The Philadelphia Murder Story (13 page)

“Police?” he said at last. He was almost whispering. “They wouldn’t listen—they wouldn’t believe me. My—my own hands aren’t clean.” He looked down at his hands. Then he brought his head up and half rose from the bench.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll tell. I’ll pull down the palace he’s built—his—his deceit.”

He stopped, sinking back down on the bench, the weak flame dying as quickly as it had flared up. His face crumpled, tears ran down his cheeks.

It seemed shameful just to leave him there, hysterical and in agony, but I didn’t know how to do anything else.

Monk Whitney looked at me curiously as I came up to him. “What gives?” he demanded. “Who’s your small friend?”

I couldn’t speak for an instant. “That’s Mr. Toplady,” I said then. “I’m—”

He cut me off abruptly, instantly alert. “The man who wrote Kane the letter?”

I nodded. He took a couple of quick steps past me and stopped.

“Where is he?”

I looked back. The bench he’d been sitting on was empty. There was no trace of him anywhere.

“Who is Mr. Toplady, Monk?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He’d thrown away his cigarette, and he stood with his brows drawn together, fumbling absently in his pocket for another. He lighted one deliberately, as if it were a process demanding his entire attention.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go eat.”

We didn’t stop at the Barclay or the Warwick. “We’d better steer clear of the haunts of the elite,” he said.

The place we went to was down a narrow side street and up a flight of rickety steps. It obviously had been a speakeasy once, but it was quiet and empty, and the scalopini and green peppers fried in olive oil were very good, and it was pleasantly nostalgic with the iron-grille peephole in the door and the straw-covered bottles on the plate rail that had once held somebody’s best china plates.

“It’s none of my business,” I said, when the waiter had gone back through the bamboo-and-bead curtain.

“It’s certainly not,” Monk said. “But what?”

“It’s just that you aren’t making sense,” I said. “You can’t act the way you did with Captain Malone and expect to get away with it.”

He didn’t raise his eyes from his plate. “I don’t give a damn about Malone.”

“Now you’re being childish,” I said. “Why don’t you tell him where you were this afternoon?”

“Because I can’t, lady,” he said evenly. He looked across at me. “It’s you that’s not making sense. What would you do if you—well, if you were in the spot I’m in? You wouldn’t expect me to shed any tears for Kane, would you? And if he hadn’t got bumped off this afternoon, he’d be with the district attorney right now, and in the morning where’d my father be?”

“Do you know that?” I asked.

“That’s what I’ve been doing today,” he said quietly. “And I can’t say to Malone, ‘I wasn’t at the Curtis Building, sir; I was out in the Whitemarsh Valley, trying to find out whether it’s true my father killed his best friend, so count me out.’ Can I?”

“Why, no,” I said. “I guess you couldn’t.”

“Well, that’s what I was doing. I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know what difference it can make now. Except that—Good God, I’ve got to know! Here that poor guy—that’s what’s so hard to take.” He stopped for a while, thinking intently, and then looked over at me. “You kill somebody,” he said abruptly. “Maybe you lost your head, maybe something happened, maybe it was an accident. Okay, you try to get away with it. Nobody wants to hang. If it can be made to look like a suicide, fine. But what I can’t get away with is my father—Judge Nathaniel Whitney—being a damned hypocrite.” He looked down at his plate again.

“I haven’t any idea at all what you’re talking about,” I said.

He nodded silently. “It goes back a long way, Grace,” he said, after a moment. “So long you get to thinking everybody knows. Trav’s father and Laurel’s father and mine were all born around the square there, and they all grew up and went to college together. Then Laurel’s father went to medical school, and Trav’s and mine did law. They were tops, all of them. They were respected, and honored, and honest—or that’s what everybody thought. Doctor Frazier, Laurel’s father, he was a wonderful guy. They don’t come any better. He worked himself to death. When he died, he didn’t leave a terrific lot, but enough for Laurel and her mother, with what his father had left him. They were Quakers and pretty well heeled. You know doctors don’t know much about finance, and the better they are the less they know. Anyway, he left it with Travis’s father, Douglas Elliot, as discretionary trustee. He was a lawyer, and he was supposed to be the soul of honor. You know. Without any of my father’s dramatic flair.”

He seemed to be coming to the hard part, the way he hesitated before he went on.

“Everything was fine, then, or seemed to be. Trav went to law school and came back and went in his father’s office and got engaged to Elsie. At least there was a sort of family understanding—childhood sweethearts, that sort of thing. That was September, 1936. Laurel was sixteen and all set for—you know, the usual brilliant social career. Everything was beautiful, and then just overnight everything went to hell.”

He’d folded his raincoat up on the seat beside him in the booth. He picked it up now and brought a small packet of papers out of the side pocket. They were tied together with a torn strip of white cloth.

“This is what happened to my handkerchief,” he said. “I tore it up to tie these together. I couldn’t risk losing any of them.” He loosened the knot with his fork. “We’ve got a place out in the Whitemarsh Valley. My father keeps his old papers in a stone bam he fixed up into a library. It’s a storeroom now; he doesn’t go out there much anymore. He had it all together—the history of the Affaire Elliot.” He picked one of the clippings out and handed it across to me.

Noted Philadelphia Lawyer Ends Life,
the headlines said, above a picture of a handsome, black-haired, strong faced man in his late fifties, I’d imagine.

Legal circles were shocked today to learn that Douglas Elliot, one of the leading figures in the city’s civic, social and juristic affairs, met death by his own hand in the library of his home in Delancey Place shortly before midnight last night. His body was found by his lifelong friend and associate, Judge Nathaniel Whitney. Judge Whitney, following a practice of many years’ standing, had dropped in to see Mr. Elliot on his way to his home in Rittenhouse Square. A note found beside the body has not been made public. One of the most beloved and highly respected members of the bar, it is believed that the long illness and death of his wife last year must have preyed on Mr. Elliot’s mind. His friends could give no other reason, as it is not believed that a heart condition, though serious, was sufficient to explain his action.

Nearly a column of Douglas Elliot’s brilliant and active career followed: “He is survived by one son, Travis Elliot, at present starting his own career in his father’s office in Chestnut Street.”

I put it down and looked at Monk. He was silent for a moment, his face somber and his jaw tight. Then he said: “There wasn’t a bean of Laurel’s money left.”

I looked at him in shocked silence.

“He’d used it all, every cent of it, speculating. You’d think he’d have learned in 1929. They said he was under such heavy expense for his wife’s illness-I don’t know. They hushed it up as well as they could. That’s where Travis came in.” He looked down for an instant at the packet of clippings and letters. “He wasn’t legally responsible. His father had the right, under the terms of the trusteeship, to use the money any way he thought best—and nobody could prove he didn’t think what he was doing was the best. I never saw the letter—what was taken as the suicide note—but I understood it said he hoped Travis would do anything he could for Laurel and her mother. What I mean is, he didn’t legally have to.”

“And did he?” I asked.

“Did he? He turned over his father’s insurance. It was only about twenty-five thousand. He sold everything they had except the Delancey Place house. He’d have sold that, but nobody lived in town then. It’s only since the war and gas rationing that anybody’d be caught dead staying in. Everybody lived out on the Main Line or Chestnut Hill or in the Whitemarsh Valley, except the already dead and buried. The old business of ‘Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine’ was ancient history. He simply cleaned himself out and turned the money over to Laurel’s mother.”

It explained a lot, of course, I was thinking.

“And that’s why she’s supposed to be grateful to him?”

He looked at me, not understanding. “A lot of people wouldn’t have done it. And that’s not all he did. Every cent he made he turned over to them. His father didn’t have much when it was turned into cash, and Trav wasn’t making much, but he worked like a dog and lived on bread and cheese, practically. And never a peep out of him. That’s what makes it so—”

He stopped again, trying to cover up how hard hit he was by all of it.

“You see,” he said, “in Philadelphia, people still have the quaint idea that if you misuse money that’s entrusted to you, you’re no better than a common thief. If your father did it, you’re the son of a common thief. If your father does it and commits suicide, it doesn’t make it any better, it makes it a hell of a lot worse. Trav had damned tough going. Elsie threw him over, crack out of the box, and married Soapy Sam, or Up From Scrapple to Caviar, and all the mothers snatched their beautiful daughters out of his path—and had they been pushing them into it! It wasn’t easy, Grace. It was damned hard.”

“He seems to be all right now,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I’m coming to, slowly. That’s what I can’t stand about my father in all this. Maybe he went over there that night, knowing his old pal had cleaned out the widow and orphan of his other old pal.”

He stopped, staring down at his plate, recreating in his mind, I supposed, the scene that night eight years ago in the Elliot library when his father was passing final judgment, perhaps, on the man who was his friend.

“I don’t know, Grace. That’s all right, I guess. I’m not saying maybe he didn’t have provocation enough. But after you kill a guy, whether he had it coming or not, you don’t then take his son in and let him get the idea you’re his great and noble benefactor.”

There was such bitterness in his voice that it was hard to believe it was his own father he was talking about, after the way he’d spoken the night before—before he’d heard Abigail Whitney and knew his father had killed Elliot.

“You see, Trav was crazy about his father,” he went on slowly. “He just took it on the chin and shut up. The only thing he ever said was he couldn’t understand his father taking that kind of out. I mean, he tried like the devil to find some excuse to explain it to himself. I know he went to his father’s doctor. That was the tough part of it. If it was cancer or heart, then he could save something out of it—a decent memory. But there wasn’t.” He gave me a twisted kind of grin. “What I’m getting at, Grace, is my father and old Abigail. Everybody thought they were wonderful, the way they stood by. I guess one of the things that burn me up now is that one of the memories I had of my father is seeing him after the funeral. He brought Trav back to stay at our house. I can see him standing in the library with his arm around Trav’s shoulder, giving him a pep talk about being captain of his soul and not letting another man’s mistake warp his own life. He was wonderful—like one of the old Romans. Trav wanted to pay up and get out—go to New York or someplace where everybody didn’t know him. My father wouldn’t let him. He’d help him build up his practice, and so on.”

The waiter took away our plates, looking pointedly at the clock.

“He did that, and he carried Trav’s torch all over the place. He got everybody on his side. He saw that everybody knew Trav was paying up and knew Laurel and her mother were getting everything the guy could scrape together. So everybody pitched in, and Trav got all the breaks he deserved, and it’s been swell.”

“Then what are you—”

“What I’m objecting to is Trav thinking my father was doing it for his sake, for him, because he loved his father, instead of doing it to—to ease over a guilty conscience. That’s what I’m objecting to. Trav thinks my father is the Number One guy of the universe. He’s worked like a slave helping him, doing the dirty work on the books my father writes. He goes to see old Abigail all the time, and she could give him the money to replace what his father took without noticing it as much as if I gave a beggar a dime. Both of them, they’ve used him, used him all the time; and they knew all the time that the thing that was eating him was the fact that his father was a suicide, taking a run-out powder instead of facing the music. They’ve built him up, and what for? Just to cover the fact that my father, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, is a murderer. And Abigail—that old whited sepulcher. Pretending she’s bedridden—”

He took another of the clippings out of the packet and pushed it across to me.

Accident at Funeral of Prominent Suicide,
it said. It was from one of the sensational tabloids. There was a picture of Abigail Whitney in a Merry Widow hat dripping with ostrich plumes that must have been in the paper’s morgue for years.

Famous Beauty’s Accident Recalls Gossip Linking Her With Dead Lawyer
, it went on.

Many of Philadelphia’s socially elite are recalling that Abigail Whitney’s elopement with her first husband, a millionaire cotton broker, was widely believed to be the result of a broken heart when Douglas Elliot married another. Her spectacular career was given a setback yesterday when she slipped getting into her limousine and sustained a broken hip. The coolness that has existed throughout each of her successive marriages between Abigail Whitney and her brother, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, is rumored to have resulted from his interference in the match that would have made her the bride of a struggling young lawyer.

“Is that true?” I asked. “I mean, about Abigail and Travis’ father?”

Monk Whitney nodded. “The Whitneys, my dear madam, are a practical people. It’s just as simple to fall in love with somebody with money as with somebody without money. Abigail set out to embarrass them with a
reductio ad absurdum.
And she never forgot and never forgave. She also hates Elsie for having thrown Trav over. Though actually I don’t think Elsie was really in love with him before he was cleaned out.”