Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  He shook his head.

  “I imagine that’s one of the reasons I’d like to stay here in your house, me and Buck. I’d like to keep an eye on you.”

  He chuckled suddenly. “It’s very reassuring in any kind of dustup to have Sergeant Buck’s eye on you.”

  “You don’t think, by any chance,” I asked, “that I murdered Sandra Gould?”

  He cocked his black eyes at me for all the world like a wicked old parrot about to take a piece out of my ear. “I shouldn’t like to make any broad declaration of the sort just at this time. I think you’re undoubtedly a very important person in the case—perhaps even more important than you realize. I’ve already told you that you know too much about all this—fore and aft. Perhaps we might even work together.”

  “That,” I said, “is nothing but the most unmitigated flattery, and I’m not falling for it . . . not at any rate till it’s disguised better. But you may stay here—if you will assure your sergeant that it was your own idea, not mine, and that personally I should be much happier if you’d never set foot in April Harbor.”

  “It would have come out eventually, Mrs. Latham. Shryock would have drunk too much one night and told Parran. Or one of your friends here would have talked over the bridge table one afternoon. It would have been worse then, and more trouble. If, indeed, the Goulds’ order to ship the body to Baltimore for cremation hadn’t already done the trick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shryock—qua undertaker, not coroner—had that order.”

  “From whom?”

  “From the Goulds, I imagine.”

  I was silent.

  “So you see.”

  I nodded. “I think I see,” I said. “When do you start . . . and where?”

  “Now and here,” said Colonel Primrose cheerfully. “Mr. Parran is starting in the garage. He’s going to meet me shortly. I thought I’d speak to you first. Of course, I want to know about Sandra Gould. What’s the history?”

  “I don’t know much about her, except that she married Jim in Shanghai,” I said. “They’ve been coming here ever since Jim got out of the Navy.”

  “Why did he get out?”

  “I suppose he thought he’d rather sell bonds, or something.”

  He cocked his head and fastened his sparkling black parrot’s eyes on me.

  “Mrs. Latham—unless you tell me the truth, there’s not much use in taking your time or mine,” he said reproachfully.

  “Is it truth you want, or all the wretched gossip and malicious imaginings of a hundred busybodies?” I demanded hotly.

  He smiled a rather wry subrisive smile. “Unfortunately, gossip usually has a large grain of truth in it. It’s extremely useful in my business.”

  “It must be a rather ghastly business.”

  He smiled again.

  “I take it you think the general idea that Jim Gould got out of the Navy because a certain admiral on a certain China station requested that he be detached because of Sandra is malicious imagining?—The Chetwynds told me that to show how much she’d improved under the tutelage of her mother and sister-in-law.”

  “She did improve,” I had to admit. “She wasn’t very attractive when she first came. A little too Eurasian Mae West. Very lush—like a ripe passion fruit. Too much make-up, hair curled too much, clothes too fancy, fingernails too red and not too clean, eye too obviously roving. But she has changed. You saw her. Sleek straight hair, marvelous make-up, exquisite clothes. Still very gay and all that but oh so toned down, and . . . Westernized. Thanks to a mother-in-law with impeccable taste and a lot of money. I don’t think she’s any handicap to Jim now.”

  “She’s a very definite one just this minute, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said. “Well, what about his marriage, and what happened between him and Rosemary Bishop?”

  “Their engagement was broken. That’s all I know. He married Sandra then—it frequently happens, you know. The old course of true love and the slip ’twixt cup and lip.”

  “And the fish in the sea that haven’t been caught?”

  “Precisely. That’s Paul Dikranov. Loads of money—which Jim hasn’t any more.”

  “I see.”

  “No . . . you don’t. Because I don’t mean it that way at all. That might just possibly be in Rodman Bishop’s mind. It certainly wouldn’t ever be in Rosemary’s.”

  He smiled. “Then perhaps I do see, after all,” he said.

  We heard a car coming in my back drive. Colonel Primrose got up.

  He looked at me seriously.

  “I think I ought to tell you,” he said slowly, “that Parran is going to arrest him. Jim Gould, of course.”

  I stared at him stupidly. “What for?”

  “For the murder of Sandra Gould.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “I wish it were. I’m afraid it’s not, Mrs. Latham. Just on the face of it even, there’s a powerful case against him. Motive, opportunity . . . all the rest.”

  I tried frantically to find something for Jim in all this mess.

  “What about the letter, Colonel Primrose?”

  He shook his head soberly. “It’s a forgery, Mrs. Latham. It’s got to be. Rather a transparent one, I suspect. That woman didn’t kill herself.”

  He looked at me. I’d recovered myself by then and said nothing . . . for which I was thankful a little later.

  At that point the wooden face of Sergeant Buck loomed through the screen at the end of the porch. The State’s Attorney Mr. Parran was with him, and behind him were two other men, one of them in the summer khaki and helmet of the Maryland State Police.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” Mr. Parran said. “Ready, Colonel?”

  I watched them go across to the opening in the hedge, towards the Goulds’. The thought struck me then that Colonel Primrose had kept me there talking, asking questions whose answers he already knew, so that I couldn’t warn Jim. I sat down suddenly, very sick and weak in the knees.

  For the second time that day I resisted the impulse to fly to the telephone. I told myself that that was just what Colonel Primrose would be waiting for and watching for, some move of mine or of somebody’s to point a direction for him. So I sat there, pretty miserable, trying to picture to myself just what they’d be doing . . . how Jim would take it, what his mother would do. I never thought of Lucy Lee until I heard a sound in the living room and saw her there beckoning to me, white-faced and terribly frightened.

  “What’s the matter, Grace? What are they doing—why are they in the garage?” she demanded frantically. “Colonel Primrose is there—Bill told Andy he’s some sort of private detective. Don’t they—”

  She stopped short. “Grace . . .”

  “They think Sandra didn’t kill herself, Lucy Lee,” I said quietly.

  She stared at me, gradually shrinking until she seemed more like a child herself than a twenty-six-year-old mother of three. Poor little Lucy Lee . . . always the prettiest, most popular girl at the Harbor, with dozens of beaux, married by the age-old process of natural selection to the biggest, handsomest and most heroic of the lot . . . and it just hadn’t worked. If we’d been Vikings, Andy Thorp would have been headman; but in Broadway offices where the headman is a very different sort, Andy doesn’t seem to fit. Lucy Lee’s fiercely loyal, doing without the things she’d always had, doing her own work in town and pretending she liked it!—She stood in the center of my living room staring at me, her pale soft face paler than usual, framed in her mass of soft short chestnut curls, her dark eyes bigger and more bewildered.

  “Listen, Lucy Lee. You’ve got to buck up. This is going to be rotten for everybody . . . but it’s going to be terrible for Jim.”

  She looked at me as if she didn’t understand at all.

  “For Jim?”

  It was my turn to stare. The strangest kaleidoscoping of emotion and calculation went through her pretty transparent face. I wasn’t sure she even knew what I was talking about.

  “I’m afraid they
think Jim killed her, darling,” I said.

  Fond as I am of Lucy Lee, and devoted as I know she is to Jim, I thought I saw an expression of the most extraordinary relief relax her whole body.

  “But . . . it wasn’t his car! How could he . . .”

  She stared at me silently for a moment. Then she seemed rather more like herself. “Oh, no, Grace!” she cried. “That’s not fair, he’d never . . . Oh, Grace, will they drag out all the business about China and Rosemary?”

  “I’m afraid they will, Lucy Lee. In fact, they’ve already started.”

  “But what if nobody tells them. They can’t find out, and they can’t ever prove it . . . I mean, that he . . . killed her. He wasn’t even with her last night . . .”

  She rushed on, from one thing to another, not very convincingly. Two red spots had grown in her cheeks, making her look oddly hectic.

  “But . . . they won’t be after Andy, will they?”

  That was what was alarming her, then, making her willing to cast Jim or anyone else to the lions if she had to, to keep Andy clear of it.

  I don’t know exactly what I would have said to her, because I was pretty angry. Jim is worth so many dozen Andys—if only for the reason that he grew up and didn’t stay a halfback when he should have been doing a job. I didn’t have a chance to say anything, however. She saw the Bishops coming before I did.

  “I’d better get back,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anybody I was here.”

  She fled just as George Barrol opened the porch door for Rosemary and her father.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They came in, George Barrol with a little the air of a deputation. I looked at Rosemary, rather alarmed. Rodman Bishop, in an old seersucker suit with the trouser legs a little shrunk from years of laundering so that his feet looked enormous, went back to the porch door and threw his half-smoked cigar out onto the lawn, and came back, wiping his flushed perspiring face with a large red silk handkerchief. George wiped his forehead too. He was more flustered than hot. And between the two Rosemary stood as cool and lovely and detached as a lily. Only a shadow in the fringed gray depths of her eyes as she looked at me indicated that any of this touched her at all.

  Rodman Bishop sat down heavily.

  “Jim’s in a tight spot, Grace,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve just seen this fellow Parran. Saw him on his way out. I gather it’s Primrose has let the cat out of the bag.”

  Rosemary smiled faintly. George was definitely upset.

  “We haven’t anything to hide, of course, Uncle Rod,” he said hurriedly.

  Rodman Bishop’s brows beetled as they did practically every time anybody but Rosemary opened their mouths.

  “I didn’t say we had. All I say is that if you’d kept your mouth shut, there wouldn’t have been any question of its not being suicide.”

  “I was merely doing my duty as I saw it,” George said. It was just like him.

  “That’s one trouble with the world. Too damn many people going around doing their duty as they see it!”

  “Well, I’m sure—”

  “Shut up, George, and let Dad get on with it,” Rosemary said amiably.

  Her father started to beetle at her, but the sight of her standing by the window tapping a cigarette on the back of her hand changed the expression on his old pirate face. He adored her, and he was disturbed about her too.

  “This is what I’m getting at, Grace,” he said brusquely. “We’ve got to get together on this. I’ve sent for Kaufman. It’s his sort of thing. We’re going to make this suicide thing stick.”

  “Do you think Jim’s going to like that, dad?” Rosemary asked quietly.

  “He’ll like it unless he’d rather hang.”

  “But if he had nothing to do with it, darling—he’d probably like to have the person who did it hanged instead.”

  Rodman Bishop snorted angrily. His old square face was set in extraordinarily determined lines—and I don’t know anyone who can look—and be—more determined.

  “It’s his one defense,” he said. “They’ve got motive enough to hang him a dozen times. I tell you that’s Parran’s case. He had the motive and the opportunity, so far as anybody knows yet—and he forged that suicide note and then tried to have her body cremated so the blow on the skull wouldn’t come to light when the neighbors started talking.”

  We were all silent a moment.

  “What about that note, Grace?” Rosemary asked, turning from the window. “I mean, is it her writing?”

  I nodded. “I’m sure it is.”

  “But what about the blow on the head?” George Barrol asked nervously.

  Rodman Bishop looked steadily at him. “That,” he said, “is where you come in.”

  George turned the color of an old warm oyster.

  “Me?” he said.

  Bishop nodded.

  “Parran is a fool,” he said quietly. “This Primrose is an able man. I’ve heard about him.”

  He looked inquiringly at me. I nodded. “I should say he’s a very able man.”

  He went on, looking steadily at George and speaking in a deliberate tone.

  “You were with her on the boat last night. You saw the jib give her a crack on the back of the head.”

  “Well . . .” George said nervously. He hesitated. “Well, as a matter of fact, it did, you know.”

  His face brightened.

  “It . . . it knocked her flat. It really did. That’s when the mast cracked and broke off and the boat capsized. I got hold of her. I nearly died. I couldn’t have held her, but the cold water brought her to. I just hung on to her till she could get hold of the boat.”

  We stared at him in complete astonishment. That was why she hadn’t swum back, then—why she’d let Jim bring her in. It was so simple, and so much like Sandra.

  “Why the devil didn’t you say so before?” Rodman Bishop growled.

  “Why, I just remembered it. And anyway, I couldn’t go around pretending I’d saved her life when everybody knows I can’t do much more than keep afloat. I thought she’d mention it.”

  “Then she really might . . .”

  Rosemary’s face was quite pale now. She steadied herself against the back of the chair, swaying a little.

  “I think I’ll go back home, dad,” she said quickly. Before we knew it she was gone. George dashed after her with one look at his uncle.

  Rodman Bishop turned to me.

  “I told her not to come in the first place,” he said gruffly. “I want to talk to you alone.”

  I sat down again.

  Rodman Bishop was nodding his head with grim satisfaction. “I think that will about do it,” he said curtly. “We’ve got a case now. We didn’t have before. I’ll tell you frankly, Grace, it’s not Jim I was worried about. It’s Rosemary.”

  “You didn’t by any chance think Rosemary killed her, did you, Mr. Bishop?” I inquired.

  “Don’t be a fool, Grace. I mean I don’t want her name mixed up in it. She’s had a bad enough time without being dragged through a murder trial.”

  He looked at me steadily through his thick shaggy brows.

  “You see, Grace, this marriage of hers means a lot to her, now, and I’m frank to tell you that while I’d rather she was marrying an American, Dikranov is a fine chap. He’s got plenty of money, and he’s tremendously in love with Rosemary.”

  I didn’t say anything. It seemed a reasonable enough attitude.

  “There have been several men I would have liked her to marry—that have had money and position—but she couldn’t see it. You see, we’ve been hit pretty hard, Grace. Chapin’s money from his aunt went to his male cousins. Rosemary’s has shrunk, so has mine.”

  “So has everybody’s.”

  “Not Dikranov’s. He sells arms in Africa, Arabia and Turkey.”

  Rodman Bishop smiled a little and shook his head at the same time.

  “But he’s all right, and shrewd as they come.”

  �
��I’m glad you feel that way.”

  “Not that it would have made any difference. Rosemary’s as headstrong as a mule. The point is, I don’t want her dragged through any scandal. I don’t want all that Chinese business brought up. She was nineteen and a spoiled little fool. Jim was a fool too.”

  He got up.

  “I can count on you, Grace—about the note being genuine, not a forgery?”

  I nodded. “It’s Sandra’s writing.—Is Rosemary in love with Paul Dikranov, Mr. Bishop?” I asked as we came out on the porch.

  “Officially—madly. Between the two of us, she’ll never love anybody but Jim.”

  He shook his head.

  “It beats me. Never a word out of her. Just suddenly, every six months or so, ‘Jim and I used to go there,’ or in Paris, ‘Jim liked Paris’—so you know she’s always thinking about him. I want this marriage of hers to go through, Grace. It’ll kill her, if she doesn’t have something to take it off her mind.”

  “What about waiting now and marrying Jim?”

  “He’s poor. Alice’ll have Lucy Lee’s family on her hands. Rosemary can’t be poor. Anyway . . .”

  He put on his old panama.

  “Kaufman will be here tomorrow. I wish to God we’d never come back.”

  “Why did you?”

  I’d been wondering about that.

  “Oh, Rosemary was set on it. George and I were both opposed. I told Dikranov it was a mistake, but he backed her up and I was too weak-kneed to hold out. I persuaded myself it might be good for her.”

  I went over to the Goulds’ garage as soon as he’d gone. The bruise on the back of Sandra’s head was the bit of tangible evidence that Colonel Primrose was basing his theory of willful murder on, and I thought he would like to know there was a perfectly simple explanation of it.

  They were swarming over the place. I never saw five men—another state policeman had joined them—doing so many different things at once. Except Colonel Primrose and Mr. Parran. I couldn’t see either of them.

  I asked Sergeant Buck. He looked at me and said, “The Colonel’s busy, ma’am. He ain’t got no time for visiting.”

  I must have looked annoyed this time, because he added stiffly, “He’s upstairs, ma’am.”