I WAS GOING OVER ALL THAT IN MY mind when the telephone rang. For a moment I didn’t get the name of the man who was speaking. Then I understood it.
“Oh, good morning, Mr. Folger,” I said.
“Will you lunch with me, Mrs. Latham?” he asked.
“On the Samarkand? It’s my last party—I’m turning her over to the Navy next week.”
I hesitated. I could have told him I had a luncheon engagement, which was true, though I could beg off. I was awfully curious about various things, but still——
“My sister and the Eatons are going to be here,” he went on. “My niece, Joan Eaton, thinks you’ve got a pretty one-sided picture of the family from that little wildcat of ours. It’s all very quiet, of course, but it would be a great pleasure——”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like to. What time?”
“Could you make it about a quarter to one, or is that too early?”
I put down the phone. I suppose I did have a one-sided picture of the family, but I’d certainly got it pretty directly from themselves, not Diane alone. It would be interesting to see them when they weren’t in the same cage with their little wildcat. Maybe they were very nice people. Still, it was odd, it seemed to me, that they should have cared one way or the other about what kind of a picture of them I’d got. It wasn’t as if they were staying in town and would have to go on coping with me.
And it meant, of course, I was reflecting, that Mrs. Hilyard had got safely back from her two-o’clock pilgrimage.
I was just wondering what I was going to say to Colonel Primrose about the night before when Lilac came up.
“The colonel he’s downstairs,” she announced. She always does it, when there’s trouble around, as if he’d come in with the noose in his hand and was at that moment engaged in erecting a gibbet in the front hall.
“Tell him I’ll be down immediately,” I said.
It was probably the hat, I thought. But it wasn’t the hat that I was worrying about just then. I had a very real and intricate problem. I didn’t care about Mrs. Hilyard, but I did care about Diane and, in a way, about the so-called beggar. I could still see his face raised to the window, last Monday, when Mrs. Hilyard peremptorily motioned her husband to go on. The man might be cracked, I thought, but if more people’s religion gave them as sweet and other-worldly a light in their eyes as his gave him, maybe more people would be handling out tracts and fewer ordnance supplies.
Colonel Primrose was standing in front of the fire reading the paper. He plainly hadn’t had much sleep, and he also looked as if he wasn’t in a mood to put up with anybody’s being an obstructionist at that moment. He folded the paper and handed it to me.
“Have you seen this?”
It was the picture of all the hats. As I nodded I thought, It’s coming now.
“If that hat turns up,” he said, sitting down, “Mr. Bowen Digges’ goose is very browned.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither did he for a moment.
“If I knew where it was, I’d have to turn it over to Lamb,” he went on equably. “Fortunately, I don’t.”
I didn’t look at him. “Would you suppose it might have been destroyed?”
“I hope not,” he answered. “That would be damnably unfortunate. I expect that hat to be used in evidence, against Digges if he did murder Hilyard, or against whoever did do it.”
“You’re sure he was murdered?”
“I’ve never for an instant doubted it, my dear. There was no known reason for suicide. He had a mild peptic ulcer, but they tell me everybody in the Department of the Interior has that. They just attribute it to Mr. Ickes and go on a diet. Hilyard’s letter of resignation, written after he got home from OPM, made an appointment for a board meeting tomorrow morning. Furthermore, he was in a rage when he left the house to take his dog out. A man doesn’t start a suicidal depression that way.”
“Do you know what he was in a rage about?” I asked.
He nodded. “I think so. It was partly one Mr. Ira Colton accusing him of holding out on promethium and ruining him, which is firmly and erroneously fixed in Mr. Ira Colton’s mind. It was also partly his daughter Diane. According to Duncan Scott, the lawyer who was going to fix things for him, Colton lost his temper and told Hilyard a lot of things, including an item of gossip he’d picked up at a party.”
“Was it about Stanley?” I asked quickly.
“About the five thousand dollars Stanley borrowed. And Stanley and Diane walked in nearly five minutes later.”
“Oh, gosh,” I said. “I suppose that was the door that hit Stanley, after all. Could he have done it?”
Colonel Primrose nodded calmly. “Stanley’s life hasn’t been designed to keep him particularly fit.”
“So he was fibbing when he said Mr. Hilyard was pleased about having him for a son-in-law.”
He looked at me with mild surprise. “Of course, Mrs. Latham. The law doesn’t make a man give incriminating evidence against himself.”
“Look,” I said. “Is Bowen Digges really in such a mess?”
“I can think of one way it could be worse,” he said soberly. “He could have been seen, by a reliable witness, with a gun in his hand, just before and immediately after it was fired at Hilyard’s head.”
“That was he in the police line-up, then?”
He nodded. “He says he doesn’t remember running, but he was in a hurry and maybe he was. He won’t say where he was running to, or why he was in a hurry.”
He made a little gesture of impatience, as if Bowen Digges might have helped out with at least one explanation.
“And that’s not all. He had appointments all day Tuesday. People sat around ten deep. And he never showed up. Lamb sent a man to OPM to pick up the washroom gossip. It seems he wasn’t there, for one reason, because he’d gone somewhere the night before and got boiled to the eyebrows. Absolutely stinko.”
“After he ran into Diane!” I said.
He nodded.
“Then he’s still in love with her.”
He drew a long breath. “I … should have thought you’d realized that,” he said reproachfully. “Otherwise the fool would see the spot he’s on. Well, Hilyard called him up when he didn’t meet Duncan Scott and Colton for lunch and asked him to come to dinner before they came that night. He was all right by that time and said no, thanks, he’d be there at nine-twenty. He hung up the phone and said he might have to work with the hard-named old so-and-so, but he didn’t have to eat with him. That was told around OPM before they’d heard about Hilyard.”
“That was just dandy, wasn’t it?” I said.
“It was mortar for the bricks, certainly.” He got up and paced back and forth in front of the fire. “There are a lot of things I don’t understand about this. Either it’s the strangest series of coincidences or the young fellow is guilty. Lamb may be right, of course. He says I expect a person who’s murdered somebody to cover up, and he points out that Digges did cover up. He made it look like suicide, and, as a matter of fact, that would have held if I hadn’t happened to be interested in Hilyard before it happened.”
He came back and sat down again.
“Lamb thinks he may still get away with it, if Mrs. Hilyard and the family stick to their story of suicide. But will they stick? They don’t like Digges. If they realize the case against him, they may just quietly sign off and let him take it right on the chin.”
“Oh, no!” I protested. “They couldn’t do that.”
He shrugged. “It’s been done, Mrs. Latham. I don’t mean they’d perjure themselves.” He got up. “Digges’ thumbprint is on the metal foil of that twisted cigarette pack, incidentally. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence about.” He started to the door, stopped and came back. “Does anybody know where that hat is?” he asked gravely.
“Only the person who hid it, I suppose,” I said. “Why?”
“Because I’d rather have Digges hanged, even if he’s as innocent as an angel, than have anybody I care about pretty deeply get hurt because she’s a quixotic, if very lovely, fool.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Colonel Primrose,” I said.
He smiled. “Don’t forget. I don’t want anything to happen to it ... or to you. Especially it.”
I followed him out into the hall.
“What about the beggar?” I asked. I felt I was being awfully casual about it.
He looked at me.
“The mystery man, as the papers call him.”
“What about him, my dear?” he asked placidly.
“I mean, has he been found yet?”
He shook his head. “We haven’t got hold of him. I’ll tell you about him later on.”
He opened the door. Behind us the great granite form of Sgt. Phineas T. Buck was coming up out of the kitchen. He avoided looking at either of us, but at least he didn’t spit.
I went back, got my coat and put on my galoshes to take Sheila for a walk to the market.
Lilac came heavily up the kitchen stairs. “The sergeant say the colonel ain’ never goin’ to solve no murders, nor nothin’, if he keep on wastin’ his time comin’ over here irregardless.”
I laughed. “You just tell the sergeant to mind his own business,” I said.
“ ’Deed Ah did. Ah tol’ him we wouldn’ give him or the colonel house room if you hadn’ gone crazy as a June bug.”
She normally used the more classical entomological phrase. I let it go at that and whistled for Sheila.
“When you goin’ to remember to see ’bout my chair?” Lilac demanded darkly.
All my property is hers by definition. The chair was one I’d taken to the cabinetmaker’s to be reglued a month before and forgotten all about.
“I’ll do it now, Lilac,” I said. I attached Sheila’s leash, never dreaming that Lilac was the ebony fleshpot in which Fate had chosen to reside that morning.