The Philadelphia Murder Story: A Colonel Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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my fault and it means everything to me. Everything, I tell you!”
Her face and voice were alive with passionate determination. I started to move behind Myron to go out the other door, and then I was caught in the crowd of people streaming in, beginning the homeward rush of a city of commuters emptying itself at the close of the business day.
Myron Kane’s Oxford-out-of-Virginia accent and slightly superior tone seemed shockingly casual compared with the girl’s intensity.
“All right,” he said. “Marry me and I’ll skip it.”
“Marry you!” It was a sharp, incredulous gasp. “You’re crazy. I’m going to marry Travis Elliot. You know it.”
“Oh, no,” he said easily. “People don’t marry for gratitude any longer. You haven’t got any reason anyway to be——”
“It’s not gratitude! It’s——”
I was jostled toward the door just then, and went on to the taxi entrance, catching just a glimpse of the two bright red spots that had flared up in her cheeks, and her eyes shining with anger. If she was going to marry Travis Elliot, she was obviously Judge Whitney’s secretary, Laurel Frazier. I tried to get another look, but the door closed behind me.
It was cold outside, and across Penn Square the sleet was coming down in slanting black lines through the maze of moving headlights. It was just then I was first aware of the gray-haired, wizened little man, his overcoat turned up around his neck, standing there also waiting for a cab. I had an instant fleeting impression that he’d been back there inside and had seen me eavesdropping, but I dismissed that as just my guilty conscience.
I said, “Rittenhouse Square,” when the taxi starter asked me where I was going, and he turned back. “Wasn’t you going to Rittenhouse Square, buddy?”
It was the little man in the gray coat. He nodded, sidled forward and waited for me to get in the cab.
“Rittenhouse Square!” the starter called again.
The door swung open and Myron Kane came out alone. He raised his hand toward the starter, stiffened abruptly, turned and strode rapidly back into the station. If I could have seen his face after he’d started toward the cab, I’d have thought he’d recognized me and was making an escape, but he couldn’t have seen my face any more than I could his, and he’d hardly recognize me from the knees down. He must have thought of something he hadn’t said to Laurel Frazier, I decided.
The driver put his flag down. “Where to?” he asked.
I gave Abigail Whitney’s number on 19th Street. The driver looked at the little man. Something seemed to have happened to him. His jaw was working, but no sound came from his lips.
“Just . . . the corner of Walnut Street,” he said at last.
He sat bolt upright as we nosed into the traffic, and then he glanced at me, not furtively at all, but with a kind of anxious curiosity and an obvious desire to say something if he could get up courage enough. At last he did.
“Are you . . . going to Mrs. Whitney’s?” he stammered.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you know Mr. Kane, by any chance? The—the great foreign correspondent?”
I looked at him blankly. It would have been an extraordinary thing at any time, but after the last few moments it was incredible.
“Why, yes, I do,” I said.
“Then would you mind giving him this?” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out an envelope. “It’s a—a letter for him,” he said lamely.
“May I ask why you didn’t give it to him yourself?” I inquired, bewildered, but curious too.
“Was that him talking to Miss Frazier?” The envelope shook a little in his hand.
“Do you know Miss Frazier?” I asked it, thinking what an odd kind of cat-and-mouse game we seemed to be playing with each other.
“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “I know who she is. Her father was a—a great doctor. Everybody, poor and rich, loved him. I used to see her with him sometimes. But I don’t know her.”
The little man spoke very hurriedly, as if trying to correct at once an idea I’d got that he was pretending to be better than he was.
It was rather pathetic, because she hadn’t looked like the kind of person who’d think it was presumptuous of him to say he knew her.
“Mr. Kane is staying right in the house with Mrs. Whitney,” he said, with a kind of simple awe that was almost startling.
I tried not to smile. “You do know him?”
He flushed uncomfortably. “Oh, no. I just . . . follow his writings. He’s wonderful, don’t you think so?”
As I couldn’t say what I thought of Myron at the moment to someone who put him in the ranks of the major gods, I nodded.
“And you’ll give him this?” He handed the letter to me.
“I’ll be glad to,” I said, taking it.
“He’s doing an article about Judge Whitney,” he said, after a moment. “I read that in the papers. I used to see Judge Whitney too. I could tell him lots of things about him.”
“Good or bad?” I asked, as casually as I could. He looked at me so blankly that I let it go. “What if he isn’t there? He was in the station. He might be going away.”
He looked apprehensively at the letter in my hand. “Just put it in the fire,” he said. “It isn’t really important. I wouldn’t want to bother anybody.”
The driver slowed down at the corner of the square; the little man fumbled with the door handle.
“I could send it back to you,” I said. He got out.
“My name’s Toplady—Albert Toplady,” he said hastily. “Just Quaker Trust Company—that’ll get me. I’ll be much obliged——”
The light had changed, the driver was waiting impatiently, and the cars behind us were, too, so I didn’t hear the rest of it. I looked back through the window, but Albert Toplady was lost in the stream of people hurrying home from work through the sleety darkness.
The taxi skidded around the corner and to the curb in front of Abigail Whitney’s house. I caught my breath and got out. The house wasn’t pink. In the icy rain, it was the color of raspberry sherbet, and the soot had left black streaks hanging from the window ledges. I rang the doorbell and noticed I wasn’t alone on the step. A squirrel sat there, old and wet, twitching his moth-eaten tail impatiently, looking up at the door. It didn’t seem extraordinary to be standing there with him, and I wasn’t surprised when the butler, as old and in a coat as moth-eaten, took a walnut out of his pocket and gave it to him before he gave me a childlike, vacant smile and picked up my bag.
“Mrs. Latham? Madam is in her room.” His voice had the remote quality of the very deaf.
I followed him inside. The house was very handsome and surprisingly modern—more surprisingly so, in fact, than I then realized. There were mirrored panels in the soft beige walls. We went up a marble staircase curving gracefully to a wide foyer on the second floor. On the side wall were two more large mirrored panels, and in the space between them a decorative recess with a carved shell ceiling. A paneled library stretched across the back. The door to the room at the front stood open, and the voices coming from it, and not sounding very amicable, stopped abruptly as we came up.
“Madam’s room,” the butler said.
If the squirrel didn’t surprise me, Abigail Whitney did. It hadn’t occurred to me, when she’d said she did not now leave the house, that it was anything but another of the vagaries she was famous for, but in the wide room overlooking the square she sat propped up in yellow satin cushions against the yellow satin-upholstered