By morning, however, I should never have thought of telling him. In fact, until I saw Lilac’s solemn black face above the pink-flowered coffeepot on my breakfast tray, I had almost forgotten Sandra Gould. It’s always seemed to me a curious commentary on the human soul that a few hours’ sleep and the morning sun can manage to do away with the most horrible forebodings. I thought of that now as I waited for Lilac to prop the pillows behind me.
“Mr. Jim’s wife done away with herself las’ night, Miss Grace,” she said ominously.
“I know,” I said, unfolding the morning paper.
“Don’ seem lak she’d do that, somehow. Seem lak she was too ornery.”
“You can’t tell about people,” I answered philosophically.
“ ’Deed an’ that’s what Annie says, at church this mornin’.”
Annie is the Bishops’ cook, and there’s a community bus that takes all the colored help into April Harbor to church at six Sunday mornings and at eight Sunday evenings.
“Hawkins says the carryin’s on in the garage las’ night sumthin’ to hear.”
“Really?”
“Yas’m.”
I was intent on my paper. I didn’t want to discuss this business with her . . . not just then. She’s been with us fifteen years. There’s not very much she doesn’t know about my friends, and her judgments are shrewd.
She stood, a black mountain of irresolution, at the foot of my bed a moment, then went to the door. There she stopped and turned round.
“Shall Ah keep the Cunnel’s breakfas’ hot, or will he get his breakfas’ while he’s in town?”
I looked up, too startled to conceal anything.
“He done went out, him an’ the Sergeant, ’fore me an’ Julius got back from church. We passed ’em on the bridge, goin’ into town.”
With that she went out and closed the door. The inquiry about their breakfast, of course, was merely a gambit with which I really had nothing whatsoever to do.
I put my paper down and drank my orange juice, definitely disturbed by this move on the part of my guest. I knew from my father and my husband—both of them lawyers—that the most difficult thing for people involved in an unlawful conspiracy to do is to do nothing. Nevertheless, I put my hand out half a dozen times and took up the telephone to call Alice Gould, only to put it down each time.
I was considerably more upset, as a matter of fact, than I liked at all to admit, even to myself. What if Colonel Primrose had decided that Sandra’s death was not suicide at all, and got the State’s Attorney to open an investigation? What, for instance, would I do about the two bits of information that I had that were so damning to people I cared a great deal about—so much that I hardly dared think about them. The fact that they pointed in wholly different directions didn’t seem to matter. Rosemary’s flower clutched in Sandra’s hand—the letter that Alice Gould had found on Sandra’s dressing table. What would I do? Would I commit perjury if I had to?
I wiped the excess lipstick off my mouth with a piece of tissue, looking at myself in the mirror. I knew I would—if I had to. In a sense I’d already done it.
I was on the screened front porch when Colonel Primrose and his sergeant appeared coming around the house. That in itself seemed ominous, as none but the most formal callers bother to come in any way except through the kitchen. His greeting was cheery, but it failed to conceal the look on Sergeant Buck’s face, even more iron-grim than usual. The Sergeant did not come in. He marched down the lawn, dug out a dandelion that I’ve been carefully saving for several years, picked up an empty crumpled cigarette package and a couple of butts and went around the house. You could almost see a garbage can in his mind.
“Good morning, Mrs. Latham. I hope you slept—or did you have time?”
The Colonel smiled and sat down, straightening one rheumatic knee into place with a quite shameless grin to acknowledge the liability of years.
“I’m afraid I was up a bit early. I hope I didn’t disturb you?”
“Not at all. I only heard about it through the normal domestic channels. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
I got up to ring the bell, but he put up his hand.
“I’ve breakfasted—wisely but not too well—at the local undertaker’s.”
“It sounds bad.”
“It was. But sit down, Mrs. Latham. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you something, very frankly. I want you to be equally frank—because it’s quite a serious matter.”
I sat down again, trying to make myself meet his black intent gaze without telling him I was trying.
“I said I’d been to the undertaker’s this morning,” he went on. “I wanted to make sure that Sandra Gould died of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
He looked at me steadily. I waited.
“And she did. There’s no doubt of that.”
I breathed deeply, almost without knowing that I’d been holding my breath while I waited.
“But that’s not all, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly. “There’s a bruise on the back of her head. Only a slight abrasion, but the bruise is fairly extensive.”
“Still . . . she died of monoxide gas,” I said quickly.
“Her legs are scratched too,” he said, disregarding my interruption. “But it’s the bruise that interests me. It would have knocked her completely unconscious—if she wasn’t already dead, and we’ve been able to rule that out quite definitely. The bruise was made before she died.”
I looked at him, not knowing what all this was leading up to.
“In other words, Mrs. Latham, while Sandra Gould was actually killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, her death was not self-inflicted. She did breathe in the fumes that killed her, but she was unconscious while she was doing it. From her own point of view her death was quite unintentional. In other words again, Mrs. Latham . . . Sandra Gould was murdered.”
I stared at him, speechless. Now that my own doubts and fears were put squarely in front of me in the form of fact, I fought them off violently.
“That’s impossible!” I cried. “You can’t know that! The bruises could have been made when she fell against the door handle!”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“That’s what your coroner amicably suggested. But he’s wrong. It’s simple to prove. You see, the blood in the bruised tissue has no trace of carbon monoxide. The rest of her blood is saturated with it.”
He looked at me very earnestly.
“You see, Mrs. Latham, this sort of thing is my business. Buck and I make our living at it . . . keeping people from getting away with murder. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
He hesitated a moment, and chuckled a little.
“Frankly, I’ve already abused your hospitality. I phoned to Washington last night. The Federal Bureau sent down a makeshift sort of laboratory this morning. Dr. Potter and Mr. Shryock helped out. Furthermore, Mrs. Latham, there was no alcohol in the woman’s brain . . . not enough, anyway, to account for the odor in that car. I felt the seat last night, as you may have noticed. The whisky had been spilled on it, for the purpose of misdirection.”
I took a cigarette out of the box on the table and held it as steadily as I could while he lighted it for me.
“You see, that’s the great trouble with murder. Ordinarily, last night would have washed all this up—completely—except that I happened to be here. That’s about the only thing that makes me believe there must be some kind of design in the universe—the number of times that what seems mere coincidence steps in to thwart murder; or murderers, rather. We’ve no way of knowing how many times murder itself is thwarted and doesn’t happen.”
I looked at him for a moment. “When did you decide it was murder?”
“Last night.”
“Why?”
“Why? Perhaps it’s because I’ve got a sort of sixth sense, Mrs. Latham. And that, I suppose, is made up of little fragments of intangible evidence—like, for example, the expression on your face when you saw that suicide note, and the liquor spilled on the car seat. And a pretty strong conviction that a girl like Sandra Gould wouldn’t just throw her hand in when a beautiful rival sits in on the game. Added, my dear Mrs. Latham, to that evening at the clubhouse where at least three women had murder in their eyes, and at least four men weren’t—well, let’s say as detached as they tried to appear.”
“Meaning who?” I asked.
“Nobody that you can’t identify as easily as I can. But that’s not the immediate point, Mrs. Latham. The immediate point is this: what are you going to do about it?”
He looked at me, a little amused and at the same time deadly earnest and calculating.
“I mean, would you like me to go somewhere?”
“Very much indeed, I’m afraid,” I replied as casually as I could. “Addis Ababa, just offhand. Or Perth, Western Australia.”
He smiled.
“I’m sorry. I’m staying in too, you know. I don’t like murder. It’s just an old-fashioned prejudice, and I’m an old-fashioned man. No, I’m only offering—not wholeheartedly, because you’re so extraordinarily central—to go to a hotel if you ask me to. It’s not going to be easy, you know. For you, I mean.”
“I’m afraid I’m rather prejudiced too,” I said. “I shouldn’t like to say I approve of murder as a social pastime—but I think it’s possible for one to be pretty well justified.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“That’s the trouble with you moderns. You’ve got such a hard, polished exterior. Scratch it, and you’re like Sergeant Buck—a mass of sentimental jelly. You don’t like consequences; you’re glad when something comes along and removes them, even if it happens to be a murder. But you’re not going to escape a few consequences of your own.”
I must have looked most astonished.
“Don’t you see, Grace Latham, that you know too much?”
He looked so sober that I was a little alarmed in spite of myself.
“Don’t you see that that’s the bad thing about murder? That’s the chief reason we can’t just let it ride and say, ‘Fair enough and an easy way out.’ Because murderers don’t rest easy in their own minds—and you, my dear Mrs. Latham, are just the person that this murderer is going to worry about, more and more. How much you know . . . how much you saw . . . how much you guessed.”
He shook his head.
“I imagine that’s one of the reasons I’d like to stay here in your house, me and Buck. I’d like to keep an eye on you.”
He chuckled suddenly. “It’s very reassuring in any kind of dustup to have Sergeant Buck’s eye on you.”
“You don’t think, by any chance,” I asked, “that I murdered Sandra Gould?”
He cocked his black eyes at me for all the world like a wicked old parrot about to take a piece out of my ear. “I shouldn’t like to make any broad declaration of the sort just at this time. I think you’re undoubtedly a very important person in the case—perhaps even more important than you realize. I’ve already told you that you know too much about all this—fore and aft. Perhaps we might even work together.”
“That,” I said, “is nothing but the most unmitigated flattery, and I’m not falling for it . . . not at any rate till it’s disguised better. But you may stay here—if you will assure your sergeant that it was your own idea, not mine, and that personally I should be much happier if you’d never set foot in April Harbor.”
“It would have come out eventually, Mrs. Latham. Shryock would have drunk too much one night and told Parran. Or one of your friends here would have talked over the bridge table one afternoon. It would have been worse then, and more trouble. If, indeed, the Goulds’ order to ship the body to Baltimore for cremation hadn’t already done the trick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shryock—qua undertaker, not coroner—had that order.”
“From whom?”
“From the Goulds, I imagine.”
I was silent.
“So you see.”
I nodded. “I think I see,” I said. “When do you start . . . and where?”
“Now and here,” said Colonel Primrose cheerfully. “Mr. Parran is starting in the garage. He’s going to meet me shortly. I thought I’d speak to you first. Of course, I want to know about Sandra Gould. What’s the history?”
“I don’t know much about her, except that she married Jim in Shanghai,” I said. “They’ve been coming here ever since Jim got out of the Navy.”
“Why did he get out?”
“I suppose he thought he’d rather sell bonds, or something.”
He cocked his head and fastened his sparkling black parrot’s eyes on me.
“Mrs. Latham—unless you tell me the truth, there’s not much use in taking your time or mine,” he said reproachfully.
“Is it truth you want, or all the wretched gossip and malicious imaginings of a hundred busybodies?” I demanded hotly.
He smiled a rather wry subrisive smile. “Unfortunately, gossip usually has a large grain of truth in it. It’s extremely useful in my business.”
“It must be a rather ghastly business.”
He smiled again.
“I take it you think the general idea that Jim Gould got out of the Navy because a certain admiral on a certain China station requested that he be detached because of Sandra is malicious imagining?—The Chetwynds told me that to show how much she’d improved under the tutelage of her mother and sister-in-law.”
“She did improve,” I had to admit. “She wasn’t very attractive when she first came. A little too Eurasian Mae West. Very lush—like a ripe passion fruit. Too much make-up, hair curled too much, clothes too fancy, fingernails too red and not too clean, eye too obviously roving. But she has changed. You saw her. Sleek straight hair, marvelous make-up, exquisite clothes. Still very gay and all that but oh so toned down, and . . . Westernized. Thanks to a mother-in-law with impeccable taste and a lot of money. I don’t think she’s any handicap to Jim now.”
“She’s a very definite one just this minute, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said. “Well, what about his marriage, and what happened between him and Rosemary Bishop?”
“Their engagement was broken. That’s all I know. He married Sandra then—it frequently happens, you know. The old course of true love and the slip ’twixt cup and lip.”
“And the fish in the sea that haven’t been caught?”
“Precisely. That’s Paul Dikranov. Loads of money—which Jim hasn’t any more.”
“I see.”
“No . . . you don’t. Because I don’t mean it that way at all. That might just possibly be in Rodman Bishop’s mind. It certainly wouldn’t ever be in Rosemary’s.”
He smiled. “Then perhaps I do see, after all,” he said.
We heard a car coming in my back drive. Colonel Primrose got up.
He looked at me seriously.
“I think I ought to tell you,” he said slowly, “that Parran is going to arrest him. Jim Gould, of course.”
I stared at him stupidly. “What for?”
“For the murder of Sandra Gould.”
“Nonsense!”
“I wish it were. I’m afraid it’s not, Mrs. Latham. Just on the face of it even, there’s a powerful case against him. Motive, opportunity . . . all the rest.”
I tried frantically to find something for Jim in all this mess.
“What about the letter, Colonel Primrose?”
He shook his head soberly. “It’s a forgery, Mrs. Latham. It’s got to be. Rather a transparent one, I suspect. That woman didn’t kill herself.”
He looked at me. I’d recovered myself by then and said nothing . . . for which I was thankful a little later.
At that point the wooden face of Sergeant Buck loomed through the screen at the end of the porch. The State’s Attorney Mr. Parran was with him, and behind him were two other men, one of them in the summer khaki and helmet of the Maryland State Police.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Mr. Parran said. “Ready, Colonel?”
I watched them go across to the opening in the hedge, towards the Goulds’. The thought struck me then that Colonel Primrose had kept me there talking, asking questions whose answers he already knew, so that I couldn’t warn Jim. I sat down suddenly, very sick and weak in the knees.
For the second time that day I resisted the impulse to fly to the telephone. I told myself that that was just what Colonel Primrose would be waiting for and watching for, some move of mine or of somebody’s to point a direction for him. So I sat there, pretty miserable, trying to picture to myself just what they’d be doing . . . how Jim would take it, what his mother would do. I never thought of Lucy Lee until I heard a sound in the living room and saw her there beckoning to me, white-faced and terribly frightened.
“What’s the matter, Grace? What are they doing—why are they in the garage?” she demanded frantically. “Colonel Primrose is there—Bill told Andy he’s some sort of private detective. Don’t they—”
She stopped short. “Grace . . .”
“They think Sandra didn’t kill herself, Lucy Lee,” I said quietly.
She stared at me, gradually shrinking until she seemed more like a child herself than a twenty-six-year-old mother of three. Poor little Lucy Lee . . . always the prettiest, most popular girl at the Harbor, with dozens of beaux, married by the age-old process of natural selection to the biggest, handsomest and most heroic of the lot . . . and it just hadn’t worked. If we’d been Vikings, Andy Thorp would have been headman; but in Broadway offices where the headman is a very different sort, Andy doesn’t seem to fit. Lucy Lee’s fiercely loyal, doing without the things she’d always had, doing her own work in town and pretending she liked it!—She stood in the center of my living room staring at me, her pale soft face paler than usual, framed in her mass of soft short chestnut curls, her dark eyes bigger and more bewildered.
“Listen, Lucy Lee. You’ve got to buck up. This is going to be rotten for everybody . . . but it’s going to be terrible for Jim.”
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand at all.
“For Jim?”
It was my turn to stare. The strangest kaleidoscoping of emotion and calculation went through her pretty transparent face. I wasn’t sure she even knew what I was talking about.
“I’m afraid they think Jim killed her, darling,” I said.
Fond as I am of Lucy Lee, and devoted as I know she is to Jim, I thought I saw an expression of the most extraordinary relief relax her whole body.
“But . . . it wasn’t his car! How could he . . .”
She stared at me silently for a moment. Then she seemed rather more like herself. “Oh, no, Grace!” she cried. “That’s not fair, he’d never . . . Oh, Grace, will they drag out all the business about China and Rosemary?”
“I’m afraid they will, Lucy Lee. In fact, they’ve already started.”
“But what if nobody tells them. They can’t find out, and they can’t ever prove it . . . I mean, that he . . . killed her. He wasn’t even with her last night . . .”
She rushed on, from one thing to another, not very convincingly. Two red spots had grown in her cheeks, making her look oddly hectic.
“But . . . they won’t be after Andy, will they?”
That was what was alarming her, then, making her willing to cast Jim or anyone else to the lions if she had to, to keep Andy clear of it.
I don’t know exactly what I would have said to her, because I was pretty angry. Jim is worth so many dozen Andys—if only for the reason that he grew up and didn’t stay a halfback when he should have been doing a job. I didn’t have a chance to say anything, however. She saw the Bishops coming before I did.
“I’d better get back,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anybody I was here.”
She fled just as George Barrol opened the porch door for Rosemary and her father.