The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (7 page)

I got up and we went out, leaving the girl standing there looking down at Bliss Thatcher’s photograph. At the corner of the iron stair rail, Sylvia turned and looked back. Then she looked rather oddly at me.

“If her name’s Barbara, why does she have ‘E. A. S.’ on her belt buckle instead of ‘B. A. S.,’ do you suppose, darling?” she asked calmly.

I didn’t say anything for an instant. Ruth Sherwood had made a mistake. On the spur of the moment, with her guests lined up behind her in the hall, she’d taken the “B” of Betty instead of the “E” of Elizabeth. I suddenly remembered Colonel Primrose telling me once an axiom of the famous German, Grolz, one of the first scientific criminologists—in taking an alias the criminal almost invariably keeps his own initials.

“Maybe she borrowed the buckle,” I said.

“And why doesn’t she like Bliss Thatcher’s portrait on the table by the chaise longue?” Sylvia inquired sweetly. “And why did she pretend she’d left a book in there? That same book was in the same spot before she came.”

“You’d better exert your powers on Corliss Marshall, Mrs. Holmes,” I remarked. “There he is now.”

We went on down the stairs.

“Just forget what I told you, will you?” Sylvia said coolly. “I must have been upset.”

I wanted to say, “Yes—if you’ll forget about the ‘E. A. S.’ and Bliss Thatcher’s picture,” but I didn’t dare make it seem that important. I said, “Surely. I’ll be glad to.”

The men were straggling across from the dining room, Delvalle and Larry Villiers in front. Pete and Kurt Hofmann came after them, turning to exchange some remark with Sam Wharton. Bliss Thatcher and Corliss Marshall were still back by the dining-room door, standing there talking quietly. I could feel Sylvia’s quick glance, in odd contrast with her cool request that I forget what she’d said.

Corliss’s front gave one a totally different impression from his back. His face was suave and moonlike, and below his sharp hawk’s nose and extraordinarily long, almost pendulous upper lip the folds of flesh from years of excellent dining-out fitted in his wing collar as if it were a cradle. If anyone had to put a single word to the quality of that face I should think arrogance would be it. It wasn’t for nothing that his column so frequently started with “I, Corliss Marshall…” and that his favorite method of conducting it was in imaginary dialogues in which Corliss Marshall practically took the dialectical pants off his opponents. Nevertheless, I thought suddenly—arrogance or no arrogance—Corliss Marshall had never been known to make a mistake about a fact. I wondered if it was just possible that his hatred of Pete… But of course I had no way of knowing.

We met the others in a cluster in front of the library door. I heard Sylvia say something gay and trivial about the glass feathers on top of the lamp shades, and dropped back to join Corliss and Mr. Thatcher. The rest of them moved into the library.

“I haven’t told you how much I’m enjoying your house, Mrs. Latham,” Bliss Thatcher said.

I remember that very clearly, just as the three of us came to the door between the two glass tables.

“Hello,” he said. “Here’s a copy of that thing.”

He reached under the lamp and picked up the folded salmon-yellow oblong of paper, looked at it an instant and handed it to Corliss.

“It’s a good sample,” he said. “I wish I could analyze the technique. There’s nothing here I can say definitely is not true—and yet the impression of futility and hopelessness of our ever getting the job we’ve set out to do done is extraordinary. I
know
that the Army and Navy are not riddled with incompetency and inefficiency… and yet, when I get through reading a couple of these things, I find myself beginning to doubt it and find myself wondering what the hell’s the use of struggling. Let ’em take the whole world, us included, if they want it.”

Corliss put on his pince-nez that hung around his neck on a slightly flamboyant black ribbon, looked it over and nodded silently, and handed it back to Bliss Thatcher. Mr. Thatcher turned to put it down. I had a vague sense that something was different about the glass table there, the way you have in your own home when an object that’s brightened a particular spot has been moved in dusting and not put back. Then, as I looked down at the table again, it came into my mind instantly. The leather sheath with the jeweled stiletto hilt protruding from it that had sparkled brilliantly under the glass lamp was gone.

I realized that with a little start of dismay, even. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something, but Bliss Thatcher was speaking.

“If you’ll stop in tomorrow, Marshall, I’ll give you the figures. I’d be glad to see a piece about it.”

He’d taken my elbow and was propelling me politely through the library door, and the moment for calling their attention to it casually, without seeming to make a scene, was gone. Corliss was saying, “I’ll get away early tonight. I’ll be in first thing in the morning.—My God, it’s hot in here,” he added.

As we came in I heard Larry Villiers’ elegant voice. “What about Barbara, Ruth? Isn’t she coming down?” Larry would have called the Dowager Queen of China by her first name.

“She’s gone to bed, the little wretch,” Ruth answered, laughing. “I’d have loved for you all to meet her. Her mother’s my oldest and most intimate friend.” Which is more than most of us can say about ourselves, I remember thinking with a corner of my mind that wasn’t, like the rest of it, going around in half a dozen indecisive circles.

I didn’t know what to do. The impulse just to blurt out, “Look—somebody’s taken the jeweled stiletto off the table, and maybe one of us is going to get hurt with it, and whichever one of you has it give it up instantly,” was almost overwhelming. My reason kept saying, “Don’t be a hysterical fool. Maybe Ruth brought it in here to show some one while you were upstairs, and it’s on the mantel or on the desk in plain sight. If you call attention to it, everybody will know what’s in your mind, and Larry Villiers will see you never live it down. You don’t
call
your hostess’s friends potential murderers—or thieves at the best. Lady Alicia might be a kleptomaniac, and her maid will bring the thing back in the morning
—you
don’t know. You don’t know
anything
about it.”

My friend Colonel Primrose says a woman ought never to try to reason—she has much more validity acting from intuition. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that I sat over by the window, thinking “I’ve
got
to say something to somebody,” with a sense of anxiety and even dread that was almost physically painful, trying desperately to determine how much of my alarm was conditioned by Ruth Sherwood’s dismay and Sylvia’s despair—or how much, perhaps, of what I thought was rational was nothing but moral cowardice built up by training in social taboos.

“It is hot in here,” I heard Ruth Sherwood say, as if somebody had complained. “The other rooms are cooler. If you’d like a whiskey and soda in the dining room… or the terrace is pleasant if it isn’t too cold. The moon is lovely.”

It’s always a question in my mind whether one’s senses are sharpened by any kind of nervous agitation, or only more alive to certain stimuli. I was aware, for example, that people began to move about after she said that, but I couldn’t say who moved where. I recall hearing Effie Wharton saying, “—strong opposition,” for the third time, and Corliss Marshall’s contemptuous answer. “Loyal opposition, you mean, Effie. That’s different from personal ambition. You and Sam ought to go home. Ex-congressmen are a dime a dozen in Washington. I know your scheme. It won’t work, I’ll tell you that.”

Sam Wharton, sitting next to me on the window seat, gave me an amused twinkle.

“Effie thinks he’s responsible for my defeat,” he whispered sardonically.

I remember thinking too, though that must have been while everybody was still there in the library, that none of them looked as if he wanted actually to take the life of a fellow human being. Except possibly Kurt Hofmann once. Lady Alicia, with the usual assumption of foreigners that Americans don’t speak any other language, said to him in German, “Have I changed very much, Kurt?”

When he’d replied, “No, my dear lady—not at all, really,” she said, “But you have, my friend. You haven’t met success with humility, as I’d have imagined you would. I’d hoped we might pick up our past again.”

If the quick look he gave her wasn’t murder it was pretty close to it—and so, when I think of it, was Larry’s when Pete Hamilton, answering some question of Ruth Sherwood’s, said, “Oh, that’s in the Soiled Clothes Department—ask Villiers.”

Delvalle had taken Sam Wharton’s place by me.

“Miss Peele doesn’t reciprocate Villiers’ affections, I take it?” he said, with what I thought surprising irrelevance.

“Affections?” I asked. “If that’s what you call them, I should say she does, and very heartily.”

He laughed quietly.

“Do you wish to go into the other rooms? I’m very comfortable here.”

“So am I,” I said.

“You Americans are very blind.” He was apparently going back to something in his own mind.

“How do you mean?”

“About love, for example,” he went on. “You understand boy meets girl, but beyond that—man meets woman, I might say—you don’t understand at all.”

“Really?”

“The relations of hate to love, for instance.” We were alone in the library by then. He lighted my cigarette and smiled. “Also the effect of indifference on love. How long would, say Miss Peele, who’s a very passionately emotional woman—how long will she continue her devotion to Pete Hamilton, do you think? In face of his—shall I say awareness?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you have thought of it, I see.”

“No, I haven’t at all,” I protested quickly.

“Excuse me, then. I thought from the way you looked that perhaps you had. I thought something seemed to be bothering you. Perhaps I am not as—shall I say psychic—as I thought.”

And that sticks in my mind too.

He got up. “May I bring you something to drink?”

“I’d like a glass of water,” I said. I sat there alone in the library, hearing the voices from the other rooms, a blessed shaft of cool air coming through the door from the terrace, what he’d said about Sylvia intensifying the dull nauseating anxiety in the pit of my stomach. He didn’t come back for a long time, it seemed to me, and when he came the others were coming back too.

It was only a few minutes later that Ruth Sherwood said to somebody, “I must ask Mr. Marshall. We won’t let him get out of it this time.”

She looked around. “Where has he got to?”

“He slipped out, I imagine,” Bliss Thatcher said. “He had some work to do before morning. He didn’t want to break up the party.”

“Oh, dear,” Lady Alicia said. She looked at the watch on Larry Villiers’ wrist. “It
is
late. I must be off too. I shall walk home, I think. It’s a beautiful night.”

It was Larry, not Mr. Hofmann, who offered himself as an escort. Señor Delvalle looked at me.

Ruth took my arm. “Stay a few minutes,” she whispered.

She held out her hand, smiling, to her other guests. I shook my head at Delvalle. “I live on the next floor,” I said.

“I had hoped it was many miles away, Mrs. Latham.”

Ruth and I followed them out into the long reception room. Sylvia, just in front of us, stopped in the doorway.

“I love these tables, Mrs. Sherwood,” she said lightly. “Only I don’t see how you ever keep them clean. Look at this one.”

She took her handkerchief and polished it briskly.

“Just a busy little housewife at heart, you see.”

She went on, laughing.

“I wish you’d drop over to my place some time, then, Sylvia,” Pete said. “Is that former den of silver foxes over there yours?”

The butler had brought the wraps downstairs.

Sylvia nodded. “Wholesale, from a grateful husband for squelching a story about his wife,” she remarked easily.

I glanced at the table top. It was bright and clean.

Ruth slipped her arm through mine again. It was cold, and I thought it shook a little against mine as Mr. Thatcher said good night. He held her other hand a little longer than was necessary. It seemed to me that whatever doubt there’d been in his mind was gone now, and that he’d have liked to stay on a while, and that she knew it and was preventing it by keeping me.

Lady Alicia and Larry had gone first, the Whartons and Sylvia and Pete following them after a while. Delvalle and Kurt Hofmann waited for Bliss Thatcher. As they went out and the door closed, Ruth’s hand tightened on my arm.

“Thank God!” she whispered. “I thought they’d never go.”

The relief in her voice was unbelievable. She swayed a little.

“Come and sit down. I’ve got to try to explain to you.”

As she turned toward the library door she stopped abruptly, her hand gripping my arm again, her fingernails sharp as needle points in my flesh.

On the back of the sofa at right angles to the fireplace was a man’s evening overcoat, a black-and-white silk muffler, and a wide-brimmed black velour hat. The hat, as flamboyant as the black ribbon his pince-nez hung on, was as clearly Corliss Marshall’s as if his name had been written on it.

Ruth dropped my arm, took three quick steps to the library and looked in. She turned back toward me, her face blank, her lips parted breathlessly. Then, as she whirled around and looked up the stairs, the most extraordinary change went over her, and with the speed of lightning. It wasn’t anxiety any longer, or fear either—it was a burning furious anger. In an instant she was running up the steps and around the iron rail at the top, like a tigress, not a lovely gracious woman at all. I heard her go swiftly along upstairs and stop, a door open and then close gently, and her steps again.

I stood there motionless. What on earth she could be thinking of I hadn’t the remotest idea. I had no more when she appeared again at the top of the stairs and came quickly down. Her anger was gone. She was still pale, but bewildered again, as she’d been when she hadn’t found him in the library.

“He… couldn’t have gone without his coat, and not realized it,” she said blankly. “Could he?”