The Simple Way of Poison (17 page)

“Since she doesn’t get up for breakfast, he isn’t home for lunch and she’s out virtually every night in the week, that isn’t as surprising as you’d think,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve seen my boys but three times, except Christmas, since they’ve been home. And once then they were sound asleep. I’ve taken it for granted we are still friends.”

“Lowell doesn’t take anything for granted, I’m afraid. Even poor Mac.—You know, I sometimes think the biggest break Mac could get would be Lowell’s deciding to marry somebody else.”

“I thought she had,” I said.

“Who?”

“Steve Donaldson.”

Colonel Primrose smiled. “She’s just the girl who could do it.”

“Unless,” I said ironically, “it turns out that he and Iris were in a conspiracy to murder Randall.”

He shook his head.

“Sergeant Buck has a fine old adage, Mrs. Latham— ‘Many’s the true word spoke in jest.’ ”

He got to his feet and looked at his watch. “Where the devil is the man, by the way?”

The door opened. Wilkins came in. “The Sergeant would like to speak with you, sir—on the telephone.”

Colonel Primrose went out hastily. Wilkins took his glass, and returned shortly with a fresh one. “Is there anything else, madame?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Shall you be in for dinner, madame?”

I nodded. I think I almost discharged him at that moment, for no immediate reason except that I didn’t like his pale moon face and pale blue eyes and didn’t have any serious moral responsibility, it not being my house I was in. I rather wish now I had. But I didn’t have time. Colonel Primrose came back. He waited until Wilkins had gone out.

“Buck says the clerk at the drug store remembers Randall coming in. He got change for a quarter and went into the telephone booth. He stayed there a while and went out. He left a nickel in the little trough and the next customer brought it out. That’s why the clerk remembered him, that and the fact that he was dressed.”

“Well,” I said, “then he didn’t buy rat poison to kill himself with.”

“Did you think he had?”

“I hoped so.”

“There seems to have been plenty about.”

I heard the door open just then, and Lowell and Angus came in. Angie put down his pigskin bag covered with the labels of practically every hotel with a palm tree in its garden on the Riviera, and took off his coat. Lowell threw her hat on a chair and came over to the fire.

“Where’s the beautiful Iris?”

Angie groaned.

“At it before you’ve got your coat off. Can’t you stow it for five minutes, for God’s sake?”

Lowell lighted a cigarette and hunched down on the small of her back, her elegantly shod feet sticking straight out toward the fire.

“What’s this about a letter my father gave you to keep, Colonel Primrose?”

His eyes rested on hers.

“That’s all there is to it, Lowell. Except that he got it yesterday afternoon, a little after five.—Do you know anything about it?”

“Just that,” she said tersely. “Doesn’t Wilkins?”

“He hasn’t said so.”

“Why don’t you jog his memory?”

She gave us one of her most hard-boiled smiles, reached out and pressed the bell. Wilkins came.

“Look here, Wilkins. Didn’t my father have a letter—”

“One that he asked me to post, miss, which I did.”

“Who was it to? Now don’t say you don’t know. Anybody looks at the address on a letter. It’s like your Ceszinsky reflex.”

Wilkins hesitated only an instant, feeling at his white tie.

“It was to Mr. A. J. McClean, miss.”

“There you are. You see how simple it is to be honest. You have posted it?”

“Yes, miss.”

“How big was it?”

“It was on the regular stationery, miss.”

“And when did he give it to you?”

“In the evening, just before dinner.”

There was a moment’s silence. I saw that it surprised her a little.

“He didn’t give it to you… last night?”

“No, miss.”

“Thanks. Bring us some toasted crackers and cheese.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Then… that couldn’t be the letter he got from you?” She looked at Colonel Primrose. He shook his head.

“No. That was in a long envelope.”

“Have you asked Iris?”

“Not yet.”

She threw her cigarette into the fireplace and laughed bitterly.

“God, it must be marvelous to be beautiful! Even the police approach you with velvet gloves… and the rest of us have to jump out of the way when you barge in with the mailed hoof.”

She lighted another cigarette. Angie got up and walked down to the garden windows.

“What’s the pit doing? Are we having a barbecue?” he inquired.

Lowell sauntered down and looked over his shoulder. She turned back, her face white. Colonel Primrose glanced at me.

“Can’t they even let a poor dog rest in peace?” she asked quietly.

We said nothing. Angie came back. “Lowell wants to know if she can leave, Colonel Primrose. After… tomorrow.”

I hadn’t known, till then, that they’d set the time for the services.

“You’ll have to ask the District Attorney, Angus.”

Lowell spoke flatly from the windows. “I’m not going till I find that letter.”

Angie shrugged. “O. K., Toots.—Ten minutes ago you were going to marry Mac, or Steve, or somebody, and wash your hands of the whole business. Personally, I’d miss you. I like that. I’ve had a bum tooth for a year and I can’t bear to have it pulled. I’d never get a good night’s sleep.”

Lowell smiled.

“Shut up,” she said. “Well, if you don’t mind a small point, I’m going up stairs and wash my face.”

Her brother grinned ironically after her. “Hurry back, darling, won’t you.”

He turned to us as she closed the door.

“I don’t know what in hell’s the matter with that woman. Mac says she’s been like this for a couple of weeks. Only she’s worse now. She was crazy about dad, and all that…”

He took a deep breath.

“Well, it’s getting me down. She was all right till noon. Steve phoned to ask if he could do anything and didn’t ask to speak to her. You’d have thought Mac and I put him up to it. I told Mac I wouldn’t marry her if she kidnaped me and took me to Elkton. What he sees in that bad-tempered, wall-eyed little… hussy is beyond me.”

Angus did not see the iron-surfaced monument of disapproval who had come in and was standing in the door. Colonel Primrose and I both did. He shot me a quick glance of amusement. Sergeant Buck cleared his brass-bound vocal cords.

“There’s a bird outside wants to know,” he said, very seriously, out of one corner of his mouth, “if they’ve got a list of the pall buriers to give the press for the first Mrs. Nash, sir.”

Angie’s face paled.

“Just a second,” he said quickly. “I’ll see him out there.”

He poured a small drink of whiskey, splashed a good deal of soda in it and poured it down his throat. I could see from the expression, or lack of it, on Sergeant Buck’s grim lantern-jawed face that it was not the correct thing to have done.

He looked at me significantly as Angie went out.

“I got a report to make to the Colonel, if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

I went out hastily and up to my room, the blue guest room overlooking the garden, and sat down. I was just thinking suddenly that I hadn’t told Colonel Primrose a good many things I knew that might very conceivably have a good deal of importance. I hadn’t, for instance, told him about A. J.—nor, I thought suddenly, had I told him about Lavinia and her drunken threats. I hadn’t told him that Gilbert St. Martin had been here—in spite of what Iris had said—on Christmas Eve when Senator McGilvray had been poisoned. And then I remembered that I hadn’t told Iris that Gilbert wanted to see her that night at ten o’clock.

I heard a door open then, got up and looked out into the hall. If Iris had got up, I thought—and I doubted how well she could sleep at the moment—I would have a chance to talk to her. I went to the door of her room. It was slightly ajar, so I went in. She wasn’t in there. I could hear her voice from her dressing room. She was talking slowly and quietly and very intensely, and every word in her low husky voice came as clear as if she was speaking to me. Before I realized it, and before I could overcome the shocked inertia of my legs, I heard her:

“And listen, Lowell… I’ve stood more from you in the last three years than I’ve stood from anyone in my entire life. I made the mistake in thinking, when I first came here, that you acted as you did because you resented anyone your father was fond of. And I understood that perfectly. I thought you’d see as you grew up that there are different kinds of affection possible in people’s lives, and eventually we’d understand each other. But I was wrong. And now I’m going to tell you something. Your father didn’t tell me when I married him that he had a sixteen year old daughter. He called you his baby girl, and I thought of you as that. It was as much a shock to me as it was to you when I saw you the night you came.

“And there’s another thing. I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t or that I did murder your father. You can figure that out for yourself. But there’s one thing I will tell you… and that is, I did not poison your dog. And now this is chiefly what I want to say to you. I haven’t told Colonel Primrose, or Captain Lamb, or Mr. Doyle, or anybody, that you came home from the Assembly last night, and were in this house
after
I left it… and
after
Wilkins left your father in the library. And I know you did come, and were here—because you had on your white evening coat when you went out, and when you came in and put on your scene in the library you had on your red velvet coat with the white fox collar.”

I heard Lowell gasp, and Iris go on.

“I assume you’ve got your reasons for not wanting it known you were here… and that in some way I don’t understand they include an empty decanter in the cellaret. So far as I’m concerned I shall continue to assume they are good reasons and say nothing about it… and further more I want you to understand I ask nothing of you in return. And I want you to understand this, Lowell…”

I got out at that point. I’m not sure how I got back to my room.

Iris’s low taut voice still vibrated in my astonished ears. I sat down on the padded window seat and stared unseeing past the garden wall at my own house. The only thing I was conscious of was the shattering fact that Lowell Nash had been in the house the night her father was killed, and had said nothing about it—Lowell, who whatever her faults I would have bet my last sous was as passionately honest as anyone in all the world. Why? Why? It kept beating in my brain, and I had no answer. The idea that Lowell could have had anything to do with her father’s death by poison was unthinkable… even more unthinkable than for Iris to have had. And yet… My eye fell on the broken spot in the wall between our two gardens. Lowell was still a Nash… a direct descendant of the General Nash on whose immortal soul that dark burden lay.

“It is not possible!” I said sharply to myself. I got up and turned on the light. Some simple explanation would turn up, I told myself. I powdered my nose and went downstairs.

Halfway down I heard the sound of Mac’s voice from the drawing room, and stopped dead in my tracks. If Lowell had come to the house, then Mac must have come too. I don’t know why that struck me so forcibly just then, or why it hadn’t occurred to me before. I remembered now that they’d left the dance early.

I listened again. Someone else was speaking. I recognized Steve Donaldson’s voice. He was saying, “But if they can prove anybody else at all was here Doyle can get her off. He doesn’t even need that if he puts her on the stand.”

I waited for Mac to say something, but he didn’t. All I heard was the tinkling of ice in a glass, and the crackling of the fire. Not even Colonel Primrose’s voice. I glanced quickly down to where his coat and hat had been when I went upstairs. They were gone.

I went on down and into the drawing room. Mac and Steve were there alone. They got up, both looking pretty washed-out. Mao for the moment had evidently buried the hatchet, or maybe, I thought, he’d realized by this time that Steve was not trying to cut him out with Lowell.

“Where’s Angus?” I asked.

“Somebody called up for Colonel Primrose,” Mac said. “They beat it out of here hell for leather. Angie and that guy with the iron mug.”

Stephen Donaldson said nothing… but no sky writer ever had a question more plainly written in the air all around him.

“Iris is holding up marvelously,” I said.

“Then I guess I’ll go along. Tell her if there’s anything I can do…” he said lamely. When he’d gone I turned to Mac.

“Didn’t you and Lowell come by the house after the Assembly?” I asked casually.

“No,” he said… too promptly. “Why?”

“I just wondered.”

He got up from where he was sprawling on the sofa and wandered around the room for a minute. Then he came and sat down again, his head in his hands.

“Well,” I said, “that’s your story and you’re sticking to it. I’m not interested… except that, as Steve just said to you, if they can show anybody at all was here, Doyle can get Iris off.”

“They don’t have to prove that,” he said doggedly. “They can’t prove there was poison in that glass she washed up. They can’t prove that’s how he was poisoned.”

He stared down at the toe of his pebbled leather shoe. Then he said, “Has anybody been saying Lowell was… that we were here, after the Assembly?”

“Nobody’s told the police.—or Colonel Primrose,” I said. “Maybe somebody ought to—you or Lowell, for instance. I mean, I don’t see why Iris hasn’t got a right to one decent break.”

“Well—Lowell didn’t do it,” he said abruptly. “She didn’t go in the library. I sat on the bottom step waiting for her to run upstairs. She went straight up, and came straight down again.”

“Why don’t you tell the police that?”

“Because the whole business has knocked her cock-eyed already, without having them hounding her out of her wits.”

“What about yourself?—-Perhaps you went in the library while she was upstairs. Has all this knocked you cock-eyed too?”

“I’d just as soon tell ’em I did, if it wasn’t for Lowell,” he said dully. “But honest, Mrs. Latham, she’s taken an awful beating, with her mother going out like that, and all.”