The Philadelphia Murder Story (17 page)

“Where did Miss Frazier get this, Mrs. Latham?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Why don’t you ask her?”

“I have, and she refuses to say.”

He smoothed out what was left of the handkerchief. The cloth was scorched yellow, but the corner where the monogram was embroidered was intact. I’ve never been much good at cryptograms, and most fancy monograms defeat me with all their curling decoration, but I could see the
W
without any trouble, and the
M,
and a
T
that looked upside down to me. The bloodstains had turned dark brown.

It was a little awkward, actually, with Travis sitting perched on the table looking at it too. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the gal he was going to marry practically burning herself alive for another man.

“If you good people would be frank about these things, you’d save me time and yourselves trouble,” Captain Malone said. “Did you ever hear Kane mention any trouble he was having, Mrs. Latham? With any of the editors of the
Post,
for instance?”

I shook my head. “No. But of course he was a prima donna.”

He caught me up quickly on that. “Kane was a prima donna?”

“Top-flight, I’d say.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Latham. I’ll have to ask you to stay around town. There’ll probably be a point or two you’ll be able to help me on.”

Travis got down from his perch. “I’ll be glad to produce her for you any time.”

Captain Malone gave him a sour smile. “Thanks.”

“And by the way, Monk Whitney’s a client of mine, too, Malone,” Travis said. “I hope you don’t mind if I stick around.”

Malone looked at him patiently. “Okay. Stick around.” He turned to me. “You can go out this way, Mrs. Latham.”

I saw then why they wanted the key to the stand-up room. It was a way into the corridor that kept people from seeing each other again after one and before the others had seen Captain Malone.

I heard, “Mr. Martin, please,” as I went out, Travis following me. I couldn’t hear what Sam said.

“Don’t think he’s through with you,” Travis said to me under his breath. “He hasn’t begun.” Then he said in his normal tone, “Can you get home all right? I’ll take you downstairs. Where’s Man Mountain Buck got to?”

Downstairs the desk sergeant leaned out of his cage at the left of the door and said, “You the lady knows Mr. Buck?”

I nodded. It’s one of those anomalies I’m always conscious of. I don’t really know Sergeant Buck at all.

“He said to tell you he was taking a young lady home. Red-haired girl. Pretty.”

Travis Elliot and I looked at each other. “Miss Frazier?” he asked.

“Don’t know her name. Captain had her up there.” He went back to his paper work.

A taxi was just letting out Bob Fuoss and Erd Brandt from
The Saturday Evening Post
in front of the building. Apparently Captain Malone was dragging in the editors two by two.

Travis got me their cab. “I wish she’d told me she was coming over. She must have known about it when we saw her about midnight.”

When I demanded, “Midnight?” I must have said it as if I thought everybody in Philadelphia was in bed by nine-fifteen.

“Sure. Monk and I went over to the Service Club and got her.”

“I thought she went home early.”

I wished I hadn’t said it, because if she’d gone back she obviously didn’t want him to know she’d left. Him or somebody.

“She always stays till they shut up shop,” he said. “I’d better go call her.”

He glanced up at the window over the door. Monk’s large marine-clad back was still framed in it. The taxi stopped in front of Judge Whitney’s, behind a black sedan just pulling up in front by the pink house ahead of us.

The driver leaned forward. “Look, lady. Ain’t that cute?”

I leaned forward too. “Oh,” I said. “He always does that.”

It was the squirrel. He was hobbling arthritically down the steps with a walnut in his mouth. He looked up the street for traffic, and scooted as fast as he could across to his tree.

The driver got out and opened the door. A man was leaving the black sedan ahead of us. He went up Mrs. Whitney’s steps.

“Maybe he’ll do it again,” I said as I paid my fare. “He comes over every time anybody goes up to the door.”

“Sure enough?” the driver said.

He gave me my change, and we stood a minute watching the squirrel get up to the top step and sit up with his paws out.

The driver’s face fell suddenly. “Aw, gee! They didn’t give him one.”

The door closed and the man was coming back down, sticking his pencil back in his pocket. He had an aluminum-backed board in his hand and he went whistling back to his car. The squirrel came down, twitching his patchy tail with annoyance. I noticed a sign on the windshield of the sedan as I passed it: U. S.
Mail Special Delivery.
I quickened my steps, thinking it might possibly be for me. The squirrel dashed back, but he was disappointed again, because it was Elsie Phelps who opened the door. She didn’t have a walnut, and she probably didn’t believe in begging anyway.

“Oh, hello,” she said.

She had a brown Manila envelope folded under her arm. She didn’t quite say “Are you still here?” but she might as well have.

“That wasn’t a special delivery for me, by any chance, was it?”

She looked me squarely in the eyes, the color rising in her sallow cheeks.

“I’m sure if it had been, Mrs. Latham, you’d have been told so at once.”

“Oh, of course,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I have one child at school and one in the Air Force, and you always sort of hope it may be for you.”

“Well, it’s not,” she said. She picked up her bag she’d put on the needlepoint chair against the rose-beige wall. “Now that you’re here, I won’t bother my aunt.” She seemed in an awful hurry to get away. “Tell her I’ll be back later, will you, please?”

I started to say, “Don’t let me drive you away,” but I didn’t have a chance. She was out the door and gone. The butler, who’d come out of his pantry to answer the bell, stood smiling at the end of the hall for a moment, turned and went back again.

The special-delivery letter must have been for Elsie herself, I thought, and she’d taken it away. It wasn’t on the silver tray on the table, and she’d obviously received it herself, as the squirrel had got only one walnut, and that was when the butler had opened the door for her. I don’t think it would have crossed my mind, any of it, if it hadn’t been for the way she’d acted—as if she’d thought I was accusing her of something, and then dashing off. And the incident was anything but closed.

I saw Abigail in the mirror on the stairs. She was half out of bed, and I know I wasn’t imagining the obvious alarm that had got her that far. It was just a flash as I went by, but it was enough, and when I got to her door I was sure I hadn’t been wrong. She was back in bed, as a bedridden invalid should have been, but she was sitting up as straight as a ramrod, her blue old eyes as bright as coals.

She glanced sharply at my hands. “Was that a letter, Dear Child?” Her voice was direct and sharp.

“If it was, Elsie got it,” I said. “She must have just been there and taken it.” I broke off sharply. “Mrs. Whitney!”

The old woman had turned the color of death. Her eyes were staring, her bony hands clutching at her throat.

“What is it?” I cried.

“Oh,” she whispered. She thrust one hand out, gripping my wrist, shaking it frantically. “Go get her! Stop her! Go quickly, quickly!”

I ran out of the room and down the steps as fast as I could go, and tore open the front door. I knew it was no use, even while I was breaking my neck doing it, because I’d taken a long time getting up the stairs to give her a chance to settle herself back in bed. Elsie could have got at least a block down Walnut Street. She was nowhere in sight. She could have gone to her father’s house, I thought, and I ran next door and rang the bell. It seemed to me that it took the Irish maid hours to get to the door, and when she did, she shook her head.

“Sure, and I was just this minute tellin’ Miss Abby on the telephone. Miss Elsie ain’t been here this morning.”

I went back to the pink house and upstairs to the second floor again.

“She’s gone,” I said.

Abigail was just putting down the telephone. Her hands were shaking violently and she looked ghastly. I was really alarmed.

“I can’t get hold of Sam,” she said desperately. “None of them. Sam or Monk or Travis or my brother.”

“They’re probably all at the police station,” I said. “Or all of them except Judge Whitney were, and I imagine they still are. Do you want me to try to get one of them for you?”

She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on her yellow cushions, shaking it back and forth.

“No, no,” she whispered. “Call the Acorn Club and see if she’s there. Tell her I want to speak to her. Tell her I’m dying—anything. I’ve got to get hold of her.”

But she wasn’t there, and she hadn’t been in. I tried the entire roster of good works. Abigail lay there murmuring one of them after another, getting weaker and paler and bluer-gilled with each failure.

At last I said, “Now I’m going to call a doctor.”

She shook her head. “There’s no use,” she whispered. “I’ll be all right. Just go away now, Dear Child, and let me rest. Colonel Primrose wants you to meet him at eleven o’clock at the Warwick. Go now, and don’t say anything about this, please. I’ll take care of it my own way. Don’t tell any of them, I beg you.”

She held out her hand to me. When I took it, she clung to mine. “Oh, don’t go. Don’t leave me, Dear Child,” she whispered. “I’m a wicked, terrible old woman. You must forgive me, Dear Child… Oh, Douglas, Douglas!”

She still clung to me for a moment. Then abruptly she let me go, opened her eyes and sat up.

“Of course, Elsie is Very Irritating,” she said with great firmness. “Now, run along, Dear Child. Your Colonel will be Waiting.”

Colonel Primrose, when I met him in the comfortable and dignified lobby of the Warwick, was pacing up and down, looking from his watch to the door and back again, and pretty irritated about something.

I came up behind him. “Did you wish to see me, sir?” I asked.

He cocked his head down and around, his black eyes snapping.

“Where have you been?” he demanded. “And where in hell is Buck? I told that-to take you to see Malone and stay with you!”

“Dear me,” I said. Still, I’d often wondered if he’d managed a regiment with nothing but urbanity.

“We were otherwise engaged, both of us,” I added. “And don’t go military on us or we’ll both quit.”

“I thought you’d already quit,” he retorted. “I can’t do two jobs and look after you at the same time. I want you to go home and stay there. I’m—”

“Colonel Primrose,” a voice said. “Paging Colonel Primrose.”

He broke off and diverted a lethal glare to the bellboy.

“Here,” he snapped.

“Gentleman at the desk to see you, sir. Shall I send him over? Gentleman with the straw hat, sir.”

Colonel Primrose looked, and nodded curtly.

I saw that the gentleman with the straw hat was Pete Martin, of
The Saturday Evening Post.
His big camel’s-hair coat was hanging open down to his ankles, the belt not tied. The straw hat was a Panama that had seen many better winters. It was battered, shapeless, and aged a variegated ginger brown. Surrounded as he was by women wrapped in mink and men in heavy overcoats and scarves who kept glancing at him and edging away a little, he was doing an embarrassed best to pretend he had just picked it up on the way in. He came over, sort of bumbling and red-faced.

“I wonder if I could talk to you, colonel. I’ve just been—” He saw me and stopped. “Oh, I beg your par don.” He fumbled with the straw hat and got a shade redder. “It was on the hook,” he said. “I guess I just grabbed it without noticing. I—”

Colonel Primrose waited stiffly. That he was still mad at me and Buck, Pete Martin had no way of knowing. The big editor grew a little redder-faced, fumbled in his overcoat pocket for his handkerchief, pulled it out and mopped his forehead. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket, or thought he did. It got between his coat and belt and fell, unnoticed by him, onto the carpet. I started to say something, and stopped, not entirely of my own volition. Colonel Primrose’s steely glance rested on me for a bare instant, and I knew he’d seen it too.

Lying quite open-faced on the rug, almost as if chance had deliberately arranged it that way, was the monogram Captain Malone had smoothed out on his desk. Or its mate, rather, done in shaded blue instead of shaded tan. The T wasn’t upside down and the middle letter wasn’t a
W,
it was an
M.
It read
“W T M,”
not
“M T W.”
It wasn’t for Monckton Tyler Whitney. It was for W. Thornton Martin.

I stood dumbly, trying not to look at it lying there beside his foot, hearing those voices through the iron grille vent in the washroom on
The Saturday Evening Post
sixth floor, saying, “Where the hell was Pete?… Pipe down about Pete…”

More immediately I could hear Colonel Primrose saying, “I’m busy right now. Unless it’s urgent. I can see you at the
Post
this afternoon.”

Of course it was urgent. People don’t dash out in an aged straw hat in the middle of January unless something’s on their mind they’ve got to get off.

“I don’t guess it’s very urgent,” Pete Martin said. He was rather like a large friendly sheepdog, abashed at making an error he didn’t quite know the nature of. He backed off with a grin.

Colonel Primrose reached down and picked up his handkerchief.

“Then it wasn’t Monk’s handkerchief,” I said.

“As Malone knows perfectly well,” he said. “If you people would quit jumping to the first conclusion you see, it would simplify matters considerably. You’ve let Malone tie you all up in bowknots. If you’d acted like normal, intelligent human beings—” He shrugged.

“Has he put Monk in jail yet?” I inquired sweetly.

“I expect one of you will manage it before noon. You’ve got forty-five minutes yet.”

He took a deep breath, counting ten, no doubt.