Murder in the O.P.M. Read online

  But there’s no use arguing with Lilac. I said, “Really?” and went on with my lunch.

  “When they firs’ come,” she went on ominously, “butter wouldn’t melt in they mouf. Now they fights like cats an’ dogs.”

  I looked up with surprise.

  “Specially since that man come,” she added.

  “What man?”

  “Ah don’ know what man. Ah jus’ sayin’ what Boston say las’ night. The man tha’s hangin’ roun’ over there all time, talkin’ ’bout the devil. ’Bout he goin’ to th’ bad place when he die.”

  I started to put down my napkin and demand some sense out of all this, but I restrained myself, knowing it was the surest way to make her shiny ebony face go stolidly blank and send her muttering away to the kitchen.

  “Do you mean Mr. Hilyard’s going to hell?” I asked.

  “He already there,” Lilac said. “He don’ call his soul his own, Boston say. It’s th’ man Ah’m talkin’ about. Th’ man hangin’ roun’. Th’ devil’s goin’ to get his own self, he keep on sayin’. Mis’ Hilyer she don’ let him in th’ house. One day she go out an’ drive him away her own self. It’s excitement times over that place. Boston ain’ used to workin’ for them kind of people.”

  She hadn’t mentioned Diane Hilyard. I was thinking about that, and wondering why, as I parked my car in front of the white brick mansion in Prospect Street that the Hilyards were paying a thousand dollars a month for. It’s one of Georgetown’s distinguished houses, built before anyone had thought of the Federal City that now overshadows Georgetown and most of the world. It occupies most of the block along 37th Street across from the campus of Georgetown University. Its gardens, which used to run down to the river, are cut off now at the stone embankment they built when they put through the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal toward the beginning of the last century. The Ralstons bought it when he was chief of staff after the last war, and did a very intelligent job of changing it from a low-class rooming house back to a lot of its former glory. I remember when it seemed miles away from everything, even in the ’20’s, but now that Washington’s spread like a bottleful of ink on a clean blotter, it’s practically on the White House steps.

  I pressed the bell and waited. In a moment I heard a chain rattle lightly and slip into its metal groove. The door opened about six inches, and Boston peered out cautiously. His face broke instantly into a warm grin. He unhooked the chain and greeted me with a mixture of cordiality and relief that more than confirmed everything Lilac had said.

  “Certainly glad to see you, Miss Grace. Will you res’ your wraps? How you been keepin’, an’ how them boys?”

  “We’re all fine, thank you, Boston,” I said. “How have you been? Is Mrs. Hilyard at home?”

  I saw him glance across the street where the gray stone wall of Georgetown campus ends in a broken jagged line along 37th Street. It seemed to me that his face had the mingled anxiety and fascination that Lilac’s has when she talks about a haunted house a friend of mine owns in Fairfax.

  “Lilac tells me you’ve had a strange man around,” I said, giving him my fur coat.

  He looked quickly along the hall. “’Deed she ain’ ought to mentioned that to nobody, Miss Grace,” he whispered. “Th’ madam she say she don’ want people talkin’ ’bout that.”

  “I won’t breathe a word,” I said.

  “Ah’ll ’preciate that, Miss Grace, ’deed Ah will,” he said. He was so definitely relieved that I gathered there’d been some sharp instructions on the subject quite recently, and that he liked his job at least well enough not to want to lose it.

  “Right this way, Miss Grace. Ah’ll tell Mis’ Hilyard.”

  He opened the door of the small drawing room on the left, and I went in. Mrs. Ralston had taken the hundreds of signed photographs of notables from the tables and mantel, otherwise the room was familiarly the same.

  It sometimes seems to me that houses and furniture and servants are the only things that give Washington any basic and recognizable continuity, though I might throw in Senator Glass and Senator Norris. Everything else changes so fast—in spite of the present long tenancy in high places—that it’s hard to tell from one day to another who’ll be sitting on whose Louis Quinze needle-point chairs. I’d sat on those in this room under at least a dozen chatelaines, with their owner taking over from time to time in between, when she had a debutante granddaughter to introduce and later to marry. It’s a room that always fascinates me, because a British officer billeted there long ago engraved the face of His Majesty George III on the pink marble panel under the mantel, just above a startled fawn being brought down, with the pack coming up in full cry. I went over to look at it again, and then I stopped.

  Through the white paneled door into the large drawing room I heard a sharp and very cutting female voice:

  “. . . forgotten whose money you started on! It was mine! You’re a coward! You’re afraid of that——”

  She stopped abruptly as she heard Boston’s knock on the door. It must have been his second or third, I thought, unless he’d been standing there with his knees shaking. And I shouldn’t have blamed him. I never heard a voice that had such cool and unadulterated malignity in it. I was so startled by it myself that I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I did move in an instant, however, to a sofa by the front window as far from that door as I could get. I felt as if it would open and a she-dragon sail in and off with my head in an instant. I saw the point of the arsenic soup at once.

  That’s why I was totally unprepared for the woman who came in through the hall door a moment later, closing it behind her.

  “Oh, Mrs. Latham, it’s so nice to see you,” she said. “Agnes Philips has told us so much about you. I just feel as if I’d known you for years!”

  She held out her hand cordially. Mine must have felt like a wet, very dead fish.

  Myrtle Hilyard was a tall woman, with snow-white, smartly coifed hair and large liquid-soft dark eyes. Her voice was almost affectedly gentle and low-pitched, though I mightn’t have thought that if I hadn’t heard it high-pitched and anything but gentle the moment before. I even wondered for an instant if I had heard her—if I hadn’t imagined it or it had been someone else speaking. She sat down beside me on the sofa, reached for a blue silk knitting bag lying on the porphyry-topped table and took out a half-finished dark blue sweater.

  “I was just saying to my husband I hoped Agnes had written you we were here,” she was saying. “He did so much want to come in and meet you, but he’s late for a conference and has to rush off immediately. I don’t know how he stands the pace, really. I’m seriously thinking of taking him back home.”

  “But you’ve just come,” I said.

  “I know, but I really think he’s going to have to resign.” Mrs. Hilyard clicked her ivory needles efficiently. “He isn’t physically up to the demands they make on him. And frankly, my dear, he’s so discouraged at the confusion and lack of direction of all of it that I’m afraid of his health. You’d think in times like these people could forget politics.”

  “Haven’t they, in the OPM?” I asked.

  “My dear, if you only knew.”

  She raised her brown eyes and looked at me earnestly. The difference between what she had made herself and what she was was so sharp, all of a sudden, that it startled me. If she hadn’t been knitting I doubt if I’d have noticed it, but there was her face, limpid-eyed and gentle, and below it her hands, strong and determined, eating off the yarn with swift, almost machine-like precision, the staccato click of the needles completely belying the concerned affection in her voice.

  “I do hope you’ll dine with me before you leave,” I said. “I want to hear about Agnes and Tom. Could you come this Friday, do you think?”

  “We’d love to. It’s so sweet of you,” she said promptly. “Everyone’s so busy. I was saying to my husband I’ve never seen people so really busy. Of course I don’t want you to say anything about my husband resigning. Somebody could
make political capital out of it, and it’s just his health, really.”

  She moved a little in her seat. A big black limousine had drawn up in front of the curb, and a man who certainly didn’t look as if his health was in even the remotest jeopardy crossed the sidewalk to the open door.

  “There he goes now,” Mrs. Hilyard said pleasantly.

  Lawrason Hilyard was above middle height, with ruddy cheeks and an air of abounding vitality that was apparent in every line and movement of his well-set-up body. He stopped beside the stone mounting block with the little ice-covered puddle on it where generations of feet had worn it down, and glanced quickly across the street. I felt Mrs. Hilyard’s body tense. She leaned across the back of the sofa and tapped on the window. Lawrason Hilyard turned. The expression on his face was not particularly cordial, I may say, nor did the smile on her face as she waved good-by to him seem entirely genuine.

  Then I realized she was not waving good-by to him. She was motioning to him to get in the car and go on. And the reason was obvious. A man was crossing the street from the corner by the wall, his hand up. I had the impression that Mr. Hilyard had intended to stop and speak to him until he heard the tap on the window. He got into the car at once, and by the time the man was across the road there was nothing but an empty space where the big limousine had been.

  The man stood there, his hat in his hand, looking after it blankly. There wasn’t anything dreadfully terrifying about him that I could see. He was tall and thin, with thin straggly gray hair, and if anybody’s health was in danger, it would be his, I thought. His overcoat was threadbare and shoddy, and his hand was blue with cold as he raised it to put his hat back on. The hat was new, and his shoes were polished neatly, although they were old and out of shape. I had an impression of something rather sweet and other-worldly in his face in the fleeting glimpse of it that I got as he looked up at the window, before he turned and went slowly across the street again.

  Mrs. Hilyard turned back and went on with her knitting, accelerating the pace considerably.

  “Are there many beggars around Washington?” she asked casually.

  “Not that I’ve seen,” I said. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  The implication being sufficiently made, she changed the subject.

  “Of course, I was very much surprised when I got here. Agnes engaged this house for us. It’s very nice, of course, and I understand it’s considered smart to live in Georgetown. It seems awfully run-down and dilapidated to me. My daughter Joan laughs at me. She lives up the street. Her husband’s with the Board of Economic Warfare. I said to my husband it’s lovely to have all the family together again. My brother is here, too, you know. He’s living on his yacht, down by that awful fish market.”

  “Won’t you bring him to dinner too?” I asked. “And your younger daughter? Agnes said she’s lovely.”

  “If she isn’t going out, I’m sure she’d enjoy it very much,” Mrs. Hilyard said. She looked up from her knitting. “I wonder if by any chance you’ve ever heard of a young man named Stanley Woland?”

  If she’d asked me if I’d ever heard of the Washington Monument I should have been less surprised. Stanley Woland, whose name until recently had been Count Stanislaus Wolanski, was not what I should have called a young man, exactly. Until the war had brought a lot of personable unattached men to Washington he was the extra man whom everyone could always count on. Even after the legation he served as fourth or fifth secretary ceased functioning as an independent organization, he was still around with his moldy title, being charming to older women. For a moment I started to say, “I do hope Diane isn’t seeing very much of Mr. Stanley Woland.” Fortunately, I didn’t, for just then a maroon sports car aglitter with an extraordinary amount of the metals that are now critically important for war drew up in front of the house, its top down to the winter winds. A man in a fur-lined overcoat, a jaunty gray hat with a parrot’s feather in the band, and yellow chamois gloves, leaped out, slammed the door and bounded across the sidewalk and up the steps.

  Mrs. Hilyard put her knitting back into the moiré bag and zipped it up with a pleased, even excited, air.

  I got up. “I must be going,” I said.

  “Oh, no, my dear. I do want you to meet Stanley. He’s such a pet. And you haven’t met Diane. You know, we met Stanley entirely by accident. He was motoring through our town and his car broke down right in front of our place.”

  “Really?” I said. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “What’s that?” she asked quickly.

  I didn’t have to answer. Stanley was in the room. Some people say he bounds about like a gazelle to prove his knees aren’t stiff yet, but I think that’s unfair. I think he was told it was gay and attractive and believed it.

  “You dear boy!” Mrs. Hilyard cried, and Stanley, with that fine old old-world courtesy that women still seem to love, clicked his heels and kissed her hand. The bald spot on the top of his head always shows when he does, but probably he doesn’t know it yet. “This is Mrs. Latham, a friend of——”

  “Hello, Stanley,” I said.

  “Hello, Grace.”

  Stanley looked as if he’d like to throttle me on the spot. I gathered he didn’t feel well enough entrenched in the Hilyard household to have too many of his old friends about.

  “Isn’t it nice that our two friends in Washington know each other?” Mrs. Hilyard said delightedly. And just then something happened to her face. I looked quickly around at the door, and if, as I thought, even Stanley Woland caught his breath, I wasn’t surprised.

  By all odds the loveliest girl I’ve seen in Washington in a good many seasons was standing there. She had the most extraordinary coloring. Her hair was pale sunlit gold, and her eyes were as violet as an evening sky. She had on a periwinkle skirt and sweater, and she looked much nearer seventeen than twenty-two, going on twenty-three. Except for an almost imperceptible something around her full red mouth that I couldn’t name, her face was as expressionless as a pool of water, or as the faces in repose of most of her contemporaries. It wasn’t blank exactly, or sullen, and not bored, but rather just exceptionally unimpressed with the need of being anything she didn’t feel like being. You would certainly never get the idea, looking at her, that she’d ever shed a tear, or that anything had ever affected her very deeply.

  “Diane!” Stanley sprang forward and held out his hand. He didn’t kiss hers—he had far too much social sense for that—but the admiration in his manner was more than apparent, and very genuine.

  She smiled at him. For an instant her whole face lighted up. My heart gave a funny little downward bump. Her mother was beaming with that sort of fatuous pleasure that parents show when recalcitrant children unexpectedly toe the line. I’d felt it on my own face when my sons were dancing with my friends’ younger daughters after they’d said, “Oh, mother, what a lump!”

  Diane Hilyard came across the rug with her hand out. “You’re Grace Latham, aren’t you? Agnes told me about you. I thought you’d look older.”

  Her eyes were level with mine and very clear and steady, as if she was measuring me against some standard she had all her own.

  “Grace has been a charming young widow for years and years,” Stanley remarked, without rancor. “Ever since I first came to Washington, in fact.”

  We smiled at each other. It seemed to me best just then not to make any of the obvious retorts.

  Diane Hilyard still had hold of my hand. I don’t know why I had the feeling that she wanted to ask me something, but I did.

  “I’m glad you came to see us,” she said.

  “I’ll see you again soon, I hope.” I smiled at her and looked at Stanley. I wasn’t going to see very much of her at all, I knew, if he could help it. People who eat their cake and have it too are always afraid somebody’s going to tell on them, especially when they’ve decided to stake out a permanent claim on the shifting sands of life. However, I doubt if at that point Stanley needed
to be worried about me. If he wanted to marry Diane Hilyard and she was willing to marry him, it wasn’t any business of mine. I even liked him, in a way.

  I switched on my motor and started along Prospect Street. It had begun to snow a little, the flakes falling softly across the headlights. I slowed down as I got to the stop sign at 33rd Street, and glanced at the man standing there on the curb. It was Mrs. Hilyard’s “beggar.” For an instant I had an impulse to lean over, lower the window and ask him if I couldn’t take him somewhere. I should have done it, I think, if it hadn’t been dark, and I wish now I had. I’ve obeyed much foolisher impulses in my time. But just then the capital streets weren’t awfully safe for women anyway, and it seemed wiser not to. He stood there for a moment when he could have crossed, and as I pressed my foot on the gas I saw him turn slowly and go back the way he’d come. For the first time I was a little uneasy about him. There was something purposeful about the way he was refusing to give up.

  CHAPTER 3

  ONCE YOU BECOME CONSCIOUS OF A word it starts dogging you everywhere you go. That happened to me with promethium. Until Colonel Primrose mentioned it that Monday morning, I’d hardly been aware of having heard it before. By midnight I decided I must have been deaf ever to have missed it. And the same thing is true of people. If anyone I knew had been seeing any of the Hilyards, they hadn’t mentioned it to me—not, at least, so that it had made an impression on my mind. Now, all of a sudden, Hilyards in one form or another began popping up all over the place.

  I stopped in, on my way home from Prospect Street, to a cocktail party some friends on 29th Street were having. I drew up at the curb behind another car that was just arriving, and opened my door. As I did I saw the hands of the clock on the dash standing at ten minutes to six. I reached back and switched on the radio to listen to the news a moment before I went in. Before I could turn it lower, the voice of a well-known commentator was blaring out into the night: