Читать книгу All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

I went out through the rose-and-white marble-paved hall, bare of rugs for the summer, and down to the street. In ordinary times the narrow road leading out to Connecticut Avenue would have been lined with cars. There were only two there now. One had a diplomatic marker, and the other was a long sleek black job with a tiny troglodyte of a man leaning against the fender, fanning himself with a panama hat. I looked around, because it was like seeing a shadow without its substance. Then I saw the substance. He was standing by the luminous white board with diagonal black stripes that marks the dead end of the road where it falls sharply off down into the Park. He was leaning on his stick, looking up into the sky . . . as intently, it seemed to me, as Molly Crane had done.

As I got almost to the sidewalk, Achille, the little dwarf of a chauffeur, opened the door of the big car and turned on the lights. D. J. Durbin still stood there for a moment as though listening, then started toward the car, the dull thub of his rubber-capped stick punctuating the drag of his lame foot and the staccato clack of his good one on the cobblestones. And suddenly the most weird and extraordinary sound came out of the little creature by the car. I drew back as instinctively as if I’d heard a rattlesnake warning me from the grass. But the warning was not for me. Mr. Durbin halted abruptly, fell back a step and flung up his stick, beating the air wildly with it. Achille leaped forward across the walk. A black cat, blinded by the sudden glare of the headlights, was in the act of jumping off the wall to cross the road. Faced with the thrashing stick and the driver’s waving arms, it turned tail and lit back up through the shrubbery the way it had come.

D. J. Durbin leaned heavily on his stick, pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, and I stood gaping at both of them until I caught myself and hurried on up the street. The motor whirred then, and the car shot past me over the hump toward Connecticut Avenue as if the devil were still after it. Then, as it disappeared, in the empty stillness of the street I heard the heavy drone of a plane overhead. It was still high, its red light looking like an outlaw star, disembodied as if the plane itself had dissolved against the luminous backdrop of the vacant sky.

I know spotters who can tell what a plane is by the sound of its motor, or say they can. Perhaps it’s true, because Sheila, my Irish setter, never disturbs herself, lying in the hall half asleep, for any car hut mine pulling up at the curb. Whether D. J. Durbin or Achille knew what plane that was, before the business of the black cat, I don’t know. It may have had nothing to do with their abrupt departure at all. It certainly had something to do with Molly’s.

I heard her heels clicking up the walk behind me and her voice calling my name. She was running up the narrow pavement, turning from silver into gold as she came out of the phosphorescent moonglow into the murky yellow cone under the old street lamp, and to silver again as she came through it. Randy was pounding along behind her. It seemed to me that all I could see for an instant as she stopped was a couple of hot liquid blobs in her face where people normally have eyes. There were tears in them, and she was batting them back, trying not to let us see them. But in that pale light tears glisten, even when a face is indistinct.

“Grace,” she said abruptly, “—have you got company?”

I shook my head a little blankly. “Why?”

“Then would you let me stay all night tonight?”

“Now wait a minute, Molly!”

I didn’t have to look at Randy’s African sun-scorched face under the thatch of burnt-up hair that used to be brown to see that he was taking the whole business as hard as Molly was. His voice was enough.

“I’m not staying in that house tonight,” Molly said quietly. “I said I wouldn’t, and I’m not. If Grace won’t let me stay with her I’ll . . . I’ll go to a hotel.”

“They’re all full,” Randy said. “Don’t be a dope. Give the guy a break, won’t you? He’d have let you know if he could have.”

“He let Courtney know, didn’t he? If he could get word to her, he could to me—if he’d wanted to.”

“Maybe she just heard it tonight. If you’d been home you——”

She shook her head. “Courtney’s known it the last four days. I knew there was something, the way she’s been acting. I’ve been wondering what it was.—And don’t tell me I’m crazy. I’ve had just all I can take.”

Her voice quivered a little.

“Can I stay with you, Grace?”

“Of course,” I said.

Randy shrugged. “No use standing here till we draw a crowd. I’ll get a taxi. You can do as you please.”

He strode on toward Connecticut Avenue, and I started on as Molly stood there for an instant fishing around in her bag for her compact.

It was hard to know what to do. If she’d been married to anybody but Cass Crane, if he’d let anybody but Courtney Durbin know he was coming back, it might have been easier. Any other man coming home to a girl he’d married and left a week afterwards, to be gone four or five months heaven knows where, would have deserved every benefit of the doubt. But somehow not Cass. It may all just have gone back to the fact that Cass was the man every gal who’d come out in Washington for the last five years had decided she wanted to marry. But he’d belonged to Courtney, and nobody could get him away. When she married D. J. Durbin and it was assumed he was on the block again, the postman literally staggered up his front steps. But he was at the Durbins’ just as he’d been at Courtney’s own house before, and he and Courtney were at all the same parties together, because D. J. Durbin didn’t go out and Cass went in his place. Then he was sent to South America, and came home one Thursday. He and Molly were married on Saturday, and he was gone the next Saturday. And now . . .

She’d caught up with me on the narrow sidewalk.

“—Do you suppose he’s forgotten he married me?”

“I . . . think he’d remember, darling,” I said. “At least, it’s customary.”

“I mean, seriously. He might have got a fever, or . . . something. I mean . . . well, I haven’t heard from him for a long time, and Courtney told somebody he wouldn’t have married me if he’d——”

“You mean he had a fever when he married you,” I said. “And now he’s over it, and he’s forgotten, the way you’d forget a delirium?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I don’t want to stay at home tonight, Grace.”

There was a catch in her voice again.

“I’d just make a scene . . . or I’d act as if it didn’t matter. And—it’s got to be either me or Courtney. It can’t be both. It just won’t work that way. I’m not that . . . that smart.”

“All right, Molly,” I said. We were at the top of the slope and Randy was waiting on the corner with a taxi. “You come to my house tonight, and tomorrow you can see.”

It wasn’t to be quite that simple.

“I guess I ought to stop by the house a minute,” she said when we got in the cab. “I . . . I’ve got to get a toothbrush, and my uniform.”

“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.