The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (13 page)

He flicked the ash off his cigarette onto the floor.

“Of course, darling, you know him better than I do. If you believe—”

Sylvia’s face was white. “Stop it, Larry! I
don’t
believe it!”

“Oh yes you do, darling,” he said calmly. “You should have seen yourself last night every time somebody brought it up. And there’s no use getting sore at me about it. That’s not what I came here for.”

“What did you come for?” she asked coolly.

“Just to suggest that maybe Pete wasn’t the only person at the party last night that might be interested in Corliss’s untimely demise.”

“What do you mean?”

She turned quickly from the mirror where she was putting on her hat.

“Then you do think Pete did it, don’t you?” he said easily. “Well, as I say, you know him better than I do.”

“I don’t think Pete did it, Larry,” she said. “And if you imply I do in that filthy column of yours, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, Sylvia?”

“I’ll never forgive you, Larry—that’s all.”

He looked at her for an instant and ground his cigarette out in the ash tray.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t come here to make you feel worse. What I came for was to see if I could do anything to help. You see, they’ve been laying for Pete for a couple of weeks. My apartment’s in the front of the house and I can see them. The telephone girl just told me the other day all his calls are checked. She wanted to tell him, but she didn’t have the nerve. She’s afraid he’d fly off the handle, and she’d lose her job.”

“What do you mean? Who’s checking on him?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, darling. There was a new janitor in the building last week. He was keeping Pete’s wastebasket separate from the rest of them. I know because he goes out earlier than I do.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Sylvia demanded.

“And get my nose punched?”

“You could have told me.”

“Not in the state you’ve been in lately, old girl. Not without having all my hair pulled out. But as I was about to say, Pete wasn’t the only person on the terrace with old Corliss last night.”

Sylvia turned back to the mirror.

“—Effie Wharton was out there, for instance,” Larry went on coolly. “Bliss Thatcher was there. He’s out, because he wouldn’t murder a willing tool. Delvalle was out for a minute, the same time Pete was. And Alicia was out there too. She was out twice, as a matter of fact, and so was our hostess.”

“Anybody else?” Sylvia asked quietly.

“Not that I saw,” Larry said. He looked her steadily in the eyes.

“Have you told Colonel Primrose?”

That blank expressionless stare of hers came over her face, and I knew she was herself again.

Larry nodded. “He was in while I was eating breakfast this morning.”

“What a shame you didn’t tell him you saw me go out there too,” she said lightly. “Because he knows it. What’s worse, he knows I came back literally steeped in blood. Did you know it too, darling? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Larry didn’t say anything for a minute. I thought his hands were shaking a little.

“Look,” he said then, unsteadily. “You’re not going to take the rap for that guy? You’re crazy. You can’t do it— you’d be a damned fool. He’s not——”

“Worth it?” Sylvia said. “We’ll see. And we have to begin now. Your dear friend Alicia called me up this morning. She’s in a frightful stew about something. Any idea what it is?”

He shook his head.

“Well, goodbye,” Sylvia said. “Be sure and put the cover back on my typewriter, won’t you.”

“—I hope,” I said as we started to open the hall door, “that you don’t mind having the Sergeant along.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” she answered.

But he wasn’t there—not until we got into the elevator. There he was, standing at a sort of attention, his black hat across his chest, staring brassily in front of him, completely unaware, as far as I could tell, that we were in there at all. Sylvia started to say “Good morning,” but it was so like accosting the Washington Monument that she gave it up.

“Is your car here?” she asked me instead.

I nodded. We got out of the elevator and walked through the lobby to the semi-circular drive in front of the hotel, Sergeant Buck shadowing us discreetly ten feet in the rear. Outside I turned around.

“We’re going to Alicia Wrenn’s, Sergeant,” I said sweetly. “Would you like to come in my car?”

The brassy patina went a couple of shades darker.

“I’ll go in my own car, ma’am,” he said bitterly. He turned his head, and this time he did spit, very neatly, into the laurel bushes bordering the drive.

“This, I can see, is the end of a beautiful friendship,” Sylvia remarked as we got into the car.

“Mine and the Colonel’s?” I asked.

“No. The Colonel’s and Sergeant Buck’s.—And a lot of other people’s. Do you happen to know where her ladyship lives, by the way?”

“The Phillips’ house, isn’t it? Just down on Milbank Terrace.”

She nodded. We turned down into the maze of narrow lanes that wind in and out on the edge of the Park.

“She was really in a state this morning, when she called,” she said. “It gave me the creeps. I don’t know why it should have, but it did. Maybe I’m psychic. Lady Alicia is. She told me so last night.”

I suppose that should have warned me. If being psychic is being extraordinarily sensitive to people and tone and atmosphere, then Sylvia certainly is. But even her “creeps” wasn’t the word for it. It was more than that. It was terrible, really—and it still frightens me when I think of it.

We stopped on the side of the hill going up Milbank Terrace. The Phillipses built the house after Lorna Phillips had spent a year in Vienna being psychoanalyzed, and had learned her soul was allergic to light as well as to her husband. At least that’s what people said, and certainly very little light ever got into the place even after she’d divorced her husband.

“It’s a dismal hole, isn’t it?” Sylvia observed as a dour gaunt-faced Scottish woman showed us into the drawing room. She pulled the heavy red wool curtains across the door behind her as she went to fetch her mistress.

Sylvia sniffed the air like a pointer in the field. “What’s that?”

“Lady Alicia’s tweeds, probably,” I said. “Aren’t they smoky when they’re good?”

“She didn’t sound very tweedy this morning.”

In a moment the maid appeared again between the red curtains.

“You’re to come up to the library,” she said ungraciously. I looked at her a little surprised. It was plain she didn’t like our being there at all, and wasn’t trying to conceal the fact. She reminded me of a female Sergeant Buck—or did until I saw her eyes. They were sea-blue, and behind their sullen offensive stare was almost unbearable tragedy. And that should have warned me too.

“What’s the matter with her, do you suppose?” Sylvia whispered as we followed her up the dark zig-zag staircase that had reminded Loma Phillips of a Tyrolean hunting lodge. Animal skins were draped over the banisters, the head of a wild boar grinned down from the top landing.

Sylvia sniffed again. The servant opened the library door at the end of the hall. It was dark too. What light there was struggled cold and jaundiced through narrow panes of amber glass in the arched window at the end of the room.

Lady Alicia was sitting at a table under it. A greenish candle was smoking in front of her, filling the room with a pungent unholy kind of smell. She was playing solitaire, I thought, and so intently that she didn’t look up until the maid said, “They’re here, my lady.” Then she turned and looked at us.

I must say I should never have recognized her as the same woman who was demanding her gin and tonic the night before and holding up dinner till she got it. Her long face was haggard and actually the color of mustard thinned with milk, her eyes were hollow and desperately unhappy, and the smoke from the candle had made their rims red and moist. She had on a long robe made out of a black-bordered Paisley shawl tied around the waist with a gold-tasseled cord. It was as extraordinary as she was.

She got up. “You may go, Mary. Close the door, please.”

She turned to Sylvia without the least preliminary.

“I wanted to see you,” she said painfully. “I want to know how you knew.”

She put her hand sort of wildly to her head and pushed back her hair.

“Knew what, Lady Alicia?” Sylvia asked. She was genuinely bewildered.

“What you said last night. That I… am a coward. That I ran away. Because it’s true. I am a coward, and I did run away—but not from what you think. Not from the bombs. I’m not afraid of the bombs. It’s something else. Something that follows me wherever I go. That’s what I was running away from. And you know, don’t you? That’s what I have to know.
How
you know!”

Sylvia moved a step closer to me.

“I—don’t know, Lady Alicia,” she said unsteadily. “I didn’t mean to say it. I really didn’t. I just get annoyed at people coming over here and telling us what we should do. I was just being very rude. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

Lady Alicia shook her head.

“No, no. It’s not that—you don’t have to say that,” she said quickly. “It’s that you do know it. You could see it. That’s what I want to know. How you could see it. Was it me, myself, or somebody else?”

“But I’ve told you. Really—”

The woman’s hands dropped to her side.

“Don’t go on,” she said helplessly. “You knew, but it’s very likely you don’t know how you knew. It’s there, you see. It’s everywhere I go. I’ve tried to run away from it, but it’s here now, waiting for me.”

She turned to the table and picked up a card lying on the center pile of the game she’d laid out. It was the six of clubs.

“It’s always there. It always comes up. The knave of hearts is there too, but this is always in between us.”

It wasn’t a game she was playing at all—I realized tardily. She was telling her fortune. I glanced nervously at Sylvia.

“Oh, I’m not demented, if that’s what you think,” Lady Alicia said sharply. “That’s what my husband thought. It’s not true. It’s here, here in the cards. It’s getting closer—every day it’s closer. I thought if I came to America… but here it is. Don’t you see? Even Mary knows it’s coming closer.”

She looked at us with such helpless appeal in her eyes that my blood chilled.

“Maybe… the cards are wrong, Lady Alicia,” Sylvia said. “Maybe they might come out differently if you tried them again.”

She glanced at me, helpless herself. And there was obviously no use telling the woman to throw the pack in the fire and get out in the sunlight. She was in no state to tolerate common sense.

“It’s no use,” she whispered. “Nobody will ever believe me.”

“I believe you,” Sylvia said. “But what can I do?”

“I don’t know. If I only did!”

She gathered the cards up in her hand, bent over the table, closed her eyes and shuffled them three times. Then she cut them, twice, and turned the center pile over. Her hand was trembling and so was her body pressed against the table. Still she didn’t open her eyes.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Sylvia looked quickly at me. If she could have changed the card I know she would have.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Lady Alicia said softly. “It’s the club six.” Her voice sank to a whisper again. “It’s death. It’s always death.”

She opened her eyes slowly, nodding her head. “It’s death,” she repeated quietly.

She picked the cards up and dealt them out in an intricate order into three rows of five cards each, her eyes closed again and her hand faltering before she laid the last card down. I stared at her, fascinated, believing for an instant in spite of the fact that I knew it wasn’t true. She opened her eyes.

“You see,” she said. “It’s always the same. Even when I change my queen it’s still the same. He always comes between us.”

“Who?” Sylvia asked.

Lady Alicia put her forefinger on the knave of diamonds. It lay above the death card, and next to the queen of clubs.

“That’s my queen.” She pointed to the jack of hearts. “That is my heart’s desire. And this knave”—she returned to the jack of diamonds—“always comes between us. He brings death.”

She put her finger on the six of clubs again. “It’s never been so close before.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she picked up the red jacks.

“I don’t understand. Mary doesn’t understand either. They’re not the same. They’re not aspects of each other, as I thought once. Because the ocean still divides us.”

She pointed to the nine of spades. I didn’t ask her how she knew it was the ocean, because I believed implicitly, at that moment, that that’s what it was. And it did lie between the queen of clubs—her queen—and the heart jack.

Lady Alicia looked at us earnestly. “But it’s not true. He’s here, you see; he’s not on the other side.”

She pointed to the eight of spades. “And this is his letter. The letter I understand.”

She went over to the secretary and pulled out what some people still call a secret drawer because it looked as if it’s part of the frame. She took three letters out and held them in her hand.

“These are letters he wrote me a long time ago. This is the one from France written before he got away.”

Sylvia looked quickly at me. The idea of Kurt Hofmann as the jack of hearts was a little bewildering to me, but then I’d never been in love with him, and Lady Alicia had, and still was, apparently, extraordinary as it might seem.

She put the letters back in the drawer, pushed it shut and came slowly back to the table.

“If you could only tell me who this is,” she said, picking up the jack of diamonds and holding it out. “He’s the same color, but he represents evil. He brings my queen the death card. They always come together. That’s what you sensed. Or perhaps it was just my own fear, like a living thing, a dark flower I wear in my hair. But if you can tell me… or afterwards if you will make them understand.”

Her voice had sunk to a whisper again, but the appeal in her eyes had changed to tragic certainty, a kind of stoical fatalism that made it useless to try to say anything.

“Oh, I’m so desperately sorry,” Sylvia said, holding out her hands. “I wish there was something—”