by Zenith Brown
George giggled—or started to until he caught Rodman Bishop’s beetling glance and the giggle died into a cough.
“Of course!” Rosemary said. She included everybody in a cool definitely wicked half-smile. I shook my head uneasily. We weren’t, of course. Far from it.
“Now then, Colonel,” Mr. Kaufman went on briskly. “We’re on the side of law and order, and if my client—though so far I’m damned if I can make out just who my client is—”
“It’s all of us, isn’t it, Colonel Primrose?” Rosemary asked.
Colonel Primrose smiled politely. Why he sat there without so much as mentioning the ghastly business that was going on over at my house, I couldn’t make out. It seemed to me that he was deliberately wasting the most valuable time.
“Perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm, Mr. Kaufman,” he said, “if I told you just what the police know about this case, so far.”
Mr. Kaufman flipped a piece of paper out of his pocket and unscrewed his pen. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
“Mr. Parran knows,” Colonel Primrose said deliberately, “that Sandra Gould was upset and definitely excited when she went to the club Saturday evening. That’s what, in his mind, gives credence to the suicide note Mrs. Gould found on her dressing table.”
“You any idea about that note, other than it is a suicide note?” Mr. Kaufman asked sharply.
“So far . . . no,” said Colonel Primrose. I thought he was a little annoyed. Kaufman grunted.
“Here’s another point, Colonel. The lady didn’t die by that blow on the back of the head. I’ve seen your medical reports. Now, even if you could establish who struck her . . .”
His finger pointed arrestingly at the Colonel. Colonel Primrose smiled.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Even if my client—whoever the devil he is—should confess to striking her, that’s not murder, Colonel.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head suavely. “Oh, no, no. Not as such.”
I looked at him in horror. “Maggie Potter, Maggie Potter!” I wanted to scream out. But he was saying nothing about it. He was, as Lilac says, as smooth as owl’s grease.
George Barrol was staring, almost fascinated, at Jim. Indeed, I think everybody was, except Rodman Bishop and myself.
“I haven’t confessed anything of the sort,” Jim said angrily.
Mr. Kaufman waved his hands in the air helplessly. “Oh, my God!” he said. “Of course you haven’t. Of course you haven’t. You keep still.”
He looked expectantly at Colonel Primrose.
“After the incident of the capsized boat,” Colonel Primrose went on slowly, “she came up to the clubhouse and dried out in front of the fire. She was apparently waiting for her husband.”
He looked at Jim, who’d sat down and was staring down at the floor between his feet.
“He didn’t come. He went home with Mrs. Latham, and sat there till ten minutes of one, when he left. Well, it so happens that the period between then—or, to go back a little, from twelve-thirty, say—and one-thirty is the period that we’ve got to find out about. So far we know this:
“1. Sandra Gould quarreled with a certain woman after midnight.
“2. Between that time—after twelve, when Andy Thorp says he saw her last—and one o’clock, we haven’t much idea.
“3. At one o’clock, on Hawkins’s testimony, there’s not much doubt she was put unconscious in Thorp’s car with the motor running.
“4. Hawkins says someone closed the door of the garage just after one o’clock. He thought it was twelve, but it was twelve Columbus time, not Eastern Standard.
“5. Of course whoever did it waited until it was time to announce the hour, turned the radio on, turned it off and left. That’s the person we want.”
He paused a moment.
“Mr. Andy Thorp, looking back towards the garage when Sandra Gould had left him to go back there, saw her talking with a woman, whom he didn’t recognize. There’s no question that this woman was also there later, and saw all that went on that led to Sandra’s murder.”
There was a strange silence on the porch. I think all of us must have looked guilty. All except Paul Dikranov, who looked interested but intensely unconcerned. If it hadn’t been for the scene at the club, I should have thought he didn’t even know whom we were talking about.
“Now then,” Colonel Primrose said. “We know that between eleven-thirty, when some of you left the club, and three-fifteen, when Mrs. Gould and Mrs. Latham found Sandra Gould’s body, a good many of you—namely, Mrs. Gould, Mr. Dikranov, Mr. Gould, Miss Bishop, the woman whom Sandra quarreled with, and both Mr. and Mrs. Thorp—were out of your houses within easy calling distance of the garage. And we know this also: that for some reason there’s been a strong disinclination on the part of all these people, or virtually all, to tell the truth. In fact, most of them, excepting Mr. Dikranov probably, have deliberately lied. Mr. Gould and Miss Rosemary are the two most conspicuous examples of what I’m saying.”
Nathan Kaufman grunted.
“If you’ve got an eyewitness, I think you ought to bring her forward without delay and pettifogging,” he said angrily.
“I should be glad to,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. He looked round at each face in the group. “Unfortunately, she has been killed.”
There was no sound on the porch.
“She was murdered . . . this morning. An hour ago.”
Murdered.
The word went like a shadow compounded of sound and moving lips around the stunned circle.
Then a dreadful thing happened. Jim Gould staggered to his feet, his face as gray as death. Rodman Bishop’s big hand tightened on his daughter’s, checking her sudden impulse to rise. George Barrol said, “Isn’t it awful!” and looked from one to the other of us and back at Jim. I don’t suppose he meant to be heartless; everything disturbs him equally—a mislaid pack of cigarettes, death, a slump in sugar.
Colonel Primrose spoke quickly, looking steadily at Jim.
“Not your mother, Mr. Gould,” he said quietly.
The color surged back into Jim’s face as he realized, I suppose, what an awful thing he had done. He steadied himself against the back of his chair a moment, then sat down and took out a cigarette without a word.
I suppose we all stared at him, George especially. He started to speak and closed his mouth, flushing a little. It was obvious to everybody that he was going to point out what everybody must have realized, that Jim thought it was Alice Gould who’d had the scene with Sandra at the garage Saturday night before she was killed. Rodman Bishop glared at him furiously.
Jim said nothing at all. He had never had a ready line of snappy comebacks even in his best moments, and there’s no doubt anyway that keeping one’s mouth shut, whether it’s judicious or merely because you can’t think of anything to say, has its points. The effect of what he had done was stunning enough.
Only Paul Dikranov seemed sufficiently detached to keep to the point.
“Who was it, Colonel Primrose?” he asked easily.
Colonel Primrose looked from face to face again.
“Mrs. Potter,” he said.
“Who?” Rosemary cried.
“Maggie Potter,” I said. “In my living room.”
Rodman Bishop leaned forward. “That’s . . . why, it’s preposterous,” he said, glaring at me. “The woman’s bedridden! She hasn’t been out of her house for seven years!”
“Not since Chapin—”
George Barrol caught himself again at a swift warning glance from Rosemary. Rodman Bishop’s face darkened. He has never been the same since Chapin Bishop was found dead in the inlet below my place. It had made Rosemary too much the center of his life, in some way. I remember then, even at such a moment, thinking that it would have been so much better if he’d married Alice Gould.
“There’s no doubt Mrs. Potter had heard some of the rumors that have been fairly rife this summer,” Colonel Primrose went on gravely
. “You all know what I mean—that her husband was interested in Sandra Gould.”
Jim’s eyes stayed on the floor. He flushed a dull hot red.
Nathan Kaufman, I could see, was watching him out of the tail of one eye. The other, if possible, he had fixed on Rosemary. I suppose he would conceal all that when it came to the trial, but it was plain that at the moment he had quite obviously a strong suspicion in his mind. He glanced up, caught my eye, stared at me coldly a moment and turned away. After all, a husband in love with a girl like Rosemary, saddled with a wife who carried on with country doctors who had invalid wives—it wasn’t a pretty picture. Moreover—even leaving out the fact that Jim was in love with Rosemary—it was a picture that a jury could easily understand. You could almost hear Jim’s life story being unfolded in court.
“Jealousy is a powerful tonic,” Nathan Kaufman said professionally.
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“The woods are full of it,” George Barrol said flippantly.
Colonel Primrose looked soberly at him for an instant.
“You see,” he said quietly, “in spite of that suicide note, and whatever it may represent—”
I could feel his eyes on me for a bare instant.
“—there is no possible doubt, after what has happened to Mrs. Potter, that Sandra Gould was murdered. The immediate point concerns Mrs. Potter. I must find out where every person here—except Mrs. Latham, who was with me, and Mr. Kaufman—was from approximately quarter of eleven, when Mrs. Potter arrived in a taxi from the village, until a quarter past eleven, when Mrs. Latham and I found her dead in Mrs. Latham’s living room.”
His voice was moving quietly against a background of utter silence. When it stopped there was nothing there. Even George had no word to say. Colonel Primrose looked around with a smile.
“Good God, Colonel,” Nathan Kaufman said suddenly. “People can’t just offhand say where they were at any hour of the day.”
“An hour ago?” said Colonel Primrose, still more quietly.
Kaufman shook his head. “Not even then, sometimes. I got here a few minutes after eleven. You were here then?”
He looked at Rodman Bishop. Mr. Bishop beetled his heavy brows at George Barrol, as if poor George was responsible, somehow, for the whole situation. I suppose that’s the penalty for being a secretarial doormat and a relative at the same time. Not that Rodman Bishop wasn’t awfully decent to George always, and very fond of him, but he did demand more constant service than anyone would have stood for who was less dependent. Socially dependent, not financially, because George has a very superior income. Just why he did stand for it no one could ever figure out, except that he had no other family and liked the life that Rosemary and her father led. Being with them was convenient, in a way, too, for it allowed him to go everywhere and at the same time protected him from designing mothers. No one else would ever think of him as marriageable —being as he is the old-fashioned semi-hardy variety of perennial bachelor.
When Rodman Bishop beetles at him he always gets flustered and blows his nose quickly. He did so now.
“George and I were down in the cellar,” Rodman said emphatically. “Bottling the blackberry wine my son and I made when we were here before. It’s been in an old sherry keg.”
“Didn’t know bottle could Barrol wine,” Mr. Kaufman said, and laughed “Heh, heh, heh, heh” until we all thought he wouldn’t stop at all.
“And you, Miss Bishop?” Colonel Primrose asked gently.
Rodman Bishop looked at that instant about like a man sentenced to death.
“I’m very much afraid I can’t tell you without consulting Mr. Kaufman privately,” Rosemary Bishop said.
Her cool gray eyes met Colonel Primrose’s steadily.
“Because it just happens that I was at Grace’s house from about half past ten until after Mrs. Potter came. In fact, I left after she came.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We stared at Rosemary—or most of us did—in complete horror. A little self-possessed smile deepened in the corners of her mouth.
“You see,” she said calmly, “it’s rather awful, being in love with a man whose wife’s just been murdered, so that if you speak to him even it looks like collusion.”
I caught my breath sharply. I suppose for a moment we all thought she’d lost her mind completely. Only Colonel Primrose looked at her with perfect calm. Jim Gould stared at her, half rising for an instant from his seat, his face suddenly white, then dark red as the color rushed to his cheeks. Then he smiled suddenly, still staring at her. It was the first time he had smiled, I imagine, for some time. For just an instant he looked like the old Jim of the pre-Sandra days. But not for more than that.
The silence was more than awkward. George Barrol tittered, as he would, for all the world like the village postmistress, and Nathan Kaufman raised one eyebrow with a sort of and-what-in-God’s-name-do-they-expect-me-to-do air. I glanced sideways at Dikranov. He was perfectly unmoved. Rodman Bishop was mopping his forehead.
“And I had to see him,” Rosemary went on. “So I asked him to meet me at Grace’s. I knew she wouldn’t mind.”
Colonel Primrose nodded politely.
“And did he come?”
Rosemary nodded. “Yes. He came.”
She smiled across at Jim.
“Not very willingly. He’s got old-fashioned notions about propriety. He doesn’t want people to talk.”
“I don’t want them to talk about you,” Jim said simply.
“He didn’t stay very long.”
“How long?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“Just long enough to tell me not to be silly.”
“My God,” said Nathan Kaufman. He stopped abruptly and looked at Rodman Bishop. Colonel Primrose smiled a little. He turned abruptly to George.
“And you, Barrol?”
George jumped. “Me? Oh, I was down in the cellar with Uncle Rod, barroling the wine. I mean bottling it.”
He blushed and glanced anxiously at Rodman Bishop.
“I see,” Colonel Primrose said.
He got up. I felt a little silly following him, but he seemed to expect it.
We’d got as far as the hedge when I looked back. Jim Gould was coming out. He didn’t follow us. He went around to the road and out that way. He was whistling.
We crossed the tennis court and the lawn to the porch just as Adam Potter’s car drove in the back gate. Sergeant Buck was on the porch. He came to meet us.
“All there except the husband,” he said, in a loud whisper. “This Potter had been there but he’d left.”
Sergeant Buck glanced around over his shoulder at the man getting out of the car.
“They said he was feeling the heat. I went to the club. He’d had two whiskies neat which he never done before that the bartender can recollect. Said he’d never been known to take a drink during hours.”
He drew off a little and stood at an informal attention as Dr. Potter came up. He looked definitely haggard.
“Elsie Carter said you wanted me,” he said, taking off his new panama and wiping his forehead. He looked from me to Colonel Primrose inquiringly. “It sure is a scorcher.”
Sergeant Buck really needn’t have gone to the club bar. The man’s breath was appallingly eloquent.
“I wanted you, doctor,” Colonel Primrose said.
Even if he had not known it, one glance at Sergeant Buck’s granite physiognomy should have been warning enough—or no doubt one glance at my face should have been—that something unusual was in store for him.
“Inside, if you please.”
Colonel Primrose led the way. I knew he was watching Adam Potter like a hawk, seeing every hesitating nervous twitch in his face and hands. If I’d dared I would have cried out that she was in there, dead. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t help thinking that he knew it, even though that was impossible.
He went along with them. I stayed behind, watching their painful progress to the porch steps and through the sc
reen door that Sergeant Buck held open. He’d have to see her in two or three more steps, through the French windows, lying there! I turned away. I couldn’t bear to have it all happening in my house.
Then there was a shout and confused steps and a hysterical babble, and when I turned around Dr. Potter was trying to pull away, with Sergeant Buck holding him, and Mr. Parran and two of his men on the porch. Then abruptly there was no more confusion, only Adam Potter slumped down there in a porch chair, his head in his hands, Mr. Parran standing over him.
I went up to the porch. Adam Potter’s face was ghastly.
“I didn’t do it, I swear to God I didn’t do it,” he was saying. He shook like a leaf.
“You passed here and saw her. You came back and murdered her.”
“I didn’t. I swear to God I didn’t.”
“You struck her with the doorstop.”
“No, no!”
“When did you kill her?”
“I didn’t, I didn’t! I tell you I didn’t!”
Mr. Parran bent his thin face down towards him. “Before you had a drink, Potter, or after?”
I glanced angrily at Colonel Primrose. The man was in no shape for this.
“Listen, Dr. Potter,” he said gently. “We know you went by in your car while she was out in back talking to Julius.”
Dr. Potter raised his head. He nodded dumbly.
“I thought I was crazy,” he muttered. “I thought I was crazy.”
Parran looked significantly at Colonel Primrose, who shook his head a little.
“You knew it was she?”
Dr. Potter nodded. “But it couldn’t have been, she couldn’t walk! She hasn’t gone out for years! I thought I was having hallucinations.”
“You realized she’d been out before?”
Dr. Potter stared at the State’s Attorney. “No, no!”
“That she’d been spying on you, Saturday night? When you killed Sandra Gould?”
Dr. Potter shook his head dumbly.
“Didn’t you kill Sandra Gould?”
He shook his head back and forth.
