Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  I was silent a moment. “It was Lucy Lee who was there, quarreling with Sandra?”

  He nodded.

  “Andy knows it, probably—there’s hardly any other reason for his hiding her slippers. Her mother knows it. I don’t think anyone else does. I think I can depend on you for Lucy Lee’s sake not to tell anyone—especially George, who’d be very likely to blurt it out before I’m ready.”

  “I won’t mention it,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “George’s very special quality is inestimable, if it happens to be on your side. His mind is so concerned with present minutiae, and so concentrated on the main point, that he misses all the well-meant efforts to cloud the issue. This afternoon, for example.”

  He chuckled a little.

  “I take it Lucy Lee’s exit was violent and abrupt and the others followed in alarm. That in itself was about enough to give the Goulds away.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Let’s see Lucy Lee and find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  We went across the lawn and through the hedge. Lucy Lee was at her own cottage. She ran to the door when she heard us on the steps and stopped abruptly. “Oh!” she said. It had a curious deflated sound, as if someone had given her a sharp blow in the stomach. Nevertheless, she opened the screen door and said, “Come in!”

  “Is your husband at home?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  “I’m sorry. He’s just stepped out. He’ll be back any minute, unless he meets somebody and they have a drink. That might hold him up—”

  She went bravely on. I suppose Colonel Primrose knew as well as I did that Lucy Lee had thought we were Andy and that he’d been gone a long time already.

  “We’ll wait, if you don’t mind.”

  She gave him a stricken glance. “Not at all—won’t you sit down? I can’t imagine what’s keeping Andy.”

  Her round lower jaw trembled a little. She caught her lip between her white even little teeth and batted her eyes to keep back the tears.

  “I wonder if you know, Mrs. Thorp,” Colonel Primrose said gently, “the reason your husband is acting the way he is?”

  She stared at him desperately. “I don’t know what you mean—”

  “Perhaps I’d better explain. You see, it’s the general opinion locally that your husband is acting like a first-class fool.”

  Lucy Lee flushed wretchedly.

  “For instance: he’s gone to the most extraordinary trouble to lie, and to conceal evidence, to protect an extremely ungrateful young woman who in my opinion needs nothing quite so much as a good sound spanking.”

  She stared at him with parted lips, breathlessly. Then she flushed violently.

  “In the first place,” Colonel Primrose went on deliberately, “she’s allowed herself to get so involved in housekeeping that she lets the lilies of the field completely absorb him. And now she’s too much of a coward to come forward and tell the truth about Saturday night. You see—nobody has any doubt, my dear young lady, that it was you quarreling with Sandra Gould . . . or that your mother and your husband are both lying like troopers to protect you.”

  He leaned forward. Lucy Lee, flattened like some odd concave little figure in the corner of the sofa, stared at him, utterly fascinated.

  “Well?” he said.

  Lucy Lee nodded simply. “I hated her so,” she said miserably.

  “Was she dead when you went into the garage?” Colonel Primrose asked. His voice was still as kindly as at first.

  Lucy Lee’s dark eyes widened in horror.

  “You did go in. There’s grease on your slippers.”

  She stared frantically at him, and at me. “My slippers!”

  Colonel Primrose nodded. “The ones your husband tried to clean, and buried when he found he couldn’t.”

  I don’t think that either he or I realized just what was happening behind her blank incredulous stare, or even that she was getting up until she was on her feet, halfway across the room, heading for her bedroom. She threw open the door and flew to the closet. I glanced at Colonel Primrose and followed her. She was throwing shoes, her own tiny ones and Andy’s huge ones, out like a spaniel unearthing a rabbit.

  Then suddenly she stopped and leaned against the doorframe, shaking with terror. “They’re gone!” she whispered. “Where are they?”

  “Mr. Parran has them,” Colonel Primrose said quietly, from behind my back. “We also have the blue flowers. You know, Mrs. Thorp, I think if I were you I’d do something, just to keep Andy from barging into Parran’s office and confessing to a crime he didn’t commit just to save your skin—because I can tell you, if he did do that, he’d have a hard time laughing it off. For more reasons than one.”

  Lucy Lee pushed the mass of short chestnut curls back from her forehead and sat down limply on the edge of her bed, staring at us in a sort of dazed wretchedness.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say, “Tell him everything, all about it,” because I didn’t know what was in her mind. Since the Elsie Carter business I’d lost any notion that I was anything but the decoy Colonel Primrose had called me—jokingly, as I’d fondly thought. Not so much a decoy, I thought now, as an entree into April Harbor’s private lives.

  She had already come to a decision by herself. “She was dead,” she whispered.

  “At what time?” Colonel Primrose said quickly.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I’d waited so long for Andy, and he didn’t come. She wasn’t in either. I couldn’t bear it. Jim didn’t care, except for me. I tried to get him to go help me find them, but he wouldn’t. So . . . I went alone.”

  She stopped, for so long that I thought she was in a sort of trance. I touched her hand, lying lifeless and cold on the tufted spread. She clung suddenly to my fingers.

  “I took Jim’s keys and went out Mother’s back door. I was a little frightened. I’m a dreadful coward, but I had a flashlight. I looked around for something, some sort of a . . . weapon. I spotted Jim’s big monkey wrench, lying in the grass. I picked it up and went on to the garage. I opened the side door . . . and I heard the engine.”

  Her face contorted with a spasm of pain.

  “I thought it was Andy. I dashed around and opened the big doors and went in. Then I saw it was Sandra. I felt her pulse. I knew she was dead. And she had Rosemary’s blue flowers clutched in her hand. I yanked them away and turned off the motor. Then I got to thinking—”

  “Thinking what?” Colonel Primrose said quietly, because she’d stopped again and was staring straight ahead of her at the litter of shoes on the floor.

  “Oh, everything. How easy it was, and where Andy was.”

  “What did you do?”

  It was like talking to someone under a hypnotic spell.

  “I closed the doors the way I’d found them and came out.”

  Lucy Lee twisted her fingers together in spasms of despair.

  “I went up to Mother’s and told her. We came back together. She wiped off the handle of the wrench—I’d left it on the running board—and put it on the floor. We switched on the motor again and closed up the garage and went back to the house. I thought she went to bed, but then she went back to find Grace.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at her silently for a moment, sitting there on the bed.

  “And you thought Andy had killed her, of course?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. All I knew was she was dead . . . and I didn’t care . . . I was glad!”

  “Yes. And at twelve o’clock . . . when you’d waited for Andy, and he hadn’t, come, and you’d gone out to have a look for him?”

  I must say he was much gentler with her than he had been with anybody else.

  She stared at him for an instant as if he possessed some kind of second powers.

  “I suppose they were only trying to be decent to me. I . . . I couldn’t help it. I didn’t mean to be so perfectly foul. I . . . I thoug
ht she’d gone, I didn’t know she was coming back. I couldn’t bear to hear her telling him how ghastly it must be to be married to me, and how wonderful he was, and Mother couldn’t stop me. Oh, I didn’t want her to get him away from me!”

  She threw herself down on the pillow in a paroxysm of weeping.

  “I didn’t want her to! I love him! Oh, Andy, please come back!”

  I looked at Colonel Primrose, virtually as shattered as Lucy Lee but for quite another reason. I was terribly sorry for her, but I couldn’t help feeling still more upset at seeing her husband’s and her mother’s alibis knocked sky-winding at the drop of a hat.

  “And Hawkins . . . ?”

  She was quieter now as she raised her head and looked at him.

  “Hawkins? He didn’t come down. He just opened the window and said, ‘Mis’ Lucy, it ain’ fitten for a lady to fight with a she-devil.’ I guess he was right.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at me and shook his head.

  We left shortly after that, only to run into young Andy, with a red leather overnight case in his hand, trudging down to the cottage from his grandmother’s.

  “Taking a trip, son?” Colonel Primrose inquired.

  “I’m going to New York with Daddy if he hasn’t gone yet,” young Andy said sturdily, his blue eyes round and sober. He negotiated the steps on his fat short legs, tugging at the case.

  “So he has gone,” Colonel Primrose said. “I suppose it’s what you’d expect. It’s the trouble with young people now. They can’t take it, I’m afraid.”

  I was a little annoyed. “I should think it would distress you to recollect that it was your generation that produced these spineless jellyfish,” I said. “Now look at young Andy. Why didn’t you produce people like him?”

  Colonel Primrose chuckled.

  “He’s what we were. The school-of-hard-knocks sort of thing.”

  “He’ll coddle his children and complain about their being jellyfish,” I said.

  “Maybe. We’ve got to see Hawkins now. I should have known the truth wasn’t in him. The way he practically accused Jim Gould of murder didn’t prepare me for his lying to protect Lucy Lee.”

  Hawkins was in the Goulds’ pantry wiping the dishes, his Bible propped up against the cookie jar on the shelf over the sink. He was mumbling the most unchristian sort of noises. He came out into the kitchen, head raised, more the shepherd of his flock than the Goulds’ butler.

  “Mis’ Alice she lyin’ down. The Lawd done struck ’em down!”

  “Not Miss Alice!”

  I was terribly startled for an instant.

  “No, no! No, no! De ’Gyptians. Fayroh’s daughter.”

  Which, I presumed, was Sandra. Though there was not much reason to think he was talking sense rather than his own brand of mumbo-jumbo.

  “Hawkins,” said Colonel Primrose. “I have been told it was Miss Lucy Lee you saw quarreling with young Mrs. Gould.”

  The old negro shook his head. “Ah don’ recollect that, suh. Ah mus’ have been asleep.”

  “You didn’t see Miss Lucy Lee there, at about half past twelve?”

  “No, suh. Ah didn’ see nobody, Colonel.”

  “What about Mrs. Potter, Dr. Potter’s wife? Have you seen her recently?”

  “No, suh. Cain’ say as Ah have.”

  “I mean this noon, Hawkins.”

  “Oh, Ah saw her this noon. Yas, suh. Ah saw her so plain this noon Ah just ain’ worryin’.”

  “You didn’t see her Saturday night.”

  Hawkins shook his old head. “Ah didn’ even know she was out. It was mah impression she was a confirmed invalid.”

  We went on down the steps towards the garage.

  “There’s no use trying to get anything out of Hawkins he doesn’t want to tell,” I said.

  “I suppose not,” Colonel Primrose said absently. We went on down the brick walk.

  “How do you suppose the monkey wrench got here?” he asked, stopping.

  “Where?” I asked.

  It was quite dark. I couldn’t see any trace left by a monkey wrench that had lain there three days before.

  “Lucy Lee said she picked it up lying on the ground on her way down. Buck found a reddish black spot on the grass just about here the next morning. Or hadn’t I mentioned that?”

  “No,” I said. “But don’t be disturbed—I’m sure it’s only one of the things you haven’t mentioned.”

  He grinned.

  “Which, in view of your openhearted, generous assistance in such matters as the suicide note, the flowers and the clock, is certainly extremely low of me. Well, that’s like life, Mrs. Latham.’”

  “I suppose it is,” I said.

  “However, Buck did find a blood stain just along here in the grass Sunday morning.”

  I could see him cocking his head down and peering up at me in the dark.

  “Would you take that to mean she was struck here, and dragged over to the garage, Mrs. Latham?”

  I caught my breath. “I wouldn’t take any part of it, Colonel Primrose. I just wouldn’t know.”

  “It would mean she had to be carried or dragged a considerable distance.”

  He glanced over at the white corner of the garage. The light over the door was on, although none of the Goulds had had a car out. Hawkins, I knew, was still sleeping over it, which was odd, because normally he would have been most reluctant to sleep over violent death.

  “Parran’s case takes care of that better than mine,” he added.

  “Parran’s case!”

  “The State’s Attorney. Didn’t you know about him?”

  I stared at him in amazement. “But I thought you—”

  He shook his head.

  “Parran’s case is quite simple. Jim Gould came from your house, got as far as the back door there, heard a noise, picked up the wrench, which he says himself was there on the porch, went down to the gate, dragged his wife away from a blistering attack—actually physical, as the blue flowers show—on Rosemary Bishop, struck her over the head. He threw the wrench away, and he and Rosemary went off just leaving her there. Mrs. Gould and Lucy Lee found her when they were out, thought she was dead, and together, half dragging and half carrying her, got her to the garage and into Thorp’s car and turned on the engine. That accounts for a good many things. The scratches on her legs. The fact that the wrench was removed from the back porch, the Goulds’ continued misstatements. After all, theirs is really the only very powerful motive—from Mr. Parran’s point of view.”

  “But . . . you don’t think that, do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. That’s why I said ‘from Parran’s point of view.’ No, I take it Lucy Lee’s story was quite true. I think they found her in the car. Or at any rate that Lucy Lee did. And I should say that if Mrs. Gould had known Sandra had been slugged with the wrench, she’d have been cool enough to wipe off the business end as well as the handle. And she’d have put it back neatly somewhere. No, I think that wrench points to incrimination, Mrs. Latham. Somebody did it exactly that way to point to somebody else. I haven’t the slightest doubt the prints had been wiped off some time before Lucy Lee and her mother came along.”

  We had stopped in front of the garage. I could remember so dreadfully clearly tugging, Saturday night, at these double doors, trying to get them open so that Alice Gould and I could shut off the running engine. And with Alice, I thought now, knowing all the time what terrible thing awaited us inside, in Andy Thorp’s car! And then, quite suddenly, something flashed into my mind that I had never thought of since that night.

  “I know why somebody shot at me,” I said.

  He looked quickly over at me. “You’ve thought of something?”

  “Yes. While I was standing there, after Alice had gone to get Jim, I heard something, or somebody, outside. I couldn’t see anything, but couldn’t that have been . . .”

  “Probably.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded. “He could see you plainly, sin
ce you were just in the light there—”

  “It was much brighter than that, I’d turned on the light in the garage.”

  “That’s right. And he wasn’t sure whether you could have seen him—or she wasn’t sure whether you could have seen her. Well, that’s about it.”

  He stood looking up at Hawkins’s window for a long time without a word. In fact he said nothing until we had got virtually to my porch.

  “There’s one more thing I think I can tell you,” he said soberly. “Mrs. Carter saw Mr. Rodman Bishop going across the lawn from your house this morning, round eleven o’clock.”

  “That’s probably what she meant when she said it was a public scandal the way he hangs around my house,” I said.

  He chuckled a little. “I don’t know about that, Mrs. Latham —unless she’s seen him there more than once. But it might be described as sort of a private scandal—just among ourselves—that the time she saw him this morning was the time in which he declared he was bottling his blackberry wine in his cellar.”

  “My dear Colonel,” I said, “Elsie Carter could have seen him in North China when he was salmon fishing in Norway. You know she’s—”

  “I know,” he said. “But it is rather odd that the blackberry wine was being bottled in the winter kitchen, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. Things were piling up faster than I either liked or could keep track of.

  “Sergeant Buck again, I suppose?”

  “Precisely. The wine was moved to the cellar just before lunch.”

  It seemed so incredible to me that anyone could seriously suspect Rodman Bishop of murdering Maggie Potter. I said so.

  “I know,” he said. “It does sound ridiculous. But these are deep waters, Mrs. Latham. We’re sounding far down.”

  “And anyway, aren’t you connecting her murder with Sandra’s any more?”

  He looked a little surprised. “Oh, very definitely. They were most certainly killed by the same hand.”

  “But Rodman Bishop had no conceivable profit in killing Sandra—and could even Elsie Carter tell you a reason he had for killing poor Maggie Potter?”

  He shook his head. “She couldn’t, much to her regret, I think. Still, you underestimate Mrs. Carter.”