All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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wish I could tell you,” I said, truthfully. “But I haven’t the foggiest idea in the world. Unless—you’ll find this out if you don’t already know, so I may as well tell you—it was because Molly Crane spent the night here. And I don’t——”
“Is that Cass Crane’s wife?”
I nodded.
His black parrot’s eyes sparkled. “Why was she staying here?”
He asked it so curtly that I wondered if he’d got himself mixed up with Sergeant Buck. Buck is the really military member of the family.
“Something happened,” I said. “Cass didn’t let her know he was coming home, or something. She was hurt, and mad, so she . . .”
I broke off abruptly. “And now you’ll decide Molly was trying to poison Cass. Do you know, Colonel Primrose, that much as I enjoy knowing you, sometimes I wish I didn’t?”
Whatever he would have said to that was stopped by Lilac’s appearance.
“—Mr. Gofiel says he got some meat in, but he won’ have none long if you ’spect to get any. Here’s your book.”
“All right,” I said. I took the ration book.
“And don’ you stop and talk all day and get there late. He ain’ goin’ to save nothin’ past ten o’clock.”
She gave Colonel Primrose an unfriendly glance and waddled back down to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” I said. “Murder’s one thing, but lamb chops are another. So if you don’t mind . . .”
I picked up my hat and bag.
“There’s one thing, however. I don’t know what you’re talking about, about my having got into something . . . but I’m not going away. If my child should get leave before he goes across somewhere, he’ll want to come home and I want to be here.”
I looked at my dog-eared ration book. “And I’ve got to go.”
I left him standing in front of the house, still smoking his cigar, annoyed and more worried about the death of Mr. Durbin’s troglodyte handy man than seemed to me to make much sense. If he had, as I did, to feed two people on one ration book, he’d have something to be concerned about, I thought as I headed for the market on Wisconsin Avenue. Lilac’s books, as pristine and untouched as the unclipped coupons in millionaires’ safety deposit vaults, lie in a box on the bureau, with her insurance policies, her marriage license, and the deed to the cemetery plot. No efforts of mine to explain that the $10,000 fine mentioned on the back of them is not for their use but their misuse have had the slightest effect. She’s only threatened to leave me twice. The first time was when I tried to insist she use her coupons, the second was when I tried to get her to take mine to the store. And since I’d rather eat chicken till I fly and fish till I swim, and go after both, there was no real problem involved.
As I turned the corner toward Mr. Scofield’s, I saw it was not to be without its compensations. When, otherwise, would I ever have seen Corinne Blodgett’s ample white derriere backing down the steps of a street car as if they were a fireman’s ladder, dropping her string shopping bag and holding up what little traffic there was while she rescued a one-point red coupon that had fluttered out of the sheaf of ration books she was holding tightly between her teeth? The marines landing on New Georgia never had the beaming consciousness of triumph that Corinne had, finally making the curb in front of Mr. Scofield’s dingy-looking market. But most of the marines, probably, hadn’t spent their lives in broadcloth-upholstered limousines.
“My dear, I’m enchanted!” Corinne cried. She got her various appendages together, straightened her big white straw hat and mopped her streaming face. “The man couldn’t have been nicer. He gave me a pass for a dollar and a quarter and told me I could ride free, on any bus or street car I wanted to, for a week! Now my dear, you know that’s a lot cheaper than keeping a car and paying that awful man I had a hundred dollars a month just to drive around and open doors. You know it is, Grace, and feeding him too. My dear, I tell you I think we’re all going to learn of lots of things. And my dear, I sat next to the loveliest little woman! She says if you buy a piece of beef and cook it with okra and tomatoes, and things, and put it in jars, you have vegetable soup all winter. And my dear——”
She stopped abruptly half inside the door. It was not unlike the Queen Mary deciding to reverse engines in the middle of the Potomac Basin.
“—Have you heard about that poor little creature that drives for Mr. Durbin? My dear, he’s dead! It’s the most extraordinary thing. Why, do you know——”
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
A delivery boy with a box of groceries on his shoulder was waiting patiently to get out.
“Oh, I’m being a bottle-neck!” Corinne laughed. She went on full sail into the store. “I was saying, my dear, literally nobody can understand it. Mr. Durbin was so dependent on him, and everybody thought he was really devoted to him, in his way. And I must remember to tell him about the streetcars. But, my dear, there it is. Nobody can imagine why he ever did it. Do you suppose this is any good?”
I stared at her past the head of lettuce she was holding up.
“—Did what, Corinne?” I demanded.
“Oh, my dear, don’t you know? He killed himself. Courtney says poor Mr. Durbin was so cut up about it. She thinks it was because he’d been drinking quite a lot. Mr. Durbin had said he was going to have him deported, or something, but it was just to make him pull himself together.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You didn’t think I meant Mr. Durbin had done it? But that’s just silly, dear, because a good driver is practically impossible to replace, these days.—Of course, it didn’t surprise me, Grace, because the Swami said there was blood on the moon, and he looked straight at Courtney . . .”
“Swami?” I protested feebly. If there’s anybody who doesn’t look like my idea of a swami—gleaned, I admit, from hawk-nosed people with turbans and crystal balls in tea rooms—it’s Duleep Singh. And I hadn’t noticed he was looking at Courtney, though he had been at Molly Crane.
“Well, I don’t know whether he’s a swami or not,” Corinne said. “But you can’t call him ‘Mahatma’ because he wears clothes. I think ‘Mr. Singh’ sounds absurd, and he certainly knows things ordinary people don’t know. Just take last night. He knew something was going to happen and it did. The first time he came to our house I’d been telling Horace about him, and you know how Horace is. Dry as dust, and so literal you can’t even say it looks like rain.”
She gathered up a half dozen yellow squash and put them in her basket.
“Horace hates squash,” she remarked. “But he needs yellow food. Anyway, that night, my dear, he said to Duleep Singh, ‘My wife says you can read the future.’ My dear, I could have killed him. But Duleep Singh just said, ‘May I suggest you look carefully before you go into the venture you were considering as I came into the room.’ ”
Corinne was carefully picking out a couple of yellow cucumbers from under the pile of fresh green ones. She turned back to me.
“My dear, I can’t tell you. Horace was undone. He literally was. If the Chief Justice had turned a handspring Horace couldn’t have been more reduced. There have been times when I’ve thought Horace was the reincarnation of something fed on papyrus, but really . . .”
She wiped a tear of laughter out of one eye.
“That was less than two months ago, and Horace still isn’t the same. Of course, he never tells me anything about his business, so I don’t know what it was, but, my dear . . .”
Most people lower their voices when they are about to impart the climax of a story in the grocery store, but not Corinne.
“—Yesterday,