The Philadelphia Murder Story (23 page)

BOOK: The Philadelphia Murder Story

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“And you put the letter in my files?” Judge Whitney asked.

“I put it there. I was afraid not to. I thought you would take it out to Whitemarsh and nobody would ever disturb it until we were dead. I’ve left all my property to Travis, and I left word for him where to find the letter when I’m gone. He’s all I’ve… ever had.” Abigail Whitney’s eyes closed again.

“You knew he was going to kill Myron Kane?” Colonel Primrose asked deliberately.

She opened her eyes quickly. “No, no. I was trying to save him, just as I tried to save Elsie. I didn’t want their blood on his hands. But afterward there was nothing I could do. And now, please go, all of you. I am Very Tired.”

I didn’t see Abigail Whitney again, and I didn’t want to. I did see Monk and Laurel, because they were married at Judge Whitney’s, and she’s like a lot of other people now, living in a tourist cabin near a marine station, waiting for Monk to go across again before she goes back to her job with his father. It wasn’t till after the marriage that she told Colonel Primrose she really had tried to get a job at the
Post,
thinking she might be able to get hold of the manuscript. It was all she could think of to do to try to save Judge Whitney. And it was Sergeant Buck who’d found her in the telephone booth and got her out.

I didn’t see the people at
The Saturday Evening Post
again, either, but it seems Colonel Primrose did. We were going down to Washington on the train.

“I don’t like to admit it, of course,” I said, “but I owe you a real apology. I didn’t for a minute realize you were deliberately bringing up the Douglas steal at Judge Whitney’s luncheon.”

Colonel Primrose smiled a little.

“And how did you know about Abigail’s communication system?”

“I spotted the vent in the molding in that downstairs reception room the day I called for you,” he said placidly. “Buck followed up via the butler and the maid and the electrician who installed it. It was very simple.”

“Maybe,” I said dubiously. “There’s another thing that may be simple to you, but not to me. That’s how Travis ever got Myron murdered and stuck in the pool. He said he’d worked at the
Post,
but—”

Colonel Primrose had a wry half-smile on one side of his face. “That’s the trouble of being off the home field,” he said. “In Washington I’d have known everything Captain Lamb knew. Malone wasn’t playing it that way. I’d never got to first base if I hadn’t met up with Mr. Toplady. Malone, on the other hand, had Travis pretty well traced down, except he didn’t know it was Travis. He was still trying to pin it on somebody at the
Post
—or on Monk, at the end. Travis was still cocky enough when they got him to headquarters to correct Malone on a few minor points, but, in the main, Malone was right.

“What happened was that Travis had an appointment to meet Myron in the lobby at two-thirty. Myron was to get the script and give it to him. But Myron, as you remember, hadn’t got it—Bob Fuoss told him to wait for the proof. But Travis knew the ropes. It was he who called up Composition in the morning, said he was W. Thornton Martin, and was told the manuscript had gone to the monotype keyboard. He knew the place would be deserted at noon, when they all went to lunch. He walked in the lobby and across to the second-register elevator, went up to the fifth floor and through to the manufacturing side, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and went up on the elevator to the ninth floor. He says he didn’t have any idea of doing anything but get the script, and settle with Myron later, but when he went through the foundry, he saw the cutting-down knife lying where Albert Hesington had left it when he went to lunch.

“He says he didn’t plan at that point to stay in the building, but people started to come back. So he calmly went into that phone booth—you remember, where we went along with Mr. Trayser to get to the runway from Manufacturing to the lunchroom on the editorial side on the ninth floor. Every time anybody came along, he was busy apparently making phone calls. He waited until time to meet Myron, picked up his coat and hat, that he’d left on the fifth floor, and went on down. He says that even then he didn’t plan to kill Myron there. But Myron was standing up on the terrace, looking at the mosaic, and they were hidden from the desk by the pillars and the shrubbery. The lobby was empty and the elevators had both just gone up, and he recognized it was a natural. Myron turned to face him and he just let him have it. The knife was pointed and razor-sharp. He left it in and lowered Myron’s body into the pool, face down, and walked off.”

Colonel Primrose shook his head.

“He didn’t realize, until he was outside, how neatly he’d laid it all on the
Post’s
doorstep. It seemed to amuse him considerably. And he was civil enough to say he hoped Pete Martin wouldn’t hold it against him; he’d used his name because he’d just read one of his articles. The fact that his initials and Monk’s were the same was pure coincidence.” Colonel Primrose was silent for a moment. “And by the way,” he went on, “I had lunch with Marion Turner and Hibbs and Erd Brandt. They tell me a good many of their readers think this has gone far enough. They think you ought to marry me and get it over with.”

I picked up a copy or the
Post
the man next to me had left in his seat when he went to dinner, and opened it. Sergeant Buck, fortunately, was a dozen seats away at the end of the car.

Colonel Primrose looked at me and smiled. “Well?” he said.

FIN

About Leslie Ford

Leslie Ford (1898-1983) was one of the pseudonyms of Zenith Brown (née Jones). The other names this author used are Brenda Conrad and David Frome. Leslie Ford was born in Smith River, California and educated at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1921 she married Ford K. Brown. Leslie Ford became the Assistant in the Departments of Greek and Philosophy, then the Instructor and teacher of English for the University of Washington between 1921 and 1923. After that she was Assistant to the Editor and Circulation Manager of Dial Magazine in New York City. She became a freelance writer after 1927. Ms. Ford was a correspondent for the United States Air Force both in the Pacific area and in England during the Second World War. Her series characters were Lieutenant Joseph Kelly, Grace Latham and Colonel John Primrose.

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