The Philadelphia Murder Story (2 page)

“Travis does not think Laurel Frazier will be indiscreet about my Brother’s affairs,” Mrs. Whitney’s letter continued. “Or did you know that Laurel Frazier has been my Brother’s private Secretary for the past five years? And I can’t myself believe Laurel’s head has been turned by Myron Kane’s attentions, which are very Marked, even if he is World Famous. She has too many reasons for being terribly Grateful to Travis. I expect they will be married very soon now. Even my Brother, I understand, has given up the Hope that his son Monk will Reform, and it was nothing but Wishful Thinking on his part that Monk and Laurel would be attracted to Each Other, as they always have quarreled.”

Living in the babel of alphabetical pyramids on the Potomac as I do ought to make anyone at home in any rat race, no matter how complicated, but it hadn’t me. I was as confused by this welter of names and cross purposes as if I’d never set foot in either Washington or Philadelphia. The one thing that was really clear to me was that if Myron Kane was paying marked attention to Laurel Frazier, who was the private secretary of the man he was doing a profile about, it wasn’t for herself alone. The attentions would be finished the day the profile was, and Travis Elliot could have back the girl who had so many reasons for being grateful to him. And the rest of them could go on being bitter.

I glanced over the last page of the letter.

“But the Point, dear Child, is that I wish you to come up here at once. Myron Kane has told me about a Policeman he says you are going to marry. Perhaps you or your Policeman can have some Influence on your Friend, Mr. Kane, as it is a very Serious Matter and you are Responsible for his being in my House. I shall expect you tomorrow. I cannot meet you, as I do not Now Leave the House.”

It was signed, “Affectionately, Abigail Whitney,” with a postscript that said, “My house is the Pink one in the Square, which I painted that Color to Annoy my Brother, and am unable to get workmen to do over until After the War. I will expect you to stay here with me.—A. W.”

It was all very unfortunate, of course, I realized, but it certainly didn’t seem to me that I could be held responsible for Myron Kane. If Abigail Whitney took strange men into her house because they said someone she could remember only vaguely, if at all, had written her a letter about them, it was her problem, not mine. She was old enough and worldly enough to know better. And as for my so-called policeman, he was already in Philadelphia, doing some kind of job for the United States Treasury, in reference, no doubt, to that grim date, March fifteenth. I wrote Mrs. Whitney, telling her I was sorry, I’d never sent Myron Kane to her, and if he’d ever been a friend of mine, he wasn’t any longer. And that, I thought, was that.

But it wasn’t. She was on the long-distance telephone before I got the letter in the mailbox next morning. Discursive and disjointed as the monologue that came over the wire was, several things were clear at the end of it. One was that Judge Whitney’s son Monk had got home and was in no mood for nonsense. Another was that Myron Kane was on the point of ruining the whole family. By some curious mental process, Abigail Whitney had skipped from my being responsible for Myron Kane to my being responsible for Myron,
The Saturday Evening Post,
her brother’s profile, and a great deal of sorrow, tribulation and heartbreak for everybody. But the appeal behind all of it was desperation. It was the desperation of an old woman suddenly caught in a tangled web she’d helped to weave and now was powerless to get out of. It was extraordinary how starkly implicit her despair and fear of something was in her repeated denials of it. It seemed so strange, too, because I would have thought Judge Whitney was one man whose life had no dark places for fear of exposure to cause such desperate anxiety.

Police detectives I’ve heard talk are always saying, “It was a funny coincidence that broke that case,” or “It was just that I got all the breaks that time.” It seems to me to happen too often not to imply something else. It’s almost as if a powerful magnetic field forms itself out of the concentrated stuff of guilt, drawing the people involved in the pattern unconsciously together, without apparent reason or awareness, and that when the pattern is once definitely established, the seeming coincidences that finally make a coherent whole really are not accidental at all.

Or there’s no other way I can explain what happened the day I went up to Philadelphia. It took me so long to get Colonel Primrose on the phone up there, and tell him I was coming and about Myron, that I missed the train I was planning to take. I took the three o’clock.

It was twenty minutes late into the 30th Street Station, and my shuttling across to the Broad Street Station was just as much a part of the magnetic field. It’s the first time I’d ever done it, and why I suddenly thought I’d have a better chance for a taxi there, I haven’t an idea. And if all those things hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have seen Myron Kane or met Albert Toplady.

I saw Myron by the newsstand. He’s tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with curly black hair and always immaculately well-tailored, usually with a Homburg and fitted overcoat and stick, and generally looking as if he were just setting out to meet a prince or a potentate. I started over, and then I saw there was a girl there, talking to him. That in itself was unusual. Myron’s taste in women, as I knew it in Washington, had always run to the wide-eyed and not very bright who listened while he did the talking. This girl’s hair was a soft auburn nimbus brushed back from her broad forehead, touching the collar of her Persian-lamb Chesterfield coat. Her eyes seemed to be a sort of odd gray-blue, though just then the pupils were so dilated that the irises were hardly visible. She had high cheekbones and a pointed chin, and her face was pale with the intensity of some emotion that certainly had nothing to do with Myron’s personal charm.

I heard her voice before I saw more than her burnished hair. “… can’t do it, Myron, you can’t!” she was saying. “I’ll do everything to stop you. It’s all my fault and it means everything to me. Everything, I tell you!”

Her face and voice were alive with passionate determination. I started to move behind Myron to go out the other door, and then I was caught in the crowd of people streaming in, beginning the homeward rush of a city of commuters emptying itself at the close of the business day.

Myron Kane’s Oxford-out-of-Virginia accent and slightly superior tone seemed shockingly casual compared with the girl’s intensity.

“All right,” he said. “Marry me and I’ll skip it.”

“Marry you!” It was a sharp, incredulous gasp. “You’re crazy. I’m going to marry Travis Elliot. You know it.”

“Oh, no,” he said easily. “People don’t marry for gratitude any longer. You haven’t got any reason anyway to be—”

“It’s not gratitude! It’s—”

I was jostled toward the door just then, and went on to the taxi entrance, catching just a glimpse of the two bright red spots that had flared up in her cheeks, and her eyes shining with anger. If she was going to marry Travis Elliot, she was obviously Judge Whitney’s secretary, Laurel Frazier. I tried to get another look, but the door closed behind me.

It was cold outside, and across Penn Square the sleet was coming down in slanting black lines through the maze of moving headlights. It was just then I was first aware of the gray-haired, wizened little man, his overcoat turned up around his neck, standing there also waiting for a cab. I had an instant fleeting impression that he’d been back there inside and had seen me eavesdropping, but I dismissed that as just my guilty conscience.

I said, “Rittenhouse Square,” when the taxi starter asked me where I was going, and he turned back. “Wasn’t you going to Rittenhouse Square, buddy?”

It was the little man in the gray coat. He nodded, sidled forward and waited for me to get in the cab.

“Rittenhouse Square!” the starter called again.

The door swung open and Myron Kane came out alone. He raised his hand toward the starter, stiffened abruptly, turned and strode rapidly back into the station. If I could have seen his face after he’d started toward the cab, I’d have thought he’d recognized me and was making an escape, but he couldn’t have seen my face any more than I could his, and he’d hardly recognize me from the knees down. He must have thought of something he hadn’t said to Laurel Frazier, I decided.

The driver put his flag down. “Where to?” he asked.

I gave Abigail Whitney’s number on 19th Street. The driver looked at the little man. Something seemed to have happened to him. His jaw was working, but no sound came from his lips.

“Just… the corner of Walnut Street,” he said at last.

He sat bolt upright as we nosed into the traffic, and then he glanced at me, not furtively at all, but with a kind of anxious curiosity and an obvious desire to say something if he could get up courage enough. At last he did.

“Are you… going to Mrs. Whitney’s?” he stammered.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know Mr. Kane, by any chance? The—the great foreign correspondent?”

I looked at him blankly. It would have been an extraordinary thing at any time, but after the last few moments it was incredible.

“Why, yes, I do,” I said.

“Then would you mind giving him this?” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out an envelope. “It’s a—a letter for him,” he said lamely.

“May I ask why you didn’t give it to him yourself?” I inquired, bewildered, but curious too.

“Was that him talking to Miss Frazier?” The envelope shook a little in his hand.

“Do you know Miss Frazier?” I asked it, thinking what an odd kind of cat-and-mouse game we seemed to be playing with each other.

“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “I know who she is. Her father was a—a great doctor. Everybody, poor and rich, loved him. I used to see her with him sometimes. But I don’t know her.”

The little man spoke very hurriedly, as if trying to correct at once an idea I’d got that he was pretending to be better than he was.

It was rather pathetic, because she hadn’t looked like the kind of person who’d think it was presumptuous of him to say he knew her.

“Mr. Kane is staying right in the house with Mrs. Whitney,” he said, with a kind of simple awe that was almost startling.

I tried not to smile. “You do know him?”

He flushed uncomfortably. “Oh, no. I just… follow his writings. He’s wonderful, don’t you think so?”

As I couldn’t say what I thought of Myron at the moment to someone who put him in the ranks of the major gods, I nodded.

“And you’ll give him this?” He handed the letter to me.

“I’ll be glad to,” I said, taking it.

“He’s doing an article about Judge Whitney,” he said, after a moment. “I read that in the papers. I used to see Judge Whitney too. I could tell him lots of things about him.”

“Good or bad?” I asked, as casually as I could. He looked at me so blankly that I let it go. “What if he isn’t there? He was in the station. He might be going away.”

He looked apprehensively at the letter in my hand. “Just put it in the fire,” he said. “It isn’t really important. I wouldn’t want to bother anybody.”

The driver slowed down at the corner of the square; the little man fumbled with the door handle.

“I could send it back to you,” I said. He got out.

“My name’s Toplady—Albert Toplady,” he said hastily. “Just Quaker Trust Company—that’ll get me. I’ll be much obliged—”

The light had changed, the driver was waiting impatiently, and the cars behind us were, too, so I didn’t hear the rest of it. I looked back through the window, but Albert Toplady was lost in the stream of people hurrying home from work through the sleety darkness.

The taxi skidded around the corner and to the curb in front of Abigail Whitney’s house. I caught my breath and got out. The house wasn’t pink. In the icy rain, it was the color of raspberry sherbet, and the soot had left black streaks hanging from the window ledges. I rang the doorbell and noticed I wasn’t alone on the step. A squirrel sat there, old and wet, twitching his moth-eaten tail impatiently, looking up at the door. It didn’t seem extraordinary to be standing there with him, and I wasn’t surprised when the butler, as old and in a coat as moth-eaten, took a walnut out of his pocket and gave it to him before he gave me a childlike, vacant smile and picked up my bag.

“Mrs. Latham? Madam is in her room.” His voice had the remote quality of the very deaf.

I followed him inside. The house was very handsome and surprisingly modern—more surprisingly so, in fact, than I then realized. There were mirrored panels in the soft beige walls. We went up a marble staircase curving gracefully to a wide foyer on the second floor. On the side wall were two more large mirrored panels, and in the space between them a decorative recess with a carved shell ceiling. A paneled library stretched across the back. The door to the room at the front stood open, and the voices coming from it, and not sounding very amicable, stopped abruptly as we came up.

“Madam’s room,” the butler said.

If the squirrel didn’t surprise me, Abigail Whitney did. It hadn’t occurred to me, when she’d said she did not now leave the house, that it was anything but another of the vagaries she was famous for, but in the wide room overlooking the square she sat propped up in yellow satin cushions against the yellow satin-upholstered back of an Empire swan-sleigh bed. There was a green satin cover over the blanket, and otherwise nothing of the bedroom apparent around her. The room was a drawing room, elegantly furnished, but crowded, as if she’d brought as much as possible out of her glamorous past to be there with her.

The windows by the bed bowed slightly, so that she had a full view of the square, and I saw that she had more than that. Outside were two mirrors. One was an old Philadelphia custom I’d heard of but never seen. It was placed so that the ladies of a day when they were less mobile and more ladylike could see who was at the door in the street. The other was fixed at an angle that showed the brownstone front next door. Bed or no bed, Abigail Whitney could keep track not only of her own entrance but her brother’s too.

“Oh, Dear Child,” she said as she held out her hand to me.