The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (8 page)

“You wouldn’t think so,” I said.

We looked at the dining-room door, and both of us started toward it, with a kind of mutual agreement that he must be there if he wasn’t anywhere else. The silver tray with the half-empty decanters on it stood at the end of the table, the empty glasses doubling themselves in the black mirror surface. Corliss Marshall wasn’t there. The room was quite empty, and without the saving touch of the women’s colored gowns its black-and-white decor made it look cold and rather theatrical. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hadn’t intended to say that when I turned to Ruth. But I didn’t.

She’d stopped dead, the color drained from her face, staring across the table at the white rug in front of the terrace window. I suppose my eyes followed hers automatically, because I was only conscious that I’d gone suddenly taut and staring—aware only of the scarlet mark of a pointed shoe on the white velvet surface of the rug.

We stood there silently. Then Ruth Sherwood moved forward. She stepped around that livid spot on the white ground, reached her hand out in a kind of awful slow motion, and opened the terrace door. I stood where I was.

“Grace!” she said. “—Come here!”

She didn’t really say it, and I didn’t hear it. It was a hoarse vibration that I felt and understood without needing to hear. I went around the end of the table and followed her out.

The moonlight lay over the rooftops and the trees in the park below like a silver coat, and sifted through the ring of pollarded evergreens around the balcony terrace. Ruth’s white figure was like a column frozen there half a dozen feet from the open door. I went quickly along and stopped by her.

A dark mass was lying by the tubs of evergreens. A strayed moonbeam played white and red and green on the diamond and ruby and emerald hilt of the stiletto that lay beside the black inert form, and played another and more dreadful color on the slow viscid pool around it.

I don’t know how long we stood there, or what Ruth Sherwood was thinking, or what I was thinking, or if either of us was thinking at all. I remember feeling her hand on mine a long time after she must have put it there.

“—You’ve got to help me, Grace!” she whispered. “You’ve got to help me again!”

“You’ve got to help me, Grace! You’ve got to help me again!”

Ruth Sherwood’s tense whisper and her hand tugging at my arm penetrated through the extraordinary sense of unreality that held me as if in a spell. The dance music from the Willow Room downstairs stopped abruptly. The applause pattered like rain on a hollow wooden box. Corliss Marshall lying there, Ruth Sherwood and I, might have been on another planet… we seemed so far away and so utterly alone in the darkened parabola cast over the terrace by the green-and-white awning. The lighted windows scattered up the concave semi-circle of the Randolph-Lee’s park elevation looked out blankly into the frosted night. The sound of traffic along Connecticut Avenue might have come from miles away. It was so remote from anything that concerned us, caught in the terrible unearthly stillness that grew like some monstrous plant from the silent mass that had been Corliss Marshall.

“Come, quickly, Grace!” Ruth Sherwood whispered. She pulled at my hand.

I nodded and we went back on tiptoe to the open door and into the dining room. The same unearthly stillness had seeped in before us, and lay over the room like a pall. The empty glasses on the black glass table seemed as if they had been there for years, untouched so long that their reflections had taken on substance and form, and would always be buried indelibly in its crystalline surface.

Ruth Sherwood looked back toward the door, her breath catching sharply. I looked too. There were new shadows on the white velvet rug where her feet and mine had been. We hurried through the door. She closed it after us.

“We’ve got to call the police, at once,” I said. My voice was hardly above a whisper.

She didn’t speak. When I turned to look at her she put her hand out and took hold of my arm again.

“I’ll call them,” she said. Her hand tightened. “Grace—I don’t know how to ask you. But you will—please, I know you will—take her to your apartment. Now—before the police and the newspaper people come.”

Her voice had that desperate quality in it again, but it was no longer imagined fear of what might happen. It was realistic now, and stark. “—I can’t explain it to you—I will later. She mustn’t be touched by this. You can understand that, can’t you? You do see, don’t you?”

I saw, very clearly—more clearly, probably, than she did, knowing so well how far blood spatters when once a good sensational reporter catches the scent. And Barbara Shipley had had nothing to do with it. There was no reason I could see not to save her from the consequences of it if I could.

“But everybody knows she was here,” I said.

“I can tell them she left. She can slip away the first thing in the morning.”

“Or I could say she’d gone to my apartment earlier—if worst comes to worst.”

“No, no!” she said quickly. “She mustn’t come into it at all!”

“All right,” I said. I wasn’t so sure, because I’ve learned to have a lot of respect for the police. But there was no use getting her desperate again. “We’ve got to hurry. We can’t put off calling the police any longer. You get her up and explain to her, and I’ll see if the coast is clear.”

Normally the prospect of circumventing the authorities is rather like a heady wine to me. This time it wasn’t. I was a little scared, actually. All I could see—besides the dark huddled figure of Corliss Marshall under the tub of evergreens— was Sylvia Peele wiping off the glass top of the table over there by the library door. All I could hear—besides the awful silence that brooded over the terrace—was the casual lilt of her voice saying, “Just a little housewife at heart.” It couldn’t mean she was deliberately wiping off the fingerprints of whoever had taken the jeweled stiletto, it couldn’t possibly, I kept telling myself—and all the time I knew it could. I knew it couldn’t mean anything else, actually, because whatever Sylvia Peele was at heart it wasn’t a housewife.

I was trying desperately not to put another name to it… and I didn’t want to get mixed up in my loyalties, however dubious they might prove to be. I stood there anxiously, thinking about that, trying not to look at Corliss Marshall’s hat and overcoat and black-and-white muffler with his initials embroidered on it… or at the table top under the lamp by the door. I started for the stairs. I was suddenly so tired I could hardly drag one foot after the other up the soft gray-carpeted steps.

Then I stopped and leaned against the iron rail and looked behind me. The idea that I was still tracking the dark stain of Corliss’s blood wherever I trod made me a little sick. I looked at the step just below. Then I looked at my feet. On the thin sole of my right slipper there was a brown spot. The stain had gone in, however, so I wouldn’t leave traces of it along the hall to my apartment and back again, after I’d left Barbara there to go to bed, and to sleep if she could. I went on up the steps, opened the door and looked out. The corridor was empty. I shut the door and waited.

I could hear Ruth talking quietly to Barbara, and then the sound of a suitcase clicking shut. It seemed hours that I stood there, trying now not to look at the telephone on the table against the wall. It seemed to take on some insistent kind of animate quality that made the time drag interminably. I ought to pick it up and call the police myself, I thought— not wait for Ruth. I knew I should do that, and because I didn’t I was becoming with each second more and more acutely jittery.

Suddenly I jumped nearly out of my skin. There was a sharp insistent buzz from the box under the table that was almost like somebody bursting through the door. Ruth Sherwood ran out into the hall and stood there. The phone buzzed again. She nodded at it sharply. I reached out and picked it up, my hand shaking.

I said, “Hello,” I know my voice was high-pitched and unnatural.

A voice said, “Hello. Is this Mrs. Sherwood’s apartment?”

For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to stand up long enough to answer. It was a voice that I knew as well as I know my own. And I knew all the more just how unnatural my own voice must have been if he didn’t recognize it wherever he heard it.

“Oh, Colonel Primrose!” I gasped. “—I’m
so
glad! Where are you?”

He still didn’t recognize me.

“It’s Grace Latham,” I said.

“Oh, hello, hello, my dear! I’ve been calling you for the last two hours. I got in at ten o’clock. I’m at Corliss Marshall’s now.”

My lips went so dry, my throat so tight, that I couldn’t speak. Ruth Sherwood was at my side. I could see her face in the mirror over the table. It was almost as white as the wall behind it. I shook my head at her.

“Has he left yet?” Colonel Primrose said. “He asked me to meet him here at a quarter to eleven, and it’s almost twelve now.”

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. My mouth was just as if it was stuffed with cotton.

There was a short silence at the other end of the phone. “Mrs. Latham!” His voice was sharpened. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

“—It’s Corliss, Colonel,” I managed to say. “We were just calling the police. He’s dead. He’s been murdered.”

I don’t know whether it was because he’d already sensed it, or because his reaction time is fast as lightning, but I hadn’t got my breath before he said, “Call the police at once, Mrs. Latham. I’ll be over immediately.”

The calm unhurried competence in his voice was miraculous in its effect.

“Yes, Colonel,” I said.

“And look, my dear,” he added firmly. “—Don’t you do anything on the impulse of the moment, will you? Just for this once? I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I put down the phone and turned to Ruth Sherwood.

“It was Colonel Primrose. He’s at Corliss Marshall’s house. Corliss was supposed to meet him there at quarter to eleven. You’ve got to call the police, quick. Have you told Barbara?” She shook her head. I glanced down the hall. Ruth must have closed the door to keep the girl from hearing, because it opened now and she came out, carrying her bag and dressing case. She had her skirt and jacket on, her fur coat over her arm and her hat jammed down on the back of her head. Her face was flushed and her eyes sleepy and bewildered. She came along obediently, as if she was too unhappy—or maybe just too sleepy—to question anything else that night.

“Go with Mrs. Latham, darling,” Ruth said. “Go to bed and go to sleep. I’ll see you early in the morning.”

She put her arms around the girl and held her tightly a moment, and kissed her. “Quickly, darling.”

I opened the door. The hall was still empty. She gave Barbara a little push and turned her head away, holding blindly to the door. A few steps along I could hear her voice saying, “This is Mrs. Addison Sherwood at the Randolph-Lee.”

“Hurry, my dear,” I said. I took her dressing case. “It’s the next door.”

She came along with me, not saying anything, and waited while I fished in my bag for the key—frantically, because at the end of the hall I could see the green elevator light come on. I heard the door whirring open just as I turned the key in the lock and pushed Barbara in in front of me. I picked up her dressing case, followed her inside and closed the door. If I’d been a snowshoe rabbit just escaped from a mountain lion my heart couldn’t have been pounding harder.

“In there,” I said, and pushed my bedroom door open.

I came to an abrupt halt. It was too late to do anything about Barbara. Sylvia Peele was lying on my bed, leaning forward on her elbow, starting to speak before she saw I wasn’t alone. Her blank stare—sincerely blank, I think, for the first time that evening—rested on Barbara for a moment.

She got up quickly. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “I didn’t know you were…”

Her voice trailed off, leaving whatever the rest of it was going to be unsaid. She took her silver fox jacket from the bench at the foot of the bed, laid it around her shoulders and picked up her bag.

“I thought I’d drop in to say good night on my way upstairs.”

Her social mask was perfectly intact again.

“Barbara’s going to stay here tonight,” I said casually. The child stood there without moving, completely awake and aware by now, and conscious that something had gone very wrong with her mother’s plans. She looked at me, her sherry-colored eyes questioning and anxious.

“Go on in, Barbara,” I said. “The bath’s in there, and you can sleep in the other bed. I’ll try not to wake you when I come in. Good night, my dear.”

She said, “Good night,” and I closed the door after her. Sylvia moved across the sitting room, took a cigarette off the table at the end of the sofa and lighted it, her back to me. I came out of the narrow foyer and closed the door there. Sylvia turned.

“Well?” she said calmly.

“Ruth Sherwood and I found Corliss, Sylvia,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘found him’?”

Her face was as closed as the white jade box on the table.

“He’s dead, Sylvia.”

I waited, looking at her. Her face didn’t change. It was perfectly blank and motionless. Yet I somehow had the idea that she hadn’t intended to take the news this way. She’d intended to act as if it came as a shock, but something—an inborn honesty, probably—had made her reject that kind of fraud in spite of herself. Still she didn’t speak. She just stood there motionless.

“I’ve got to go back right away,” I said. “Ruth has called the police. Colonel Primrose is coming.”

“Colonel Primrose!”

That was shocked out of her. The scarlet lipstick on her mouth stood out sharply all of a sudden, as if her own color had retreated behind it, changing the whole background of her face.

“He was at Corliss’s apartment,” I said. “He was supposed to meet him there. He called up Ruth to see what had happened to him.”

She moistened her lips with a sharp flick of her tongue.

“What was he doing at Corliss’s?” she demanded softly.

“I don’t know… but I’ve got to be there when he comes.”

I glanced toward the other room and back at Sylvia.

“Ruth doesn’t want Barbara involved in this.”