Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  He was worried, nevertheless, worried at the way Jenny looked. He went in the wing. The door of his office was open. Digges was standing at the window, his head down, his hands in his pockets, absently rattling his change and keys.

  “Where’s the Apollo of the Old Foundry?” Jonas asked.

  “I let him go. He won’t go far.” Sergeant Digges shook his head. “If this Reed woman sticks with him, and gives him an alibi…”

  He relapsed into moody silence. Jonas sat down at his desk. He picked up his record cards and sat staring down at them.

  “But if he did it, I’ll get him. He’ll make a mistake. They all do.”

  Jonas Smith, thinking about Jenny over at the big house, automatically shuffled his cards, sorting them into alphabetical order. He started to reach out to put them in his file box, and suddenly stopped short. The top card was the one he had made out for his third patient, the little boy who had come with his sister who’d cut her knee on an oyster shell. Two words he had written on it leaped out at him, and for one instant, oblivious to Sergeant Digges there in the room or to anything else, he sat staring down at them as they burned in his mind. He felt again the cold chill at his heart as other things raced suddenly back into his consciousness.—The urushiol, he thought… the goldfish bowl… He could have kicked himself for being a blind fool… but he knew now, at long last, all about Miss Olive Oliphant.

  As he jumped to his feet, he saw Sergeant Digges staring at him curiously. “What’s the matter, doc?”

  Jonas pushed the telephone across the desk. “Get Miss Olive over here—quick.”

  He started for the door.

  “Miss Olive? Look, Smith. I talked to her yesterday. She’s bats. I’ve known her all my life. She has a mental age of two.”

  “Get her over here,” Jonas said urgently. “Not here—get her to the Darrells’. Don’t tell her I’m there, but get her. Don’t let her give you any of the childish flim-flam either.”

  He stopped at the door and looked back. Sergeant Digges had a reluctant finger pressed tentatively on the telephone dial.

  “For God’s sake, Sergeant—”

  “I tell you the woman’s bats.”

  “Sure she’s bats,” Jonas said quietly. “Jenny’s over there, trying to remember who she saw out at the Creek. If anybody. Miss Olive can drive a Model T, she can shoot, she lives next door to the St. John’s campus. Get her, quick.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Jonas walked quickly up on the back porch of the Blanton-Darrell House, looked to see if the screen was hooked as it had been in front, saw it was not and held the door open a little, waiting for Sergeant Digges.

  “Elizabeth was over there,” the Sergeant said, coming up the steps. “She answered the phone. I told her to bring Miss Olive over. I didn’t say why. Sure you know?”

  Jonas nodded. He went quietly into the hall, opened the door to the back parlor and went in. Jenny was in the front room, on the love seat where she and Elizabeth had sat, mute and frozen, on Sunday morning while Miss Olive babbled out her startling news. It was Philippa Van Holt with her now, gripping her hand as she flashed to her feet in sudden white-lipped panic.

  Philippa rose too as Jenny’s hand flew to her throat, her eyes moving from Jonas to Digges.

  The Sergeant went forward. “Jenny,” he said, “the doctor tells me you’re trying to remember who it was you saw out at the cottage. Do—”

  “Sergeant Digges.” Philippa came around the end of the love seat. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to say something before you go on.”

  She spoke quietly but with determination.

  “Go ahead, Miss Van Holt.”

  “It’s simply this, Sergeant. You have no right to walk in here this way. You and Jonas Smith think you’re being Jenny’s friends. Well, you’re not, and I’m not going to let her talk to you until she has some legal advice and protection. This isn’t Russia. It’s Annapolis in the Free State of Maryland, and—”

  She looked swiftly around behind her. Elizabeth and Miss Olive were coming up the front steps. Jonas crossed the room and opened the screen door. Miss Olive Oliphant gave him a startled look and tried to draw back as she saw past him into the house.

  “Come in, Miss Olive. Come in, Elizabeth.”

  He held the door open. As Elizabeth looked questioningly at him he shook his head. She went quickly into the big room.

  “Jenny—what is it, baby? What’s happening here? Jenny!”

  The girl drew back, shrinking away from her. “Please, Elizabeth! Go away… don’t touch me. I don’t want anybody. And I don’t want a lawyer. I just want to tell the truth.”

  Elizabeth moved toward her.

  “No! Please—let me alone! Everybody let me alone. I lied, this morning. There wasn’t anybody there. It was just me. I shot him. I wasn’t telling the truth. I did move. I didn’t stay where I said I did. I…I’d gone out in the kitchen. I had the gun in my hand. I knew I couldn’t get out the door. I thought maybe I could get out of the bathroom window. But he started after me. That’s when I shot him. That’s the truth. That’s—”

  “Jenny,” Jonas said. “Who was out there? Who did you see at the kitchen window?”

  “Nobody. Nobody was there.”

  “Was it Elizabeth?”

  “Oh, no!” She gave him a startled terrified glance. “No. It wasn’t anybody.”

  “It was somebody who’d come out in the old car I saw in the . back road,” Jonas said. He looked over Elizabeth’s pale golden head at the plump little woman. Miss Olive had managed to find a chair and was sitting bolt upright in it. Her gloved hand nervously opened and closed on the clasp of the white leather bag in her lap. “—Was it your grandfather, Jenny?”

  “No!” she cried desperately. “No! It wasn’t anybody! I did it myself! I tell you, there wasn’t anybody else there!” “—Miss Olive,” Jonas said.

  As he spoke her name, she gave him a startled look out of her innocent blue eyes.

  “I… I’m very upset, Dr. Smith,” she said unsteadily. “—And oh dear, here he comes. It would have been very much nicer if he’d stayed at the Club. It’s very hard to explain things sensibly when Tinsley’s around. I may be an old fool but I don’t enjoy being constantly called one.”

  If Miss Olive’s heart had sunk at the sight and sound of the lord of the manor returning, it was not hers alone. Jonas groaned as he heard Wetherby’s car rattle up the drive. He felt Elizabeth’s arm taut as a bowstring. But Jenny, whom he had half expected to slip down in another small lifeless heap behind the chair, curiously did not. She drew herself together, her chin up.

  “I don’t want to worry Grandfather, Mr. Digges.” She spoke in a tight controlled little voice. “He hasn’t been well. I’ve told you the truth. I’d like to go away now.”

  It was too late. Professor Darrell was at his front door.

  “Take that blasted junk heap off the steps, Wetherby, and bring me a drink. You hear, you scoundrel—and whisky, not branch water.”

  “Yes, sir, Professor. That’s jus’ what was in my very own mind.”

  The screen door slammed, Professor Darrell came in. He stood in the living room doorway. Professor Darrell had lost weight. His fey horse’s eyes glared as before, but his linen suit hung in baggy folds around him.

  “What the devil… Olive, I thought you’d gone home. Philippa, how do you do, my dear.”

  Professor Darrell bowed to Philippa. He looked at Jonas.

  “Elizabeth, what’s the horse doctor doing in my house? And who’s that? Digges, I told you—”

  “Grandfather!” Elizabeth put her hand on his arm. He shook it off.

  “I’m not getting excited.” His voice rose dangerously. “I’m asking for information! Elizabeth, I will not have my house infested—”

  “Tinsley, you’d better be quiet,” Miss Olive O
liphant said. “You’re making a donkey of yourself is what you’re doing, and Elizabeth is going to marry Dr. Smith so there’s no use at all in saying he’s a horse doctor.”

  “Elizabeth…”

  Jonas, holding his breath, tensed himself to catch Professor Darrell as he fell.

  “Elizabeth, going to marry…” Professor Darrell spoke in a dazed and quiet voice, looking around at her as if he had not seen her for a long time. “Elizabeth… Is my granddaughter old enough to be married? And she’s going to marry a horse doctor?”

  “Yes, Grandfather.” Elizabeth moved closer to Jonas. “But he’s not a horse doctor.”

  Her grandfather shot a baleful glance at the little woman beside him. “It’s that fool Olive. She said he was a horse doctor.”

  “I never said he was a horse doctor, Tinsley. And that has nothing to do with it. I’m just trying to tell Sergeant Digges that I do not believe Jenny shot Mr. Gordon Darcy Grymes.”

  Jenny Darrell’s hands tightened convulsively on the damask chair back as she braced herself for her grandfather, as he turned slowly to acknowledge her existence and her presence there in the room.

  “Jennifer… shot Grymes?” His glance moved back to Miss Olive. “Bilgewater and potato peels! Look at her. She couldn’t shoot off a Christmas cracker. What blasted fool says she shot Gordon Darcy Grymes?”

  “I say it, Grandfather! I say it!”

  “Great…” Professor Darrell felt for the black ribbon that secured his black horn-rimmed nose glasses. He put them on and looked at her. “I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m drunk or I’m crazy.”

  “You’re probably both, Tinsley,” Miss Olive said. “And I would have preferred it if everybody just said it was suicide and let it go at that. It would have been nicer for all of us. But I will not stand here and let Jenny say something I know is not the truth. Tell the truth and shame the devil, is what Papa—”

  “Olive, your father was a—”

  “Tinsley, my father was not a—”

  “Go on, Miss Olive,” Jonas said. “You weren’t asleep, Saturday night, were you. You were out walking your cat. You saw Jenny and Grymes leave the Court. You saw something else. What was it, Miss Olive?”

  The fresh pink roses in Miss Olive’s cheeks were a faded mauve, her blue eyes round with appeal, as she nervously snapped and unsnapped the catch of her white bag.

  “I’d rather not say, Dr. Smith. As long as Jenny did not do it, it doesn’t matter really, does it? He’s dead. He can’t come back.”

  “—What is urushiol, Miss Olive? Why did you give me the piece about urushiol? And why did you give me the bowl of goldfish, Miss Olive?”

  “Because I saw somebody come off the College Campus in that old automobile. I was very much surprised, because… well, it was very surprising to me.”

  “Who was it, Miss Olive?”

  Miss Olive was trembling.

  “Of course, I don’t like to make trouble for people, and I don’t like to say people aren’t telling the truth, and I didn’t know what to do, because I… I was afraid. But I tried, all along, over and over, to tell Dr. Smith I was troubled with insomnia, and up a great deal of the night. And goldfish eat mosquito larvae, doctor. I thought you ought to know that. And urushiol is named after a Japanese scientist and it’s what our Navy friends find in lacquer poisoning out in the Orient, and it is also the blistering compound in poison ivy. I gave you the fish so you’d understand there are no mosquitoes in my back yard, Dr. Smith, and I gave you the clipping about the urushiol so you’d see that anybody who is all covered up with calamine lotion and says she is bitten by mosquitoes, and suddenly starts wearing pants instead of skirts to cover up her legs, because she’s got poison ivy, isn’t telling the truth, and anyway Miss Van Holt did take the old car, and I saw her go, and I saw her come back. Because she was the one who—”

  “Watch it!” Jonas said.

  Philippa Van Holt’s hand was moving slowly down in the love seat. Sergeant Digges took two steps and caught her wrist. She straightened up sharply.

  “That’s a… a stupid lie,” she said. The sherry-brown eyes were burning coals. Her face was hard, her jaw tight. “It’s a lie. For God’s sake, Miss Olive’s—”

  “Why, Miss Van Holt.”

  Miss Olive’s cheeks were flushed an indignant pink.

  “I think that’s most ungrateful… You ought to be ashamed, after I’ve gone out of my way to say nothing to Sergeant Digges. You know you have poison ivy, and you know you got it Saturday night, because you didn’t start complaining about mosquitoes and scratching till Sunday, and littering up my bathroom with calamine lotion till the middle of the afternoon. I know poison ivy when I see it, and I keep goldfish just so I won’t have mosquitoes in my pool. And you know as well as I do that Mr. Darcy called you up at ten o’clock Saturday night, and you answered and said ‘Wait till I see if the old bat’s asleep,’ and you came up to my room and opened my door and spoke my name. I pretended I was asleep, because I didn’t enjoy being called an old bat, and if you had anything to say over my telephone you were afraid for me to listen to, then you had no right in my house, using my telephone, and I intended to ask you to leave the very next morning.”

  “Why didn’t you?” said Philippa Van Holt.

  “Because I didn’t dare. After the unladylike way you talked over the phone, about seeing people in hell first, and getting your cut of the property, and anybody being fool enough to throw away millions of dollars that belonged to them and they could prove it, and not caring whether they played around or didn’t as long as you got your share, I didn’t feel I wanted to cross you when you were in a bad mood. And especially after I saw your face under the street light, I was so alarmed I got up and took my cat out, and I saw you in the old car, and I heard you when you came back and looked in my room to see if I was still asleep. And then what you said about being married and pretending to be in love with that young man. And saying I had mosquitoes in my pool. I just don’t like people that—”

  Miss Olive broke off as the she-devil unleashed blazed out of Philippa Van Holt’s burning brown eyes. Sergeant Digges’s hand closed harder on her arm, and Jonas stepped protectively closer to the plump frightened old lady.

  “I was just dumb, lady,” he said to her. “It wasn’t till a few minutes ago after Digges put Gordon Grymes on the spot about changing his name and finding out there was a record, so it could be proved the Foundry belonged to Miss Van Holt’s husband, that I got your word about urushiol and the goldfish. I don’t know that I’d have got it then if I hadn’t just had a kid in the office with his legs covered with poison ivy, and happened to notice his card, and remembered the dab of calamine Miss Van Holt said wasn’t powder but lotion for mosquito bites on her face, down at the Yacht Club the other night.”

  He turned to Philippa.

  “You overplayed it, Miss Van Holt. I swallowed your gag about somebody in the house the night you tried to shoot me, knowing Tom Darrell had frenched out of the Yard again and knowing I’d blame it on him. It was flattering. You must have thought I was catching on to you when I wasn’t.”

  “The Sergeant could have,” Philippa Van Holt said coolly. “And you did swallow it, didn’t you?”

  “I did, and that’s okay. I forgot you called yourself a fourth-rate actress, and I forgot you’re a writer used to making up stories. And that’s okay too. But it wasn’t okay to dope my dog, and it wasn’t okay to pretend you’re a friend of Jenny’s and try to make her take the rap. How did you do it?—She told you you were saving your grandfather, Jenny?”

  Jenny Darrell, frozen behind the chair, her face a deathmask, was staring at Philippa in dumb stupid horror.

  “She… she said it was Grandfather. She said she knew. It… he’d thought it was Elizabeth, out there with Gordon, and that’s why he shot him. She said she saw him take the car from St. John’s. She
said… oh, Philippa, how could you do such a thing!”

  “All right,” said Miss Van Holt. “So what? I told you to leave him alone. You said I was jealous. Okay, maybe I was. No high school brat’s going to walk off with my husband. I shot him. What do you think? And I’ve been almost crazy, but not for reasons the horse doctor thought. It’s this damned poison ivy. How should I know the place out there’s full of it? I never saw the stuff before. I knew he was going to take you out there. He liked to tell me the places he was going and who he was taking and what he was going to do. It was old stuff. I should have killed him a long time before this. But when he calls me up and tells me he likes his precious damned brother, and the Foundry really belongs to him, and he feels sorry for him, and he’s not going to bother about the property that’s willed to him and in his name, then that’s really it. He forgot he’d made a will himself, and I’d made him make it in his own name, when he first told me about the switch—in the days I first married him and he hadn’t started picking up every gal he saw.”

  “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!”

  Jenny Darrell put her dark head down on the back of the chair.

  Philippa looked at her with a curious expression of pitying contempt.

  “Your grandfather’s right, Jenny. You’ll go through life trusting a lot of heels. You trusted my husband and you trusted me. And your grandfather here, who’s never spoken a decent word to you—what do you do for him? You’ll go to jail to keep him from going… the blustering old fool. That’s the kind you are. So you don’t believe me? Take that bag, Jonas.”

  She motioned to her handbag in the love seat. Jonas picked it up and opened it.

  “Give her that little object in there. See if she remembers it.”

  It was a beautiful thing of ivory and mother-of-pearl, chased silver and deadly steel. Jenny closed her eyes and turned away as Jonas thrust it into her hand. She gripped it and held on to it for an instant, opened her eyes and looked at it.