The Simple Way of Poison (11 page)

Not, however, before I’d caught the agonized appeal in Iris Nash’s face as she realized she was about to be left alone with him.

Captain Lamb, outside in the hall, favored me with a brief saturnine grin.

“Next time they want a gentleman bouncer for the White House…” he said.

I hardly heard him, for through the open library door I could hear A. J.’s dry precise voice.

“It’s inconceivable, Mr. Yates. Utterly inconceivable. He was a man of the strongest moral fiber. Oh, I grant you he had a weakness for liquor. That was something apart—like an abscessed limb.”

It sounded like a convenient sophistry to me. I tried to picture A. J. admitting that a bank robber had fine moral qualities entirely extraneous from his general character as an abscessed limb.

“He had everything to live for, sir.”

There was genuine emotion in his voice at that moment. No one, hearing that, could have doubted his devotion to the dead man, or his repugnance at the thought, apparently advanced, that he could have taken his own life.

My heart sank… and then it sank even lower, for the large and burly figure of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck appeared in the door. The stolid gaze he bent on me was an extraordinary blend of virtually every emotion except the tenderer ones. Disgust, I should think, was paramount, but there was a large dash of resignation and a considerable amount of grim dogged determination. I hadn’t then, and haven’t now, the faintest doubt that Sergeant Buck seriously entertained the notion that I had myself, with my own hand, murdered Randall Nash just for the purpose of having Colonel Primrose in and out of the house when I would be also in and out.

And to prove that Sergeant Buck’s general air of suspicion was not just my own guilty conscience. Captain Lamb glanced from him to me with blue eyes sharpening warily.

“I understood you’re a friend of the family, Mrs. …”

“Latham,” I said.

“Mrs. Latham?—You were here when they found the body?”

“Yes.—With Colonel Primrose. I… found it.”

“You actually found the body?”

I nodded.

“But it must have been there for a long time,” I said. “I mean, I really didn’t bring it with me.”

Sergeant Buck cleared his throat. I don’t know how disapproval could be more effectively expressed. “They’d like to speak to you, ma’am,” he said, of course out of one corner of his mouth.

Just then Colonel Primrose came out.

“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Latham,” he said. He looked disgustingly fit, some way… like one of the fire horses Edith St. Martin talks about, suddenly put in to harness with the bells for a six alarm fire ringing in his ears. For a moment the awful idea occurred to me that it ought to surprise people he hadn’t done in Randall Nash himself, just to liven the place up a bit. I recognized, however, that I was slightly jaundiced, with Sergeant Buck suddenly added to far too little sleep… and my breakfast curdled, absolutely, by Lowell’s spleen.

“Good morning,” I said. His sharp black eyes twinkled and snapped as if they’d had an overcharge of electricity. It occurred to me that I’d better step warily or I’d get bogged before I knew it… for somewhere in the few steps I’d taken across the hall into the library where Randall Nash’s outline in broad white chalk still lay on the floor, I had made up my mind that even if Iris Nash, by some awful chance, was—as they say in crime books—guilty as hell, I was on her side; I would do everything in my power to help her. I don’t know whether it was Lowell’s venom, or Belden Doyle’s melodrama, Captain Lamb’s steely eye, or Sergeant Buck’s fishy one, or just Colonel Primrose’s maddening rosy wellbeing, that made me decide that. Maybe it was all five. It might have been A. J.’s dry precise casuistry, or even simply Iris’s own slim green-eyed anguish… or possibly the hideous memory of those men out by the garden wall digging up Senator McGilvray. Whatever it was, it was very definite, and it coalesced suddenly, just then, in my stomach—where my emotional convictions seem always to lodge. I didn’t then, naturally, know that I myself held, at that very time, the one tangible, physical clue that was eventually to turn the scales against Iris as decisively and violently as if Sergeant Buck had planted his great two hundred and twenty pounds squarely in one of them, with nothing in the other but a fragile tragic wisp of a green-and-copper lady.

“This is the District Attorney, Mr. Selman Yates… Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said. I saw a handsome black-haired man with a tanned face, about forty-five; and I drew a freer breath. There was something about him that radiated a sort of vital confidence. My idea of district attorneys being gleaned entirely from the films, it was a happy surprise to see his hat on the table, not on the back of his head, and while he did have a cigar in his mouth—which he took out when we were introduced—the end of it wasn’t chewed to tatters that he had to keep spitting out on the floor. Furthermore it smelled like a good cigar.

“You came in to telephone, I understand, Mrs. Latham.”

I nodded. “It was about three. I didn’t see him at first. The light there was on and the rest of the room dark. That’s why Mrs. Nash hadn’t seen him, I suppose.”

“Had you been in the room before?”

“No. I stood in the doorway there, watching her get the things off the table.”

“She came in, as you stood there, and got…”

“She got the decanter, the syphon and the glass.”

“Which were just here, on the table?”

I nodded.

“It didn’t strike you at all then that anything was… odd?”

I hesitated. “Not really. I concluded—as I suppose everyone did—from the general set-up that Mr. Nash had probably cut loose again. He didn’t drink like most people. He’d been drinking heavily already that afternoon, at my house.”

There was a little stir in the room.

“At your house?” Mr. Yates said quickly.

“He came there while I was away, and said he’d wait. The maid brought him in a tray with a decanter and glass. He drank quite a lot—the decanter was about half-emptied when I got there. I was later than I’d phoned I’d be. He didn’t wait longer.”

“I see, Mrs. Latham.—To get back here. When Mrs. Nash came in, what did she do, exactly?”

“She slipped off her wrap. The door of this room was ajar. She pushed it open.”

“She seemed surprised not to find her husband in here?”

“No. She seemed distressed—I thought—at the sight of the decanter and the overturned glass.”

“What overturned glass, Mrs. Latham?”

“The highball glass he’d been drinking from. It was tipped over on the desk. The chair was pushed back.”

“What did she do?”

“She made the best of it. She went in and picked up the glass, and brought the tray out. The rest of us were waiting in the hall—that is, Colonel Primrose and I were. Mr. Donaldson had gone into the drawing room. She started out to the kitchen, and came back to see if there was any soda left in the syphon. There wasn’t. She took the syphon and glass out to the kitchen. I took the tray with the decanter into the drawing room.”

He nodded. “Mrs. Latham—would you say she was perfectly composed, quite normal?”

“No,” I said sharply. “Of course she wasn’t. For the perfectly swell reason that she thought her husband had staggered off upstairs… and that—if I may say so—hell might break loose at any minute. I assure you alcohol affected Mr. Nash in a very violent fashion.”

“He was… apt to be unpleasant?”

“Definitely.”

“And you put her… her perturbation down to the fact that she thought he was drunk—not that she knew he was dead?”

“I did, certainly.”

“What if I tell you, Mrs. Latham, that no one could stand at the corner of the desk there, with that light on, without seeing a body lying where Mr. Nash’s was lying?”

“I’d say you were wrong. I didn’t see it, not for some time, when I came in. It’s perfectly possible to stare at something right in front of your nose without seeing it.”

He smiled.

“What about this?—Mrs. Nash did see him there. She thought he had passed out, from liquor—didn’t know he was dead. She went back to the rest of you, knowing he was there and planning to get him to bed later, without letting her guests know about it.”

I shook my head.

“In that case, she would have suggested I go to the pantry phone, instead of coming in here.”

“And how did that incident of your telephoning come up, Mrs. Latham.”

“It was getting late. I thought my youngsters would be wondering where I was if they came in from a party and found I wasn’t home in bed. The rest of them didn’t want to go—it was very pleasant by the fire there.”

I could feel Sergeant Buck’s mountainous glowering at what no doubt was perfectly clear to him as a perversion of the fact. I’ve not the slightest doubt Colonel Primrose had told him he’d been kept against his will.

“Somebody suggested I phone home and say I’d be along later.”

“Who suggested that?”

“I don’t remember. I think it was Colonel Primrose.”

I knew it was Iris, but I thought Sergeant Buck had it coming.

“It wasn’t Mrs. Nash?”

“I don’t remember.”

“And you don’t think Mrs. Nash was waiting for the opportunity of sending someone else in there to find her husband’s body?”

My stomach felt as if it were going through a wringer. “No. I don’t think that at all.”

“You know, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly, “we have found a large quantity—five grains—of cyanide of potassium in Randall Nash’s body. Death took place within a very short time after he took that poison into his system.”

“I have no reason to doubt it, if you tell me it’s true, Mr. Yates,” I said. “That’s a matter of fact that I wouldn’t know anything about.”

He smiled faintly.

“One other matter, Mrs. Latham. I have interviewed Miss Lowell Nash this morning.”

I looked at A. J. He gave me instantly the impression of an old and desiccated cat licking the canary’s feathers off its chin. Poor Iris, I thought.

“I understand from her there has been considerable dissension in the house recently.”

“I trust you’ve also understood that she’s been largely responsible for it,” I said acidly, and was sorry the moment the words were out of my mouth.

“Are you referring to the dog, Mrs. Latham?”

“No. To a general lack of cooperation rather.”

He nodded. “You’re staying on here with Mrs. Nash?”

“No. I’m going home. I live directly behind here. If she wants me to come back this evening I’ll be glad to.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Latham.”

Colonel Primrose followed me to the door.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “May I come in for lunch?”

“If the Sergeant thinks it’s safe,” I answered. “A lot of people are being poisoned, you know.”

“I’ll leave him at home and take the chance myself.”

I didn’t expect, when I opened my front door, to find Steve Donaldson pacing up and down as if this was the circus wagon and he a panther fresh from the jungle.

“For God’s sake Mrs. Latham, what’s happening?—And why did they get Belden Doyle?”

I took off my coat and galoshes.

“I
think
someone recommended a first-class criminal lawyer,” I said. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t heard.”

“Yes—but Doyle, for God’s sake! You might as well paint Guilty all across her forehead.”

“That seems to have been done—very effectively—some time before Mr. Doyle entered on the scene,” I said. “I’d thought you were one of the people who first recognized it.”

He started pacing up and down again.

“Can’t you stand still?” I said. “You make me dizzy.”

He stopped abruptly and looked at me. Then he came over to where I was standing by the windows looking out into the sodden garden toward the Palladian window and yellow brick pediment of the Nash house showing above the wall.

“I’m sorry!” he said. His face was drawn and tense and he hadn’t shaved. His blue eyes looked as if they’d traversed a half-acre of hell since I’d first met him.

“Look here!” he went on, abruptly. “Will you tell me something?”

“I don’t know much,” I said.

“Was it… cyanide they found…?”

I nodded. “How did you know?”

He looked like a fighter who’d just taken a frightful blow just on the jaw from an invisible antagonist—should that be conceivable—and taken it standing. I stared at him open-mouthed.

“Why?” I whispered at last. “Do you…”

He didn’t answer. He just looked past me out of the windows a long time.

“Look,” I said. “Somebody’s got to start making sense, or I’m going mad. The point about it is that he
was
poisoned— not what he was poisoned with. Or is it?”

“Skip it,” he said abruptly.

“I’m glad to.—If there’s anything in it, I don’t think Mr. Selman Yates will.”

He felt in his pocket and brought out his pipe automatically, still staring at the house across the gardens.

“I used to see her around last winter when I was’ here,” he said suddenly. “Always across the room, with a thousand people in between us. I never tried to meet her, because… well, somebody told me she was married—to some rich guy. And I guess—”

“My God,” I said, “don’t tell me
you
guess you’re just old-fashioned.”

He looked at me, a little hurt, not understanding what I meant. There was no reason why he should, of course.

“I suppose it does sound like tripe.—Anyway, that’s the way it was. And I saw her every place I went. Even when she wasn’t there, after a while. When I came back this Fall I kept looking for her every place. But I didn’t see her. I kept thinking something must have happened to her, or she was sick, or something. I nearly went crazy. Then I met Lowell at a tea the day after Thanksgiving and she asked me to come in for a cocktail next day. And there she was.”

“And… you kept coming back.”

“She didn’t know it,” he said doggedly. He lighted his pipe and put the match back in the box. My husband used to do that. You could take a dozen burnt sticks out before you got to a live one. It always seemed to me legitimate grounds for divorce.

“She didn’t know I was on earth.”

He laughed, but there wasn’t much mirth in it, if any. His pipe had gone out, of course. He chewed the bit a few moments, standing in front of the empty hearth, completely sunk.