The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Leslie Ford

  “That wasn’t a special delivery for me, by any chance, was it?”

  She looked me squarely in the eyes, the color rising in her sallow cheeks.

  “I’m sure if it had been, Mrs. Latham, you’d have been told so at once.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I have one child at school and one in the Air Force, and you always sort of hope it may be for you.”

  “Well, it’s not,” she said. She picked up her bag she’d put on the needlepoint chair against the rose-beige wall. “Now that you’re here, I won’t bother my aunt.” She seemed in an awful hurry to get away. “Tell her I’ll be back later, will you, please?”

  I started to say, “Don’t let me drive you away,” but I didn’t have a chance. She was out the door and gone. The butler, who’d come out of his pantry to answer the bell, stood smiling at the end of the hall for a moment, turned and went back again.

  The special-delivery letter must have been for Elsie herself, I thought, and she’d taken it away. It wasn’t on the silver tray on the table, and she’d obviously received it herself, as the squirrel had got only one walnut, and that was when the butler had opened the door for her. I don’t think it would have crossed my mind, any of it, if it hadn’t been for the way she’d acted—as if she’d thought I was accusing her of something, and then dashing off. And the incident was anything but closed.

  I saw Abigail in the mirror on the stairs. She was half out of bed, and I know I wasn’t imagining the obvious alarm that had got her that far. It was just a flash as I went by, but it was enough, and when I got to her door I was sure I hadn’t been wrong. She was back in bed, as a bedridden invalid should have been, but she was sitting up as straight as a ramrod, her blue old eyes as bright as coals.

  She glanced sharply at my hands. “Was that a letter, Dear Child?” Her voice was direct and sharp.

  “If it was, Elsie got it,” I said. “She must have just been there and taken it.” I broke off sharply. “Mrs. Whitney!”

  The old woman had turned the color of death. Her eyes were staring, her bony hands clutching at her throat.

  “What is it?” I cried.

  “Oh,” she whispered. She thrust one hand out, gripping my wrist, shaking it frantically. “Go get her! Stop her! Go quickly, quickly!”

  I ran out of the room and down the steps as fast as I could go, and tore open the front door. I knew it was no use, even while I was breaking my neck doing it, because I’d taken a long time getting up the stairs to give her a chance to settle herself back in bed. Elsie could have got at least a block down Walnut Street. She was nowhere in sight. She could have gone to her father’s house, I thought, and I ran next door and rang the bell. It seemed to me that it took the Irish maid hours to get to the door, and when she did, she shook her head.

  “Sure, and I was just this minute tellin’ Miss Abby on the telephone. Miss Elsie ain’t been here this morning.”

  I went back to the pink house and upstairs to the second floor again.

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  Abigail was just putting down the telephone. Her hands were shaking violently and she looked ghastly. I was really alarmed.

  “I can’t get hold of Sam,” she said desperately. “None of them. Sam or Monk or Travis or my brother.”

  “They’re probably all at the police station,” I said. “Or all of them except Judge Whitney were, and I imagine they still are. Do you want me to try to get one of them for you?”

  She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on her yellow cushions, shaking it back and forth.

  “No, no,” she whispered. “Call the Acorn Club and see if she’s there. Tell her I want to speak to her. Tell her I’m dying—anything. I’ve got to get hold of her.”

  But she wasn’t there, and she hadn’t been in. I tried the entire roster of good works. Abigail lay there murmuring one of them after another, getting weaker and paler and bluer-gilled with each failure.

  At last I said, “Now I’m going to call a doctor.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no use,” she whispered. “I’ll be all right. Just go away now, Dear Child, and let me rest. Colonel Primrose wants you to meet him at eleven o’clock at the Warwick. Go now, and don’t say anything about this, please. I’ll take care of it my own way. Don’t tell any of them, I beg you.”

  She held out her hand to me. When I took it, she clung to mine. “Oh, don’t go. Don’t leave me, Dear Child,” she whispered. “I’m a wicked, terrible old woman. You must forgive me, Dear Child… Oh, Douglas, Douglas!”

  She still clung to me for a moment. Then abruptly she let me go, opened her eyes and sat up.

  “Of course, Elsie is Very Irritating,” she said with great firmness. “Now, run along, Dear Child. Your Colonel will be Waiting.”

  Colonel Primrose, when I met him in the comfortable and dignified lobby of the Warwick, was pacing up and down, looking from his watch to the door and back again, and pretty irritated about something.

  I came up behind him. “Did you wish to see me, sir?” I asked.

  He cocked his head down and around, his black eyes snapping.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded. “And where in hell is Buck? I told that-to take you to see Malone and stay with you!”

  “Dear me,” I said. Still, I’d often wondered if he’d managed a regiment with nothing but urbanity.

  “We were otherwise engaged, both of us,” I added. “And don’t go military on us or we’ll both quit.”

  “I thought you’d already quit,” he retorted. “I can’t do two jobs and look after you at the same time. I want you to go home and stay there. I’m—”

  “Colonel Primrose,” a voice said. “Paging Colonel Primrose.”

  He broke off and diverted a lethal glare to the bellboy.

  “Here,” he snapped.

  “Gentleman at the desk to see you, sir. Shall I send him over? Gentleman with the straw hat, sir.”

  Colonel Primrose looked, and nodded curtly.

  I saw that the gentleman with the straw hat was Pete Martin, of The Saturday Evening Post. His big camel’s-hair coat was hanging open down to his ankles, the belt not tied. The straw hat was a Panama that had seen many better winters. It was battered, shapeless, and aged a variegated ginger brown. Surrounded as he was by women wrapped in mink and men in heavy overcoats and scarves who kept glancing at him and edging away a little, he was doing an embarrassed best to pretend he had just picked it up on the way in. He came over, sort of bumbling and red-faced.

  “I wonder if I could talk to you, colonel. I’ve just been—” He saw me and stopped. “Oh, I beg your par don.” He fumbled with the straw hat and got a shade redder. “It was on the hook,” he said. “I guess I just grabbed it without noticing. I—”

  Colonel Primrose waited stiffly. That he was still mad at me and Buck, Pete Martin had no way of knowing. The big editor grew a little redder-faced, fumbled in his overcoat pocket for his handkerchief, pulled it out and mopped his forehead. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket, or thought he did. It got between his coat and belt and fell, unnoticed by him, onto the carpet. I started to say something, and stopped, not entirely of my own volition. Colonel Primrose’s steely glance rested on me for a bare instant, and I knew he’d seen it too.

  Lying quite open-faced on the rug, almost as if chance had deliberately arranged it that way, was the monogram Captain Malone had smoothed out on his desk. Or its mate, rather, done in shaded blue instead of shaded tan. The T wasn’t upside down and the middle letter wasn’t a W, it was an M. It read “W T M,” not “M T W.” It wasn’t for Monckton Tyler Whitney. It was for W. Thornton Martin.

  I stood dumbly, trying not to look at it lying there beside his foot, hearing those voices through the iron grille vent in the washroom on The Saturday Evening Post sixth floor, saying, “Where the hell was Pete?… Pipe down about Pete…”

  More immediately I could hear Colonel Primrose saying, �
��I’m busy right now. Unless it’s urgent. I can see you at the Post this afternoon.”

  Of course it was urgent. People don’t dash out in an aged straw hat in the middle of January unless something’s on their mind they’ve got to get off.

  “I don’t guess it’s very urgent,” Pete Martin said. He was rather like a large friendly sheepdog, abashed at making an error he didn’t quite know the nature of. He backed off with a grin.

  Colonel Primrose reached down and picked up his handkerchief.

  “Then it wasn’t Monk’s handkerchief,” I said.

  “As Malone knows perfectly well,” he said. “If you people would quit jumping to the first conclusion you see, it would simplify matters considerably. You’ve let Malone tie you all up in bowknots. If you’d acted like normal, intelligent human beings—” He shrugged.

  “Has he put Monk in jail yet?” I inquired sweetly.

  “I expect one of you will manage it before noon. You’ve got forty-five minutes yet.”

  He took a deep breath, counting ten, no doubt.

  “Damn it,” he said. “If I could only get hold of that manuscript.”

  “Perhaps I could help you if you’d be at all civil,” I said calmly. “Civil instead of military.”

  He didn’t snap this time. He looked at me earnestly for a moment. “That is what I was afraid of,” he said soberly. “That’s why I wanted Buck not to let you out of his sight.”

  I drew a blank at that one.

  “You know, sometimes, Mrs. Latham,” he said, “I think you ought to have your I. Q. determined. Or maybe it’s better never to know.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a sitting room on the third floor. Come along. I want to talk to you.”

  “I hope Sergeant Buck won’t mind,” I said, when we got out of the elevator.

  “Sergeant Buck won’t mind anything when I’m through with him,” he said grimly. He opened the door.

  It was a pleasant room with an electric icebox humming away in a small kitchen off the foyer.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Don’t you realize a man has been murdered in cold blood, right in sight of God knows how many persons, on account of that manuscript? And here you go wandering around in the middle of the night as if the world was a field of buttercups. Who knows you’ve got that manuscript?”

  “You and I,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so. At least, unless Myron told somebody else, which I doubt.”

  He thought for a moment and nodded. “Go ahead,” he said shortly.

  “Well, there’s nothing to go ahead with, really,” I retorted. I was getting a little mad myself. “Myron told me he’d sent a copy of his script to my house in care of me. Somebody was prying into his papers, and he wanted a copy in reserve, I suppose.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t know quite how much to tell him, and then I decided that, since Abigail had got the document back, it didn’t matter, really.

  “I thought first he’d sent what they all call a document he got by mistake from Judge Whitney’s files down, too, but he said he hadn’t,” I went on. “And they’ve got it back anyway.”

  He was looking at me with a kind of pained incredulity that I found a little irritating.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said. “He had to send it somewhere— the script—and he said my address was the only one in Washington he could remember offhand. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have.”

  He shook his head silently, went to the sofa, sat down and picked up the telephone on the table at the end of it.

  “Get me Washington, Hobart One-five-nine-six,” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  It was my phone number in Georgetown.

  “I’m having that manuscript sent to Captain Malone,” he said calmly. “Then you’re going to Judge Whitney’s with me for lunch, and you’re going to tell them you’ve done it. You’re going to tell your friend Abigail. I’m going to call Ben Hibbs and tell him. We’ll have a notice put on the front page of—what is the paper in Philadelphia everybody’s supposed to read? For the simple reason that I don’t want you to have a knife between your ribs. God knows why, but I don’t. It’s—” He turned back to the telephone. “Hello. … Yes. Hello… Lilac?”

  Lilac is my colored cook, and the angel without whom for twenty years, life would never have been so gay, or stormy at times, but always fundamentally secure in the honesty and dependability and affection of the best friend I’ve ever had.

  “This is Colonel Primrose… Yes, she’s here. She’s fine. I’m fine… Yes, it’s very cold here.”

  You can’t ever talk long distance to Lilac without an intimate discussion of the weather.

  “Now listen to me, Lilac. A friend of Miss Grace’s sent some mail in care-What’s that?” He listened for a long time, his face settling into soberer and soberer lines.

  My I. Q. may be too low to risk the public shame of having it measured, but I knew what she was saying. I knew it before he said, “All right. Here she is. You can talk to her.”

  He handed me the phone.

  “Hello, Lilac,” I said… “Yes, I’m very well… No, it isn’t snowing here. What’s this about Mr. Kane’s mail?”

  “Mr. Kane he called up yes’dy an’ said I was to send it to him in Philadelphia, at the address you was stayin’ at, an’ did I have it, an’ I said ’deed I did. He says I was to send it special delivery right away. Now what does he mean sayin’ he ain’?”

  “What time did he call, Lilac?” I asked.

  “It was half pas’ three. He say it was important, and would I get myself a taxi and go to the main post office and ask th’ man where was the box to put it in, so it would go right away. He say he would give me the money for the taxi when he come down next time.”

  “Thanks, Lilac,” I said. We talked about a lot of other things before I could ring off. At last I put the phone down.

  “Myron Kane called her at half past three,” I said.

  Myron had been dead for some time just then, and neither of us bothered to say it.

  I said instead, “Elsie Phelps has that script now, colonel. Judge Whitney’s married daughter, Sam Phelps’ wife.”

  He waited for me to go on, and I did. I told him about the taxi driver, and the squirrel, and the special-delivery letter Elsie said wasn’t for me. And about Abigail Whitney sending me dashing after her, and the scene I’d had with her, calling up all over town, trying to get hold of Elsie. The only thing I didn’t tell him was about her crying “Douglas, Douglas” as she clung to my hand. I couldn’t tell him that without telling him about Judge Whitney and Douglas Elliot, Travis’ father, and that whole story of embezzlement and murder.

  He listened to me silently. When I was through, he got up and walked over to the window. He stood looking down on the Locust Street crowds hurrying back and forth. He came back to the sofa and picked up the phone.

  “Lombard Six-five hundred,” he said.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  “Ben Hibbs. I want them to know Elsie Phelps has the script. Or I don’t really. All I really want them to know is you haven’t it.”

  I looked at him blankly. “I thought you thought none of them—”

  “Mr. Ben Hibbs, please… Hello, Ben, this is John Primrose. Elsie Phelps—you remember her, Whitney’s daughter— has a copy of Myron’s profile of the judge, if you still want to run it… Yes, I’m going to see her—this afternoon if I can… Right. I’ll try to get it for you. You might let the boys know, by the way. And tell Pete I’m sorry I was short with him. I’ll see him later. Goodbye.”

  He put down the phone and stood with his hand resting on it for a few minutes, looking fixedly past and beyond it. Then he turned to me and smiled, shaking his head slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “The thing we’ve got to do now is get hold of Elsie Phelps.”

  It was five minutes past twelve then. Elsie wasn’t at home. The maid said she wouldn’t be home unt
il half past five. At half past four they found her. She was lying face down on the frozen bank of Wissahickon Creek, out toward Germantown. The reason they hadn’t found her before was that there was a clump of laurel bushes between her and the driveway.

  She had been there since half past twelve, the police said. Her watch had struck a stone when she fell.

  Tossed in the bushes, they found a heavy bronze medallion. It had Benjamin Franklin’s profile in relief on the face, and on the reverse side an engraved picture of The Curtis Publishing Company Building:

  COMMEMORATING THE

  200TH ANNIVERSARY

  “THE SATURDAY EVENING POST”

  1728 FOUNDED BY 1928

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  The people at the Post all had them on their desks for paper weights.

  The one they found in the laurel bushes had blood on it, and there was a sharp, deep cut on Elsie Phelps’ head where the bronze rim of the medallion had struck her.

  13

  But when we were lunching with Judge Nathaniel Whitney at a quarter past one, we naturally didn’t know that Elsie Phelps was dead, and I may say the conversation would have been very different if we had. If we had, that is, and there’d still been a lunch.

  We were supposed to be at the house at one o’clock, but after I’d told Colonel Primrose about Elsie and the special-delivery letter, and about the scene Abigail had put on, I was too involved to stop. Or rather, I suppose, I’d given Colonel Primrose a lever to pry the rest of it out with. I can see now that I was put through a third degree—the rubber-hose-in-the-velvet-stocking sort of thing—and it’s a wonder to me that I managed to hold out as much as I did. The handkerchief with W. Thornton Martin’s monogram on it, not Monckton Tyler Whitney’s, lying on the table in front of me, was no doubt put there on purpose, as a reminder that if it was Monk I was worried about, I didn’t have to be any longer. It was a childish ruse, but Colonel Primrose had already said I was simple-minded, and I guess I am.