The Simple Way of Poison (32 page)

“Say, Mrs. Latham, why don’t you call Iris and ask her to come over? She must be pretty sunk, over there all alone.—If the baby panda here’ll keep her shirt on.”

Lowell didn’t look around. “Sure, go on,” she said. “Ask her.”

But I could see her drawing into herself. I didn’t know then that the drive we had taken, the hour and ten minutes during which she hadn’t opened her mouth or made any sign she was thinking or feeling, had been a long long trek for her through the wilderness of indecision… with all the instruments of revenge lying within her grasp, to seize upon—or to cast away. If I’d known that I still would not have known what path out of her wilderness she had chosen. But I could have guessed easily enough, heaven knows, from the set of her jaw and the tilt of her head, and the steadfast way she avoided Steve’s all unconscious eye and the way she played up to Mac all of a sudden.

Then Iris came, with a new radiance—subdued but still so electric that everything in the room was instantly keyed up to the most extraordinary degree. She didn’t look at Steve, and I saw the dogged aching look in his eye as he leaned down and knocked out his pipe on the polished fire irons to keep from looking at her. We all sat there, watching Mac and Lowell undeck the Christmas tree, nobody saying much of anything, while Angie fiddled at the radio in the corner. And suddenly I heard Lowell say, “All right, now give me the big blue one, up there,”… and all of a sudden it flashed into my mind with the most astonishing clarity that we’d been through all this before.

For a moment I confused it with that psychological phenomenon we all experience, in which it seems that one has been in this place, hearing precisely this conversation, doing precisely these things, yet knowing of course that it isn’t true, that one has never been there or heard that conversation, no matter how real it may seem. Then I realized that this wasn’t any psychological phenomenon, that we had been in precisely this pattern, all of us, before… except that like Alice Through the Looking Glass it was just backward. It was on my side of the garden wall, not the Nashes’. We were untrimming the Christmas tree, not trimming it. Lowell was asking Mac to hand the blue ball down to her, not to put it up… and I thought suddenly that they realized it too, because she took the gold ball he handed her and they looked at each other, rather surprised.

In a moment now Mac is going to step back, I thought, and Senator McGilvray’s ghost is going to squeal, and Randall Nash’s ghost is going to come in the door and whisper the story of the vault so that Iris and Steve Donaldson will have to listen to it…

Then quite suddenly I realized that my head ached and that I was quite giddy, as if I was going to faint, and that it was Colonel Primrose standing in the door, not Randall Nash, and Sergeant Buck there with the two syphons, not Wilkins and me seeing double. Colonel Primrose was looking at Lowell. It came to me abruptly then that he had been watching her all this time; he hadn’t taken his mind or his eyes off her since they had begun to dismantle the tree.

Just then Lilac came in, and all this oddly backward scene was shattered. “Mis’ St. Mahtin, she’s at the doah—says can she come in?”

The golden ball in Lowell’s hand dropped to the floor, splintering like the crashing of a thousand dainty silver cymbals. It wasn’t Lowell that spoke, it was Angie. “Can’t somebody give that woman a tent so she can stay in it?”

Edith came in.

“Oh Grace, your poor precious head—my dear, does it ache awfully? Hello, everybody, isn’t it funny you’re all over here. I went to see Iris and Wilkins said you were all here.— Iris, I hope you’re not going to be furious with me, but Wilkins is such a pet, he said you were letting him out at the end of the week, I do hope you won’t mind my taking him on.”

“I think it’s fine,” Iris said.

Lowell turned around for an instant. “Do you need him to keep an eye on dear Gilbert?” she asked sweetly. “They say he’s awfully good at that sort of thing.”

She looked across at Iris. Iris smiled. And Lowell smiled too, quite suddenly, and then, for some utterly incredible and incomprehensible reason, they both laughed… for the first time I’d heard either of them laugh, except with dreadful bitterness, since I’d come home from Nassau.

Then Lowell looked away, and her eyes happened on Steve Donaldson, watching Iris like a hungry dog watching a bone he knows he can’t have, and the magic moment was gone. Her hard brittle little mask slipped back into place. She turned back to the tree and started singing, perversely, to the effect that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one, and stopped abruptly when Angie said to shut up for cripe’s sake.

Through all this Colonel Primrose was standing in the doorway, with Sergeant Buck behind him, something in the expression in his sharp black eyes so horribly, grimly depressing that I thought I couldn’t endure it another second. I saw Sergeant Buck looking at Iris. Colonel Primrose said, “Iris, where is Belden Doyle?”

She took a quick breath.

“He’s gone back to New York… for good,” she said. “He… still thinks I murdered my husband.”

“I thought so too,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “It’s what we were meant to think, from the beginning. I happen to know now that you didn’t. That I happen to know that is the oddest and sheerest chance.”

He looked around the silent room, and went on slowly.

“And yet I know that’s not true. It isn’t chance that brings the murderer to book. It isn’t chance, those infinitesimal things that ninety-nine murderers out of a hundred do that trip them up. Call it God, Fate, Necessity… something… whatever it was that made the lime eat every shred of the pajamas that Dr. Crippen wrapped the body of his poisoned wife in, except the tiny merchant’s label that sent him to the gallows.”

We sat there rigidly silent, not daring to look at each other, not knowing where to look. In the periphery of my awareness I knew that Lowell had moved, that she was holding on to the back of the chair she’d been piling the Christmas ornaments in, her hands ivory-white against the dark wood.

“Something of that sort was working in this case… something the murderer of these people knew, and in another sense could never know… not to be sure of.”

Angus Nash had turned away from the radio. He was still sitting there on the floor, marking the design in my great-grandmother’s aubusson carpet with his thumb nail, apparently absorbed in the process.

“Last night, when three women were together in that house across there, one watching the other two, I realized the possibility that we had what might be called a conspiracy on our hands. I take it you all know that Randall Nash hated his first wife with bitter intensity, compounded out of outraged pride and terrible resentment of a woman’s demanding a pound of flesh she had no need of. That feeling was superposed on a temperament that had to throw back only a century and a half to come to an ancestor who could bury three people to die a slow anguished death in an underground vault. So Randall Nash could hate, and hate he did… though he could hardly do more than see that Marie Nash would never get a penny of his money, and bring his daughter up to hate her too. He failed in that, because his daughter turned to her mother, and I suppose found a sort of comfort there that nature allows all human beings, no matter how shallow the source.”

Lowell’s eyes rested steadily on the brightly colored ornaments in the chair.

“So Randall Nash put his money where Marie could not get it. Marie died… and the custodian of that money had come to the simple decision that he did not care to return it. Randall Nash died, in a sense because he had tempted another human being too far, even though he had figured out, very carefully, that he was not tempting anyone. Which was the second mistake he made about his daughter.”

Angus Nash had quit marking out the pattern in the carpet, but he had not raised his eyes.

“Randall Nash had taken one step to protect himself. He had written a letter, or obtained a receipt, that stated, naturally, who the person was who held his money for him. I held that letter for three years. He got it from me on the evening of the 28th—it was a demented thing for him to do, of course, till he’d got the money, but he was arrogant and cocksure and had no suspicions—and came on to this house. There was a possibility, in the mind of someone, that he had left it here.— So it occurred to me last night, with those three women together there, in the Nash drawing room, that perhaps one of them was keeping an eye on the other two… so that a man could be free to come here, and try desperately to find that letter, left here perhaps by Randall Nash, that put the finger on him. If it was here, if he did find it—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Chance, if you will, or Fate, or God, had already put the finger on him.

“I’m not going to show you how each of you in turn came up, and how we rejected each of you. Each, I suppose, in his own mind, has done that for all the others. I don’t know how much information you may have… such for instance as that next to A. J. McClean, to whom Randall Nash went originally with his proposition, the person whose financial sense he had the most respect for—in spite of the smoke screen she puts up constantly—was Edith St. Martin.”

I looked at Edith. Her face was drawn and haggard. The thin line around her throat where the plastic surgeon had done his job was livid red… almost, I thought with a shudder, as if the hangman’s rope had already bitten there.

“He did not, however, have the same respect for her sense of human values—rightly or wrongly. And, of course, he was laboring under the bitter delusion that his wife was in love with Edith St. Martin’s husband. That delusion was fostered and fed by the mad letters of a jealous half-mad woman, and the dishonest spying and reporting of an unscrupulous and complaisant tool. I think you all understand that Iris Nash was an innocent victim in all this.”

Then why, I thought painfully, had she gone to Lavinia?

Colonel Primrose looked at me, smiling faintly, and turned to the doorway then as if he had read my mind.

“You have something to give Mrs. Nash, I believe, Sergeant?”

It was the only time in my life I had ever seen such great fissures rent in the solid granite front of Sergeant Buck’s frozen pan. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and turned a slow dull red.

“Let’s have it, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Buck cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. He reached silently in his pocket, brought out a stamped envelope, and handed it to Colonel Primrose. Colonel Primrose crossed the room and gave it to Iris.

“I don’t know whether you’d care to say what’s in this,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to.”

She opened it, and took out three ragged filthy envelopes. She got up and went to the fire place, paused there and tinned toward Lowell and Angus.

“It’s very simple,” she said. “A reporter who covers M Street found out that Lavinia had… what he thought was a swell human interest story. For a couple of years he’s been trying to get these letters from her. They are letters your father wrote Lavinia when she was young… and he was young. She wouldn’t give them up, but when Randall… died, he offered her what was a lot of money, to her, for them, and she telephoned me she was selling them, unless I came to terms. I tried to get them, twice, and here they are. I thought that he—and you and I, Lowell, who cared the most for him—and you, Angus, wouldn’t want them-glaring out from the pages of a Sunday supplement.”

She tossed them down into the flames, and turned to Sergeant Buck. “Thank you!” she said softly.

Sergeant Buck turned a still deeper brick-red. “Okay, miss,” he said.

Colonel Primrose smiled a little.

“To get back to the night of the 29th, when Randall Nash was poisoned. The custodian of his money had seen, as soon as he knew how desperately ill Marie Nash was, that the financial arrangement was through. He had made up his mind before, possibly a long time before, that he was not going to return Randall Nash’s money, and he had no doubt planned Randall Nash’s death, carefully and… with a kind of cold, shrewd cunning. From Christmas day, perhaps even earlier, he had planned it exactly, and in detail.—The first step in his plan was to kill Lowell’s dog. It had two reasons. The first: to point the subsequent murder of Randall—with Lowell’s expert and ungrudging assistance—to Iris Nash. The second: to try out the salol, which could be used if it turned out to be the best way of doing that crime to bring it to Iris’s door.

“The night of the Assembly, the 29th, it was put directly up to him. He had, I am sure, talked with Randall; he knew, I’m also sure, that Randall had got that letter from me. He knew Marie Nash was dying. He knew Randall Nash could not help but drink if liquor was near him. He knew that on that night everybody was to be away from the house. He knew Randall would probably be in no mood, or in no condition, to go to the Assembly himself.”

Colonel Primrose paused, looking from face to face in the silent room with a kind of grim urbanity.

“He knew one other thing, too. He knew that Lowell had given Randall a patent soda syphon as a Christmas present.”

My eyes were drawn irresistibly to the two that Sergeant Buck was again holding in his two great hands.

Colonel Primrose glanced around at them himself.

“They’re made by thousands, of course, in a few simple patterns, and those in each pattern are identical. And on the night of the 29th the murderer came to the house with a syphon he had already prepared, containing a small amount of charged water and a fatal amount of cyanide of potassium, and calmly substituted it for the one that Iris had prepared for her guests. He put it on a tray on Randall Nash’s desk, with a glass and a decanter, knowing that Randall could not resist it. And he went away, taking the other syphon with him, leaving the door unlocked because he could not afford to be seen going down those steps and he did not dare to stop outside there, even for so short a time.”

I looked at Lowell. She was hardly breathing, still staring down at the chair, her face bloodless and set, not with fear so much as with a sense of inexorable inevitability.

“Well, it was a terrible set-up… for Iris, of course, as it was planned to be. As you all know, it pointed—everything pointed—directly to her. She admitted, freely—and erroneously, as it happened—that she had charged that syphon herself; and with her actions when we came back from the Assembly that night, perfectly natural but fitting with deadly preciseness into a pattern of apparent overwhelming guilt, it appeared irresistibly that she had poisoned Randall Nash. If it had not been for a blunder of the most unusual sort on the part of the actual poisoner, a blunder that only one person out of ten thousand could make… that the poisoner does not yet even know he did make… then Iris’s act of sending Belden Doyle back to New York might easily have been a folly that would have convicted her of the murder of her husband and A. J. McClean.—Fortunately for her, and for all of us, that blunder
was
made.”