The Philadelphia Murder Story: A Colonel Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is it’s something that will . . . hurt somebody terribly.” She tried to control her voice. “It’s worse because it wasn’t his. It’s something she gave him to keep.” She nodded down toward Abigail Whitney’s room. “She gave it to him because she said she could trust him not to open it better than she could herself.”

      “Then she doesn’t—neither of them knows what’s in it?”

      “She may now. Maybe Myron told her. She always finds everything out, someway.”

      I wondered if that could explain her sudden desperate fear when she’d talked to me over the phone that morning. She surely hadn’t known, whatever it was, when she wrote to me.

      “If only I hadn’t been so smart,” Laurel Frazier was saying helplessly. “It was me that suggested it. I wanted people to know about my boss, because I’m so proud of him. And he said I could give Myron a file of his old records, and it must have been in them.”

      She stopped short, her slim body stiffening as if an electric charge had gone through it, the color rising in her cheeks again. She was looking past me at the door, and I turned quickly. Monk Whitney was there, looking down at the littered floor. If he was surprised, there was nothing in his manner to show it. He came on into the room.

      “It didn’t occur to you to check through the file before you gave it to him?” he said calmly. “Where’s the old Frazier efficiency they talk about, Coppertop?”

      She flared up passionately. “Quit calling me Coppertop! And I don’t need you to tell me what I should have done! I know it. I started to, but we were busy, and they were all before my time. I know it’s my fault. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t!”

      “Myself, I don’t see what all the row’s about,” he said imperturbably. “If the old man’s got a dark streak in the past, I’m all for it. If it’s too dark, the Post isn’t going to publish it. They aren’t running a scandal sheet. Nobody’ll be hurt.”

      “You don’t know Myron Kane!” Laurel retorted hotly. “He’s so clever, they’ll never know what he’s doing. It’ll sound perfectly all right. I know. He told me in London last year he’d got even with lots of people that way.”

      Monk Whitney shook his head. “Who’s he: got to get even with around here, Dear Child?”

      “Everybody. Sam and Elsie treated him like a police reporter with the smallpox. And he’s sensitive as a child; he’s always trying to cover up to keep from being hurt. Travis was horrid, and you’ve been just as bad. Patronizing and superior——”

      “I thought he was doing the superior patronizing, myself.” He grinned at her amiably. “And personally, I don’t give a damn about what he said to de Gaulle. And as for how close the bomb missed him in the viceroy’s swimming pool——”

      “That’s what I mean,” Laurel said. “You don’t care what happens to anybody but yourself. If you people had been halfway decent to him, we wouldn’t have had this sort of thing.”

      She bent down and picked up a handful of the discarded papers on the floor, thrust them into Monk Whitney’s hand and stood watching him as he read them aloud. The first paragraph Myron had written over half a dozen times. The version he’d got farthest along with said:

      Like most people who deal successfully with other people’s domestic and parental relations in problem form, Judge Whitney has been unsuccessful in his own, sometimes to the point of melodrama. He and his sister, who lives next door to him in Rittenhouse Square, have not spoken to each other for some eight years. His children have been a steady disappointment. His batting average on them was fattened, however, when the war gave his son Monk—short for Monckton—an outlet for energies admirably adapted to the South Pacific, but not to the staid moribundity of the Quaker City. His——

      Myron had crumpled up the sheet at that point. The next one was on the same general tack:

      While not obtrusive or vulgar about it, the judge is nevertheless aware of the eminent fitness of the fate that arranged for him to be born in Philadelphia and a Whitney. His daughter’s marriage to a man who as a boy carried his father’s lunch in a tin box to the coal mine was a breach, never entirely healed by the fact that his son-in-law can write a check for the judge’s gross earnings over a lifetime of serious legal and juristic effort without dipping into his current income enough to notice it. In the ordinary course of events in Philadelphia, Elsie Whitney might have been—and apparently was—expected to marry the socially acceptable son of a close friend of the family. The judge’s present secretary was the unwitting cause of the tragedy that put an end to that, as the young man took over his father’s financial obligations, and in so doing obligated the beautiful young secretary to the point that a movie finish is expected any——

      That was as far as Myron had got with that one. Monk Whitney stood looking down at it steadily for a moment after he’d finished reading it. Then he crumpled it up with the others and tossed them back into Myron’s wastebasket. He turned to Laurel with a sardonic grin.

      “Being nice to Kane didn’t net you much, Miss Frazier. You are marrying the young man, aren’t you?”

      The two red spots I’d seen in her cheeks at the Broad Street Station were burning there again.

      “I certainly am.”

      He looked at her silently for an instant, the grin disappearing slowly. “You know, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

      Her eyes widened with astonishment. I thought as much at the sudden change in his tone as at what he’d said.

      “You’ve never been in love with the guy,” he added.

      “I suppose you think I’m being grateful too?”

      “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t you I was thinking about. It’s Travis. He’s too good a guy——”

      “You mean he’s not in love with me? He’s just marrying me because——” She stopped, her eyes incredulous, her breath coming quickly.

      “I think you’re both all mixed up with a lot of feeling grateful and sorry and this is what’s expected of you, and neither of you has ever been in love with anybody.” He stopped short, looking at her. “I guess I ought to keep my trap shut. I’m sorry, Laurel. I didn’t——”

      “You just don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s all,” she said quickly.

      The words were blurred and scarcely audible as she made an abrupt move toward the door and was gone down the stairs.

      Monk Whitney stood staring after her for an instant. He turned back slowly and looked at me. “I guess we’re all wet,” he said. “She is in love with the guy, after all.”

      He went on looking at me, so I said, probably acidly, “It looks like it. And what are you trying to do?”

      He looked for an instant then as if he thought it was none of my business, which, heaven knows, was true. But he said curtly, “Aunt Abby’s worried. She doesn’t think Laurel’s in love with Travis, or Travis with her, and Laurel’d marry Kane if she had an out. She asked me to talk to her—and now, because she didn’t know she was up here. I came up to see if Kane was in. I guess I wasn’t——”

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