The Simple Way of Poison (33 page)

Authors: Leslie Ford

Tags: #Crime, #OCR-Editing

BOOK: The Simple Way of Poison

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He turned deliberately to Sergeant Buck and took the blue syphon with the lighter blue band around its shoulder.

“The poisoner found a syphon of this kind, in the Nashes’ house—the syphon that Lowell had given her father for Christmas, and that Iris had charged before she left the house that night. And he took that syphon away with him.”

He turned back to Sergeant Buck, gave the syphon to him, and took the other one held out in the Sergeant’s great left hand.

“Iris had seen that syphon only a few times,” he went on calmly. “When she returned to the house that night, after the Assembly, she did not notice that the syphon on Randall Nash’s desk was… not the one that she had charged. But when, last night as we were trying to reconstruct just what had happened, and had this syphon on the desk there, Lowell Nash came into the library, and saw it for the first time, she… knew. The murderer of Randall Nash had substituted a poisoned syphon that was identical with the other… as far as he knew. But the murderer of Randall Nash is… color blind, in a very unusual way. He does not have the ordinary and very common red-green color blindness at all. He has the extremely rare form of color blindness that cannot distinguish between blue and yellow. To his eyes they are both grey.”

I looked for just one instant at the blue syphon with the gold band, as he held the two of them out together, and closed my eyes.

“For Randall Nash had entrusted his money to the man whom he thought would have the greatest interest in preserving it… for his own interest as well as Lowell’s. But that man had realized that Lowell Nash was not in love with him, and was not going to marry him. He is furthermore the man who would know most quickly that A. J. McClean had guessed the truth of it; he is the man who is in charge of the safety deposit boxes in his uncle’s bank, and had the safest and most effective means of concealing the money.—As Lowell has realized… for some time before she asked him, just now, to hand her the blue ball from the top of the tree.”

I had opened my eyes and was staring, as I suppose we all were, at Mac, standing there by himself at the foot of the step ladder, his eyes resting dumbly, helplessly, on the two syphons, his face so dreadfully white… and I suppose we were all trying, as I was, to readjust the meaning of his strong, determined, inarticulate face, and realizing, with a cold shocked thrill of horror, that we had never known him, really, at all… never known the turbulent complex man under the boy we had always known…

It was Lowell we looked at, a few minutes later. Mac had dropped through our lives with such cataclysmic force that we were too numb to think of him. She stood there, white and rigid, in front of the denuded Christmas tree, the broken ball at her feet, still holding to the back of the chair. Her eyes had not raised until she spoke now.

“It’s my father’s fault. He killed himself and A. J… and Mac. Mac never knew this would happen to him when he took that money to keep. I know he didn’t.”

“I’m sure he didn’t, Lowell,” Colonel Primrose said.

No one else spoke, not even Edith St. Martin. And then she did the one tactful thing I’ve ever seen her do; she picked up her mink coat and went out, without a word. And after a little time Iris, who had been standing by the garden window, the sun on her hair making it like another sun in the room, turned to Angus.

“Let’s go home, Angie,” she said.

I saw the startled look in Lowell’s eyes as she turned to where Steve Donaldson stood in front of the fireplace, his cold pipe gripped between his teeth until white ridges stood out in his lean sun-tanned cheeks, not moving.

Angie got up off the floor and stood there, looking quietly at his sister, waiting.

Lowell raised a hand to her forehead and pushed back her short black curls.

“Angie can’t go, Iris,” she said. “He… he just bet me we couldn’t go around the world together without having a single row… and if I win he’s… he’s going to give me half the money mother left him.”

Angie Nash took two steps to her side, put his arm around her and grinned at everybody.

“This is the one bet I’ve ever made,” he said cheerfully, “that’s really foolproof. I can’t lose. Honey, you couldn’t be decent twenty-four hours to save your neck. The only thing I don’t see is what I want to go off to… to China for to find it out.”

Lowell was still looking at Iris.

“We’re going alone,” she said. “—Unless you and Steve would come with us. To… to keep him from ditching me in the desert of Tibet.”

And Iris looked at her, her face suddenly quite pale, and started to speak. But Lowell had gone to her.

“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “Steve never knew I was on earth, and I’ll be just as mad about him for a stepfather, anyway. And… you told me yourself I oughtn’t to marry till I’d had some fun, and seen more than one man… and I know it… and please, Iris, don’t think I’m as bad as…”

But the rest of that sentence was lost in her stepmother’s arms that bridged, in one brief instant, the gap of those bitter years. The tears streamed down Iris’s face. She held out her hand to Steve Donaldson.

“My God,” said Angie Nash, “the little armadillo’s cast her shell!”

“You shut up!” Lowell said.

“You see? And I’m going to China with that!”

Lowell raised her head and wiped her nose. “It doesn’t count till we get on the boat, does it, Iris?”

They laughed at each other. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my eyes, for some reason, and Colonel Primrose was smiling that quiet placid smile of his, and Sergeant Buck was beaming like the great stone face with the morning sun on it.

It was after lunch a couple of days later that Colonel Primrose and I were having coffee in my living room overlooking the garden. He was tying up a few loose ends for me—such as Mac’s having Lowell’s keys, and how easy it was for him to slip away unnoticed from the Assembly, before he and Lowell went back to the Beall Street house together. I remembered our discussion in the little gallery of Linthicum Hall, when Lowell was sitting under Mr. Linthicum’s portrait, surrounded by young men, with Mac completely crowded out. And I told Colonel Primrose about Mac’s obviously not distinguishing the blue Christmas ornaments from the yellow when they were doing the tree there Christmas Eve—obviously, that is, when you got to thinking about it—and showing up at Marie Nash’s home on Massachusetts Avenue the morning I went there to see Angus and Lowell in a dark blue suit and yellow tie.

“I put it down to his being distraught and upset over what poor Lowell was going through.”

“You know,” he said, “it was you who put me on to that, originally.”

“I did?” It was a mystery to me.

“When you told me about A. J. going out against the traffic light. There’s no doubt, from that and other things I’ve turned up, that A. J. was red-green color blind, in the ordinary way. Well, they don’t know much about blue-yellow color blindness, but apparently any kind of color blindness is pretty apt to be congenital. It got me to thinking, eventually… Well, let’s see. Oh, the dismantling of your place here. Mac, of course, looking for that letter—and I don’t know whether he found it or not. He won’t speak. Anything else?”

“Yes,” I said. “The poison Lavinia had. Where—”

He chuckled.

“I’ll tell you, some time,” he said calmly. “Well, I’m glad Iris is going along with Lowell and Angus. For Lowell’s sake too—she needs a chance to make up a little for the last few years. Donaldson’s meeting them in France at the end of the summer. He’s a good sort.”

“Iris deserved a break,” I said.

“Yates thinks he’s found the money, by the way. There’s a little over a quarter of a million stowed away in a safety deposit box at the Colonial Trust Company, leased—in Mac’s hand writing—to a T. J. McClelland. They haven’t been able so far to turn up a Mr. McClelland. I imagine that’s Randall’s cache. You know, there’s a certain extenuation, to my mind, in the fact that he didn’t do any of this to cover up just vulgar defalcation. He hadn’t been using the money to play the horses or the market. It was a major operation, a grand coup.”

“You’ve got an odd notion of extenuating circumstances,” I said.

He smiled. “No, I’m merely saying he did it in a big way. The stake was worth so much that obstacles had to be pushed aside, perfectly ruthlessly.”

He smiled at me again, through a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.

“Possibly I’m merely trying to explain my own defense, if anything should happen to—say—-Sergeant Buck. Because you know, my dear…”

That was as far as he got, for at that moment Lilac put her head in the door.

“Mis’ Grace, they’s a lady an’ gennelman at th’ do’ say can they see you? Majo’ an’ Mis’ Albright is th’ name.”

I looked at Colonel Primrose. He shrugged his shoulders, I thought a trifle shortly.

“No friends of mine,” he said.

“Show them in, Lilac,” I said. And they came—Mrs. Albright a fluffy pleasant little woman tripping along, followed by a tall military-looking man with grey eyes and an eagle nose.

“Oh, I do hope I’m not intruding,” Mrs. Albright said. “But an old friend of my husband’s told us you would consider letting your house, and we’re so anxious to get settled! He said you wanted to get away immediately. It would be heavenly…!”

Colonel Primrose looked at me, I looked at him. A little shadow crossed his face.

“Who… is your friend?” he asked.

“I’m not sure you know him, Mrs. Latham, as a matter of fact,” Major Albright said. “He said he was merely a friend of a friend of yours. He’s an old Army sergeant—”

“Named… Phineas T. Buck?” Colonel Primrose asked evenly.

“Then you do know him!” Mrs. Albright said delightedly.

“Oh, very well,” Colonel Primrose said, with a certain ominous calm perceptible only to me.

The Palm Castle pulled out of New York harbor, and I waved goodbye to Colonel Primrose, who’d come up to see me off to resume my interrupted winter in Nassau. When the white ship passed the squat greenish figure of the Statue of Liberty, glistening in the winter sun, I left the rail and went to my stateroom to straighten out the litter of flowers and books and what-not deposited there by kind friends. Tucked in one side of a mammoth basket of fruit and comestibles was a large red folder. I opened it.

Mr. Hofnagel had really outdone himself. Staring up at me on one side, from a dappled grey background, was a highly— and indescribably—tinted portrait of Colonel John Primrose. Facing it—and me—and even more indescribably tinted, was the rockbound granite facade of Sergeant Buck. And there was something in the fishy grey eyes that I couldn’t quite make out. It may have been caused, that look, by the large bottle plainly visible through the open door of Mr. Hofnagel’s closet laboratory that Colonel Primrose had recognized as a legitimate accessory of the photographer’s art and the illegitimate source of the cyanide of potassium that had killed two men and Senator McGilvray. It may have been that, since that was the real reason Colonel Primrose had sent him there the next day to have his picture taken. Or more likely still, it may have been just at that moment that Sergeant Buck thought up the small but decisive expedient by means of which he got me out of Georgetown, and gave his Colonel the chance to elude once more a fate far worse than death.

FIN

About Leslie Ford

Leslie Ford (1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.

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