The Simple Way of Poison (12 page)

“Well,” I said, “she’s a widow, now.”

He raised his head and looked at me for a moment without saying anything. Perhaps he was going to speak. I don’t know. But he didn’t get the chance. Lilac came in.

“Mr. St. Martin, he’s in the hall, Mis’ Grace,” she said. “No he ain’, he’s right here.”

And he was.—In his camel’s hair coat and brown hat with the bright little feather at the side. The contrast between his glowing fresh-shaven face and Steve Donaldson’s day-old beard was amazing.

He saw Steve. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know you were busy.”

He tossed his hat on the table.

If there’s anything in the business of elective affinities, or certain people having chemical reactions when they meet certain other people, then the whole table of valence was in violent flux in my house just then. In the first place, Lilac doesn’t like either of the St. Martins. She burns the roast virtually to ashes if they’re in for dinner. In the second place, Steve Donaldson and Gilbert oxidized the moment they laid eyes on each other. They glared and bristled when I introduced them—of course in a highly civilized way—like a couple of stray dogs.

“I guess I’ll shove,” Steve said, in a kind of an angry growl.

Gilbert raised those too perfect eyebrows of his, sauntered over to the garden windows and stood there, insolently tapping a cigarette on his gold case.

“You’ve got a nice little place here, Grace,” he drawled. “Too bad you don’t do something with it.”

Steve flushed angrily. I pushed him out of the room hastily and nodded to Lilac.

And then an odd thing happened. The minute the outside door closed, Gilbert St. Martin dropped his elaborate nonchalance as if it had been swept violently off him by some major cataclysm.

“Grace,” he said desperately, coming down the room toward me; “what in God’s name was she thinking of?”

I stared at him open-mouthed. I’d never thought he was capable of any emotion—certainly none as strong as this. He threw himself down on the sofa and buried his face in his hands.

I went to the door and pressed the bell.

“Bring some Scotch and soda, Lilac,” I said.

She looked oddly at me. “Wouldn’ you prefer
sherry,
Mis’ Grace—this time in th’ mornin’?” she said tentatively.

“Scotch and soda,” I said. “Immediately.”

I should have known enough—or known Lilac enough—to see this translated for that excellent man Sergeant Buck into Gilbert St. Martin arriving at my house in a state of complete collapse, at a time when any collapse was suspicious. As a matter of fact I poured myself a drink, when it came, and pushed the low table over in front of Gil.

“I take it you think Iris has murdered her husband,” I said.

He poured a double peg of whiskey and tossed it-off, and shot a little soda into the glass as a chaser.

“I’m a fool about that woman.”

“It’s too bad you’re leaving for the Orient so soon,” I said deliberately.

His head jerked up.

“Who says—”

“Your wife, darling.”

There was no doubt from the sudden change of expression in his handsome face that this was news.

“She was over at Iris’s this morning, telling her about it.”

“Really?”

He poured himself another drink and lengthened it with soda—an indication, I took it, of a definite sort of pulling himself together. His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly as he tapped the yellow ash off his cigarette.

“It mightn’t be such a bad idea at that,” he said, after a long silence. “Then people couldn’t say… I mean, if I went away, by the time I came back all this would have blown over.”

“Unless, of course,” I said practically, “they hang her.”

He glanced at me sharply. Then he shook his perfectly groomed head.

“No. She’d stand a better chance of getting off if I’m not around. Of course, I hate to pull out and leave her. Who’s her lawyer, by the way?”

“Belden Doyle.”

He whistled, raising his neat dark eyebrows.

“Was that this Donaldson’s idea?” he asked, more casually than he felt, I thought.

I shook my head. “It wasn’t,” I said.

He pressed out his cigarette in the ash tray. “Look here, Grace,” he said abruptly. “I want to see Iris… but I don’t think it would look good if I went over there. I wonder if you’d get her here, so we could have a talk, before I… leave?—I wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea…”

“No—I can see that,” I said.

“Then, when I come back, we could get married and go abroad a year.”

“And what,” I asked, “are you planning to do with Edith?—Dump her into the Yellow Sea, some dark night?”

“She’ll give me a divorce.”

“I wonder,” I thought. I didn’t say anything.

“Even a year wouldn’t seem long. Not after all the time we’ve waited.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m old-fashioned like everybody else around here. It hadn’t appeared to me, somehow, that either of you had waited.”

He looked at me quickly—not understanding, I thought, but not quite liking to ask what I meant.

“It was my fault,” he said. “But I’ve told her all that. And I’ve paid for all I got. I… I took her too much for granted. I nearly dropped dead one night at a dance at the Sulgrave Club. Somebody said ‘Here comes the ravishing Mrs. Nash’—and I looked up, and by God it was Iris, in shimmering green lame, with that hair. I’d known I’d made a mistake, but I didn’t know what a mistake. Men around her like flies, and she wasn’t having any.”

He lighted another cigarette out of his thin gold case.

“She’s a one-man woman—I know that now. I guess we’ve both learned our lesson.—Funny, isn’t it.”

“It seems pretty funny to me,” I said, which was not the truth. “But maybe that’s the way it is. There’s no accounting for tastes.”

He got up and looked out of the windows again toward the Nash house beyond the garden wall.

“I should think tonight about ten would do.”

“For what?”

“To get Iris over.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And by the way, Grace—I wouldn’t mention those letters. There’s no use complicating things.”

He put on his luxurious camel’s hair overcoat and picked up his hat.

“Well, so long. I may be a little late. Edith’s having some stuffed shirt from some minor legation… greasing the Oriental Limited, I imagine.”

I heard him open the front door and close it, and saw Lilac’s disapproving face in the door.

“Colonel Primrose is coming to lunch,” I said.

A momentary light dawned, and faded.

“Mr. Angus, he’s been callin’ up. Wants you come ovah to his mother’s place right away.—’Deed, Mis’ Grace, an’ Ah hopes you ain’ gettin’ mixed up in no mo’ murders. ’Deed, Julius an’ me
both
hopes you ain’. Not if we got to have trash like that Mistah St. Martin in an’ out of the house all time.”

“There’s something in what you say, Lilac,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to twelve. “Did Mr. Angus say how long he’d be at home?”

“No, ma’am. He jus’ said he wished you’d come as soon as you could. Ah sen’ fo’ the car, case you’d be needin’ it.”

I nodded. She helped me on with my coat and handed me my gloves and car keys.

“ ’Deed an’ Ah hope Mis’ Nash ain’ gone an’ killed that man lak they say. Seems lak a funny way fo’ intelligent people t’ act.—Sendin’ all th’ servants out the house an’ puttin’ pizen in his drink.”

Lilac’s sources of information are unknown to me, but they’re always up to the moment and generally pretty accurate.

“They got plenty money t’ bury him with, an’ that’s one consolation,” she added, opening the door for me. “Seems funny, both of ’em goin’ out same time—lak the Lawd he didn’ have no use fo’ one of ’em ’thout the othah.”

Marie Nash’s house is the ornate Renaissance stone mansion just above Rock Creek Drive on the left hand of Massachusetts Avenue. Its terraced gardens in the back run down into the narrow valley and overlook the opposite hills of Montrose at the upper end of Georgetown where R Street curves into 28th. As the crow flies it’s a short minute from my house in P Street to hers. Not being a crow I had to turn off P Street, drive down under the P and Q Street Bridges along the tiny river and come up into Massachusetts Avenue, which took about six minutes, actually, as I didn’t have to wait for the light at the top of the park drive.

Henry the Japanese butler opened the elaborate iron grilled door and let me in. “Mr. Angus is in the drawing room, madame.”

“I’ll go up,” I said. I gave him my coat and went up the Italian marble staircase with its walls lined with modern French watercolors. At the top I turned into the small elegantly furnished room at the right, with silk paneled walls and carved rose marble fireplace.

Angus was sitting hunched down on the small of his back in a cushioned divan between the windows. There were cigarette ashes all over the gorgeous carpet at his feet. Lowell was lying on her stomach on a long Empire sofa, her chin in her hands. Angus got to his feet and came to meet me. Lowell didn’t move.

“The police have been here,” he said shortly. “They say my father was poisoned.”

“I could have told them that.” Lowell’s voice was strained, hard-surfaced.

“They’re asking a lot of questions about Mother.”

“About your mother?” I demanded.

His lips twitched as he turned quickly away.

“That’s rot,” Lowell said bitterly. “She had flu, she went out in the snow without any clothes on to speak of, and she got pneumonia. She wasn’t poisoned.—The lovely Iris hasn’t been around here, has she?”

Lowell flushed. She sat up quickly. “Or
has
she?”

“She hasn’t.”

He hesitated, and added deliberately, “Father has. He was here before they took her to the hospital.”

Lowell swung her feet to the floor and sat, her taut body erect, red lips set.

“Can you tell me what that’s got to do with anything?”

Angie Nash whirled toward her, his freckled face white. “Listen,” I said quickly. “When you two young idiots stop jumping down each other’s throats maybe we can make some sense out of all this.”

I downed a maddening desire to poison both of them.

“I know,” Lowell said hotly. “But he’s trying to pretend Father came over here and murdered my mother and went home and killed himself—that’s what he’s doing, and I won’t stand it!”

“Just because you happen to hate Iris, you’re doing your damndest to make everybody believe she did it, just because you’re a spiteful, jealous little rat!”

They stared at each other furiously for an instant, Lowell speechless for one of the few times in her life. Then she rallied.

“You’re in love with her too,” she said. Her voice was dreadful with contempt and hatred. “She makes a fool of every man that comes near her. My father, you and Mac, everybody. Steve Donaldson’s the only one of you that can see through her. He knows she’s nothing but a… a mercenary gold digger. That’s what she is!”

“Well,” I said, “I’m going home.”

She caught me at the door.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Grace! I didn’t mean that… quite. But don’t you see—she
must
have done it! Nobody else wanted Father out of the way… and if anybody’d poison a dog they’d just as soon poison a person!”

“You don’t know she poisoned your dog!” Angie said. He’d got control of himself. “You don’t even know he was poisoned in the first place.”

I suppose it would have begun all over again if Mac hadn’t come in just then. He went straight over to Lowell. “Gee, I’m sorry about your mother!” He took her hand.

Her face flushed. Suddenly she held out her free hand to Angie. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “I’m… I guess I’m upset.”

She went over to him and put her arms around him. Mac looked on awkwardly, pretty much upset himself. A plain indication of it that must have annoyed his uncle, I thought, was a nice yellow tie he had on with an otherwise quite sober dark blue suit. It gave his troubled earnest face an irresistibly comic air of spurious gaiety.

“Are you two staying here, or are you going over to Beall Street?” I asked practically.

Angie hesitated. Lowell wiped her eyes with her sleeve and blew her nose. “She doesn’t want me over there.”

“Odd of her,” I said. “Considering what a pleasant sweet-tempered little thing you are. Still, she’ll probably put up with you. You can come to my place if you want to.”

Colonel Primrose was waiting in the drawing room when I came in. He was sitting in a straight chair he’d pulled up to the small table in front of the sofa where Gilbert St. Martin had been sitting.

“What is this nonsense about Marie?” I demanded.

He got up, straightening his rheumatic knee with a deprecatory grin.

“No importance. Somebody at Headquarters who doesn’t believe in coincidences figured it was odd that both of them should cash in at the same time. Marie died of acute lobar pneumonia. Nothing in her stomach but calves foot jelly and milk toast. It looks as if she was just put in to make it harder.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. I pressed the bell by the door.

“I told Lilac to make some dry Martinis, by the way. She said you’d gone to see Angus and Lowell. I figured you’d need a bracer.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I said, and regretted it instantly, of course.

He smiled. Then his face sobered instantly. Lilac set the tray on the table and tiptoed out. Colonel Primrose poured two cocktails, held up his glass and emptied it at a swallow. He set it down.

“The dog, however,” he said deliberately,
“—was
poisoned.”

I felt for just a moment as if a cold hand was closing in on my heart.

“Not… really?”

He nodded.

“Oh, how
awful!”

“And by cyanide of potassium, Mrs. Latham. Given in candy, apparently. They can’t tell exactly yet. They’ve sent the carcass to the laboratory for analysis.”

He poured another cocktail and sipped it.

“In fact, Mrs. Latham—as you can’t help but see too—it all looks peculiarly bad. Captain Lamb’s been very much on the job, of course, and Lowell’s contributed very handsomely. Many choice items out of the daily life of the family.”

“Is everything she blurts out taken as gospel?” I demanded hotly.