The Simple Way of Poison (19 page)

I had long since abandoned my relaxed air and was sitting bolt upright, dreadfully anxious. It was plain that we were now getting a motive for the murder of Randall Nash that was far more tenable than Iris’s fear of him. And still—just as in Iris’s case—it was utterly unbelievable, to my mind at least. It was simply impossible. Angie couldn’t conceivably…

At just that moment Sergeant Buck appeared, grimly frozen-faced, bringing with him A. J. McClean… and another and as it turned out terribly important element was introduced abruptly into the drama of Randall Nash’s murder.

“He was over at the house acting like a crazy guy,” Sergeant Buck whispered behind his hand. He could have been heard in the White House, I suppose.

A. J. was not acting exactly like a crazy guy then, but he was plainly upset. He bowed to us, formal as usual, and sat down, his face grey, his hands shaking.

“I’ve got some very disturbing information, Colonel Primrose,” he said jerkily. “Very disturbing indeed. In fact I may say—-—”

He stopped short.

“Perhaps I should go directly to the District Attorney. But… there is a curious angle that I thought I should discuss with you first. Er… I think…”

He looked significantly at Angie and me. Colonel Primrose nodded Angie toward the door. I started to go too. He said crisply, “Take notes, Mrs. Latham.—Have you got your notebook?”

I had just started to say “No,” I suppose, when a great hand appeared over my shoulder with a bridge pad and pencil in it.

“You left it on the table,” Sergeant Buck said gruffly, without turning a hair. I caught myself from staring open-mouthed at him, thinking what an amazing instance it was of forbearance, as well as presence of mind, and rallied as quickly as I could.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on, Mr. McClean.”

A. J. McClean looked a little doubtful at this, not being anybody’s fool, as I knew, and undoubtedly knowing that I have no knowledge remotely as useful as shorthand. However, there wasn’t much he could say.

“It’s a delicate situation, Colonel Primrose,” he began rather pointedly. Colonel Primrose nodded placidly. He gave me a sideways glance again, and went on.

“We have been going into Randall Nash’s affairs, Colonel— his attorney Sam Lehrmann and myself—at the request of the District Attorney and Captain Lamb. And we have found a very queer set of circumstances indeed. We knew, of course— Lehrmann and myself—that for the last three years he has paid income tax on, roughly, some forty-five to fifty thousand dollars.”

“I understood that,” Colonel Primrose said. I wrote down “45-50,000 dollars.”

A. J. McClean leaned forward, his face working convulsively.

“And… we have been through his bank deposits and securities. He kept only his current household account with us.—And… we can’t find anything!—Anything at all, Colonel Primrose!”

His thin hands shook as he waved them in the air, his voice rose almost to a scream. The expression of merely polite interest on Colonel Primrose’s face vanished sharply; my pencil stopped motionless on the pad.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Colonel?—We can’t find any assets, of any kind! We find that every dividend he’s received in the last three years has been converted into cash, every asset—over and above those that brought in his mere living expenses—has been liquidated… and the proceeds have vanished!”

Colonel Primrose shifted forward to the edge of his chair, bolt upright, listening intently, his eyes sharp and sparkling with interest. “He couldn’t spend that much money in the course of a year—”

“No, no, no!”

A. J. shook his head impatiently.

“He never spent more than twenty thousand dollars in a year. We should, in normal invested savings, have at least sixty thousand dollars somewhere; and more than that, we have evidence of one property sale alone, in this past year, of over fifty thousand.”

A. J. leaned back in his chair, wiping the beads of perspiration from his forehead with his handkerchief. He cast me another sideways glance, and leaned forward again.

“And this is the very delicate point I want to talk over with you,” he said, more calmly. “—Without going into the rights or wrongs of it—merely the cold facts—Randall had the most violent feelings against his first wife. I am not going any farther into that. I merely ask you to believe that it was so.”

“I’ve always understood so,” Colonel Primrose said.

A. J. clasped his bony hands between his knees, and looked very deliberately at him for a long moment, hesitating. He was still upset, but he was much more his dry, precise self than he had been a moment before.

“And this,” he said at last, “is my explanation—in view of that, and all the circumstances,-—of what has happened. The settlement that Marie demanded, and that he was forced to give, because liquidating any of his assets at that time would have ruined him, was most irksome to him.—I wish to emphasize that as strongly as possible, to explain—if possible—what otherwise would appear nothing but monomania.”

Colonel Primrose nodded. I could see that he was profoundly interested in what A. J. was saying; and unless I was mistaken there was an odd expression on his face, as if he was not entirely surprised by all this, and knew pretty well what was coming. As I hadn’t the faintest idea of it, I listened completely engrossed.

“It is my belief,” A. J. went on slowly, with a quietly dry emphasis, “that Randall determined never to allow Marie to have one cent of his money. He… loathed and hated her, Colonel Primrose. But when it became impossible to conceal assets as readily as it could once be done, he began a program of liquidation.—I come now to the time of his second marriage—to which, incidentally, I was unalterably opposed, on Lowell’s account. And… this is what I have to tell you. You will understand, of course, that up to this time I had not thought it of the least importance.

“Randall came to me, shortly after his second marriage, and explained to me, at great length, what I had already heard many times—his antagonism to his first wife. He told me that he was going to make a proposition that he knew I would disapprove of, at the outset, but that he hoped I would consent to, in view of our friendship of many years standing.

“I listened to his proposal, Colonel Primrose. It was this: he planned to convert all his assets into cash, and turn that cash over to me. I was to put it away, or use it, or do anything with it, as steward, secretly… so that in event of his pre-deceasing Marie Lowell Nash, none of it would fall into her hands.—I needn’t say, Colonel, that I refused, flatly and finally. It was of course dishonest and… and illegal.”

Any pretense at taking notes that I may have made had long since been forgotten in my gaping fascination at this story, so unfolded by the dry, meticulous president of the Colonial Trust Company. And Colonel Primrose sat there, looking placidly at him, nodding his head absently.

“The object, obviously, being that Marie’s legal one-third of his estate, should he pre-decease her, would amount to nothing.-—He was not offended, and we said no more of it for some time. Then, some months later, I spoke to him about it. He said to forget it, that he must have been out of his mind to consider such a course. And I agreed with him. But… Colonel Primrose, it is now evident that he had not abandoned his plan at all! He merely gave the execution of it to more complaisant—and, if I may say so, less honest—hands.—And somewhere, Colonel Primrose, in someone’s hands, held in the way that he wished me to hold it, is the bulk of Randall Nash’s fortune… and that, sir, is—I really believe—the reason he was killed here last night!”

Colonel Primrose continued to nod his head absently. Sergeant Buck nodded his head also, and—I suppose by way of additional emphasis—turned and spat neatly into the fireplace. He then turned abruptly to answer a tap on the door, and turned back from it. “The kid says Captain Lamb and Sylvester are waiting in the other room, sir.”

Colonel Primrose got up.

“We’d better have a talk with them, Mr. McClean. Will you go on with the Sergeant? I’ll join you.”

He came over to me and took the bridge pad out of my hands. All I had on it was “45-50,000 dollars.”

He smiled.

“I had to keep you here some way,” he said. He chuckled suddenly, looking at me intently with his black old eyes.

“I admit I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known what was coming. But I didn’t want you to go out and have a heart to heart talk with someone.”

His face became abruptly sober.

“Listen, my dear. Believe me when I tell you that it isn’t safe to talk to anybody… won’t you? I don’t know what you know that you haven’t told me—but you’ve heard plenty here just now. And anything you’ve heard may be exactly what somebody’s trying desperately to keep from getting out… and somebody could easily get the idea that you know too much to stay above ground.”

He gave me a politely sardonic grin.

“Will you get that through your lovely but impulsive head, Mrs. Latham? And that means everybody around here. Just because you don’t like to think somebody you know has committed murder, and has still got murder in his or her heart, is no sign it isn’t terribly true.—You and I know a lot of people who’d murder their parents and their grandparents for three or four hundred thousand dollars.”

He tore off the sheet of paper with my note on it, crumpled it up and threw it in the fire.

“You realize, of course,” he said slowly, “that the minute Randall Nash knew Marie was dying he began taking steps to get that money of his back into his own hands. That explains his visits to his wife. It wasn’t because he’d stopped hating her—it was simply so he could find out how ill she was.”

He shook his head. “When did you first hear Marie was sick?”

“Christmas Eve. Gilbert St. Martin told me. Edith phoned him she’d seen Randall going to Marie’s house that afternoon.”

He walked over to the fireplace and stood there, looking down into it, for a long time, tapping his forefinger on the mantel.

“That’s the night the dog was poisoned,” he said. “I wonder—”

“What do you wonder?” I demanded, after a while.

“I wonder whether the dog was a… a trial flight, so to speak—or whether the poison Senator McGilvray got was meant for Randall and miscarried. Did Randall eat candy? I can’t remember.”

I shook my head.

“I wouldn’t know. Certainly not the way A. J. eats it, for instance. He doesn’t smoke or drink, of course. But surely it must have taken some time to fix those capsules—unless Marie had been sick for some time…”

He shook his head impatiently.

“That’s what I’ve been trying so hard to tell you, Mrs. Latham,” he said reproachfully, with a despairing shrug. “This isn’t any hit and run business, and you’ve got to get it out of your head that it is. It’s a carefully planned killing, worked out in detail and in absolute cold blood. The murderer has probably been hatching it for—how long ago did McClean say Randall came to him?—for three years, even. Months, at any rate. Such ideas grow, like an ugly weed in a dark cellar. You can’t tell what happened. The money was probably taken in good faith at first… and then, as it grew, its custodian became obsessed with the idea that, if anything happened to Marie, or Randall changed his mind, why, he’d have to give it up. And the moment that thought occurred… that was when Randall’s death warrant began to be written.”

“And the letter you had was the key to it, then.”

“I imagine so. Randall was too shrewd, of course, not to give himself some safeguard. I expect that was it. A statement in it, of course, that there was that money somewhere… and who had it.”

I had another idea. “In the event of his death you were to give it to Lowell. That lets her out, then.”

There was a tap on the door. Sergeant Buck’s grim face appeared. It must have gratified him to the very heart to have seen Colonel Primrose on his way out turn and shake his finger at me.

“Remember, please, Mrs. Latham. I haven’t got time to bother with you. You keep out of this.—Just coming, Buck.”

I don’t know how soon it was after he went out that I was conscious of Wilkin’s presence, quietly picking up the used glass and refilling the thermos ice tub. I do know that I suddenly had the odd sensation that he had been there a long time. It was a sort of psychological atmospheric continuity— if, as Edith St. Martin always says, you know what I mean— in which no element as foreign as the suety butler had suddenly or newly introduced itself.

“Is Mr. McClean senior staying for dinner, madame?” he inquired politely.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t normally, does he?”

“No, madame. But I heard Miss Lowell call down and ask him to stay as he went into the library. He said he would.”

“Then I fancy he will,” I said.

“I didn’t know if madame would object…”

I wasn’t sure for a moment whether he meant I would, or Iris.

He picked up the tray. Then he set it down and cleared his throat.

“I wonder if I might be so bold as to ask your advice, madame,” he said quietly.

I suppose there’s nothing any woman likes so much as to have her advice asked. Who asks it doesn’t matter… and it’s never till it’s been given that she even suspects that her leg, in a manner of speaking, has been pulled. So I quite forgot Colonel Primrose’s elaborate instructions about minding my own business.

“I don’t know whether you have heard that Mr. Nash had been receiving anonymous letters… for some time now,” he said.

I nodded.

“Then perhaps you will advise me what to do with this one, which came in the usual way this morning.”

He put his hand inside his coat and brought out an envelope that I recognized instantly, with a sudden warping of my heart, as a mate to the one I’d seen Gilbert St. Martin take from his pocket.

He handed it to me. I took it without looking up at him… knowing as I took it that I shouldn’t, that of course I should have said “Go get Colonel Primrose, we’ll give it to him.” Either that, or got up myself at once and taken it to him. I knew it then, I know it far better now. And yet… if I were put in the same position again, I’ve no doubt at all I’d do exactly what I did then; not from reason—far from it—but just from a sort of plain primitive fear. The black shadow in which Iris Nash had stood had moved away a little. I couldn’t bear the idea of jerking it back; and even before I read the letter I held in my hand I knew that that was what it must do. There’s no use in my trying to find a rational explanation for that moment. Distrusting Wilkins as I did, with his pale moon face and fat white hands, I still must have believed his “No, madame—certainly not,” when I asked him if he had read the letter. And that surely must be the great trouble of a conspiracy, knowing who’s in it and who isn’t, and who’s on which side or both.