All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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start. Lilac was in the doorway.
“Mis’ Grace—Colonel Primrose, he downstairs. He says, don’ you hurry yourself none, but he want to see you if it ain’ inconvenient.”
5
There have been times when I’ve been glad to see Colonel Primrose, and no doubt there will be again . . . but this was not one of them.
Normally, I have no reluctance about murder, but the more the details of the night before reconstructed themselves in my mind the less I found myself wanting to be in anyway involved with anything that might have happened on 26th and Beall Streets. As I came into the sitting room and looked out into the garden, however, and saw his solid, slightly rotund figure in white linen, he looked so much more like the county agent inspecting the tomato vines than a sub rosa policeman that it occurred to me suddenly that might not be why he was here at all.
He came to the back hall door and inside, smiling as if the idea of murder had never been remotely in his mind.
“What kind of a spray are you using, if any, Mrs. Latham?” he asked amiably.
“Nicotine, I think, was the last one,” I said.
I looked at the perforated leaf he had in his hand. The tip was curled down with some kind of blight, and the whole thing looked pretty discouraging, frankly. I changed the subject.
“Anyway, I thought you were out of town,” I said. Then I said, “But look at you! What have you been doing . . . haunting a house?”
The shoulder of his white linen suit had a great black cobweb streaked over it, and there was another down the side of his trousers leg, which also had a jagged tear in it.
He cocked his head down and around—he can’t turn it normally because of a bullet he stopped in the last war—and looked at himself.
“I’ve just been in one,” he said. “If it wasn’t haunted before, it ought to be now. You know that empty hovel on the corner next to the Cass Cranes’?”
I stood looking at him blankly. “. . . the corner of 26th and Beall Streets,” the radio reporter had said. But that wasn’t the Cranes’ house at all. It was the empty tumble-down shack next door to them. And if it wasn’t the Cranes’ house, it obviously wasn’t Cass they’d found in it. I walked to a chair and sat down abruptly, so relieved that I don’t think my knees would have continued to support me!
He was looking at me with a quizzical but rather perturbed interest. “—Do you know something about this business, Mrs. Latham?”
“I don’t even know what business you’re talking about,” I said. “I just heard the end of a broadcast this morning, and I thought something unpleasant had happened at the Cranes’, is all.”
“Why did you think that?”
“No reason—except the location.”
“Then you don’t know whose body was found there?”
He was looking at me with odd intentness.
I shook my head.
“Do you know who this is?”
He reached in his inside coat pocket, took out a small oblong leather folder and handed it to me. It was a public vehicle driver’s identification, issued in New York City . . . the kind you see in taxicabs, with a usually unrecognizable picture on it of the man sitting in the front. I looked at it, and at Colonel Primrose.
“—This is that queer little creature who drives for Mr. Durbin, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“It was his body found in the house next to the Cranes’.”
It may have been wrong of me, but it seemed a little strange, somehow, that Colonel Primrose should have been so disturbed, as he patently was, about such an odd little creature. After all, when the papers say we’ve lost two Flying Fortresses it can hardly mean anything except that twenty of our best have probably gone. We seem to think so little in terms of individual lives any more, and Colonel Primrose had been where better men than this died by the thousands, in the last war.
I handed it back to him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened, do you know?”
He hesitated for just an instant.
“The body was carried in there. He died somewhere else.”
“How do you know——”
He smiled patiently.
“The dust on those floors is a quarter of an inch thick, Mrs. Latham. The body didn’t move after it was put down. The footprints from the front door were made by a man with feet twice the size of his. And in stocking feet. He caught his foot on a nail on the floor and left a thread of his sock. The police have it. Furthermore, the little man had been drinking whisky . . . with a strong base of nicotine. Enough to kill him about fifty times.”
He raised the leaf from my tomato plant to his nose and sniffed at it. I stared at him with my mouth open, and I mean it literally.
“Why, Colonel Primrose!” I gasped. “You don’t mean you think——”
He smiled a little wryly.
“Think you poisoned him? No, my dear. I don’t think you did. But I think somebody with a Victory garden in the back yard could have . . . and there’s quite a nice one at the Cranes’, next door. I saw it over the fence.”
I sat there pretty stunned for a moment or two. But it seemed so preposterous.
“Why in heaven’s name would any of them want to kill that little man?” I demanded. “It’s . . . it’s absurd!”
“I’m wondering if it is,” he said calmly. He got up and went over to the fireplace where I keep the big parlor matches, and was lighting a cigar. It seemed to take a very long time. When he turned around his face was soberer than I’d ever seen it.
“I want you to do something for me, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly. “I want you to go upstairs and pack your bag, and leave Washington . . . without telling anybody but me where you’re going. I’ll have Buck drive you to Baltimore to take a train.”
It must have been-one of my blanker mornings, because it seemed to me all I’d done since I woke up was stare at somebody like an idiot child.
“Why on earth . . . ?” I demanded.
“Because I don’t want you hurt,” he said.
He hesitated a moment.
“I don’t know as much about this as I’d like to, my dear . . . but it looks serious. And it looks as if you’ve stepped right into it. I’m afraid you probably don’t know anything about it on the one hand, and may know altogether too much on the other. Won’t you, just for once, believe what I’m telling you, and believe that if you didn’t mean as much to me as——”
“Is this what brought you over here this morning, Colonel?” I asked. It seemed a little early in the morning for all this, and I do have my duty toward Sergeant Buck. “—Or why did you come?”
He drew a deep breath.
“I had some idea, Mrs. Latham, of finding out what a man whose body was dumped in a hovel in Beall Street was doing on your doorstep at twenty minutes to twelve last night.”
“My doorstep?”
He nodded.
“A police patrol car keeping an eye on my house saw him. He ran when you turned on the light. His car was just down the street, and he got in and drove away. You came out on the porch a minute later.”
He smiled rather grimly.
“You probably know that. They got his number, and stood by here in case he came back. Then they picked