The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read online

“They’ve done a frightfully nice job,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “My name’s Ruth, by the way—I forgot you didn’t know it. They took out the ceiling and put in these stairs.”

  We’d got to the top of the landing. She stopped abruptly, glancing back down the stairs, her hand tightening on my arm.

  3

  I suppose I looked as completely staggered as I felt at the extraordinary change that had come over her. Her face was the most perfect mask of tragedy I’ve ever seen—tragedy, and fear so total that it was almost appalling.

  “—Forgive me, please!” she whispered urgently. “You have a child, haven’t you?”

  “Two,” I said.

  Her hand gripped my arm tightly.

  “Then will you for God’s sake do something for me?”

  For a moment I thought either she’d lost her mind or I’d lost mine.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be glad to. What is it you want me to do?”

  She let my arm go and pushed her hair back from her forehead, like someone coming back to her senses. She looked quickly back of her again.

  “Go to your room and telephone my daughter in New York.”

  Her voice was scarcely a whisper.

  “—I’ll write down her number for you.”

  There was another glass console table against the white wall in front of us, between two doors. It had a telephone on it, and beside it a pad and pencil.

  “Tell her you’re calling for me, and that I say it’s most inconvenient for me to have her herb, and I’d prefer she didn’t come. Tell her I’ll be in New York on Tuesday and I’ll see her then.”

  She turned her head away a moment.

  “You see…”

  She hesitated painfully, and looked back at me. “You see, she wouldn’t fit in. She’s just a child, and…”

  “You don’t have to explain, Mrs. Sherwood,” I said. I couldn’t possibly have called her Ruth just then. It seemed like such a… well, I suppose, shocking thing—just to tell your child not to come home. Still, she was so distraught that I was really sorry for her.

  I must have looked at the phone there in front of us, because she said, “I can’t phone from this apartment—the servants would hear me.”

  That seemed to me an extraordinary explanation indeed, and she couldn’t help realize it.

  “Believe me—it’s dreadfully important,” she said, with a kind of suppressed desperation. “I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t.” She picked up the pencil and scrawled a number on the back of the telegram and handed it to me. “You can go through this door. Your apartment is the third on the left.”

  I took the blank and opened the door.

  “Thank you, Grace Latham,” she said. “Thank you—more than you know!”

  I couldn’t look at her. The relief in her voice was too terrible. I just hurried along the corridor to my door. I didn’t even look back to see if she was waiting for me.

  I unlocked my door and went in to the bedroom, went to the phone and gave the operator the number. As I waited I realized abruptly that Mrs. Sherwood hadn’t told me her daughter’s name. I turned over the wire and looked at the signature. As I looked, my eye caught the date line, and I looked again. The time was 12:05 P.M. And the message said—I read it shamelessly—“Coming down unless you wire you don’t want me—love, Betty.”

  I looked at my watch. It was seventeen minutes past eight. Something had obviously happened that had delayed that telegram’s delivery… and that meant that that child was in all probability well on her way. I started to signal the operator to change it to a person to person call, but just as I did a woman’s voice said, “Hello—this is Devereaux.”

  “It must be a school,” I thought. I said, “May I speak to Miss Elizabeth Sherwood?”

  There was, the kind of pause you expect to have followed by “Sorry, there’s no one here of that name.” Instead the woman said, “Who is calling, please?”

  “I’m calling for her mother in Washington,” I said. “I have a message for her.”

  “I’m very sorry,” the woman said. “Elizabeth Sherwood is not here just now.”

  “Do you know if she’s left for Washington?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I couldn’t tell you.” If she’d said, “I won’t tell you,” it would have matched her tone better.

  “Her mother is anxious to have her put off her coming,” I said. “Will you try to get that message to her?”

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “Goodbye.”

  I heard the phone click down. It all seemed stranger than ever. I sat there with the phone in my hand. Suddenly I heard her voice again.

  “—Operator,” she said crisply.

  I realized that we hadn’t been disconnected, so I said, “Yes?”

  “Operator—this is the Devereaux School.”

  She hadn’t recognized my voice, apparently.

  “Can you tell me where the call I’ve just had came from?”

  “Washington,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  It may have been my imagination, but I thought there was a definite relief in her voice. She hung up then, and so did I. She’d evidently thought it was a local call. And that was odd too. Of course I knew that some schools live in mortal terror of kidnapping, and are reluctant to give information about their pupils, but this was watchful suspicion of a very special order. My curiosity was growing by the minute.

  I glanced at the telegram again, put it down quickly and glanced around. Sylvia Peele was there in the doorway, looking at me with a kind of calmly detached appraisal. I didn’t know whether she’d seen the telegram in my hand or not. I let it slip onto the floor and got up.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” I asked casually. “Have you decided to have your headache after all?”

  “I don’t think this party’s going to be my headache,” she said coolly.

  “Whose, then?”

  “I’m not sure. Somebody’s certainly. I came upstairs to tell you something I thought would amuse you, and saw the door open here. Not calling the Colonel, by any chance, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “It mightn’t be such a bad idea at that,” she remarked.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Fee fie foh fum, I smell the blood of… well, not an Englishman necessarily.”

  “Sylvia!” I said.

  She looked at me with bland indifference.

  “Perhaps it won’t go as far as murder. But there’s something awfully phoney about this setup. The place reeks, Grace.—Listen. Do you know that not one of Mrs. Addison Sherwood’s guests—as far as I can make out—has the foggiest idea who she is, or where she comes from, or what she’s settled here so handsomely for? There’s just nobody here who knows her at all.”

  I stared at her.

  “Maybe she just likes the climate,” I said.

  “Then she’s crazy, and maybe that explains it,” Sylvia said coolly. “But do you understand that not even Corliss knows who she is? Pete doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He doesn’t know the difference between the social register and the telephone book.”

  Something clicked sharply in my mind when she said that. It was at a crowded party somebody gave for a newcomer to Washington—one of those post-election names that make news arrivals—and the Press turned out en masse. I met Pete on the stairs as I was coming in.

  “Is Sylvia here?” I asked. “A friend of mine has got engaged.”

  “Sylvia?” Pete said. “Good Lord, no. The nearest the guest of honor ever got to the social register is the telephone book. The only time he’s exclusive enough for Sylvia is Saturday night, and then he’s in the bathtub.”

  “That’s funny,” I retorted. “—I thought I’d seen her with you, sometimes.”

  “She’s got to know one member of the working class to keep her professional standing,” he said. He grinned, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was more important th
an he pretended. “She preferred—on this occasion—to have tea with the new Charge of some third-rate embassy. So long. They used bilge water for the cocktails, so don’t stand in line.”

  A little later I saw Sylvia come in.

  “Has Pete been here?” she asked.

  “He left,” I said. “He thought you were being exclusive.”

  “I wish he had my job for about two weeks,” she said, a little bitterly. “He thinks I like these people. I wish I could make him understand.”

  All that flashed through my mind again as I listened to her going on.

  “But Corliss does know the difference. He came to meet the great Kurt Hofmann and because Bliss Thatcher would be here. He’s a great admirer of Hofmann’s—you remember how he went to town for Terror Unleashed when it came out. He plumped so hard for it people were saying he must have helped write it. But a body’s got to be fair, even to Corliss.”

  She crossed over to the foot of the bed, ostensibly towards my dressing table, but I knew that in passing she’d seen the telegram lying on the floor. There wasn’t much that those blank vaguely nontracking eyes of her missed.

  “And Kurt Hofmann came because Corliss was coming. He doesn’t know our hostess either. Your Latin admirer Se-nor Delvalle got mixed up—he thought it was somebody else when he accepted. He doesn’t know her.”

  “And Larry?” I asked.

  “Oh, Larry. She’s probably paying him space rates.”

  “There’s still Mr. Thatcher.”

  “She met him on the ship coming up from South America two months ago. She told me that herself just now. I asked her.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason,” I said. “He’s a widower, isn’t he?”

  “It might be at that,” Sylvia said. “But that doesn’t explain the atmosphere down there. I tell you I can smell it, Grace. And there’s something wrong with Corliss—something’s happened to him. When you and Mrs. Sherwood left he went oil the deep end completely. It wasn’t pretty. He and Pete have been quarrelling a long time, but…”

  “But what?” I asked when she didn’t go on. “What happened?”

  “I don’t quite know. I was doing a little prying into Effie Wharton’s plans for poor Sam when it blew up at the other end of the room. Delvalle apparently brought up ‘Truth Not Fiction’ again. The first thing I knew they were practically tearing Pete and Corliss from each other’s throats. I wish to Heaven you hadn’t dragged that thing up.”

  “I wish to Heaven you’d tell me why!” I demanded.

  She looked oddly at me.

  “Grace,” she said—more serious than I’d ever seen her. “Drop it, will you? It’s just plain dynamite. Take my word for it, this once. I’m sorry to go enigmatical on you, but—I haven’t got time to go into it. That’s really why I came to find you.”

  She shrugged and turned to the mirror, looking at herself critically. The insistent seriousness faded from her face. She looked almost poignantly lovely for an instant as her eyes went blank and young. No one would have thought she had a brain in her head. She turned back to me.

  “Let’s go, if you’re through. I want to see Bliss Thatcher and Lady Alicia make their entrance. I’ll bet anything her ladyship doesn’t know our hostess either.”

  She took my arm. “You know, darling, it’s really wonderful. It couldn’t happen anywhere in the world but in Washington. Just think: four columnists, and a lady—that’s you, dear—and a great industrialist in a key position, a famous anti-Totalitarian author, a defeated House Leader with an ambitious disgruntled wife, a big shot in the Good Neighbor racket, and an English peeress trying to skim off a little top-milk while the skimming’s good… all together in the same place. And what for?”

  “Well,” I said, “our hostess conceivably might have the quaint idea that we’re all nice people.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I’ve lost my innocence and have a bad case of spiritual jaundice. Maybe Corliss just needs a good night’s sleep, and my nose is betraying me at last.”

  “Well, I hope so,” I said. If it hadn’t been for that telegram lying back there on the floor I’d have said it with greater confidence.

  Having Corliss Marshall and Pete Hamilton together anywhere was bad enough, I thought, but with Larry Villiers ready to slit both their throats neatly with his typewriter, and Sylvia Peele quietly reconnoitering in the interest of “Peelings” and acting like Cassandra on the walls of Troy, all we really needed to finish it off in grand style was to have Ruth Sherwood’s problem child barge in. I felt that even more strongly when we’d joined the rest of them again in the library. The atmosphere was not what you’d call relaxed. Corliss Marshall’s fleshy face was apoplectic and mottled with gray. Pete was like a dog with the hair still standing up along his spine, though he was at least trying to be polite. Delvalle was watching them with bright shrewd eyes. Ruth Sherwood, talking to Sam Wharton and Larry, looked up suddenly.

  “Oh, there they are. I hope you aren’t all starved.”

  She went out into the hall.

  “Bliss—how nice!” I could hear her through the doorway. “How do you do, Lady Alicia. I’m Ruth Sherwood. It’s so nice of you to come.”

  Sylvia glanced at me with nothing in her face at all. I was listening to Senor Delvalle, but watching Kurt Hofmann. He was wandering about the room, rather as if he wanted to be au fait with each object when the auction began. He stopped at a desk in front of the side windows, and picked up a photograph in a tooled-leather frame that was lying— face down, I had an idea—on top of it. He made an odd sort of face, squinting his glass out of his eye.

  “What an unattractive person!” he said, holding it up for everybody to see. He was right. It was a photograph of a girl about fifteen, and not very… oh, well, after all, all people can’t be magazine covers. I felt a little sick. I had no doubt now why Ruth Sherwood didn’t want Betty to come just then. It was rather distressing—and infinitely more when we were all suddenly aware that Ruth Sherwood was standing there in the doorway, Bliss Thatcher by her side, and that her face was as white as the exquisitely cut dinner gown she wore.

  4

  She steadied herself against the door-frame for an instant, then came forward with all the ease and dignity in the world and took the picture out of Kurt Hofmann’s hands.

  “This is my daughter, Mr. Hofmann,” she said. “I’m sorry you won’t have the pleasure of meeting her. She’s away at school.”

  She put the picture in the desk drawer and closed it.

  Hofmann bowed. “I am sorry, Mrs. Sherwood. I’m… sure the child has a beautiful soul.”

  “—The swine,” Senor Delvalle said under his breath.

  “She has indeed,” Ruth Sherwood said coolly. She turned back to Mr. Thatcher, standing there massive and good-looking, his crisp curly black hair just touched with gray. He’d stopped short, and I thought for an instant he looked as if he was shocked by something. I wondered if he hadn’t known she had a child, or what difference any of it made in any case. It was all very puzzling to me—the more so as it was also obvious that Ruth Sherwood felt whatever it was that he was thinking. The effort with which she forced herself to smile, introducing him, was a painful contrast with the casual air she’d managed when she got the telegram.

  Only one thing was plain to me, and that was that I couldn’t possibly sit there and let the child burst in on her without some kind of warning. It wasn’t for any one of us to judge her, in any case—and certainly, I thought just then, it wasn’t something for anyone to make gossip fodder out of for the consumption of the public. I glanced at Larry Villiers. I didn’t think of Sylvia, because Sylvia has a heart in her body. I don’t think Larry Villiers has. He was watching Mrs. Sherwood, his eyes as bright as a copperhead’s spying a day-old thrust.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed him. Pete Hamilton bent down by him to pick up a cigarette.

  “—Not for publication, pal—see?” he said unde
r his breath.

  Larry picked up his glass and set it down again, a shadow of a smile on his lips. If only Lady Alicia Wrenn would come down and we could get into the dining room, I thought. If it hadn’t been for the rhythmic beat of the current in the clock on the desk I’d have been sure it had stopped. I tried desperately to remember what time the New York trains got into Washington, and then how long it would take her to get a taxi and get out to the Randolph-Lee. Maybe they’d call from the desk, I thought.

  I tried again to catch Ruth Sherwood’s eye, and couldn’t. Then there was a momentary respite. Lady Alicia Wrenn came in, and Larry, who adores a title, was on his feet and at her side in an instant.

  “How charming you look this evening, Alicia,” he said.

  Senor Delvalle glanced at me, flicked his cigarette case open and smiled faintly, as if he had a rather special secret joke. Of course charm is a curious word. It can mean an awful lot of things. And Lady Alicia Wrenn was a rather curious woman. In general she looked rather more like a horse than a woman, though I don’t know whether horses are ever near-sighted. Lady Alicia certainly was, or her rouge would have been on differently, and the dress she had on would have been in a Bundle for Britain to make gun-wadding out of. Yet there was something curiously fey about the quick, searching glance she gave each person she met.

  She shook hands vigorously with Sam Wharton. “Oh yes. You’re what you call a mugwump in this extraordin’ry country, aren’t you?”

  Sam looked a little dazed.

  “You mean a lame duck, darling,” Larry murmured.

  “Oh, is that so?” Lady Alicia said. “I want a spot of grog. And I don’t want one of your cocktails. I’ll have gin and tonic. And I’m starving. I hope we’ll eat shortly.”

  “So do all the rest of us,” Pete said politely. “It’s you we’ve been waiting for.”

  Lady Alicia was making the rounds, giving everybody’s hand a swift pump and saying “Howjado,” looking at everybody sharply. Ruth Sherwood had come over to the fireplace by me to press the bell.

  “She’d already left, Ruth, I think,” I whispered quickly. “The telegram was marked 12.05.”