Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  Rosemary smiled, trying to hide the sudden tears in her eyes.

  “I suppose it would have gone on indefinitely if Dad hadn’t told him to shut up.”

  “But I don’t quite see what all that’s got to do with Paul.”

  “Don’t you?”

  She looked full at me for a moment, and looked away again.

  “I suppose nobody would—but me,” she said after a long time. “Only, you see, he did know her. He must have, because later, you remember, she came up to him and said something about his going out with her for old times’ sake. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember he looked rather blank,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “That’s it. It must have been something he doesn’t want to remember. And . . . well, I wouldn’t want to marry him, because I couldn’t ever forget. And . . . I’ve got to forget all about her, Grace—all about there ever having been anybody like her . . . if I’m going on living at all.”

  She looked out across the water.

  “It’s been pretty rotten. I don’t seem to have . . . managed things very well. And if . . . if she’s been in Paul’s life too—well, it looks as if she’s sort of an albatross round my neck.”

  “You haven’t forgotten she’s dead, by any chance, have you, darling?”

  “I guess a dead albatross is harder to get rid of than a live one,” she said. “You see, I asked him again on the way home about her. I suppose I was crazy, but . . . I can’t help it. He didn’t say anything at first. Then he said he thought he had known her, but he also thought we’d be a lot happier if we didn’t pry into each other’s past lives, or something of the sort. Let the dead past bury its dead, that sort of thing. Except, of course, that they don’t stay buried.”

  We stood looking over the bay. It was almost deserted, the last straggling sailboats heading for the basin.

  “She called him up while we were at dinner. Pearl recognized her voice. He came back from the phone quite angry. And, Grace, there’s no use beating about the bush. If she was murdered—and I guess that’s settled—then somebody must have done it.”

  I looked at her, wondering. “Jim seems to be the favorite.”

  I was sorry, because she drew back almost as if I’d struck her.

  “Or do you really think it was Paul?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Grace. I’m terribly frightened. Because—well—Paul doesn’t have a Western notion about the sanctity of human life. They don’t in the East. There are such billions of people—one more or less doesn’t matter, especially if he isn’t in the ruling class, or . . . or happens to be a woman. I don’t mean he’s not . . . well, almost overcivilized He’s marvelous, and all that, Grace. But I’d be a fool if I didn’t see that he could be perfectly ruthless if . . . if he had to be. And if he’d come here, knowing her before, not expecting to see her . . . oh, don’t you see?”

  I didn’t, quite. That is, I didn’t see whether she was desperately worried for fear it was Paul, or whether deep in her subconscious mind she wanted it to be Paul—so that it couldn’t be Jim. Whether she was like Lucy Lee, willing to toss one man to the wolves to save another.

  “You aren’t seriously accusing the man you’re going to marry of murder, are you, darling?” I inquired as casually as I could. “Or are you going to marry him?”

  She didn’t answer for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to.

  “Last night I told him I wouldn’t marry him unless I knew about Sandra,” she said finally, with a twisted little smile. “I’m afraid he’ll tell me the same thing—after he sees the morning papers. I don’t think he’s the sort that’ll like the idea of my being out with Jim till half past one. Not when I’ve told the police I went to bed at half past twelve.”

  I don’t know how long we would have stood there in the gradually lowering dusk, going over and over the same ground, Rosemary telling me nothing, and not knowing that I knew anything but what she had told me. As it turned out, she knew a great deal that she’d never tell. I’m not sure that it would have done much good, because the things she did let slip meant nothing to me, and didn’t later—not until I saw them neatly spliced together with others, and knotted and woven into one of the most deadly nets that ever trapped a jungle beast.

  Because that was what Colonel Primrose had insisted that he was after from the beginning, no matter how fair-seeming and pleasingly gentle its face or how velvet his claws. It seemed a bit fanciful when he said it. It wouldn’t seem so now, when we know how terribly bloody those claws were, how narrow the road that some of us had walked with death.

  While we were still standing there, looking out over the bay, a strange thing happened. We both heard someone coming along the lane from our left. That in itself wasn’t startling, although the lane isn’t used very much. The startling thing was that the man coming was obviously moving in an extremely stealthy fashion, coming on a little ways, stopping to give an elaborate pantomime of just standing there enjoying the evening mosquitoes and not really looking behind him at all.

  He was doing that for the second time when we recognized Andy Thorp and saw that he had something inside his gray flannel jacket, pinioned under his arm by the simple act of having one hand in his trousers pocket and his elbow against his side. He stopped before he got as far as my gate and looked around again. Then he dived with extraordinary speed down the bank towards the beach. We heard a few rocks fall, and after a moment Andy appeared again. He brushed the dirt off his legs, emptied the sand and gravel out of his sneakers—using both hands—and strolled back the way he had come. He had not looked our way once, though I discovered later that we had been pretty well concealed behind the tall bunches of Queen Anne’s lace that grew along the lane and along the Goulds’ fence.

  “What does that mean?” Rosemary whispered. It showed how furtive an air Andy Thorp had had, in spite of his nonchalance. Neither of us had spoken. In fact we’d practically held our breath.

  “It means that he got rid of whatever he had under his arm,” I said.

  Rosemary shivered.

  “It’s getting cold. Let’s go up to the house,” she said, slipping her arm into mine. It was trembling. She glanced behind us several times on our way up the path, and when a large square figure loomed quite suddenly in front of us she started violently and gave a sharp frightened gasp before she saw who it was. I hadn’t realized what a highly nervous state she was in till then—although as a matter of fact the appearance of Sergeant Buck, standing at a sort of modified attention in the shadow of the crape myrtle hedge, had been a little abrupt.

  “The Colonel ordered me to tell you ladies you’re not to stay out in the dark alone, ma’am,” he reported stiffly. Then he added, to Rosemary, “It ain’t safe, miss, not when a killer’s loose. Take it from me, the Colonel knows what he’s talking about. I been with him twenty-eight years, and he ain’t never been wrong yet.”

  Then, with an almost imperceptible coming to present arms, he waited for us to pass, and fell in as a rear rank, and marched us up to the house in a sort of squads right. There was something very comic about it, but there was also something definitely reassuring, though it wasn’t at all dark yet. Rosemary had quit trembling, and she didn’t look back again.

  “I guess I’ve got the jitters,” she said as we came up on the porch into what I erroneously had regarded as the privacy of my own home.

  I had not counted on my guest. He was in the living room. More than that, Mr. Parran was with him, and also a hot-looking young man obviously from the city. They were around a table, bending over a small gray sheet of note paper. I didn’t have to get a very close look at it to see that it was Sandra’s suicide note. They had two other pieces of paper that they were apparently comparing it with.

  “I hope we’re not intruding,” I said.

  Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and peered up at me. He grinned.

  “Not at all, Mrs. Latham. Come right in.”

  He said it as cordially as l
ater he invited me into his own yellow brick house on P Street in Georgetown.

  “Awfully kind of you,” I said.

  The quick amused flicker in the snapping black eyes disappeared instantly as he looked past me to Rosemary. She was just inside the door. Her face was like wax, and I had a sudden feeling that it had just turned that way, from something she had seen as we came in. I glanced around as unobtrusively as I could, but I couldn’t see through the large bulk of Law—so that whatever was on the table by the fireplace was out of my view. I hesitated, with Colonel Primrose watching me, to step deliberately around to where I could see.

  Furthermore, it was perfectly apparent that they would be glad when we left. So we went—as far as the kitchen. Nobody has servants Sunday nights in April Harbor—they all go to church and we get our own suppers, usually everybody at somebody else’s house. I got Rosemary a glass of water. She drank some of it and put the glass down, staring at it on the table in front of her, opening and closing her fingers around it, watching the warm prints of her hot fingers against the cold surface fade out and disappear as the glass cooled.

  “It’s funny to think they’re still there . . . and that they could make them come out again,” she said abstractedly, nodding towards the living room door.

  “Is this an amateur lecture on fingerprints, Miss Bishop?” I asked. I was a little worried.

  She didn’t pay any attention to me, just kept on making the prints on the frosty glass and watching them go out.

  “Can they find them on cloth?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  She emptied the glass into the sink and started to set it down when she stopped, listening.

  Outside there was a faint scrabbling sound coming towards the door. It didn’t sound like an animal. We waited, a little breathless probably, until there emerged out of the dusk the stocky sober little figure of young Andy Thorp junior. His face was streaked where two big tears had been wiped resolutely towards his ears with dirty little fists. He blinked at us for a moment.

  “Hello, Aunt Grace. Is Juyus here?” he said sturdily.

  “No, Andy. He’s at church. Can I do something for you?”

  He stood there irresolute, his four years weighing heavily on his blond little brow, determined not to cry.

  “Juyus helped me find Daddy once, and I fought he’d help me again,” he said.

  We stared at him for an instant. Then Rosemary sprang up and went over to him and picked him up in her arms.

  “Oh, you lamb!” she said. “I’ll help you find him!”

  She was weeping, but young Andy wasn’t.

  “Don’t cry. Men don’t like people that cry all the time. That’s why Daddy doesn’t like . . .”

  Some sixth sense propelled Rosemary out with him . . . or perhaps she’d seen the pantry door move. She and young Andy were gone just as Colonel Primrose cocked his head into the kitchen and followed it immediately.

  “I wish you’d go away,” I said.

  “I know you do.”

  He smiled and shook his head sympathetically.

  “But if I did, you’d be out hunting Andy too, and it isn’t safe.”

  “Then you’d better send your sergeant after Rosemary.”

  “No,” he said. “Rosemary’s safe enough.”

  I stared at him, my mouth slightly open, I’m afraid. He grinned.

  “Do you know, Mrs. Latham, you seem to me a curious example of a bright woman being almost abysmally stupid—or perhaps obtuse is a better word?”

  “Meaning?”

  He sat down and looked at me intently.

  “Meaning that—like Gaul—all people who are around in an affair like this are divided into three parts. Those who are trying to find the murderer. The murderer himself, who is trying to hide. And thirdly, those well-intentioned—or not well-intentioned—people who are trying to hinder the investigation. So far, we’ve got Parran and myself in the first group. The second group is X—still unknown.”

  “And . . . the third?”

  “The third group is enormous, Mrs. Latham.”

  His eyes sharpened, the amused twinkle in them quite gone. He leaned forward.

  “In fact, Mrs. Latham, it includes—besides all the Goulds and the Bishops—such oddly assorted people as yourself and my Sergeant Buck.”

  “Sergeant—”

  “Exactly. I told you he had a heart of jelly. He also has a deep and abiding conviction that women are the root of all evil—and I’ve never seen him anything but a complete fool when he meets a pretty one in trouble. Now, I have a great weakness for Woman . . .”

  “But not individual woman?”

  He chuckled.

  “Perhaps that’s putting it a little strong. I—”

  There was a sudden elaborate clearing of a throat just outside, and the harshly disapproving face of Sergeant Buck appeared in the open window over the sink. I felt pretty silly, and also definitely annoyed, because it was perfectly obvious that Sergeant Buck was convinced I had the basest designs on his wretched colonel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was after nine when I ran across the garden to the Bishops’. I hadn’t intended going out alone after what Colonel Primrose had said, but when I saw him and Mr. Parran and their small cohort leaving the place I changed my mind.

  Rosemary and George Barrol were on the screened front porch. I spotted them by the two small red dots of their cigarettes. George got up and opened the door.

  “Come in—we were just going over. Your Hawkshaw’s got Paul on the carpet,” he said. “What’ll you have? Scotch?”

  “Nothing.”

  I sat down on the foot of the wicker chaise longue where Rosemary was sitting.

  “Did you find Andy?”

  “He was home—said he hadn’t been out,” she answered. “He said Lucy Lee had taken the kids over to her mother’s and he guessed young Andy had decided he’d stick with him, and probably had got scared and so on. Children aren’t particularly reliable.”

  “They make up things,” I said, understanding by the little pressure of her foot against my knee that the less said about Andy’s strange antics in the lane the better. Unless we wanted George to blurt it out suddenly at the most inopportune moment.

  “I wonder what he’s saying to Paul?” Rosemary said.

  “I wonder what he was saying to old Potter?” George put in.

  I looked at him in complete astonishment. “Dr. Potter?”

  “Didn’t you know he was at your place this evening? I went over to find Rosemary, and Potter was coming out, wiping the perspiration off. I said hello and he jumped a foot. What about that rumor that Sandra Gould had him going six ways for Sunday?”

  “Dr. Potter?” I gasped.

  George looked at me, surprised and a little chagrined.

  “Don’t tell me I’ve put my foot in it again,” he said sheepishly. “I thought everybody knew about it. Elsie Carter told me yesterday afternoon that he was just another one of the dubs. Anyway, he was looking like a pickled oyster when I saw him coming out of your place. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know—”

  “Of course you didn’t . . . but, darling, if you could only keep what you don’t know to yourself,” Rosemary said patiently.

  It’s lucky she had eyes in the back of her head, because I should never myself have noticed that Paul Dikranov was coming. She caught my look of surprise as she turned suddenly. “It’s his cigarette,” she said softly. “They’re something special from the Balkans.”

  I caught the pleasant fragrance of Eastern tobacco as he came out . . . tall and slender and dark, and always polite and a little elegant.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Latham. Your colonel’s gone. He is a very shrewd man.”

  He stood in the doorway, towering above all of us, the dim light of the living room behind him making him still taller and darker.

  None of us spoke for a moment. I suppose it was my nerves that made me suddenly intensely uneasy. Or maybe it was the sligh
tly sibilant emphasis with which he said, “He is a very shrewd man.” George Barrol must have felt something too. He laughed nervously, and would no doubt have said something unwise if Rosemary had not stepped in.

  “Why don’t we have a rubber of bridge?”

  George jumped up. “Good idea—I’ll get the table.”

  Paul Dikranov moved aside for him to pass. Then he did a rather odd thing. He stepped to Rosemary’s side, took her hand and raised it to his lips.

  George, still in the door, laughed nervously again. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Rosemary, I’ll bet the Colonel’s told him all.”

  Dikranov shook his head.

  “On the contrary, George. The Colonel can tell me nothing. I merely salute the lady I love.”

  Somewhere in the house the telephone jangled noisily: one long, three short.

  “That’s yours, Grace,” George said. “I’ll answer for you.”

  He went on in while I waited. We’re all on one rural line, so that you can answer your phone at anybody’s house.

  When George came back he had the bridge table and the cards.

  “It’s your colonel, Grace,” he said. “He’s bellowing ‘Hello, hello,’ and nobody’s on the line. They must have hung up.”

  He set up the table, Paul Dikranov helping. Our bridge wasn’t very successful. Dikranov and I collected $1.80 from Rosemary and George at 11:30, and I went home. George went with me—at least to the hedge. I didn’t expect him to go farther, because he doesn’t like being out alone in the dark and I’ve never minded.

  Colonel Primrose was in the living room when I came in. He’d pulled a table out into the middle of the room and was sitting there meditatively with his back to the door. He glanced up when I came in, nodded and pushed back his chair. I looked at the table, and my heart sank to my boots.

  In the middle of it, on a piece of white note paper that had been taken from my desk, were two crumpled blue velvet petals.