The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (19 page)

She just looked at me. So slowly that I wasn’t sure I wasn’t imagining it, the blood drained out of her face, and her eyes that had flared up so passionately went as blank as an empty sheet of paper.

“Grace,” she whispered. “Does he think… Oh, how awful, how horrible! Oh, he couldn’t think I—”

She closed her eyes.

“Oh, Grace, how he must hate me!”

Then she just stood there, the color seeping slowly back into her lips and cheeks. When she spoke next I didn’t think I could believe my ears.

“—I’m not sure I don’t hate him too,” she said softly.

I couldn’t say anything. In a moment she was just like she used to be, blank-eyed and expressionless, very young-looking, with only a deeper pallor than usual to show that she’d been different.

I got my voice. “Don’t be a fool, Sylvia,” I said sharply. “If Pete does think that, just think what he’s going through! It’s because he’s so much in love with you—”

She shook her head slowly.

“If he loved me, he’d come and ask me—he wouldn’t just take it for granted I’d… I’d betrayed him. I see it now. I thought last night the reason he didn’t come and didn’t call me was that he was just too upset. Oh, well. If that’s what he thinks of me, the sooner I know it the better.”

The phone on the table by her buzzed. She picked it up. I could see her body go taut. She didn’t speak for a moment, and I could hear the operator talking again. Then she said quietly, “Tell Mr. Hamilton I’m awfully sorry. I’m very busy just now. I don’t know when I’ll have time to see him.”

“Oh, Sylvia,” I cried, “—don’t! Please don’t! Don’t be such a stupid fool!”

She put the phone down, stood with one hand out for a moment, and then broke away and ran blindly across the room. Her bedroom door slammed. I heard her throw herself down on her bed, and a heartbreaking sob before she buried her face in the pillows. There was nothing after that.

I sat there unhappily. I was thinking about Bliss Thatcher and Colonel Primrose. Both of them refused to believe that Pete wrote ‘Truth Not Fiction’; and yet Pete could believe Sylvia did, and Sylvia could believe it—or something—about him. I suppose the truth is that if two people are in love with each other, they’re more instantly ready to doubt and mistrust each other than anybody else ever is.

Gradually, as I sat there, I became aware of the typewriter again. I’d got up and started over to look at it more closely when there was a rap on the door. My pulse quickened instantly. It was just the sort of thing I’d expect Pete to do. I ran to the door and opened it, and said “Oh.”

“Who did you expect it to be, my dear?”

The flicker in Colonel Primrose’s eyes was gone instantly. He was sober-faced and serious.

“Where is Sylvia?”

“I’ll call her,” I said. “Come in. She’s dressing, I think.”

I knocked on the bedroom door. “Sylvia—Colonel Primrose is here.”

I turned back to him to say she’d be out in a minute, and my heart sank. He was looking thoughtfully over at her typewriter. I thought he was going to it, but he didn’t. He went to the window, and came back and sat down.

“This affair’s getting rather interesting,” he remarked, a trifle grimly. “Lamb and I thought we’d wait till this morning to see Hofmann. The servant’s showing signs of recovery. Lamb wanted to be sure just what he was doing. When he didn’t answer the phone the manager let us in. There was a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on his door. He was sprawled on the floor between the beds, shot through the head. No gun in the room. The couple next door hadn’t heard a shot, and the heads of their beds are just through the wall. There was some fairly loud talking about ten-thirty, when they went to bed. They complained to the desk, and the desk called Hofmann. It was quieter after that and they went to sleep. Which, of course, means a silencer, unless they just don’t want to be bothered giving evidence.”

He looked up as Sylvia came in. She wasn’t quite herself, but I don’t think even Colonel Primrose could have guessed the storm she’d been through.

“Good morning, Colonel,” she said coolly. “I hope you don’t think I murdered Hofmann too.”

Colonel Primrose frowned. I thought he was a little irritated, which he rarely is. He spoke placidly enough.

“Hofmann came to see you last night,” he said. “A few minutes after ten. The elevator boy saw him knock at your door. He stayed about ten minutes. What did he want?”

“You’d be surprised, Colonel,” Sylvia said. Her voice was direct and matter-of-fact. “He wanted me to tell Mr. Hamilton that if worst came to worst he thought he had a friend who’d give him a job. I told him I understood Mr. Hamilton had a job, and if he didn’t he could probably get one for himself.”

“What kind of a job?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he could do most anything. He couldn’t drive a taxi, because he hasn’t ever learned about red lights.”

“I’m referring to the job Hofmann’s friend had, Sylvia,” Colonel Primrose said politely.

“He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask him.”

She got up at a tap on the door. “Excuse me.” She went across the room.

“Oh—good morning, Senor Delvalle. Do come in. Colonel Primrose is just telling us about poor Mr. Hofmann.”

Colonel Primrose got up and nodded politely. Senor Delvalle stopped just inside the room, or did stop until he saw me. Then he came over, bowed and kissed my hand.

“Good morning, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “You have not told me whether I’m to have the pleasure of taking you to lunch.”

“She can’t,” Colonel Primrose said calmly. “She’s in protective custody, as they call it.”

I looked at him blankly. It was the first I’d ever heard of it.

“You see, Delvalle, I can’t let anything happen to her. Under the circumstances I’ll be happier if she’s where I can keep an eye on her.”

“I can understand that perfectly, Colonel,” Senor Delvalle said. Colonel Primrose himself was not more urbane. “Except that it was my own happiness I was considering. However, I am sure the Army takes precedence.”

He bowed to me again, a deprecating smile on his dark mobile face. He turned to Sylvia.

“What I came up for, Miss Peele, is to tell you that your friend Lacey has been found. In fact, he has been found, and poured—is that what you say?—into a plane. His property has been labelled and arrangements made to explain to him, when he can understand. He will be put off here in Washington, and he arrives here at half-past six tomorrow morning. I shall meet him for you if you like. I can recognize him, I take it?”

“Quite easily,” Sylvia said. “Thank you so much! It’s very kind of you.”

“It has been a pleasure, Miss Peele. Goodbye.”

She closed the door and stood holding it for a moment, her eyes closed. I thought she was going to come out of the mummy case she’d closed herself up in, but she didn’t. She came coolly back and stood as if the sooner both the Colonel and I left the better she’d like it—politely, of course, but unmistakably.

Colonel Primrose sat down.

“Will you tell me why you’re so anxious to get hold of Gordon Lacey, Sylvia?” he asked.

“I’m not anxious at all. I thought it might clear up all this nonsense about ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ This holocaust just can’t have any connection with it. Lady Alicia and her six of clubs, for instance. I think you’re being frightfully farfetched.”

Colonel Primrose nodded, to my surprise.

“I would have been if I’d ever thought of that. I happen to know who killed Lady Alicia. And you’re quite right about that part of it. It had nothing to do with ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ ”

“Who did it?” she asked evenly.

“Kurt Hofmann—in a sense,” Colonel Primrose said.

“How do you know he did it? And what do you mean by—”

“I know because the servant he thought he’d killed too is a very dour and tough Scotswoman. She’s conscious this morning, and very lucid. She says he came after you and the Whartons had come and gone. She tried to keep him from seeing her mistress.”

“Why?” I demanded.

He shrugged.

“She believes in the cards. Her story is that the minute she saw him she knew there was something wrong about him. Of course—she usual—she’s reading her present knowledge back into those things.”

“What
do
you mean?” I asked.

“It’s quite simple. Lady Alicia was killed because she knew—or had known—Kurt Hofmann. She was the only person here who did. You remember Hofmann rocketed into fame on one book. Up to then, nobody here had ever heard of him. Nobody but Lady Alicia.”

“But just that—”

“ ‘Just that,’ ” Colonel Primrose said, “was what made killing her imperative. That and the fact that she had three letters in his handwriting. The point being, you see, that the quite dead man downstairs is not Kurt Hofmann.”

I started to speak, and couldn’t. Sylvia said, “Then who is he?”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” Colonel Primrose said, very placidly. “The important thing is that he was passing himself off as a distinguished anti-Totalitarian exile.”

She nodded slowly. “No wonder, then. You remember, Grace—he said that after he got her letter the little man in Chartres was arrested, or dead, and then they’d got on to the underground railway and no more prisoners escaped?”

I nodded, looking back on all sorts of things. His oddness about the old love affair, which of course he didn’t know anything about; his demanding of Ruth Sherwood over the phone, “Why did you have that woman there?”—I stopped abruptly, wondering what this meant in terms of Ruth Sherwood. The whole thing seethed dismally around inside me as Colonel Primrose went on.

“That’s the F. B. I.’s job. Ours is to find out who killed the fellow calling himself Hofmann—and who killed Corliss Marshall. That’s where ‘Truth Not Fiction’ comes in, Sylvia.”

“—I don’t believe it. I can’t.”

I couldn’t help wondering, with a little chill, why on earth she’d come out of her lacquered shell to say that unless she really knew.

He looked at her inquiringly. “If you have any information, you’d be doing yourself and Pete a great service by telling me about it.”

“I haven’t. I haven’t any at all.—You’re absolutely sure about Hofmann?”

Colonel Primrose took a small box out of his pocket.

“Hofmann’s distinguishing characteristic was that sabre cut,” he said. “I have it here.”

He opened the box. It contained a thin ridge of plastic material about three inches long, clamped to a piece of white cardboard.

“This is one of three he had behind the lining of his dressing case. The one on his face has peeled. That’s the first thing I noticed about him. Lady Alicia called him on the phone when I was in his room yesterday morning. His face turned color as if he was violently angry, but the color of the scar didn’t change.”

Kurt Hofmann’s face in the mirrored table outside Ruth Sherwood’s door flashed into my mind. I’d seen the same thing, without knowing what I’d seen.

Colonel Primrose got up. I picked up my letter from the table and put it in my pocket.

“I meant what I said about your protective custody, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “It’s not—as Delvalle assumed—just because I like to have you around. I’d rather not, today, but Buck’s mutinied.”

“All right,” I said. As we went out I turned back to Sylvia.

“If I see Pete can I tell him you’re not so busy now?” I asked.

She turned unhappily away without answering and closed the door.

“Pete?” Colonel Primrose asked as we started along the hall. I nodded.

“I thought it was. He thinks she writes it, doesn’t he?”

“Did he tell you?”

“It was pretty obvious last night, wasn’t it? If you’ll give me that letter, I’ll mail it for you.”

We’d come to the mail chute by the elevator.

“Don’t be recalcitrant, my dear. I know all about Sylvia’s typewriter. I spotted it the night she handed me her stuff about Corliss to read. And don’t look so upset.”

“You make me tired,” I said. I gave him the letter. He dropped it in the chute without even looking at it “And I’m going back to my apartment and stay there.”

He shook his head.

“If I could trust you, that’s exactly what I’d like. But with a two-fold murderer around here, and the unfortunate way you’ve meddled in everybody’s affairs, plus the well-known fact that I can’t trust you, I’m going to hang on to you. Or you can go down to the police station.”

“You’re not getting ready to assume the dictatorship, Colonel?” I inquired sweetly.

“I’ll tell you about that later, my dear.—Third floor, please.—We’re going to see the Whartons new.”

I didn’t ask what for and he didn’t say.

When we got down there, the Congressman opened the door. He was in shirt sleeves and suspenders, and his splendid white mane was a rumpled mess that hadn’t been combed that morning. He had the fey look in his eye that a horse gets just when the idea of tossing you into the ditch occurs to him. He glared at me, and glared still more at the Colonel, and I thought he wasn’t going to let either of us in until he subsided suddenly.

“Come in,” he said. “I’ll get my coat.”

We came in. As he went into the bedroom I could hear Effie crying. He certainly didn’t bother to try and stop her, because he was out again in an instant and had the door shut. And as he came out I stared at him, open-mouthed and speechless.

He had his coat on, and his hat, and he was carrying his overcoat. And it flashed into my appalled mind that he thought Colonel Primrose had come to arrest him.

I managed to close my mouth.

“Take it easy, Sam,” Colonel Primrose said placidly. “What’s the trouble?”

Sam Wharton glared at him again, and at me. Then he dropped his overcoat on the sofa and his hat on top of it. He was so mad that he couldn’t really talk. He paced up and down the sitting room half a dozen times, and at last pulled out a chair and sat down. I hadn’t realized what a turbulent sort of person he was, he’d always been so calm and Olympian when I’d seen him. And he quieted down eventually now, Colonel Primrose waiting with his usual urbanity.

“Well, let’s have it, Sam,” he said patiently, after a while. “—You went down to Kurt Hofmann’s last night, and as far as I can make out you tore the place up a little. What about?”