The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (12 page)

“Sylvia,” I said. “This is Grace.”

“—What is it?”

The quick alarm in her voice made me realize how much like doom my own must have sounded.

“Colonel Primrose came in with me tonight, and found your dress. He’s here now—right here.” I went on quickly to keep her from interrupting me. “He’s on his way up to you, I guess. I’m sorry.”

I could almost see her struggling to control herself. I’d started to hang up when I heard her say, “Grace—what about Barbara? Can’t you get her up to me as soon as he’s gone? I’ll phone you. There’s a room next to mine I use for guests. She’ll be safer here.”

It was like her, when she must be almost out of her wits about herself, to manage to think of somebody else.

“Barbara’s gone,” I said. “He knows she was here.”

“Oh, how sickening!” she gasped. Then she said quickly, “But he didn’t see her? Does he know who she is? He can’t hear me, can he?”

“The answer is No,” I said, hoping she’d understand how inclusive it was. She did, apparently, because she said “O.K.”

I put down the phone and turned back to Colonel Primrose. He was watching me with a very dispassionate intentness. Obviously whatever affection he’d had for me— and I’d begun to take it more or less for granted—was like the foreign propaganda agencies: it had definitely gone underground. And unlike them, it wasn’t likely to come up again.

“Good-night, Mrs. Latham,” he said.

He closed the door, and I stood there, rather unhappily, for a few minutes. Then I thought that Sergeant Buck would be happy, anyway, and my crown could do with one star in it, even if it was made of granite. I went slowly out into the sitting room, turned off the light and bolted the hall door. Then I came back into the bedroom and started to undress, wishing very much I’d never gone to Ruth Sherwood’s. I put on my dressing gown, went to the bathroom, opened the door, switched on the light and stopped dead in my tracks.

“Barbara!” I said.

“Has he gone?” she whispered. She was sitting on the plastic top of the clothes hamper, her feet propped up on the side of the tub, her jacket and hat and handbag piled in a heap on the top of her suitcases inside it. It would have been very funny if her face hadn’t been as pale as the towels and her cheeks stained where the tears had dried a long time ago. And it wasn’t funny—it was heartbreaking.

“Has he gone?” she repeated urgently.

“Yes, he’s gone. He won’t be back tonight.”

She pushed her bright tousled hair back from her forehead.

“I heard you come in, and I thought I’d better hide. I was afraid to go to sleep. I heard what you said. What did my mother say?”

“She thinks you’ve gone back to New York, I imagine,” I answered. “You’d better get undressed and go to bed. I’ll get you a glass of milk. Here’s a towel. Wash your face.”

When I came back with the milk she was sitting on the bed, her hat and coat beside her, looking as tragic as a refugee child from Europe waiting alone on the dock for someone to come and claim her.

“Why doesn’t my mother want me here?” she said, without looking up.

“I don’t know,” I answered, as gently as I could. “All I know is that right now it’s better for you not to be here. One of her dinner guests was—murdered, last night.”

She didn’t blink an eye, and I realized—without knowing how—that she must some way have heard already.

“But it was before that that she didn’t want anybody to know who I was,” she said. She raised her sherry-colored eyes to mine.

“I know,” I said helplessly.

“Is it… because of that man in the picture?”

“I shouldn’t think so, because he’s awfully nice,” I said. “But I don’t know. Let’s go to bed. We can talk about it in the morning.”

She shook her head. “No, because… well, you see, Mother is… I don’t know how to explain it.”

Her voice faltered.

“She’s frightened about somebody, and she’s never been frightened before. Not even when my father died and left us without any money or anything down in South America. I heard the lawyer talking to her and I was so scared I couldn’t go to sleep. He said there were a lot of debts, and wasn’t there some relative we could go to. Mother said, No, there wasn’t, but she’d manage some way. She was wonderful. That’s why I’m so worried now. She was crying last night when she came up.”

“Tell me this tomorrow, darling,” I begged. “Go to bed now.”

“I’m going somewhere else,” she said steadily. “That man will find me if I stay here.”

I looked at my watch. It was already two o’clock. “If I can get you up to Sylvia Peele’s,” I said.

“She was here, wasn’t she?”

I nodded.

“She’s nice. She said I mustn’t be upset—nothing is ever so awful if you can go to sleep and forget it a while.—What’s the matter with her? Who’s Pete? Why did she call him up and tell him about… what happened? And why did she say he had to get to Corliss’s room before the police got there?”

I was too appalled at that to think coherently.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But forget it, darling—please. And don’t let anybody else know you heard that, will you? Promise?”

She nodded slowly. Then she said, “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “But do. And finish your milk while I phone.”

I got Sylvia’s apartment again. Her voice was so dead and colorless that I hardly recognized it.

“Yes, Grace—what is it now? I can’t stand much more tonight, darling, but go on.”

“It’s Barbara,” I said. “She is here. She’s coming up. Can you leave the door open so she doesn’t have to go through your apartment? What’s the room number?”

“639 E,” she said quickly. “Tell her just to go in as if she lived there—not to bring her bag. I’ll give her a toothbrush. It’s the third brown door on the left of the elevator.”

I put down the phone. It flashed through my mind that this was the most utter and total nonsense—two grown and presumably intelligent women smuggling an eighteen-year-old girl in and out of apartments in Washington’s most exclusive residential hotel like something out of a third-rate movie. It just didn’t make any possible sense.

She was standing there with her hat in her hand, her eyes opened very wide.

“Do you suppose it’s the same thing they’re worried about at school?” she asked. I must have looked blank, because she went on quickly, “I mean, they always say, ‘No, there’s no Elizabeth Sherwood here,’ when anybody calls me up, as if they were afraid somebody was trying to kidnap me. They don’t do it for anybody else except a girl whose father is trying to get her away from her grandmother.”

“I don’t know,” I said. The almost hostile reception I’d got earlier in the evening came back into my mind. “I don’t know, really. Leave your bags here.”

I told her what Sylvia had said. She nodded.

“Wait till I see if the coast is clear—then go down the hall.”

I explained how she could get to the other side of the building and up to Sylvia’s apartment. Then I went out into the foyer, unbolted the door and opened it.

“Oh,” I said.

Sergeant Phineas T. Buck was standing there.

I said, “Oh,” again, blankly.

He gave me a fishy-eyed stare. “Is something off color,
ma’am?”

“Oh no, Sergeant,” I said. “Nothing at all. I was looking to see if the milk had come. Is there anything I can do for you? Or are you just waiting around?”

“Colonel’s orders, ma’am,” he said. He spoke as usual out of the corner of his iron-rimmed mouth, so that it sounded as if the firing squad was cleaning its guns just around the corner. “I got to look out for you—see you don’t get into no trouble.”

That Sergeant Buck would have preferred a week in the guardhouse was only too painfully clear.

“Well, good luck,” I said. “And good-night. I’m going to bed.”

He didn’t say “Oh, yeah?” nor did he expectorate over his shoulder… but both were definitely implied.

“No offense meant, ma’am,” he said.

“And none taken, Sergeant,” I replied sweetly.

That was the form we’d established to wipe the slate clean of personal animosity, which is just as well, because there’s a limited amount of slate in the world.

I closed the door, bolted it firmly and went back. “You’ll have to stay here tonight,” I said. I picked up the phone and called Sylvia once more.

“She can’t come, dear,” I said. “The Iron Guard’s taken over the Palace.”

If I thought I was being funny I was wrong. When I opened the door to get the paper next morning, there he was—still or again, it didn’t matter much. Though I saw immediately that it was again, because he was dressed in the black suit I’d never seen except when he went with the Colonel to a military funeral or to the White House. His lank undistinguished hair that I’d never noticed particularly before was plastered down across his iron dome like the pictures of saloon keepers in the gay Nineties, and he had his gold nugget stickpin in his black tie. I was sure that nothing short of a field marshal had died.

He handed me my papers.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, as bleakly as if the snow was up to the rooftrees.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. I went back to the phone and ordered breakfast.

“Service for how many, madam?” room service inquired. It was reasonable enough, since I’d never ordered cereal and bacon and eggs and milk and buttered toast before.

“One,” I said.

It was very awkward, and probably very futile. As soon as the maid came to clean the room Sergeant Buck would know Barbara was there. Still, he didn’t know now, and as it might be a morning funeral there was no use crossing that bridge till I came to it.

I sat down to look at the papers. Sylvia’s column had been written the day before and was the usual sort of thing. So had Larry’s. I glanced at “Shall We Join the Ladies?” casually, and then came sharply to attention.

“Shush stuff,” it said. “Rumor creeping around town on rubber soles. An international news syndicate has to go on paying for a certain well-known column until the contract runs out in April, but nobody is going to see it except the janitor who empties the office wastebasket. Reason—aid and comfort to the enemy. Same with his radio contract.”

I put the paper down, completely stunned. The waiter knocked for the third time before I managed to let him in. When he’d gone I picked up the paper again. A name in the rest of the column caught my eye.

“Corliss Marshall is making his first Washington appearance since his return from South America at the dinner the glamorous Mrs. Addison Sherwood is giving for Kurt Hofmann, visiting the Capital, tonight. Señor Delvalle, owner and publisher of a string of newspapers, also radio stations, South of the Border, will be there. Prophecy: ex-Congressional War Horse Sam Wharton’s pipedream of an important inter-hemispheric public relations job will sink back into the dust bowl. Effie might as well give up her Spanish and start brushing up on her bingo for the long winter nights at home by the range.—If Corliss Marshall gets Senor Delvalle’s right ear before We Join the Ladies.”

I poured a cup of coffee and let it sit there. As I started to drink it at last, the phone rang. I picked it up and said “Hello.”

“Have you seen the papers?”

It was Sylvia.

“Just Larry’s column,” I said. I hadn’t even glanced at the front page.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Is it true?”

“I’d heard it, but Pete hasn’t said anything,” she answered. “Would you go around with me to see him? I’m afraid to go alone, with the police following me about. And how’s Barbara?”

“She’s still asleep,” I said. “How soon do you want to go?”

“Right away. Will you come up?”

I woke Barbara up when I was ready to leave. “Look, my dear lamb,” I said. “There’s some food out there. You can phone your mother, but don’t go out. She can see when the coast is clear and come here if she wants to, but you stay in. And don’t answer the phone.”

She nodded sleepily. “I’m a lot of trouble, aren’t I,” she said, sitting up and trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes. She looked more like six than eighteen.

I kissed her forehead, “You’re
very
sweet,” I said. “Remember about the phone, won’t you?”

All that was a mistake. I knew it the minute I got out into the corridor, because Sergeant Buck wasn’t going to a funeral at all. He was going with me. That was why he was all dressed up. I stared at him with my mouth open.

“Colonel’s orders, ma’am,” he said grimly, out of the side of his mouth, his face turning the color of tarnished brass.

“Very well,” I said. There wasn’t anything else I could say. And as a matter of fact I look back on that day with quiet pleasure. I didn’t have to have my hair done, but seeing Sergeant Buck turned to a pillar of salt outside Henri’s while I sat for hours under the dryer was wonderful. I didn’t need any lingerie either, but I knew I’d never again have the pleasure of seeing Sergeant Buck really unhappy. It cost me a lot of money, but it was worth it. But that was later.

“I’m going to see Miss Peele,” I said, as we got out of the elevator and turned down the hall. “I won’t be long.”

Sylvia let me in and closed the door.

“Did you bring the Iron Horse with you?” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “He came. He’s The Shadow.”

“Oh,” she said.

I followed her into the sitting room and stopped. And I said “Oh.” Larry Villiers was standing by the table. The handsome smiling face that had looked up from the upper left-hand corner of the column I’d just read wasn’t smiling now. He looked about as unhappy as it was possible to imagine him looking.

“You certainly did a nice job this morning,” I said, pleasantly.

“Shut up, will you!” he said savagely. “I’ve had enough of that from Sylvia. How the hell did I know this was going to happen? I don’t want to get old Effie of the dyed red hair in trouble. Good Lord! Thank the Lord they’ve killed it in the late morning edition.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said bitterly. “And what about Pete? They’re going to kill that, are they?”

“I can’t help that.” His voice was as bitter as hers. “If you’d let me tell him what everybody was saying two weeks ago, this wouldn’t have happened. The trouble with you, Sylvia, is you believe he writes that tripe. I don’t. You’re a friend of his and I’m not. He doesn’t take cracks at your stuff the way he does at mine. And still
I
don’t think he’d sell out, and you do.”