The Philadelphia Murder Story (19 page)

“I think a profile ought to include a glimpse of the clay everyone’s feet are made of. That’s why I like the modern profile method. It’s an insult to every man’s intelligence to pretend, as the old biographies did, that the subject was flawless. That’s what makes for our common humanity.” He glanced at the three at the end of the table again and smiled. “For one thing, I understand Myron Kane made it very clear he thought I had, in a sense, adopted Laurel Frazier and concerned myself professionally with other people’s children, because I’d done such an unsatisfactory job with my own.”

His smile as his eyes rested with great pride on Monk was a palpable denial. Monk’s eyes were still on his plate, and the ears and mind he was listening with were too beclouded to catch the gentle raillery in his father’s tone. His jaw tightened and the flush on his face darkened.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. His own tone was clipped and curt. “You won’t have to put up with me after tomorrow. My leave’s up and I’ll be glad to steer clear of Philadelphia hereafter. And as Elsie’s apt to get her throat cut any time now, you’ll be rid of her too. I’D be glad to do it myself, if it’ll help you out any.”

His father had raised his glass of sauterne. He held it halfway to his lips, completely stunned, looking blankly across the table.

“Oh, Monk!” Laurel said. “You ought to—”

“You can shut up, please,” Monk said quietly. “Furthermore, I hope somebody’s told you the handkerchief you tried to palm off on Malone wasn’t mine, after all. You didn’t burn the right corner. What—”

Travis Elliot put his wineglass down. “Come on, Monk. Cut it out.”

Laurel was sitting bolt upright, her lips parted. “It—it wasn’t yours?” she whispered.

“No, Sweetie-pie.” He spoke with elaborate irony. “It wasn’t mine, and you knew damned well it wasn’t.”

Colonel Primrose’s urbane glance moved from one to the other of them. Judge Whitney sat there silently. The whole activity of the table centered in the young maelstrom swirling up at the other end.

Travis pushed his chair back a little, his jaw beginning to stick out too. “Monk,” he said quietly, “you don’t know what you’re saying.” He had a good deal of force under his well-tailored exterior. “Just shut up, will you?”

Laurel flashed around, the color suddenly flaming up like two geranium petals in her cheeks. “Will you be quiet yourself, Travis?”

Judge Whitney’s hand came down on the table sharply. “That makes it unanimous,” he said. “I suggest all three of you shut up. I don’t understand this—any of it. I don’t understand you—any of you. I’m astonished that you-Colonel Primrose, Mrs. Latham, I hope—”

If Mr. Samuel Phelps had tried to plan his entrance for the worst possible moment, he couldn’t have done it better. He came bravely in through the living-room door, his bald head pink and glistening, rubbing his hands together.

“I’m very sorry I’m late, sir,” he said.

The atmosphere was crackling with static. Judge Whitney fixed his blue eyes on him. “Where is my daughter?”

Sam Phelps stopped in his tracks, looking at the two empty chairs. I glanced at Colonel Primrose. He was still looking quietly around. Laurel had picked up her Waterford goblet, the bright pink stain still visible in her cheeks. The pulse in her throat was going a mile a minute. Monk and Travis were both staring grimly down at the table.

“I thought she would be here, sir.” Sam spoke politely, if not very tranquilly, and he was obviously not happy. “May I sit down, sir? I don’t care for anything to eat.” He sat down between Colonel Primrose and Travis.

“I assume you’re aware, Sam, of what Elsie has done,” Judge Whitney said quietly.

“I think we can trust her discretion, sir.” There was something very smug about the way he said it.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you.”

I don’t know why Sam missed the storm warnings. They were certainly plain.

“I mean you don’t have to disturb yourself about the—the document any more, Judge Whitney.”

It wasn’t only smug then, it was slightly patronizing. I didn’t dare look at anyone.

“I mean, I’m sure Elsie will destroy it at once.”

I looked at Travis then. He’d put his hand out to Laurel and was holding hers tightly on the edge of the table. She’d gone the color of the meringue under the fresh strawberries on her plate, the blue of her eyes drained until they were gray.

“If you’ll pardon me, sir,” Travis said abruptly, “I think Sam had better explain what he and Aunt Abby have been doing. I think you should listen, sir.”

Judge Whitney looked at him silently, and glanced at Monk, still sitting there like a hundred-and-ninety-pound Hamlet in contemporary dress, absorbed in a wordless soliloquy. He looked at Laurel and at Travis, and nodded.

“What have you and my sister been doing, Sam?” he asked.

“I would rather tell you in private, sir.” Sam’s collar seemed higher and tighter. He glanced sideways at Colonel Primrose.

“I prefer to hear it now,” Judge Whitney said.

“Very well, sir. It’s merely that Aunt Abby learned this fellow Kane had sent the document he got from Laurel—she says by mistake—down to Mrs. Latham’s house in Washington. I lunched with Aunt Abby yesterday, at her request. She suggested I telephone Mrs. Latham’s house and have Kane’s mail sent back here. We know it was the only way to get the—the document in the proper hands again.”

The silence then was deep and long as well.

“You see, that was before we knew Kane was dead,” Sam said. “It was… unfortunate, of course,” he added lamely.

Still nobody spoke.

“I was acting in what I regarded as the family’s best interest.”

He waited, and was starting to add something when Judge Whitney interrupted him. “Thank you, Sam,” he said.

If you have seen a soft crab dropped into a kettle of smoking fat, you will know what Sam Phelps looked like just then. I wouldn’t have believed three words could so wither and burn. It was fortunate the maid came in then.

“The telephone, sir,” she said.

Laurel jumped up. “I’ll answer it, sir.”

The silence continued a moment after she’d got out. To my surprise, it was Colonel Primrose who broke it; and after a moment I was more than surprised.

“I ran across some curious ancient history this morning,” he said—“While Miss Frazier is gone. I was at the Quaker Trust Company, having some microfilm records run off on the screen. The bookkeeper—his name is Toplady—got an extra roll in by mistake. They were films of the famous Douglas Elliot steal of ten years ago, and the note you’d signed the day he blew his brains—”

If a bolt of lightning had struck the table, we couldn’t, any of us, have been more appalled or more rigidly speechless with horror. Colonel Primrose stopped abruptly, sensing it, as he would, but still, of course, not realizing.

“I—I’m sorry!” he said. He looked quickly at the door. “I was sure she was out of hearing. I’m very sorry!”

I have never seen people more aghast—even Sam—and all of us trying to look anywhere but at Travis.

Monk pushed his chair back. “Excuse me, please, father,” he said shortly. He got up… “Come on, Trav.”

Travis got up slowly. “My name is Travis Elliot, Colonel Primrose,” he said quietly. “Douglas Elliot was my father. Will you excuse me, please, sir?”

Judge Whitney came around the table and put his hand on Travis’ shoulder. “If you’ll wait, son, I think Colonel Primrose would like the privilege of being allowed to tell you he didn’t—”

If it hadn’t all been so awful, the sight of Colonel Primrose’s face would have been irresistibly funny.

Travis shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, sir. It was a steal, and my father did blow his brains out. I—I can’t ask-Just excuse me, sir. Will you, please?”

Monk was waiting for him in the door. He was looking back at his father. He didn’t speak, but just looked at him. They went on out.

Colonel Primrose had got himself together and got to his feet, knocking over his wineglass as he did it.

“I’m very sorry, Judge Whitney,” he said quietly. “I—I understood the young man’s name to be Travis. I—you know, I wouldn’t for the world have—”

“I know, indeed, you would not have,” Judge Whitney said. He let himself down heavily in his chair and sat there, looking down at the table. “It can’t be helped, colonel. Travis has had a good deal to forgive a good many people—including his father before and at his death. I—I didn’t know the records were still in existence. It was a very great tragedy.” He got slowly up. “I think, if you will excuse me now—I don’t wish to be rude, but I—I feel the need of a little rest.”

We went out of the dining room. All of us, that is, but Sam Phelps. At the door, I glanced back. Nobody else seemed to notice that he was still sitting at the table.

“I don’t want to rub it in, but if you just hadn’t been so brutal about it—” I said as we left the house. “Did you have to call it a steal? And couldn’t you have said something besides ‘blew his brains out’?”

He gave me a rueful glance. “I’m sorry,” he said briefly.

We were walking toward Walnut Street in silence after that, because it seemed to me that it was hardly sufficient apology for such an incredibly inept breach of courtesy.

“I guess it must have been that Ibsen quotation,” he said as we reached the corner. He repeated the lines Judge Whitney had spoken:

“Our lives should be pure and white

Tablets whereon God may write.”

He was silent a moment.

“You see, I knew Douglas Elliot,” he said. “He was in the Judge Advocate General’s Department in the last war. I never knew a man whose life was a whiter tablet for God to write on. It made me very sore. Stupid, I suppose, but there it is.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I thought I had a fairly good idea. He always knew things I never gave him credit for knowing, and if he knew what Monk and I knew, that quotation, coming from Judge Whitney, must have sounded like the crassest and most hypocritical bombast and deceit. I knew that was what it had sounded like, and sickeningly, to Monk. It hadn’t to me, but I’m easily affected by what I believe is called theater. And it was good theater, at that. Still, to anyone inclined to be a realist or with a personal connection I didn’t have, I could see how it would have sounded, knowing the tablet of the judge’s life was splotched with the blood of his friend.

Anyway, I decided I’d better go back and tell Monk it wasn’t I who’d told Colonel Primrose—or not so far as I knew.

“I’ll go back to Abigail’s, I think,” I said.

He smiled faintly. “You’re going with me.”

He hailed a taxi.

“To the Warwick, please. After that I want to go to Camden.”

“You mean New Jersey?” I demanded. My knowledge of geography being pre-Copernican, I had no way of knowing it was just across the river and not as far as Capitol Hill is from my house in Georgetown.

It seemed to me an embarrassingly long time that he was in the Warwick, but that was, no doubt, because so many people wanted the taxi in which I was parked outside.

He came out at last and said to the driver, “Three hundred ten Pepperell Street.”

“Who lives on Pepperell Street?” I asked.

“Albert Toplady.”

I said, “Oh.”

He cocked his head down and around again, and looked at me this time, sharply.

“Will he be home?” I asked.

“Yes. He will.”

No. 310 was painted bright yellow, with white trim, and it had a whitewashed picket fence around its minute lot, with a star-shaped flower bed marked with whitewashed bricks as a front garden. The shades were drawn in the two front windows and there was a bottle of milk on the porch.

“Wen, it doesn’t look as if anybody’s at home,” I said.

We went up to the door. I noticed two women peering out at us through the orange curtain of the window next door. They were still there when Colonel Primrose gave up ringing the doorbell after several minutes.

“I’ll go around to the back,” he said. “You wait here.”

I waited. I could hear him banging on the back door, but either Mr. Toplady was not at home or Mr. Toplady had no intention of coming out. The taxi driver got back into his car and settled down. Colonel Primrose came back.

One of the watching women came out on her front porch. “He’s home, all right,” she said. “I saw him go in.” She looked at me and back at Colonel Primrose. “Are you and your daughter relations of his?”

“Just mends,” Colonel Primrose said, only slightly discomfited.

“A lot of people been coming here to see him the last few days,” the woman said. “My goodness, I’ve never seen the like of it before. A gentleman came last night—he had white hair—and just before him a young, red-haired lady came.”

“Is that so?” Colonel Primrose said politely.

“And there was another man. And now you two. He’s never had any visitors before, in all the time we’ve lived here.”

Colonel Primrose murmured something. His face was puzzled and very grave. “I don’t understand this,” he said. “I’m damned if I—”

He banged on the door again, and waited. There was no sound inside the little house. Then he got down suddenly on one knee, cupped his hands around the keyhole and peered in. He gave a sudden startled exclamation, got up, took a step back and lunged into the door with all his weight. The cheap frame splintered and the lock snapped like brittle taffy. He went on quickly into the room and stopped short.

In the instant before he said, “Get back, Mrs. Latham,” I saw what he had seen. It was Albert Toplady. He had a blue automatic in his hand, and his hand was raised. His face was gray and terrible as he stared at us, his hand shaking so that the gun was aimed God knows where. All I know is that I saw the muzzle of it, and it was aimed Colonel Primrose’s way then. And—well, I’ve always underestimated him, I guess. He walked deliberately across the room toward Mr. Toplady, the little man backing off into the corner, his finger trembling on the trigger of the gun.

And I heard Colonel Primrose saying quietly, “I’ll take that, Mr. Toplady. It might go off.”

He went up to him and took the pistol out of his hand, and then, as Albert Toplady suddenly collapsed, he caught him, moved a chair with one foot and let him gently down into it. I came on in, rather more than half paralyzed. That’s when I became aware of the room itself, and I was so dumfounded that I didn’t hear Colonel Primrose tell me to close the door until he came back and did it himself. He put up the window shades then, and I could see everything clearly in that unbelievable room.