The Simple Way of Poison (27 page)

There was also the scene I’d witnessed—and that her husband had heard—through the Palladian window from my own window Christmas Eve, when Gilbert St. Martin was there… and that she’d denied to the police. Or was that the touching farewell?

I think I’d started to ask her bluntly, when a tap on the door brought us to the awareness that Colonel Primrose was waiting downstairs. “Just coming,” I called. Chiming in with my voice the blue Sevres clock-on Iris’s mantel struck nine tiny silver notes. Downstairs I could hear the telephone ringing urgently.

Colonel Primrose was just coming out of the library. I tried to read in his face which message he had got, but I couldn’t.

“I want to talk to you, Iris,” he said quietly. “Let’s go into the dining room.”

I went too. He didn’t tell me not to, and Iris caught my hand as she followed him.

We went into the long room with windows opening on the garden, and sat at one end of a Chinese Chippendale table with a low silver urn filled with a fairy shower of sweet-smelling mimosa. Facing me, between two of the three windows, was the mahogany, cellarette where Lowell had got the decanter of whiskey to give Lavinia. Over the lovely Hepplewhite sideboard with its gleaming silver service and tall ornate candelabra at either end was the mirror in which Iris had watched the silent suety figure of the butler move from place to place.

“I suppose Mrs. Latham has told you we saw you at Lavinia’s just now,” Colonel Primrose said pleasantly.

“I asked her if you had,” Iris answered. “She said yes.”

“Why did you go there?”

He had a way of looking at people that made it awfully difficult to tell anything but the truth.

“I can’t tell you, Colonel Primrose,” Iris said. She met his glance with straightforward composure.

“You mean you won’t?” he said politely.

“That’s just what I mean.”

He beat a muffled tattoo on the polished surface of the table with his fingertips, regarding her with steady appraising eyes.

“Does Belden Doyle know you went there?” he asked abruptly.

“No… nor why I went. And I couldn’t tell him, either. It’s a private matter.”

“I see.” He leaned forward. “Iris, I think I ought to tell you that they have found out that A. J. was poisoned.”

She nodded. “Lowell told me. I’m sorry.”

“Lowell was… guessing,” Colonel Primrose said steadily. “She was right, however. And I think we may take it for granted that he was poisoned because he had found out—or because somebody thought he had found out—who has Randall’s money.”

“Then for God’s sake why don’t you let him keep the money!” Iris said passionately. “It isn’t worth it… not all the money in the world is worth all this!”

Something flickered for an instant in his eyes.

“The second point about it is this,” he went on impassively; “Mr. McClean was poisoned with cyanide of potassium, administered just as it was administered to Senator McGilvray, in enteric capsules, in chocolate candy. He died at approximately five minutes to six. He took that poison into his system sometime between four and five o’clock this afternoon.”

She looked at him, the smooth gold mask of her face changing to a tragic bewilderment.

“But… he couldn’t have! He was here, in… in this house, having tea!”

The horror dawned in her face as she turned from Colonel Primrose to me, and back again. Her lips parted, her face drained of all its warm golden glow. She gripped the edge of the table with her hands, and got some way to her feet.

“That means that someone… someone here at tea…”

The words came out of her lips in Controlled jerking monosyllables.

Colonel Primrose nodded.

She looked at him without speaking. I could see each name as it went through her mind. Lowell, Angus, Mac, Edith St. Martin, Steve Donaldson, Wilkins.

“—and A. J. himself,” she said softly. “Couldn’t he have done it himself… knowing someone knew where the money was… or had been?”

“Does someone know, Iris?”

“Well,” I said cheerfully, “someone
must
know.”

He shot me an annoyed glance. She was still standing there, her fingers tips pressed hard against the table, steadying herself, when the door opened and Wilkins’s pale moon face appeared. He paused perceptibly, taking in the scene with motionless eyes. Colonel Primrose noticed it, I think, because he said “What is it?” rather curtly.

“Mr. Belden Doyle has come, madame. He wants to know if he can see you at once.”

The muscles of her throat contracted, her body swayed ever so slightly, her finger tips were white against the velvet patina of the old mahogany. She looked at Colonel Primrose, and then, the color of her eyes changing faintly, at the plump white face of the butler in the doorway.

“I beg pardon, madame. Captain Lamb and Mr. Yates are also here. They wish to see Colonel Primrose.”

Colonel Primrose pushed his chair back. “You have an upstairs sitting room where you can see Doyle, haven’t you?” Iris nodded.

“Take Mr. Doyle upstairs, Wilkins. Tell Captain Lamb and the District Attorney I’ll see them in the library.”

He got up and stood aside for Iris to pass Mm. She didn’t move. It seemed almost as if her feet refused to obey. She stood rooted there, pale and helpless. Then without warning her body crumpled and she sank into her chair, her head on her arms thrown across the table, shaken with sobs. Colonel Primrose started, and looked at me helplessly. I motioned him out, and went round the table to Iris and put my arms around her.

“Please, Iris,” I said. “You can’t do this—not now. Wait… please.”

“Oh, I don’t care, Grace,” she whispered. “It’s too terrible. Don’t you see what it means? I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!”

“That’s the funny thing about it, darling,” I said. “You’ve got to bear it. And it’s time to start.”

Her body was quiet a moment. Then she raised her head, and stood up.

“I can bear any of it, except… except that man.”

I thought of course she meant Wilkins.

“Then why don’t you tire him?” I said.

“Can I, do you think?” she asked quickly.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Then I will. I don’t want him to save me, if he has to do it at… at somebody else’s expense—somebody he knows didn’t do it, when he thinks I did.”

I stared at her as it dawned on me it was Belden Doyle she was talking about.

“And… Grace! You
must
believe me, Grace! I didn’t! I really,
really
didn’t!”

I went to the sideboard and poured her a stiff drink, brought it back and handed it to her. “Here,” I said. “Drink this, and go up and talk to him.
Tell
him you didn’t do it.”

She pushed the glass away.

“I don’t want that, and I have told Mm. He just nods, as if he were… John Barrymore, or somebody, and says ‘Of course you didn’t, my dear—but everybody
thinks
you did.’— And I can’t bear the way he says that ‘thinks’.”

“He probably hadn’t heard about the enteric capsules when you saw him,” I said, more hopefully—I hope—than I felt. “That means any one of half a dozen people could have done it.”

“But they can’t prove Randall was poisoned that way.”

“No,” I admitted. “But they can’t prove he wasn’t. And in view of the two other deaths, the assumption that he was is perfectly good.”

She looked at me for a while.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she said abruptly, “how you can get all tangled up without ever knowing it? For a long time—a year, I guess,—after I married Randall, and he was so marvelous, and all the kinks Gil had left in me were smoothing out, I kept thinking I hadn’t any right to all this. I ought to be punished, some way, for taking it… not loving him…” She drew a long breath and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

“Then that changed, and I realized all of a sudden that I did love him, in a mature, grown-up way. And when men round about who sort of go in for making love to willing ladies made love to me, because I had an older husband, I always thought it was pretty funny and explained they’d made a mistake… I decided perhaps I’d done penance enough in my old life. But I guess I hadn’t. I guess I’m just beginning… all over again. Life has a quaint way of pulling out an extra ace just after you’ve finessed a king.”

“Well,” I said, “you’d better keep Belden Doyle, my dear. He knows more of the local conventions than you do.”

She looked at me and smiled. “I’ll see.” She went out.

I could hear Mr. Doyle somewhere outside asking Wilkins, I suppose, where the hell Mrs. Nash was. He wasn’t used to being kept waiting, I imagine. I sort of wandered about the room aimlessly. I ate a couple of grapes off the elaborate arrangement in an old silver soup tureen on the serving table, and had started to eat another when I saw Wilkins in the door. I hadn’t known that his suety face could express so polite but firm a rebuff for vandalism. That’s the nice thing about colored servants, incidentally; they don’t regard their handiwork as too sacred to touch.

“I beg pardon, madame. Colonel Primrose asks you to join them in the library.”

“All right,” I said. “You might take them some whiskey and soda.”

“Thank you, madame. And madame… if I may be so bold… I shall be free here at the end of the week. I shall be wanting another situation… If you have any need for my services, or any of your friends…”

I nodded.

“I’ll keep it in mind, Wilkins.—I know several people I’d be glad to recommend you to.”

“Thank you, madame.”

“If nobody hangs you first,” I said to myself as I went through the door he held open for me. Then I turned back… just for fun.

“Oh, by the way,” I said. “Captain Lamb had a man watching the house. He saw that letter put under the door, and saw you bring it in. They… have it, now.”

I couldn’t see his face. I heard a slightly choked “Thank you, madame,” and went in to join the police force.

Colonel Primrose held a chair for me in the library there, Captain Lamb looked at me over the top of his horn-rimmed spectacles, Mr. Selman Yates the District Attorney nodded.

“Glad to see you aren’t all torn up, ma’am,” Captain Lamb said. “She was a holy terror till we showed her all her money and let her count it. We’re hanging on to it for a while. There’s any number of people walking around would cave in her skull for a tenth of it.”

“How much was it?” I asked.

“Fifteen hundred and three dollars,” Mr. Yates said. “She says it’s what she’s been saving. There’s more of it somewhere. You could tell that by the way she kept asking if that’s all we’d found.”

“Is she… locked up?”

He shook his head with a smile, seeing, I suppose, what I was thinking.

“A lot of crackpots around write letters, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Most of them send them in to the newspapers. She didn’t, of course. But don’t you worry about it. Lamb’s keeping an eye on her. Ah—there are much more important matters.”

He picked up a sheaf of papers on the desk.

“I’ve just been talking to the Commissioner,” he went on. “He’s interested in this enteric capsule business.”

He smiled suddenly.

“So am I… and so is Belden Doyle.”

He turned to Colonel Primrose.

“As I understand it, if the poison that Randall Nash took in this room was administered as it was to the dog, and to Mr. A. J. McClean, then it’s evident he took it sometime between the time he left this house, yesterday, and the time he came back.”

Colonel Primrose nodded.

“When he left here, he went to his wife’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, to that drug store, to the St. Martins’ place, to McClean’s. If he was given that delayed-action poison, and he did not take it in the house here—and there’d seem to be no point in his doing so—then the
obvious
people who could have given it to him are Angus Nash, Mr. or Mrs. St. Martin, A. J. McClean, and the butler Wilkins.”

He looked up from the typed notes. Colonel Primrose was looking at me with a quizzical smile. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Thought of something?”

I shook my head. “Just that the St. Martins are leaving in the morning.”

“They’ve changed their plans,” Mr. Yates said.

I said “Oh.”

He went on deliberately.

“We happen to know definitely that A. J. McClean
was
poisoned by means of enteric capsules. In some cases— Randall Nash’s, unfortunately—it’s not possible to tell; post mortem doesn’t detect. In Mr. McClean’s case, we know. And there’s no getting away from the fact that the
obvious
persons who could have given him that poison, at the correct time, are those who were here this afternoon at tea. Iris Nash, Lowell Nash, Angus Nash; Mrs. St. Martin; Mr. Trevor (Mac) McClean; Stephen Donaldson; the butler Wilkins.

“Well, it’s like the old game of cancelling names. There are just three people in both lists. Edith St. Martin, Angus Nash, Wilkins.”

He stopped for a moment, staring down at the typed papers on the desk in front of him.

“And that doesn’t make sense, to my mind, Colonel. You get down immediately to Angus Nash. I’d say you could rule out the St. Martin tribe just offhand. Neither of them could keep an idea in his head long enough to follow it around the block. Unless you’re springing another motive on us…”

He looked at the blank Buddha face of Sergeant Buck’s chief. Colonel Primrose shook his head.

“Randall Nash’s cash,” he said. “I see no other motive.”

Yates nodded.

“I agree. And God knows he’d never have trusted that male flyweight with it, or that female flyweight either. That leaves Wilkins, and Randall Nash’s son. And they’re out too, to my mind. We’ve not been able, so far, to find any sign of a connection between Wilkins and Nash prior to a few months ago. It seems just silly to think he would be the illicit custodian of a large sum of money. But Angus Nash is still more out. He and his father fought like wild boars every time they met, which I understand was seldom.”

“That quarrelling could have been a blind,” Captain Lamb said suddenly.

The Assistant District Attorney nodded his head, without much conviction. I couldn’t help shaking mine. If it was a blind, it was the very best blind I’d ever seen.