The Philadelphia Murder Story (7 page)

“Where on Earth have you Been, Dear Child? I was Alarmed about you. Your Policeman telephoned three times. But don’t tell me now, I am very Tired. Good night. Dear Myron isn’t in yet Either. You keep such odd hours in Washington, Dear Child.”

I got out and went upstairs. I hadn’t seen Judge Whitney. It seemed odd to think of his hiding in a closet somewhere, waiting for me to close my door, so he could slip out and home. It was more than odd, it was ghastly, and so was the whole thing. I shut my door and sat down on the side of the bed. I couldn’t stop shaking enough to get my coat off, and for hours after I got into bed I lay there, freezing and unable to get warm.

Why had Abigail Whitney pretended for all those years that she was bedridden? What had kept her there, lying all day on her yellow cushions, watching in her mirrors, getting up at night, so her muscles wouldn’t atrophy, and—who could tell?—perhaps even slipping out and wandering alone in the empty darkness of the square?

I lay there listening. Myron Kane still hadn’t come in. I wondered where he could have gone, and then I wondered what could be in the letter Albert Toplady had given me in the taxi that was ruinous enough for Myron to be willing to barter the knowledge he had of Judge Whitney for it. And incredible as it must seem, it struck me then, for the first time, that the reason Myron had gone to Travis Elliot was not that Travis was a lawyer, but that he was the son of the man Judge Whitney had killed. And Travis Elliot didn’t know it. Myron hadn’t told him what he was going to see the district attorney for. I was sure of that. If he had, Travis could never have received Judge Whitney as warmly as he had done-—not in his father’s own house, not so soon after he had learned anything so ghastly. It seemed suddenly to take on a kind of tragic irony. They were all appealing to Travis to help them protect his father’s murderer. And Judge Whitney’s demand that Albert Toplady’s letter to Myron be returned to him—he’d wait up for it, he’d said—had a new and astonishing significance. It was not to save Myron, as I’d thought it was, that he’d come. It was to save himself. “A Useful Life,” Abigail Whitney had said. “Let the Dead Past stay Buried.”

In the shadowy silence of the room, it seemed to me in some way, bewildered as I was, to begin to fit together and make sense. If I could only see Colonel Primrose, I thought, and then I remembered. I’d promised Monk, and though I’d never been very good at keeping knowledge from Colonel Primrose, this was different. If I could tell him, he might be able to help, but I knew he wouldn’t. Behind the urbane humor with which he regards human frailty, I knew there was a rigid and uncompromising sense of justice and honor that neither friendship nor affection would make him deviate from by a hair’s breadth. I knew perfectly well that if the occasion rose he would hang both me and Sergeant Buck to the nearing sycamore tree without batting more than half an eye.

I was so absorbed in what seemed to me the issuing of some kind of clarity out of everything, and in my determination to keep one secret in my life, that I’d finally got warm without knowing it. I looked at my traveling watch on the table. It was almost three o’clock. I got up reluctantly to open a window to let in a little air, and stood for a moment looking out. Seeing other buildings and lighted streets brought a sense of some kind of perspective to my distracted mind. Abigail Whitney, even if she was at this moment moving stealthily about the house, wasn’t so terrifying when I was looking out on a sleeping world where other people were sane and normal.

I put my hand out to lift the sash and stopped. A dark figure was coming rapidly across the square, zigzagging a course over the intercepting paths that led toward 19th Street. There was something familiar about it, which is why I stood watching until it got to the curb and started across the street. It was Monk Whitney. Even in the shadowy darkness I recognized him, before I saw him head for his father’s house next door. I opened the window after a moment and went back to bed, and for several minutes I kept a disturbing after-image of a man moving quickly, not just coming home, but coming home from something.

And next morning at nine-thirty I didn’t have much doubt about what it was. The deaf butler brought my breakfast, aided by a gaunt, stiffly starched maid as old or older, whose “The mistress wishes good morning to you, ma’am,” was as thick and Irish as a peat bog. The butler went back into the hall and returned with an ivory-lacquered telephone that he plugged in beside the bed and handed me.

“It’s a message for you, ma’am, it is,” the woman said. She began picking up my clothes, left pretty much where I’d got out of them the night before.

I
must be careful,
I thought. I knew it was Colonel Primrose before I heard his voice, and the night before flashed vividly back, like life in a drowning man’s memory: “I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”

“Hello,” he said. “I tried to get you last night. Have you heard the news?”

I thought it was the war he meant, but it wasn’t.

“Ben Hibbs’ house was broken into last night.”

I caught my breath sharply and tried to cover the mouthpiece with my hand, but it was too late.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “You just made me spill some hot coffee.” I could hardly hope it would deceive him. “I hope they didn’t take much,” I said. It sounded silly, but at least more natural than asking “Who?”

“Just his brief case, oddly enough,” Colonel Primrose said. He was as placid as ever. “It was full of manuscripts he’d taken home to read last night. I just talked to him. They got in his study window, sometime around two. Some crank, apparently. A neighbor saw a car there.”

I wanted to ask a dozen other questions, but I didn’t dare. I knew from experience that the association of ideas in my mind would present no problem to him. And I was trying to remember if Monk Whitney had been carrying a brief case when he’d hurried across the street in the early hours of the morning.

“What about lunch?” he said. “I’m free unless the bookkeeper from the Quaker Trust shows up later. He hasn’t come in yet, and—”

I’d known, of course, that the association of ideas can work two ways, but before I could stop I heard, with repentant horror, my voice saying, “Not Mr. Albert Toplady, by any chance?”

There was the shortest silence at the other end.

“Yes,” Colonel Primrose said, very affably. “How did you know?”

If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,
I thought; if
thy tongue offend thee, tear it out.
I would gladly have got rid of mine any way I could just then.

“We used to have an account there,” I said lamely. “The name stuck, I guess.”

“He’s been there for years,” Colonel Primrose said. “I’ll pick you up at noon, then. I’m going over to Curtis to see Hibbs now.”

I put down the phone and sat there unhappily, remembering Monk shaking his head at me when Travis was trying to remember who I’d said had given me the letter for Myron. And here I was, two minutes after I’d told myself I must be careful. It seems very strange to me, at this point, that it never so much as crossed my mind just then that there was anything odd in what Colonel Primrose had told me. That there might be any connection between Albert Toplady’s not showing up at the bank that morning and the letter I’d failed to deliver for him, or Myron’s not coming home the night before, just never occurred to me. I simply sat there, acutely unhappy about not keeping my mouth shut when Colonel Primrose called.

And that wasn’t because I thought I’d done anything irreparable as much as it was a grim warning of what I could expect I’d say on the impulse of the moment sometime when Judge Whitney’s name came up, or Abigail Whitney’s—or Douglas Elliot’s. I could already hear myself: “Oh, you mean Travis Elliot’s father, the man Judge Whitney killed. And you know, the judge’s sister Abigail isn’t bedridden at all.”

I decided then that Washington, D. C., was the place for me, where we have so many murders of our own that no one’s interested in imported ones, and where if more people stayed at home pretending they were bedridden it would be wonderful.

But that was before I took a bath and dressed and met Myron Kane on the stairs coming up to his room. He looked awful. He had black circles under his eyes and he hadn’t shaved. All the starched, immaculate grooming that made him look as if he were the combined London tailors’ contribution to Allied amity was so gone that it was hard to believe he had on the same clothes he’d had on the day before.

“Come in here, Grace; I want to talk to you,” he said peremptorily.

He closed the door of his room behind me and sat down on his bed without even taking off his overcoat. Then he got up, went to his typewriter, pulled out the piece of paper in it and looked at it.

“Somebody’s been in here again, damn it,” he said. He turned to me. “Look, Grace. I’m being persecuted around here.”

When I said “Oh,” my voice, I suppose, must have sounded a little like Charlie McCarthy’s.

“I want to see Primrose. Where is he?”

“He’s at the
Post,
I believe,” I said. And when I went on, I knew what I was saying this time. “He was at the Quaker Trust Company, but your admirer, Mr. Toplady, didn’t show. So he’s free. I’m having lunch with him.”

He looked at me sharply. I had the feeling he already knew about that or at least knew why Colonel Primrose was at the bank. He was speculating, I thought, as to whether I knew.

“I’m getting pretty sore,” he said. “I’m getting out of here today. Let me tell you something. I happened across something that will knock somebody around here sky-west. I wasn’t going to use it, but now I am going to. Nobody’s treating me like dirt. I’m a lot smarter than these people are, and I can hurt them worse than they can hurt me.”

“Myron,” I said, “why don’t you give back that—document, whatever it is, that you’ve got, and let them give you back your letter, and call it off?”

He looked at me intently again. “They don’t need proof to ruin me,” he said curtly. “I need proof. And I’m keeping it— for a while—even if I do get my letter.”

“But your manuscript? You’ve turned that in to the
Post,
haven’t you?”

He nodded. “Some days ago, in fact. I didn’t tell them that. But I’m getting it back today. I’ll play ball if they will.” He looked morosely around the room. “You can tell them they needn’t go through my stuff anymore. I’m not ass enough to leave anything here. And look, Grace. I want you to do something for me.”

“No indeed,” I said. I shook my head firmly. “I’m having no part in this, Myron.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’ll run this show myself. But I’ve sent some of my mail to your house. It’s the only private Washington address I could remember. Will you hang on to it till I give you a forwarding address?”

“Myron,” I said, “did you send that—”

“I sent a copy of my profile of Judge Whitney, because people here keep sticking their snoots into my stuff.”

“Which you started, didn’t you?”

He nodded coolly. “And am going to finish.” Then he gave me an angry glare. “And I might have known whose side you’d be on. If you’ll scram, I’d like to get a bath and pack.” He opened the door for me. “And look. When you see Primrose, just shut up. I’ll handle this business my own way.”

I went out. Abigail Whitney’s door was closed, which was just as well, I thought. Myron’s voice was high-pitched and strident, and if she’d overheard me calling her a scheming, worldly old woman she couldn’t very well have helped hearing his uncomplimentary allusion to her nose.

Her door hadn’t opened and Myron hadn’t come down when Colonel Primrose called for me shortly before noon. When I got down, he was waiting in the first-floor front room. It was a formal, rather lovely room in pale old-gold Louis Quinze and gray, but lifeless, as rooms are that are never used. Colonel Primrose was looking around it with more interest than he usually shows in interior decoration, his black eyes as alert as a terrier’s by a rat hole.

“Well,” I said, “Mrs. Whitney’s changed her mind about you. She thought at first she wanted you to help her, but now she doesn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d like to meet her.”

“She’s an extraordinary woman.” I could certainly say that much truthfully, I thought. “What about the Hibbs burglary?”

“His brief case was left at the Sansom Street entrance to the Curtis Building, sometime early this morning. Nothing gone. One of the watchmen found it. The police are fingerprinting it.”

“Were there fingerprints at the house?”

He shook his head. “Footprints, but the sun’s melted them. It was a big man. Can’t tell you anymore. Not a professional, but quiet.”

I asked, as casually as I could, “Have they any idea what he was looking for?”

“Not the foggiest. They’ve run several pieces on some pretty shady setups, like the one Jack Alexander did on Atlantic City, but nothing like that’s scheduled at the moment. Some crackpot, probably—though most of them make a personal call at the office. We’ll go around after lunch and see if anything’s happened.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was being honest or cagey, and I didn’t dare try to find out. Then it occurred to me that obviously, if that manuscript of the profile of Judge Whitney had been in as long as Myron had said it had, it wouldn’t have been among those in Ben Hibbs’ brief case last night.

“What brought you up here?” he asked, as we were going down the front steps. “You seemed to be just a little incoherent over the telephone.”

There’s nothing military about Colonel Primrose’s slightly rotund figure; he leaves all that to his sergeant. Except for the bullet wound in his neck that makes him cock his head down and around when he looks sideways, and his black eyes that contract like an old parrot’s, the Army doesn’t seem to have left many traces on him. I’m so accustomed to his polite urbanity and to the affable and slightly amused attitude of a man who’s lived a full and exciting life and reserves judgment on it that I’m never quite sure whether he’s more or less deceptive than he appears.

“I came up because Mrs. Whitney asked me to,” I answered casually. “And of course Washington isn’t the same when you’re away.”