The Philadelphia Murder Story (18 page)

“Damn it,” he said. “If I could only get hold of that manuscript.”

“Perhaps I could help you if you’d be at all civil,” I said calmly. “Civil instead of military.”

He didn’t snap this time. He looked at me earnestly for a moment. “That is what I was afraid of,” he said soberly. “That’s why I wanted Buck not to let you out of his sight.”

I drew a blank at that one.

“You know, sometimes, Mrs. Latham,” he said, “I think you ought to have your I. Q. determined. Or maybe it’s better never to know.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a sitting room on the third floor. Come along. I want to talk to you.”

“I hope Sergeant Buck won’t mind,” I said, when we got out of the elevator.

“Sergeant Buck won’t mind anything when I’m through with him,” he said grimly. He opened the door.

It was a pleasant room with an electric icebox humming away in a small kitchen off the foyer.

“Sit down,” he said. “Don’t you realize a man has been murdered in cold blood, right in sight of God knows how many persons, on account of that manuscript? And here you go wandering around in the middle of the night as if the world was a field of buttercups. Who knows you’ve got that manuscript?”

“You and I,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. At least, unless Myron told somebody else, which I doubt.”

He thought for a moment and nodded. “Go ahead,” he said shortly.

“Well, there’s nothing to go ahead with, really,” I retorted. I was getting a little mad myself. “Myron told me he’d sent a copy of his script to my house in care of me. Somebody was prying into his papers, and he wanted a copy in reserve, I suppose.”

I hesitated. I didn’t know quite how much to tell him, and then I decided that, since Abigail had got the document back, it didn’t matter, really.

“I thought first he’d sent what they all call a document he got by mistake from Judge Whitney’s files down, too, but he said he hadn’t,” I went on. “And they’ve got it back anyway.”

He was looking at me with a kind of pained incredulity that I found a little irritating.

“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “He had to send it somewhere— the script—and he said my address was the only one in Washington he could remember offhand. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have.”

He shook his head silently, went to the sofa, sat down and picked up the telephone on the table at the end of it.

“Get me Washington, Hobart One-five-nine-six,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

It was my phone number in Georgetown.

“I’m having that manuscript sent to Captain Malone,” he said calmly. “Then you’re going to Judge Whitney’s with me for lunch, and you’re going to tell them you’ve done it. You’re going to tell your friend Abigail. I’m going to call Ben Hibbs and tell him. We’ll have a notice put on the front page of—what is the paper in Philadelphia everybody’s supposed to read? For the simple reason that I don’t want you to have a knife between your ribs. God knows why, but I don’t. It’s—” He turned back to the telephone. “Hello. … Yes. Hello… Lilac?”

Lilac is my colored cook, and the angel without whom for twenty years, life would never have been so gay, or stormy at times, but always fundamentally secure in the honesty and dependability and affection of the best friend I’ve ever had.

“This is Colonel Primrose… Yes, she’s here. She’s fine. I’m fine… Yes, it’s very cold here.”

You can’t ever talk long distance to Lilac without an intimate discussion of the weather.

“Now listen to me, Lilac. A friend of Miss Grace’s sent some mail in care-What’s that?” He listened for a long time, his face settling into soberer and soberer lines.

My I. Q. may be too low to risk the public shame of having it measured, but I knew what she was saying. I knew it before he said, “All right. Here she is. You can talk to her.”

He handed me the phone.

“Hello, Lilac,” I said… “Yes, I’m very well… No, it isn’t snowing here. What’s this about Mr. Kane’s mail?”

“Mr. Kane he called up yes’dy an’ said I was to send it to him in Philadelphia, at the address you was stayin’ at, an’ did I have it, an’ I said ’deed I did. He says I was to send it special delivery right away. Now what does he mean sayin’ he ain’?”

“What time did he call, Lilac?” I asked.

“It was half pas’ three. He say it was important, and would I get myself a taxi and go to the main post office and ask th’ man where was the box to put it in, so it would go right away. He say he would give me the money for the taxi when he come down next time.”

“Thanks, Lilac,” I said. We talked about a lot of other things before I could ring off. At last I put the phone down.

“Myron Kane called her at half past three,” I said.

Myron had been dead for some time just then, and neither of us bothered to say it.

I said instead, “Elsie Phelps has that script now, colonel. Judge Whitney’s married daughter, Sam Phelps’ wife.”

He waited for me to go on, and I did. I told him about the taxi driver, and the squirrel, and the special-delivery letter Elsie said wasn’t for me. And about Abigail Whitney sending me dashing after her, and the scene I’d had with her, calling up all over town, trying to get hold of Elsie. The only thing I didn’t tell him was about her crying “Douglas, Douglas” as she clung to my hand. I couldn’t tell him that without telling him about Judge Whitney and Douglas Elliot, Travis’ father, and that whole story of embezzlement and murder.

He listened to me silently. When I was through, he got up and walked over to the window. He stood looking down on the Locust Street crowds hurrying back and forth. He came back to the sofa and picked up the phone.

“Lombard Six-five hundred,” he said.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“Ben Hibbs. I want them to know Elsie Phelps has the script. Or I don’t really. All I really want them to know is you haven’t it.”

I looked at him blankly. “I thought you thought none of them—”

“Mr. Ben Hibbs, please… Hello, Ben, this is John Primrose. Elsie Phelps—you remember her, Whitney’s daughter— has a copy of Myron’s profile of the judge, if you still want to run it… Yes, I’m going to see her—this afternoon if I can… Right. I’ll try to get it for you. You might let the boys know, by the way. And tell Pete I’m sorry I was short with him. I’ll see him later. Goodbye.”

He put down the phone and stood with his hand resting on it for a few minutes, looking fixedly past and beyond it. Then he turned to me and smiled, shaking his head slowly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The thing we’ve got to do now is get hold of Elsie Phelps.”

It was five minutes past twelve then. Elsie wasn’t at home. The maid said she wouldn’t be home until half past five. At half past four they found her. She was lying face down on the frozen bank of Wissahickon Creek, out toward Germantown. The reason they hadn’t found her before was that there was a clump of laurel bushes between her and the driveway.

She had been there since half past twelve, the police said. Her watch had struck a stone when she fell.

Tossed in the bushes, they found a heavy bronze medallion. It had Benjamin Franklin’s profile in relief on the face, and on the reverse side an engraved picture of The Curtis Publishing Company Building:

Commemorating the

200th Anniversary

“The Saturday Evening Post”

1728
Founded by
1928

Benjamin Franklin

The people at the
Post
all had them on their desks for paper weights.

The one they found in the laurel bushes had blood on it, and there was a sharp, deep cut on Elsie Phelps’ head where the bronze rim of the medallion had struck her.

But when we were lunching with Judge Nathaniel Whitney at a quarter past one, we naturally didn’t know that Elsie Phelps was dead, and I may say the conversation would have been very different if we had. If we had, that is, and there’d still been a lunch.

We were supposed to be at the house at one o’clock, but after I’d told Colonel Primrose about Elsie and the special-delivery letter, and about the scene Abigail had put on, I was too involved to stop. Or rather, I suppose, I’d given Colonel Primrose a lever to pry the rest of it out with. I can see now that I was put through a third degree—the rubber-hose-in-the-velvet-stocking sort of thing—and it’s a wonder to me that I managed to hold out as much as I did. The handkerchief with W. Thornton Martin’s monogram on it, not Monckton Tyler Whitney’s, lying on the table in front of me, was no doubt put there on purpose, as a reminder that if it was Monk I was worried about, I didn’t have to be any longer. It was a childish ruse, but Colonel Primrose had already said I was simple-minded, and I guess I am.

I told him why I’d come, in the first place, and about that document that Laurel had given Myron by mistake, and about Mr. Toplady’s letter, and about Mr. Toplady generally, but not about the conversation I’d had with him on the bench in the square. Nor did I tell him about Abigail and Judge Whitney, nor about what Monk had told me the night before, about Travis’ father using Laurel’s money and supposedly committing suicide. I thought, in fact, I really did a very good job of keeping faith with Monk, as I’d promised I would do.

And then I discovered it wasn’t interest in what I was telling him that was keeping us there when we were supposed to be at Judge Whitney’s at one. It was because Sergeant Buck hadn’t come. When he did come, Colonel Primrose took him into the bedroom and closed the door. He came out a little later and we left immediately. He must have unburdened himself, I thought, because he was in a vastly better humor. It was too bad that I hadn’t had courage to listen at the keyhole.

Our being late didn’t matter, however, because Monk and Travis were just going in as we got to that side of the square, and Laurel had taken us upstairs to the back library before Judge Whitney himself came in.

They all looked pretty grim, frankly. The judge covered it up fairly well, and so did Laurel and Travis. Monk didn’t even try to. He wasn’t sullen exactly, but he sat with us but not of us, and if you’d taken his face without any of the background, you might have thought he sensed a polecat in the room, although Sam hadn’t come yet. It wasn’t Laurel, either, because neither of them seemed even to see the other. She was spared having to offer him a glass of sherry when he got up, went to the cellarette and poured himself a bourbon and water, emphasizing his nonconformity to the household mores.

Judge Whitney looked at his watch. “Where are Sam and Elsie?” he asked… “I wanted you to meet all the members of the family, Colonel Primrose.”

“Soapy had a busy day ahead of him,” Monk said.

“Does he know, I wonder,” Colonel Primrose asked blandly, “that his wife is in possession of what seems to be a very dangerous document?”

Laurel, who’d taken a chair where her back was all Monk could have seen of her if he had cared to look, which he didn’t, glanced quickly at me. She was taut and tense again, the way she’d been the first day, when the responsibility for the document Myron had was still entirely hers. She looked away as quickly.

I realized that Colonel Primrose was only trying to find out if they knew about it, and there was no doubt they all did. There was a well of silence, not long, but fathoms deep.

“Aunt Abby told him, sir,” Travis said at last. “She called the police station. That’s why he left without waiting to see Malone. I don’t get it, because he said Kane showed him the manuscript, and there was nothing in it anybody could object to. But he sure got out of there in a hurry. Boy, did he go!”

“He didn’t say where he was going, Mr. Travis?”

Travis hesitated for just an instant. I think he was going to correct Colonel Primrose about his name, but it would have been rather awkward, and he let it go.

“No, sir,” he said.

Judge Whitney looked at his watch again. He nodded to the maid who’d come to the door. “We won’t wait for them any longer.”

“Elsie is probably at a Meeting,” Travis said.

We went downstairs to the large dining room across the back of the house. It was dark and heavy, with beautiful gleaming silver on an oak sideboard and closets full of lovely old china and porcelain along one whole side of the room. Whatever sun there was wasn’t enough to get very far, and the overhead lights didn’t help out too much.

Judge Whitney had me at his right and Colonel Primrose at his left. The two Phelpses’ seats yawned empty beside us, and then came Monk on my side, Laurel at the end and Travis next to her.

“Of course, Colonel Primrose, it’s a very curious thing to me,” Judge Whitney said. “I’ve no idea why my family is so determined that this profile of mine has to be censored or why it’s regarded as dangerous. It’s a complete and total mystery to me.”

“You didn’t see it, I understand?”

“No,” Judge Whitney said deliberately. “I didn’t want to.”

He avoided looking at the three members of his family— actual or virtual—at the end of the table, where they were sitting like children with their eyes on their plates.

“Once in a city out West—Tacoma, Washington, I think it was—I was walking through a public park,” he went on quietly. “I’ve forgotten now whether it was a bust of Ibsen or a full figure I came on. But there was a tablet on it with a quotation from him that I’ve never forgotten. It said:

“Our lives should be pure and white

Tablets whereon God may write.

“I’m not so presumptuous as to pretend that I’ve followed that edict to the letter, but I think I can say there’s nothing in my life I would object to having published in
The Saturday Evening Post.”

Monk was the only one of the three who wasn’t looking at him then. A dull flush had deepened the color in his sunburned face. His eyes were still fixed on his plate.

“I’ve made mistakes,” Judge Whitney said calmly. “A great many of them. I’ve done as many small and petty things I’m ashamed of as any man, and I wouldn’t flaunt them in public. But I have an idea that if Myron Kane had stumbled on any of them, it might be good for my soul to have them exposed.”

He turned his fine white head and strong blue eyes toward Colonel Primrose, smiling faintly.