The Philadelphia Murder Story: A Colonel Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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came in once and found him reading a letter I’d left on my desk. It was from the wife of a cabinet member, and the fact that he was doing a piece on her husband seemed sufficient reason to him, if not to me, or to her when it came out in print.
But Myron hadn’t got to be the pal of princes, potentates and premiers by letting what Sergeant Buck calls the amendities stand in his way. The special-delivery letter I got from Abigail Whitney one morning early in January was added evidence of that.
“Dear Child,” it began, and it was scrawled at what looked like white heat in green ink across and around and crisscross on the blue paper. “I must have mislaid your Letter introducing your Friend Myron Kane, but of course I am Happy to have him here for your Sake, and I’m sure the Hotels are very crowded. I remember the Lathams very well, although I haven’t seen any of them for Years, and always thought they were Estimable but Dull.”
I could hardly have been more appalled. I knew Myron Kane had the effrontery of a brass elephant, but this was a fabrication out of such whole cloth that I doubt if even such an elephant would ever have thought of it.
“You know, of course,” her letter went on, “he is doing a Profile of my Brother for The Saturday Evening Post, which I wish to say I no longer subscribe to since they have Changed the Cover, as in my Opinion it is like painting a Bathing Beauty on Independence Hall, nor can I imagine a Sane Editor wanting a Profile or even a Rear View of my Brother, who, as you know, is a Scoundrel. But the Reason I am Writing is that your Friend is making a Great Deal of Trouble. The Children are Very Bitter about him.”
As I’d never known anyone Myron did a story about who wasn’t very bitter about him, I wasn’t surprised at that. I read on, wondering if I’d find out who the children were:
“Monckton, who, you remember, was Very Wild, is coming back on leave today. Elsie, who married that Stuffed Shirt, Sam Phelps, whose Father made so much Money, must have sent for him, and I am very much Alarmed. Travis Elliot—you will recall our dear old friend, his father, Douglas Elliot, and his shocking Death, it was so Useless, my dear!—Travis is being very Sensible.”
I did, as a matter of fact, recall Douglas Elliot. He was the Latham family lawyer, and his death was indeed shocking, because it was by his own hand. It was not only shocking, it was incomprehensible. He was one of the most prominent and respected men in Philadelphia. How useless it was, I didn’t know, as there had never been anything but vague rumors about why he did it before it was all hushed up quickly and quietly. I had, however, heard there was a son who had carried on with a good deal of courage, and Travis Elliot, I gathered, must be that son.
“Travis does not think Laurel Frazier will be indiscreet about my Brother’s affairs,” Mrs. Whitney’s letter continued. “Or did you know that Laurel Frazier has been my Brother’s private Secretary for the past five years? And I can’t myself believe Laurel’s head has been turned by Myron Kane’s attentions, which are very Marked, even if he is World Famous. She has too many reasons for being terribly Grateful to Travis. I expect they will be married very soon now. Even my Brother, I understand, has given up the Hope that his son Monk will Reform, and it was nothing but Wishful Thinking on his part that Monk and Laurel would be attracted to Each Other, as they always have quarreled.”
Living in the babel of alphabetical pyramids on the Potomac as I do ought to make anyone at home in any rat race, no matter how complicated, but it hadn’t me. I was as confused by this welter of names and cross purposes as if I’d never set foot in either Washington or Philadelphia. The one thing that was really clear to me was that if Myron Kane was paying marked attention to Laurel Frazier, who was the private secretary of the man he was doing a profile about, it wasn’t for herself alone. The attentions would be finished the day the profile was, and Travis Elliot could have back the girl who had so many reasons for being grateful to him. And the rest of them could go on being bitter.
I glanced over the last page of the letter.
“But the Point, dear Child, is that I wish you to come up here at once. Myron Kane has told me about a Policeman he says you are going to marry. Perhaps you or your Policeman can have some Influence on your Friend, Mr. Kane, as it is a very Serious Matter and you are Responsible for his being in my House. I shall expect you tomorrow. I cannot meet you, as I do not Now Leave the House.”
It was signed, “Affectionately, Abigail Whitney,” with a postscript that said, “My house is the Pink one in the Square, which I painted that Color to Annoy my Brother, and am unable to get workmen to do over until After the War. I will expect you to stay here with me.—A. W.”
It was all very unfortunate, of course, I realized, but it certainly didn’t seem to me that I could be held responsible for Myron Kane. If Abigail Whitney took strange men into her house because they said someone she could remember only vaguely, if at all, had written her a letter about them, it was her problem, not mine. She was old enough and worldly enough to know better. And as for my so-called policeman, he was already in Philadelphia, doing some kind of job for the United States Treasury, in reference, no doubt, to that grim date, March fifteenth. I wrote Mrs. Whitney, telling her I was sorry, I’d never sent Myron Kane to her, and if he’d ever been a friend of mine, he wasn’t any longer. And that, I thought, was that.
But it wasn’t. She was on the long-distance telephone before I got the letter in the mailbox next morning. Discursive and disjointed as the monologue that came over the wire was, several things were clear at the end of it. One was that Judge Whitney’s son Monk had got home and was in no mood for nonsense. Another was that Myron Kane was on the point of ruining the whole family. By some curious mental process, Abigail Whitney had skipped from my being responsible for Myron Kane to my being responsible for Myron, The Saturday Evening Post, her brother’s profile, and a great deal of sorrow, tribulation and heartbreak for everybody. But the appeal behind all of it was desperation. It was the desperation of an old woman suddenly caught in a tangled web she’d helped to weave and now was powerless to get out of. It was extraordinary how starkly implicit her despair and fear of something was in her repeated denials of it. It seemed so strange, too, because I would have thought Judge Whitney was one man whose life had no dark places for fear of exposure to cause such desperate anxiety.
3
Police detectives I’ve heard talk are always saying, “It was a funny coincidence that broke that case,” or “It was just that I got all the breaks that time.” It seems to me to happen too often not to imply something else. It’s almost as if a powerful magnetic field forms itself out of the concentrated stuff of guilt, drawing the people involved in the pattern unconsciously together, without apparent reason or awareness, and that when the pattern is once definitely established, the seeming coincidences that finally make a coherent whole really are not accidental at all.
Or there’s no other way I can explain what happened the day I went up to Philadelphia. It took me so long to get Colonel Primrose on the phone up there, and tell him I was coming and about Myron, that I missed the train I was planning to take. I took the three o’clock.
It was twenty minutes late into the 30th Street Station, and my shuttling across to the Broad Street Station was just as much a part of the magnetic field. It’s the first time I’d ever done it, and why I suddenly thought I’d have a better chance for a taxi there, I haven’t an idea. And if all those things hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have seen Myron Kane or met Albert Toplady.
I saw Myron by the newsstand. He’s tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with curly black hair and always immaculately well tailored, usually with a Homburg and fitted overcoat and stick, and generally looking as if he were just setting out to meet a prince or a potentate. I started over, and then I saw there was a girl there, talking to him. That in itself was unusual. Myron’s taste in women, as I knew it in Washington, had always run to the wide-eyed and not very bright who listened while he did the talking. This girl’s hair was a soft auburn nimbus brushed back from her broad forehead, touching the collar of her Persian-lamb Chesterfield coat. Her eyes seemed to be a sort: of odd gray-blue, though just then the pupils were so dilated that the irises were hardly visible. She had high cheekbones and a pointed chin, and her face was pale with the intensity of