by Zenith Brown
As if to prove his theory the Thorp children and their nurse straggled across the garden not twenty feet from the porch, and young Andy came to the screen door, banged once or twice and called, “Juyus, Juyus!”
I started out to head him off, but his nurse called and he ran along after her.
“You see. Anyone else could do the same and come on in,” Colonel Primrose said.
He bent down to examine the doorstop.
“However, we may be a bit forrarder. There’s no doubt that Mrs. Potter knew something, and was on her way here to tell it, after trying to say it on the phone and being afraid to. And I suppose there’s no doubt it was something that happened Saturday night.”
He stared down at the doorstop, then cocked his head around and peered up at me.
“I take it Andy Thorp wouldn’t recognize Mrs. Potter, in the dark?”
I shook my head.
“He used to know her, of course, but he hasn’t seen her for . . . oh, I suppose seven years, or more. She used to be around a lot. She played bridge every afternoon with the older women at the club. Andy knew her casually. I don’t think he’d recognize her. You’re thinking she was the woman Sandra was with at the garage?”
He nodded. “Probably.”
“Of course it was dark there too.”
“Not very, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “That light over the side door of the garage is pretty bright.”
“Andy said she wasn’t in the light.”
“I know.”
“And above all,” I said, “how on earth did she get there?”
Colonel Primrose shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. However—she even got here.”
He looked down at her and shook his head again. “Not a very amiable sort, was she?”
I didn’t need to look at her again. I knew what he meant. The querulous face of a childless and selfish woman, with nothing to occupy her mind or her heart but herself and her ills, petty and resentful, envious of other people and suspicious of them. For years her husband had quit even dropping in at the club bar for a highball at night. He’d only begun again the last few years—after Sandra came, as Elsie Carter was to point out significantly.
We heard a car in the drive at the back of the house. Colonel Primrose moved back a step or so into the corner where he could watch the door without being seen. I should have connected that up with Dr. Potter, but I didn’t. Anyway, it wasn’t Dr. Potter, it was Mr. Parran, the State’s Attorney. He pushed the door open and came briskly and inquiringly into the room, and stopped dead in his tracks, staring blankly in utter horror.
“Good God!” he said. “Maggie Potter!”
Then he looked at the square granite figure of Sergeant Buck, and his eyes moved on to the Colonel.
“It was Maggie trying to phone?” he said.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “She was the other party on the line.”
“And it was her quarreling with Mrs. Gould.”
“Probably.”
Mr. Parran’s head moved back and forth. He was still staring down at Maggie Potter there on the sofa, his face a little white.
“And when they told me young Mrs. Gould was carryin’ on with old Potter, I laughed. The old—”
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat violently, and jerked his head towards me. Mr. Parran gulped his words back with an effort.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” he muttered, very red in the face. Which showed one reason for his not being invited to mixed parties on the Estate. I never heard Jim or Andy or Rodman Bishop swallow anything in my life, in the line of words—or any of their friends. Nevertheless, I knew now that I’d rather underestimated Mr. Parran.
“We’ve sent for him,” Colonel Primrose said. “He ought to be here any minute. He was at the Goulds’, apparently, when it happened.”
Mr. Parran’s lean jaw tightened. Colonel Primrose turned to the Sergeant.
“Go over to the Goulds’ and see if he was there. Mrs. Latham, would you mind asking Julius to step in here?”
When I went out into the hall Julius peered in from the pantry saucer-eyed and putty-faced, sensing easily that something had happened.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” I said.
He stuck his head out of his starched white coat collar like a sand turtle stretching his neck.
“ ’Deed an’ Ah know that, Mis’ Grace.—Was that there lady Mis’ Potter?”
I nodded.
“ ’Deed an’ Ah thought Ah knew her. She used to come here, didn’ she?”
I nodded again.
“What time did she come this morning?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“She come about a quarter of ’leven, while Ah was sweepin’ the back walk. Booths’s taxi stopped, an’ she got out. She told him not to wait, an’ she wanted to know if you was home, Mis’ Grace. Ah said no, an’ she said is the man here that’s a detective. Ah said you was both on the place, an’ would she wait, an’ she said yes. She kep’ lookin’ around like she was scared somebody’d see her.”
“Did anybody see her?”
“Not that Ah know of, suh.”
“Did anybody pass in a car?”
Julius craned his neck around slowly.
“There was cars passin’,” he said. “ ’Course, Ah didn’ notice who was in ’em.”
“Try to think, Julius,” I said. “Didn’t you notice anybody you know?”
His face brightened.
“There was Charlie Bates.”
Charlie Bates drives his father’s grocery truck.
“Ah didn’ see nobody else, ’cept, o’ course, Dr. Potter.”
We stared at him standing there, ashy-pale and shaking. And my head kept whirling. Was it conceivable that Colonel Primrose really thought Adam Potter had killed his wife, here, in this living room? Because to me it was not conceivable, it was utterly fantastic and impossible. But, I kept thinking desperately, the idea that any of us—that someone from my own little group there—could have done such a thing was just as impossible.
“An’ o’ course there was the regular people . . . nobody that ain’t always flyin’ up an’ down like the devil was after ’em.”
Mr. Parran looked at Colonel Primrose in patient disgust.
“Well, just who were they, Julius?” Colonel Primrose said.
“ ’Deed, Colonel, an’ Ah don’ recall jus’ which. You see, Ah had other mattuhs to attend to.”
They might as well have stopped there, because the fact that Julius had other matters to attend to is final. In the fifteen years he’s been with me it has definitely explained everything, from burnt biscuit to frozen radiators.
“You don’t recall anyone except Dr. Potter?”
“No, suh. Ah only recalls him ’cause Ah thought to mahself that there lady looks powerful like Mis’ Potter, but if he don’ know her, an’ if she cain’t walk, like they say, then Ah mus’ be mistaken. So Ah ast her who she was, an’ she says it didn’t make no difference, she’d wait. So she jus’ walked in an’ set herself down in a chair.”
“You just left her there?”
Julius craned his neck out and wet his lips. He looked at me.
“Ah didn’ feel exac’ly comfo’table,” he said. “She didn’ look jus’ right in her mind.”
I could see exactly what he meant. Maggie was perfectly sane, of course.
“She is rather odd-looking,” I said.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “Didn’t Lilac know her?”
“Ah don’ think Lilac even seen her,” Julius said. “She was talkin’ to Hawkins, an’ she wasn’t payin’ no attention to the outside.”
“What about Dr. Potter? Did he speak to you when he went by?”
Julius shook his head.
“He waved his hand, suh, like he always does. Ah guess he didn’ see her ’cause she was facin’ the house.”
Colonel Primrose looked at me. “All right, Julius,” he said. He nodded to Sergeant Buck, who departed for the Goulds’. When he went on erran
ds he set out on a sort of double-quick, and you half expected to see a line of khaki-clad men materialize out of the empty air and file along—either that or little Mercury wings sprout suddenly at his heels and ears, like the florists’ emblem.
Colonel Primrose and Mr. Parran set to work. If the Sergeant’s line of men hadn’t appeared, the State’s Attorney’s had. I retired to the dining room. I could hear Colonel Primrose’s terse clipped instructions, the men moving about, the clicking of the camera, Mr. Parran’s nasal Maryland drawl. I felt curiously helpless and at loose ends, not knowing at all what to do. It’s an odd sensation, having the corpse of somebody you know quite well but have no emotion about appear suddenly on your living-room sofa. But I suppose any corpse would be much the same. I opened the screen, brushed out a wasp and closed it again.
“I’m going over to the Bishops’. Will you come along?”
I turned. Colonel Primrose had come back from the living room and was standing there regarding me with an eye cocked in a manner definitely and disturbingly speculative. At least he can’t think I had a hand in this, I thought. But it was impossible to tell what he was thinking, actually.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Oh, yes.”
I was all right, after that first terrible shock. There was no point in being anything else.
We went out through the kitchen, leaving Julius and Lilac pretty ashen and saucer-eyed.
“You ain’ goin’ away, is you, Mis’ Grace?” Lilac said desperately.
“Just over to the Bishops’. Mr. Parran’s here.”
“Ah knows he’s here,” Julius said, very pointedly.
“If he bothers you, phone me,” I said. “Anyway, Sergeant Buck will be back in a minute.”
Julius looked very unhappy.
“I wish,” I said as we went out, “there was some way of going at police work without first terrorizing all the servants.”
“Hawkins doesn’t seem particularly terrorized.”
“He has the consolations of religion,” I said. “Anyway, he’s no doubt delighted that another Jezebel has bit the dust.”
Colonel Primrose looked at me, startled.
“Mrs. Potter?”
“O Lord, no. Sandra. Mrs. Potter is Julius and Lilac’s problem. He can enjoy that at a distance. And furthermore—while I’m complaining about the law—why do you go off and leave that man in charge? Julius is probably perfectly correct in suspecting that the minute we get out of the house Mr. Parran’ll arrest him and Lilac. Just to be doing something satisfying in a big way.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“No point sitting around in the barn after the horse has left,” he said. “You have to take a bridle and go after him.”
“Is he over at the Bishops’?”
His face sobered abruptly.
“I wouldn’t be sure. He’s not awfully far away.”
We went along.
“I’m sick of this!” I cried suddenly.
“I dare say,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”
“What do you mean?”
He cocked his head down and looked up at me with his black sparkling eyes.
“I mean that our murderer is getting panicky, Mrs. Latham.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We went on across the garden.
“Isn’t that a bit on the locking-the-barn-door side, Colonel?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely,” he admitted. “Well, anybody but a complete ass would have seen, knowing what I knew—or what I’d guessed—about Mrs. Potter, that she was in danger.”
“You really think it was she at the garage?”
“I can’t figure it as any of the rest of you, Mrs. Latham, someway.”
He held up a straggling trailer of trumpet vine for me to go under through the wicket between my place and the Bishops’.
“Who, for example? Lucy Lee?”
He smiled soberly.
“I’m afraid Lucy Lee is pretty transparent. Frankly, it’s really your Rosemary that interests me now. It doesn’t seem credible, does it?—Look at her now.”
We were crossing the lawn up to the great screened and pillared veranda of The Magnolias, hidden from the people there for the moment by the two gigantic shiny-leaved trees that helped give the place its name.
“You wouldn’t think, to look at her, that she’s practically tying a noose—they hang people in a shed in the penitentiary yard, here in the Free State of Maryland—round the neck of the man she was and is popularly supposed to be pretty mad about . . . or her own neck?”
I stared at him open-mouthed. “You don’t still think—”
“My dear young woman,” he said quietly, “Mr. Parran is the State’s Attorney—not I.”
We went along across the grass.
“You know, Mrs. Latham—you have a charming but decidedly naïve streak in you that makes you assume everybody is exactly what he or she appears to be. Which means—all these people being your friends—just what you want them to be. Now I, and still more Mr. Parran—having no illusions or preconceptions about these people, or about character in general—can see clearly that—just to take one point—the mainspring of human conduct, even in nice humans, isn’t always love.”
He shook his head. “I haven’t time to go into it. We’ve got to find out what these people up on the porch have been doing with themselves this morning.”
We came out from behind the magnolia trees. George Barrol came to meet us. I remember wondering fleetingly, as he came, why with his share of his aunt’s money he still acted as the household secretary—or general functotum, as Sergeant Buck called him. The Sergeant called himself that also, so the word hadn’t any derisive significance.
“They tell me you were shot at last night, Grace!” he said. “Dear me, it was lucky I didn’t go home with you. They might have got me too!”
George giggled in his nervous way, but it was perfectly obvious that he meant every word of it. That’s one of the nice things about George; he’s frank.
“It happened they didn’t get me,” I said. “And it was long after I left here, so you’d have got home safe.”
“If Grace keeps such odd company, she’ll have to expect to get shot at,” Rosemary said.
She came down from the porch, almost breath-takingly lovely, with her warm golden skin and dull gold hair and serious wide-set gray eyes above a simple high-throated earth-brown cotton frock. I glanced back and saw that Colonel Primrose thought about her as I did; his interest had quickened perceptibly.
Behind her, not very far away, giving the impression that he was not going to be far away for a moment, was Paul Dikranov. I wondered if he had come to some decision to keep an eye on her, and why. Since Colonel Primrose had said she wasn’t in any danger I had been wondering. Since the night before I had wondered still more. For granted no one would want to hurt Rosemary, who could there be who felt strongly enough about me to shoot me . . . and at the same time hadn’t hesitated at the brutal murder of a perfectly harmless hypochondriac?
As Paul Dikranov greeted us in a friendly way I wondered a little, too, if George’s constant presence didn’t annoy him. Rodman Bishop seemed to keep out of the way diligently, but so far I couldn’t remember having seen Dikranov and Rosemary together once without George. Except that unfortunate period Saturday night, and that was hardly George’s fault.
The matter was settled conclusively before long, however, and in George’s inimitable way.
“Is your father here, Miss Bishop?” Colonel Primrose asked.
Rosemary nodded. “Come on in,” she said. “He’s in the library with Nathan Kaufman.”
“I’ll tell him you want him, shall I?” George said helpfully. His face fell, and then brightened instantly. “It’ll be all right if I go, now that Grace and the Colonel have come.”
Then George turned brick-red, and well he might, for the look Rosemary gave him would have charred a hide only slightly less tough.
; “Oh, dear!” he said.
Dikranov’s face darkened. George departed uneasily. Rosemary smiled with remarkable self-possession.
“Let’s go up on the porch, shall we? Dad’ll be out in a minute.”
“I’d like to see him now, if you don’t mind,” Colonel Primrose said.
Rosemary glanced at Paul Dikranov. “He’s engaged at the moment,” she said reluctantly.
At just that moment a querulous, slightly pompous voice came out of the hall.
“Well, bring him in, bring him in. We want to see him, we want to get the facts!”
The owner of the voice came out onto the porch—a short small slightly paunchy man with thick black hair going white at the temples, bloodshot eyes that looked as if they had never had an illusion to lose, and a red choleric face. As Rosemary said later, he had the consistency of a persimmon, ripe and just ready to burst. Mr. Nathan Kaufman looked as if he drank too much, and I dare say he did. He certainly drank a lot.
“Let him come in here,” he was saying. “Nobody’s going to lynch him.”
I assumed, unraveling this, that the first “him” was Colonel Primrose. The second, surprisingly enough, was Jim Gould.
“This is Colonel Primrose, Mr. Kaufman,” Rosemary said. Mr. Kaufman made some sound not in ordinary usage, and they shook hands. Rodman Bishop came out, still dressed in the ancient shrunk seersucker suit, towering over everybody, beetling his black shaggy brows right and left except when his gaze happened to rest on his daughter. Then a proud satisfied smile lighted his leathery piratical old face . . . though now, when he looked at her as he came out of the cool hall, his eyes were worried too. It seemed almost as if he were avoiding meeting her, and when he sat down and she came over and sat beside him on the arm of his chair, he gripped her hand and patted it clumsily, his jaw working savagely.
It was Jim Gould that Colonel Primrose looked at. Something had obviously been going on inside Jim. His eyes were narrowed a bit and his jaw and lips tight. He stood there tall and erect, the sort of person who would knock you down and throw you overboard if necessary, but who certainly—to my mind—wouldn’t hit a sick old woman over the head if he’d wanted to kill her.
“Well, we’re all friends here,” Kaufman said, darting a quick look about. Then he laughed a pursy little “Heh, heh, heh!—Or are we?”
