The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (18 page)

“Colonel Primrose told me so,” I said. “I asked Sylvia about it, and she almost snapped my head off.”

He made some kind of sound at that. If it didn’t sound melodramatic and stupid I’d say it was more of a sob than a laugh.

“Well, I thought it was important. I mean, really a contribution. You hear all sorts of inside stuff that makes all the outside of this crazy place have some kind of sense when you know about it. It makes you believe in democracy. I don’t mean lip service. It makes you see the country’s sound, on the whole, and—well, it’s something I believe in like hell. And I believed in this book, and…”

“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

“Well, I told you I had a system of shorthand,” he said. “I thought I could take all the dope down verbatim, and I’d have it someday. I wouldn’t have to depend on memory. And a lot of it was the sort of thing you couldn’t risk letting get in anybody else’s hands.”

He stopped again. I waited.

“I told Sylvia about it. She was as excited as I was. We talked about doing it together, then. She’d do the social comedy, and it would be a complete picture of Washington. There was none of her stuff she couldn’t keep in her own notes, but we were doing it all together and I taught her my system of shorthand.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And I keep it all under lock and key except the current record—about a week at a time.”

He stopped again, and went on quietly.

“Well, that’s it. That’s what comes out in ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ Word for word. I told you I didn’t read it at first, and that’s right. I’ve been checking the last two months of it with my own notes—got ’em out of the bank this noon. Well, they’re right. I’m the guy, and that’s all. They can’t prove it, but they don’t have to. And I’m—well, I’m washed up, Grace. And I don’t care about that. It’s—oh, hell, I didn’t think she’d let me down. I really—had my heart in this thing.” We sat there on the roadside, the cars coming slowly by, their chains clank-clanking rhythmically on the snow-covered drive.

“It just
can’t
be, Pete,” I said at last. “It just
can’t.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all day. I’m going crazy saying it.”

He put his hand out and squeezed mine hard for an instant.

“There’s no two ways out of it, Grace. And it’s okay. Maybe she needed the money for something. Maybe she just thought I was too smart. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just pack up and take my carcass somewhere else. Now let’s go find your Colonel.”

“No,” I said. “This isn’t fair, Pete. You can’t do it this way. You’ve got to tell her—see what she says.”

“No, sister,” he said. “It’ll just stop, you see. She’ll be O.K., and nobody’ll ever know the difference. It’s finished—”

“It’s not,” I retorted. “What about Corliss Marshall? Colonel Primrose is sure that’s why he was killed. Captain Lamb is sure Sylvia did it.”

“I thought it was me,” he said shortly.

“It was Sylvia’s dress and shoe that—”

I stopped. If he thought she wrote it, I was telling him she was a murderess too.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Finish it,” he said curtly.

“Blood, that’s all,” I said.

He looked at me, his face turning paler in the glare of the snow under the park light. Then he let out the clutch without a word. The chains caught and the car moved slowly under the Q Street bridge and then the P Street bridge, and up the hill to Georgetown.

“I don’t believe it,” he said as we stopped at the top to let the cars come by.

I suppose that being a woman makes me volatile and unstable. At any rate, by the time Pete and I got to my house and rang the bell the terror that had brought me there was dim in the background.

Bliss Thatcher opened the door himself.

“My dear Mrs. Latham, you’ve come to—”

He stopped abruptly, seeing Pete behind me on the steps, his smile vanishing as if someone had wiped it off with a cloth.

“Good evening, Hamilton.—Will you come in?”

It’s always odd seeing your own house being lived in by somebody else. Even Colonel Primrose standing in front of the fire in the back sitting room was one of those familiar things become suddenly unfamiliar. He glanced from me to Pete and back at me again, his face a little troubled.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Hamilton,” Bliss Thatcher said. “It saves me the trouble of coming to you.”

He turned to my desk that he’d had moved in front of the garden windows, and picked up the folded salmon-yellow sheet lying there. His face was hard and his eyes steely. Pete’s jaw tightened. I knew, of course, inside of me, that he didn’t know exactly what was coming—but he did know the nature of it.

“I’ve refused to believe you were connected with this thing, Hamilton,” Bliss Thatcher said grimly. “I told you this—last week—in order to see. I told no one else, and no one else could have got it from any other source… because I made it up. And here it is. My name included.”

He held the folded sheet out. Pete took it and read it. I thought his jaw went a little tighter, as if this came as a shock in spite of his being ready for it. He handed it back silently.

“What have you got to say, Hamilton?”

“You’ve proved it, sir. I have nothing to say.”

Colonel Primrose took a step forward.

“You can say you didn’t write it, Hamilton.”

Pete looked at him. “I obviously do write it, Colonel,” he said coolly. “If I said I didn’t, earlier, it’s because I’m apt to forget these things I just tear off in my spare time.”

He turned back to Thatcher.

“I’m sorry. It was a low filthy way to repay you for all your kindness. There’s nothing else for me to say.—If you’re all right now, Grace, I’ll leave you.”

I held out my hand. He gripped it hard for a moment.

“Good-night.”

“Good-night, Pete,” I whispered.

I stood there, and so did Bliss Thatcher and Colonel Primrose, until the door closed quietly and he was gone. And then none of us said anything—for hours, it seemed to me.

“What does this mean, Colonel?” Bliss Thatcher said at last. “I still don’t believe that man writes it. I’m damned if I do.”

He tossed the salmon-pink sheet down on the desk while Colonel Primrose was giving the impression of a man nodding his head and shaking it at the same time.

I picked it up and opened it. I didn’t read all of it. The first sentence was enough—something to the effect that Bliss Thatcher had admitted to this correspondent that he had used his present position to ruin at least two small competitors. I put it down quickly.

“It’s quite false, of course, but I was so sure of him,” he said simply. “And I don’t know why, but I still am. What’s going on here, Colonel?”

Colonel Primrose did shake his head, this time, very thoughtfully. And I remembered what I’d come for, just as we were leaving. I suppose it’s because dignity and faith are fundamentally more important in human relations than murder is, really, that the whole business of Kurt Hofmann seemed an anti-climax when I finally told it. We’d gone outside and got into Colonel Primrose’s car, Sergeant Buck standing guard, and sat there in front of my house while I went through it. I don’t know whether Colonel Primrose thought it was an anti-climax, but he didn’t say anything for several moments. Then he said,

“Have you told anybody else?”

I shook my head.

“Then Buck can take you back to the hotel.”

“I’d better stick around there tonight, I guess, sir,” the Sergeant said. It was the only time I’d ever heard anything come out of the side of that lantern-jawed dead pan that made me think he’d care whether I lived or died. And then he said, “I wouldn’t want anything should happen to Miss Sherwood. She’s a mighty fine little girl.”

Nevertheless, it was my door he stayed outside of—or at least he was there in the morning when I opened it to get the papers. He handed me my mail, glacially as ever.

“Would you like some coffee, Sergeant?” I asked.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said, just as always.

I went back and ordered my breakfast. There was a letter from my younger son concerning a bargain in skis. Their owner had broken one leg and one arm and two ribs. They would count as a birthday present in July if I’d send the check that day special delivery, before the offer expired in favor of the boy’s roommate. I wrote the check and a letter about anatomical breakage and looked around for an envelope. There was none in the desk. Just as I was about to call the maid for some the phone rang. It was Sylvia.

“Can you come up here right away?” she said. Her voice was flat and lifeless. “I’ve got to see you.”

There’s no use saying all the things I thought as I got dressed and went out. I was on my own again, I noticed— Sergeant Buck was gone. I remembered the check as I started toward the elevator, went back and got it and my letter and went on up.

She was sitting at her typewriter, just finishing a letter. She pulled it out and put an envelope in without more than nodding, her eyes lost in deep circles in her white face.

“Be an angel,” I said. “Address that envelope for me to my son Scott, will you? Scott C. Latham.”

“He’s at St. Paul’s, isn’t he?”

I nodded. She typed it, pulled it out and handed it to me. The phone rang just as she’d started to speak. I was standing right by it and picked it up. She watched me almost desperate-eyed, I knew hoping against the bitterest possible hope that it was Pete. But it wasn’t. It was Colonel Primrose.

“It’s Grace Latham, Colonel,” I said.

“I’m glad, my dear. Hoped I could get you. I wanted to tell you that Kurt Hofmann is dead.”

I caught the back of the chair to steady myself. Sylvia started forward, catching something of what had happened from the look on my face. “It’s Kurt Hofmann,” I whispered quickly.

“Was it—suicide?” I said into the phone.

“No, my dear,” Colonel Primrose answered calmly. “He was shot by someone. Not suicide. I’ll be up in a few minutes. I want to see Sylvia.”

I put the phone down.

“He was shot,” I said. “Colonel Primrose will be up here in a few minutes. It wasn’t suicide.”

I took the letter with the check in it out of my pocket and put it in Sylvia’s envelope, hardly aware I was doing it. I moistened the flap, put it down on the table and moved the side of my closed hand across the face to keep from getting my hand sticky. Then I stopped, staring down at it in slowly dawning fright.

“Scott C. Latham,” it read.

As plainly as if he were in the room repeating it, I could hear Colonel Primrose saying, “The small ‘t’ and the capital ‘L’ are out of alignment and the tail of the small ‘a’ is very dim. The whole thing needs cleaning…”

I turned slowly and looked at Sylvia. Then my eyes moved gradually and came to rest on her typewriter.

As I stood there staring down at that typewriter, Sylvia got up suddenly, too absorbed in something else to pay attention to me, stood for a moment by the window and turned abruptly. How I’d ever thought her face was a mask to conceal anything I couldn’t imagine… or how it could have changed so, from that radiant instant she was in Pete Hamilton’s arms yesterday to what it was now.

“If I could only get hold of Gordon Lacey,” she said, with a kind of quiet desperate intentness. “He must be somewhere—he can’t have dropped off the earth completely!”

If I looked blank it wasn’t for the reason she thought, because she said, “Don’t you see, Grace! Don’t you remember what Corliss said about him that night! Corliss
must
have found out—something—through him! He
must
be the person who knows about this!”

I couldn’t say a word. It had come into my mind how odd it was for me to be sitting there with two opposite interpretations of what she was saying in my consciousness at the same time. For if she herself did write that wretched newsletter—perhaps even had murdered Corliss Marshall to keep him from telling not on Pete but on hex self—then that would explain her almost frantic anxiety to get hold of Gordon Lacey, just as easily as it was explained if she didn’t write it, and truly believed Pete didn’t, and thought that finding Lacey would prove who did.

“I don’t understand this, Grace,” she said more calmly, and with a definite effort to be calm, as if she realized how important it was that she should be. “Corliss is killed because he knew who wrote the thing. Colonel Primrose insists on that. And Alicia Wrenn’s killed. But she
couldn’t
have known who wrote it—she didn’t know anything about it. And I’m sure she didn’t know who killed Corliss. And now Hofmann’s killed.”

She turned away, her hands thrust into the pockets of her yellow wool dress, trying to control herself.

“There must be some other reason. Colonel Primrose
must
be wrong.”

“Pete,” I said quietly, “told Colonel Primrose and Bliss Thatcher last night that he writes ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ ”

I hadn’t meant to say it. It didn’t really follow, the way I said it, what she’d said. When I did, I don’t know what I expected exactly—whether I had a remote idea that she’d do something dramatic and confess then and there, or what. She didn’t, at any rate. She just looked at me, her face going blank, the way I used to see it, and her body becoming suddenly quiet.

“Oh,” she said. She didn’t speak for some time. Then she said, “It
is
true, then, isn’t it?”

“That… he writes it?” I asked steadily.

She flared up like a box of matches thrown into the fire.

“No! That it’s his stuff they use. That’s what I’ve been afraid of, and that’s what I haven’t had the courage to say to him! He loved it so, he was so proud of it. I couldn’t say ‘Pete, it’s too dangerous.’ He was so sure nobody else could read it. And now it’s happened—and that’s why I’ve got to find Gordon Lacey. Don’t you remember what Pete said? He’s the
only
other one who could read it—it
must
be coming through him!”

“—The
only
other one, Sylvia?” I asked.

The words got out of my mouth before I really knew what I was saying. I shouldn’t have said them in any case—and here, apart from everything else, I was certainly breaking a solemn promise.