The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (22 page)

“Skoda,” he said laconically. “Best silencer there is.”

Colonel Primrose turned to me. “You and Sylvia go in the other room.—You’ve called the police?”

Pete nodded. “Lamb’s on his way. Go on, Sylvia.”

He took her arm and led her to the door. “It won’t be long,” he said gently. “I know what’s up now. And I know how to prove it. You know too, don’t you?”

She nodded slowly. “It’s my fault poor Gordon’s dead. I never thought of him. It was just you I was thinking of.” They were oblivious to any of the rest of us just then. He put his arms around her, held her to him for a moment and kissed her.

“Just wait a little while.”

He closed the bedroom door on us. Sylvia stood there by it, her eyes closed, listening. It was maddening, being in there, hearing those footsteps, light and heavy, going back and forth. I recognized Captain Lamb’s voice, and then, to my surprise, Bliss Thatcher’s. As Sylvia heard it I couldn’t tell whether the blank unsurprised look on her face was real, or the old mask slipping back again. We both stood there by the door listening then. The coroner had come with Lamb, apparently, and had gone, and they’d taken Gordon Lacey’s body away. After that I heard Larry Villiers come up the steps and start for his apartment, and then come across the hall instead.

I could hear him say “Good God!” And then, “Hello, Delvalle. What are you doing here?”

Sylvia moistened her lips and brushed her hair back from her forehead. “It’s all my fault,” she whispered again.

They were all there still when one of Captain Lamb’s men came to tell us we could come in—Bliss Thatcher, Larry, Delvalle, Colonel Primrose and Captain Lamb and the quiet man who’d come with the Colonel. Pete was at the desk talking to Colonel Primrose, the others standing by the window. They turned abruptly as we came in, apparently not having known we were anywhere around. As Colonel Primrose moved away from the desk I saw Pete pick up a pencil and the scratch pad by the phone. He wrote rapidly for a minute, tore off the piece of paper and slipped it into his pocket, and moved back a little, leaving Colonel Primrose standing there by himself.

“I want to introduce Special Agent McTeague to you,” Colonel Primrose said. “He knows all of you already. He is here because espionage and alien activity come under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He has agreed that you have a legitimate interest in knowing what’s been going on, and he has given me permission to tell you.”

He looked around gravely.

“I needn’t say that all this is entirely off the record.”

I saw Larry’s cool sardonic glance at Pete, and the slight lift of his eyebrows.

“The so-called Kurt Hofmann’s name was Albert Voegler,” Colonel Primrose said. “He was substituted for the real Hofmann after the arrangements for Hofmann’s escape had been discovered. What his purposes here were must be plain to you. All we are here concerned with is that he arranged for the publication, and dictated the trend of the newsletter called ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ And as that is in the hands of the F. B. I. it concerns us only as it’s connected with the murder of Corliss Marshall and of Hofmann, as I’ll go on calling him.”

I could sense a sudden atmosphere of alarm in the room, as sharp and acrid as electricity. I couldn’t possibly say who had created it, but someone had… someone who just at that moment had realized that there was a purpose behind all this, who’d just then become aware of a slowly tightening net cutting off all escape. I glanced around at the faces in the room. They seemed to be thrown into some curious kind of high relief against the nondescript background of Pete Hamilton’s apartment. Senor Delvalle was the only person there who appeared completely at ease. The rest of them—even Bliss Thatcher—were tense, their nerves on edge.

“It has been plain from the beginning,” Colonel Primrose went on evenly, “that Marshall was killed for the simplest possible reason—that he said he was going to reveal the authorship of ‘Truth Not Fiction.’ It’s plain also that his information came from Gordon Lacey. Lacey had sold out— and he was killed here, of course, to keep him from telling whom he’d sold his and Hamilton’s shorthand system to. It was to get that information that McTeague and I came here this morning. Like Hamilton and Miss Peele, I got a whispered telephone call supposedly from Lacey. I have no doubt he was dead at the time. He was shot with the gun that killed Hofmann—Hofmann’s own gun.”

There was no sound in the room except his voice, going evenly and steadily on.

“Under our laws, ‘Truth Not Fiction’ was not treason. There were no legal steps that could be taken against it. All that could be done was to cut off the news sources of the author. Which brings up—in connection with the murder of Corliss Marshall—the matter of who has been writing it. The interesting thing about that is something that so far no one has said anything about. While the whole thing was done in Pete Hamilton’s style, the items that were directly traceable to his shorthand notes virtually never had any relation to the propagandist message in the rest of the letter.”

His eyes moved around the silent room, resting for an instant on each of the faces there.

“In other words, while ‘Truth Not Fiction’ was being written for propaganda purposes, it was also—and I know now, primarily—written to ruin Hamilton. It served both the purposes of the persons who were paying for it, and the person who wrote it.”

I saw Pete Hamilton quietly take out of his pocket that slip of paper he’d written on before Colonel Primrose began. He leaned over and handed it to Bliss Thatcher. Thatcher opened it, looked down at it for a moment and looked blankly back at Pete. He folded it again, reached across the table that separated him from Larry Villiers and Senor Delvalle, and handed it to Larry. I saw Larry stare for an instant, take it and unfold it. He’d been watching first Colonel Primrose, and then Sylvia.

“Four people could read the self-invented shorthand that Hamilton had written the notes for his book in,” Colonel Primrose was saying quietly. “The first three of them were Hamilton himself, and Gordon Lacey, and Sylvia Peele. The fourth…”

He came to a stop, his eyes resting steadily on some person there in the room, and I turned, my blood freezing, and sat there quite motionless, my heart hardly beating.

Larry Villiers had started slowly to his feet, staring down at that paper in his shaking hand, his face ashy white. He opened his mouth to speak, and opened it again, and then sank back into his chair and looked quickly around at us. And only then did he look across the room and see Colonel Primrose’s eyes resting steadily on him.

“The fourth person who can read that shorthand,” Colonel Primrose said, and I have never heard his urbane voice more steely, “—as he has just shown us—is Mr. Larry Villiers—”

I sat there, my own hands shaking as terribly as Larry’s, a cold dread gripping at my heart. And Larry looked across the room at Colonel Primrose, his eyes like the eyes of a trapped animal and his face a dreadful white. He tried again to speak, and then he rose slowly to his feet, swaying as he stood there, and flung the paper down on the floor.

“It’s a lie!” he screamed. “You’re framing me! You’re trying to—”

He stopped, staring down at the paper, and then at Colonel Primrose and at Pete Hamilton, his hands still shaking violently, his delicate handsome features contorted with an incredible terror and despair. He stood there for an instant, still swaying, and then lunged frantically across the room toward Colonel Primrose. Sergeant Phineas T. Buck took two giant steps, and I saw his great hands come down on Larry’s elbows. The F. B. I. man moved quickly. I closed my eyes, sick with horror, as Captain Lamb followed them, Sergeant Buck’s ice-bound visage unchanging as he carried a writhing screaming figure out of the room.

Sylvia’s face was as blank and bloodless as an ivory mask. She stared straight ahead of her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she whispered. “I… I never dreamed of it!”

Pete took a swift step around the sofa, took her in his arms and held her close. “You couldn’t help it. It was my fault, not yours. I should have known it.”

“Weren’t you both a little blind?” Colonel Primrose asked, very placidly. “Or perhaps all of us have been. I’ll admit it wasn’t until he began to be nervous, and phoned Mrs. Latham from your apartment yesterday, that it was clear to me.”

“But why?” Sylvia whispered. “Why did he do it?”

“He hated Pete,” Colonel Primrose said. “That’s all. Pete was everything he wanted to be. He hated the kind of stuff he had to write. He hated to be laughed at. He knew he could write, but no one would take him seriously. And not only in his profession. He was in love with you, and you didn’t take that seriously. You were in love with Pete. Pete had everything Villiers wanted. That was his only motive. His bank balance doesn’t show any profit. He didn’t do it for money. And when everybody thought Pete was writing that thing, he felt he’d succeeded. Pete was ruined. Consequently he was through with Hofmann, and he wiped Hofmann out. It was Hofmann, of course, who’d bought the secret of the shorthand from Lacey, on Villiers’ suggestion. I imagine it would have been a hideous shock to Hofmann to know that the man he thought he was using was really using him—for a purely personal and private revenge.”

He went across the room and picked up the slip of paper that Larry had flung down. I saw as he held it out in his hand that it was scrawled with half a dozen lines of curious stenographic pig-tracks. He nodded to Pete as he put it in his pocket.

“It was a good idea. And one thing, Sylvia—why did you go to Lady Alicia’s again, that afternoon?”

She brushed her hair back from her forehead, hesitating.

“I… I don’t really know,” she said unsteadily. “I’d got to thinking about that jack of diamonds. I… it seems silly…”

Colonel Primrose nodded soberly. “The false Kurt Hofmann, of course—odd as it seems. And when did you first suspect Villiers?”

“Just—all at once,” she said. “He’d used my typewriter when there didn’t seem any particular point in it. He’d done all the build-up for Mrs. Sherwood. He lived here, right across the hall from Pete. He knew all about my trying to get Gordon Lacey. I don’t know… it just came all at once when I thought about that voice whispering ‘Sylvia’ over the phone. I really knew we wouldn’t find Gordon alive. I knew it was either Pete or me—or both of us—he was trying to destroy.”

I came into the Randolph-Lee the next afternoon about half-past five and stopped at the newsstand for the evening papers. It was all rather dreadful, on the outside. Larry was still front-page news, and so were Lady Alicia and Corliss Marshall. “Kurt Hofmann” was curiously out of it—in the interest of public policy, I suppose. I turned to the inside and looked at the society page. Sylvia looked up at me, blank eyed, from the box at the right-hand top of “Peelings.” I glanced through it until I came to the end, and I read that with more interest than I’d read anything for a long time.

“This column has it for true, as they say, that Bliss Thatcher submitted his resignation as member of the Defense Commission yesterday, and that it was politely but ever so flatly returned to him. The Commissioner, they said, could marry the lady and take his wedding trip later—in June, probably, when his lovely new daughter, whose name is Elizabeth Anne Sherwood, is out of school. Elizabeth Anne has been visiting her mother, Mrs. Addison Sherwood, at the Randolph-Lee the last few days. We’re delighted with the Commission, because with Sam and Effie Wharton gone back to Berryville, Washington couldn’t afford to lose any one else just now. And with that cheerful note, dear readers, Peelings is signing off. Hereafter all the peeling we’ll ever do is potatoes for The Capitol Calling.”

I turned to the space where Pete’s column had been until the day before. There was a box in the lower right-hand corner. “The Capitol Calling,” I read. “The distinguished analysis of Washington news by Peter Hamilton will appear on this page as usual, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” I came out of the newsstand into the lobby and started over to the desk to get my mail. Coming up the palm-lined stairs from the lounge was Senor Delvalle. Coming along the corridor from the elevator was Colonel John Primrose. Behind him the regulation two paces was Sergeant Phineas T. Buck. Senor Delvalle and Colonel Primrose, both smiling, converged on me at about equal angles. Sergeant Buck converged too, but visibly congealing. His viscid fish-gray eyes set glacially in his granite dead pan were fixed on Senor Delvalle.

Senor Delvalle bowed and kissed my hand. I knew, without the slightest doubt, that at that moment Sergeant Buck would clear his throat gigantically. He did. Senor Delvalle turned to Colonel Primrose.

“I was under the impression, Colonel,” he said, with faint reproach, “that you were a little suspicious of me, for a while…”

Colonel Primrose shook his head, smiling.

“That was my Sergeant. Who furnished you, incidentally, with a water-tight alibi—as I suppose you know.”

Senor Delvalle smiled too. He turned to me.

“I was about to ask you to dine with me this evening, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “But under the circumstances…” He glanced around at the great granite figure near him. His shoulders lifted in an elegant Latin shrug.

“… Perhaps it might be safer…”

“Perhaps it might,” I said.

Colonel Primrose’s manner was his most urbane.

“I take it you’re dining with me, Mrs. Latham?”

“It… seems so,” I said.

Sergeant Buck turned and spat neatly, and with apparent satisfaction, into the gold palm tub at the top of the stairs.

FIN

Leslie Ford
(1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.