The Philadelphia Murder Story Page 4

  I was finding it rapidly more difficult to think at all. I was appalled. I just stood there staring at her, blankly.

  “Don’t be Naïve, Dear Child,” she said. “What I have suggested is the Best Possible Solution for everybody.”

  “For everybody except Laurel Frazier,” I said, with some warmth.

  “For Everybody,” she repeated. “If Laurel marries Travis, she’ll be buried alive out on the Main Line. She’ll take him to the eight-thirty train every morning, and meet him again at five-thirty. She’ll take the children to school, and she’ll pick them up. She’ll play tennis and bridge and go to Meetings, and in five years she’ll be just like Elsie Phelps, a typical suburban matron. It is a Living Death. If she marries Myron Kane, she’ll live in New York and Washington and abroad. Laurel is perfectly aware the only thing wrong with Myron Kane is a sense of Social Inferiority. Her background is excellent Philadelphia, all Myron Kane needs to make a Powerful Person of him. He needs her, Travis does not. Any nice girl, preferably one not so bright as Laurel is, is all dear Travis needs.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether she’s in love with Myron or not, I take it,” I said, as calmly as I could.

  Her hands moved slightly on the green cover. “Love has very little to do with marriage, in my opinion, and I’ve had sufficient Experience to speak with Authority. Actually, the nearest to love Laurel has ever come is her Blind Hero Worship for my Brother. She was attracted to Myron in London. Money, I think, has more to do with marriage than Love has, and I’m prepared to underwrite that aspect of Myron and Laurel’s life, even though he has a handsome income of his own from his Writings.”

  “Why,” I asked, “don’t you just buy him off, and leave Laurel out of the picture?”

  She looked at me placidly for an instant, and when she spoke, Colonel Primrose himself couldn’t have been more suave. “The Dear Boy can’t be bought with money. I would have failed if I had attempted anything as unpolitic as that. I have a very simple Code of Ethics, Dear Child. I believe a single Mistake, however Serious, should not be held against a man who has Repented it and become a Respected Citizen. I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”

  Her voice was firm and clear, and the only sign of agitation was her hand fiddling with the dial of the small radio on the table beside her.

  “I am sure Elsie is right in saying that if it had not been that Laurel and Myron Kane were attracted to each other in London last summer, he would never have come here to write a Profile of my Brother. He would not have had the opportunity to dig up the Past. If by marrying him, Laurel can undo the Harm she has done—however much my Brother would pretend to be opposed to it—I feel she should do it. But I would be the Last to attempt to Force her to do it or even allow her to know I thought it her Duty.”

  What she called everything she’d been saying up to that point, I had no idea.

  “You ask me very legitimately, I think, what there can be in my Brother’s life that cannot be published in The Saturday Evening Post,” she went on. “You have never met my Brother?”

  I shook my head.

  “They complain that dear Monk Whitney is wild and untractable, and had to have a War to Come of Age,” she said. “My brother didn’t have a War, and his son is a pale and docile Lamb compared with him. Women adored him. He married, because it was expected of him, the way his son will no doubt do—before he met the woman he adored. He paid for that, and so did she. That is what Elsie wants kept out of The Saturday Evening Post.”

  She stopped for a moment, looking very steadily at me. “It is not what I want kept out. My Brother killed a man. That is what I want kept out. That is why I don’t see my Brother. He doesn’t know I know it. That man is dead. I loved him, but I want him to stay dead. I don’t want another Useful Life destroyed because of one Mistake.”

  Her voice was vibrating, her eyes a burning vivid blue under the preposterous fuzz of henna hair. I’d hardly noticed that she had dropped all but the emphasis of her usual roundabout speech, and all her vagueness.

  “That, Dear Child, is why I would be happy to see Laurel marry Myron Kane,” she said. “And now, I’m Very Tired. Will you close the door as you go out? One can’t always be sure, my dear. We may still need your Policeman.”

  I was too torn by conflicting ideas and emotions and too bewildered by the whole thing to think very clearly or even think at all. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood there for a moment, my hand still on the knob. Then I sort of came to, and blinked my eyes without quite believing I was seeing properly.

  The girl with the copper hair and the wood-hyacinth eyes was sitting as motionless and white as marble in the needlepoint armchair beside the shell-ceilinged recess. Mrs. Whitney had not been talking to me. Every word she’d said she’d said to Laurel Frazier.

  5

  The girl sat there in the armchair in front of the shell-ceilinged recess, motionless and white as alabaster, shocked and completely stunned. And I was nearly as much so myself, at what Abigail Whitney had done, and at what she wanted kept out of The Saturday Evening Post. “My Brother killed a man.” If those words were still going crazily around in my mind, however, they must have been infinitely more intense and paralyzing in Laurel Frazier’s. I thought back, trying to decide how much she could have heard, at what point Mrs. Whitney had known she was there and couldn’t help but hear. It must have been when she’d stopped and then said that about the dead past burying its dead, not coming back to destroy a useful citizen. That, of course, must have been for Laurel, for up to then she had certainly never referred to her brother in terms like that.

  And when she’d said to me, “You ask me very legitimately, I think, what there can be in my Brother’s life that cannot be published in The Saturday Evening Post,” I knew she was talking to Laurel Frazier—because I hadn’t asked her at all. And, of course, when she’d said it was Laurel’s duty to undo the harm she’d done, but that her brother would pretend to oppose it and she’d be the last to try to force it, every word she’d said had been deliberately phrased and timed, and I’d been nothing at all but the simplest means to an end.

  I looked at the girl, trying to think of something to say, but there wasn’t anything. She raised her hand slowly and moved it across her forehead as if trying to wipe everything away. Then she got up and walked mechanically across the hall into the library at the back. I followed her after a moment. A small table was set in front of the fire, laid for one and glistening with damask and silver.

  She turned to me. “This is for you,” she said slowly, out of a sort of thick fog. “Eat something, will you? I’ll wait. I want you to go with me. Please. I want to think.”

  As she stood in front of the fire, looking down into it, the tawny brilliance of her hair made the flames look a pallid yellow and without much warmth.

  “Are you going to tell him?” she asked after a few minutes.

  “Tell who?”

  “Your policeman. Colonel Primrose. Isn’t he the detective she had you bring up? Myron said you were his—his assistant.”

  I caught my breath and tried not to choke. “Myron,” I said, “is crazy. Colonel Primrose isn’t an ordinary detective in the first place, and I’m anything but his assistant in the second. Furthermore, I didn’t bring him up, because he’s already here. And I haven’t thought about telling him or not telling him. It was as much of a—a shock to me as it was to you.”

  She shook her head mechanically. “You don’t know him—the judge, I mean. He’s wonderful. But he’s a——” She stopped and began again after a moment. “I could believe he’d kill a man. I saw him angry once. But——” She hesitated again, and went on. “About this . . . woman she was talking about. I don’t think Myron knows that. And the judge wouldn’t mind anyway. He loved her very deeply. He tried every way there was to marry her. He’s not ashamed of it. It’s just that Elsie doesn’t understand. Of course she wouldn’t. If that came out in The Saturday Evening Post, he wouldn’t min
d at all, because no story of his life would be true without her. His friends all knew it. It was when Elsie and Sam came and dared to talk about disgrace that I saw him angry.”

  “But of course that’s not the kind of thing they’d want to print, anyway,” I said.

  She looked at me for an instant and changed the subject entirely. “That’s not what we’re talking about, is it? It’s the other thing we’ve got to stop—even if I have to marry Myron Kane to stop it.”

  She stood looking down, lost in the dancing movement of the flames along the oak logs.

  “And I would marry him, if it was the only way out,” she said slowly, at last. “I’d hate him for it. But what she said is way. So, if you’re ready, I’d like you to go with me to see Travis.”

  “Travis?” I asked. I would have thought Judge Whitney was the person to see, and I said so.

  “Do you think I’d dare go and tell him I’d heard he killed somebody? I wouldn’t want him ever to know I knew, in the first place. And he’d die before he’d let me marry somebody to save him anything. You don’t know him. Travis is a first-rate lawyer, and he adores the judge. Maybe he’ll—— Oh, I just don’t know. It’s just that he and I are the ones that owe him the most—more than Elsie or Monk, really.”

  I couldn’t think of anything at all to say.

  “So if you’re ready, I wish you’d go with me. Now that you know, too, and you’re a friend of Myron’s. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  I was more than a little dubious about it, especially at being on a basis of friendship with Myron, but I went upstairs, got my coat and galoshes and came down again. She was waiting for me in the lower hall, standing by the door, her forehead pressed against the glass to cool what must have been a throbbing ache inside it.

  The sleet had almost stopped, but it was bitterly cold with the wind whipping through the naked branches of the buttonwood trees in the square, and the sidewalks like glass underfoot. We cut across the corner of the square into 19th Street again and went along across Spruce to Delancey Place, and turned right. It was like walking into a different period, with the old gaslights shimmering under the trees that lined each side of the narrow, empty street. It had escaped the blight fallen on the others around it, as it jogged in and out at angles useless for streetcars and inconvenient for any traffic, and the brownstone and brick houses had a remote and quiet dignity retained from a lost older day.

  We’d gone about halfway along the block, silent since we’d left the square, when Laurel touched my arm and stopped abruptly.

  “Look,” she said.

  A man had come hurriedly down the steps of a house a little farther along. As she spoke, his feet shot out from under him on the icy steps and he landed at the bottom, catching himself grotesquely on the railing, his stick flying out of his hand and his hat rolling to the curb. He picked himself up quickly, retrieved his hat and cane, started our way, I thought, then turned and went rapidly off in the other. It was Myron Kane.

  “That’s Travis’ house,” Laurel said. “What do you suppose——”

  She stopped, her hand closing on my arm sharply.

  A man had disengaged himself from the shadow of the tree on the other side of the street and was crossing over. He came into the perimeter of light in front of Travis Elliot’s house, stepped up onto the curb and stood there waiting for us.

  “What are you two gals doing here?” he asked. It wasn’t till then that I recognized Monk Whitney.

  “What are you doing out of uniform?” Laurel retorted.

  “I’m not on business befitting an officer and a gentleman, Coppertop,” he said calmly. “Let’s say I’m exercising, which makes it okay. I still don’t know what you’re doing.”

  He lighted a cigarette, his eyes searching hers intently across the tip of flame from his lighter.

  “We’re going to see Travis,” she said. “Don’t let us keep you, major.”

  “I figured that one out already, and you’re not keeping me. In fact, I’m coming along.”

  She stood there stiffly for an instant, and then we followed him up the steps. There was a sharp click-click-click as he pressed the bell. He opened the door and stood aside as we went in. It was a handsome house of the late 1890 taste, and had the air of needing a woman’s hand and a couple of open windows. The dark green walls were covered with large lithographs and heavy gilt-framed pictures of cows standing placidly around in fields by brooks. Upstairs, the back library, where Travis Elliot was, was slightly more modern. The portraits of past Elliots looked down from the walls and a coal fire burned in the grate. Travis Elliot himself looked a little grim, I thought, as we came in. He gave Monk’s civilian clothes a surprised glance as he helped Laurel with her coat. It was the first time I’d seen him with her, and if they were in love with each other, they were certainly matter-of-fact about it, I thought. They seemed much more like brother and sister to me.

  “We saw Kane coming out,” Monk said. “What did he want?”

  Travis Elliot opened the cellarette at the end of the long sofa by the library table.

  “The affairs of a client are a sacred trust,” he said easily. “I couldn’t possibly discuss them with you. Did you take the letter Mrs. Latham brought him, by the way?”

  “Not me,” Monk said. “I’ve got my own fan mail to answer. Somebody take it?”

  “Somebody took it. And made a systematic search of his room to boot—or so he says. It’s apparently wrong to meddle with private papers if they belong to Myron Kane.”

  Travis Elliot turned to me. “Sure you left it in Aunt Abby’s room, Mrs. Latham?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  Laurel was listening, looking from one of us to the other. “Who did take it?” she asked abruptly. “And what was it?”

  Travis shook his head. “I gather it wasn’t a fan letter. He wouldn’t say what it was, except that he damn well wants it back quick. He’s in a cold sweat about it. I asked him how he thought I could get it back if he won’t tell me what it is or who wrote it. Who did you say gave it to you, Mrs. Latham?”

  I started to say, “Albert Toplady,” and caught a swift glance from Monk.

  “I’ve forgotten, I’m afraid,” I said.

  Monk set his glass of whisky and soda on the mantel. “The only other people who could have taken it.” he said, very casually, “were Elsie and Soapy Sam.”

  Travis nodded. “And Sam wouldn’t. That leaves Elsie. She’d take it if she thought there was anything in it and got the chance. She’d think it was her duty. But why should she think there was anything in it? And I wasn’t paying any attention to either of them.” He looked at Monk. “I think,” he said coolly, “that if we could get that letter—whatever it is—we’d have Kane just where we want him. There’s something about it—— He offered, just now, to turn over his manuscript and give back any other papers he’s got, if he gets that letter, unopened, before he leaves for New York tomorrow. If he doesn’t——” He picked up the poker and stirred the fire.

  “If he doesn’t, what?” Laurel asked.

  “He’s going to keep a dinner date, he says, with the head of the bar association. The district attorney will be there.”

  A coal dropped out of the fire and clattered noisily on the brick hearth, and at the same moment the bell pealed loudly out in the hall. Monk Whitney was watching Laurel intently. She was standing taut and motionless, her whole bearing a dead giveaway that Myron’s hardly veiled threat had meaning to her that it did not have to him or Travis.

  Travis went over to the switch and pressed the button. The front door opened.

  “Travis?” A full deep voice I hadn’t heard before came up the stairway. Laurel took a deep breath and looked urgently at Monk. I saw his jaw tense as he turned and stood looking down into the fire. I thought he was more disturbed than he had been at any time before.

  Travis had gone out into the hall.

  “Come on up, sir,” he was saying, and I could hear a muffled
pattern of more than one pair of feet on the carpeted stairs. “Oh, hello, Sam.”

  There was a good deal less cordiality in his greeting then than when he’d spoken first. Sam Phelps, I thought, in spite of how much Myron Kane thought he could write a check for, was certainly not what one might call a universal favorite. It was Judge Whitney, however, not Sam, that I was interested in, and when he came up into the room, I could see why Laurel Frazier thought about him as she did. He was large and robust, with thick white hair and shaggy, grizzled eyebrows over a pair of very wise blue eyes. His face was broad, shaped like his son’s, but filled out and mature. It was strong as iron, full of repose and understanding.

  “This is Mrs. Latham, judge,” Travis said. He followed him in, leaving Sam Phelps to bring up the rear.

  Judge Whitney took my hand in a warm, friendly grasp. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham? I dined with your friend Colonel Primrose this evening. He said you’re staying with my sister Abigail. I hope that isn’t going to keep me from having the pleasure of seeing you.” The twinkle in his eye disappeared as he turned. “You’ve met my daughter’s husband, Mr. Phelps, I believe?”

  Sam Phelps and I murmured something at each other. Judge Whitney went over to the fireplace.

  “I’ve come after the letter that Mrs. Latham brought to Myron Kane,” he said calmly.

  “We were just talking about it, sir,” Travis said.

  “I presumed as much. Which of you has it?”

  Monk moved over by me. “Better hand it out, Sambo,” he said.

  Sam Phelps’ polished dome flushed. “You’re just trying to annoy me, Monk,” he said angrily. “The first I knew of it was when Kane called me from here an hour ago. I reported it to the judge at once. I’m not in a position to——”

  “I don’t doubt you have the best intentions in the world—one or all of you,” Judge Whitney said. It was almost as if he had been concentrating on Something Else, too, and was unaware his son-in-law was speaking. “Let me say you are badly advised. It’s of the utmost importance that that letter be returned to Myron Kane—and immediately.”