THERE WAS A NOTE ON MY DESK WHEN I got home. “The colonel was here an’ lef’ it,” Lilac said, pointing it out to me.
I opened it. It was hastily scribbled on a sheet of my house paper.
Mrs. Latham: Will you see if you can get hold of B. D. and ask him to come in for a drink this afternoon, late, and keep him here under some pretext—if any is needed—until I come? This is getting serious. I’m trying to avoid publicity as long as I can. His number is Republic 7500.
J. P.
An added line at the bottom read:
I believe I was right about the family. The wind is shifting.
I read it through again and dropped it into the fire. The last line stood out clear and distinct on the blackened paper before the flames gulped it down. I stood there wondering about it, unable to think of it except in terms of Carey Eaton. He was the one member of the family Colonel Primrose had seen that day, so far as I knew, since he’d talked to me. And all I could think about it was that he’d been very pointed about his alibi, at lunch, and that he was the one who’d seen Bowen Digges pick up the gun there in the Hilyard library Tuesday night.
I dialed Republic 7500. Bowen was pretty well protected at OPM. I had to give my name, tell why I wanted to speak to him, and a good deal more, before I could get hold of him.
When I did, and explained it again, he said, “I’d like to come, if I’m not in jail.” Then he hesitated. “Wait a minute. Is anybody else going to be there?”
“Not unless you’d like me to ask her,” I answered.
He made a sound that could have been mistaken for a laugh, but not very easily.
“No, I’m afraid I couldn’t take it. Not just now.”
It was quarter to six when he came. The evening papers were out, of course, and a kind of perspective had been re-established. Men dying in the Pacific were more important again than the man who’d died in the C. & O. Canal. Only one column on the front page was given to Lawrason Hilyard. POLICE REPORT PROGRESS, REFUSE DETAILS, it said. I looked through it hastily. The chief of the homicide squad, Captain Lamb, stated that several members of the family of the dollar-a-year OPM man had been recalled for questioning. Captain Lamb had refused to comment on the rumor circulating at OPM that a member of the division of which Mr. Hilyard had been chief had been taken to headquarters and grilled for several hours. Lamb said everyone known to have had any association with the dead magnate would be questioned, but refused to name any individual or comment on names suggested by reporters. He admitted that no progress had been made in the police search for a man seen around the Prospect Street mansion.
It went on with a résumé of the case on an inside page. When I turned it I started violently. Bowen Digges’ picture covered several columns above it. The implication didn’t need to be stated.
LONG MENTIONED TO REPLACE DEAD OPM CHIEF, it said at the top. Under that I read in boldface type:
It was disclosed today that Bowen Digges, assistant chief of the Promethium Division of OPM, has taken charge until a successor can be appointed. It is also stated that Carey Eaton, the dead promethium magnate’s son-in-law, may be called in to head the division. He has been connected with the Promethium Corporation for the last five years and is familiar with both defense needs and the available supply.
It also became known today that Digges, the acting head, was at one time employed in a minor position in the plant of the dead man whose position he now holds. An ill-fated romance, it is said, was responsible for his breaking his connection with the corporation several years ago. No confirmation of this could be secured. The dead division chief had two daughters. One is Mrs. Carey Eaton, whose husband may succeed her father. The other is Miss Diane Hilyard, whose name has been romantically connected, recently, with Stanley Woland, the former Count Stanislaus Wolanski.
I’d just finished reading it when Bowen came in.
“Hullo,” he said. “Nice of you to ask me.” He glanced at the paper lying on the sofa. “I’m beginning to think I ought to carry a little bell around. The leper’s spots are beginning to show. Or am I mixed up?” He held his hands out to the fire. “If they don’t put me in jail pretty soon, I’m going to have to buy another overcoat.”
“If they wait, you’ll die of pneumonia, and save the taxpayers’ money.”
“The Diggeses are tough,” he said. “You’d be surprised.” He looked at the paper again. “But not tough enough. I guess they couldn’t keep it out any longer.”
“I suppose not,” I agreed.
He slumped down in the wing chair by the corner of the hearth and sat there silently. His face had sobered into hard clean lines. There wasn’t a flaccid muscle or drooping line in it. It wasn’t handsome, as Carey Eaton’s was, but it was better. It had strength and character. It was the fundamental difference between them, just as it was between Diane and her sister Joan.
I mixed him a Scotch and soda and took it over to him.
“You didn’t shoot Mr. Hilyard, did you, Mr. Digges?” I asked, going back and sitting down again.
He grinned irrepressibly then. ”I’ll shoot you if you call me Mr. Digges again, Mrs. Latham.”
“All right,” I said. “But you didn’t, did you?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Shoot Hilyard?”
I nodded.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. But if I’d known what Folger told me this noon, I certainly would have.”
“I’d shut up about it, in that case.”
“Why? If they’re going to hang me anyway, I might as well get it off my chest while I’m still here. I don’t expect to meet any of them on the other side. I may go to hell, but I won’t be in the bottom pit.”
“You’re just going to sit around and let them hang you, I take it.”
“Not on your life,” he said evenly. “Not if I can help it, I’m not. But it’s beginning to look as if there’s not so much I can do about it.”
“You can explain where you got all that blood on your clothes, for one thing,” I said. “Have you got some quixotic idea of saving somebody, or something?”
“Just myself,” he said calmly. “No, that’s one satisfaction I won’t give them.”
There was a bitterness in his voice that surprised me.
“Give who?”
“The Hilyards.”
He leaned forward, looking down into the fire.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said.
“What is?”
“Ever since I was a kid, the Hilyards have dominated my life, in one way or another. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never lived in a one-family town. Everything was by the grace of the Hilyards—politics, jobs, everything. My father worked in the plant. He was killed there. I worked there; one of my brothers. My mother never wanted to stay, but she had to. Well, I never wanted to leave. And then, later, I never wanted to see or hear of one of them again.” He picked up his glass and put it down again. “I was free of them for five years. Except for one. And that was the bitterest of the lot.”
I hadn’t realized how deep that wound had been, how sore and sensitive it still was. He’d covered up, the three times I’d seen them together. It wasn’t covered up now.
“In a way, it was all right, I guess. I worked like the devil to try to forget it, and to—to show them. I took a lot of exams and got in Tech as a special student. My mother’d been a school-teacher, and the work in the plant laboratory helped a lot. I worked nights in a service station for six months. Then things picked up. I made it in two years, and the last three I’ve been teaching and working in metallurgy. If you work hard enough, and long enough hours, you can forget . . . almost anything.” He gave me a kind of a grin. “How’d I get on this subject? Anyway, when they asked me to come here in the minor metals, I went to a lot of pains to make sure none of the Hilyards were going to be around. Then in a couple of months I was transferred to promethium and Hilyard showed UD as a dollar-a-year man.”
He stopped a moment.
“It was a funny thing. I was going to resign and get out. Then I ran into him accidentally. We’d both changed. He was a pretty big frog, of course, but this pond’s huge, and he was jittery. Well, I found I didn’t care any more. The job was too big. We were doing two important sides of it. And we got along all right. It was absolutely impersonal; you’d never have known we’d ever met before.”
I deliberately said, “Did you know when Diane came?”
“I heard him talk to her on the phone one day. She was waiting in her car to meet him one day when I came out. Well, it wasn’t so easy after that. I realized it wasn’t the family; it was just old . . . hurt. . . . I guess I’m being a bloody fool.” He finished his drink. “Anyway, I’ve got to be going. I’m boring the socks off you.”
I looked desperately at the clock. It was well after six, and no sign of Colonel Primrose.
“You haven’t told me what you are going to do to keep from being hanged,” I said.
I wanted very much to tell him about Diane and that letter, but I didn’t dare.
“I didn’t shoot Hilyard,” he said. “He was alive when I left him. And he certainly didn’t give me the impression he had any idea of killing himself. That’s rot. Somebody did it—and I can think of a lot of people, and a lot of reasons. I’ve gone on saying I hated his guts—I said that to you—but, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t true any longer. It was just force of habit.” He shook his head. “I wish to God I knew who did it. It’s got me wondering, sometimes, if I went crazy and did it myself.”
There was a kind of pain in his voice that frightened me. Otherwise I don’t think I’d have said what I did.
“What about that old man, Bowen?”
He looked up at me. “What old man?”
“The one the police are hunting for. He was hanging around Prospect Street. Mrs. Hilyard told me he’s a beggar. But there’s something queer about that. He’s been living over at an antique-repair shop back off Wisconsin Avenue, Mrs. Kalbfus’ place, and Mr. Kalbfus told me he won’t even take money for the work he does. He distributes leaflets about the end of the world.”
Bowen shook his head. “I read about him in the papers. I know the type, and I know the place, but I don’t know him. He doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“I thought you recognized him today,” I said.
He stared at me. “What do you mean?”
“Down on the wharf. When you left the boat. He came out—”
I didn’t get any further. The slowly changing expression on his face stopped me. It shifted gradually, as he sat there staring at me, from surprise to incomprehension to a sudden understanding, and then to something else that I couldn’t name. And then Mr. Bowen Digges leaped to his feet
“Magnussen!” he shouted. “I thought I knew that fellow!”
He was across the room before I could catch my breath. At the door he whirled around. “Bless you, Mrs. Latham!”
I heard the front door slam.