Читать книгу Washington Whispers Murder - Leslie Ford - Страница 4

The day the Rufus Brent-Hamilton Vair dogfight became more to me than just another irritating headline in the morning paper is very vivid in my mind.

I’d had a long lunch with Colonel John Primrose (92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired) in the Mayflower Lounge and left him there to go on up Connecticut Avenue to the hairdressers’. They have glassed-in cubicles that are divided, so I was only half conscious of the woman I was sharing one with. She’d got a fresh dye job and still had a brick-red streak behind her left ear. We each had a newspaper, and it had a story in flaunting type in a double column at the bottom.

COLOSSUS OF GREED WITH A WART ON HIS NOSE, VAIR CALLS BRENT IN TODAY’S BITTER ATTACK ON ITC HEAD.

“Today’s bitter attack” was right. There’d been one the day before and the day before that and there’d no doubt be another. I was aware of the woman in my compartment dropping her paper on the floor and closing her eyes, when I heard the operator ask if she’d like a glass of water. She shook her head. I didn’t finish reading the piece, because I was startled at the sound of a familiar voice in another double cubicle across the narrow room.

“. . . Having lunch today with John Primrose?” It was that that startled me rather than the voice itself. “Oh, my dear, that’s Grace Latham.”

Why women think frosted glass booths are soundproof, or try to talk when they have that instrument of torture known as the dryer whirling in their ears, deafening them so their voices are ten times louder and higher than normal, I’ll never know. The girl doing my hair stopped. “Shall I tell her to shut up, Mrs. Latham?” she asked anxiously.

I shook my head. The woman was an old friend and my life’s a fairly open book. But I was surprised at the red-haired woman next to me. She’d opened her eyes and turned her head. She was listening too.

“You must meet her.” My friend went happily on. “There are enormous advantages in knowing Grace Latham. She has two perfectly enchanting sons. They always come home for the holidays, which is when you need attractive young men the most. And then, she’s got Colonel Primrose. You’ve no idea what that means if you should ever get into trouble of any kind. He’s a sort of super-intelligence agent of some kind, but he’ll do anything for Grace. My husband’s niece . . . my dear, you remember the perfectly foul mess she got into when somebody murdered that miserable husband of hers. She was a friend of Grace’s and the Colonel really saved her life. My husband sent him a whopping check, but he sent it back. He said he’d just done it for Grace. So you see, my dear . . .”

She laughed pleasantly. “Of course, I’m devoted to Grace,” she said, and I took a deep breath, waiting for the “But . . .” that I knew was bound to come. “But she’s an awful fool, realty.”

The hairdresser and I looked at each other, and we both laughed.

“I’m sure she could have married John Primrose a dozen times if she’d just make up her silly mind. I’ve told her so a dozen times.”

It was nearer fifty, as I recalled it.

“Her husband was killed in an air accident when the two boys were small. She was terribly brave, I thought, but frightfully stubborn. Life can be very disillusioning for a young widow in Washington. But the boys aren’t children any more, and Colonel Primrose would make them a wonderful stepfather. Just hostages to fortune is all that stops her.”

What hostages to fortune I had I couldn’t think, but she went on to count them.

“It’s that barn of an old house of hers, and that dreadful old savage that cooks for her. Lilac’s been with her so long, I don’t know what either of them would do without the other. And the Colonel’s got an old house, just down the block from hers on P Street in Georgetown. Her ancestors built hers and his ancestors built his and they’re just like Chinese, my dear, they’re stuck, they just can’t get rid of their damned ancestors. And John Primrose has that dreadful sergeant he brought back from some war with him.”

That was Sergeant Phineas T. Buck (also 92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired), Colonel Primrose’s guard, philosopher and friend, also self-styled “functotum,” she was talking about then.

“The Sergeant saved his life, or something, and I know he kept that old house going through the depression, because John Primrose didn’t have a bean except his retired pay and the Sergeant had a sockful. And that old cook of theirs, Lafayette, he must be a hundred, and he and Lilac don’t even speak. It’s just a conspiracy, my dear, of sticks and stones, and sons, and cooks, and sergeants. It’s so irritating. If Grace didn’t have what money she needs, she’d have to marry, and she’d get over this quixotic idea she’s got that it wouldn’t be fair to disrupt that military menage of theirs.

“And my dear, she lives right across P Street from me, and every time John Primrose comes to see her, that Sergeant of his marches right along behind him, and sits in the basement kitchen till time to take him home. It’s perfectly absurd, you’ve never known two people chaperoned the way they are. I doubt if John Primrose has ever even kissed her. And she’s not getting any younger, and how she keeps that figure of hers is a mystery to me, there’s not that much difference in our ages.”

I was playing hop-scotch on P Street in Georgetown when she married if it makes any real difference.

“And people think she’s attractive, as she is, but she’s not the beauty her mother——”

She broke off. “Oh, my dear, did you see this? ‘Colossus of greed with a wart on his nose.’ Ham Vair’s shocking, really.” She laughed, not shocked at all. “But I must say he’s getting himself tremendous publicity. When you think nobody ever heard of him up to a month or so ago. . . . My husband says you won’t be able to get a good man to come to Washington . . . but I say where there’s smoke, my dear, and it’s very peculiar that nobody’s been able to answer any of Vair’s charges. Not that I approve of Vair or the way he’s going at it, but really . . . And you’ll notice the Brents haven’t brought that daughter of theirs to Washington.”

“—I’ll get you a glass of water.”

I heard the operator say that to the red-haired woman next to me. She was sitting there, her eyes closed again, her face pale and splotched, tugging at the tie of the pink salon coat swaddling her. She was trying to get up, but she was so shaken she slumped back in the chair. The voice across the room was going on.

“—Have you seen that picture of the girl the night she was caught in a raid on some gangster. . . . Oh!”

I could feel that breathless gasp. The red-haired woman had got up. The girl doing my hair stopped, her hands suspended, her own face white as her starched uniform. There was a discreet flurry of operators, and the soft-voiced manager was there outside and they were taking the woman somewhere.

My operator leaned down. “That was Mrs. Rufus Brent, poor thing,” she whispered.

But apart from the painful embarrassment of seeing a woman so acutely distressed, I didn’t think too much about Mrs. Rufus Brent. You tend to get case-hardened, in Washington. If an important man comes to do a job and nobody talks about him, you take it for granted he’s not so important, and you automatically assume that if a man’s clay feet haven’t shown by the second week it’s because he hasn’t had time to take his shoes off. Then the whispering innuendo about his home life begins to creep its scurrilous rounds. If you live here, you just assume it’s a calculated risk.

I do remember thinking it was too bad the Brents’ daughter should be caught in a gangster’s raid, but actually I was more concerned with what I’d heard about myself than the Rufus Brents. I hadn’t known about that whopping check Colonel Primrose had sent back, and. I was a little staggered, because he’s helped a lot of my friends. I’ve even thought of myself as an unpaid five percenter that people run to when they’re in a jam. It’s never occurred to me that anything else was involved. Whenever I’ve seen Sergeant Buck’s lantern-jawed, rock-ribbed dead pan congeal forty degrees and the viscid glaze come over his fish-grey eyes, which is whenever my presence is forced upon him, I’ve assumed it was purely in the interest of his Colonel’s matrimonial unentanglement and that Buck unwaveringly viewed me as a termite doggedly chewing away at the foundations of their masculine independence. I hadn’t realized I was also chewing at their financial structure.

So I was a little appalled at the whole thing, realizing too that they don’t normally do private stuff. It’s the Treasury they work for, mostly, sometimes Justice or State, and always in really superior criminal echelons. And it may be quixotic, of course, to feel it would be a shame to separate the Colonel’s substance from his long-time and devoted non-commissioned shadow, but obviously that’s what would happen if I married Colonel Primrose. Buck finds me difficult enough to take living up in the next block and across P Street. The glacial immobility that would permanently paralyze him if worse came to worst is something no woman in her right mind would care to contemplate—or not me, anyway. And as for the rest of the conspiracy of sticks and stones, sons, cooks and sergeants, there’s one simple fact, at any rate: it’s that Colonel Primrose has never actually asked me to marry him, and I’m sure we’d both be very much embarrassed if I suggested it.

Other people constantly do, though, and I doubt if I go anywhere without the man when some wag doesn’t at least ask me where he is. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Tom Seaton asked it, when I went over to dinner on Massachusetts Avenue that night, except that the Seatons are old enough friends of mine to know I do have a pallid existence of my own.

He was hovering at the top of the handsome marble staircase with its blue velvet carpet when I came up.

“Where is he, Grace?”

There was nothing waggish in his weatherbeaten face, which seemed drawn in spite of the healthy overlay of wind-and-sunburn that comes from being a farmer as well as one of Washington’s leading younger lawyers. He and Marjorie and their three youngsters move down to their six hundred sub-marginal acres on West River in Maryland as early as they can in the spring and stay as late as possible in the fall. They’d even gone down at the end of January, this year, and it was the first time I’d seen them together in town all spring.

“You’ve got to get Colonel Primrose to help us out, Grace. We——”

He glanced past me down the staircase and managed a frigid bow at whoever was behind me. I turned and understood perfectly. Tom Seaton is Mr. Rufus Brent’s legal representative in Washington. The man who’d come up was Edson Field, the gangly greying columnist who’d first christened Congressman Hamilton (Call Me Ham) Vair the Hot Rod from the Marsh Marigold State, and was more responsible for his initial rise to fame, or whatever, than any other single individual including Ham Vair.

“—And that’s one of the reasons,” Tom Seaton said as Field went on into the drawing room. “Something’s got to be done, Grace, about all this back-alley stuff about Rufus Brent. Tell the Colonel, won’t you?”

“Not me,” I said. “I’ve gone out of business, as of today.”

We were interrupted then, and it wasn’t till we were at dinner that I saw it was no accident that had brought Rufus Brent’s attorney and Ham Vair’s columnist together. They were seated directly across from each other. Field’s long nose was quivering with enjoyment.

“Perhaps you could tell us, Seaton,” he remarked as he took his first spoonful of clear turtle soup. “What are Mr. Brent’s plans? There’s a good deal of anxiety about whether he’s going to stay on as head of the Industrial Techniques Commission. There’s some feeling that the facts Vair’s bringing out may . . . er . . . impair, let’s say, Mr. Brent’s usefulness in ITC.”

“I hadn’t realized Mr. Vair had brought out any facts,” Tom Seaton said. “He’s made charges . . . on the floor of the House, where he’s immune from legal action.”

“Rufus Brent wangled the Brentool Plant—right in Vair’s own district, Seaton—from the War Assets Board for two dollars a thousand of the taxpayers’ money. That means Surplus Property sold him the people’s farm land the plant was built on for one cent an acre. That’s shrewd business even on Mr. Brent’s level, isn’t it? Funny business, Vair calls it. He’s demanding an investigation of that deal.”

I saw Marjorie Seaton’s eyes smoulder as she shook her head at her husband from across the table.

“The Army paid fifty dollars an acre for the land, originally,” Tom Seaton said. “I imagine the farmers didn’t get more than about a cent an acre, after they’d paid off the mortgages Vair’s father held, for farm machinery he’d sold them. I’ve never blamed Vair for being sore about Mr. Brent’s deal. He had a deal of his own—no capital required—with the Gulf States Scrap Company that fell through, because of Brent, to the tune of thirty-five or forty thousand bucks. The fact that the Brent plant had raised the per capita income there till it’s the richest county in the state doesn’t concern Mr. Vair, I suppose. But I’d rather not speak for Mr. Brent. He knows as well as you do Vair’s just trying to make him quit and go home. It certainly wouldn’t do the people of Taber County any good if Mr. Brent closed Brentool Taber City down—which Vair’s also trying to make him do. The place would be a sinkhole of poverty again in nothing flat, if——”

“But, Tom!” It was a woman who broke in. “If Mr. Brent wants people to be on his side, why doesn’t he do something? Nobody knows them, here in Washington . . . they might as well be buried alive.”

“Oh, my dear, it’s that daughter of theirs, haven’t you heard?” Another woman hurried in. “She’s tragic, a complete alcoholic——”

“That’s false! That’s utterly false!” Marjorie Seaton’s eyes were blazing. “It’s more than false, it’s a——”

“Shut up, Marge.” Tom Seaton didn’t raise his voice, but she stopped short. “—I apologize for my wife. We’ll be as civilized and malicious as everybody else when we get back to town. Living with steers and tobacco distorts your point of view.”

“But Marjorie, you can’t say it’s a lie, dear.” That was a determined dame at the other end of the table. “The camera doesn’t lie. There may be a good reason why the Brents’ daughter should be running out of a place where there’s just been a mob killing——”

“What are you talking about?” Marjorie Seaton demanded hotly.

“Just what everybody else in Washington’s talking about, darling. If you prefer your steers and tobacco you can’t hope to know, can you, dear? I’ve seen the picture.”

“I’m afraid it’s nothing you can laugh off, Marjorie,” Edson Field said. “They’re very rigid, out in the Marsh Marigold State, you know. That sort of conduct might be corrupting for their own youngsters.”

It was the picture I’d heard about at the hairdressers’, of course, and I tried to recall Mrs. Rufus Brent’s face as she struggled up out of her chair. It was clear that Marjorie Seaton had never heard of it. Her face was as pale as the lilacs, and she sat in stunned silence in the babbling sea that broke around her.

“Of course, I don’t approve of Vair’s tactics, but—” It was a man contributing that now current Washington cliché. I heard something else whispered sharply to my left. “—It isn’t the daughter, from what I heard, it’s Mrs. Brent. They say she’s completely gaga, my dear. They say she’s a——”

I put my goblet down quickly. “Kleptomaniac” was what I thought I’d heard. Then a man laughed maliciously as he said, “Oh, really? How interesting,” . . . and if you don’t think men can be as malicious as women you’ve never lived in Washington, D.C.

“Of course, I don’t really believe it,” the woman who’d said it remarked pleasantly. “But it might explain why he never lets her go out without him. I asked her to lunch and she told me so herself. I told Lucy . . . she was trying to capture them and I thought a garden party might be the safest. . . .”

Bright laughter bounced like a shower of pingpong balls back and forth across the table. Marjorie Seaton’s eyes were burning again, her cheeks patched with scarlet, and when we left the table and she caught up with me, her hand on my arm was trembling and icy-cold.

“Come on, Grace,” she whispered. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

A woman ahead of us with a pile of bright blue hair and so bony that a shroud would have looked better on her than the glittering backless frontless job she wore raised her voice so Marjorie would have had to be stone deaf not to hear her. “I’m told Mrs. Brent isn’t a recluse at all, really, only it’s men she likes . . . all very young and very handsome. And of course, the Seatons are in rather a spot, aren’t they? I hear it’s not any five or ten percent they have with the Brent connection, it’s something fabulous, that’s why Tom can afford to throw away all that money farming. I mean, they’ve really got to be on the Brents’ side. . . .”

I felt Marjorie stiffen taut as an arrow, and when she dropped my arm I took hers, though I didn’t suppose she was really going to strike one of her mother’s oldest friends.

“Listen, Grace.” She closed the powder-room door. “You’ve got to get Colonel Primrose to do something. That poor woman . . . you don’t know what she’s going through. They’re driving her out of her mind. That’s why she doesn’t go out. She’s terrified at what she’ll run into. And she’s an angel, Grace. She’s fey as hell, but my God, she’s got a right to be fey. And poor little Molly Brent . . . I don’t know what the picture is they’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. She’s really sweet, Grace. You’ve got to persuade Colonel Primrose to do something. It’s foul, it’s murder, really.”

She broke off as we heard the other women coming into the bedroom outside. They were like a flock of penned-up ducks quacking about an exciting secret millpond. There was a sudden burst of laughter. “Oh, no!” somebody said. “Oh, I can’t believe it, I really can’t!”

“But she can and she will and she’ll tell everybody else she sees,” Marjorie said bitterly. “It’s hideous, Grace—it’s evil. Tell Colonel Primrose, won’t you? And go see that poor woman. Just talk to her. You can’t believe how horrible it all is. Something’s got to happen. Ham Vair oughtn’t to be allowed to live, Grace. I swear I’ll . . . I’ll kill him myself, if something doesn’t happen.”

But I didn’t go see Mrs. Brent, and I didn’t tell Colonel Primrose he had to do something about it. I don’t know whether I was deterred by the idea that I’d cost him and Sergeant Buck too much already, or whether I unconsciously thought Marjorie was a special pleader for her husband’s chief client. There was no reason why the Seatons couldn’t call Colonel Primrose themselves . . . and if Rufus Brent couldn’t look out for himself, who in America could?

Even then, I’d probably have told Colonel Primrose about it, except that my younger son came home for a week, and as he thinks about the Colonel a little the way Sergeant Buck thinks about me, I hardly saw the man. And then, the Monday morning after my child had gone back to New Haven, such an extraordinary thing happened in my house that I forgot the Rufus Brents. Sergeant Phineas T. Buck paid me a personal and private call.