We went on across the garden.
“Isn’t that a bit on the locking-the-barn-door side, Colonel?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely,” he admitted. “Well, anybody but a complete ass would have seen, knowing what I knew—or what I’d guessed—about Mrs. Potter, that she was in danger.”
“You really think it was she at the garage?”
“I can’t figure it as any of the rest of you, Mrs. Latham, someway.”
He held up a straggling trailer of trumpet vine for me to go under through the wicket between my place and the Bishops’.
“Who, for example? Lucy Lee?”
He smiled soberly.
“I’m afraid Lucy Lee is pretty transparent. Frankly, it’s really your Rosemary that interests me now. It doesn’t seem credible, does it?—Look at her now.”
We were crossing the lawn up to the great screened and pillared veranda of The Magnolias, hidden from the people there for the moment by the two gigantic shiny-leaved trees that helped give the place its name.
“You wouldn’t think, to look at her, that she’s practically tying a noose—they hang people in a shed in the penitentiary yard, here in the Free State of Maryland—round the neck of the man she was and is popularly supposed to be pretty mad about . . . or her own neck?”
I stared at him open-mouthed. “You don’t still think—”
“My dear young woman,” he said quietly, “Mr. Parran is the State’s Attorney—not I.”
We went along across the grass.
“You know, Mrs. Latham—you have a charming but decidedly naïve streak in you that makes you assume everybody is exactly what he or she appears to be. Which means—all these people being your friends—just what you want them to be. Now I, and still more Mr. Parran—having no illusions or preconceptions about these people, or about character in general—can see clearly that—just to take one point—the mainspring of human conduct, even in nice humans, isn’t always love.”
He shook his head. “I haven’t time to go into it. We’ve got to find out what these people up on the porch have been doing with themselves this morning.”
We came out from behind the magnolia trees. George Barrol came to meet us. I remember wondering fleetingly, as he came, why with his share of his aunt’s money he still acted as the household secretary—or general functotum, as Sergeant Buck called him. The Sergeant called himself that also, so the word hadn’t any derisive significance.
“They tell me you were shot at last night, Grace!” he said. “Dear me, it was lucky I didn’t go home with you. They might have got me too!”
George giggled in his nervous way, but it was perfectly obvious that he meant every word of it. That’s one of the nice things about George; he’s frank.
“It happened they didn’t get me,” I said. “And it was long after I left here, so you’d have got home safe.”
“If Grace keeps such odd company, she’ll have to expect to get shot at,” Rosemary said.
She came down from the porch, almost breath-takingly lovely, with her warm golden skin and dull gold hair and serious wide-set gray eyes above a simple high-throated earth-brown cotton frock. I glanced back and saw that Colonel Primrose thought about her as I did; his interest had quickened perceptibly.
Behind her, not very far away, giving the impression that he was not going to be far away for a moment, was Paul Dikranov. I wondered if he had come to some decision to keep an eye on her, and why. Since Colonel Primrose had said she wasn’t in any danger I had been wondering. Since the night before I had wondered still more. For granted no one would want to hurt Rosemary, who could there be who felt strongly enough about me to shoot me . . . and at the same time hadn’t hesitated at the brutal murder of a perfectly harmless hypochondriac?
As Paul Dikranov greeted us in a friendly way I wondered a little, too, if George’s constant presence didn’t annoy him. Rodman Bishop seemed to keep out of the way diligently, but so far I couldn’t remember having seen Dikranov and Rosemary together once without George. Except that unfortunate period Saturday night, and that was hardly George’s fault.
The matter was settled conclusively before long, however, and in George’s inimitable way.
“Is your father here, Miss Bishop?” Colonel Primrose asked.
Rosemary nodded. “Come on in,” she said. “He’s in the library with Nathan Kaufman.”
“I’ll tell him you want him, shall I?” George said helpfully. His face fell, and then brightened instantly. “It’ll be all right if I go, now that Grace and the Colonel have come.”
Then George turned brick-red, and well he might, for the look Rosemary gave him would have charred a hide only slightly less tough.
“Oh, dear!” he said.
Dikranov’s face darkened. George departed uneasily. Rosemary smiled with remarkable self-possession.
“Let’s go up on the porch, shall we? Dad’ll be out in a minute.”
“I’d like to see him now, if you don’t mind,” Colonel Primrose said.
Rosemary glanced at Paul Dikranov. “He’s engaged at the moment,” she said reluctantly.
At just that moment a querulous, slightly pompous voice came out of the hall.
“Well, bring him in, bring him in. We want to see him, we want to get the facts!”
The owner of the voice came out onto the porch—a short small slightly paunchy man with thick black hair going white at the temples, bloodshot eyes that looked as if they had never had an illusion to lose, and a red choleric face. As Rosemary said later, he had the consistency of a persimmon, ripe and just ready to burst. Mr. Nathan Kaufman looked as if he drank too much, and I dare say he did. He certainly drank a lot.
“Let him come in here,” he was saying. “Nobody’s going to lynch him.”
I assumed, unraveling this, that the first “him” was Colonel Primrose. The second, surprisingly enough, was Jim Gould.
“This is Colonel Primrose, Mr. Kaufman,” Rosemary said. Mr. Kaufman made some sound not in ordinary usage, and they shook hands. Rodman Bishop came out, still dressed in the ancient shrunk seersucker suit, towering over everybody, beetling his black shaggy brows right and left except when his gaze happened to rest on his daughter. Then a proud satisfied smile lighted his leathery piratical old face . . . though now, when he looked at her as he came out of the cool hall, his eyes were worried too. It seemed almost as if he were avoiding meeting her, and when he sat down and she came over and sat beside him on the arm of his chair, he gripped her hand and patted it clumsily, his jaw working savagely.
It was Jim Gould that Colonel Primrose looked at. Something had obviously been going on inside Jim. His eyes were narrowed a bit and his jaw and lips tight. He stood there tall and erect, the sort of person who would knock you down and throw you overboard if necessary, but who certainly—to my mind—wouldn’t hit a sick old woman over the head if he’d wanted to kill her.
“Well, we’re all friends here,” Kaufman said, darting a quick look about. Then he laughed a pursy little “Heh, heh, heh!—Or are we?”
George giggled—or started to until he caught Rodman Bishop’s beetling glance and the giggle died into a cough.
“Of course!” Rosemary said. She included everybody in a cool definitely wicked half-smile. I shook my head uneasily. We weren’t, of course. Far from it.
“Now then, Colonel,” Mr. Kaufman went on briskly. “We’re on the side of law and order, and if my client—though so far I’m damned if I can make out just who my client is—”
“It’s all of us, isn’t it, Colonel Primrose?” Rosemary asked.
Colonel Primrose smiled politely. Why he sat there without so much as mentioning the ghastly business that was going on over at my house, I couldn’t make out. It seemed to me that he was deliberately wasting the most valuable time.
“Perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm, Mr. Kaufman,” he said, “if I told you just what the police know about this case, so far.”
Mr. Kaufman flipped a piece of paper out of his pocket and unscrewed his pen. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
“Mr. Parran knows,” Colonel Primrose said deliberately, “that Sandra Gould was upset and definitely excited when she went to the club Saturday evening. That’s what, in his mind, gives credence to the suicide note Mrs. Gould found on her dressing table.”
“You any idea about that note, other than it is a suicide note?” Mr. Kaufman asked sharply.
“So far . . . no,” said Colonel Primrose. I thought he was a little annoyed. Kaufman grunted.
“Here’s another point, Colonel. The lady didn’t die by that blow on the back of the head. I’ve seen your medical reports. Now, even if you could establish who struck her . . .”
His finger pointed arrestingly at the Colonel. Colonel Primrose smiled.
“Even if my client—whoever the devil he is—should confess to striking her, that’s not murder, Colonel.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head suavely. “Oh, no, no. Not as such.”
I looked at him in horror. “Maggie Potter, Maggie Potter!” I wanted to scream out. But he was saying nothing about it. He was, as Lilac says, as smooth as owl’s grease.
George Barrol was staring, almost fascinated, at Jim. Indeed, I think everybody was, except Rodman Bishop and myself.
“I haven’t confessed anything of the sort,” Jim said angrily.
Mr. Kaufman waved his hands in the air helplessly. “Oh, my God!” he said. “Of course you haven’t. Of course you haven’t. You keep still.”
He looked expectantly at Colonel Primrose.
“After the incident of the capsized boat,” Colonel Primrose went on slowly, “she came up to the clubhouse and dried out in front of the fire. She was apparently waiting for her husband.”
He looked at Jim, who’d sat down and was staring down at the floor between his feet.
“He didn’t come. He went home with Mrs. Latham, and sat there till ten minutes of one, when he left. Well, it so happens that the period between then—or, to go back a little, from twelve-thirty, say—and one-thirty is the period that we’ve got to find out about. So far we know this:
“1. Sandra Gould quarreled with a certain woman after midnight.
“2. Between that time—after twelve, when Andy Thorp says he saw her last—and one o’clock, we haven’t much idea.
“3. At one o’clock, on Hawkins’s testimony, there’s not much doubt she was put unconscious in Thorp’s car with the motor running.
“4. Hawkins says someone closed the door of the garage just after one o’clock. He thought it was twelve, but it was twelve Columbus time, not Eastern Standard.
“5. Of course whoever did it waited until it was time to announce the hour, turned the radio on, turned it off and left. That’s the person we want.”
He paused a moment.
“Mr. Andy Thorp, looking back towards the garage when Sandra Gould had left him to go back there, saw her talking with a woman, whom he didn’t recognize. There’s no question that this woman was also there later, and saw all that went on that led to Sandra’s murder.”
There was a strange silence on the porch. I think all of us must have looked guilty. All except Paul Dikranov, who looked interested but intensely unconcerned. If it hadn’t been for the scene at the club, I should have thought he didn’t even know whom we were talking about.
“Now then,” Colonel Primrose said. “We know that between eleven-thirty, when some of you left the club, and three-fifteen, when Mrs. Gould and Mrs. Latham found Sandra Gould’s body, a good many of you—namely, Mrs. Gould, Mr. Dikranov, Mr. Gould, Miss Bishop, the woman whom Sandra quarreled with, and both Mr. and Mrs. Thorp—were out of your houses within easy calling distance of the garage. And we know this also: that for some reason there’s been a strong disinclination on the part of all these people, or virtually all, to tell the truth. In fact, most of them, excepting Mr. Dikranov probably, have deliberately lied. Mr. Gould and Miss Rosemary are the two most conspicuous examples of what I’m saying.”
Nathan Kaufman grunted.
“If you’ve got an eyewitness, I think you ought to bring her forward without delay and pettifogging,” he said angrily.
“I should be glad to,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. He looked round at each face in the group. “Unfortunately, she has been killed.”
There was no sound on the porch.
“She was murdered . . . this morning. An hour ago.”
Murdered.
The word went like a shadow compounded of sound and moving lips around the stunned circle.
Then a dreadful thing happened. Jim Gould staggered to his feet, his face as gray as death. Rodman Bishop’s big hand tightened on his daughter’s, checking her sudden impulse to rise. George Barrol said, “Isn’t it awful!” and looked from one to the other of us and back at Jim. I don’t suppose he meant to be heartless; everything disturbs him equally—a mislaid pack of cigarettes, death, a slump in sugar.
Colonel Primrose spoke quickly, looking steadily at Jim.
“Not your mother, Mr. Gould,” he said quietly.
The color surged back into Jim’s face as he realized, I suppose, what an awful thing he had done. He steadied himself against the back of his chair a moment, then sat down and took out a cigarette without a word.
I suppose we all stared at him, George especially. He started to speak and closed his mouth, flushing a little. It was obvious to everybody that he was going to point out what everybody must have realized, that Jim thought it was Alice Gould who’d had the scene with Sandra at the garage Saturday night before she was killed. Rodman Bishop glared at him furiously.
Jim said nothing at all. He had never had a ready line of snappy comebacks even in his best moments, and there’s no doubt anyway that keeping one’s mouth shut, whether it’s judicious or merely because you can’t think of anything to say, has its points. The effect of what he had done was stunning enough.
Only Paul Dikranov seemed sufficiently detached to keep to the point.
“Who was it, Colonel Primrose?” he asked easily.
Colonel Primrose looked from face to face again.
“Mrs. Potter,” he said.
“Who?” Rosemary cried.
“Maggie Potter,” I said. “In my living room.”
Rodman Bishop leaned forward. “That’s . . . why, it’s preposterous,” he said, glaring at me. “The woman’s bedridden! She hasn’t been out of her house for seven years!”
“Not since Chapin—”
George Barrol caught himself again at a swift warning glance from Rosemary. Rodman Bishop’s face darkened. He has never been the same since Chapin Bishop was found dead in the inlet below my place. It had made Rosemary too much the center of his life, in some way. I remember then, even at such a moment, thinking that it would have been so much better if he’d married Alice Gould.
“There’s no doubt Mrs. Potter had heard some of the rumors that have been fairly rife this summer,” Colonel Primrose went on gravely. “You all know what I mean—that her husband was interested in Sandra Gould.”
Jim’s eyes stayed on the floor. He flushed a dull hot red.
Nathan Kaufman, I could see, was watching him out of the tail of one eye. The other, if possible, he had fixed on Rosemary. I suppose he would conceal all that when it came to the trial, but it was plain that at the moment he had quite obviously a strong suspicion in his mind. He glanced up, caught my eye, stared at me coldly a moment and turned away. After all, a husband in love with a girl like Rosemary, saddled with a wife who carried on with country doctors who had invalid wives—it wasn’t a pretty picture. Moreover—even leaving out the fact that Jim was in love with Rosemary—it was a picture that a jury could easily understand. You could almost hear Jim’s life story being unfolded in court.
“Jealousy is a powerful tonic,” Nathan Kaufman said professionally.
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“The woods are full of it,” George Barrol said flippantly.
Colonel Primrose looked soberly at him for an instant.
“You see,” he said quietly, “in spite of that suicide note, and whatever it may represent—”
I could feel his eyes on me for a bare instant.
“—there is no possible doubt, after what has happened to Mrs. Potter, that Sandra Gould was murdered. The immediate point concerns Mrs. Potter. I must find out where every person here—except Mrs. Latham, who was with me, and Mr. Kaufman—was from approximately quarter of eleven, when Mrs. Potter arrived in a taxi from the village, until a quarter past eleven, when Mrs. Latham and I found her dead in Mrs. Latham’s living room.”
His voice was moving quietly against a background of utter silence. When it stopped there was nothing there. Even George had no word to say. Colonel Primrose looked around with a smile.
“Good God, Colonel,” Nathan Kaufman said suddenly. “People can’t just offhand say where they were at any hour of the day.”
“An hour ago?” said Colonel Primrose, still more quietly.
Kaufman shook his head. “Not even then, sometimes. I got here a few minutes after eleven. You were here then?”
He looked at Rodman Bishop. Mr. Bishop beetled his heavy brows at George Barrol, as if poor George was responsible, somehow, for the whole situation. I suppose that’s the penalty for being a secretarial doormat and a relative at the same time. Not that Rodman Bishop wasn’t awfully decent to George always, and very fond of him, but he did demand more constant service than anyone would have stood for who was less dependent. Socially dependent, not financially, because George has a very superior income. Just why he did stand for it no one could ever figure out, except that he had no other family and liked the life that Rosemary and her father led. Being with them was convenient, in a way, too, for it allowed him to go everywhere and at the same time protected him from designing mothers. No one else would ever think of him as marriageable —being as he is the old-fashioned semi-hardy variety of perennial bachelor.
When Rodman Bishop beetles at him he always gets flustered and blows his nose quickly. He did so now.
“George and I were down in the cellar,” Rodman said emphatically. “Bottling the blackberry wine my son and I made when we were here before. It’s been in an old sherry keg.”
“Didn’t know bottle could Barrol wine,” Mr. Kaufman said, and laughed “Heh, heh, heh, heh” until we all thought he wouldn’t stop at all.
“And you, Miss Bishop?” Colonel Primrose asked gently.
Rodman Bishop looked at that instant about like a man sentenced to death.
“I’m very much afraid I can’t tell you without consulting Mr. Kaufman privately,” Rosemary Bishop said.
Her cool gray eyes met Colonel Primrose’s steadily.
“Because it just happens that I was at Grace’s house from about half past ten until after Mrs. Potter came. In fact, I left after she came.”