The Philadelphia Murder Story (22 page)

“They’re coming.” Abigail’s voice was as sharp as a lancet. “Go quickly.”

The blue eyes were intent and crafty again. I don’t know how or why, but I knew, with a flash of intuitive certainty as clear as lightning against a summer sky, that she was planning, someway, to sell him out.

“Don’t go, Monk!” The words came out of my mouth before I was aware of even thinking of saying them.

He stopped short halfway across the room and turned back. He couldn’t have helped catch the malignant glance Abigail Whitney shot me before she settled back in her yellow cushions.

“It is too late to do anything, Dear Boy,” she said calmly. “They’re here, I’m afraid.”

I looked quickly in her outside mirror. The street was empty. I looked at her. Her eyes were fixed on the other mirror—the one by the door on the wall. In it I could see the shell recess in the hall outside. The whole shell was moving, swinging open, and as it moved I saw a narrow corridor that was full of men. Judge Whitney’s white head towered above them all. Then they were in the hall, crowding the mirror. In front were Colonel Primrose, Albert Toplady and Judge Whitney. Mr. Toplady was staring around him like a frail awed soul newly admitted through the paradisial gates.

Abigail Whitney’s fingers drummed silently on the green silk cover and were motionless. Judge Whitney’s deep, grave voice came in from the hall. “He said he was coming over here.”

Monk stood silently by the window, facing them.

“He is probably with Mrs. Whitney,” Colonel Primrose said.

He looked at the door. It seemed to me that his eyes and old Abigail’s met in the mirror and held an instant before he turned away. “Perhaps you’d better see, Malone.”

Captain Malone’s head showed over Mr. Toplady’s. He came to the door.

“I’m here, if you want me,” Monk said evenly.

I heard Colonel Primrose’s voice again from the hall. “All right, Mr. Toplady. Will you wait back there in the library until we’re ready for you?”

Captain Malone turned in the doorway. “You ought to have somebody wait with him,” he said dryly.

“If you think so.” I thought Colonel Primrose’s voice sounded a little annoyed. “Will someone—”

“I will, if you’d like me to.”

I hadn’t seen Laurel Frazier anywhere, and her voice came as a surprise to me. And to Monk Whitney. He moved abruptly and was motionless again, his face going tight and shuttered.

“Travis can stay, colonel,” Judge Whitney said.

“I’ll be glad to, sir,” Travis Elliot said. “If you’ll see they aren’t too rough on Aunt Abby.”

I glanced at Aunt Abby. A faint smile moved at one corner of her mouth. She settled back for all the world like a cat curling down on a cushion in front of a fire.

“Very well,” Colonel Primrose said. “You can close the door, Elliot. I want a few words first with Mrs. Whitney.”

In some way that seemed incredible to me, Abigail had managed to smooth out her face and soften her eyes and look the ultimate in a fragile invalidism that the first rude breath would end forever. If ever I saw a sepulcher so freshly and perfectly whited in my very presence, I can’t recall it.

Monk glanced at her and at me, the lift of his eyebrows hardly perceptible. Then they were coming in.

It’s hard to get what happened then so that it makes factual sense, it all happened so quickly. One minute Abigail was lying back against her yellow cushions, a calm and controlled, if faded, shadow. The next her face was saffron again, the lines in it carved deeply and terribly, all her pretense about not becoming Emotionally Involved lying in wretched tatters about her, a stricken old spider with her web torn apart, useless to protect the only thing she loved. Judge Whitney came in, grave and dignified, and as secure as if he were wearing his judicial robes, and in an instant he was gray and haggard, his hand reaching blindly out for a chair or anything to keep him from utter physical collapse. It happened to all of them except to Laurel Frazier, and that was because she’d come in, her bright copper hair like a flame that had burned all the life from her body, moving erect and taut, her lips parted a little, her eyes dulled and gray, waiting for some blow to fall. And Monk Whitney stood motionless by the window.

Colonel Primrose came in passing a foot in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction, and went directly to Abigail Whitney’s stately and lovely swan bed. She looked up at him with so much concentrated charm in those vivid cornflower eyes that I wondered for an instant if she’d got herself mixed up with Madame de Sevigne, or whoever it was who still had lovers at ninety. She held out her hand.

“I am honored, colonel,” she murmured. “I’ve seldom—”

His hands held hers for a bare instant and moved down to her bedside table. He picked up an ivory-painted radio. Abigail’s hand poised in the air was rigid, her body erect. The limpid eyes, cornflower blue, were black as a cobra’s.

“The blue dial, colonel,” she said. Her voice was clear and sharp.

Their eyes met for an instant.

“I think not, Mrs. Whitney,” he said politely.

His fingers went to the red dial, and turned it quickly.

That was when she changed, sooner than the rest, because she knew. And I knew, too, then. I knew how she’d heard everything Myron Kane had said to me, how she knew the carbon copy of the manuscript and the document that Laurel had given him by mistake out of Judge Whitney’s files were at my house in Georgetown, and how she knew I’d called her a scheming, worldly old woman. The red dial tuned her in to every conversation that went on in the house. The blue dial went the other way. It was the one I’d seen her fiddle with when she told me she didn’t want a useful life destroyed. It had let Laurel Frazier hear every word she’d said then, and it had been on the night I’d heard Judge Whitney’s voice in my room for a brief moment before she’d switched it off. That was why no servant ever had to appear upstairs for an order. And I knew now why she wanted the blue dial turned on, and why, when Colonel Primrose turned the red dial, she collapsed back against the cushions, old and saffron and destroyed, even before we heard Travis Elliot’s voice in the library.

He was speaking very quietly, but his voice came with a horrible and ghastly clarity. “… a break I really didn’t expect, Mr. Toplady. I’m playing in luck these days, it seems.”

The calm, confident voice, tinged with amused arrogance, came out of the ivory box so perfectly that I found myself not hearing it, but seeing Travis Elliot standing there, poised and entirely controlled, as he’d been standing when I came into this room the first time.

“Where are they, Mr. Toplady? You brought them, didn’t you?” His voice sharpened for an instant. “Good. And let’s be quick about it. You’re sure they’re all here?”

There was a long silence—in both rooms.

The voice came out of the ivory box again. “It’s too bad I can’t see for myself, Mr. Toplady. But I don’t think you’d have the guts to pull a fast one—not when you’re in for the five thousand Abigail gave you to protect my father’s good name. It’s funny I never thought about this. Not till today, when the good colonel spilled it at the table. So he saw the records of the Elliot steal, did he? And you didn’t talk, did you, Mr. Toplady?”

When the little man’s voice came out of the ivory box for the first time, the contrast to Travis Elliot’s cool, articulate confidence was so frightening that I felt a cold dread around my heart. And yet, shaking and hardly audible as it was, it had a kind of dignity and courage—I suppose of a man who knew he was utterly lost.

“He saw them. I—I couldn’t help it. They were on the same film he was looking at.”

“He couldn’t tell anything,” the coolly amused voice said.

“Yes, he could. If he knew about signatures.”

Travis’ voice sharpened again instantly. “What do you mean, Mr. Toplady?”

“I mean because of your father’s heart. You can see it—it shows in a person’s signature. Bookkeepers can tell lots of times before a man suspects it himself or the doctor does. That’s how I knew it wasn’t your father signing the checks against Miss Frazier’s money. The signature looked the same but for that. I found out you’d opened a Number Two Account in his name. You presented a letter he was supposed to have signed. But it wasn’t his signature. It was yours—you had no heart condition. I didn’t know what to do. It would have raised such a scandal at the company. So—so I went to him and told him about it myself.”

There was a silence again.

“Well, it won’t matter now, will it, Mr. Toplady?” the cool voice said. “Here they go, and they burn nicely, don’t they? Much better than paper, Mr. Toplady.”

Then there was a sudden gasp, and a small cry like the cry of some terrified little animal.

“I don’t want to do this, Mr. Toplady,” Travis Elliot said, “but there’s nothing else I can do. The walls are thick and the doors closed. Primrose and Malone are busy in there. Primrose has been getting his dope from the charming Mrs. Latham, and she and Monk and my future wife all think it was the judge. Because—thanks to Aunt Abby—they all think he murdered my father. And Malone doesn’t know I was an office boy at the
Post
one summer, the year they got out the medals for the two-hundredth anniversary. And part of my job was taking manuscripts up to the composing room when the pneumatic tubes got clogged. It’s too bad I can’t tie you up with the
Post,
too, Mr. Toplady. I’m afraid you’ll just have to be a suicide. The powder marks will show the gun was close to your forehead, and your prints will be on it. Nothing against you personally, Mr. Toplady, but I didn’t have anything against Kane. Or Elsie, except she was so damned officious. Even calling me up to tell me—”

His voice changed suddenly into a snarl that was nothing human. I stood there perfectly paralyzed and frozen-hearted, and I remember turning with a kind of despair to Colonel Primrose.

“Oh, can’t you do something?” I cried.

Then Sam Phelps was running toward the door, his face convulsed, and Captain Malone caught him and held him, wrestling with him, just as the gunshot cracked and we heard a crash and a sound like brass fire irons clanging on a brick hearth. Monk started toward the door and stopped as Colonel Primrose shook his head.

And Colonel Primrose stood there, imperturbable and undisturbed, and reached down and turned on the blue dial.

“Well, Buck?” he said.

And I could have wept as I heard that composed granite voice coming out of the little ivory box. “Everything as ordered, sir,” Sergeant Buck said. Then there was a tinge of something like apology in his sinister tones, as if it wasn’t quite as ordered, after all.

“I had to knock the son of a—the fellow out. Little man’s okay. Shot missed him, winged the looking glass. Captain Malone can—”

Colonel Primrose switched off the red dial. The room was suddenly silent, except for Captain Malone’s swift strides and the metallic clink of the handcuffs against the doorknob and the door banging shut after him.

Laurel Frazier hadn’t moved since she came into the room. The color was coming slowly back into her cheeks and the blue was deepening the gray of her eyes again. Monk was looking at her, his face full of a compassion and tenderness that was very moving. He went over to her slowly and put both hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Coppertop,” he said gently.

She looked up at him silently for a moment. Then she said, “I was just—just afraid it—maybe it was you. Oh, Monk, don’t be horrid to me anymore!”

She was in his arms then, her burnished head by those starred ribbons, and he was holding her close to him. And I turned away just in time to see Colonel Primrose going out into the hall. I followed him, and saw the two of them coming from the library. I’ve forgotten who it was—Moses, I imagine—who brought water out of the solid rock. Miracles, I suppose, like history, repeat themselves, because Sergeant Buck was actually mopping his granite forehead with his sleeve. His other huge arm was round Mr. Albert Toplady’s frail shoulders.

I turned back. Monk held Laurel’s arms in his hands and bent down and kissed her. He went over then to his father and put his hand on his shoulder. Judge Whitney raised his head. They didn’t say anything. After a moment, Judge Whitney got slowly to his feet and looked across the room at his sister.

“Well, Abigail?” he said quietly.

Colonel Primrose came back into the room. Outside in the hall I heard the tread of heavy feet, and I turned away quickly. Colonel Primrose closed the door, looking from Judge Whitney to his sister.

Abigail Whitney straightened up against her yellow cushions, but her blue eyes were old and tired. The alchemy was there no longer.

“You did kill Douglas Elliot,” she said, her voice slow and painful. “When you came to me to borrow the money to make up the loss—Oh, if you had only told me it was for him, not for you! You said you needed it; you didn’t say Douglas needed it. If you’d said it was for Douglas I would have given it willingly, and then he would never have had to take his own life. He’d never have had to make the sacrifice he did to shield his son. It was morally you that killed him, Nathaniel, even though the gun was in his own hand.”

“You wouldn’t have lent this money to your own brother?” Colonel Primrose asked quietly.

The blue fire blazed up in her eyes. “Never! If it had not been for my brother I would have married Douglas Elliot, and Travis would have been my child. Money was all I ever got out of marriage. I would have died before I let my brother profit by a single dollar of it.”

“I would have told you,” Judge Whitney said slowly, “if I had known he was going to take his life. I would have broken my word to him. He made me swear solemnly that I would not tell you it was for him. I didn’t realize that it was his last resort and there was no other way out. I—it may be that I was wrong in not letting him marry you. Money seemed to be all you ever wanted, and you would have ruined him in making him get it for you… What was this document that Myron Kane got?”

A touch of her old manner came back to her. She sat up straighter.

“It’s most Unfortunate,” she said. “It was a letter Douglas wrote to you. He posted it before he… killed himself. It came the morning after. I—I did what Elsie did. I signed for it and I read it. I should have burned it, but it was his last word, and I—I never dared.” She closed her eyes for a moment, the tears rolling down her wasted yellow cheeks. “It said the envelope enclosed in it was being entrusted to you. You were to look after Travis. If he was ever in trouble of his own making, you were to open it. I opened it then—like Elsie. It said he was taking the blame for the loss of Laurel’s money. He wanted to save his son from disgrace and give him another chance. It was the only way he knew. He was doing it because he loved him, and it may have been his fault for giving him responsibility beyond his years. He said he had told Travis he was leaving a statement of the truth with someone, not telling him who, so Travis would never go wrong again. He said the man Toplady would know. All he was trying to do was protect Travis against temptation again.”