The Simple Way of Poison (8 page)

And that of course was the point things had got to downstairs—not in so many words, as the men down there were all being strictly non-committal. They had put Iris and Mac out of the library and had closed the door. I could hear their voices as Steve Donaldson and I came down the stairs after the doctor had left and Lowell was asleep, a yellow satin coverlet thrown over her exotic red figure on the white curtained bed.

Iris and Mac were in the drawing room, Iris sitting erect and detached on the gold damask sofa by the fire, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like someone finding herself alone suddenly in a terrible wasted land, drawing into herself, building up an impenetrable wall, remote and untouchable. Mac on the other hand was pacing back and forth like a caged animal, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, his black tie slightly cock-eyed, distressed and a little sore too. He gave Steve what my younger kid would call a dirty look, and so should I for want of a better word, and looked appealingly at me. I nodded reassuringly. He blew his nose hard, picked up the decanter and poured himself a drink. Just as he put his thumb on the trigger of the syphon Captain Lamb appeared in the door.

He came quickly across the room as he saw what Mac was doing.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have to take that along. Is this the setup your husband had on the desk when you came in, Mrs. Nash?”

“Except that the syphon was empty,” Iris said calmly. “I rinsed it out, as much as you can do without taking it apart. I filled it with water from the pantry faucet and recharged it.”

Captain Lamb picked it up. It was one of those patent arrangements—dark blue with a yellow stripe round its shoulder, chromium cap and trigger. Iris was looking at it. Her eyes shifted to the decanter on the low table. Captain Lamb picked it up, took Mac’s drink out of his hands and poured it back into the decanter.

“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

Mac looked startled. “You—”

“All the rest of us have been drinking it,” Steve Donaldson said evenly. “It seems to me you fellows are jumping to some pretty quick conclusions.”

He was repeating, curiously enough, Colonel Primrose’s exact admonition to him.

Captain Lamb looked at him steadily. “We aren’t jumping to any conclusions. We are following our regular routine in cases where the cause of death is unknown.”

It sounded like a sentence from the Coroner’s Act, or something.

“Look,” Mac said suddenly. “He’s been acting darned queer lately, if you ask me. Maybe he… killed himself. He—”

Captain Lamb nodded. “That’s one of the possibilities we have to consider.”

“I think you can save yourselves that trouble,” Iris said quietly. “My husband wouldn’t possibly have committed suicide.—But the doctors have told him for years that he would kill himself if he didn’t stop drinking. Dr. Clem Lewis at Johns Hopkins told him so again last month. I advise you to see him.”

Captain Lamb nodded and wrote the name down in his notebook. He took the decanter and syphon. Mac and Steve and I watched him cross the room and go out into the hall, closing the door behind him. Iris was staring into the fire, her hands clenching the edge of the sofa until her knuckles stood out shiny white. Suddenly she got up and stood facing us, her face white and drawn under the burnished copper of her bright hair. She wanted to speak. I thought she was going to, but she didn’t. She looked first at Mac, then at Stephen Donaldson, and turned back to the fire. I looked at Steve. His face was drawn. He was staring at her back as she stood there, the flames licking up the dry log on either side of her, lighting up the cloth of gold tissue of her slim sheathed body, bare to the waist in back, her smooth skin only a paler gold than her gown.

“Iris,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to alarm you, but—”

She turned, a quick smile in her green eyes.

“I know. You think I ought to get a lawyer.”

The smile spread to her red lips. “—A first-rate criminal lawyer,” she added coolly.

Steve’s face darkened.

“I’m only—”

She interrupted him. “I know, Steve—thanks! You’re probably right. I can see, thanks to—”

She paused. She was going to say “Lowell,” I thought, but she changed it.

“Thanks to Captain Lamb—that I’m going to need one. And now, if you don’t mind… and if it’s all right with the police… I’d like to be alone.—Except you, Grace,—do you mind staying?”

Steve flushed again, started to speak, turned brusquely and went out. Mac came over and held out his hand.

“Gee, Iris,” he said lamely. “—If there’s anything I can do…”

She smiled.

“Thanks, Mac. You sort of stand by—Lowell will want you, a little later.”

He looked grateful, and moistened his lips. But after all there wasn’t very much that anybody a great deal more articulate than Mac could have said. I followed him over to the door and held it while he went out. One of Lamb’s men was coming down the stairs. He had a small brown bottle in his hand. I don’t think he liked my looks, for some reason, for he put the bottle behind him quickly, narrowing his eyes the way Sergeant Buck does when he looks at me, and kept his gaze fixed on me until I’d closed the drawing room door. I had a numb cold feeling in the pit of my stomach as I turned back to Iris.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Turn off the lights on that tree, will you?” she said suddenly. Her voice sounded like tearing silk. “They’ll drive me out of my mind.”

I hadn’t noticed they were on. I unscrewed two or three so they all went out.

“You’d better hang on to it,” I said. “You’re going to need it.”

“I know I am.” She laughed with sudden bitterness. “Where do you get first-rate criminal lawyers?” she asked, in a caught strangled voice.

“I wouldn’t know. Why didn’t you ask Steve?”

She shook her head. “No, darling.”

Her green eyes met mine squarely. “He thinks I poisoned Randall.—Do you, Grace?”

“I’d rather wait and see if he
was
poisoned, first,” I said, in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage. “And I’ll tell you.”

She nodded calmly. Then we were quiet. Out in the hall we could hear the slow labored tread of men carrying a heavy load. I glanced quickly at her. She was standing there in front of the fire, her eyes widened, lips parted. She bent her head and held it there until the door closed and we heard a motor start, whirring in the silent night. I saw the tears on her face as she turned and buried her head in her arms on the carved mantel, her bare pale gold shoulders quivering. I put my handkerchief in her hand, remembering that she had wiped up the spot on the mahogany surface of the desk with hers.

The front door opened and closed again, and the door behind us opened. Colonel Primrose came in. He stood there a moment, his hand on the silver knob, looking at Iris. At the first sound of the opening door she had raised her head and dried her eyes. When she turned she was in complete control of herself again. I saw the guarded admiration in Colonel Primrose’s eyes as he hesitated, changing his tack, plainly, now that he saw her away from Lowell and the rest of them.

“Sit down, Iris,” he said quietly. “You too, Mrs. Latham. I want to talk to you both.”

I sat down. Iris did not move. Colonel Primrose glanced up at her, cocking his head down and around with a quizzical flicker in his eyes.

“I’m not entirely unofficial, Iris,” he said steadily.

She nodded.

“I know you’re not—and that’s precisely the point, Colonel Primrose. I’ve been advised this evening to get a first-rate criminal lawyer. I think—if you don’t mind—that’s what I’ll do. And… before I talk to anyone—even remotely official.”

Colonel Primrose sat down. He looked up at her with sharp steady appraisal.

“It’s entirely up to you, my dear.—I hadn’t, somehow, expected you to take that attitude.”

Their eyes met evenly.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.”

He sat down, leaning back in the cherry damask fireside chair without taking his eyes off hers.

“Possibly I’m not quite clear. I’d assumed that if, by any change, Randall’s death should turn out not to be natural, you’d be the first person who’d want it properly settled.”

He hesitated an instant and went coolly on.

“I know, of course, it’s the fashion to assume the police are not only fools, but scoundrels who try to hang the first person they lay eyes on.”

Iris moved abruptly, her face suddenly hard.

“That’s quite false,” Colonel Primrose went on placidly. “When they do happen to hang the first person they lay eyes on, it’s because that person is guilty. However.”

He got up.

“I want to tell you—for your own information—what the situation appears to be, on the face of it. You’d better count on the fact that Randall was poisoned. They’ll know definitely in the morning.”

He hesitated a moment, looking steadily at her, and went calmly on.

“You were presumably the last person in the house this evening. When we came back you went into the library, and destroyed what was probably direct evidence as to the means of Randall’s death. Those are two very serious points that you’ll be called on to answer when the District Attorney’s office gets around to it.”

He moved toward the door.

“If there’s anything I can do to help you at all, I hope you’ll call on me.”

He glanced at me. “I assume you’re staying here until morning, Mrs. Latham.”

I nodded furiously. I had never heard anything so brutal in my life… or seen anything so marvelous as the way Iris Nash took it squarely on the chin without a quiver.

We heard him go out and close the door behind him.

“Well,” I said, “that’s that.”

She sat down as suddenly as if someone had knocked her feet out from under her. I went over beside her. She gripped my hand. Her own was ice-cold. Her whole body was trembling like a blade of grass.

She closed her eyes.

“I’m afraid, Grace,” she whispered suddenly, trembling uncontrollably. “Horribly, horribly afraid!”

I sat there stupidly, saying nothing. I couldn’t think of anything at all to say. Then quite suddenly she opened her eyes and looked around at me. “Will you do something for me, Grace?”

“Surely,” I said. “What is it?”

“Call up the Emergency Hospital and find out how Angie’s mother is. I’ve
got
to know.”

I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was twenty minutes past five.

“Hospitals carry on all night, I suppose,” I said, and got up. Then I came to a dead stop.

“There’s a phone in the pantry,” she said quickly.

The pantry light was still on. There was a tray of ice cubes in the sink, half melted where they’d been left and forgotten. Iris’s handkerchief was on the shelf above it. It was quite dry. I put it in the pocket of my lace jacket to give her, picked up the phone book and dialed the hospital number.

“Can you tell me how Mrs. Marie Lowell Nash is this morning?” I asked, trying to sound as casual about calling it morning as if I was just getting out the mop to start the day’s work instead of still being in a lace evening gown and silver sandals.

A crisp efficient voice answered me, with just a hint of surprise.

“Who is calling, please?”

“Mrs. Nash’s former husband’s home,” I said, hoping that way to get something more definite than the usual “She’s doing very nicely, thank you.”

And I did. The voice hesitated, and spoke quietly.

“I’m sorry—Mrs. Nash died this morning at twenty-five minutes past one. Her son has been notified.”

I stared stupidly into the wall, the telephone still in my hand, the dial tone zinging in my ear. Marie Nash dead… It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be. But it was. When at last I put down the phone and turned to go back into the drawing room, Iris Nash was in the door looking at me. She knew instantly, without my saying a word.

“Poor Angie,” she said softly.

“You’d better go to bed for a couple of hours,” I said. It seemed to me—and in spite of the Fifth Commandment—that Angie’s difficulties were definitely behind him, Iris’s were just beginning.

She shook her head, “I don’t want to lie down.”

We went back toward the drawing room.

“You’ll think I’m pretty ghastly, I suppose. Maybe it’s just the effect of shock and I’ll come out of it tomorrow. But right now I don’t feel any of the things I know I ought to feel. All I really feel is the almost unbearable relief of having Lowell out of my sight, and… and Randall.”

“Look, darling,” I said. “I know—but there are a lot of things you can’t say… not out loud, you know.”

“I know.”

She drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.

“But I’ve got to tell you this. I’ve never told anybody—not even myself, really. I only knew it tonight, while I was waiting for Randall to come home.”

She looked at me with wide open eyes, like a child.

“I couldn’t have carried on here another day, Grace. I couldn’t have come into this house tonight, by myself. My father drank too much. I just couldn’t have stood it any longer.”

She turned away with a faint sudden smile on her lips.

“I would have left before, except—and you’ll think this is pretty funny—I couldn’t bear to leave Lowell alone here with him. That and another reason that doesn’t matter now.”

She sat down and spread her hands out before the dying fire.

“I don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow, or next month, but right now I feel just as if I’d been struggling through a horrible nightmare, and had waked up suddenly and found… everything quite sane and lovely again.”

“Look here,” I said. “I’m sure you’d better get a lawyer. I’m going to call up a man I know and find out who to get. You stay here.”

She nodded. I went out into the pantry again and closed the door. Then, with only a very faint qualm, I dialed Colonel Primrose.

When he answered I said, “Tell me who to get for Iris.”

I’m sure he hadn’t been asleep, that he knew I’d call and had just been waiting.

“Call Belden Doyle in New York in the morning,” he said calmly. “I’ll get in touch with him. He’ll be expecting you. Now you go to bed, both of you.”