The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Perhaps.”

  The doctor licked his lips. “Well?”

  “And yet she didn’t,” Duff said. “Will you tell me this much? To whom did Mary drop this … hint? Whatever it was?” The doctor stood dumbly. “Who was there at the breakfast table this morning?” Duff insisted.

  “Just the children,” Dr. Christenson said.

  “Yes,” said Duff heavily, “yes, as you say, of course. The children. All of them?”

  “I believe they were all there,” the doctor said sadly. “Terrible thing. I do hope … Well … Ready, darling?”

  Constance Avery bowed, from the neck. She held no white glove out to Duff, the detective. “Good night,” she said brightly, as to a doorman.

  CHAPTER 6

  Duff went around closing windows and locking them, testing doors. He did not know whether this was the Moriarity custom, but the window screens were only half-screens with handles inside by which they could be pushed up. Duff felt that the absence of handles on the outside would not prevent a determined person from raising them. So he locked the windows, wishing to err on the side of caution. Gathering up his bag, which he had left in the hall on his first entrance, he went up the creaking stairs to Dinny’s room.

  The big old house was quiet, except for the kind of breathing an old house does at night. It did not feel empty. The presence of sleeping children was somehow evident. There was nothing weird or sinister in the near-silence. It was simply an old, shabby, well-inhabited house on a quiet street.

  Duff prepared for bed and turned out his light. He stood in Dinny’s window, looking out at the dim garden. No moon tonight, but a street light filtered through the trees.

  These kids. Duff sorted them in his mind, let his impressions flow together, tried, as he so often had, to lean on his intuition. It seemed to him that they were conspirators. He liked them—oh, very much. They were delightful. Nevertheless, they were allied to keep something out of his knowledge.

  Mary was worried about the kids.

  Duff began to face it. Mary was afraid that the kids might have, in some childish, half-innocent way, caused Brownie’s death. There it was. That was the thing that frightened Mary, and frightened Duff, too.

  However, and of this he felt certain, they were not conspirators in Brownie’s death. These children were not allied to commit murder and conceal their crime. An impossible idea! Not tenable.

  Yet, he supposed, one conspirator could have a deeper secret of his own. But …

  Duff yanked his mind again and forced it to the thing that must be faced, the most frightening thought of all. One little person was not a conspirator, and that was the one they had rushed away, put away safe, for given reasons that were not too adequate. One little person, just old enough to understand what poison is, and young enough to be still unmoral, as a baby is.… Who had been playing nurse, giving medicine to her dolls.… Who had suffered injustice from Miss Emily Brown.… Who, even though she may have long forgotten the incident, may have kept a feeling of being out of sympathy.… Duff’s heart shouted No! But his mind went on. A little person who had heard her mother say … and to her, Mother must seem infallible, like God.

  And, worst, a little person about whom Eve knew a secret. Eve had been at the hospital. Why was Taffy better off in the hospital? Why must she be out of the house before the police came? If Eve knew, did Mary know, too? Did the doctor know?

  Yes, he thought the doctor knew.

  Oh, Taffy wouldn’t count as a murderer. She would count as an accident. God help her. Duff felt sick. For the first time, since he had won the battle of self-integration, long ago, he found that he was unwilling to follow passively wherever the truth led. If it should lead this way. No! Not Taffy! No ! He knew his mind to be scrambling for some sand under which to rest its metaphorical head, and he let it go. If this were so, he didn’t want to know it. If it looked as if it were going to be so, he would hang onto doubt, keep doubt handy, to hide in, to give her the benefit of … for the rest of her life.

  But there was plenty of doubt, after all. There was, for instance, Eve herself. He must ferret out what the feud was about and how seriously those two women were enemies. Eve, the nervous wreck, might … might, mind you … think she could get away with so simple a device as handing the woman a bottle of poisoned wine. There was a possible motive, a possible method, both sounding very obvious and too simple. Still, they must be checked. A simple, obvious, half-crazy way of killing. Maybe.

  Who else? Where could he find more doubt? Another suspect. The man who was hidden in the house. Professor Moriarity?

  Come, thought Duff, why should a man hide in a house anyway? Would he hide for the purpose of getting at Brownie? Then the motive must be important and urgent. What motive? None known.

  Or was he hiding for some other reason and had he been discovered by Brownie, and therefore, to maintain his concealment …? Brownie may have gone quietly or suddenly into her room, that room through which the back stairs passed, and seen what she shouldn’t have seen. Found out what she mustn’t know, or at least mustn’t tell.

  Now, why does a man hide? What makes it as important as that to stay hidden? When he is afraid for his life. For his fortune. When he is running from the law.

  Haggerty and his escaped convict! Duff thought that an escaped convict hiding in the house would come in very handy. Except for the fact that only one man, convict or not, could possibly command the co-operation of the Moriarity kids. Duff sighed. Still a family affair.

  Could a man hide here without the kids knowing?

  Duff thought not.

  However, let us see. There was that clipping, the one Brownie had treasured, about the actor and the runaway woman and the auto accident. Professor Moriarity? They said he was an actor. Who, then, would the woman be? And even so, unless this could somehow be twisted to mean that missing urgent motive, what bearing could it have?

  Duff smiled to himself. He had nothing against a coincidence. They are elements of reality, after all. The only coincidence was the word “actor.” Lots of men were actors. His real conviction was that the clipping meant the gray hair ad. Awkwardly cut out, so as to save the address. The clipping was quite fresh, consistent with Brownie’s growing older. It was not, for instance, a record or reminder of some old trouble about which she had been blackmailing.

  For she might have been a blackmailer, in a hearty good-scoutish kind of way. His picture of Brownie admitted that. A woman who liked to crack little whips, liked enough power over her friends to make her whims important. A good soul, kindhearted and petty, jolly, and just a little cruel, for fun.

  Dr. Christenson said he’d been paying interest on a loan. But was there ever a loan? Or were the payments something else? Although Dr. Christenson was no actor.

  Haggerty. O’Leary. Moriarity. Very Hibernian flavor to Duff’s world, suddenly. The Irish are proud of being Irish, aren’t they? He wished he had a picture of Mary’s husband.

  Yes, he must have that, must find one. He awoke to his surroundings, switched on Dinny’s lamp again, and looked carefully at the snapshots stuck into her mirror, at the few other photographs in the room. Lots and lots of girls, some boys, several dogs, one cat, no fathers.

  Duff turned the light off and got into Dinny’s rather hard little bed. He was too long for it. He was always too long. A pattern of leaves moved on the ceiling in silhouette. Country quiet out here. Would there be a cock crow? Chickens. Constance Avery.

  Ah ha, there’s a one! Duff thought to himself: My fine lady, wouldn’t I just like to pin this rap on you! Right on your rosy fingernails. A henhouse alibi. Had he better check? No, not so. When it’s poison, alibis are not convincing. Poison can go into a bottle and sit and wait until the victim gets around to taking it. That is, it can, if anyone can ever figure out the tangled evidence about those wine bottles.

  Hm. Brownie sipped wine on the terrace. And lived. No good. We don’t know which bottle. Or do we? The bought bottle, of course, for
Eve’s was open already. Therefore, since both bottles had been opened by the time Dinny came home, Brownie had opened her own. Duff didn’t know what difference it made.

  He thought of Alfie, on the back porch in the rain. Alfie couldn’t have done anything then, although he was there alone, outside the empty dining room. But too late. Too late. Besides … not Alfie. Not Taffy!

  Duff embarked, for comfort, on a fantasy. Suppose Brownie and the doctor to have had a love affair, long ago. Of course, the baby. Maybe the baby had been rung in on Mary’s family. No, too old. None of these kids, he was willing to bet, had ever worn embroidered petticoats. Ah, well … say Constance discovers all. Mad with jealousy, she … Hm.

  There was a sound in the old house too regular to be the normal creaking of its timber bones. A measured pace. Thump, thump, thump, thump … wheeeeee, thump. It was what music did in the movies, in a funny movie when there was going to be a ghost.

  Duff heaved himself out of bed, then listened again. No, he was wrong. It was not that insulting rhythm, after all. But it was footsteps.

  “Damn it,” said MacDougal Duff, wrapping his robe around him. “there is a bogey man!”

  He got very quietly to the top of the stairs, on the third floor. Puzzling swishes and soft bumps seemed to surround him. He had his flash, but he did not turn it on until he had softly opened the door to the boys’ room. The boys were two silent humps. But were the humps boys? Duff crossed over and investigated. They were boys, all right. Sweetly and innocently asleep, breathing gently.

  Duff’s light wavered away across the wall, and Alfie stirred and sat up. “What’s the matter?”

  “Never mind.” Duff would have fled, but Alfie was pounding Paul, and the two of them made a hushed uproar of alarm and question.

  So he posted one of them at the top of each stairs and searched, finding nothing.

  The whole time he had an absurd vision of Mr. Moriaity tiptoeing about just ahead of him, and once he even turned suddenly in his tracks to catch him if he were behind.

  Nothing.

  Duff went grimly down to the second floor. In the big bedroom Dinny was curled protectively around her baby brother, both sleeping sweetly and innocently. In the other bed Mitch heaved her curly top up and said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Ssh,” said Duff mysteriously. “I’m the night watchman.”

  She lay back and seemed to accept these goings-on as just one more incomprehensible adult activity, one more queer grownup habit she hadn’t encountered before, to be sure, but which would never be fully explained until she was grown up herself.

  Feeling very foolish, Duff went downstairs. The boys hung over the stairwell, high up. He paid no attention to them. He began the rounds conscientiously, testing all entries. The cellar door, which had been locked, was not locked any more. There was a key on the inside. He had noticed a key on the outside. The key that had been on the outside, or at least a key, lay on the floor.

  Duff slipped his light around the cellar. Nothing. It was a big open space, no partitions. A ping-pong table stood hard by the furnace. Nothing. Nobody.

  Duff came back up and stood frowning at the key when there was a faint tap on the outside door, the one dubbed the back door, although it led to the driveway on the side.

  “Who’s that?” Was the bogey man locked out?

  Duff opened cautiously to the solemn and somehow conspiratorial face of Mr. Haggerty. “Good evening,” said that one. “I happened to see your light.”

  “That was quite a happening,” said Duff tartly, “since to see it you must have been lurking in the driveway.”

  “It so happens I was,” said Mr. Haggerty. He lifted his brows. His melancholy eyes popped a little. “Any— er—trouble?”

  MacDougal Duff began to laugh. The ridiculous delicacy this fellow put into his impertinence reminded him of Charlie Chaplin in the old days. That same fussy, formal, exaggerated, self-confident absurdity as when Charlie used to flit over the screen, dusting with gay abandon, after having been caught doing something he shouldn’t. And Duff himself was cast in the role of the suspicious, glaring, menacing authority who had caught him and under whose eye the pitiful and hilarious attempt to deceive took place.

  “No, no trouble,” Duff said at last. “A little haunting, perhaps. These old houses …”

  “I happen to know,” said Haggerty, “that there was someone in your cellar a minute ago.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Oh, yes. I heard someone. No lights were shown. But someone came up from there and, I believe, opened this door.”

  “It’s possible,” Duff said. “What were you doing out here?”

  “Keeping an eye out,” Haggerty said. “I warned you I wouldn’t give up, you know.”

  “Did you happen to see a light in the attic, longer ago than ten minutes?”

  “That I can’t see from here.” Haggerty looked extremely apologetic within his curious dignity.

  “Mr. Haggerty, I don’t suppose I can persuade you not to hang around any longer?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve had a very interesting time, so far.”

  Duff leaned back against the wall. “Who was in the cellar?”

  “Who? I can’t say.”

  “Was it you?”

  “Me?” He answered a question with a question. “How would I get in?”

  Duff said, “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

  “Wait. I … er”—the fellow cleared his throat—“saw Miss Brown’s will.”

  “You mean, of course, that you happened to see it,” said Duff after a moment. “All right. What was in it?”

  “She tears up the mortgage,” said Haggerty with a fine dramatic gesture. “Also … also”—he held the tidbit tantalizingly—”she forgives Dr. Christenson his debts. She forgives everybody.”

  “Who is everybody?”

  “People in California.” Haggerty intoned his next like the end of Hamlet. “The rest,” he said, “is charity.”

  Duff shook his head. “She had loaned the doctor money?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Haggerty promptly. “Five thousand dollars. Fifteen years ago.”

  “A genuine loan?”

  Haggerty pricked up his ears. “What’s that?”

  “Just the death rattle of a little notion,” Duff said. “I do thank you.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Haggerty. “I’ll call again.”

  Duff closed and locked the back door and went upstairs, thinking. Now, if, when Haggerty was here earlier, he had nipped around and got in at the back, he might have flushed that toilet. Might have had time, that is. Although how he could have made such a betraying error … Reflex, he thought.

  The boys were still hanging over the rail. “Who was that?” they demanded.

  “Our friend, Mr. Haggerty,” Duff told them. “Go back to bed. I’m baffled.” They hesitated. “If that’s any comfort to you,” Duff added, a trifle nastily.

  They vanished then. Duff stood in the second-floor hall and sniffed the air. Someone had been smoking here. He smelled tobacco. Now, Haggerty had not been smoking on the second floor while talking to Duff in the back hall. Not he.

  “What I need,” said Duff to himself grimly, “is my little monograph on the varieties of tobacco ash. Or the needle, Watson.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dawn came up over the high evergreen hedges at the edge of Mary’s garden and blazed in full bright at the eastern window of Dinny’s room. It was too bright for Duff, and he woke. He was standing at the back window, looking out over the narrow porch roof to see how the stable lay, there at the end of the drive, in the corner of the property, and how low hedges fenced off the vegetables beyond the back lawn, and how a curving back lane bounded the place in that direction, when there came a tap at his door.

  It was Dinny herself in a blue calico skirt and a thin white blouse. “Hello. I thought maybe you’d want to know that those men are back. The ones who were here? They say it’s all right to get breakfast.
So shall I?”

  “It sounds like a good idea,” he said, smiling. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Of course,” she said wonderingly. “Did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. It’s very quiet here.”

  “We like it,” Dinny said. “Of course, we’ve always lived here. I guess we wouldn’t know how to act anywhere else. I’ll make you some coffee.”

  Duff sniffed. “Don’t you mean you already have?”

  “I took a chance,” said Dinny swiftly and went away.

  Duff turned thoughtfully back into the room and walked again to the south window. He was organizing his problems. His eyes, unfocused, were caught by a difference in the view, and slowly he brought his gaze in toward what was different. On the red porch roof that had been bare a moment ago, there now lay a neat pair of eggshells. And not birds’ eggs, either. Hen’s eggs. Breakfast eggs.

  Duff looked at them for a long minute. Then he put on his coat and went downstairs.

  Pring said, “Good morning.” The two detectives looked very dewy with their clean shirts and their fresh shaves. They appeared to be waiting for him in the hall. “How’d it go?”

  “Why,” said Duff, “once I thought I heard something, and I got up and looked, but there was no one there. News?”

  “Yep,” Pring said. “We got the poison. It was in the wine, all right.”

  “It really was, eh?”

  “Yep. Nicotine.”

  “Nicotine.”

  “Yep. In the dregs of her glass. In the bottle that was on the table. In the body. No place else.”

  “That seems to have been enough,” Duff said.

  “Yeah, it was plenty. Well, the next thing … we got fingerprints off them bottles. And that’s a funny thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, on the bottle that had the poison, the one we found on the table, there was the dead woman’s prints and the girl’s, the oldest girl.”

  “Dinny?”

  “Yeah, and a set we don’t have. Female, or seems like it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Not Mrs. Moriarity,” said Robin. “Not if she brushes her own hair.”