Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  “Dr. Jonas Smith?”

  He rose without haste. Between thirty-five and forty, stockily built, with a ruddy complexion, searching hazel eyes and a determined chin, he looked intelligent, level-headed and capable.

  “I’m Sergeant Digges of the Anne Arundel County Police. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  There it was, Jonas thought—as inevitable as it was simple and entirely matter-of-fact.

  “All right, Sergeant. Come in, will you?”

  He opened the door.

  “You’re new here, Dr. Smith?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sergeant Digges followed Jonas across the vestibule into the reception room. He looked around him.

  “Mighty nice place you’ve got.” He glanced at the wild fowl pictures on the wall. “Nice prints. Do much shooting yourself, doctor?”

  “Duck, and an occasional deer,” Jonas said. “Not people, Sergeant, if that’s what you could be getting at. I’ve patched up a good many, but I’ve never shot one.”

  Sergeant Digges moved through the door into the consulting room. He was ignoring what seemed to Jonas a very good opening if it was brass tacks he wanted to get down to. Time was apparently not of the essence in Sergeant Digges’ method of interrogation. As he moved from a casual examination of the portrait of Jonas’s father in his academic robes over the mantel to the bookcase along the wall, Jonas went to the french window behind his desk, opened it and let Roddy in.

  “Mind if I feed my dog?”

  “Go right ahead.” Sergeant Digges was more than amiable. “Nice dog,” he said. He followed Jonas through what had been the connecting pantry and was now the office wash room and utility closet into the kitchen.

  “One of the colored watermen out at Arundel Creek said a long lean young fellow with a spotted hunting dog and a blue cross on his car had been staying at the Fergusons’ place out there the last few days,” he remarked.

  “The last six,” Jonas said.

  He got a can of dog food off the shelf, opened it and put it in Roddy’s dish under the sink. It occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry enough to eat it himself.

  “Miss Van Holt said the description sort of fitted you. She said she didn’t know about the dog, except you looked hike you’d have one, and being a doctor you’d have the medical cross on. And you’d just moved into here. She said she didn’t think you knew anything about the shooting, though.”

  Sergeant Digges strolled back into the consulting room. Jonas followed. He was looking again at the portrait over the mantel, and around the room.

  “I like to see the places people live in. You get a sort of different slant on people when you do.”

  He looked at Jonas.

  “Take you, for example. I’d put you down for a pretty square shooter, meeting you and seeing you in this kind of place. It’s hard to figure why you’d let yourself get off on the wrong foot when you’re just starting out down here. I’ve been trying to figure what you had in mind. Maybe you can tell me. Why didn’t you stick around till we got out there last night, doctor? After you called up. That’s a fair question, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. It’s a fair question,” Jonas agreed. “I guess I figured I didn’t want to start out all mixed up in a lot of police stuff. The guy was dead, and—”

  “How well did you know him, Dr. Smith?”

  “I didn’t know him at all.”

  “You sure about that, doctor?”

  “I certainly am.”

  Sergeant Digges sat down.

  “That’s one thing I wanted to find out about. In our business it’s practically a rule that people who don’t have any connection with the people who get in trouble are always the ones that want to help us out. Our problem’s mostly how to get rid of them. Curiosity, plain or morbid, I guess you’d call it. Or they want excitement, or to feel important. It’s one way we have of narrowing things down. It’s the ones that clam up or just plain beat it that we figure must have some personal reason—or they’d be curious like everybody else. You see what I mean, doctor?”

  “Sure,” Jonas said. “I see all right. Except that you forget a dead body’s no treat to me.”

  “Nor me either. But we’ve got our duty, doctor. Or don’t you look at things that way?”

  Jonas nodded. “I do. But—”

  “Then why don’t you come on out there with me now, and—”

  Sergeant Digges broke off. “Looks like you’ve got company, doctor.”

  Jonas swung his chair abruptly around. Then he got quickly to his feet. It was Jenny Darrell, and it was too late to stop her. She had slipped through the wicket in the privet hedge that divided his small private garden from the larger grounds behind the Blanton-Darrell House and was already halfway to the brick terrace, her head turned, glancing back the way she had come with every possible outward sign that her visit was surreptitious in the extreme. She had something in her hand, covered up with a white napkin, and as she turned her head and saw Jonas standing in the long window she quickened her step. Her small face was pinched and all but lost, so that it looked nothing but pale eyes and scarlet mouth.

  “I’ve brought you some sandwiches, Dr. Smith.”

  The words came out breathlessly, pell-mell.

  “I hope they’re all right. I made them myself. But you don’t have to eat them. It’s just an excuse, really, because I want to talk to you. I want to ask you—”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got company now.” Jonas spoke brusquely, but he put his hand out for the plate. “But gee, thanks. That’s darned sweet of you. I’m half starved.”

  Her startled glance had darted past him into the room. He saw her hands sink down at her sides and the tip of her tongue creep out to moisten her lips as she swallowed and blinked her long lashes, one foot moving back as she tried to edge away off the terrace.

  “Hi there, Jenny.”

  Sergeant Digges had come to the corner of the desk.

  “Hello, Mr. Digges.”

  She swallowed again and edged a step further away.

  “I…I just brought Dr. Smith some sandwiches. I thought he… he probably didn’t have any food in the house. And I wanted to ask him about Grandfather.”

  She looked up at Jonas, the corners of her mouth trembling. “—Help me out of this. Please help me…”

  Her eyes appealed desperately as she hurried on.

  “Nobody will tell me anything. Nobody’ll let me help…”

  “There’s no way you can help, Jenny,” Jonas said. “There’s nothing any of us can do but wait.”

  “What’s all this? What’s the trouble?” Sergeant Digges took a step forward.

  “Professor Darrell had a stroke this noon,” Jonas said. “He’s still unconscious. Dr. Pardee was with him when I left.”

  He turned back to Jenny.

  “There’s one thing you can do. Go home and stand by, and help keep the place quiet. So run along like a good girl and I’ll see you later.”

  He lifted the edge of the napkin, took a sandwich and smiled down at her. “And thanks for these.”

  Then for a grim and awful moment his smile froze, and the bite of bread and cold roast chicken he’d taken froze, a dry lump, half-way down his throat. The girl in front of him was not leaving. She was staying. A subtle but determined change had come over her. As clearly as if it were written in neon lights above her head Jonas Smith read what was happening to her. She was making up her mind, slowly, stubbornly, and in open and outright defiance of her sister and her brother.

  “Oh my Lord God,” he thought, “—she’s going to blurt out the whole thing…”

  He groaned inwardly and with a sudden panicky sinking in the pit of his stomach. And he had to stop her. In spite of everything, including the fact that he had just barely got. through advising her brother and sister it wa
s the only intelligent and rational thing to do, he knew he had to find some way to stop her. Drawing herself up into a taut slender arrow of determined honesty, she was turning from him to Sergeant Digges, about to speak. His own impulse, blind and unreasoning compared to the straightforward simplicity of hers, was nevertheless immediate and compelling.

  He saw her chin go up. “I think I’m just going to—”

  “—to go home.” He finished abruptly for her. “So scoot along, honey child.” He thrust the plate of sandwiches aside into Sergeant Digges’s unexpectant hand and took a firm but outwardly casual grip on her shoulder. He felt the tense quiver of protest that shot through her small rigid body as he turned her around and propelled her off the terrace and across the garden to the wicket in the hedge.

  “Now shut up and go on,” he said savagely under his breath as he opened the wicket and pushed her through. “—Scoot along, baby,” he added cheerfully.

  He closed the gate and fastened the latch. Sergeant Digges was in the open window, the plate still in his hand, watching him with a detached and he thought somewhat skeptical air. As Jonas reached the terrace he turned and set the plate down on the desk.

  “Pretty young, isn’t she?” he remarked dryly as Jonas came inside. “I thought it was middle-aged women that went all out for doctors.”

  Jonas stifled the hot impulse of anger that flared up in him. He shrugged and took another sandwich. Sergeant Digges was watching him impassively. Whether he seriously thought Jenny’s visit had any personal or emotional significance Jonas couldn’t tell. He knew it was better to ignore such a suggestion than give it possible credibility by making an issue of it.

  “Or could it be there’s something on her mind, Dr. Smith?”

  “Plenty, would be my guess. It’s touch and go whether her grandfather wakes up or not. That seems to me to be enough on anybody’s mind.”

  “Maybe so. Only I’ve never heard about there being much love lost between Jenny and her grandpa.”

  “I guess you know them both better than I do, Sergeant,” Jonas said. “I’m a stranger here myself.”

  “I expect I know ’em pretty well,” Sergeant Digges remarked thoughtfully. “Well enough, I’d say, to make me sort of wonder if there could be some kind of connection between the old fellow having a stroke right after this fellow Darcy Grymes gets his. I’m not saying there is a connection, mind you. All I’m saying is it seems sort of funny it happened right now, after all these years he’s been hell-raising around town and everybody saying it was going to happen and it never did. It’s what you’d call a remarkable coincidence, doctor. Because the Professor he thinks Elizabeth’s white with a blue rim around her… so I guess it could be quite a shock after the big rush this fellow Darcy Grymes’s been giving her and all.—Elizabeth Darrell.”

  It wasn’t until he repeated her first name and added her last that Jonas realized how abruptly he had halted his sandwich half-way to his mouth, or how blankly transparent the stare on his face must have been.

  “But I see you know her too, doctor,” Sergeant Digges remarked. “For a stranger it sure looks like you know how to get around places. In fact I wonder if you ought to call yourself a stranger, come to think of it. For a young fellow that’s just been in town one night—or the part of one night that was left after there’s been a pretty serious shooting—you sure know quite a few of the Three Hundred. Not that I’m saying any of you are personally mixed up. I’m not trying to do any of this psychological stuff. I don’t have any use for it myself. I’m just an ordinary country policeman, doctor—working for a pretty hard-headed community that likes facts and doesn’t like, any of this fancy whoop-de-do they get by with in the movies and all. So, what do you say, doctor?”

  Sergeant Digges picked up his hat from the floor beside his chair.

  “What do you say we take a run out to the country now? And then maybe you’d like to make a statement. We figure it’s always the best thing to get our facts down straight in black and white, so the State’s Attorney knows what he’s got to go on. The wheat from the chaff, like the preacher says.”

  He got to his feet. Roddy, alert to any move toward the outdoor world, bounded forward.

  “Sure, you can come, boy.”

  Sergeant Digges reached down and patted his shoulder. “Never did like to see a field dog cooped up in the house all day, myself,” he said. “Let’s go, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Okay,” Jonas said. “Come on, Roddy.”

  He had a momentary twinge of doubt about Sergeant Digges’s beguiling pretence at being a friend and lover of all God’s creatures whatsoever. His original impression of a shrewd and hard-bitten intelligence was only slightly clouded by all the meandering amiability that cloaked it. Brother to prince and fellow to beggar could be a dangerous technique. At the moment, however, and as applied to himself, it seemed so entirely reasonable that Jonas accepted it and in fact liked it. It was only when they had crossed College Creek leaving Annapolis on their way out to the country that it began to worry him again, although not for himself at all.

  They were going down the hill to the Severn River Bridge, between the Naval Academy Hospital and Perry Circle on the old golf course.

  “You know, people are funny, doctor,” remarked Sergeant Digges. “I suppose you find that out in your business too. Window curtains, for instance. People see out through window curtains. They never seem to figure anybody else can see in through them. Then again you might say, well, why shouldn’t they look out to see what’s going on if they want to? You might say it’s natural people’d be curious seeing a neighbor walk off with a policeman. I expect maybe you’d say it’s just natural even young people’d be interested.”

  Up to then Jonas Smith had sincerely hoped Sergeant Digges had not spotted the two shadowy figures behind the white muslin curtains in the front bedroom of the Blanton-Darrell House as they left the wing to get in the police car. If he had spotted them he could hardly have failed to recognize Tom Darrell’s navy blue uniform or Elizabeth Darrell’s softly shining gold hair. Whether, having seen them and recognized them, he had gone beyond that and got the impression of watchful waiting and intense anxiety that Jonas had got, still was not clear.

  “I guess it’s natural,” Jonas said. He kept his eyes straight ahead of him on the narrow paved road. In the brilliant atmosphere the shadows of the trees and telephone poles along the rim of the old golf course stood out black and so physically well defined that they looked like solid obstructions thrown across the road. Perhaps the same thing was true of Sergeant Digges, and much of the seeming substance behind his casual comments was not substance but shadow without substance, the substance being only in Jonas’s mind because he had special knowledge that made the shadows seem real when they were not. If he made the mistake of assuming that innuendo was fact, he would find himself walking neatly and directly into the psychological trap that Sergeant Digges, pretending he had no use for it as a plain ordinary country cop, had been assiduously baiting from the moment he walked into Jonas’s house.

  “It’s certainly a mighty pretty day,” Sergeant Digges said. “I’d figured on going fishing myself this morning.”

  He spoke with the air of a wistful ruminant as they crossed the Bridge. Men and women, young and old, fat and thin, were leaning over the parapet, their lines in the blue water below.

  “I could have, if people had stuck around last night. Stuck around and told the truth. Now I’ve got to take it step by step. I’m counting on you to help me, doctor. I guess we’ll start at the Ferguson place if that’s okay with you.”

  He turned off the Ferry Road in a few minutes onto the dirt road leading to the creek. As they bounced over the corduroy that brought them closer and closer to the physical scene of the death of Gordon Darcy Grymes, Jonas realized with an abrupt mental start just how far his precipitate flight early that morning had removed him
from it. His concern with the people involved in it had blinded him completely to the practical details that concerned Sergeant Digges. He’d thought of the Milnors’ cottage. He’d forgotten the Fergusons’ house. He had completely and totally forgotten, until that instant, what Sergeant Digges would see the exact minute he crossed the threshold there. He’d forgotten that mud and silt dries, and dries in the form it is deposited in.

  A vivid image of Jenny Darrell splashing up from her beached boat, stumbling, terrified and hysterical, across the terrace, into the living room, flashed into his mind, and in his mind he followed her from the telephone across the grass rug and bare polished floor of the passage into Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom, saw her by the closet door, her sodden evening shoes in her hand, her torn mud-stained net dress dripping, her wet stockinged feet depositing their outlines on the bare waxed boards.

  “Good Lord… why didn’t I mop up?”

  He thought it with a sudden desperation that was staggering in terms of his own stupidity. Elizabeth Darrell had mopped up at the Milnors’. All he’d done was grab the beach bag, and leave the whole story written in mud and silt for anyone to read.

  It was too late to think about it now. What he had to think about was some story that would hold water and wash… some plausible explanation of a lady in her stocking feet… And suddenly, as Sergeant Digges swung the car off the gravelled corduroy across an iron culvert into the white oyster-shell lane that branched left down over the marsh to the Milnors’ and right up the slope into the Fergusons’ circular driveway, Jonas Smith M.D. came to his proper senses.

  The story to tell was right there in his mouth, as glaringly matter-of-fact and obvious as the oyster-shell lane, a white and brilliant ribbon in the sun. The story was the Truth. The Simple Truth, without deceit or evasion. Jenny wanted to tell it, he had advised the Darrells to tell it. There was no doubt in his mind that all Sergeant Digges’s roundabout psychological technique of indirection was his advice to Jonas, in a different form but to the same end: when you’re in doubt, come clean. And he was caught. Only a fool would try to blunder on in face of the palpable and overwhelming physical evidence that it wouldn’t take a bright child to read.