The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (16 page)

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Well, where is she?”

“I don’t know that either.”

That was true too, of course. I hadn’t been back to my apartment all day. She might have gone to the moon for all I knew.

He shook his head a little. “You can’t back the whole field, you know, my dear,” he said. “Think it over, will you?”

We went inside and up to the second lobby. I saw Sylvia and Senor Delvalle at the top of the stairs just beyond a palm tree in a gold tub, waiting for Larry on his way over to the newsstand.

“I’ve got to get in touch with him some way,” Sylvia was saying urgently. “He left Panama City last week. I got a cable this evening from a newspaperman down there. Have him arrested if you have to—or I’ll fly down—but I’ve got to get hold of him. It’s Lacey with a c-e-y. He’ll be in the nearest bar.”

Colonel Primrose glanced at me.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Senor Delvalle said earnestly. “You must understand my position. There is so much Fifth Column activity in my country that any doubt at all in the mind of any member of your government would make it impossible for me to send him down. He has got to make a very firm denial of all this, Miss Peele.”

“But he won’t,” Sylvia said. “And as I know he doesn’t do it, I’m out of my mind. But I know from what Corliss Marshall said that Gordon Lacey’s got something to do with it.”

“If he is in South America, I will find him for you, Miss Peele.”

We went on up the steps. Larry Villiers was coming back from the newsstand opening a pack of cigarettes. He saw us and stopped, looking at Sylvia’s bag in Colonel Primrose’s hand with raised eyebrows.

“Don’t tell me, Colonel,” he said politely. “The latest in Army circles? ‘What the Retired Officer Will Wear.’ I must make a note.”

Sylvia and Delvalle turned.

“Oh,” Sylvia said. “Thanks, Colonel. I was just going down to get it.”

She held out her hand. Colonel Primrose shook his head.

“I’m going to keep it a while. I wonder if I could talk to you a minute, if you’re not busy.”

She looked at him with her blank stare. “Surely. Shall we go up to my place?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Senor Delvalle was smiling at me, just by my side, so I couldn’t give her any kind of warning.

“Good-night, Colonel,” I said. I wanted to get upstairs and see about Barbara before he decided to pay me another call. I nodded to the rest of them and started away. Just as I did, the assistant manager of the hotel came across the lobby.

“Oh, Mrs. Latham, I want to apologize,” he said, the way assistant managers of hotels do. “I hope we didn’t disturb the young lady. We phoned before the boy took the flowers up. He didn’t know she was there. She—”

“I’m sure it’s all right,” I said hastily. But it was too late. Colonel Primrose had stopped and was looking back, his head cocked down and twisted around and his black parrot’s eyes resting on me. He shook his head a little.

“—If you’d register your guests, Mrs. Latham,” the manager said.

“Of course I should have.”

Delvalle and Larry both looked at me.

“Not the girl that came last night, Grace?” Larry inquired suavely. “Young, of course, but awfully pretty. I missed her name in the dramatis personas this morning.”

I got away before I said what was on the tip of my tongue. At the elevator I glanced back. Colonel Primrose and Sylvia had stopped before they had got to the elevator in the other wing, and she was waiting for him outside the florist shop.

It really was a curious thing, I thought as I stood there waiting. It hadn’t occurred to me before Colonel Primrose said it that there might be a connection between Ruth Sherwood’s desperate appeal to me to help her keep Barbara from coming and her conduct later about Corliss Marshall’s death. Yet none of it made sense. She couldn’t possibly have known it was going to happen, unless she’d done it herself and invited him there for that purpose… and she didn’t know him, she’d invited him sight unseen by cable—or that’s what she’d said. And while it was obvious enough that there was someone there who she was desperately anxious shouldn’t know she had a beautiful daughter, it couldn’t possibly have been Corliss. He was Washington’s leading perennial journalistic bachelor; his lack of interest in women was notorious.

I got into the elevator and out of it and started down to my apartment. It was the first time I’d seriously tried to figure out just who it was at her party that she didn’t want to know about the girl. If she wanted to marry Bliss Thatcher, she certainly wouldn’t want him to think the child in the photograph was hers. That it was Sam Wharton was absurd on the face of it. Then there were Larry and Pete and Sylvia, and she hadn’t been very much upset when I told her Sylvia knew. That left Corliss and Lady Alicia Wrenn—and they were both dead, and anyway, what possible connection a titled refugee and an eminent stuffed shirt could have with an eighteen-year-old girl born in South America was beyond me. And of course it also left Senor Delvalle and Kurt Hofmann. I began to think of Delvalle with a new interest, remembering that all three of them were from South America.

My apartment was dark. “Barbara,” I called. There wasn’t any answer. I switched on the lights and went into the sitting room.

On the table was a vase of American Beauty roses, like the ones trampled on the floor in Lady Alicia’s hall. There was another one on the mantel. I picked up the card that had come with them. It was from Senor Delvalle with a suitable inscription and an invitation for me and Sergeant Buck to lunch with him the next day. It was gay and amusing. I couldn’t believe the hand that had written it could be a menace to anybody. Senor Delvalle was too civilized and too worldly for that sort of thing.

I put the card down and went into the bedroom. The child’s bags were gone, and there was a note propped up against the dressing table mirror. It was printed, in the absurd kind of script now in vogue in the better finishing schools, and some of the spelling was equally familiar.

“—Dear Mrs. Latham, I’m going to mother’s apartment. The boy came with the roses and then the maid let that funny square looking man in that talks sideways. He was more embarrassed than I was. I didn’t mean to, but I told him who I was and everything about me. He was awfully sweet and I liked him a lot but maybe I shouldn’t have told him everything the way I did. He says it will be alright for me to go to mothers because he has his eye on a south American because he’s sure that’s who mother is afraid of. Thank you for everything, love, Betty”

“Ps. He said the south American hadn’t ought to send you roses because
somebody
wouldn’t like it. I guess he read the card. B.”

I put the note down. Just what it is about Sergeant Phineas T. Buck that makes young people immediately break down and completely unburden themselves to him is utterly beyond me. Weeping on the rocky bosom of Mr. McKinley I could manage to understand, but on Sergeant Buck’s, no. Still, there it was. And as for Senor Delvalle, it would take Mr. Hull and a dozen Pan-American conferences to get back a favorable press if Sergeant Buck wasn’t stopped.

I stood there and thought as sharply and quickly as I could. There were two things I had to do. One was to, get hold of Colonel Primrose and have him call off his troops, and the other—and it seemed to me the more immediately pressing—was to see Ruth Sherwood at once and explain Sergeant Buck’s status as unofficial agent.

I hurried out of the apartment, looked at the upstairs door down the corridor and decided I’d better go down to the proper entrance so I wouldn’t look like the third conspirator if the police happened to be there. As I got out of the elevator I saw coming towards me the tall distinguished figure of the great anti-Totalitarian author Kurt Hofmann, complete with monocle and stick and white carnation. He quickened his step, recognizing me and smiling cordially.

I glanced hastily down the corridor to the left. A bellboy with a package was in the middle distance, and beyond him, just letting herself into the apartment, was Ruth Sherwood. There was something hurried and indeed almost frantically single-minded about the way she got in and closed the door behind her without a backward glance, as if she had to get inside as quickly as she possibly could. The package boy continued on, and Kurt Hofmann had got within speaking distance.

“This is a pleasure, madame,” he said, bringing his heels together and bowing, and coming on. “I was afraid I was not going to have the pleasure of seeing you again before I left your most amazing and interesting city.”

“Are you leaving soon?” I asked politely, something inside me registering a sharp warning to be careful of what I said.

His cool, hardly short of offensively appraising glance took me in just about from head to foot.

“This evening, I’m afraid,” he said, letting his eyeglass fall. “Alas, my time is not my own. You have a song your Salvation Army sings. ‘Work for the Night Is Coming.’ It is truer than they know, Mrs. Latham.”

“I’m sure it is,” I said.

“You were going to Mrs. Sherwood’s?”

He glanced down towards her door.

“I thought I saw her get out of the lift.”

It was too late to say I wasn’t going there, with his cool arrogant gaze resting on my face.

I nodded.

“I am going also, to pay my respects and say adieu,” he said.

The package boy had got to Ruth’s door and was waiting. As we started along the hall the suet butler opened the door, took the parcel and signed the book. He started to close it, saw us coming, put the package down and waited. He seemed to recognize Kurt Hofmann.

“Good evening, sir,” he said, bowing. “Madame has just come in. She is in the library, sir.”

He took Mr. Hofmann’s hat and stick and laid them on the chair. I had the oddly disconcerting impression that this was not an unfamiliar but an honored guest. Kurt Hofmann did nothing to dispel it. He started for the library without waiting to be announced, rather giving the impression of rubbing his hands together. I found myself just following him, my eyes glued to those hands—Lady Alicia Wrenn’s staring eyes and swollen tongue someway superimposing themselves on the blunt powerful fingers that had lost the calluses of his concentration camp days in the ease of his life as a distinguished refugee. One of those hands reached out, took hold of the library door, and then closed on it sharply.

Kurt Hofmann stopped, his body coming to attention with the kind of lithe stealthiness of a great jungle cat.

From inside Ruth Sherwood’s voice rose, vibrant with fright and anger. “—I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you!” My heart froze in my throat. It wasn’t anger at all in her voice, really, I recognized instantly—it was despair goaded on by frustration and terror.

“Go upstairs and shut the door and stay there, and don’t come out till I call you. My God, it’s you I’m thinking of! If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be doing this! I can’t tell you anything else! Bliss Thatcher has nothing to do with it. I’ve told him all about you. Oh, Betty, Betty!—please don’t make me tell you! Try to understand it’s because you
are
my child—”

Kurt Hofmann straightened up slowly. In the mirror fop of the table I caught a glimpse of his face. For an instant it turned perfectly livid, the sabre scar standing out on his cheek as if it had been pasted there. Then the blood receded slowly, and he smiled—a kind of smile so faint and yet so cruel that my blood turned to ice. He turned his hand on the door knob and went inside without so much as a glance behind him at me. I followed automatically, too numb to be aware of the difference between the tiled floor of the middle room and the soft deep pile of the library.

Barbara was standing in front of the desk, her face as bloodless as marble, her great sherry eyes dark now as mahogany, her lips parted. She turned slowly toward the door. Her mother, in the middle of the room, her hat and coat still on, flashed around. If I’d really needed still to know who it was she’d been afraid of, I didn’t any longer. Her face, flushed with anger, went ashen white. Her eyes, burning with some kind of passion, were suddenly dead and really awful. And it was all as instantly as if a bolt of lightning had struck her, searing and paralyzing every nerve in her body.

“So this is your daughter, Mrs. Sherwood,” Kurt Hofmann said quietly.

He took a step forward and bowed, raising the girl’s shaking hand to his lips and letting it fall limply to her side again. He put his glass in his eye and looked at her with cool appraisal.

“Charming, my dear, charming,” he said.

He turned back to her mother.

“How could you be so callous, madame?”

He picked up that photograph on the desk, looked at it, dropped it into the wastebasket as if it was something old and foul, and brushed his hands lightly together. “You amaze me, Mrs. Sherwood,” he said.

Ruth Sherwood was like somebody pulling herself back to life out of the grave. The girl was staring at her, frightened and uncomprehending, and I must have been too, I suppose, in just the same way.

“Go to your room, Elizabeth—at once, please,” she whispered. “Please go!”

Kurt Hofmann went to the table and picked up the telephone.

“Room clerk, please,” he said. “—This is Mr. Hofmann in Room 232 E. I have postponed my departure. I shall be keeping the room for a day or so longer. Thank you.”

The sound of Betty’s feet going slowly up the stairs came back like the toll of some far-off small bell. Ruth Sherwood closed her eyes, steadying herself against the back of the fireside chair.

Hofmann bent down and took a cigarette from the table in front of the fireplace.

“Perhaps Mrs. Latham will be good enough to call another time.”

He said it coolly, looking at me through the feather of smoke he sent upward slowly from his lips. The same warning I’d felt at the elevator flashed inside me like a red light going sharply off and on. I stopped abruptly from saying what it was on the tip of my tongue to say. “—I just came to tell you they found Lady Alicia dead, about an hour ago.” I didn’t say it. And the reason I didn’t was that Kurt Hofmann, waiting coolly there for me to go, had put his hand in his coat pocket and drawn out three letters. He glanced at them casually, turning them over in his hand, took a step forward and dropped them into the fire, watching them curl and leap into blue-tipped flame as he’d looked at that picture he’d dropped in the wastebasket. One of them was in a thin blue envelope, unstamped, and they were the letters from the drawer in Lady Alicia’s secretary.