Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  Bill Chetwynd wrinkled his forehead and squinted his eyes, trying to think, which is rather hard for him.

  “Yeah, now, lessee. You mean the lady that’s a cross between an elephant and a hawk, married to the little guy that looks like the stuff they used to give us in the nursery instead of tea.”

  “That’s the people,” I said patiently.

  “Lord, Grace, you don’t think she did Sandra in—”

  “Shut up,” I said quickly. Elsie was coming stalwartly out of the tea store, her lips compressed, not missing anything that was going on, from Bill and me to the Reverend Arrowsmith’s daughter in shorts smoking a cigarette with some boy at the popcorn stand.

  “Hello, Mrs. Carter!” Bill said. “Lovely day, isn’t it? Too hot, though.”

  He grinned at me as Elsie went on.

  “Now, lessee. I can tell you, if it’s important. What I mean is, I’m not going to all the trouble to think about the Carters unless it’s damn important. I’d rather think about anteaters, or a nice cool drink of vitriol.”

  “Please, Bill, don’t be an idiot,” I pleaded. “I really want to know.”

  “O.K. Then I was in the bar having a drink.”

  “I know, darling. It’s the Carters—you know, the Carters.”

  “Sure. I was in the bar. Ferney Carter was in the bar too.”

  “Be serious, Bill—please!”

  “ ’Struth. Ferney Carter was there having a lemon coke. It was—lessee—it was just when they dragged the foreign gal and Georgie out of the water. I said—”

  “No, Bill. The Carters!”

  “I’m getting to ’em. Elsie came to the door and said, ‘Ferney dear, we ought to be going home, it’s late.’ Need I say more? Next thing I knew there was a gap, and then Andy Thorp was filling it by saying a double whisky neat.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then the Carters left before Andy and Sandra.”

  “Not so fast, girl. Not so fast. When I went upstairs, Ferney dear was sitting in the hall, hat on his knees. Dame Elsie was gassing with some old girl about whether the men wouldn’t prefer creamed chicken and peas at the auxiliary picnic to peas and creamed chicken.”

  “Bill, please!” I said. “This is serious, really!”

  “But that’s a fact, Grace. I know, because I’d had just enough to make my heart bleed for poor old Ferney. I said, ‘Elsie, can’t Ferney go have another coke, just one more?’ She said, ‘Bill, you’re a man, which would you rather have, creamed chicken and peas—’ and I said ‘Yes’ and tottered off. I waited to dance with Rose, but she’d gone too. Then I went and fetched Ferney a lemon coke, but I had to water the rubber plant with it. He’d gone.”

  “You wouldn’t know what time that was?”

  “It was before one,” Bill said earnestly. “Because I don’t remember anything after one.”

  “Well, that’s a help,” I said. “I wanted to know, because Elsie’s going to be an eyewitness to Rosemary slogging Sandra over the head with the monkey wrench, or something, before another day’s gone, and I just wondered whether she could possibly have been anywhere in the district.”

  Bill shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said cheerfully. “I can tell you this—I’d like to slog her.”

  “Wouldn’t we all.”

  I answered rather absently, because it was a sort of academic point anyway. Chiefly, however, because I was just then remembering the crack she’d taken at me about Rodman Bishop, and trying to figure out what she’d meant by it. I should probably have thought about it seriously enough to see its importance if I hadn’t had to go on to a Red Cross Board Meeting, and after that out to Mrs. Rowe’s to get two country hams she’d been saving for me. As it was I dismissed it—much too lightly. Even Elsie Carter has to be right once in a while.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was after five when I got home. No one was around, and the Bishops had phoned for me to come over for a cocktail when I got back.

  “Where are the Colonel and Sergeant Buck, Julius?” I asked.

  “ ’Deed, Mis’ Grace, an’ Ah couldn’ say,” Julius said serenely. “A boy come clear out with a telegram fo’ the Colonel, ’stead of phonin’ it, an’ they got in the cah an’ drove off. ’Deed an’ Ah don’ know which way they went.”

  It didn’t take very long for me to find out where they’d got to. I saw Colonel Primrose the minute I passed the magnolia trees and came towards the porch. He was there, very much at his ease, and oddly enough the Goulds were there too, all of them except Andy. If it hadn’t been for the haunted look in Lucy Lee’s eyes, and the constant cigarettes she smoked, and George’s uneasy titter, I should never have guessed from the group on the porch that the heavy dreadful somber cloud of murder hung over them, like a French funeral pall première classe.

  Jim especially was more jubilantly himself than I’d seen him for years. The sun, filtering through the leaves, made a moving arabesque of light and shade on Rosemary’s gold hair and warm peach-tan skin, and played on her yellow sun-backed frock and bare brown arms and legs. She looked extraordinarily lovely and detached too—only her long gray eyes were warm and alive and intensely present.

  Dikranov watched her, I thought, with an almost wistful quality of worship in his dark face. Rodman Bishop watched her too, more quietly, less obviously worried about her than he’d been in the morning. Now and then he and Alice Gould exchanged a half-humorous, half-despairing glance, as if they’d both given up completely. Nathan Kaufman sat on the side lines, as it were, giving in some way the impression that he was holding a rather vague watching brief tightly by the scruff of the neck.

  “Where’s Andy?” I said cheerfully, before I’d remembered about the funeral pall. My house guest gave me an amused little half-smile.

  “Sulking in his tent,” Jim said.

  George Barrol as usual created the necessary diversion. “What will you drink, Grace?” he said hastily. I nodded at the mint julep he was holding up, and turned to Colonel Primrose.

  “I just met Elsie Carter in town,” I said, firmly ignoring the instant flag of warning that he ran up behind his eyes. “I gather she’s given you the low-down on the whole local situation.”

  He managed a smile, but it was not greatly amused. “I found her very helpful, Mrs. Latham,” he said coolly.

  “I’ll bet you did,” Jim Gould remarked. “Did you hear the one about Parran? He sent the bootlegger to the Cut for twenty years because he held a mortgage on the fellow’s farm, and then he foreclosed on it.”

  “Or the one about Dr. Potter throwing a party at the club and putting something in the crab imperial to jog business up a bit?” George put in.

  Colonel Primrose shook his head. “No,” he said. “I didn’t hear them.”

  He looked quietly at me for an instant, as if wondering for just a fraction of a moment about something.

  “No,” he repeated. “But I did hear the one about Miss Bishop and Sandra Gould meeting at the Goulds’ gate Saturday night.”

  There was a tense sharp instant when everybody on that porch might have been in a state of suspended animation. Except Colonel Primrose. He was looking at Rosemary with calm deliberation, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, catching the almost imperceptible pallor that hardened her lips a moment before it relaxed again.

  “It seems rather a public place for a scene,” he said. “In fact, I’m not sure I’d have believed her if I hadn’t already found this there by the gate.”

  We sat there like eight graven images, watching him stretch a little so he could reach into his pocket and bring out his leather folder. Nobody moved while he opened it with maddening slowness and took out a piece of crumpled white tissue paper. He opened that. We stared at the two little blue velvet petals lying there on the tissue in his hand. He looked around from face to face, his eyes sparkling and terribly piercing.

  “I lost the bunch of flowers,” Rosemary said coolly. “At the clubhouse, I think.”

  Colonel Primrose shook his
head. “That won’t do, Miss Bishop. I found that too, you see. This is another piece of it.”

  I tried not to look at Alice Gould and I knew Colonel Primrose knew it.

  “You see,” he went on slowly, “there can’t be any doubt that Sandra Gould had a primitive streak in her.”

  Rosemary flushed, her gray eyes almost black, her breath coming a little quicker in spite of herself. The flush receded from her forehead and throat and concentrated in two burning spots in her cheeks.

  “Are you suggesting, Colonel Primrose,” she said coolly, “that after she flew at me and ripped the flowers off my dress, I reverted to primitive type too?”

  I looked at Jim Gould. He was shaking with anger, fists clenched, jaw clamped.

  “You shut up, Rosemary,” he said savagely. “Let me handle this.”

  Colonel Primrose looked mildly surprised.

  “But I understood you weren’t anywhere around, Gould,” he said. “I understood you walked down to the lane from Mrs. Latham’s front porch.”

  “Then forget it,” Jim said curtly. “I met Miss Bishop at the gate just in time to keep my wife from making a bloody fool of herself.”

  “I see,” Colonel Primrose said. He looked questioningly and deliberately from one to the other of them.

  Nathan Kaufman jumped to his feet suddenly. “Now then, now then!” he said. “That’ll be enough of this, Primrose!”

  He brought the fist of his hand down on the table.

  Jim took two steps across the porch. “Sit down!” he said. He planted his hand on Kaufman’s chest and pushed him firmly into a low chair.

  “Don’t forget he’s trying to save your neck, Gould,” Paul Dikranov said quietly, under Nathan Kaufman’s irate splutterings. He blew a nonchalant column of gray smoke through his full lips.

  Jim looked down at the little lawyer for an instant, and turned to Dikranov. “Thanks!” he said. “When I need somebody to save my neck I’ll call him in myself. And you’d better begin looking out for your own neck a little. And while I’m on your subject, you’re not marrying Rosemary, do you get that?”

  Rosemary got quickly to her feet. “Jim—stop it!”

  “I told you to shut up. And I’m telling the whole bunch of you Rosemary’s going to marry me—as soon as it’s decent.”

  I looked anxiously at Colonel Primrose. He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to Jim. He was watching somebody else, intently, his bright old eyes steady and unwavering. I couldn’t make out just who it was. It was not Dikranov; he was standing easily against the white column of the porch, a smile in his eyes. As Jim spoke he bowed.

  “I congratulate you, sir,” he said suavely. “As a matter of fact, I’d thought of suggesting it myself.”

  I could not see George, but I heard his nervous laugh. Then Rodman Bishop got up abruptly. “Sit down, Jim,” he said gruffly. “You’re making it damned embarrassing for Rosemary.”

  “Quite the contrary, dad,” Rosemary said quickly.

  “That’s because you’re a shameless hussy,” Rodman Bishop said. The tone of his voice showed how much he meant it. A quick grin lighted his savage old face for a moment and died. “Can’t you young fools see this is just about all Colonel Primrose needs—”

  There was a sudden sound from Lucy Lee. It was half sobbing.

  “I wish Elsie Carter—”

  Her mother leaned over towards her, but it was Colonel Primrose who interrupted actually and stopped her from going on.

  “I’m very grateful to Mrs. Carter, really,” he said calmly. “She gave me several extremely useful bits of gossip, Mrs. Thorp. Three that I’m especially grateful for. For instance: where was it that you said you were this morning, Mr. Barrol, between quarter to eleven and quarter past?”

  George looked most startled. “I was—”

  He remembered suddenly and blinked at Rodman Bishop.

  “Oh,” he said quickly. “I didn’t get the time for a minute. I was down in the cellar bottling the blackberry wine.”

  I suppose if Rodman Bishop could have killed George just then without messing up the front porch, he’d gladly have done it.

  Colonel Primrose shot a quick glance at Nathan Kaufman.

  “And you, Dikranov—where were you?”

  “At eleven o’clock also?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was in my room, packing my things,” Paul Dikranov said imperturbably. “I have got urgent business in New York. I am sorry I cannot stay at this charming place longer. But business, you know . . .”

  George tittered.

  “Unfinished business,” he said aside to Alice Gould, sitting by him on the swinging couch.

  Rosemary and Jim looked at each other. Rosemary’s eyes and his were a startling testimony of how shallow and insecure Sandra’s hold had been.

  Colonel Primrose frowned a little. Alice Gould went over to the porch rail and stood looking out. She knew better than anyone there, I suppose, the old adage about the slips between cup and lip. She stood there, fragile and elegant, her curly white hair shining in the sun, pleating and unpleating her handkerchief in her transparent trembling fingers. Lucy Lee was watching her. She was slumped down in a deep chintz-padded wicker chair, only her dark eyes alive. The rest of her was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t make Lucy Lee out then, and I couldn’t later. You don’t expect people like Lucy Lee to do odd things.

  I’ve wondered since what would have happened if Nathan Kaufman had held his tongue the next moment. He got up—I imagine the third mint julep had something to do with it, though Colonel Primrose said he doubted it—and came out into the center of the little circle, rather as if he were mounting a rostrum. There was something a little forensic about everything he did.

  “Colonel Primrose,” he said sharply, “I see the way this investigation of yours is heading.”

  Which was very interesting, because, as I learned later, at that moment Colonel Primrose himself had only a glimmer of what way it was heading.

  “I’m going to tell you now that the defense is suicide while of an unsound mind.”

  He shook his forefinger vigorously at the Colonel.

  “You haven’t got a leg to stand on, sir. I’ve seen Hawkins. His whole story has collapsed. He didn’t hear anything except the radio that Sandra Gould was playing while the motor filled her lungs with carbon monoxide. Her family will tell you she never sat a moment of the day without the radio on. Mrs. Gould can tell you that she herself turned that radio off while she and Mrs. Latham were standing by the car. The station was dead but the instrument was still turned on.”

  I looked at Alice. She may have done it, of course. I certainly couldn’t—and wouldn’t—deny it.

  “Because, you see, Colonel, Mrs. Gould had read that note Sandra Gould, her daughter-in-law, had left. She knew what was in her mind. And then, and above all, you’ve got that note itself—a note that’s plain and specific, and that’s genuine beyond all question. That handwriting’s been identified by everybody here who had any knowledge of the subject whatsoever. You can’t get around that note, Colonel. You can’t even establish the fact of murder—let alone not having a shred of evidence against any specific person.”

  He paused for an instant, glaring a little heatedly across the floor.

  Colonel Primrose shook his head suavely. “I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!” he said politely. “I have a great deal of evidence. And that note—”

  His eyes met mine for an instant, and he smiled a little sadly. My heart was icy.

  “You attempt to deny its authenticity?” Mr. Kaufman barked triumphantly.

  “No, no,” said Colonel Primrose. “No, it’s authentic. The only trouble with it, for present purposes, is that it was written—by Sandra Gould, of course—four and one-half years ago, when she came back from the hospital after her child was stillborn.”

  Jim Gould, completely and utterly speechless, stared across the porch at his mother. Alice swayed a little, and I could see her eyes c
lose in pain. Her delicate unlined face was so old and ravaged that it looked as if she had pulled a mask suddenly down over it. Jim struggled to his feet. She opened her eyes and looked across at him.

  “I know you’ll never forgive me,” she said slowly. “But it’s true.”

  She looked painfully around at Colonel Primrose. “You found Ellen Stanley?”

  He nodded.

  “She was the only one who knew,” she whispered.

  She’d forgotten me, and I tried not to look as if I remembered the night she came out of that room and showed that note to me, and said, “I hope God will forgive me, Grace.”

  “I had the ink in the note tested,” Colonel Primrose said, “and then I found her.”

  Jim was by his mother’s side. She clung to him with one frail hand.

  “I was angry with her. She kept going to pieces. I’d never let her see I knew she’d ruined my son’s life, not until then, and then I told her things I shouldn’t have, and left the room.”

  She brushed her lace handkerchief across her dry lips.

  “I went to my room and got to thinking how unfair and cruel I’d been, when she was ill and nervous with no defense. So I went back to her room. She’d got up and gone to the bureau and had Jim’s revolver in her hand. I took it away from her and talked to her a long time, and put her back to bed, and then Ellen Stanley came in, her nurse. She saw the letter before I did. I took it away with me, and I kept it . . . to remind me how near I’d been to murdering my son’s wife. Because it would have been that.”

  She pressed her handkerchief to her lips and turned her head away.

  Nobody had moved, not Lucy Lee nor Rodman Bishop—only Paul Dikranov was no longer there. I don’t know when he’d gone.

  Colonel Primrose leaned forward. Before he spoke the telephone inside rang loudly. It seemed strangely ominous, coming just then. It rang one long and three short.

  “That’s yours, Grace,” George said.

  I glanced at Colonel Primrose. He nodded.

  “I’ll answer it, then,” I said.

  “Right through to the left, in the library, Grace,” Rosemary said.