“I wonder. A. J. and Randall Nash started out together. Randall tried to get a certain wealthy girl. Her father lost his money, Randall dropped her. Meanwhile A. J. was doing the same thing, with the difference that his girl had a lot of money and hung on to it. And Randall walked in and took the girl
and
the money. Marie, of course. Well, looking at A. J., with his long reputation—and a very well deserved one too—for square dealing, what would you think he’d thought of that?”
“I don’t suppose he liked it at all,” I said.
“And you’re probably right, for once.”
He smiled.
“Everybody’s got to be right once in his life,” I said philosophically.
“You’d be surprised, Mrs. Latham. Anyway. Then came Nash’s disagreements that ended in divorce. A. J. is supposed to have remained neutral, and did, as far as I remember. Until Randall married again, that is. And A. J. never married at all. Now, you heard Iris say he didn’t see her hand when she first met him.—You don’t think that was the result of any sudden feeling against
her,
do you?”
“No,” I admitted. “It would seem to be letting off a bit of old spleen.”
“Old steam is the idiom, I believe. But I see what you mean. Well, let’s say A. J. had been nursing some sort of an inverted grievance a good many years, and along comes Randall Nash… and adds horrible insult to horrible injury by asking him to be a party to cheating the only woman he’s ever known to have been in love with. Though, as you say, it’s hard to see how he could have been.”
“I don’t say things like that,” I said. “Well, it does seem pretty shortsighted. Or something.”
He grinned.
“You don’t normally go in for such admirable understatement, Mrs. Latham. Nevertheless, and supposing you
are
an upright man, what do you do when such a proposition is put to you? Remember, you’re torn between conflicting loyalties, to your friend, to your old love, to your duty as a man of integrity. What do you do?”
I saw then what he was getting at.
“Oh dear!” I said. “I suppose I forget I’m an upright citizen and man of integrity, and I take the money to keep, with the idea in mind that I see my old love gets her rights. Not, of course, that anybody’s ever thought of me as being an upright man. If I went into a phone booth and found a nickel I’d keep it, probably. A. J. ’d never think of doing it.”
Colonel Primrose nodded calmly. “No—but he might very easily let his private feelings for Marie, and his definitely integrated hatred of this red-headed interloper, make him do a thing that in the end would right the wrong that Randall was trying to do. And he wouldn’t be the first honorable man who held that the end justified the means.”
“I’m afraid he wouldn’t,” I agreed.
“All right, then. Suppose you had a large sum of money in your possession, and you needed a little of it. You know, of course, that you can put it back again almost immediately. That’s the way it always starts, Mrs. Latham… with any number of perfectly well-meaning people. I don’t suppose one embezzler out of ten admits he isn’t just borrowing, that money for a few days.”
“No doubt,” I said. “And that’s where I stop. I’ll go with you as far as admitting there’s a faint possibility that A. J. might have taken the money, thinking of Marie and hating Iris. But no further.”
“You won’t have gone as far, then,” he said calmly, “as Captain Lamb has gone.”
I stared at him in blank amazement. He’d got up and was facing me, fits face sober and a little hard.
I tried to pull myself together. “He can’t think…” I began. “—A. J. has certainly got more than all the money he needs?”
He nodded. “Apparently so, certainly.” Then he chuckled suddenly at the expression on my face.
“I don’t myself go as far as Lamb,” he said placidly. “But if Marie dies, part of that money rightfully belongs to Marie’s daughter. Marie’s daughter is unhappy and downtrodden, or that’s her story. Why should she share it with this other woman? Why should Randall, having cheated Marie and got away with it, be allowed to cheat her daughter… who, as you may know, is going to marry A. J.’s nephew.”
He looked at me with a sardonic glint in his eyes, shaking his head a little. “However, my dear Mrs. Latham, I don’t—”
The telephone rang sharply. I thought from the alacrity with which he answered that he had probably been waiting for it. I watched him, listening calmly; and as I saw his eyes harden suddenly and his face become intensely serious my heart was strangely heavy, so that it pounded when it beat.
“Right,” he said quietly. “I’ll bring him along.”
He put the phone down.
“What…
is
it?” I said.
“Something I haven’t expected,” he answered slowly. He was looking straight down at the phone still. I waited until I couldn’t bear it any longer.
“What
is
it?” I demanded.
“Captain Lamb,” he said. “They’ve… discovered that A. J. is accustomed to take salol tablets. For his rheumatism.”
I stared, hardly understanding what he was saying. “And that means-?”
He shook his head quickly.
“It may not mean anything, my dear.—Beyond the fact that Lowell’s dog was definitely poisoned with potassium cyanide coated with salol… and that Randall Nash spent almost an hour at A. J.’s home last night and came here and died.”
He crossed the room and opened the door. Sergeant Buck was in the hall, talking with Wilkins—whose face seemed to me unusually waxen.
“Tell Mr. McClean I’d like to speak to him.”
As the sergeant opened the drawing room door across the hall I could see the group gathered round the tea table: Angus and Steve and Mac, and Iris behind it, green-eyed and taut but smiling and outwardly entirely calm. Edith St. Martin was sitting on the sofa, her Pekinese in her lap, that fixed lifted smile on her face under her black dyed hair with the two white wings, but not in her eyes. A. J. was not there, neither was Lowell.
“Mr. McClean, ma’am?” I heard Sergeant Buck say, and I heard Angie’s answer: “He’s gone home. My sister drove him.”
When Sergeant Buck came back to the hall Colonel Primrose nodded curtly before he spoke. “Go tell Captain Lamb I’ve gone out to Foxall Road. Bring him out.”
He turned to me. “Have you got your car here?”
I nodded.
“Can you drive me out to McClean’s?”
“Surely.”
I glanced surreptitiously at Sergeant Buck. He was not beaming with satisfaction… since I’m apparently going in for understatement.
It was dark outside. Colonel Primrose got in the car beside me and I started the engine. I crossed Wisconsin Avenue into Reservoir Road, passed the High School and the Medical School, and turned down Foxall Road and into A. J. McClean’s graveled driveway at just the instant that the tail-lights of Lowell’s blue roadster disappeared down the hill, making at least sixty miles an hour.
“Oh,” I said, “—I should have given you this before, by the way.”
I stopped the car in front of the two stone dogs that guard A. J.’s Victorian dwelling and put on the brake. I reached under my fur coat and fished the letter Wilkins had given me out of my pocket. I suppose it was remembering the sight of Sergeant Buck talking to Wilkins in the hall that must have made me think suddenly that of course it was bound to come out sooner or later. At any rate, I gave it to him. He opened it under the light on the dash.
“You’re very annoying,” he said seriously, putting it in his pocket. “And this, I should say, is just about one of the silliest things you’ve ever done.”
He got out of the car and hurried up the steps. I followed meekly.
“You’d better stay here,” he said. He pressed the bell and pressed it again, hardly waiting until the far-off buzz had died out of our ears. He turned the knob. The door was locked. He looked at me for an instant, sharply and very queerly. I stood there beside him, stupidly I’m afraid. I have never seen him like this before.
Then somewhere in the house I could hear a door open and close. We waited, Colonel Primrose pressing the bell again and again. At last I saw a door open at the top of the stairs, visible through the glass in front of us, and a light swinging, pendulum-fashion, back and forth across it—now light, now dark. An old colored woman came hobbling down the stairs. It seemed ten minutes before she got to the bottom and across the hall to let us in.
“Good evenin’, Cunnel—’deed it’s mighty nice t’ see you all.—Mistuh A. J. he ain’ home.”
“Didn’t he just come?” Colonel Primrose asked sharply.
“ Deed he might have. Ah’s gettin’ a little deaf. Ah don’t heah lak Ah use’ to.”
We went on in. Colonel Primrose stood for a second in the hall, and went directly across it and through the parlor to the room that A. J. always called his den. I followed him, and got to the door just after he’d opened it. A. J.’s chair behind his desk was empty. Colonel Primrose stepped into the room, and I saw him start suddenly and stand there, frozen rigid.
I took two quick steps and looked past him. A. J. McClean was lying on his leather buttoned couch, his head rolled to one side. On his’ face was the same ghastly bitter grin that I had already seen, only last night, on the dead face of Randall Nash.
We both stood there, Colonel Primrose and I, in the dark little Victorian room, speechless, all motion frozen in our limbs, staring at that dreadful grin on A. J. McClean’s grey lifeless face. It was so hideously ironic that death should make him do that, when life had never got more than a cold smile from him, and that seldom. But of course it was not his own. We had both seen that grimace before, on Randall Nash’s face, and there was no mistaking it.
It was I who spoke first, oddly enough—or so I thought till I realized that Colonel Primrose was struck silent not so much with A. J.’s death as with the fear that he might have been able to prevent it. Whether he could have done I’m not sure now, nor is he. He thought so then.
“Is it suicide?” I whispered. My voice reverberated in the unearthly silence of the room. I saw him shake his head slowly, and I saw rather than heard him say, “No. It’s murder.”
“Then it wasn’t—”
He shook his head impatiently. “No, no.”
In the silence I could hear a queer shuffling sound somewhere behind me. I must have felt it long before I heard it, for I had a curious cold prickling sensation along my spine—a vestigial remnant, I suppose, of the reaction that makes the hair on a dog’s back stand when he senses an unfriendly presence. I turned around slowly, as if a magnet was drawing me against my own will.
Standing in the dim half-light of the parlor, decked in rags, rubbing her nose with the back of her dirty toil-worn hand, was Miss Lavinia, blinking, peering bleary-eyed, with her terrible drooping lips, past me into the room where A. J. lay, endlessly grinning.
I think for a moment I didn’t actually think of it as being Lavinia Fawcett, but rather as some incredibly repulsive witch-like being, profaning the corridors of death where a bewildered soul was learning its first new steps.
She shuffled closer, her mouth working.
I lost control of myself completely. “Go away!” I cried. “Oh, go away!”
I recoiled with sudden unbearable revulsion, and then stood simply aghast at my hysteria. I was shaking like a leaf.
Colonel Primrose whirled around, the astonishment on his face changing to dismay as he saw her there.
Lavinia stared at me uncomprehendingly, with that brandy-drugged stare of hers, and started shuffling backward, blinking her watery colorless eyes, moving her mouth but making no sound, casting furtive glances past us into A. J.’s room.
Colonel Primrose took a step toward her. “What are you doing here, Lavinia?” he asked quietly. She stopped, almost to the door. She had hardly seemed to me to be moving, yet the distance between us had grown perceptibly.
She shook her head and began edging backward again.
“Where’s the servant?” Colonel Primrose snapped.
“I guess she went upstairs again,” I said. I’d recovered. I was almost ashamed to look at him, knowing how he disliked women who go to pieces at the drop of a hat.
“Get her,” he said curtly. “Have her keep Lavinia in the kitchen until I talk to her. How long have you been here, Lavinia?”
“I just came, sir, I came to see Mr. McClean. I ain’t doing anybody any harm. All I want’s my rights, Colonel Primrose…”
I heard her old sing-song whine, punctuated by sniffles, going along as I hurried upstairs to find Annie. She was in a little room at the back of the third floor, reading the comic section we’d no doubt interrupted her at. Not many people came to that house; none in the daytime. Most people thought of it as being empty all day. Old Annie seldom came out of her room, except to get breakfast. Her nephew came in around five to get dinner if A. J. was to be at home.
She looked up.
“Listen, Annie,” I said. “Old Miss Lavinia’s downstairs. You take her in the kitchen and give her something to eat and some strong coffee, and keep her there. And now listen to this in particular, Annie, so you’ll understand what I’m saying. You’re not to start carrying on till later, because we need you now—do you hear? Mr. A. J. is dead.”
She dropped the brightly colored paper and blinked at me. I didn’t know whether I’d made any impression on her, or whether she’d start wailing and weeping then and there. Very slowly her black old face went putty-grey. “Lawd a’ mercy!” she breathed at last. “Oh, Lawd a’ mercy!” Then she wet her lips suddenly. “An’ Ah been up heah alone all th’ time!” she added, terror overcoming her piety.
“Go down and make some coffee for Miss Lavinia,” I said sharply. “She’s waiting.”
She nodded, dazed and grey, and hobbled out. As I heard her go heavily down the back stairs I drew a deep breath of fervent relief. I hadn’t dared to hope it would be so simple, for even if I’d been able to keep her from instantaneous and protracted mourning, I hadn’t been at all sure I could get her to go and make coffee for Lavinia Fawcett. Her own respectability would come in there. Perhaps she hadn’t understood me, I thought, and waited, half expecting to hear her hobbling back upstairs. Then, after a bit, I heard water running, and heard her call “Miss Lavinny!” and I knew it was all right.