The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (14 page)

Lady Alicia shook her head. She stood looking down at the cards for a long time. Then she said slowly,

“When they came last night and said that man had been killed, I was almost mad with relief. I thought I’d read the cards wrong. I thought perhaps they could have meant that. That this was for him.”

She touched the six of clubs.

“I called Mary. We ran up here and laid them out, and read them together.”

Her body went limp and helpless again.

“It turned up immediately—the first card I uncovered.— And I don’t know why it terrifies me so. I’m really not afraid to die—not really afraid.”

I’m still not quite sure how we got out of that room and down the stairs. I know I’ll always remember the maid looking at us as she closed the door, and my almost sickening sense of relief seeing Sergeant Buck’s square granite figure standing there looking up at the house. He executed a sharp about-face and got into his car. Sylvia and I got into mine.

“It’s terrible!” Sylvia whispered. She was as shaken as I was. “Just think, the two of them living there with that ghastly fear always around them. She’s so terribly
sure
of it, isn’t she?”

The pale wintry sunlight and a modem motor gathering power under the pressure of my foot, together with Sergeant Buck’s realistic presence, began to have its effect on me. “It’s crazy,” I said. “It’s just plain medieval witchcraft.”

“I know, but if you think things hard enough, you can make them happen,” Sylvia said. “You really can. That’s what she’s doing.”

Then her own voice cleared. “And who
do
you suppose that jack of diamonds is? He’s not her Kurt Hofmann anyway—and isn’t
that
something! Who were the other blond gentlemen there last night?”

“Well, there’s Larry,” I said. “And Sam Wharton. He must have been blond before he was white. His eyes are blue. And—”

“I know,” she said quietly when I hesitated. “Pete. But that means we believe in witchcraft too, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t answer, and we didn’t say anything else until we came out of the Park on the P Street Bridge and turned back toward Massachusetts Avenue. Then I said, “Sylvia, what is this book Pete’s writing?”

She turned her head quickly.

“What book are you talking about?” she demanded sharply. “Who told you about it?”

I was so surprised I didn’t stop for the red light on 21st Street. Fortunately the car on my left had good brakes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was a secret weapon. Colonel Primrose told me about it. Last night.”

“I’m sorry too,” Sylvia said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just—well, the less said about it the better. Let’s skip it, shall we?”

I nodded and drove along. Pete Hamilton lived on 16th Street not far from the White House in a brownstone mansion that had been converted into bachelor apartments. The switchboard operator eyed us a little suspiciously as we went in.

“Mr. Hamilton hasn’t gone out yet, so I suppose he’s up there,” she said. “The back apartment, third floor. His mail’s just come—would you mind taking it up?”

She handed Sylvia a pile of letters and newspapers.

We went up the staircase that had seen Washington in perhaps not more opulent but certainly more formal days. The janitor was emptying the trash on the third floor. Sylvia glanced at me. One wastebasket was definitely set aside, the others being dumped into a big brown paper carton.

She knocked at Pete’s door, the janitor watching us out of the corner of his eye. I could hear Sergeant Buck’s iron tramp on the stairs. From inside came a shout: “Come in!” and Sylvia opened the door.

“Who is it?” Pete shouted.

“It’s me,” she called. “And Grace. Can we come in?”

“Sure, come ahead. Eyes front—the maid hasn’t come yet today.”

We went along a narrow hall with a bedroom on one side and a tiny kitchenette and bathroom on the other to a big room at the end, across the back of the house, overlooking the garden.

“What do you mean, today?” Sylvia said. “It looks more like a week.”

Pete grinned. He was working at his desk in the middle of the room behind the sofa littered with papers and his dinner coat and shirt from the night before. He had on an old gray sweater and he hadn’t shaved. On the gateleg table behind him was a coffee percolator and the remains of a self-made breakfast. The drawers were hanging out of his fifing case, and papers were piled on top of it.

“It’s a mess, all right,” he said. “If I was a beachcomber I’d have a native girl to look after me. That’s the trouble with civilization.”

He turned to me.

“You know, one of the things I like about Sylvia is she doesn’t come in and first crack out of the box start picking up and washing the dishes.”

He looked at her critically.

“Only I can’t figure out whether it’s self-control or she just doesn’t give a damn.”

“I thought this was the way you liked it, dear,” she retorted serenely. “After all, you can get a native girl for three dollars a week.—One that’ll come in, I mean.—What’s the matter? Why didn’t you let her stay? Aren’t you going to the Commissioners’ press conference this morning?”

Pete shook his head. “I’ve been asked to stay away,” he said quietly.

She stared at him. “Oh,
Pete!”
she cried. “When?”

“This morning.—I guess the Colonel was right.”

“And what are you going to
do?
You aren’t just going to sit here and take it, are you?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

There was a long silence. He sat there stuffing his tobacco into his pipe, looking down at his typewriter.

“Pete,” Sylvia said after a moment. “Have you seen Larry’s column this morning?”

“Me? Lord, no. I get my social items out of the
Police Gazette.”

“Well, you’d better read it.”

She picked
The Chronicle
up off the sofa, opened it to the society page and handed it to him. He shifted his pipe to the other side of his mouth and tilted his chair back, the paper propped up in front of him against his typewriter. His chair came slowly down to the floor again. He took his pipe out of his mouth and looked blankly up at Sylvia.

“This—is news to me,” he said. He looked down at the paper again. “Nice crack at the Whartons too. Ought to cheer Captain Lamb up.”

Sylvia was watching him with a kind of tense anxiety. She looked back now at the table by the door where she’d put his mail, went quickly over, picked it up and brought it to him. He looked through the pile and straightened up abruptly as he came to the last letter. He ripped it open and read it, his face going as tight as a steel trap, a slow hard flush darkening his cheeks. He looked at it a long time and handed it to her. Her hands were trembling as she read it.

I saw that the letterhead was that of the news syndicate that handled Pete’s stuff.

“Then—he’s right,” Sylvia whispered.

“Straight from the horse’s mouth. Larry sure gets the dope.”

She put the letter down on the desk. “Pete,” she said unsteadily. “You don’t seem to think what all this means!”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It means I’m a dirty rotten traitor. It also means I’m out on the sidewalk on the seat of my pants. That’s what it means.”

“You can do something, can’t you?”

“Sure. I can get a job digging ditches, if they aren’t all dug.”

“I don’t mean that, and you know it. I mean, can’t you stop all this? Can’t you
deny
it? Can’t you—”

He got up, came around the table to her and put his hands on her shoulders, gripping them tightly, looking down into her face. Any idea I might have had that he was taking what had happened lightly, or that he didn’t know clearly what it meant and what it involved, was gone from that moment.

He looked at her with an expression that I’d never seen on his face before.

“Look, Sylvia,” he said, his voice hard and his eyes steady. “You don’t think I write that stuff?” And that’s not the word he used. “Do you?”

Her eyes searched his just as steadily for a long moment.

“No!” she said, with a sudden almost passionate triumph. “No, Pete—never! Oh, Pete!”

Suddenly his arms were around her, crushing her to him, his mouth pressed against hers. He raised his head then, pushed her hat off with one hand, still holding her, pushed her hair back from her forehead, still looking steadily down into her eyes. “Sylvia,” he said. “I didn’t know—I’ve never known—how much I love you.”

It was obviously no place for me, and I got out as quickly as I could, interrupting Sergeant Buck’s quiet heart-to-heart with the janitor over the garbage. I felt a lot better. I didn’t know who wrote “Truth Not Fiction,” but I did know now that it wasn’t Pete Hamilton. And I didn’t seem to care much, at the moment, who’d killed Corliss Marshall. I say that because otherwise there’s no possible excuse for the chase I led poor Sergeant Buck that afternoon. The hairdresser was first, then the lingerie department of a woman’s specialty shop, and then—I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it—I left him for at least half an hour outside a Ladies’ Room while I wrote a couple of letters admonishing my sons about their grades and did the day’s telephoning. And not least, as I was going back into the Randolph-Lee I met Senor Delvalle. Sergeant Buck, by this time permanently dyed the color of glacial brick-dust, was the usual ten paces behind me.

“How charming, madame,” Senor Delvalle said. He bent over my hand and kissed it.

Sergeant Buck cleared his throat—and if the Randolph-Lee had had walls like Jericho, they’d have gone down with a crash. As it was, his square-toed size twelve boot was in dangerously near proximity to Senor Delvalle as he was bending over my hand. I was a little alarmed, frankly. I pulled my hand away quickly, probably, because Delvalle straightened up and looked around, and back at me with a questioning lift of his eyebrows.

“It’s just a member of the Elite Guard, Senor,” I said. “He goes wherever I go.”

“Does he have to have tea with us?” Senor Delvalle inquired.

“He’d love it,” I said.

When we were settled in the cocktail lounge, with the Sergeant practically at the table with us, I said, “I suppose you saw your name in the paper, this morning.”

“Yes, I did,” he answered. “It’s very interesting. I understand Mr. Wharton would like to go to my country. Mrs. Wharton, I mean. Perhaps you can tell me, Mrs. Latham, why women are so much more determined not to return to private life than men.”

“I guess it’s deadly dull back home after Washington,” I said. “You don’t find Washington very glamorous?”

“Not until I met you, madame.”

Sergeant Buck cleared his throat again. The waiter came out so fast from behind the bar that you’d have thought an evzone had appeared there. I’m sure I don’t know how long this would have gone on, or whether Senor Delvalle, who was enjoying it quite as much as I was, would have got out alive, if Colonel Primrose hadn’t come in.

Sergeant Buck saw him first, stood at attention, did a veritable squads right to the door, reported and left—very fast. I can’t think he was ever relieved from any duty with greater satisfaction.

The Colonel came over with a twinkle in his eye. He smiled at me. “May I join you?” Senor Delvalle wasn’t as Latin after that, and by the time we got up to go I was beginning to be a little worried. It didn’t seem so amusing now as it had before. I remembered that Corliss Marshall was dead. And that Barbara was somewhere, unhappy and frightened—and that her mother had cried the night before. And that Pete Hamilton—even if love had risen like a phoenix from the ashes—was ruined unless something happened. Lady Alicia Wrenn, haggard-eyed and ashen-cheeked, and her cards—the death card and the knave of diamonds— came back to my mind too. And I’d been making Sergeant Buck wait outside the Ladies’ Rest Room.

“What’s the matter?” Colonel Primrose asked after Senor Delvalle had left and he and I had decided to stay and have dinner where we were.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“You’re not the type, really.”

Then he looked at me seriously.

“What did you go to Lady Alicia’s this morning for?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” I said. “You’ll think it’s a lot of nonsense, but you see, she called Sylvia…”

He listened silently while I told him what had happened. When I came to the end he was still silent.

I said, “Of course, I
know
it’s nonsense, and all that—”

He shook his head. “Fear is never nonsense, my dear,” he said. “I’m glad you told me.”

He sat there thinking about it. “There are, or could be, some very remarkable things about that,” he said, and then he was silent again, just looking down at his dinner.

“You know,” I went on when he didn’t say any more, “I was thinking if you would go down and talk to her, maybe you could do something. You’re so appallingly sane, and rather comforting at times.”

He smiled. “Thank you, my dear.”

“What I mean is, if you’d find out what’s behind it, or just give her a pack of cards that hasn’t got a six of clubs so slippery it always comes up first—”

He nodded quite seriously and called for the check.

“Why don’t we go down and see her together? You know her. It won’t look quite so officious as if I went by myself. Shall we walk? It’s just down in the Park, isn’t it?”

We went out across the terrace, bleak and so empty now that it was hard to remember how gaily crowded it was in the summer time. It was dark too, down the sloping lawn to the road. The brilliant arc lights on the Connecticut Avenue Bridge made the street lights scattered through the trees ahead of us very pale and ineffectual.

“By the way,” I asked. “Do you know anything about a newspaperman named Gordon Lacey?”

He thought a moment.

“Vaguely. He used to be around the Central Police Station here a long time ago. Liquor got him, if I remember correctly. Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just happened to think of him. Because Pete doesn’t write ‘Truth Not Fiction’—I’m as sure of that as anything in the world—and last night Corliss brought Lacey’s name up. He’d seen him in South America. Pete objected to what Corliss said about him, and Corliss said something about Lacey’s not being a friend of Pete’s, and I just wondered. Here we are. It’s the funny dark house in the trees.”