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

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СКАЧАТЬ up at Molly’s door, went back up, opened it quietly and looked in.

      The bed was empty and she was gone, her bag still on the luggage racked in front of the fireplace.

      That, I thought, was that. A couple of hours of sleep had done its job, and she’d gone home to Cass. I realized then that that was what I’d been counting on. And I was more relieved than I’d thought I’d be. It’s always such a mess getting mixed up in other people’s domestic quarrels. And Molly belonged with Cass. She must have been acutely aware of it, waking up and lying there alone, before she slipped out through the darkened streets and back to him.

      The air probably just seemed fresher and lighter as I went back to bed. It was certainly hot enough the next morning. I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows and Lilac’s heavy step plodding up the stairs. She wasn’t muttering darkly to herself, so we were headed for a peaceful day, I thought as I sat up and looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to eight. I turned to smile at her polished ebony face in the doorway; and my jaw dropped, but literally, as I stared blankly past her.

      Molly Crane was there in the hall. She was dressed in her blue nurse’s aide uniform, with her hair brushed up on the top of her head, the curling tendrils around her neck still wet from the shower. Her suntanned face was fresh and lineless, her lips bright red and smiling. Her amber eyes were a little pale, but it could so easily have been the heat that for a moment I wasn’t sure it hadn’t affected me myself.

      She laughed. “Don’t tell me you forgot I was here. I tried to be as quiet as I could.”

      I didn’t know what to say, under the circumstances. She obviously had no idea I knew she’d been out, and apparently had a definite reason for wanting me to think she hadn’t. It was very confusing. But she didn’t wait for me to answer.

      “I’ve got to be at the hospital by eight-thirty,” she said. “If . . . anyone should call me, will you tell them I’ll be back after lunch? If I may come back . . . do you not mind, really?”

      Lilac stopped closing the outside shutters. “No, child, Mis’ Grace she don’ mind. It’s company for her. She like company in the house.”

      As I didn’t need to say anything, with Lilac taking over, I just smiled.

      “Goodbye, then—I’ll see you,” Molly said. She went out, Lilac following her.

      I poured a cup of coffee, turned on the portable radio on the table for the eight o’clock local news, and glanced through the comic strips waiting for it to come on. When it did come there wasn’t much I hadn’t heard the evening before. I turned to the gossip column. The last paragraph stood out from the rest of it.

      “We can hardly call it this column’s scoop, because it’s what everybody’s been saying since they caught their breath again. But unless our crystal ball is cloudy with the heat, we see a low pressure area reaching as far west as Reno. Some people say he forgot to tell her he was coming back last night, but he looked cheerful enough when we saw him being met by one of the Capital’s coolest looking lovelies . . . who may, of course, just have happened along. You know how airports are, these days. You’re apt to run into most anybody.”

      I turned the page and took up my orange juice, half listening to the commercial reporter announcing that the Snow White Laundry was discontinuing pickup and delivery and would take no more new customers, and Fur Storage Inc. had no room for more furs or woolens. You know how it is . . . the radio goes on, and your inner ears are partly closed. Then mine were abruptly open.

      “. . . corner of 26th and Beall Streets in Georgetown this morning,” the voice was saying.

      I put my glass down and sat up, trying to grope back into the lost ether for what had gone before.

      “—The police were called by a paper carrier who noticed the front door standing open and looked inside. The body was taken to the Gallinger Hospital, where the cause of death will be determined. Officers of the Homicide Squad said there was no evidence of violence, but the circumstances surrounding the case were such that an investigation will be made. If you are unable to find your usual supply of Mullher’s Five-X Beer at your dealer’s . . .”

      I switched off the dial and sat there, staring blankly in front of me. I couldn’t bring back the words I’d missed . . . but I could hear Randy Fleming as plain as if he were in the room speaking to me. And I could hear the tone of his voice. “Yeah . . . In fact, I’ve seen him . . .”

      “—Mis’ Grace?”

      I looked around with a 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 СКАЧАТЬ