The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Leslie Ford

  “I’m Grace Latham,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was looking for my room.”

  She took a step toward me. “You’re a friend of Myron’s, aren’t you? He’s talked about you. I’m Laurel Frazier. Maybe you can do something. That’s why Mrs. Whitney asked you to come, isn’t it?”

  She stood there, her back to the desk, slim and really lovely, and still startled, the color in her cheeks heightened, her chin raised, not defiant now, so much as defensive. She didn’t look more than eighteen, in the Quakerish gray wool dress with a narrow white collar tied in a small bow at the throat. Her eyes were wide-set and the curious gray-blue of wood hyacinths, flecked with black. I could understand Travis Elliot and Myron Kane wanting to marry her more easily than I could Judge Whitney having had her as private secretary for five years. She looked more like a frightened, lovely child than an efficient young woman one took on a mission to London.

  It was an extraordinarily embarrassing situation for both of us, and I didn’t really know what to say.

  “I’m not a friend of Myron’s when he takes things that don’t belong to him,” I replied. I don’t know why I added, “It’s the—the document, I suppose?”

  It seemed a silly thing to call it, but that was apparently what it was, the way they all referred to it.

  The pulse in her throat quickened as she stared at me. “He… told you?”

  I shook my head. “Judge Whitney’s daughter. Mrs. Phelps.”

  “Elsie.” It was hardly more than a whisper, and the color ebbed sharply from her cheeks. “Then she was listening. I knew she was. I told him so.”

  “Told—”

  “Judge Whitney.” She said it mechanically. “Oh, it’s so awful! Now everybody-And it’s my fault!”

  She turned her head away, trying to keep back the tears that were glistening along her thick black lashes. I looked around the room. She’d done a thorough if slapdash job of searching it. The drawers of the dresser and the desk were pushed back crooked and the books and papers on the desk were pretty helter-skelter.

  “If only I’d been careful!” she said. “And he’s being so wonderful about it. He keeps saying not to worry, it isn’t my fault and it’ll turn up somewhere in the library, but I know he’s terribly upset. He’s gone through everything over and again, at night after I’ve gone. But it isn’t there. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “What… is it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is it’s something that will… hurt somebody terribly.” She tried to control her voice. “It’s worse because it wasn’t his. It’s something she gave him to keep.” She nodded down toward Abigail Whitney’s room. “She gave it to him because she said she could trust him not to open it better than she could herself.”

  “Then she doesn’t—neither of them knows what’s in it?”

  “She may now. Maybe Myron told her. She always finds everything out, someway.”

  I wondered if that could explain her sudden desperate fear when she’d talked to me over the phone that morning. She surely hadn’t known, whatever it was, when she wrote to me.

  “If only I hadn’t been so smart,” Laurel Frazier was saying helplessly. “It was me that suggested it. I wanted people to know about my boss, because I’m so proud of him. And he said I could give Myron a file of his old records, and it must have been in them.”

  She stopped short, her slim body stiffening as if an electric charge had gone through it, the color rising in her cheeks again. She was looking past me at the door, and I turned quickly. Monk Whitney was there, looking down at the littered floor. If he was surprised, there was nothing in his manner to show it. He came on into the room.

  “It didn’t occur to you to check through the file before you gave it to him?” he said calmly. “Where’s the old Frazier efficiency they talk about, Coppertop?”

  She flared up passionately. “Quit calling me Coppertop! And I don’t need you to tell me what I should have done! I know it. I started to, but we were busy, and they were all before my time. I know it’s my fault. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t!”

  “Myself, I don’t see what all the row’s about,” he said imperturbably. “If the old man’s got a dark streak in the past, I’m all for it. If it’s too dark, the Post isn’t going to publish it. They aren’t running a scandal sheet. Nobody’ll be hurt.”

  “You don’t know Myron Kane!” Laurel retorted hotly. “He’s so clever, they’ll never know what he’s doing. It’ll sound perfectly all right. I know. He told me in London last year he’d got even with lots of people that way.”

  Monk Whitney shook his head. “Who’s he got to get even with around here, Dear Child?”

  “Everybody. Sam and Elsie treated him like a police reporter with the smallpox. And he’s sensitive as a child; he’s always trying to cover up to keep from being hurt. Travis was horrid, and you’ve been just as bad. Patronizing and superior—”

  “I thought he was doing the superior patronizing, myself.” He grinned at her amiably. “And personally, I don’t give a damn about what he said to de Gaulle. And as for how close the bomb missed him in the viceroy’s swimming pool—”

  “That’s what I mean,” Laurel said. “You don’t care what happens to anybody but yourself. If you people had been halfway decent to him, we wouldn’t have had this sort of thing.”

  She bent down and picked up a handful of the discarded papers on the floor, thrust them into Monk Whitney’s hand and stood watching him as he read them aloud. The first paragraph Myron had written over half a dozen times. The version he’d got farthest along with said:

  Like most people who deal successfully with other people’s domestic and parental relations in problem form, Judge Whitney has been unsuccessful in his own, sometimes to the point of melodrama. He and his sister, who lives next door to him in Rittenhouse Square, have not spoken to each other for some eight years. His children have been a steady disappointment. His batting average on them was fattened, however, when the war gave his son Monk—short for Monckton—an outlet for energies admirably adapted to the South Pacific, but not to the staid moribundity of the Quaker City. His—

  Myron had crumpled up the sheet at that point. The next one was on the same general tack:

  While not obtrusive or vulgar about it, the judge is nevertheless aware of the eminent fitness of the fate that arranged for him to be born in Philadelphia and a Whitney. His daughter’s marriage to a man who as a boy carried his father’s lunch in a tin box to the coal mine was a breach, never entirely healed by the fact that his son-in-law can write a check for the judge’s gross earnings over a lifetime of serious legal and juristic effort without dipping into his current income enough to notice it. In the ordinary course of events in Philadelphia, Elsie Whitney might have been—and apparently was— expected to marry the socially acceptable son of a close friend of the family. The judge’s present secretary was the unwitting cause of the tragedy that put an end to that, as the young man took over his father’s financial obligations, and in so doing obligated the beautiful young secretary to the point that a movie finish is expected any—

  That was as far as Myron had got with that one. Monk Whitney stood looking down at it steadily for a moment after he’d finished reading it. Then he crumpled it up with the others and tossed them back into Myron’s wastebasket. He turned to Laurel with a sardonic grin.

  “Being nice to Kane didn’t net you much, Miss Frazier. You are marrying the young man, aren’t you?”

  The two red spots I’d seen in her cheeks at the Broad Street Station were burning there again.

  “I certainly am.”

  He looked at her silently for an instant, the grin disappearing slowly. “You know, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

  Her eyes widened with astonishment. I thought as much at the sudden change in his tone as at what he’d said.

  “You’ve never been in love with the guy,” he added.

  “I suppose you think I’m being grate
ful too?”

  “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t you I was thinking about. It’s Travis. He’s too good a guy—”

  “You mean he’s not in love with me? He’s just marrying me because—” She stopped, her eyes incredulous, her breath coming quickly.

  “I think you’re both all mixed up with a lot of feeling grateful and sorry and this is what’s expected of you, and neither of you has ever been in love with anybody.” He stopped short, looking at her. “I guess I ought to keep my trap shut. I’m sorry, Laurel. I didn’t—”

  “You just don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s all,” she said quickly.

  The words were blurred and scarcely audible as she made an abrupt move toward the door and was gone down the stairs.

  Monk Whitney stood staring after her for an instant. He turned back slowly and looked at me. “I guess we’re all wet,” he said. “She is in love with the guy, after all.”

  He went on looking at me, so I said, probably acidly, “It looks like it. And what are you trying to do?”

  He looked for an instant then as if he thought it was none of my business, which, heaven knows, was true. But he said curtly, “Aunt Abby’s worried. She doesn’t think Laurel’s in love with Travis, or Travis with her, and Laurel’d marry Kane if she had an out. She asked me to talk to her—and now, because she didn’t know she was up here. I came up to see if Kane was in. I guess I wasn’t—”

  I drew a deep breath. “Look,” I said. “You talk about your aunt as if she were God. She’s not. She’s a scheming, worldly old woman, a lot smarter than all the rest of you put together.”

  I was more than a little annoyed, for some reason, or I expect I’d have used more tact.

  “She knows perfectly well Laurel Frazier isn’t in love with Myron Kane, but she’s perfectly willing to sell her down the river just to stop him from writing that profile or to get back that document, whatever it is—one or both. I’ll be willing to bet anything she and Myron have made a deal. She wrote me yesterday and said Laurel ought to be terribly grateful to Travis Elliot and she thought they’d be married soon. Now she’s made a complete about-face. She’s counting on all of you to make Laurel so unhappy she’ll marry Myron. If that doesn’t work, she’ll probably put it to her, on the grounds that it’ll save your father, because she knows the girl adores him and thinks this is all her fault. And if I were you, I’d be ashamed to have any part in it.”

  I stopped, rather appalled at my own temerity, and also startled at the towering structure I’d built up on the patch of quicksand of fact I’d overheard in the Broad Street Station.

  “Well, of course I may be entirely wrong,” I added hastily. “I haven’t—I mean I guess I said that because I think you’re being a little rough on her.”

  He stood there silently, thinking it over. “I wonder,” he said. “Could be.” He looked around the room. “Did she do all this?”

  He indicated the hastily pushed-in drawers and littered papers. I nodded. He went around methodically straightening things up, still pretty sober-faced, picked up one or two of Myron’s unfinished paragraphs lying on the floor, glanced at them and dropped them into the wastebasket.

  “You think she’s really in love with Travis?” he asked, looking at me. “And don’t get me wrong, lady.” His grin completely changed his whole face. “When I fall in love it’s going to be with a gentle cow creature, so there’ll be peace in the home. And Travis is my best friend. I just wondered, that’s all.”

  “I wouldn’t know, really,” I said. “I never saw her till today.”

  “You never saw Aunt Abby till today, either, did you?”

  We both laughed, and then we looked quickly at each other. Myron Kane was coming in. I could hear his voice booming up the stair well as he tried to make the old butler hear it was a nasty day out. It was, and not a lot better in, I thought as I hurried along to my room in the front and Monk Whitney went down the stairs. I could see him in the mirror there, going into his aunt’s room. In a minute, I heard Myron whistling as he came up, and the door of his room close. It opened again shortly, and I waited about ten minutes before I followed him downstairs.

  4

  Mrs. Whitney and Myron were in her room. I could see her in the mirror just inside the door, but not him. She must have given him some signal, because his voice rose suddenly, expansively anecdotal with something about an Eastern ambassador. “… and I said, ‘Effendi—’ ”

  He stopped so abruptly, seeing me, that I saw while he knew someone was coming he didn’t know it was to be his unwitting sponsor in the house. And it must have taken him all of a second to rally himself.

  “Why, Gracie!” he exclaimed cordially, and I hate to be called “Gracie.”

  “How very nice!”

  He came toward me and gave me an affectionate kiss on the cheek. I hadn’t, I guess, realized what close friends we were, and I don’t think Mrs. Whitney was fooled either.

  “Yes, isn’t it Pleasant?” she said. “And didn’t you bring a Letter for our Friend, Dear Child?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. I’d forgotten it entirely in the press of interim business. I went over to the table where I’d left it with my bag when she’d dismissed Travis Elliot and me so peremptorily. “It’s from a fan; he thinks you’re divine.”

  I picked up my bag, but Mr. Toplady’s letter wasn’t under it. I looked inside. It wasn’t there either.

  “That’s very funny,” I said. “I thought I left it here.”

  I knew I had, in fact.

  “It must be Somewhere, Dear Child,” Mrs. Whitney said, without concern. “Or did you take it upstairs?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, well,” Myron said.

  It was spoken as by a public favorite to whom another fan letter was as a drop to the ocean, a grain to the desert. He’d returned to the mantel and was standing there with his elbow on it, at ease with himself and the world.

  “It was from Someone who wrote a Book, Dear Boy,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  “No,” I said. “It was from a little man named Albert Top-lady. I met him in a—”

  I stopped, staring at him. It was unbelievable. He looked as if an invisible hand had landed him a paralyzing blow in the pit of the stomach. His face just in a fraction of an instant had turned a sickly gray-green, his mouth sagged open stupidly and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip.

  “Where is it? The letter!” he said.

  His voice shook, and his body swayed as he took a step toward me. I thought he was going to grab the bag out of my hand and go through it himself.

  “Grace, you’ve got to give it to me! Where is it?”

  I stared at Mrs. Whitney, completely bewildered. She was resting back very calmly on her cushions, concentrating on Something Else, I supposed.

  “I don’t know where it is, Myron,” I said. “It isn’t here where I left it. Maybe one of the others picked it up by mistake.”

  “If they did,” Abigail Whitney said placidly, “I’m sure they will return it, Dear Boy. They wouldn’t open a sealed Letter addressed to anyone Else. It’s one of the things that isn’t Done.”

  A dark flush came into Myron’s cheeks. “I wish you’d see if you took it upstairs, Grace,” he said. He had made an effort to get himself under control, but his hands were still trembling and his voice harsh.

  “Do, Dear Child,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  He followed me out of the room.

  “Look, Myron,” I said. “That letter was under my bag, and that’s all I know about it. It is not upstairs.”

  The look in his face was as near despair as I’ve ever seen in all my life.

  “My God, it’ll ruin me,” he whispered.

  I’d have felt very sorry for him if I hadn’t seen almost the same look in Laurel Frazier’s eyes, and for much the same reason.

  “It’s sort of the biter bit, isn’t it?” I said.

  He stood there for a moment without answering, hagg
ard and terribly diminished, someway. His mouth was trembling and there were actually tears in his eyes.

  “Who was in there?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Elsie and Sam Phelps, Monk Whitney, Travis Elliot, Mrs. Whitney and myself.”

  He nodded and went on up to his room.

  I’d been standing facing him at the foot of the stairs. As I turned and started to go back into Mrs. Whitney’s room, I stopped. I was looking directly into the mirrored panel at the right of the shell-ceilinged recess. The long mirror inside in her door was reflected in it. I could see her lying back on her cushions, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. I could not only see her, I could see a series of other reflections from other mirrors, and in them the lower hall—the hall I was in— and a part of the upper hall too. Those mirrors weren’t just decorative detail in a modern interior architecture at all. They were placed, like the ones outside her window, with method and purpose. She could sit in her Empire swan-sleigh bed and see all approaches to her room. More than that, she could have seen Laurel Frazier go up to Myron’s room, and seen that Myron hadn’t either come in or gone up. Her sending Monk up, knowing Laurel was there, must have been a conscious and deliberate act.

  The rattle and clack and ring of Myron’s typewriter starting up at full speed came abruptly down the stair well. I saw Mrs. Whitney move, and I went on into her room.

  “Did you find Myron’s letter?” she asked, more to be polite than anything else, from her manner.

  “No. What happened to it?” I asked, meeting her blue gaze directly.

  “It’s so difficult to be Sure about things, isn’t it?” she said vaguely.

  “Didn’t you see who took it?”

  “I’ve got awfully blind with Advancing Years,” she said. “But you’ve got eyes, Dear Child. You should train yourself to use them.”