The Simple Way of Poison (29 page)

I was planning on going over to my house to tell Gilbert St. Martin that Iris was not keeping his proposed rendezvous. But I wasn’t telling Sergeant Buck.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I added sweetly, “Do you mind, Sergeant?”

I meant, of course, that it was none of his business, but I didn’t quite like to say so. After all, the court plaster striped up and down his face was there so it wouldn’t be on mine. But he understood me perfectly.

He turned the curious molten brassy hue he gets. “It ain’t that
I
mind what you do, ma’am,” he said, with feeling. “It’s my orders. The Colonel says I’m to watch out nothing happens to you. I just thought I’d tell you in case you might be wondering.”

I took off my hat.

“I don’t suppose you want to go for a walk,” I said.

“No, ma’am. Not just now.”

“Then I’ll go upstairs. You can tell Mrs. Nash if she asks for me.”

I went up. He stood there in the hall watching me as impersonally and with as evident distaste as if I were a lap dog he’d been given to hold. I went into my room and partly closed the door. I waited by it, listening, until I’d heard him go back into the library. Then I put on my coat and hat again and tiptoed across the hall to the back stairs. It was after ten, and I didn’t want Gilbert St. Martin making a scene on my front steps… or coming here—not if I could head him off.

I’d got across the hall but not quite to the steps when I heard the drawing room door open. Reflected in the darkish tilted panes of the Palladian window I could see Lowell and Steve Donaldson. Steve had his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. The library door opened at that moment, and Sergeant Buck looked out.

“Okay,” he said. “I thought it was Mrs. Latham.”

“Where is she?”

It was Steve’s voice.

“Upstairs,” Sergeant Buck said gruffly.

I slipped down the back steps, grinning to myself. I was half-way down when it occurred to me all of a sudden that if I could see Lowell and Steve reflected in that window, then Randall Nash could have seen Gilbert and Iris there… and undoubtedly had seen them, Christmas Eve when I watched from my bedroom window and saw Gil raise her hand to his lips. “He must have been wild,” I thought.

The kitchen was empty, and the little passage between it and the servants’ wing. I unlatched the back door and crept outside. It was as dark as pitch. The garden wall and my own house loomed dimly, a darker darkness in the starless night. For a moment I hesitated. It was very much nearer across the wall, and I might meet one of Captain Lamb’s men if I tried to get out into Beall Street through the servants’ entrance. On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a climber. Still, the wall was partly broken down, and Lowell had done it.

I glanced back. Whatever I was going to do had better be done quickly, I thought. I scooted across the soggy lawn to the broken-down place above the old Nash vault, stepping warily there for fear I might conceivably cave it in. I’m not quite sure, now, how I got over that wall. I couldn’t possibly have done it in the daylight, when I could see how high it really was. The sharp broken brick cut my hands and tore my stockings to ribbons. However, I made it. My eyes were getting used to the dark now, and it wasn’t too bad, except that everything was strange and unreal. Even the urn on my side of the wall loomed pale and unfamiliar and a little frightening.

I jumped down on the other side, clinging to the bare ropey branches of the trumpet vine, got to my feet and brushed myself off. Suddenly my hands stopped short as something white and ghostly moving beyond my tiny orangery made my blood turn to water and my feet freeze in their muddy tracks. Then I took a deep breath. It wasn’t moving, obviously, being a white fluted marble column, broken at the top, that so far as I know has never done anything but stand there. It shook me, however, because it made me realize how jumpy I was. Perhaps I really needed Sergeant Buck to look out for me after all, I thought.

I let go the trumpet vine that I’d caught hold of again and ran quickly across the grass. And I stopped short a second time. The Venetian blinds in the living room were pulled flat, the velvet hangings were drawn. That was strange, I thought, because Lilac never draws them unless I’m in the house and tell her to. The garden’s completely enclosed, and like another room in the house, as a matter of fact, so there’s no need to, really, except that it is cozier when the fire’s burning to have them drawn.

Then I realized what had happened. Gilbert St. Martin had come, of course—it was after ten—and he’d be just the person who’d want to shut himself in so no one could see him… so he wouldn’t get caught, I thought suddenly, in one of Sergeant Buck’s uncompromising positions.

I went quickly along the narrow herring-bone path to the garden door. I felt in my pocket for my keys, counted them off in the dark till I came to the fourth from the left, and put it in the lock. As I did, the path of light from the living room door across the hall was abruptly blotted out; the place was in utter and total darkness.

I stood stock-still on the threshold, for a long time, my heart a cold lump in my throat. I called “Lilac!” and waited. There was no answer. “Julius!” I called. I waited again, but still there was no answer, no sound of any kind, in all the pitchy blackness, except, from somewhere downstairs, my Irish setter Sheila’s deep-throated bark and her claws scratching against a door.

I stood there with my hand on the brass knob. Somebody was in my house… for what reason I didn’t know, but I did have the most instant and complete conviction that whoever it was it was a murderer, a man—or a woman—on whose hands already lay the blood of Randall Nash and of old A. J. McClean… and that my blood couldn’t dye those hands a great deal redder, or sear the scar on that immortal soul one whit deeper.

For a moment—for one
awful
moment—I nearly turned tail and ran. But I didn’t. There was no use. There was no place to run to. I’d be trapped there in the garden… I couldn’t possibly get back over the wall, the bricks I’d used as stepping stones were all piled on the other side. And there was another reason. I can’t pretend that I’m brave. I’m a most frightful coward. But even a frightful coward couldn’t go away and leave two old colored people sleeping in that house, as I knew they must be, alone with murder. If I could make a dash, I thought, for the light switch at the end of the hall, or the one by the door leading down to the kitchen—or even the one inside the dining room… The darkness worked two ways. I was as used to it in itself as whoever was inside there, and I was more used to the house.

I reached down and slipped off my soggy shoes. My hands weren’t shaking now, but my knees were. I threw my shoes out on the grass and took a step forward, and another—only my pounding heart would give me away, I thought—and another, my hand running along the wall, past the picture of the red vase of gentians that I could almost see, I knew it so well, and the pembroke table with the terrarium with the lone yellow lady slipper in it, to the door frame. But the door had been closed, closed since the light had been turned off, just while I was standing there… we were so close to each other, this murderer and I. I could hear a sharp intake of breath, or so I thought—whether it was mine or his I couldn’t tell.

I slipped past that door, my heart almost bursting. I knew now that I had to make the switch by the kitchen stairs. I started to run, even in the dark there. It was only a few steps. But I didn’t make it. I could hear the door open behind me, and a quick step, and then a cold kid-gloved hand came over my mouth as I screamed and something crashed against the back of my head, and that was all except for a blinding pyrotechnic flash through all my being…

When I opened my eyes I was moving in great giddy circles in a sort of universal wind tunnel, in which I got nowhere. Through the haze and the roar I could dimly hear someone swearing at me, and it occurred to me crazily that I was in France, then, and hadn’t tipped the driver enough. However, he was swearing in English, and so I closed my eyes again, knowing it was Sergeant Buck and that he had every right to swear as roundly as he chose and in whatever language.

Then I was aware of another voice—cool, bored, drawling. “Good Lord, I nearly broke my neck falling over her. The front door was wide open, all the lights off. I say, they’ve certainly ripped the place up.”

I opened my eyes, with an effort, and tried to raise my pounding beating head.

“Stay where you are, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck growled.

I couldn’t have lifted my head anyway, even if I’d dared to try, but I could roll it to one side and open my bursting eyes. I couldn’t believe they were seeing straight. The living room was torn to bits; pictures down, books on the floor, chairs with the upholstery ripped off, boxes dumped out and left.

I closed my eyes again, and felt Sheila’s wet comforting nose in my face and her feet in the pit of my stomach, and heard Sergeant Buck saying “Get off there, pup,” and then Colonel Primrose was beside me, my hands in his. I knew without caring that the tears were rolling down my cheeks like rain out of a broken eave trough. I knew he’d be angry, and I tried to explain, but he put his hand under my chin and closed my mouth.

“I imagine she wouldn’t have seen who it was,” I heard him say.

“She came in the back, sir, over the garden wall,” the Sergeant’s brassy voice said. “Look at her feet. The house was pitch black. She was laying in the hall with that there ribbon clerk kneeling down by her, holding his cigarette lighter over his head. Scared to go look for anybody, I guess. Good thing she’s got a thick skull or she’d be dead as hell.”

Colonel Primrose’s hands tightened on mine.

“Where are Julius and Lilac?”

“Don’t know, sir. They ain’t around any place I can find.”

“Then keep Mr. St. Martin in the other room. Don’t let him go prowling around the house.”

“Okay, sir.”

“You stay just here for a minute, Mrs. Latham, till we see if you’ve got a fracture. I hope you have if it’ll teach you a little sense… but I’m afraid it won’t so I hope you haven’t.”

Something warm brushed my aching forehead. I thought for a moment he’d kissed me, but I was awfully muddle-headed, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, I was alone with Sheila after that, and Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were with Gilbert St. Martin in the dining room, and all I knew was that somebody thought I had something he wanted very badly… and would much rather kill me than have me know who he was… and that Lilac and Julius hadn’t been found…

The most immediate result of all this was that Headquarters, so to speak, moved from the yellow brick house in Beall Street across the garden wall to my red brick house in P Street.

“You don’t know what it is somebody’s hunting so frantically, I suppose?” Colonel Primrose asked me, the next morning.

My head still hurt, especially when I turned it or tried to open my eyes very wide, and worst of all when I closed my teeth together quickly, all of which I seemed constantly to do.

“The only thing I can possibly think of is that somebody thinks Randall Nash left that letter he got from you here, when he waited for me after he’d left your house with it.”

It was early in the morning, and I was downstairs propped up on the sofa because I was too curious to stay properly in bed. The sun was out. It looked more like April than December, except that it was still cold. Through the long windows I could look out into the garden and see my heel tracks zigzagging drunkenly from the wall to the brick walk, and my shoes were still lying there where I’d thrown them.

Lilac brought in my tray and put it on the table. Her eyes were like saucers.

“ ’Deed an’ I’d nevah fo’gived mahself if they’d killed you, Mis’ Grace!”

“What happened to you?” I asked. I’d been doped and put to bed before she and Julius had turned up the night before.

“Mistah St Mahtin, he come and asked was you heah, an’ Ah says No. So he says he go get a pack a’ cigarettes, an’ come back. ’Bout three minutes, the telephone ’menced ringin’, an’ a man said he was callin’ fo’ you, an’ me an’ Julius was t’ go right away ovah t’ Mistah Angus’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, an’ you was goin’ t’stay theah all night, an’ we should get some things you had, an’ bring ’em home.”

“But… Lilac,” I said weakly. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

She nodded vigorously. “ ’An that’s jus’ what Ah tol’ Julius, but he say a lot a’ things Mis’ Grace does don’ make no sense—mo’ that doesn’ than does.”

I nodded a feeble and painful agreement, and Sergeant Buck, standing in his usual position behind the Colonel, nodded too, very vigorously, and spat sizzlingly into the fire. Colonel Primrose smiled, but very briefly. I’d never seen him quite so depressed and grim about anything before.

Neither had Buck, I think, because a few minutes before, when Colonel Primrose had gone down to the kitchen to see Julius and Lilac, he made, in his usual curt manner, the only comment he’s ever made to me about the state of his chiefs psyche. It sounded peculiarly sinister, coming out of one corner of his own grimly depressed dead pan. “Lower’n a snake’s belly,” he said, jerking his head toward Colonel Primrose’s retreating figure.

Then he said, “Are you staying here, the rest of the winter?”

I nodded in spite of my bursting head. “I have to,” I said. “I haven’t got a tenant, and I can’t afford to keep up two houses.”

It was the only interest he’d ever evinced in my personal affairs, and perfunctory as it was I was rather touched. I needn’t have been, of course, as I could have known. I suppose it showed my head was hurt worse than I’d realized.

When Colonel Primrose came back Sergeant Buck looked at his watch.

“You want me to ask him a few questions, sir?”

“No, no,” Colonel Primrose said hastily. “You let him alone, Buck.”

I knew what he meant. Sergeant Buck had mysterious, or perhaps not so mysterious, ways of his own for extracting information from people he didn’t like.

Buck nodded curtly. “Then I got a date to get my picture shot, sir,” he said, a little self-consciously I’m happy to say.

Colonel Primrose pulled up a chair and sat down beside me.