All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford

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      “Right,” Randy said. He told the driver. His voice was casual and matter-of-fact, but he took hold of her hand and gave it a tight squeeze. If he hadn’t been in love with her, I suppose, he wouldn’t have been standing by as he was, though it’s always seemed to me the young are capable of a lot more unselfishness than they’re given credit for. If an occasional eyebrow had been raised about these two, it would have reflected more on the minds of the raisers than on them. And Courtney’s calling Molly a whited sepulchre, and a two-timing little rat, has always seemed to me rather ironic to say the least. The trouble with Courtney is the trouble with a lot of women whose mothers forgot to tell them about eating their cake and having it too, and making their bed and lying in it, and those other useful bits of information preserved in the domestic time-capsules of yester-year. Though at the moment and on the face of it, Courtney Durbin seemed positive proof that such things are as obsolete as the recipe for A Very Nice Face Pomade made out of mutton tallow and attar of roses that I’ve still got at home, in my great-grandmother’s spidery script.

      The taxi slowed down on 26th, and turned a little dubiously, as well it might, into the end of Beall Street. Molly and Cass’s house is the only one in the block that has so far reversed the blight that most of the rest of Georgetown has been rescued from, to become a landlord’s Garden of Eden with the Rent Control Board its only serpent . . . if an anaemic gartersnake can so be called. It’s the second house from the corner. They bought it the day they were married, from a cousin of my cook Lilac who’d got a war job and was moving to civilized quarters. It looked then as if it would collapse in an unlovely heap of rotten boards if you bounced a ping-pong ball off it. The house next door on the corner, by the parked space above the drive along Rock Creek, was both too expensive and too far gone . . . so far gone, in fact, that it’s still empty, rats and fungi its only life, an old wisteria vine and the boards nailed across the sashless windows all that holds it together at all. The house we stopped at had no resemblance whatever to its original self or to any of its neighbors. It was gleaming white, with green shutters and window boxes full of hanging begonias.

      On the uneven brick sidewalk Molly stopped short and listened intently.

      “—Isn’t that my phone?”

      She ran through the white gate and up the iron steps. I could hear the muffled peal of the bell sounding again. She got the key out of her bag, unlocked the door and ran in.

      “She’s done a swell job, hasn’t she?” Randy said casually. He looked up at the white face of the little house. “She damn near killed herself, scraping and painting and patching plaster.—God, I hope that’s him, the stinking . . .”

      He stopped without finishing it. We stood there listening. We could have heard her voice, but we didn’t, and then a light went on in the back room, making a yellow path through the doorway. We went up the steps and inside.

      Molly was in the front room, staring down into the fireplace. As Randy switched on the light she turned around and smiled, quickly and too brightly.

      “They’d hung up.”

      “Then let’s stick around till he calls again.” Randy said. “He probably didn’t even know you were living here. He wouldn’t have had a key——”

      She put her hand on his arm.

      “You’re sweet, Randy—but . . . don’t! Please don’t!”

      She tried to smile. “I’ll get my things. If you want a drink there’s some ice downstairs.”

      She went out into the tiny hallway and up the stairs. I could hear her feet going across the floor and the creak of a bed, and that was all.

      Randy stood there a moment, pulling a brush hair out of a blob of paint on the mantel.

      “I’ll get some ice,” he said curtly. “God, this makes me sore. A guy like that . . .”

      “Listen,” I said patiently. “There must have been a slip-up. I can’t believe there wasn’t.”

      The look he gave me made me feel old and infirm and feebleminded.

      “—I was going to get some ice, wasn’t I.”

      I waited. It was the first time I’d been in the house since she’d painted the woodwork. If you looked too carefully the old chocolate-brown still showed in places, but it was very pleasant, and a superhuman job in this weather. And now she was upstairs alone with it, and all the fun it was going to be to show Cass what she could do, in between being a nurse’s aide four hours a day and working at the ration board and all the other things she did, was lying like a lump of uncooked dough in the pit of her stomach.

      Downstairs I could hear Randy swearing at the ice cubes. From outside in the street came a burst of high laughter from some unrestrained libido, full rich voices from the colored church around the corner drowning it suddenly with “Marching Down the King’s Highway.” In the warm duskiness of the surrounding night the little house with its smell of wet plaster and fresh paint seemed very pathetic and young and lonely.

      I could hear Randy plodding up the stairs, ice clinking against glass, and the creak of the floor above as Molly began to move around again. Suddenly the phone rang in the back room. Randy stopped, ice bucket in hand, looking at it, his lean sunburned face expressionless. The next instant Molly was flying downstairs. She’d changed her dress and taken off her evening slippers. She was barefooted, with one shoe in her hand, her face lighted up in a poignantly transparent denial of everything she’d said before.

      When she said “Hello,” her voice was a further betrayal, and it was even more of one when she said, “Oh, hello, Courtney.”

      She listened silently for a moment.

      “Thanks a lot for calling. No, I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve got to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn. I’ll see him tomorrow. Goodbye.”

      When she turned her face was drained of everything. Even her eyes were pale. She shook her head and picked up her shoe from the table by the phone.

      “Cass is at the Durbins’,” she said calmly. “He was too busy to come to the phone. Courtney wanted me to come over.”

      She went back to the hall. “I’ll be down in a second, Grace. Will you see the lights are off downstairs, please, Randy?”

      She’d just got upstairs when a woman’s voice called from the street—“Yoo-hoo, Molly! Cass?”—and we heard a lot of feet scraping up the iron steps.

      3

      I recognized Julie Ross’s voice.

      “Hello, angels, can we come in a minute? We didn’t know you’d got home till we saw you through the kitch——”

      Julie came in through the front room door and stopped short, her face blank for an instant.

      “Oh, hello, Grace. Hello, Randy. We thought it was Cass and Molly.”

      The “we” consisted, besides herself, of one large, fat-faced untidy man with a lot of moist black hair, his pongee suit dripping wet, and a man with a long face, gray hair and a quick pair of slate-blue eyes who looked as if he’d stopped on the top step, taken a cool shower and stepped into a linen suit just off the ironing board. He looked, furthermore, as acutely СКАЧАТЬ