The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  The doctor moistened his lips. “That’s too bad. Too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I did my best to explain how I stumbled into the thing. I tried to explain that I had no more reason to think this was murder than he had. But he continues to believe, and nudge me in the ribs about it, that I am withholding and concealing some brilliant observation or other. Damn it all!” Duff said, “shall I go back to New York? And stay there?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said uneasily. “What do you think?”

  “I think that I shall have to solve this case whether I like it or not.”

  “Of course,” the doctor said, “that would be … if you could …”

  “If I can find a solution that satisfies,” Duff muttered.

  The doctor didn’t answer. He nodded, a bit nervously. His glance flicked over toward O’Leary under his lamp, though Duff had been speaking in low tones. Duff shrugged.

  “Shall we go into my office?” the doctor suggested.

  “Not necessary,” Duff murmured. He was not going to commit himself to a frank conspiracy with this man. Not tonight. Let it be understood, if it were understood, without any more words on the subject. Bad enough to conspire with himself.

  “Have you seen the toxicologist’s report?” he asked, more easily.

  “Yes, yes. Doesn’t tell us much. Can’t really tell how much she actually got, you know. Have to guess what she got rid of and so forth and so forth.”

  “At least it tells us that both the wine and the body held more poison than could have been in the solution Paul was using on the roses.”

  “I never thought he had anything to do with it.”

  Duff agreed. “He couldn’t have dealt in such strong poison from so large a container. That’s what it comes down to. Not unless he had nearly a pint of the 40 percent solution. Those little bottles hold what? An ounce? No, Paul couldn’t have done it, for these and other reasons.”

  “Nor would have,” the doctor insisted.

  “We have to do a little better than ‘wouldn’t have.’ It’s better to know that the sprayer won’t suck on a mere ounce. And other things of that sort. Evidence. Fact.”

  The doctor frowned and bit off a piece of his little fingernail. “You say Dr. Surf might have been satisfied that it was accidental?”

  “They have a half-baked theory. They imagine that the bottle of wine standing open in Mrs. Meredith’s house for the best part of a week may have accidentally got contaminated. They can’t prove that, of course, but they seem willing to believe it, just the same. Of course, now, to believe it they are going to have to believe that Mary is lying when she says she drank the wine from her tray. And that Mitch is lying when she says she did not change the position of those damned wine bottles. They’re bound to wonder why people take the trouble to lie.”

  The doctor looked bewildered, and Duff explained, carefully, how matters stood.

  “Of course”—the doctor cleared his throat—”there’s another—er—possible …”

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose Dinny is mistaken about which bottle she used to pour the wine for her mother? That would explain her—er—fingerprints …”

  “She poured it from the one on the table, you mean? Therefore, the bottles weren’t switched? The poison was put in just after Dinny left?”

  “No, no. I mean, of course the bottles were switched. But the wine in the pantry was—er—poisoned, let us say, at Eve’s.”

  “I see what you’re after,” said Duff. “You’re trying to let Mary tell the truth and still have the wine poisoned at Eve’s by accident But why would Dinny make such an odd mistake as that? Or do you mean she lied? I don’t see why. Do you?”

  “No,” the doctor said, “no, still … children.”

  Duff looked a bit contemptuous. “Oh, I grant you if we begin to go into the possibility of lying, we run into all sorts of thoughts. Dinny lied and touched both bottles. Paul lied by covering up someone’s fingerprints on that little bottle of poison that was found in the stable.”

  “But—”

  “Why? Yes, there again, I don’t see why. How would he know it was necessary or desirable?”

  “He was in the stable afterward.”

  “After she died?”

  “Yes, after she died.” The doctor squirmed and Duff frowned.

  “One thing I do see,” said Duff: “something is wrong with Alfie’s testimony.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Alfie claims to have been sent, or at least to have gone, out to the back porch, just outside the dining room. He claims that no one entered the dining room at all while he was there. Now, he was there between the_time Brownie was dying, and the time, or close to the time, the police came.”

  “He may be right.”

  “Yes,” said Duff thoughtfully, “he may. But Dinny says the toaster was on when she and the small ones left the room. The police say it was off when they entered. Who turned it off, doctor? Someone did. Therefore, it seems to me, someone went into the dining room and did so. Who? And when?”

  The doctor lifted his holder gracefully. “Dinny may be mistaken. Maybe one of them turned it off so automatically that it—er—”

  “Didn’t register?” Duff stroked his long chin. “That’s possible. Plenty of false evidence is given in this world in all sincerity. Also, I can see a tiny gap.” He hesitated. “Of course, I’ve been wondering if someone hasn’t been hiding in that house.”

  “Hiding!” The doctor was confounded, astonished. He sat up so fast he spilled some of his Tom Collins.

  “There have been slight indications,” Duff said wryly. He got a piece of paper out of his pocket “Ever see that face?”

  The doctor took it, and as he held it, it shook. He seemed unable, for a moment, to speak. He made a negative sign with his head.

  “It’s the picture of a man who has a reason to hide, and who must, in fact, be hiding somewhere.”

  “Olaf Severson, wanted …” the doctor read. He turned the paper over, popped his eyes out at Duff in bewilderment.

  “Oh, I see things!” said Duff, snatching it back. “I hear things! I have hallucinations, maybe. Fantastic ideas roam around in the great emptiness of my head.” He got up. He was an angry man, angry with himself. “I don’t seem to see any way to get hold of this problem,” he confessed bitterly. “So far, I have done nothing but sit around and listen and watch and make up fantasies. I have taken no steps. No steps occur to me to be taken. I am in a state. I worry about ghosts.” He put his elbow on the mantel and leaned his head on his hand.

  The doctor murmured sympathy. Across the room, Mr. O’Leary had pricked up his ears.

  “What terrifies me,” said Duff, “is the simplicity, the undetectable nonchalance, the perfect cold-bloodedness of this crime, if it is a crime. Someone puts poison in a bottle of wine. Not another thing does he do. Thinks no more about it. Simply maintains that he did not Suppose there are no nerves involved. Suppose …”

  “I see what you mean,” said Mr. O’Leary crisply. “A childlike quality. Yes.”

  Duff stared at him. He vaguely considered the American idiom, ‘I see what you mean’ and the rather stagey effect of that British intonation.

  “You must give it over to your subconscious,” said Mr. O’Leary emphatically.

  “My subconscious,” said Duff without smiling, “is at the moment an incompetent mess. I’d hate to rely on it.” He turned his back. “Look here, doctor, one thing you can tell me. What brick did Miss Avery drop this afternoon?”

  “Brick?”

  “Surely you remember.”

  “Oh. She—er—when you and she got into an argument? Connie rides her hobby horse a little hard.”

  Duff’s eye gleamed. “Is Eve Meredith, perhaps, on the verge of insanity?”

  “Insanity!” The doctor’s eyes rolled. “Good heavens, I shouldn’t say so. High-strung Eve is, always has been. But she’s devoted to her son, of course. And in a b
ad state of anxiety right now. War nerves, one might say. Well accounted for in her case. I mean to say, naturally she’s anx-ious. Who isn’t? And being a very nervous woman, she is much affected. But insane? No.”

  Duff sat down again. “I think,” he said wearily, “you had better tell me more about Denis Moriarity. Was he insane? Or in any way a little off?”

  “Dear me,” said the doctor. “Dear me. Why, not that I ever knew. Of course, I never knew him too well. But there was no hint of such a thing. No hint at all. I do think you must be … confused.”

  Duff caught the impression of great care. The doctor was walking softly, watching his own words, pussyfooting.

  O’Leary said, “There is a great deal of loose talk about insanity.” His mouth snapped shut again.

  “Are you a psychiatrist, among other things, Doctor?” Duff wondered.

  “No, no, not at all. I mean to say, no more than any doctor has to be. But I assure you, there is no insanity involved here. That I know of.”

  “What was the dropped brick, then?” Duff persisted.

  “Oh, class,” the doctor said …”Class consciousness. Connie … I’m afraid …”

  “Whose class? Was Moriarity a social error?”

  “No, no. But I believe Eve’s people were … from humble sources.”

  Again Duff sensed the care, the caution, the pussy-foot.

  “I don’t know, of course,” the doctor said. “All that I meant this afternoon … I felt that Connie was being rather high and mighty. I know Mary was annoyed. Connie gets carried away, sounds much more—er—rude and intolerant, believe me, than she means to be. She’s so direct, you know, so—”

  “Tell me,” Duff broke in, “why did Moriarity get out? Why leave that family? What happened?”

  “To the marriage, you mean?”

  “Yes, to the marriage.”

  “Why,” the doctor spread his fingers, “I can’t tell you exactly. My impression, if you are interested in that?”

  “I am.”

  “My impression was that then lives diverged. Mary, after all, was pretty much absorbed out here with all those children, her house, domestic life. Whereas Denis, of course, traveled in theatrical circles, met people who were not in the least domestic, people who had other ideas.”

  Duff looked down at his shoes. “Was there what is known as another woman?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid so,” the doctor said sadly.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. Understand, I don’t even know that there was. I suspect It seems likely.” The doctor wiped his face.

  “I’m sorry,” said Duff. “This hurts me as much as it does you, you know. This kind of question.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you are so much concerned, if that is the right word, with Moriarity.” The doctor was pussy-footing again. “Really, I don’t see what he has or could have to do with this … this poison business.”

  “Oh, neither do I,” Duff said. “Neither do I, I assure you. I don’t really see anything at all.” His despair came over him again and his great dissatisfaction with himself. “Something seems to have gone wrong with my faculties. I haven’t asked the right questions,” he said heavily. “I don’t analyze. I drift. I don’t follow a direct line. I veer. I wander. I am not organized. I am not logical. One must, at least, begin with logic. And I haven’t begun at all. I am making no real investigation whatsoever. I am batted around by worries. I do not think. And even my intuition, which sometimes saves me, has gone to hell.”

  “Go to bed,” the doctor said softly. “You need rest Forget about it, if you can. Believe me, Mr. Duff, that is good advice. Things may not be so confusing, or so bad, in the morning.”

  “Better take his advice,” said O’Leary in his crisp sudden way. “He is a very wise man, Mr.—er—Duff.”

  “Very well I will go to bed.” Duff got up. Added to the rest, now, was shame for having confessed before them. Duff’s feeling of personal disintegration was intolerably painful. Into his head had run the thought that Mary must have been relieved to get him away from the house. Of course, if Moriarity was there, she would need to talk to him. She would not have wanted Duff to know how relieved she was. She would have acted as she had acted.

  He bit hard on nothing, pressing his teeth tight.

  “Remember your dreams,” said O’Leary, as one who gives a hot tip or betrays a secret process. “Try to remember what you dream.”

  The doctor took Duff off to his room, and Mr. O’Leary, with a sad knowing little smile on his lips, went back to his reading.

  Dr. Christenson’s housekeeper was a colored woman of great size who seemed to consider breakfast for three men a nine-egg affair. Mr. O’Leary was there, spruce and trim, resisting her coaxing. The doctor was there, too, not quite so spruce, looking a bit rumpled and heavy-eyed, as Duff came down.

  O’Leary put cream in his coffee, measuring it carefully on his spoon. “Did you write it down?” he demanded brightly. Duff looked at him. “Your dream, of course.”

  “No, but I dreamed. I remember.”

  “Dreams are very interesting,” said the little man in his clipped accent. “Don’t you think so? Clues, really.”

  “Clues?”

  “To oneself. Tell the doctor.”

  “Does the doctor intepret dreams?”

  The doctor nibbled bacon. “O’Leary thinks I can,” he said, “but I’m a pure amateur.”

  “I have put myself in Dr. Christenson’s hands this summer,” said O’Leary, “with the greatest confidence.”

  Duff sighed. He did not feel rested. The sense of inner confusion still pained and distressed him. “What do you make of this, then?” he asked. “I was in a hall …”

  O’Leary put down his fork and bent toward him to listen. The doctor went on with his bacon and only occasionally flashed his eye over the coffee cup in Duff’s direction.

  “… an auditorium or theater in which there was a large audience of people gathered. I was among them. Someone, a man, I think … a person … was on the stage talking. It may have been a lecture. I don’t remember what he said. But I was very uncomfortable and uneasy because the spotlight, if that’s what it was … or in some way, some kind of light … was focused on me. I kept squirming away from it, but it stayed on me. I didn’t like it.

  “The dream melted and dissolved—you know how dreams do—and suddenly I was on the stage myself, or rather backstage, and I seemed to be trying very hard to get this speaker, the one who had been talking, into a small place like a dressing room and get the door shut before they came.”

  “Who?”

  “The audience. The people seemed to be surging up at me over the footlights. There was danger in that I had to get the door shut. I straned at it in that futile way …”

  “Frustration,” murmured O’Leary. “Yes …”

  “But,” said Duff, “I did get it shut in time. I was not frustrated. I managed it Then there was another dissolve, and I was on the stage alone with a broad beam of light as if from a movie projector, leading from where I was to the balcony. In the balcony”—he hesitated—”there was a very lovely lady. I began to walk up the beam of light, and it held me. I daresay,” he said, pulling his mouth down at all this nonsense, “I was about halfway there, walking on air, of course, when I woke up.”

  “Ah!” breathed Mr. O’Leary, and he turned bright, interested eyes on the doctor.

  “Well, obviously,” said the doctor, “you were afraid of something.”

  Duff nodded. He plunged into his grapefruit.

  “Probably the spotlight on you meant that the speaker was talking about you. So you had to—er—shut him up. You see?”

  “Of course!” O’Leary crowed. “That’s very interesting. Translation of the phrase ‘shut him up’ into closing the door. Shutting him up literally. Eh, doctor?”

  “I think so,” said the doctor. He seemed to enjoy this. “Then, having conquered that which you feared, you—er—well, ne
xt came your reward. The beautiful lady, eh? That’s a success dream, Mr. Duff.”

  “Meaning?”

  The doctor shrugged. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I only guess at these things. You mustn’t take me seriously. I think perhaps it means effort, determination, resolve. You are afraid of something, but you are going to fight it. Eh?”

  “Thank you,” said Duff thoughtfully.

  “Are you going to the funeral?”

  “No. I think not.”

  Mr. O’Leary got up from the table very abruptly. His head back, chin in, he looked past his nose at the doctor with reproach. In fact, he looked as if he were going to cry. “I shall walk ten miles,” he said, “that is, if I can, now. Until lunch, then.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the doctor, “Yes, ten miles this morning. But take them easy. You can do it.”

  When O’Leary had gone, the doctor began to explain that he ought not to have mentioned a funeral before O’Leary, whose nerves were shaken by all such words. Duff only half listened.

  “Just one more question,” he broke in. “I see I must ask you.” The doctor’s hand stopped buttering toast. “Because, of course, you know what we are both afraid of.”

  The doctor’s hand stopped buttering toast. “Because, of course, you know what we are both afraid of.”

  The doctor blinked.

  “Tell me,” said Duff solemnly, his heart contracting, “for any reason, are you sure?”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes. Have you a reason I know nothing about for thinking Taffy … guilty?”

  The doctor put down his knife and smoothed his mustache with a thoughtful finger. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  Oh, God, thought Duff, don’t handle me! Don’t treat me like a patient! He said aloud, “You know of nothing, beyond what I know?”

  “No, nothing,” said the doctor. “I am not sure. It’s just …” He spread out his hands. His eyes looked miserable and watchful behind the lenses.

  “Is Mary going to the funeral?”

  “Yes, I think she is going with the Lomaxes. Friends.”

  “I see. I had better not go.”

  “Perhaps it’s better if you don’t. What will you do?”