The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “We took her hairbrush,” explained Pring to Duff’s narrowed eyes.

  “Yes, of course. But—that’s all?”

  “That’s all. On that bottle. But what I mean is funny … on the bottle that we found in the pantry, the one that isn’t poisoned at all, perfectly good wine … on that bottle there aren’t any fingerprints.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “You’re telling me! I don’t make head nor tail of those wine bottles. I was trying to figure it out, see. Now, the bottle on the table … she pours herself a glass, takes it out in the hall, gives the doc a swig, so it’s O.K. So I figured, first, it must be somebody switched bottles there. While she was out in the hall. But the girl says she gave her mother a drink out of the other bottle. So it wasn’t poisoned either. Not at that time. Finally, I see a light. That first glass she poured herself musta come out of the pantry, the good bottle. Trouble is, now we got the girl’s fingerprints on the wrong bottle, unless she touched them both.”

  “You didn’t hear about the little fellow,” Duff said pityingly. And told him about Davey.

  “Yeah? So where’s his prints?” Pring demanded.

  “Somebody wiped them off the bottle you found in the pantry.”

  “But it musta been on the table when he took some.”

  “The bottles were switched.”

  “Yeah, but when?”

  “It’s a cinch they got switched before she took that poisoned swallow,” Robin said.

  “O.K.” said Pring. “So it’s in between when the little kid took some and when she came back to the table.”

  “Therefore,” said Duff, “very likely it was young Mitch who switched them. Still …”

  “Why?” said Pring suspiciously. “Why would she?”

  “Why? Perhaps the boy spilled it in pouring, messed up the neck of the bottle. Something of the sort. She might, therefore, wipe it off, you see?”

  “Sure. Sure,” said Robin in excitement. “Wipe it off, and then change bottles because more was gone than oughta be. Hm? Whadda ya say?”

  “So Bottle B, from the pantry, gets to the table and Brownie dies of it. But,” Duff reminded them, “after all, Mrs. Moriarity does not die.”

  “We better ask her …” Pring stopped and chewed his lip.

  “Maybe she didn’t drink it,” Robin blurted.

  “That’s what I have been wondering,” Duff told him.

  “Yeah? Why wouldn’t she?” Pring’s eyes looked hard and suspicious again.

  “Dinny put it on her tray to be thoughtful. But if Mrs. Moriarity didn’t care for it …”

  “I gotcha,” Robin said. “It was kinda cute of the kid. Her mother wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. I think you got it, Mr. Duff.”

  “I think he’s working for Mrs. Moriarity,” said Pring dryly.

  “It doesn’t matter who I’m working for,” said. Duff with a hidden twinge. “Let me ask you, have you looked for a napkin or rag or towel stained with wine that Mitch might have used to wipe the bottle?” They didn’t answer. “And then again,” Duff went on gently, “you did take her fingerprints, did you not? Why are the third prints you find on the poisoned bottle strange to you? How did Mitch carry it? In her teeth? And if with gloves or their equivalent, why?”

  “So when she wiped off the bottle, it was after she moved it,” Pring snapped and turned to Robin. “Go root around for that rag. And find that kid.”

  “After she moved which bottle?” Duff insisted softly, “She didn’t wipe both, you know. Although she moved both, if any.”

  Pring gave him a disgusted look and strode to the telephone. “I’m going to find out when we can get ahold of Mrs. Moriarity.”

  Duff said, “I’ll use the phone after you,” and strolled through the now open glass door into the dining room.

  It was a pleasant sunny room, here on the east and south, facing the garden both ways. There was a crusted place on the rug, an ugly and tragic mess. Poor woman. Duff turned away from it. The oval dining-room table was drawn toward the back windows, the long windows that led to the porch. Duff studied it, noted the toaster still plugged into the wall socket.

  Dinny put her head in through the swinging pantry door. “Breakfast’s in the kitchen. The cleaners are coming …”

  “Come in here a minute. Tell me who sat where.”

  She approached the table, skirting the bad place on the floor with delicate courage. “I was up here in Mother’s place.” She indicated the end of the table toward the front hall, where, if one sat, one would have one’s back turned to the rest of the house. “Paul was supposed to be here, on my left. But he hadn’t come in. Then Brownie. Taffy’s regular place.” This faced the pantry, Duff noted, and one sitting there would be well able to see the doctor as he came downstairs. “Then Davey. Then Mitch.” The two littlest were spaced around the far end. “Then Alfie, and then nobody, because that’s where I usually sit.”

  “Thank you,” Duff said. He ran his eyes over the crumpled napkins. One lay on the floor. One lay in Mitch’s chair, and it was stained with wine. “Is Mr. Robin in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, he’s poking around all over.”

  “Tell him to come in here a minute.”

  Robin came and looked at Mitch’s napkin. “So she did wipe it off. Good guess, Mr. Duff.”

  “Have you found her?”

  Robin jerked his head toward the kitchen, and he and Duff went through the little square pantry, so near the back stairs, into the big and much dimmer kitchen, where Dinny had set out breakfast on a linoleum-topped table, and where Mitch and Davey, side by side, were lapping up bowls of cereal like little lambs.

  Pring came in by the other door. He took one of the chairs and turned it sideways, sat down. “Your name is Mitch? That’s what they call you?” He creased his face with a smile.

  Mitch flicked her long black lashes and pursued rice crispies without comment.

  “Look, suppose you tell me, if you can, huh, when your little brother took some wine, you say you didn’t want Miss Brown to know it?”

  “That’s right,” said Mitch.

  “So what did you do? Try and tell me now.”

  “I took it away from him and washed out the glass.”

  “But he’d drunk some, huh?”

  “Umhum.” Mitch’s head went up and down affirmatively.

  Davey said, “Bit”—Davey for “but”—“I lo-ove wine.”

  Dinny, standing behind him, put her hands on his cheeks caressingly. It looked as if she were holding his jaw shut.

  “O.K.” said Pring, stretching his mouth in another smile. Duff and Robin were watching silently from near the pantry door. Mitch didn’t seem bothered by her audience. She seemed quite happy. She turned her spoon daintily in her hand.

  “Now, did you wipe the bottle off any? I guess it was kinda sticky, huh?”

  “Certainly I wiped it off,” Mitch said indignantly as if he had questioned her housekeeping.

  “You did, eh? With your napkin?”

  Mitch nodded.

  “Oh, Mitch,” wailed Dinny, “and it stains!”

  Mitch kept her eyes steadily on Pring’s. “What else would you like to know?” she asked, and lifted her milk and tossed off the last swallow as if it had been a cocktail.

  “I would like to know what else you did, huh?”

  “What else? I washed the glass and I dried it and I brought it back and I dumped some of my milk in it. So it wouldn’t look too clean, of course.”

  “Naturally,” said Duff. He couldn’t help it. Mitch looked up at him and winked.

  Pring looked stern. “But you thought they might notice some wine was gone, so you changed the bottles around?”

  “Uhuh.” Her curls flew from side to side. It seemed a perfectly spontaneous negative.

  “Why didn’t you?” Pring said.

  Mitch looked at him solemnly. “Because I didn’t think of it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure wha
t?”

  “You didn’t move the bottles? You didn’t take the one on the table and put it in the pantry and take the one in the pantry and put it on the table?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mitch as if she were considering the idea quite abstractly.

  “Did she, Davey?” said Dinny softly.

  Davey said, “Yes, she did.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did too!”

  “Da-avey! You’re a not-so!”

  “I am not a not-so. Not today,” said Davey.

  Mitch looked at the men, a little worried now. “Are you going to put me in jail?” she asked.

  At this Davey’s ears got red, and he began suddenly to howl.

  Pring, escaped from the uproar into the front hall, mopped his face and said, “What did I do wrong, for the love of Pete?”

  “You were doing swell,” Robin assured him.

  “Yeah, but those kids! Listen, would you say she swapped those bottles? Or didn’t she?”

  “I’d say no,” said Robin, cocking his head on his fat neck.

  “Then why’d she think she was going to jail, if she wasn’t telling a lie?” He swung around to Duff, who was just coming toward them. “What did you make out of that?”

  Duff shrugged. “It seems to me that she didn’t switch the bottles,” he said, “and yet …”

  He knew, as they did not, that this wasn’t Mitch’s first denial. That lovely spontaneity was a repetition. And now Davey said she lied.

  “You can’t believe Davey,” he said aloud.

  “Yeah. And yet.” Pring was gloomy.

  “Tough going,” said Duff sympathetically. “Did you reach Mrs. Moriarity?”

  “She and the other kid are coming home around noon.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, the kid’s better. I think I’ll wait and come back. See her here. Well, we’re going out in the stable a minute, see if we missed anything.”

  “Any nicotine?”

  “We didn’t miss that. It was there, all right. Got it last night. Nicotine sulphate, for bugs.” Pring sounded disgusted.

  Duff raised his brows. “Still there last night?”

  “Who knows how many of those little bottles she had? And the one we found isn’t full.”

  “Fingerprints? Or was it wiped clean, too?”

  “Nobody’s fingerprints on any of them poisons,” Robin said, “except the big boy’s. That’s Paul.”

  “Paul. I believe he works in the garden a good deal.”

  “That so?”

  “So they tell me. I wonder if you know …” Duff pulled his lip. “Is nicotine a stomach poison or a contact poison?”

  “Contact,” Robin said promptly. “I got roses.”

  “Roses,” Duff murmured.

  Pring leaned on the newel post and considered Duff insolently. “Seems to me,” he drawled, “that we haven’t heard much about what you been thinking or doing. Is this a one-way business?”

  “Not at all,” Duff assured them. He made a lightning decision. “Do you know Eve Meredith?”

  “Yeah, sure. Lady next door?”

  “Do you know she had a feud on with Emily Brown?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That she never came into this house while Miss Brown was here? That Miss brown had done something, said something, long ago? I don’t know yet just what. Did you know that Miss Brown went over to her house yesterday afternoon to borrow an ice collar for the sick little girl? That Mrs. Meredith had a bottle of Dubonnet she says was given her? She says she herself had opened it. She says she herself had tasted it. Did you know that she gave that bottle to Miss Brown as a present? That it was the second bottle, the mysterious one? Do you know whether Mrs. Meredtih has a garden?”

  “Has she?”

  “I’m asking,” said Duff.

  “Yeah, she’s got a garden, too,” said Robin.

  Pring looked as if he were about to whistle.

  Duff said carefully, “I don’t want to throw her to the wolves. I don’t mean to. She seems to me not very well, and extremely nervous. I’d be careful, if I were you. She looks as if she might go off into hysterics any minute, and then what would you know?”

  “I’ll go easy,” Pring said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Their faces were all relaxed. Duff knew this was dangerous. He’d sent them to poke their noses close to some secret he didn’t yet know himself. Close to Eve’s dangerous semi-hysterical state. But he’d had to give them something. The advantages of their confidence were great. He could not give them the hidden man, Professor Moriarity. The evidence was so flimsy and ridiculous. Eggshells, tobacco smoke, bumps in the night, and a toilet flushing. He hoped Eve Meredith would keep them busy and keep what there was of her head.

  He said, “You’re very welcome. Tell me a couple of things more, will you? Did you turn off that toaster, the one that’s on the table in there, when you got here last night?”

  “Hm?”

  “Nope.”

  “You did not?”

  “We did not,” said Pring.

  “It bothers me some,” Duff said. “None of the children big or small, and I’ve just asked the smallest, seem to have done so. We can take it that Miss Brown didn’t. The doctor didn’t. Mrs. Moriarity, so I hear, wasn’t in the dining room at all after it happened. Or before, either. Who turned off the toaster?”

  “Maybe it was the photographer, or some of those guys,” Robin offered. “I’ll find out.”

  “Nuts,” said Pring. “If you ask me, it could have been the small children, either one of ’em, whatever they say. You said yourself you can’t trust the little kid. And if you asked him just now, you picked a bum time to ask him.”

  “Still,” Duff said, “Dinny tells me she believes it was still on when she took the little kids out of the room. She says it crossed her mind to do something about it, and then, in the excitement, she didn’t. That’s support, perhaps.”

  “Hm. She tell you that last night?”

  “No,” Duff admitted.

  Pring threw out his hands. “Kids!” he said.

  “I wish you’d tell me about this escaped convict.” Duff’s switch of subject shocked them.

  “What escaped convict’s that? Oh, you mean that fellow Severson?”

  “Do I?”

  “Fellow the coroner was talking about last night? Yeah, well, seems they were bringing him up to White Plains, and he walked out on them.”

  “What’s his crime?”

  “I dunno. Forgery, or something like that. He wasn’t any convict. Had to stand trial. He was pretty slick, and everybody’s wild. We got orders to comb the woods for him.”

  “You have his description?”

  “Sure.” Robin began to quote. A conscientious man, Robin. “Five foot eleven. Weight, a hunnert and sixty. Brown eyes, black hair, swarthy complexion, mole under right ear …”

  “Severson, you say? His right name?”

  “Olaf Severson. That’s what we’ve got. Say, who can tell his right name? Though he don’t sound like a Swede, at that.”

  “There are black Norwegians,” said Duff, “but he doesn’t sound—er—right. He doesn’t sound like an Irishman, either.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Eggshells,” said Duff. “Don’t mind me. Do you know a newspaperman name of Haggerty?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Is that so? Well, perhaps you will. He’s been hanging around here.”

  “We’ll deal with the press,” Pring said with dignity. “Any time, Mr. Duff, you want to tell us what you mean by eggshells, we’ll listen.”

  “Listen,” said Robin, “no escaped prisoner is going to sneak into a strange house and put poison in a bottle of wine! That don’t make sense.”

  “Who said it did?” Pring snapped. Then to Duff, “You coming out to the stable with us?”

  Duff said he thought he’d have some breakfast instead. And what was Miss Brown’s address in New Yor
k?

  There were things in the stable he wanted to examine privately.

  CHAPTER 8

  He used the telephone first. He called Maguire in town. Maguire was a little man whose short legs had carried him on Duff’s business before. Duff gave him Brownie’s address. “I want you to go up there and find out what you can about her. Take a look at how she lived if you can get in. See if you can dig up somebody who can give her a past. I want to know about some goings-on with a woman named Eve Norden, schoolmate of this Brown’s.” He gave the school. “Eve Norden is now Mrs. Meredith. Find out why they had a feud on. You may have to go all the way back to the school. Don’t hesitate to travel. Dig me up enemies, any others. Also, what’s in her safe-deposit box? That’s a tough one. Find her lawyer, if any. When you run into authority, you’re working for me. I’m working for Mrs. Mortality. See if you can find out how this Brown felt about Mr. Moriarity, husband or ex-husband of another schoolmate.”

  “O.K.” said Maguire cheerfully, as Duff stopped speaking. One never needed to repeat. He soaked up Duff’s words and would retain them. “Anything else?”

  “If you have a spare moment, look up an ex-newspaperman who calls himself Haggerty. I want to know if he exists. Also, look up one Olaf Severson, mixed up with the law out here at the moment. How far back does his background go? In other words, how long has he existed. That’s all.” He gave his own whereabouts.

  As he hung up, he reflected that he had not asked for the most obvious kind of check. He had not asked Maguire to trot around to theatrical agencies and find out where an actor named Moriarity had got to now.

  But if at any time he needed to know, he could, of course, ask Mary.

  Duff shook himself and proceeded to the kitchen, where Dinny was washing up after the kids. The boys, she said, were not down yet. Davey and Mitch had gone out to, play.

  “Would you like an egg or anything?”

  Duff said he thought not. She brought his coffee and slid into a chair beside him, elbows on the table, round chin in her hands. Very innocent she looked, as if she were sitting at the feet of his superior wisdom. Duff wondered. “Diana Mortality.” He turned her name over on his tongue aloud. “A little long for lights. Or will you change it for professional purposes?”