The Murder of a Fifth Columnist
“LESLIE FORD AT HER BEST”
—NEW YORK TIMES
“Plot with a double bounce, urbane people, skillful suspense. A ride on silk”
—SATURDAY REVIEW
“A swift, smart, exciting mystery romance that has everything you need for entertainment”
—BOOKS
“Wonderful reading”
—Philadelphia Enquirer
Leslie Ford mysteries available in Popular Library editions:
ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT
THREE BRIGHT PEBBLES
WASHINGTON WHISPERS MURDER
THE BAHAMAS MURDER CASE
THE PHILADELPHIA MURDER STORY
MURDER IS THE PAY-OFF
BY THE WATCHMAN’S CLOCK
MURDER IN MARYLAND
RENO RENDEZVOUS
INVITATION TO MURDER
MURDER COMES TO EDEN
ROAD TO FOLLY
THE GIRL FROM THE MIMOSA CLUB
THE DEVIL’S STRONGHOLD
ALL FOR THE LOVE OF A LADY
BURN FOREVER
HONOLULU MURDERS
All POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the POPULAR LIBRARY Editorial Board and represent titles by the world’s greatest authors.
POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright, 1940, 1941, by Leslie Ford
Published by arrangement with Charles Scribner’s Sons
Scribner’s edition published in July, 1941
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
1
It was Pete Hamilton who first called the great J. Corliss Marshall the Fifth Columnist. It was just a sardonic crack that Pete took once, talking to three other Washington columnists when Corliss walked into a cocktail party at the French Embassy before Vichy. But it stuck like grim death to a dead nigger—largely, I suppose, because everybody liked Pete Hamilton, and I don’t know anybody who ever really liked Corliss Marshall.
The two of them, naturally, didn’t like each other, but everybody knew that. It was one of those secrets that anyone who read their syndicated columns (some millions of people did) could see without having to be told. “Marshalling the Facts” in column one, and “The Capitol Calling” in column six—Monday, Wednesday and Friday in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States—couldn’t have been farther apart if one was written at the North Pole and the other in Little America, instead of both of them a stone’s throw from Lafayette Square in front of the White House.
But up to the time Pete said, “Here’s the Fifth Columnist— I thought I smelled something,” and walked out of the room, their status had been one of non-belligerency, punctuated by occasional aerial attacks in the Press Club bar. They were kept from the public—except that portion of it who knew what Larry Villiers meant when his “Shall We Join the Ladies?” asked “What w. k. columnist marshalled his beer mug and launched an aerial Blitzkrieg at whose head at the Press Club last night?” It was also “Shall We Join the Ladies?” that reported the Fifth Columnist incident, which it followed up a week later with the information that a certain w. k. columnist had had two hundred and fourteen cancellations, and had had to hire an extra secretary to answer the bombardment of I-always-suspected-you-were-a-member-of-the-Fifth-Column letters that poured in from all over the country. “There isn’t,” said “Shall We Join the Ladies?”, “any actual evidence that
we
know that the columnist in question is a member of a Fifth Column. On the other hand,
we’re
constantly surprised at how many things we don’t know.” That wasn’t any help—as indeed it wasn’t intended to be—and Corliss Marshall made it worse trying to make it better by explaining in his column that it was just one of those
jeux d’esprit.
That alarmed a lot of people who hadn’t heard about it in the first place, and convinced a good many who didn’t quite know what a
jeu d’esprit
was that Corliss Marshall was anti-Semitic.
After all, it would have been hard to keep the two of them separated, though Corliss Marshall did his best by taking a trip to South America and marshalling his facts from there for a while.
The reason that I, Grace Latham, widow by act of God and resident of Georgetown by act of my parents in buying a house there when I was born, shortly after the turn of the century, knew anything more about it than I read in the papers was that my friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), is a member of the Press Club and knew both of them very well. In fact it was Colonel Primrose who persuaded Corliss to go to South America. It was ostensibly because he needed the rest—but since the Colonel’s ostensible motives usually conceal others not so ostensible, I suspected it strongly.
If Corliss hadn’t gone to South America, however, I imagine more people around Washington would have suspected—though some did—that Pete Hamilton was responsible for his violent death. In general there was the impression that Time Heals All, and that two months is a considerable time-span on the quicksand shores of the Potomac, where any autobiography can fairly be entitled “Out, Out, Brief Candle.” So most people assumed—if they thought about it—that it would take at least more than forty-eight hours after Corliss’s return for the old feud to get back to blood-letting proportions.—That, and the fact that a bludgeon was more Pete’s style than a stiletto.
People don’t, of course, normally have either bludgeons or ornamental stilettos lying loose on their tables around Washington… or if they do, they don’t usually have a columnist to call attention to them, as Mrs. Addison Sherwood had on this occasion. “I wonder,” Larry Villiers wrote in “Shall We Join the Ladies?”, “when I see lovely creatures examining the jeweled dagger a certain charming woman uses to open her ever-growing stack of invitations, whether they’re thinking how beautifully decorative it is, or how neatly lethal it could—perchance—be.” However, I suppose it’s fair enough to assume that even among civilized people a thin blade of steel—however decorative—doesn’t really need a columnist to suggest its original purpose.
That piece of Larry’s was some time before the Tuesday night the whole thing happened. I call it the whole thing because I don’t know what else to call it. It was fantastic from the beginning, or would have been anywhere except in Washington, or at any time here before now, when things we’ve always thought fantastic seem to have become normal and have a kind of horrible validity. And I’m not thinking about the end of it so much as the beginning that made Sylvia Peele point out in her script that the party could only have happened in Washington. It didn’t get into her column, because her editor blue-penciled it. “It’s all right to be disillusioned, but you can’t be disillusioning,” he said.
It was about eight o’clock on Tuesday that I went around to Mrs. Addison Sherwood’s apartment in the Randolph-Lee. Anyone who’s been to Washington knows that astonishing place, sticking up over Rock Creek between the Shoreham and the Wardman-Park—a trinity that the Aztecs would have been proud to build, though not many of Washington’s so-called cave dwellers live in them. I was living in it myself, because I’d rented my Georgetown house for the winter to Bliss Thatcher for much more than the dollar a year that he got for being on the Defense Council, so I could go to New York for Christmas and to Guatemala for a couple of months afterwards. I’d found Mrs. Sherwood’s big engraved invitation in my mail box three days after I’d turned the house, including Lilac my cook and Sheila my Irish, setter, over for defense and taken up my temporary quarters.
I was puzzled about why she’d asked me. Extra women are a drug on the market in Washington. I’d sometimes found that such invitations were just a bait to get Colonel Primrose to the party too, but Colonel Primrose and his self-styled “functotum” Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, also 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), were out of town on one of their again ostensible vacations that had become pretty frequent since the Department of Justice activities had expanded, and they weren’t expected back, so I thought that probably wasn’t the reason. And the only thing that made me feel there must be a reason, I suppose, was that the second night I was at the Randolph-Lee, Mrs. Addison Sherwood and I had gone up on the elevator together—my apartment’s on the same floor as part of hers—and she hadn’t recognized me. I wasn’t really surprised at that, since I’d only met her once, at lunch somewhere, and seen her across crowded rooms, until I got her dinner invitation next morning. That rather interested me, and I’d probably have gone anyway, because when the society columns, which always had her name in them somewhere, gave lists of her guests they were usually interesting people.
When I pressed the bell at her door a bald-headed butler who looked as if he’d been carved out of a firm pinkish leaf of lard let me in, and indicated a wrought-iron staircase that looked like a prop in a stage set of a deluxe duplex penthouse on Park Avenue. It opened up beside a passage leading from the corridor to a room obviously used for informal entertaining. Through the door to my left I could hear voices, and I started to go in. Then I glanced up the stairs.
Sylvia Peele was coming down—and that was a little like a stage set too. She was lovely, with a short-sleeved frock of pale pinkish-brown chiffon that billowed like a cloud of smoke from a tight-fitting bodice, and she looked her usual vague and open-eyed and expressionless self at first, so that, again like a stage play, I got the impression that when she spoke I’d begin to know what everything was all about.
“Oh,” she said. She came down a few steps and said “Oh,” again. She needn’t have added, “I didn’t know you were coming,” but she did. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
She was looking at me blankly still, but at the same time with an odd kind of almost professional interest. The suet butler stood a moment, and then, leaving us to get in by ourselves, went around the stairs and disappeared about his business.
Sylvia came on down. “What are you here for, do you suppose?” she inquired coolly.
“I’ve wondered myself,” I said.
“I’ll bet I can guess. Where’s Colonel Primrose, and his iron cross?”
“I don’t think Sergeant Buck’s as much of a cross as Colonel Primrose pretends,” I said—though why, after all I’ve put up with at the hands of that man, with his odd obsession that I’m trying to marry his Colonel, I should have leapt so instantly to his defense is beyond me. “Anyway, they’re taking their ease at Virginia Beach, or somewhere.”
“I’ll bet,” Sylvia said. “Like the big G-man playing around night clubs—just for fun. But don’t tell me if you don’t want to. When are you and the Colonel middle-aisling it, by the way?”
I don’t know why that’s an expression that makes me see a mild shade of red, but it is.
“The point has never come up, dear,” I said. “So far as I know, you and Sergeant Buck are the only people it’s ever occurred to. And I’m quite sure Mrs. Sherwood hasn’t ever heard about it.”
Sylvia smiled faintly.
“That’s not quite what I meant,” she said. “Well, I’m just trying to decide whether I’ve got a frightful headache right now, or wait till just before dessert. They say she has a wonderful cook.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Take a look. I haven’t seen so many people I don’t like in one place for a long, long time.”
I went up beside her. A mirror on the wall reflected another mirror over the fireplace inside. I saw a number of people in there, some of whom I knew.