonel Primrose and get it over with, the answer is simply that he’s never actually asked me to, and I don’t feel I know him well enough to suggest it myself.
In any case, I was responsible neither for the body’s being put into the goldfish pool in The Curtis Building lobby nor for Colonel Primrose’s being there to help get it out. The editors of The Saturday Evening Post are responsible for the whole thing. If they hadn’t let Myron Kane do the profile of Judge Nathaniel Whitney, the marble-alabaster sanctuary of that lobby would never have been the scene of as astonishing a murder as ever turned a magazine inside out, and if they hadn’t themselves got Colonel Primrose in when things first began to look odd, I doubt if anybody would have discovered who did it or why. Where Colonel Primrose is, Sergeant Buck follows as the night the day, and it was Buck who stated the whole responsibility in a very few words. Few for most people, I mean. For Sergeant Buck it was a full week’s supply of his stringently rationed vocabulary, and the longest coherent statement I ever heard him make.
“If you lay down with dogs, you got to expect to get fleas,” he said.
He may have had something more in mind than the editors of the Post consorting with Myron Kane, because he’d already said Colonel Primrose’s being there in Philadelphia was a wild-moose chase, and he’s almost as suspicious of anybody connected with the printed word as he is of women who are designing to marry his colonel. And he never actually got over his mistrust of the people on the Post. Being a black-jack-and-poker man himself, he could easily suspect anything of Bob Fuoss, the managing editor, and Art Baum, one of the associate editors, when he found out they wasted their lunch hour playing three-cushion billiards, and the fact that Fuoss had played with Willie Hoppe was only the slightest mitigation. Ben Hibbs, the editor, he got to like, I suppose because of the earthy grass roots Ben had trailed from Kansas, though certainly that wouldn’t explain his attitude toward Marion Turner, one of the two women editors on the Post. It was his deep conviction that she, at least, had nothing to do with the murder—or it was until he saw her lunching at the Downtown Club with Colonel Primrose. Black hair, gray-green eyes and magnolia-petal skin are excellent things in a woman, but not when one’s colonel is so absorbed in conversation with them he forgets he’s supposed to be at the city jail.
However, when Sergeant Buck first saw them, all pretty shattered, I may say, by sudden violent death in their own front door, the marble bust of Benjamin Franklin looking quietly down from his fluted pedestal while detectives, white-faced editors and a pair of startled paper and ink salesmen milled about, he and the pallid goldfish huddled at the far end of the oblong pool regarded them with much the same look in their clammy eyes. It was no doubt the most excitement they’d had in all their submerged and sunless lives. The goldfish, I mean. I don’t know about the editors of the Post. And yet it was the editors who’d decided to have Myron Kane do the profile of Judge Nathaniel Whitney. The marble lobby, the pool with the water playing from shallow fountain urns, the goldfish, the great mosaic Dream Garden by Tiffany out of Maxfield Parrish will never seem so enchanted again. I’ve forgotten who it was said a lot of people had sweated blood crossing that lobby, going to interview an editor, but nobody had ever shed it there before.
2
Myron Kane had come back on the national scene after his notorious run-in with the military about evading censorship in the Near East. I’d read about him in a column syndicated from New York:
Another foreign commentator has decided fairer fields are closer home. Myron Kane, pal of princes, potentates and premiers—but not generals—is around town. He’s doing a piece for a national-circulation weekly on a Quaker City celeb. May be dull, may be a libel suit, depending on what table in snob Rittenhouse Square he picks his crumbs up at.
That was in November, and when I got back home to Georgetown for the Christmas holidays, I found a letter from Myron on my desk. It said:
Dear Grace: I understand you have relatives by marriage in Philadelphia. If they include, or you otherwise know, that eccentric museum piece, Abigail Whitney, will you drop me a note of introduction? I understand she’s taken her own name back, not being up to the mental effort of keeping her marital ventures in proper sequence. I’m doing a profile of her brother, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, for the Sat Eve Post, and I
understand they’ve lived next door to each other and haven’t spoken for years, so I can’t meet her through him. If you ever get up there, give me a buzz and I’ll buy you a stengah.
MYRON KANE.
I did have relatives by marriage in Philadelphia, and some of them might be called museum pieces. Abigail Whitney was not one of them. I knew her very slightly, and that just from times I’d met her before I married Bill Latham, who came from there. After the plane crash that left me with two small sons, I seldom went back. In those days Abigail Whitney was in her late heyday and still very beautiful. My husband’s family thought she was shocking, and no doubt she was, but being a Whitney kept doors open to her that her money couldn’t have and that her four marriages and numerous escapades on both sides of the Atlantic should have locked and double-locked. She seemed to my generation to be a high wind, fresh if somewhat salty.
I didn’t know her well, however, and I’d never seen her since, though I’d heard a lot of gossip about her, and tales of the jungle warfare she carried on with her brother from their foxholes next door to each other in Rittenhouse Square.
She wouldn’t, furthermore, have known me from Adam, and if she’d been my best friend I wouldn’t have sent Myron Kane an introduction to her. He seemed to have forgotten the time I came in once and found him reading a letter I’d left on my desk. It was from the wife of a cabinet member, and the fact that he was doing a piece on her husband seemed sufficient reason to him, if not to me, or to her when it came out in print.
But Myron hadn’t got to be the pal of princes, potentates and premiers by letting what Sergeant Buck calls the amendities stand in his way. The special-delivery letter I got from Abigail Whitney one morning early in January was added evidence of that.
“Dear Child,” it began, and it was scrawled at what looked like white heat in green ink across and around and crisscross on the blue paper. “I must have mislaid your Letter introducing your Friend Myron Kane, but of course I am Happy to have him here for your Sake, and I’m sure the Hotels are very crowded. I remember the Lathams very well, although I haven’t seen any of them for Years, and always thought they were Estimable but Dull.”
I could hardly have been more appalled. I knew Myron Kane had the effrontery of a brass elephant, but this was a fabrication out of such whole cloth that I doubt if even such an elephant would ever have thought of it.
“You know, of course,” her letter went on, “he is doing a Profile of my Brother for The Saturday Evening Post, which I wish to say I no longer subscribe to since they have Changed the Cover, as in my Opinion it is like painting a Bathing Beauty on Independence Hall, nor can I imagine a Sane Editor wanting a Profile or even a Rear View of my Brother, who, as you know, is a Scoundrel. But the Reason I am Writing is that your Friend is making a Great Deal of Trouble. The Children are Very Bitter about him.”
As I’d never known anyone Myron did a story about who wasn’t very bitter about him, I wasn’t surprised at that. I read on, wondering if I’d find out who the children were: “Monckton, who, you remember, was Very Wild, is coming back on leave today. Elsie, who married that Stuffed Shirt, Sam Phelps, whose Father made so much Money, must have sent for him, and I am very much Alarmed. Travis Elliot—you will recall our dear old friend, his father, Douglas Elliot, and his shocking Death, it was so Useless, my dear!— Travis is being very Sensible.”
I did, as a matter of fact, recall Douglas Elliot. He was the Latham family lawyer, and his death was indeed shocking, because it was by his own hand. It was not only shocking, it was incomprehensible. He was one of the most prominent and respected men in Philadelphia. How useless it was, I didn’t know, as there had never been anything but vague rumors about why he did it before it was all hushed up quickly and quietly. I had, however, heard there was a son who had carried on with a good deal of courage, and Travis Elliot, I gathered, must be that son.
“Travis does not think Laurel Frazier will be indiscreet about my Brother’s affairs,” Mrs. Whitney’s letter continued. “Or did you know that Laurel Frazier has been my Brother’s private Secretary for the past five years? And I can’t myself believe Laurel’s head has been turned by Myron Kane’s attentions, which are very Marked, even if he is World Famous. She has too many reasons for being terribly Grateful to Travis. I expect they will be married very soon now. Even my Brother, I understand, has given up the Hope that his son Monk will Reform, and it was nothing but Wishful Thinking on his part that Monk and Laurel would be attracted to Each Other, as they always have quarreled.”
Living in the babel of alphabetical pyramids on the Potomac as I do ought to make anyone at home in any rat race, no matter how complicated, but it hadn’t me. I was as confused by this welter of names and cross purposes as if I’d never set foot in either Washington or Philadelphia. The one thing that was really clear to me was that if Myron Kane was paying marked attention to Laurel Frazier, who was the private secretary of the man he was doing a profile about, it wasn’t for herself alone. The attentions would be finished the day the profile was, and Travis Elliot could have back the girl who had so many reasons for being grateful to him. And the rest of them could go on being bitter.
I glanced over the last page of the letter.
“But the Point, dear Child, is that I wish you to come up here at once. Myron Kane has told me about a Policeman he says you are going to marry. Perhaps you or your Policeman can have some Influence on your Friend, Mr. Kane, as it is a very Serious Matter and you are Responsible for his being in my House. I shall expect you tomorrow. I cannot meet you, as I do not Now Leave the House.”
It was signed, “Affectionately, Abigail Whitney,” with a postscript that said, “My house is the Pink one in the Square, which I painted that Color to Annoy my Brother, and am unable to get workmen to do over until After the War. I will expect you to stay here with me.—A. W.”
It was all very unfortunate, of course, I realized, but it certainly didn’t seem to me that I could be held responsible for Myron Kane. If Abigail Whitney took strange men into her house because they said someone she could remember only vaguely, if at all, had written her a letter about them, it was her problem, not mine. She was old enough and worldly enough to know better. And as for my so-called policeman, he was already in Philadelphia, doing some kind of job for the United States Treasury, in reference, no doubt, to that grim date, March fifteenth. I wrote Mrs. Whitney, telling her I was sorry, I’d never sent Myron Kane to her, and if he’d ever been a friend of mine, he wasn’t any longer. And that, I thought, was that.
But it wasn’t. She was on the long-distance telephone before I got the letter in the mailbox next morning. Discursive and disjointed as the monologue that came over the wire was, several things were clear at the end of it. One was that Judge Whitney’s son Monk had got home and was in no mood for nonsense. Another was that Myron Kane was on the point of ruining the whole family. By some curious mental process, Abigail Whitney had skipped from my being responsible for Myron Kane to my being responsible for Myron, The Saturday Evening Post, her brother’s profile, and a great deal of sorrow, tribulation and heartbreak for everybody. But the appeal behind all of it was desperation. It was the desperation of an old woman suddenly caught in a tangled web she’d helped to weave and now was powerless to get out of. It was extraordinary how starkly implicit her despair and fear of something was in her repeated denials of it. It seemed so strange, too, because I would have thought Judge Whitney was one man whose life had no dark places for fear of exposure to cause such desperate anxiety.
3
Police detectives I’ve heard talk are always saying, “It was a funny coincidence that broke that case,” or “It was just that I got all the breaks that time.” It seems to me to happen too often not to imply something else. It’s almost as if a powerful magnetic field forms itself out of the concentrated stuff of guilt, drawing the people involved in the pattern unconsciously together, without apparent reason or awareness, and that when the pattern is once defin
itely established, the seeming coincidences that finally make a coherent whole really are not accidental at all.
Or there’s no other way I can explain what happened the day I went up to Philadelphia. It took me so long to get Colonel Primrose on the phone up there, and tell him I was coming and about Myron, that I missed the train I was planning to take. I took the three o’clock.
It was twenty minutes late into the 30th Street Station, and my shuttling across to the Broad Street Station was just as much a part of the magnetic field. It’s the first time I’d ever done it, and why I suddenly thought I’d have a better chance for a taxi there, I haven’t an idea. And if all those things hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have seen Myron Kane or met Albert Toplady.
I saw Myron by the newsstand. He’s tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with curly black hair and always immaculately well-tailored, usually with a Homburg and fitted overcoat and stick, and generally looking as if he were just setting out to meet a prince or a potentate. I started over, and then I saw there was a girl there, talking to him. That in itself was unusual. Myron’s taste in women, as I knew it in Washington, had always run to the wide-eyed and not very bright who listened while he did the talking. This girl’s hair was a soft auburn nimbus brushed back from her broad forehead, touching the collar of her Persian-lamb Chesterfield coat. Her eyes seemed to be a sort of odd gray-blue, though just then the pupils were so dilated that the irises were hardly visible. She had high cheekbones and a pointed chin, and her face was pale with the intensity of some emotion that certainly had nothing to do with Myron’s personal charm.
