Colonel Primrose stepped quickly across the room and touched the painted doorstop lightly with the tip of his brown and white shoes. I kept my gaze riveted to it, trying not to see the lumpy protruding feet in their house-worn black strap slippers, the bony legs in streaked gunmetal stockings, that ghastly head. It was all so unbearably, hideously grotesque. The gaunt sallow figure in the mousy old-fashioned clothes that hadn’t been in the sun for seven years—and on the floor in its usual place the white-painted iron basket full of gay red and blue and yellow and white iron posies . . . splotched and splattered with blood.
I stared at it, trying desperately to keep from being sick. It was Colonel Primrose who saved me. He shook my arm, and I came to sharply, out of the dark swirling fog.
“Mrs. Latham! Get Buck, send him in here; phone Parran, and watch that telephone! And get hold of a doctor! Is there anyone else in town—any other doctor?”
I shook my head mechanically.
“Get him then. Poor devil! But hurry—don’t just stand there!”
I went back through the door into the hall and called Julius.
“Wha’s the matter with you, Mis’ Grace?” he exclaimed.
“Nothing, Julius. Just tell Sergeant Buck to come quickly, and you stay in the kitchen,” I said.
I let the door swing to and took down the telephone. For an instant I almost heard the tickety-tick, tickety-tock, tickety-tick, tickety-tock, but it must have been in my own head, because what I really heard was Elsie Carter’s voice saying, “Creamed chicken and peas in patty shells is always nice, and the men enjoy it.”
A thousand church suppers rolled over my head. I gripped myself firmly to keep from screaming.
“Elsie,” I said. “This is Grace Latham. Would you mind letting me have the line? I have to get Dr. Potter, immediately.”
There was an instant’s startled silence, then Elsie’s avid voice. “Is somebody sick, Grace?”
“No,” I said. “Please, darling.”
“I’ll call you later, Mary.—If there’s anything I can do, Grace . . .”
“Thanks.”
I hung up the phone and cranked to signal the operator.
“Mr. Parran, please.”
“Yes, Mrs. Latham—he’s just gone to his office,” the operator said, with the friendly helpfulness of the village exchange. Which was also the reason that I just told Mr. Parran, when I’d got him, that there had been an accident and Colonel Primrose wanted him immediately.
Then I tried to get Dr. Potter. He was out. I could hear the phone ring again and again.
“Mrs. Potter must be upstairs, Mrs. Latham,” the operator said. She’s a village girl whose mother mends for me. “I’ll keep on ringing.”
“Don’t bother, Mabel,” I said. “But if you hear where he is, tell him to come to my house as quick as ever he can.”
I hung up, knowing she would find him before I could. Then I took down the phone again and listened to see if I’d missed the tickety-tick, tickety-tock, or if it really had not been there. But it wasn’t. Only Elsie, saying, “Are you through, Grace? I just saw Dr. Potter leaving the Goulds’—he’s gone in to see Annie Kellogg now, she cut her knee on an oyster shell. Shall I tell him you want him?”
“Please—and tell him it’s urgent,” I said. I knew she’d break her neck to do it, and anyway she wouldn’t let me have the wire in peace again.
I went back to the living room. Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were standing at the door. Buck was more like a piece of artillery than a human being, or so I’d imagine, having only the faintest notion of what artillery is. All I mean is that he seemed ready to go into instant action when his chief gave the word.
He said, “It’s all in the cards, sir, but who’d have guessed it.”
“I should have guessed something, anyway,” Colonel Primrose said shortly. “When Potter left here.”
He looked around at me.
“Mr. Parran’s coming,” I reported. “Mrs. Carter said she just saw Dr. Potter leaving the Goulds’. He’s at the Kelloggs’ now. She’s getting him.”
If I had dropped a minor bomb shell, or even a major one, into the middle of my living room, I don’t think Colonel Primrose would have jerked about so quickly.
“Just left the Goulds’!” he repeated.
I didn’t even then see what to them was the appalling significance of the fact, because it would never have occurred to me—even if I’d not been very well acquainted with Adam Potter for many years—that a doctor would kill his wife that way with so many other easier ways at hand. I forgot entirely Elsie Carter’s theory that he’d been killing her by degrees for seven long years. It wasn’t till later even that I remembered the Saturday morning in Church Street in front of Mr. Toplady’s store.
“No telling what they’ll do when they’re jealous,” Sergeant Buck said. It occurred to me suddenly and incongruously that one of his gifts I’d not yet noticed was the gift of sententious remark.
“I wish to God I’d used my head,” Colonel Primrose said bitterly.
Sergeant Buck shook his, with the utmost conviction. “It wouldn’t have done no good if you had, sir,” he said. He drew his wide hard mouth down at the corners, shaking his head back and forth like one of those loose-headed toy policemen children have. I don’t know why the two of them—Sergeant Buck about a foot behind, and towering at least a foot above and projecting a good deal to each side of the stocky gray-haired man in the tan poplin suit—should have seemed so utterly incongruous just then. They looked much more as if they should be inspecting the beer at the canteen than viewing the ghastly figure of Maggie Potter, sprawled feet out and dreadfully motionless on the sofa in front of them.
“Neat at that, sir,” Sergeant Buck said.
I could see that it was. I knew that room so well—and except for Maggie Potter and the blood-spattered iron pot of painted flowers, there was nothing out of place that I could see, and nothing that wasn’t always there. No convenient bits of upholsterer’s twine or ends of cigarettes with orange lipstick on them.
Colonel Primrose nodded slowly.
“That’s the confounded part of it,” he said. “Somebody walked in, and walked out again. A hundred to one nobody would ever notice him.”
As if to prove his theory the Thorp children and their nurse straggled across the garden not twenty feet from the porch, and young Andy came to the screen door, banged once or twice and called, “Juyus, Juyus!”
I started out to head him off, but his nurse called and he ran along after her.
“You see. Anyone else could do the same and come on in,” Colonel Primrose said.
He bent down to examine the doorstop.
“However, we may be a bit forrarder. There’s no doubt that Mrs. Potter knew something, and was on her way here to tell it, after trying to say it on the phone and being afraid to. And I suppose there’s no doubt it was something that happened Saturday night.”
He stared down at the doorstop, then cocked his head around and peered up at me.
“I take it Andy Thorp wouldn’t recognize Mrs. Potter, in the dark?”
I shook my head.
“He used to know her, of course, but he hasn’t seen her for . . . oh, I suppose seven years, or more. She used to be around a lot. She played bridge every afternoon with the older women at the club. Andy knew her casually. I don’t think he’d recognize her. You’re thinking she was the woman Sandra was with at the garage?”
He nodded. “Probably.”
“Of course it was dark there too.”
“Not very, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “That light over the side door of the garage is pretty bright.”
“Andy said she wasn’t in the light.”
“I know.”
“And above all,” I said, “how on earth did she get there?”
Colonel Primrose shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. However—she even got here.”
He looked down at her and shook his head again. “Not a very amiable sort, was she?”
I didn’t need to look at her again. I knew what he meant. The querulous face of a childless and selfish woman, with nothing to occupy her mind or her heart but herself and her ills, petty and resentful, envious of other people and suspicious of them. For years her husband had quit even dropping in at the club bar for a highball at night. He’d only begun again the last few years—after Sandra came, as Elsie Carter was to point out significantly.
We heard a car in the drive at the back of the house. Colonel Primrose moved back a step or so into the corner where he could watch the door without being seen. I should have connected that up with Dr. Potter, but I didn’t. Anyway, it wasn’t Dr. Potter, it was Mr. Parran, the State’s Attorney. He pushed the door open and came briskly and inquiringly into the room, and stopped dead in his tracks, staring blankly in utter horror.
“Good God!” he said. “Maggie Potter!”
Then he looked at the square granite figure of Sergeant Buck, and his eyes moved on to the Colonel.
“It was Maggie trying to phone?” he said.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “She was the other party on the line.”
“And it was her quarreling with Mrs. Gould.”
“Probably.”
Mr. Parran’s head moved back and forth. He was still staring down at Maggie Potter there on the sofa, his face a little white.
“And when they told me young Mrs. Gould was carryin’ on with old Potter, I laughed. The old—”
Sergeant Buck cleared his throat violently, and jerked his head towards me. Mr. Parran gulped his words back with an effort.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” he muttered, very red in the face. Which showed one reason for his not being invited to mixed parties on the Estate. I never heard Jim or Andy or Rodman Bishop swallow anything in my life, in the line of words—or any of their friends. Nevertheless, I knew now that I’d rather underestimated Mr. Parran.
“We’ve sent for him,” Colonel Primrose said. “He ought to be here any minute. He was at the Goulds’, apparently, when it happened.”
Mr. Parran’s lean jaw tightened. Colonel Primrose turned to the Sergeant.
“Go over to the Goulds’ and see if he was there. Mrs. Latham, would you mind asking Julius to step in here?”
When I went out into the hall Julius peered in from the pantry saucer-eyed and putty-faced, sensing easily that something had happened.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” I said.
He stuck his head out of his starched white coat collar like a sand turtle stretching his neck.
“ ’Deed an’ Ah know that, Mis’ Grace.—Was that there lady Mis’ Potter?”
I nodded.
“ ’Deed an’ Ah thought Ah knew her. She used to come here, didn’ she?”
I nodded again.
“What time did she come this morning?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“She come about a quarter of ’leven, while Ah was sweepin’ the back walk. Booths’s taxi stopped, an’ she got out. She told him not to wait, an’ she wanted to know if you was home, Mis’ Grace. Ah said no, an’ she said is the man here that’s a detective. Ah said you was both on the place, an’ would she wait, an’ she said yes. She kep’ lookin’ around like she was scared somebody’d see her.”
“Did anybody see her?”
“Not that Ah know of, suh.”
“Did anybody pass in a car?”
Julius craned his neck around slowly.
“There was cars passin’,” he said. “ ’Course, Ah didn’ notice who was in ’em.”
“Try to think, Julius,” I said. “Didn’t you notice anybody you know?”
His face brightened.
“There was Charlie Bates.”
Charlie Bates drives his father’s grocery truck.
“Ah didn’ see nobody else, ’cept, o’ course, Dr. Potter.”
We stared at him standing there, ashy-pale and shaking. And my head kept whirling. Was it conceivable that Colonel Primrose really thought Adam Potter had killed his wife, here, in this living room? Because to me it was not conceivable, it was utterly fantastic and impossible. But, I kept thinking desperately, the idea that any of us—that someone from my own little group there—could have done such a thing was just as impossible.
“An’ o’ course there was the regular people . . . nobody that ain’t always flyin’ up an’ down like the devil was after ’em.”
Mr. Parran looked at Colonel Primrose in patient disgust.
“Well, just who were they, Julius?” Colonel Primrose said.
“ ’Deed, Colonel, an’ Ah don’ recall jus’ which. You see, Ah had other mattuhs to attend to.”
They might as well have stopped there, because the fact that Julius had other matters to attend to is final. In the fifteen years he’s been with me it has definitely explained everything, from burnt biscuit to frozen radiators.
“You don’t recall anyone except Dr. Potter?”
“No, suh. Ah only recalls him ’cause Ah thought to mahself that there lady looks powerful like Mis’ Potter, but if he don’ know her, an’ if she cain’t walk, like they say, then Ah mus’ be mistaken. So Ah ast her who she was, an’ she says it didn’t make no difference, she’d wait. So she jus’ walked in an’ set herself down in a chair.”
“You just left her there?”
Julius craned his neck out and wet his lips. He looked at me.
“Ah didn’ feel exac’ly comfo’table,” he said. “She didn’ look jus’ right in her mind.”
I could see exactly what he meant. Maggie was perfectly sane, of course.
“She is rather odd-looking,” I said.
Colonel Primrose nodded. “Didn’t Lilac know her?”
“Ah don’ think Lilac even seen her,” Julius said. “She was talkin’ to Hawkins, an’ she wasn’t payin’ no attention to the outside.”
“What about Dr. Potter? Did he speak to you when he went by?”
Julius shook his head.
“He waved his hand, suh, like he always does. Ah guess he didn’ see her ’cause she was facin’ the house.”
Colonel Primrose looked at me. “All right, Julius,” he said. He nodded to Sergeant Buck, who departed for the Goulds’. When he went on errands he set out on a sort of double-quick, and you half expected to see a line of khaki-clad men materialize out of the empty air and file along—either that or little Mercury wings sprout suddenly at his heels and ears, like the florists’ emblem.
Colonel Primrose and Mr. Parran set to work. If the Sergeant’s line of men hadn’t appeared, the State’s Attorney’s had. I retired to the dining room. I could hear Colonel Primrose’s terse clipped instructions, the men moving about, the clicking of the camera, Mr. Parran’s nasal Maryland drawl. I felt curiously helpless and at loose ends, not knowing at all what to do. It’s an odd sensation, having the corpse of somebody you know quite well but have no emotion about appear suddenly on your living-room sofa. But I suppose any corpse would be much the same. I opened the screen, brushed out a wasp and closed it again.
“I’m going over to the Bishops’. Will you come along?”
I turned. Colonel Primrose had come back from the living room and was standing there regarding me with an eye cocked in a manner definitely and disturbingly speculative. At least he can’t think I had a hand in this, I thought. But it was impossible to tell what he was thinking, actually.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Oh, yes.”
I was all right, after that first terrible shock. There was no point in being anything else.
We went out through the kitchen, leaving Julius and Lilac pretty ashen and saucer-eyed.
“You ain’ goin’ away, is you, Mis’ Grace?” Lilac said desperately.
“Just over to the Bishops’. Mr. Parran’s here.”
“Ah knows he’s here,” Julius said, very pointedly.
“If he bothers you, phone me,” I said. “Anyway, Sergeant Buck will be back in a minute.”
Julius looked very unhappy.
“I wish,” I said as we went out, “there was some way of going at police work without first terrorizing all the servants.”
“Hawkins doesn’t seem particularly terrorized.”
“He has the consolations of religion,” I said. “Anyway, he’s no doubt delighted that another Jezebel has bit the dust.”
Colonel Primrose looked at me, startled.
“Mrs. Potter?”
“O Lord, no. Sandra. Mrs. Potter is Julius and Lilac’s problem. He can enjoy that at a distance. And furthermore—while I’m complaining about the law—why do you go off and leave that man in charge? Julius is probably perfectly correct in suspecting that the minute we get out of the house Mr. Parran’ll arrest him and Lilac. Just to be doing something satisfying in a big way.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“No point sitting around in the barn after the horse has left,” he said. “You have to take a bridle and go after him.”
“Is he over at the Bishops’?”
His face sobered abruptly.
“I wouldn’t be sure. He’s not awfully far away.”
We went along.
“I’m sick of this!” I cried suddenly.
“I dare say,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”
“What do you mean?”
He cocked his head down and looked up at me with his black sparkling eyes.
“I mean that our murderer is getting panicky, Mrs. Latham.”