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

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      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 up the car, parked on O Street near 26th, at four-fifteen this morning. He was dead—as far as they can figure in this weather—between two and three. Not later, anyway.”

      He stopped and looked at me intently. “I’d like to know why he was here.”

      “I 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 СКАЧАТЬ