The Philadelphia Murder Story (3 page)

I was aware there were other people in the room, but it was the pair of blank blue eyes in the saffron face of the old woman that focused my attention. They were blank and vague, but they sharpened with surprising intentness as she took me in from head to foot, and without a glimmer of remembrance or recognition.

“Dear Child,” she repeated. “You haven’t changed at All. I’m so Happy to see you Again.”

I wouldn’t have remembered her either. There was no trace of the extraordinary beauty she’d had once. She had on a black padded silk coat with an enormous burst of diamonds in the white ruching at her neck. Her nose was sharp as a hawk’s and her hair was a preposterous dye job of brilliant henna in a short fuzz all over her head.

Abigail Whitney’s feud with her brother didn’t, it seemed, extend to his family.

“You remember my Brother’s children, dear Child,” she said. She emphasized words the way she capitalized them when she wrote. “Elsie, and Monk, and Elsie’s husband, Sam. No, not Sam. No one remembers Sam, because no one knew him. Sam is Respectable… Come, dear Boy, I want you to meet Mrs. Latham… This is Sam Phelps, dear Child.” Respectable was the word, I thought as Sam same forward. He was very bald, with a waxed mustache, pince-nez in his hand, a high wing collar, a black coat and knife-edge-pressed, gray-striped trousers. He was forty, I imagined, and looked as if he had all the prejudices he would ever need.

We spoke to each other. There was nothing cordial about Sam, but there wasn’t about any of the others. Philadelphians, a famous Philadelphian once said, are taller and fairer than the Chinese but not so progressive, and, he might have added, not so warmly effusive as the English. In this instance, however, looking around at the three others nodding stiffly to me, I wasn’t surprised, for they’d obviously been in the course of a first-class family row.

“And Travis, dear Child. You remember Travis Elliot.”

The son of Mrs. Whitney’s old friend who had taken his own life seemed much more at home than Sam Phelps did, and furthermore, I thought, he did not look as if it would take any particular gratitude to make a girl delighted to marry him. He was tall and attractive and about thirty-five, and looked definitely what Mrs. Whitney had said he was, a successful young Philadelphia lawyer. I looked at Judge Whitney’s son Monk with more interest. He was at least old enough to be a major in the Marine Corps, and from the double row of ribbons, two of them star-sprinkled, over the pocket of his tunic, he had seen action in places far remote from Rittenhouse Square. His face was broad, rugged, tough and weather-beaten, and so sun-bronzed that his gray eyes looked very light. He had shaggy eyebrows and a big, generous mouth, and what was left of his hair after a G.I. haircut was dark and crisp.

I wondered whether he’d really been wild or just headstrong. He looked disciplined enough now, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or eight, and people don’t get to be majors in the Marine Corps—out there—without something.

After he’d spoken to me, Sam Phelps went abruptly to the side of the bed. “We must be going, I’m afraid. Mustn’t tire you.”

“Goodbye, dear Boy,” Abigail Whitney said, hastily and with considerable relief, I thought. “Goodbye, Elsie.” She turned to me. “Do sit down, my dear. What is that you have in your hand?”

I wasn’t aware at all that I was still holding Myron Kane’s fan mail.

“It’s just a letter for Myron Kane,” I said. “A little man named Toplady gave it to me in the taxi.”

I thought even then there was a short silence in the room.

Mrs. Whitney spoke quickly, “Wasn’t that a book?
Toplady on a Totem Pole?
… Travis, where is Elsie’s coat? She has a Meeting.”

Elsie Phelps spoke sharply. “I’m not leaving this house, Aunt Abby—not until you’ve told us what’s in that profile of father. You know what’s in it. We want to know too.”

I’d already got the impression that Elsie Whitney Phelps was the focal point of the seething disturbance in the room. It seemed to me a fine instance of natural selection that she was Sam’s wife. She was thirty, probably, sandy-haired, with rather pale blue eyes, and not unattractive, in a green tweed suit and hat that she’d had a long time and would continue to have till she gave them to some extraordinary deserving and respectable indigent. There was a simple conviction of superiority about her that was not complacent at all, but just the natural consequence of having been born in Philadelphia, a Whitney, endowed at birth with the knowledge of right and wrong and no sense of humor.

Mrs. Whitney held out her hand to me. “Elsie’s a Tiresome Woman, Dear Child,” she said. “You have no interest in this—”

Elsie Phelps cast me an angry glance. “She’s a friend of Myron Kane’s, isn’t she? I’ll tell you what’s happened, Aunt Abby. You’ve been sitting up here for years trying to make trouble for father, and now it’s backfired.”

Her husband and her brother both started to speak, and she turned on them hotly. “If you had any pride you’d do something, Monk Whitney!” Her voice rose. “It doesn’t make any difference to Sam. He doesn’t realize that people in our position can’t have mud thrown at them! And Travis— you’d think Travis would understand how I feel. If he wasn’t trying to defend Laurel Frazier—”

“Keep Laurel out of this,” Monk said curtly. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“Whose fault was it? If it hadn’t been for her, Myron Kane wouldn’t ever have thought of doing a story on father! He was mad about her in London last summer—father told me so. He says himself it’s the only reason he ever came here!”

Travis Elliot said, “If I were you, I’d shut up, Elsie.”

She turned furiously on him. “You’re a fine one to talk! After the smear campaign people put you through, everybody’d think you’d—” She stopped short, in a sudden silence that struck the room like a clap of thunder. “I’m sorry, Travis,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right,” he said. His face was flushed a little. “Just get it straight, though. Nobody ever smeared me. People were damned decent to me. And if Laurel made a mistake, she didn’t do it on purpose. If you’d stow this holier-than-thou business, you’d make fewer yourself. I think you’ve said plenty, and if I were you I’d go home.”

Mrs. Whitney was lying back on her yellow pillows.

“All right,” Elsie Phelps said. When she looked at her aunt, her eyes were sharp pinpoints of anger. “When Aunt Abby feels better, maybe she’ll tell you what was in the sealed document Laurel gave Myron Kane. And why she’s so frantic to get it back.”

Mrs. Whitney’s hand moved slightly on the green blanket cover.

Monk Whitney turned abruptly. “What sealed document?”

He’d been looking out the window at the mirror reflecting his father’s doorway. I saw in it, as he must have done, the slim, auburn-crowned figure of the girl there, visible in the light from the hall as she took the key out of the lock and slipped quickly inside.

“What document?” he repeated.

Elsie Phelps laughed shortly. “Nobody ever heard of anything. Nobody knows anything. If Myron Kane was in this conspiracy of silence, it would be lovely. But he isn’t. You’d better go back and get another ribbon in the Pacific; you’ve never been any good anywhere else. You can kill Japs, but you haven’t got what it takes to keep one news reporter from disgracing your own family.”

He looked at her silently. There was an angry flush on Travis Elliot’s face as he turned and threw his half-smoked cigarette abruptly into the fire.

“I think we’d better go,” Sam Phelps said nervously. He went to Monk Whitney and put out his hand. “Sorry. Elsie’s upset. All this war work she’s doing—”

Monk Whitney smiled rather grimly. “I’m used to it, Sam. So long.”

Sam Phelps made a stiff bow to me and followed his wife out. There was complete silence in the room for an instant. Abigail Whitney opened her eyes then.

“Elsie is Very Trying,” she said. “I’ve always found it best not to listen to her. I Concentrate my Mind on Something Else.” She raised her hand toward me. “Dear Child, you want to go to your room. It’s upstairs, in back, or is it front? It’s wherever Myron isn’t, and I’m sure you can tell. Come down Again soon, won’t you?” She went on without a stop, “Travis, dear Boy, you must have a great many Things to do. I won’t keep you any longer—and close the door, it’s very drafty in here.”

Travis Elliot followed me out into the hall and did close the door. Then he looked at me with a smile. “You’ll get used to her.”

“I hadn’t realized she was an invalid,” I said.

He nodded. “She slipped on the ice eight years ago, and she’s never walked since.”

His face sobered. “It was coming from my father’s funeral. I’ve always felt sort of-Well, you know. That’s not why I come here, though. I’m nuts about her… Oh, I forgot.”

He turned back and knocked on the door, and I went on upstairs, to find the back room, or was it the front.

I knew the instant I pushed open the door that it wasn’t the back. My feet had made no sound on the thickly carpeted stairs. The girl kneeling on the floor beside the waste-paper basket, her back to me, her hair a shower of molten copper in the light from the desk lamp, was too intently occupied to be aware the door was opening until it was too late.

She started violently and flashed her head around, a breathless gasp parting her red lips, the defiance that had darted into her eyes changing to alarmed dismay at the sight of someone she didn’t know. I must have looked just as startled myself.

“Who… are you?” she stammered. Her face flushed crimson as she got to her feet in the middle of the litter of papers from Myron Kane’s wastebasket. Some of them were still in crumpled balls, and the ones she’d smoothed out to read had partly finished paragraphs on them, obviously discarded by Myron Kane as unsatisfactory.

“I’m Grace Latham,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was looking for my room.”

She took a step toward me. “You’re a friend of Myron’s, aren’t you? He’s talked about you. I’m Laurel Frazier. Maybe you can do something. That’s why Mrs. Whitney asked you to come, isn’t it?”

She stood there, her back to the desk, slim and really lovely, and still startled, the color in her cheeks heightened, her chin raised, not defiant now, so much as defensive. She didn’t look more than eighteen, in the Quakerish gray wool dress with a narrow white collar tied in a small bow at the throat. Her eyes were wide-set and the curious gray-blue of wood hyacinths, flecked with black. I could understand Travis Elliot and Myron Kane wanting to marry her more easily than I could Judge Whitney having had her as private secretary for five years. She looked more like a frightened, lovely child than an efficient young woman one took on a mission to London.

It was an extraordinarily embarrassing situation for both of us, and I didn’t really know what to say.

“I’m not a friend of Myron’s when he takes things that don’t belong to him,” I replied. I don’t know why I added, “It’s the—the document, I suppose?”

It seemed a silly thing to call it, but that was apparently what it was, the way they all referred to it.

The pulse in her throat quickened as she stared at me. “He… told you?”

I shook my head. “Judge Whitney’s daughter. Mrs. Phelps.”

“Elsie.” It was hardly more than a whisper, and the color ebbed sharply from her cheeks. “Then she was listening. I knew she was. I told him so.”

“Told—”

“Judge Whitney.” She said it mechanically. “Oh, it’s so awful! Now everybody-And it’s my fault!”

She turned her head away, trying to keep back the tears that were glistening along her thick black lashes. I looked around the room. She’d done a thorough if slapdash job of searching it. The drawers of the dresser and the desk were pushed back crooked and the books and papers on the desk were pretty helter-skelter.

“If only I’d been careful!” she said. “And he’s being so wonderful about it. He keeps saying not to worry, it isn’t my fault and it’ll turn up somewhere in the library, but I know he’s terribly upset. He’s gone through everything over and again, at night after I’ve gone. But it isn’t there. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What… is it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is it’s something that will… hurt somebody terribly.” She tried to control her voice. “It’s worse because it wasn’t his. It’s something she gave him to keep.” She nodded down toward Abigail Whitney’s room. “She gave it to him because she said she could trust him not to open it better than she could herself.”

“Then she doesn’t—neither of them knows what’s in it?”

“She may now. Maybe Myron told her. She always finds everything out, someway.”

I wondered if that could explain her sudden desperate fear when she’d talked to me over the phone that morning. She surely hadn’t known, whatever it was, when she wrote to me.

“If only I hadn’t been so smart,” Laurel Frazier was saying helplessly. “It was me that suggested it. I wanted people to know about my boss, because I’m so proud of him. And he said I could give Myron a file of his old records, and it must have been in them.”

She stopped short, her slim body stiffening as if an electric charge had gone through it, the color rising in her cheeks again. She was looking past me at the door, and I turned quickly. Monk Whitney was there, looking down at the littered floor. If he was surprised, there was nothing in his manner to show it. He came on into the room.

“It didn’t occur to you to check through the file before you gave it to him?” he said calmly. “Where’s the old Frazier efficiency they talk about, Coppertop?”

She flared up passionately. “Quit calling me Coppertop! And I don’t need you to tell me what I should have done! I know it. I started to, but we were busy, and they were all before my time. I know it’s my fault. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t!”

“Myself, I don’t see what all the row’s about,” he said imperturbably. “If the old man’s got a dark streak in the past, I’m all for it. If it’s too dark, the
Post
isn’t going to publish it. They aren’t running a scandal sheet. Nobody’ll be hurt.”

“You don’t know Myron Kane!” Laurel retorted hotly. “He’s so clever, they’ll never know what he’s doing. It’ll sound perfectly all right. I know. He told me in London last year he’d got even with lots of people that way.”