The Simple Way of Poison (13 page)

“No, no. Lamb’s got a daughter of the same age. However—as I’ve heard at least two dozen times this morning—it shows which way the wind blows. Also which way the cat jumps.”

“I can see it does that—up to a point.”

He nodded very soberly.

“You see, Mrs. Latham, it’s generally known—just to begin with—that Randall Nash went all to pieces suddenly, about something, and took to drink again. When he was drunk he was violent and dangerous. There’s no doubt he made life little short of hell for his second wife. Now all this seems to have started round midsummer—after Iris came back from a month at Cape Cod and began doing the house over. It corresponds closely—which is bad too—with her renewed association with Gilbert St. Martin, who helped to do the house.”

He paused deliberately and surveyed me with placid composure.

“It seems to correspond also with a series of anonymous letters.”

I looked as blank as I could, but it wasn’t blank enough. “Hello!” he said quietly. “You know about them?”

I shook my head quickly. His face went a shade soberer, so I realized I’d been pretty transparent. However, he has X-Ray eyes anyway, as I’ve known for some time.

“Well, there are such letters. They’re printed with a toy printing set. But I see you know all this…”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “Not really. I mean, I didn’t know Randall Nash had been getting them… Are there many?”

“About one a week since September,” he said drily. “Maybe before that. The first two or three are crumpled—as if his first impulse had been to tear them up. It would appear to indicate he had destroyed some.”

“What did they say?”

“They suggested—strongly—that she was conducting a clandestine affair with St. Martin. Lamb’s trying to track them down. They were in a manila envelope in the wall safe in Randall’s dressing room—together with a batch of old letters from Iris to St. Martin, written before he married Edith.—He was apparently insanely jealous.”

“I’d gathered that,” I said. I told him about the story of the vault. “It seemed so gratuitous, somehow,” I said. “As if he was warning her… Gilbert wasn’t there, of course, and I don’t suppose it had occurred to him that Steve Donaldson was interested in Iris. He was Lowell’s friend.”

An idea struck me suddenly.

“Listen, Colonel Primrose. Do you suppose he could have killed himself in a jealous rage, just to hurt Iris? That Christmas Eve when he told the story about the vault he talked about refinements of cruelty known only to people in love.”

He poured a watery Martini and looked at it for a long time, shaking his head slowly. “It… would be very hard to prove, Mrs. Latham.”

“Isn’t it going to be hard to prove Iris poisoned him too?”

He downed his cocktail and looked at me steadily, a sardonic glint in his black eyes.

“I… hope so,” he said at last. “I dare say Mr. Belden Doyle is counting on it—together with a beautiful face. But my dear Mrs. Latham—it must be perfectly clear to you that just now it looks as if it’s going to be very simple. In fact it’s so simple that Lamb’s a little puzzled. There’s a chain of circumstantial evidence against her that’s going to take a lot of explaining.”

He went on over the fat juicy Lynhavens Lilac had provided for her favorite guest—while I had my clear soup with a slice of lemon in it.

“Her motive is very plain. Fear, of course, plus the desire to be free to go back to Gilbert St. Martin. Furthermore, she gains handsomely by Randall’s death, financially. She gets a third of his property if he died before Marie, half of it if Marie died first. The point’s not determined yet. Anyway, Randall has paid income tax on $49,900 the last three years. McClean told us that this morning. They lived comparatively simply.”

Lilac came in with country ham steak and spoon bread. I suffered, watching him, while I consumed a vegetable salad and melba toast.

He went on slowly, almost painfully, I thought; and a chill seemed to me to settle down over my dining room as he did.

“That isn’t important, really, Mrs. Latham, compared with what seems actually to have happened last night. They had a scene—reported by both Lowell and Wilkins, who I take it listens at keyholes when he hasn’t anything else to do. Randall, according to the two of them independently, told Iris he’d never give her freeedom as long as he lived. He left the house. We don’t know just where he went yet. He got to A. J.’s house about 10:30. He phoned you, sometime later. He came home after twelve. There was a tray on his desk, with whiskey and soda on it. Wilkins expresses great surprise at Iris for leaving it there. She’d let all the servants go; she was herself the last person to leave the house. Wilkins returned shortly before Randall got in, and saw him make a definite effort to resist drinking—in fact he ordered the tray taken away, and then rang for it to be brought back. Sometime between the time Wilkins returned with the tray and the time we came in, he consumed enough cyanide of potassium to kill him.”

“Couldn’t he have taken it of his own accord?” I asked earnestly.

He nodded.

“It’s possible of course. Consider the rest of Lamb’s case.—Iris went into the library, when we got back; you and I standing there in the hall waiting for her. Donaldson going on into the drawing room. She says she didn’t see Randall’s body lying there—but the fact that she was badly upset when she was in the kitchen with me, a little later, is suggestive. In fact she was upset all the evening—particularly when she first came to your house if you’ll remember.”

I avoided meeting his glance. I remembered it very clearly.

“At any rate, she did go into the library, picked up the glass, put it on the tray and brought the tray, with the whiskey and the soda syphon, out into the hall. She took the glass and syphon out to the kitchen. I went with her. She washed the glass, dried it and put it away. She then rinsed the syphon out, filled it with fresh water and charged it. We came back and joined you two in front of the fire, and Iris spent the next couple of hours having a drink or two out of the decanter she’d taken from Randall’s desk.—The point being sufficiently clear, I take it, that the whiskey in the decanter was not poisoned.”

He stopped for a moment and went on still more gravely, looking at me across the table.

“And that, unfortunately, is not all. Wilkins says he has never known Iris to wash a glass in the evening before. The syphon she had herself prepared earlier—before she came over here. He saw her do that. She sent him into the living room while she was doing it, telling him she was bringing back some guests after the Assembly and to leave a tray for them.”

He took another large helping of spoon bread and watched the enormous golden piece of butter melt slowly on it.

“And Iris doesn’t deny a single one of all these statements, Mrs. Latham. She told Belden Doyle, in my presence, that they are all true and correct.—And even that, unfortunately, isn’t all. There is no trace of poison in any of Randall’s pockets, or on the skin of his hands, and there is no sign of any around the desk, to point to suicide.”

I stirred uneasily. “And Iris, I suppose,” I inquired caustically, or so I intended, “has large quantities of cyanide all over the place?”

“No,” he said. “Just a small quantity. She had a solution of cyanide of potassium, labelled ‘Metal Cleaner,’ in the medicine chest in her bathroom. Her fingerprints and nobody else’s are on it. They are quite fresh prints, Mrs. Latham.”

He stopped again.

“And moreover, my dear… that bottle with its contents was given to her less than a week ago.-—You’ll be surprised to know, by Mr. Stephen Donaldson.”

The picture of Stephen Donaldson, gaunt-eyed and intense, asking me if it was cyanide Randall Nash was poisoned with, flashed into my mind.

“What on earth would he be giving her cyanide of potassium for?” I demanded.

“It’s a point the police are interested in,” Colonel Primrose said.

We had left the lunch table and were back in the sitting room that opens into the garden. Beyond the wall the white-corniced pediment of the Nash house in Beall Street loomed, its slate roof glistening silver in the winter sun.

“Iris says he gave it to her to clean an evening bag made of plaited gold braid that had got badly tarnished.”

“That sounds reasonable enough to me,” I said. “She does have a bag made out of gold braid. Where did Steve Donaldson get it?”

“He’s attorney for a chemical combine that keeps a few smart legal chaps sitting around the Capitol—watching its interests, so to speak. He got it from their Baltimore laboratories. It is used in cleaning, you know.”

I did know, recalling a case at one of the Navy bases. A colored man working in a pressing plant where it was used for cleaning gold decorations on officers’ uniforms got it mixed up with a bottle of gin he had parked near it, and was carried out feet first a minute later.

“Did Iris know it was poison?”

He shrugged. “She says not. That oddly repulsive butler— Wilkins?—says he was in the drawing room taking away the tea tray when Donaldson gave it to her. He heard him say very distinctly ‘Be careful of this, it’s a deadly poison.’ ”

“So that the oddly repulsive Wilkins,” I observed, “knew it was in the house too—and also knew it was poison.”

Colonel Primrose nodded.

“That fact, you’ll be surprised to hear, has not entirely escaped the keen eye of the law,” he said with a chuckle. He put his coffee cup on the tray and sat down, fixing his sharp old parrot’s eyes on me.

“However, Mrs. Latham… let’s clear up one important point before we get on to the matter of the anonymous letters.”

“Very well,” I said. “What is it?”

“Just the little matter of where you stand in all this… business.”

He waved a hand in the air.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said. It occurred to me then, as it’s done several times before, that I really had to learn to knit. It would have been most convenient to have something to look at and study intently just then, instead of having either to face him down, as it were, or gaze shifty-eyed about the room.

“Then I’d better make myself clearer.”

He exhaled a full fragrant cloud of cigar smoke.

“There’s no doubt, Mrs. Latham, that Randall Nash was murdered. There’s equally no doubt that—at present— everything points to Iris Nash as the poisoner.”

“I don’t believe it, Colonel Primrose,” I said. “It’s too easy, for one thing.”

He looked at me with a quizzical smile.

“That’s one of the surprising things about detective work, Mrs. Latham. It usually is too easy. The lay idea that people who commit murders are clever is entirely erroneous. If you’re clever you can work out your problems without resorting to murder. I don’t suppose there’s more than one murder out of a hundred that the police don’t solve.—The proof is harder sometimes, of course. And usually, my dear, it’s the person with the strongest motive, emotional and pecuniary, and with the best opportunity—in other words, the obvious person— who does the job.”

“Have you examined,” I asked, “into the motives that anybody else may conceivably had had for wanting Randall Nash out of the way?”

“You mean, I presume, that if we figure Iris wanted to marry someone else badly enough to murder Randall, then it’s possible that that someone else may have wanted to marry her—with a fortune—badly enough to have done it himself.”

“That’s rather involved,” I said, “but roughly correct.”

He smiled.

“It’s evading my question, however.—I want to know just how far I can count on you. Are you, in this instance—in other words—hunting with the hounds, Mrs. Latham, or… running with the hare?”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “that I’m constitutionally on the side of the hare. Especially when the pack’s in full cry.”

“But if the pack happens to be not after the hare, but after the wolf in hare’s clothing, so to speak…?”

He went on when I didn’t say anything.

“I have some sympathy for anybody who gets to the end of his tether and picks up a fire iron and bashes somebody over the head. Or even takes a knife or gun to them. Sometimes the primitive instincts boil over, and drown all the civilized things we’ve learned. That doesn’t explain the poisoner, Mrs. Latham. Poison is a furtive, cowardly, evil thing.”

“Wherein woman is as strong as man,” I said, remembering Euripides, and Medea’s passionate cry.

“Exactly,” he said, looking steadily into my eyes.

I looked down. He always manages to make me feel rather self-conscious, as if he was reminding me some way that there were a lot of things between us we hadn’t settled yet.

“Then maybe I’d better tell you how I feel about Iris Nash,” I said.

“I wish you would. I’d really like to know.”

“Well, in the first place then, and in spite of all your anonymous letters, and in spite of Edith St. Martin’s obvious fears, I don’t really, honestly, believe Iris is any longer in love with Gilbert St. Martin. He’s really nothing, of course, but a crashing bounder!”

He chuckled.

“No doubt, Mrs. Latham.—He was that, you know, all the years before he married Edith. Iris was in love with him then.”

“I know,” I admitted ruefully. “But that was before she married Randall, and had a chance to orientate herself. Randall knew all about Gil from the beginning—it was his faith in her that enabled Iris to forget Gil. Oh, I’m sure—just as sure as I can be, Colonel Primrose—that she’s played the game fairly and squarely with Randall, and that Gil wasn’t nearly as hard to get over as she’d thought he was going to be.”

“Then why has she gone back to him?”

“Are you sure she has?”

He shrugged.

“There are two possible explanations, besides that one,” I said. “One is that she’s merely taken up a casual friendly relation with a man she was once in business with and who’s certainly in a position to give her a lot of help doing over her house… and it’s just that series of jaundiced letters that’s given everybody a totally wrong slant. It’s just what anybody who’d write an anonymous letter would think, without having any real truth to go on.”

He smiled dubiously.

“What’s the other one?” he asked.