The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (21 page)

“It must have been when I was out of the room, or so desperately worried about Betty that I wasn’t listening.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sherwood,” Colonel Primrose said. We started out. Half way to the door he stopped. “There’s one other thing you haven’t told me.—Who writes ‘Truth Not Fiction’?”

She looked at him blankly. “It’s… Mr. Hamilton, isn’t it?”

“Did Hofmann tell you that?”

“No. Not exactly. He said—”

She stopped, trying to think.

“He said I needn’t worry about it not being true and accurate, and then he said Pete Hamilton was a first-rate newspaperman.”

Colonel Primrose nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He went on.

I shook hands with Ruth.

“Goodbye, Grace.” She turned to Bliss Thatcher. She didn’t hold her hand out. “I’m sorry. I hope you’ll try to forgive me. Goodbye.”

She went back to the sofa. Betty was sitting there, staring pale-faced into the fire. She looked up as her mother sat down by her.

“If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have done it, would you?” she whispered.

The suet butler closed the door behind us and we started down the hall. None of us spoke. Bliss Thatcher moved automatically, as if he was too intent on something to be conscious of anything else.

Half way down to the elevator he stopped. We stopped too, looking at him.

“I’m going back,” he said steadily. “She needs somebody right now. I don’t care what she’s done. Any one of us would have done the same.”

He faced about and went down the corridor to Ruth Sherwood’s door. Colonel Primrose stood there looking after him.

“Well, he’s old enough to know his own mind—if anybody is,” he said.

He ordered lunch sent up to my apartment. While we were waiting for it Colonel Primrose paced up and down my sitting room until I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer. He did sit down to lunch, but he was still so preoccupied that we ate in Trappist silence. Finally I couldn’t stand that any longer.

“Look, Colonel Primrose,” I demanded. “Are you trying to find out who murdered Corliss, and Kurt Hofmann, or is it just this ‘Truth Not Fiction’ business?”

He looked puzzled for a moment.

“I thought I told you,” he said then, blandly. “They’re one and the same.”

“And was Hofmann killed because he knew who murdered Corliss, or because he knew about the newsletter?”

“Both,” he said.

“Then—what about this Gordon Lacey? I should think all you’d have to do is find him. That’s what Sylvia’s doing.”

He looked at me silently for a moment.

“I know she is,” he said at last. “In fact several people seem very much interested in this chap Lacey all of a sudden. Including myself. Sylvia and Delvalle chiefly.”

“Are you implying…” I began.

“I’m not implying anything, my dear. I’m sticking to the few things we’ve got that can legitimately be called Facts. Corliss’s murder, for instance. And Hofmann’s. It’s also a fact that Corliss was in South America. In fact he was there because I persuaded him to go. I did it for a rather curious reason, all things considered.”

“What was it?” I demanded.

He gave me a rather twisted smile.

“I thought he was writing ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ One of the foreign correspondents here was talking about it before it began to be taken seriously. He said, ‘The style is the style of Hamilton, but the ideas are the ideas of Marshall.’ I had a sneaking notion that Corliss might be taking this method of settling an old score with Pete. I didn’t know about Pete’s shorthand and his notes for his book. Those are facts too, Mrs. Latham.”

The phone on the table buzzed. He started to pick it up, and stopped. “It’s probably your friend Delvalle,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to answer it yourself.”

Then, as I started to take it, he changed his mind and put out his own hand. “Hello,” he said.

He listened an instant and straightened, abruptly wary. “Hello.”

There was no answer at the other end. He pressed down the bar and released it. “—Can you tell me where the call you just put through here originated? Thank you—ring her apartment for me, please.”

I heard the phone ringing, unanswered.

“Maybe the call was for me, private-like,” I remarked. “Maybe they didn’t want to talk to you.”

He didn’t seem to think it was amusing. He waited intently for a moment, then got up and went over to the window. I watched him looking across the roof of the lounge and terraces up at the lighted windows of Sylvia’s apartment.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little silly?” I asked.

“Very possibly, my dear,” he said equably. “This happens to be one of those times when I’d rather be silly than sorry. Just offhand I don’t know why anybody who wants to talk to you shouldn’t want to when I answer the phone.”

I suppose it was because I’d been thinking so intensely about it that I woke up a little before six-thirty next morning. I could either hear the great sleeper plane come zooming in or I imagined I did, and in any case it must have been there. In a minute or two it would land. I tried to imagine what would happen then. I hadn’t any doubt at all that Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck would be there at the gate waiting, and maybe Captain Lamb too, and certainly Sylvia. I could almost see Gordon Lacey, his frog-face still blurred with sleep, barging down the runway, shivering with cold after the tropics, wondering what it was all about. I tried sleepily to picture the rest of it, and finally gave that up and also trying to go back to sleep, and got up and ordered my breakfast.

It must have been about ten minutes past seven that I heard a knock on the door. It was Sylvia, terribly distressed and hopeless.

“What is it, Sylvia?” I asked. “What happened?”

“He didn’t come,” she said dully. “He wasn’t on the plane. I can’t imagine what happened. Delvalle said he was on it at Atlanta—he phoned me at six o’clock.”

I stared at her uncomprehendingly. “Was Colonel—”

She nodded. “He was down there. I couldn’t ask anybody anything, with him around. That’s why—”

The phone buzzed. I picked it up. It was Colonel Primrose.

“Is Sylvia with you, Mrs. Latham?” he asked curtly.

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell her to stay there. I’m coming up at once.”

When I let him in he went past me into the sitting room without a word. His eyes were snapping and he was tight-lipped and angry. I don’t remember ever seeing him so far from his usual suave placidity.

“—Where is Gordon Lacey, Sylvia?” he said shortly.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Colonel Primrose.”

For a moment he didn’t speak. “Look here, Sylvia,” he said then. “I’ve kept Lamb from arresting you for three days. He’s in your apartment now, waiting for you to come.”

She got slowly to her feet, steadying herself against the table.

“Let me tell you a few things,” he went on curtly. “It happens I’m pretty sure you didn’t kill Marshall. For one thing, the sole of your shoe and the hem of your skirt show you stepped out onto the terrace long enough after he’d fallen so that a pool of blood had gathered. But you’ve obviously been trying to shield Pete Hamilton. You’ve had reasons of your own. You had them that night when you wiped all the fingerprints off Mrs. Sherwood’s glass table. You had them yesterday when you radioed Gordon Lacey to leave the plane in Richmond.”

Her lips were suddenly white around the scarlet outline of her lipstick.

“That’s not true!” she cried. “I didn’t! Why should I stop him when I’ve been trying so desperately to get him here?” Colonel Primrose pulled a crumpled paper out of his pocket and handed it to her.

“That was sent at three-thirty this morning. It was phoned in and delivered on the plane, and found under Lacey’s seat this morning—after he’d got off at Richmond.”

I looked at the radiogram in her hand. “Washington Airport dangerous,” it said. “Alight Richmond. Meet ten-thirty as arranged.—Sylvia Peele.”

She looked from it to Colonel Primrose.

“I… don’t understand. I didn’t send this.”

He was looking at her steadily. “Who else knew what plane he was to be on, Sylvia?”

“Nobody. We lost track of him, until he wired Delvalle from Atlanta just after the plane landed there.”

“Did Pete know he was coming?”

She nodded. “But not on this plane. I didn’t want him to know at all, but Delvalle thought he ought to.”

“But neither of them met the plane?”

“No. I tried to get Delvalle. When I couldn’t I called Larry. He went down with me.”

Colonel Primrose was still watching her intently. “Sylvia,” he said, more gently than he’d said anything up to then. “I’d like to tell you that I’m sure neither you nor Pete killed Corliss Marshall, or the fellow who called himself Kurt Hofmann. Furthermore, I don’t believe either of you writes ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ That’s why I want to find Lacey, Sylvia. If you know where he is, you’ve got to tell me.”

She shook her head slowly.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. I wish I did, Colonel Primrose.”

After he’d gone she turned and came slowly over to the sofa, and picked up her fur beret. Her face was so lifeless that I was badly worried about her.

“What is the matter, darling?” I said.

She looked at me hopelessly.

“When Lacey didn’t get off that plane I… well, I just thought I might as well die,” she said. “Even Larry felt so sorry for me that he said he’d marry me—believe it or not— and we could go someplace else if it would do any good. You can imagine the mess I was.”

I was a little staggered. “Are you going to do it?”

She managed a smile.

“Don’t be silly. Larry was just being kind, for the one time in his life. But I am going away. It’s foolish, of course. There’s no use ever running away from things. But Delvalle’s giving me a job. He’s wonderful—I don’t know what I’d have done without him. It’s the job Pete turned down. He thought it would look as if he was running away because he couldn’t take it. I’m willing to admit I can’t take it—not any longer, I can’t.”

I don’t know why, but I had the same vague feeling that Colonel Primrose must have had when he kept looking at her so intently.

“Look,” I said. “Do you know who killed Corliss Marshall?”

She shook her head.

“You did think it was Pete, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “I heard him talking to Corliss out on the terrace. He came in and stood there by the window talking to me. I went out right after that and Corliss was lying under the tubs. I was so appalled that it didn’t occur to me that someone must have gone out the other window. I didn’t know the balcony runs all around the dining room.”

“If Pete didn’t do it, Sylvia, somebody did,” I said.

“I haven’t thought about that. It’s something I just don’t want to think about.”

She was just putting on her hat when the telephone buzzed sharply. She looked up, her face brightening for an instant until she remembered.

“Hello,” she said.

Her body went instantly as taut as an electric wire.

“Oh yes!” she gasped. “Where?—All right.”

She put the phone down quickly. “It’s Gordon Lacey, Grace. He’s here, at Pete’s! Get your coat—hurry!”

I suppose if I get to be ninety and someone mentions Sylvia Peele, I’ll see her as she was there in the corner of the taxi on our way down to Pete’s apartment on 16th Street that morning, looking forward desperately to each traffic signal, closing her eyes, her hands in tight knots as we missed it and waited interminably for it to change. We didn’t make a single green light, and she didn’t say a word.

We got out in front of the brownstone house and hurried up the steps. The girl at the desk looked at us curiously.

“Mr. Hamilton’s just come in,” she said.

Sylvia glanced at me and ran up the stairs. I followed. The door of Pete’s apartment was open. She ran across the outer hall and inside. I saw her stop abruptly, just as I became aware of a familiar acrid odor.

“Pete!” Her voice rose in sudden sharp alarm. She ran on to the living room and stopped again. “Pete!—Oh, Pete!”

The last was just a whisper, but there was death in it… just as there was in the pungent smell of cordite lying heavily in the cold motionless atmosphere. I ran breathlessly down the hall and looked past her.

The body of a man lay crumpled on the sofa in front of Pete’s desk, his lifeless face staring toward us. And one look at that face was enough. It was oddly foreshortened. The hair parted in the middle flattened it even more. The eyes bulged, the mouth stretched clear across the face. Even in death Gordon Lacey looked very much like a frog. And he was quite dead. A thin trickle of blood flowed from a small wound in his temple.

On the floor beside the sofa was a small evil-looking gun. I stared from Gordon Lacey’s body to it, and then at Pete Hamilton, moving around the sofa toward the telephone. He picked it up.

“Get me the police, please,” he said calmly.

It seems like a nightmare now. I remember standing there in the doorway watching them. Sylvia went slowly into the room and stopped, staring down at Gordon Lacey. Then she went over to Pete. The two of them stood looking silently at each other.

Then she shook her head.

“You didn’t do it, Pete,” she said. “I know you didn’t. He phoned you, didn’t he—just a few minutes ago.”

As he nodded gravely she went on like somebody in a trance.

“He called me too. Only I know now it wasn’t Lacey who called. He called me ‘Sylvia,’ and Lacey never did. And whoever called wanted us to find him here dead… wanted one of us to find the other here with him, so we’d think—”

She broke off abruptly, and I turned, at the sound of hurrying feet in the outer hall. It was Colonel Primrose. He stopped for a moment, seeing me there, and came quickly on, Sergeant Buck and another man behind him. I moved aside for him to go past, but he came to a halt in the doorway by me.

“Good God,” he said.

“He was here when I came in, less than five minutes ago,” Pete said quietly.

Colonel Primrose went on in. He touched the limp hand hanging beside the sofa, and looked up at Pete and Sylvia standing there.

“The last man who
knows
who writes ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ ” he said. He turned to the other man who’d come with him and nodded down at the gun on the floor. The man picked it up carefully.