Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  “And how did she get into Andy’s car in the garage?” I asked, a little triumphantly, knowing I had him there.

  He shook his head.

  “That’s so easy, Mrs. Latham,” he said, rather reproachfully. “You haven’t understood this. She has scratches all over her legs, her shins are skinned, her arms are bruised.”

  I stared at him in astonishment and horror. He met my gaze steadily.

  “There’s no remotest doubt, Mrs. Latham,” he said soberly, “that somebody carried, or dragged, Sandra Gould to the car. She was hit over the head with that wrench, and put into the car with the engine running.”

  We were walking back to my place from the clubhouse, along the patch overlooking the bay. I tried not to look at him. It all seemed so devilishly futile to try to hold out against this slow inexorable closing in and weeding out, drawing the net tighter and tighter before he would, one moment, open it and find somebody wriggling helplessly in the toils of it.—And it would be one of my friends!

  “A man,” he went on deliberately, “could have got her into the car, you’d think, without all those bruises and marks. Unless—just for instance, Mrs. Latham—it was a man coolly and craftily trying to make out that it was done by a woman.”

  He shook his head.

  “Complicates things, doesn’t it?”

  “It still could have been . . . Andy, for instance, then.”

  “Andy obviously has ideas on this subject,” he said. He smiled a little. “The fact that he buried Lucy Lee’s slippers in the bank shows that. Those slippers are interesting. The soles show a frantic search, or chase, or perhaps a vigil, in pretty damp grass. There’s car grease on them that somebody’s tried to clean off with benzine. They’ve had whisky on them. In fact, they show pretty conclusively that they’ve been in a garage, as well as in the wet grass.”

  I waited with a sick ominous feeling in the pit of my stomach for him to go on to the bunch of blue flowers, but he seemed to have forgotten them.

  “We know,” he went on deliberately, “that Lucy Lee left her mother and went home at ten-thirty, Saturday night. She came back later. The implications of what she did are obvious. She wouldn’t have been out if her husband hadn’t been out. He knew Sandra was somewhere with his car—or so he says. Oh, well . . . the question is, Where was he? And where was Lucy Lee? And where was Mrs. Gould senior? And where were Rosemary and Jim, who were meeting at one o’clock? And why, in so small a space, didn’t some of them see some of the others? Of course, the answer to that, Mrs. Latham, is that they did. They must have.”

  I could think of only one thing to say.

  “And Paul Dikranov?”

  Colonel Primrose smiled. “Oh, yes. Mr. Dikranov. He’s an interesting fellow. I doubt if he’d want the Bishops to know just how extremely interesting he is.”

  “Sandra knew him, of course.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m afraid she did. But I didn’t know how to prove it—or, what’s more interesting, what difference it makes.”

  “Then,” I said, “you don’t really think Jim killed Sandra?”

  He looked at me steadily. “If Jim Gould struck Sandra in great anger, with that monkey wrench,” he said slowly, “and left her, he didn’t kill her. Don’t forget it was carbon monoxide that killed her.”

  “How ghastly,” I couldn’t help but say.

  “On the other hand, if someone else struck Sandra with intent to kill, and someone else still, thinking Jim had done it, let’s say, and that she was already dead, had put her in the car . . . well, that becomes a horse of a different color, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?” I asked stupidly.

  “Well, legally perhaps not. But actually, with a jury trial, I should think so. If you and Mrs. Gould had been trying to cover up Jim—”

  I gasped in horror.

  “Me!” I said. “Oh, dear!”

  He looked at me with a sort of sardonic amusement.

  “Let’s skip it then. I don’t want to distress you. But you haven’t told me yet why anyone wanted to shoot you.”

  “Lots of people can’t stand the way I comb my hair,” I said. It was a feeble attempt to reduce all this to a palpable absurdity.

  He shook his head.

  “That’s where you’re making a big mistake. People don’t attempt to murder other people for such good reasons as that. No, it’s never that simple. Motives for murder are generally definite and commonplace. Take Mrs. Potter and the attempt on you. They’re obvious. Someone was trying to cover up. You’re both in the way. Whether you know why, and are perjuring yourself to save somebody, I wouldn’t know. You’re a fool if you are. Mrs. Potter knew and was on the point of telling—and look what happened to her.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant idea. I didn’t, furthermore, know how to convince him that I really had not seen Sandra killed. Which apparently he seemed to believe.

  “As for Sandra, that’s a different matter,” he went on thoughtfully. “I’d say the chief motives for murder generally are greed, fear, love—or hate, jealousy or revenge. Those are all pretty fundamental psychological concepts. Mrs. Potter’s death was due to fear. That can be a complex business, you know. A cornered rat fights because of fear. I’d say offhand it’s a damned sight more powerful and more universal motive for murder than many of the others—than jealousy, for example.”

  This was a little hard for me to follow.

  “Then what have you been saying about these people?” I demanded. “Surely if Rosemary, or Lucy Lee either, had murdered Sandra, that would have been the motive. Jim’s, or his mother’s—that would be hate, I suppose. But what about the others?”

  “The motive that was behind the monkey wrench wasn’t necessarily the one that was behind the carbon monoxide,” he said.

  I thought about that a few moments.

  “That was fear, I suppose,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be fear of Sandra so much as fear for someone else.”

  “I said fear was a pretty complex business,” Colonel Primrose remarked. “It’s one of those things that have long roots—and long arms. It doesn’t have to be anything that happened today, or yesterday.”

  “I see,” I said. I knew he was thinking about the note in Paul Dikranov’s pocket.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I suspect Colonel Primrose was as surprised as I was to see Jim Gould and Sergeant Buck sitting on the front steps of my house so deep in conversation that they didn’t even see us coming until we were almost up to them. When they did Buck jumped to his feet, giving the Colonel a sharp probing glance—unless I was mistaken—no doubt to see whether I’d proposed to him. Then he came to an abrupt attention.

  “Mr. Gould’s got an idea, sir,” he said stiffly.

  “Really?” said Colonel Primrose. “What is it?”

  “It’s about the foreigner, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  Colonel Primrose gave me a glance.

  “Yes, sir. It’s his idea that the foreigner knew the missus in Georgia.”

  He looked over at Jim out of one eye.

  Jim grinned. There was something decidedly grim, just the same, about his lean set jaw and steady eyes, fastened, squinting a little against the sun, on the Colonel.

  “It sounds cockeyed, Colonel Primrose, I admit,” he said easily, shifting his long sinewy frame from one leg to the other. “I didn’t pry into my wife’s affairs. But I guess anybody’d have been blind if he didn’t see she knew him when he first came into the clubhouse.”

  “I noticed she did,” Colonel Primrose said.

  “You did? Well, then, I guess I’m not telling you anything.”

  “That depends, of course.”

  “She called him up when we were at dinner and talked to him. She was pretty sore when she came back to the table.”

  “You didn’t hear what she said?” Colonel Primrose asked bluntly.

  “I heard it, all right, but I don’t speak the language.”

  Colonel Primrose n
odded. “Georgian, of course.—You didn’t happen to see him, when you were with Miss Bishop, Saturday night?”

  Jim shook his head. “No.”

  “Whom did you see?”

  “Nobody but Santa Claus,” Jim said cheerfully.

  “Did you see Santa Claus this noon too? When Mrs. Potter was killed?”

  The smile left Jim’s face.

  “No. I didn’t see anybody. Except Miss Bishop. I saw her, here. I went directly home by the side door. I didn’t know Mrs. Potter was in the house.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded politely. “And Saturday night—where did you meet Miss Bishop, at one o’clock?”

  Jim hesitated. Then he nodded down towards the group of white chairs by the tree.

  “Down there. I was going for a walk before I went home. We walked down to the lane and back up through their garden. I cut straight across here and home.”

  “When would that be?”

  “Two-fifteen, perhaps, I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see anybody, except Santa Claus?”

  The fraction of an instant that Jim hesitated was imperceptible unless you knew him very well, or so I thought.

  “Quite sure.”

  “Just what was your mother doing, Gould?” Colonel Primrose asked—suavely.

  Jim flushed a little. “I didn’t see my mother, Colonel Primrose,” he said evenly. The two of them looked directly at each other for a long time. I couldn’t have said whether it was challenge or merely appraisal.

  “That’s straight, Colonel,” Jim added steadily.

  Colonel Primrose nodded again. Jim took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. His brown hands were perfectly steady as he held his lighter to his cigarette and snapped it shut.

  “I didn’t come over for a cross-examination, anyway,” he said curtly. “I just came over to tell you I don’t think much of the method of hounding women and children, and tell you I’m in on this myself from now on.”

  “That’s fine,” said Colonel Primrose cheerfully. He hesitated an instant, looking questioningly at Jim. “Have you . . . learned something?”

  Jim hesitated also, a barely perceptible fraction of a moment. He shook his head grimly.

  “Well,” Colonel Primrose remarked, “you’ll find it a little difficult to take much of a part in this if you’ve just made up your mind about things. And a little dangerous.”

  “You can leave that to me, Colonel.”

  We watched his long figure move swiftly across the lawn towards the Bishops’. I looked at Colonel Primrose. He was staring after him thoughtfully. He looked at me, shaking his head a little.

  “That young man’s headed for trouble,” he said. “He’s found out something, or thinks he has, that’s changed the setup for him. What was it, Buck?”

  The iron-faced Sergeant shook his head.

  “He’s had a heart-to-heart talk with his brother-in-law, sir, is all I can get.”

  Sergeant Buck looked at Jim’s disappearing form with some approval. “He’s a good boy, sir,” he added.

  I brightened up considerably at that, for some reason, but I learned later that that was a mistake. It seemed that in all the businesses of this sort that the two of them had been in, the people Sergeant Buck took a fancy to invariably turned out to be monsters of villainy. At least, so Colonel Primrose maintained. I learned later, also, that Sergeant Buck was a man of considerable means, having invested his army pay and army poker winnings in houses on the Coast near naval stations, and actually, what with his retired pay and his rents, doing rather better than his colonel with his retired pay and his nonproductive stocks. There was never any confusion about their relationship, however. The Colonel was still the Colonel and the Sergeant still the Sergeant—though he did often seem a pretty severe manager.

  It was apparent now that whatever Jim had said or done while we were away, he had quite definitely sold himself to Sergeant Buck. Personally I suspected it was because the Colonel had left Buck and taken me. Also, of course, here was Jim obviously a fine young fellow done in by a woman, and a foreign woman at that.

  I left the two of them a few minutes after Jim had gone and went around the house to get my car. I hadn’t been to the village all day, and the family larder was definitely low. I got the car and set out for Church Street with utterly no idea of what an important development in the business of Sandra Gould and Maggie Potter I was about to run into, or how—just as in Mrs. Potter’s case—a hitherto quite trivial figure in the whole affair was to take on new proportions. It was, I suppose, nothing short of Fate that when I walked into the tea store Elsie Carter should be there, pressing the cantaloupes and turning the berry boxes upside down.

  She abandoned the whole business the instant she spotted me and came across to where I was.

  “My dear Grace, this must be simply terrible for you, you poor child!”

  She fixed me with a bright predatory eye.

  “I’m bearing up wonderfully, Elsie,” I said.

  “Oh but my dear! What could you expect? I told poor Maggie just last week that I didn’t see how she stood it.”

  I stared at her a horrified instant.

  “You did?” I said, and no doubt very bitterly. “Then you can thank yourself for Maggie Potter’s death.”

  Elsie turned a livid green.

  “And what’s more,” I went on furiously, “if you could bring yourself to stop all this nonsense about Rosemary and Jim, we’d all be better off.”

  I don’t really know why I said that, except that I was dreadfully angry all of a sudden at her carrying her wretched gossip to poor Maggie Potter. Certainly I hadn’t the faintest notion that it would affect Elsie as it did. She went from green to a dead-white. Her sharp beady eyes fairly burned holes into me.

  “You’re not the one to talk, Grace Latham!”

  She almost spat the words at me.

  “Don’t think I haven’t got eyes in my head. What’s Rodman Bishop doing around your house all the time?”

  I gaped stupidly at her. She’d got started and under way, and when Elsie once gets that far nobody has ever been known to stop her.

  “And what’s more, if Rosemary Bishop comes back here, and hasn’t the decency to leave Jim alone, you can’t blame Sandra for fighting for her happiness—and you can’t expect me to perjure myself when Colonel Primrose asks me about it! Heaven knows I’m merely doing my duty as I see it!”

  “Oh dear!” I thought. I could have known that very astute little man with the sparkling black eyes had no doubt been doing lots of things he hadn’t told me about. And I thought again that Rodman Bishop was quite right. The trouble with the world is that too many people are barging about doing their duty as they see it. George Barrol wasn’t the only one.

  “I didn’t know Rosemary and Sandra had taken to fighting, or at any rate not in the public streets,” I said, as casually as I could manage.

  “Then the crowd’s wrong in thinking Colonel Primrose takes you into his confidence,” Elsie snapped spitefully. “He came to me yesterday afternoon. Obviously realizing that the whole lot of you couldn’t be relied on to tell the truth.—Even if you knew it,” she added with sharp malice.

  I don’t know why I felt I had to defend my position as confidante of the Colonel—especially when what she was saying about our unreliability was only too true. But there’s something about Elsie’s predatory nose and thin lips and prying eyes that would make a cat defend a mouse.

  “Colonel Primrose hasn’t pretended to take me into his confidence,” I said stiffly—and truthfully. I realized also that it was more truthful than I’d thought. And actually it was really more truthful than I realized even then.

  Just then somebody reached past her and started to take the largest and crispest head of iceberg lettuce. Elsie turned and grasped it firmly out of her hand. I fled, feeling just as if I’d eaten a large cold pancake.

  What must Colonel Primrose have heard from Elsie Carter—or rather, what c
ouldn’t he have heard from her? I dreaded to think of it, but I couldn’t keep the series of crazy notions Elsie had had for years from rushing like wild horses through my head. Rodman Bishop and Alice Gould had been “carrying on.” Dr. Potter was slowly doing poor Maggie to death. Little Andy Thorp was deaf and dumb, because he didn’t talk till late. Sandra’s baby had been born Chinese, or Malay, or green, or yellow, or something pretty ghastly. As it was also born dead, no one ever knew but the hospital people. The manager of the club had sold the original paneling to the Metropolitan one winter and replaced it with beaverboard and pocketed the money. Rosemary’s dull gold hair was peroxide, my auburn hair was henna. Sandra was really from Hoboken, New Jersey; she was really an escaped Georgian aristocrat, misunderstood and nagged to death by Alice Gould. Chapin Bishop’s head had been forcibly held in the pool until he’d drowned. The Catholics were building a tunnel to the White House, President Roosevelt was a Jew.

  In fact, I couldn’t think of any notion that Elsie Carter hadn’t had. I shuddered to think of the tale she must have told Colonel Primrose. Especially if, as she’d virtually said, she’d actually seen Rosemary and Sandra quarreling . . .

  I opened the door of my car and waited for the boy to put my groceries on the back seat.

  “Hello, Grace,” somebody said. “How’s the charnel house doing?”

  I turned around. Bill Chetwynd was coming down Mr. Toplady’s steps, carrying a can of kerosene with a potato stuck on the spout.

  “It’s just dandy,” I said.

  Then I thought of something.

  “When did you leave the clubhouse the other night, by the way, Bill?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Grace.” He grinned. “My friends can probably tell you.”

  “Would you happen to remember when the Carters left?”