Читать книгу Washington Whispers Murder - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

No doubt the day will come when either mutation of the species or atomic science applied to gadgetry will develop some kind of Geiger counter for use in the home. Having avoided Marjorie Seaton’s appeal to get mixed up in the Rufus Brent mess, I should have had some sort of instrument, that china-blue morning in May, to warn me that if I listened to Sergeant Buck I was going to be in it up to my shoulder-blades in nothing flat . . . and in reverse, which was the awful thing about it. I wouldn’t speak to Colonel Primrose or go to see Mrs. Rufus Brent, but I would be so flattered by a visit from Buck that I’d turn my own home into an underground headquarters for Hamilton Vair without batting an eyelash. Still, even if there’d been a Geiger counter there, I’d have assumed it was jumping because of the headlines in the paper I put down when I heard the Sergeant’s heavy footsteps coming, grimly dogged, up the stairs from my basement kitchen.

VAIR DEMANDS INVESTIGATION OF BRENTOOL CONTRACTS. SAYS TOOLMAKER USES ITC TO LINE OWN POCKETS.

And it had taken Vair’s apologist, Edson Field, a whole week to get around to reporting the dinner party he and Tom Seaton had been to.

“A shocking sidelight on the lengths that private interests will go to silence Congressional criticism can now be told,” he said in his column called Washington Business Is Your Business. “Rufus Brent, too sensitive to rising public indignation to threaten Mr. Vair openly, uses his astronomically-salaried Washington mouthpiece to do it for him.

“The threat to close down the Brentool Plant in Vair’s Congressional district, where Brent has a stranglehold on local industry, and force the entire population of the county into unemployment and starvation, unless Vair withdraws his charges, was carefully veiled, and will be, as usual, promptly denied. It is a deplorable but well-known fact that serious business in the Capital is frequently conducted at swank dinner parties as well as in bar lounges and at cocktail parties. It is the first time, however, that this column has ever been handed a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to transmit to a member of the United States Congress along with his plate of green-turtle soup.

“The courageous young representative of’ the Ninth District has flatly refused to be coerced, bribed or intimidated. If the Brentool Plant in Taber City develops so-called labor troubles which force it to close down in the near future, do not be either surprised or misled. The fact that Rufus Brent’s handy man is prepared to starve an entire community in order to silence one man is a staggering blow worthy of Darker Ages than those we live in.”

It would teach Mr. Brent’s astronomically-salaried mouthpiece to keep it resolutely shut hereafter, I thought as I put the paper down. I was having lunch, if that’s what I could call the lettuce leaf, black coffee and melba toast I was stuck with to pay for the week of spoonbread, fried chicken and apple crisp that’s our staple diet when one of the kids is home. I was having it at my end of the long polished expanse of dining-room table. Lilac still has her standards, a dinner table is made to eat at, there I eat come hell or high water, and there I sat, in lonely dignity, wondering why Buck was coming to see me.

He came through the door, ducking the low bridge so he looked like a bull squared off to charge, and brought his massive hulk to a dead stop just inside—the Missouri grounded and as red of face. He was in his teal blue Sunday suit and what Lilac calls his Sunday laundry, a stiff white collar on a pale pink shirt, with a hand-painted necktie some woman must have given him, it was so debonair and so awful, his hair still damp and plastered over his bald spot, his lantern jaw the color of a tarnished hog kettle, his fish-grey eyes lighted with the affectionate warmth of half-thawed oysters. As he cleared his throat the lustres on the mantel set up a musical jingle like miniature elephant bells.

“We got a favor to ast you, ma’am.”

His voice comes out of one side of the fissure in his granite dead pan, so that it sounded as sinister as it in fact was . . . if the Geiger counter had only been there to tell me. But again I wouldn’t have heeded it, I was so pleased to have Sergeant Buck asking a favor of me. It not only looked as if he’d declared a truce in the cold war we conduct across the P Street parallel, it gave me a chance to make a payment on the just debt I’d so recently become aware I owed him.

“These personal friends of mine, they’re very high-class people, ma’am. Their little girl won a contest, and she’s coming to D.C. It’s my appreciation they want a respectable home she can stay a couple of days till she looks around permanent. I and the Colonel are taking the 4.00 P.M. plane out West on business, ma’am. What the Colonel said was, I was to ast you, ma’am, could you keep her for us till we get back?”

Beads of perspiration popped out on Sergeant Buck’s forehead and the tarnish went deeper brass, as he waited for my answer. The only thing that delayed it was the “respectable.” That Sergeant Buck thought my home was respectable, and to the extent of commiting the child of a high-class personal friend of his to it, was overwhelming.

“Why, of course, Sergeant,” I said. Nobody can say I’m not gracious to a sweating foe. “I’d love to have her. When’s she coming?”

The breath of relief he took must have strained even his iron ribcage. “Friday, it says here, ma’am.” He took a dog-eared letter out of his teal-blue pocket. “Virginia Dolan’s her name. Her daddy was with us in France.”

That startled me. It was the other war when Colonel Primrose and his Sergeant were in France. I’d figured the child was ten or twelve, and I’d been wondering who I’d get to climb the Monument with her if I took the day at the Zoo and maybe the Congressional Library. “How old is she, Sergeant Buck?”

“Eighteen, going on nineteen, ma’am.”

“Oh, well,” I said, the Zoo and Monument both happily dissolving in my mind. “She’s old enough to look after herself, then.”

That was a mistake.

“She’s a very high-class little lady, ma’am.” You could see he already regretted letting his Colonel high-pressure him into putting this tender shoot into my callous hands. “Her daddy says she ain’t never been out of Taber City more than once or twice. They’re very high-class people, ma’am.”

“We’ll do our best, Sergeant,” I said. “You tell Lilac. I’m sure everything’ll be all right.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He started to back out of the room, and stopped. I’d picked up my coffee cup again, but I didn’t get it more than half-way to my lips, because something very odd indeed seemed to have happened to that battered, congealed stonework he’s facially equipped with. He was looking at my table, his dead pan sort of going to pieces in the oddest possible fashion. “—It just don’t look right, ma’am,” he said suddenly.

I glanced quickly down the polished bare expanse. It looked all right to me. I’d just paid some fabulous amount to get it refinished. “What doesn’t, Sergeant Buck?”

“You sittin’ by yourself at this bare old table, and the Colonel down the street sittin’ by himself at his bare old table.”

I expect I set my coffee cup down. It was on the bare old mahogany, six inches from the saucer, when I noticed it. I was so staggered I wouldn’t have known if I’d put it on the floor. But no more staggered than Sergeant Buck, I think. He came to a sort of semi-attention, his cast-iron jaw the color it must have been when they first took it out of the furnace.

“No offense meant, ma’am,” he said hastily.

“And none taken, Sergeant,” is what I should have answered, and what I’ve always answered, ever since that exchange became the password of our mutual forbearance. But this time I couldn’t say anything at all.

He cleared his throat again. “But if you’d let the Colonel be, till he gets back, ma’am. . . . He’s mighty busy. He ain’t got himself packed yet. You’d do him a personal favor if he calls up to come over, if you’d say no dice, ma’am.”

As both he and I knew well that Colonel Primrose has never packed himself since he left West Point, I saw he’d already regretted his momentary dissolving. But I nodded. I was still too touched, even then, to be articulate. And when Lilac, my cook for twenty years, waddled her two hundred pounds of sometimes sulphur and sometimes molasses, I never know which, up the stairs, I was still half-dazed.

“What you done to Mister Buck?” she demanded, her black moon face hovering between perplexity and righteous indignation. “What you say got him all outside himself?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her it was what Sergeant Buck had said, not me. Never could I have foreseen him as a concrete-mixer-like Salome handing me on a silver charger the head of his St. John Primrose. “Nothing,” I said.

“You goin’ to take that girl in here for Mister Buck?” she inquired dubiously.

“We’re going to take her.” I was clear-headed enough to underline our joint responsibility. “It’ll only be for a few days.”

“Hm” she said. “Govamen’ Girl, Troublemen’ Girl. . . .”

That startled me too. I hadn’t got the idea the high-class little lady was in Washington for a job. Not that it would have mattered, however, and not that I’d have heard Sergeant Buck really if he’d told me in so many words. He did tell me where it was she’d never been away from more than once or twice, and I wasn’t bright enough to catch that.

I’d just left the bare board that had moved Sergeant Buck so incredibly when Colonel Primrose did call up, quite innocent of the recent disposal operation and merely wanting to drop in for a few minutes before their plane left.

“No,” I said, keeping faith with Sergeant Buck. “I’m doing you a personal favor. No dice. You’ve got to pack.”

He laughed, not too amused, I thought. “I’m sorry we’re saddling you with this girl of Buck’s,” he said.

“It’s a pleasure. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for Mister Buck.”

“Mister Buck’s a damn fool,” he said. “Clucking around like an old hen with a yellow chick to hide. He’s been combing the town for the last three days.”

Of course, I should have known, when Buck came, that a favor from me was an avenue when all other avenues were closed. But I was still too touched to remember that leopards don’t really change their spots, and delighted for him to hide his yellow chick in my respectable precincts. In a burst of predawn goodwill I even decided to take her to a garden party I was going to on Friday. Depending, of course . . . I’d seen only one other female friend of the Sergeant’s and she was fully feathered and the moulting season well advanced. But I suppose it was fate, really, and nothing else, stacking the cards against the Rufus Brents, that decided that. I can only think now how different things would have been if Sergeant Buck’s little lady had walked into that garden party with me. It seems incredible that Miss Virginia Dolan’s train being held up two hours by a flash flood in West Virginia could have made such a fantastic difference in the lives of the famous industrialist and his wife, who’d never seen or heard of Miss Virginia Dolan, and in the life of little Molly Brent, which in the long run was by far the most important.

It was Thursday, the day before the garden party and the little lady’s arrival, that I met Mrs. Rufus Brent the second time. I was having some people in to lunch, so I left the Red Cross early to get home and make the cocktails. Lilac belongs to the “Whoso Never Will” Society, and touching liquor is one of the things they chiefly won’t. Even her friend Mister Buck has to get the bourbon bottle out of the cupboard downstairs for himself. When I saw her moon face peer up out of the area window at me, obviously disconcerted about something, I hurried, thinking I was late, until I got along the hall to the living room that opens on the walled garden and saw the woman I’d seen at the beauty shop, sitting there patiently waiting for me.

The bright red hair was dry now, gathered on the back of her neck in a bun that was magnetized, I judged from the way her flowered pink straw hat kept slipping back, giving her a dizzy off-center look. She had on a white print dress with purple, red and green splotches that looked like a colored plate from a textbook on visceral diseases in a final stage. Her face was heavy and looked as if she’d been crying, and her pale blue eyes searched my face with a tremulous pathetic uncertainty and no sign of recognition at all.

“Are . . . are you Mrs. Latham?” She wavered a moment. “I’m Lena Brent . . . Mrs. Rufus Brent. I’m a friend of Tom and Marjorie Seaton’s.” Her eyes moved down to the framed photograph of my two boys on the pembroke table. “You look so much . . . younger than I’d expected,” she said. “Are these your sons? You really. . . .”

(“Don’t let ’em feed you that, Ma, it’s because we’ve had a hard life, withered before our time. . . .” I could see it in the two engaging faces.)

As she looked back at me then, her face lighted incredibly with the most lovely smile I think I’ve ever seen. It transformed her utterly. If some kind of magic wand had touched her or my eyes that were seeing her she couldn’t have been so totally another being. All the uncertainty and the heaviness, even the splotchy print, had dissolved in a warm soft radiance. She had an almost other-worldly quality of simplicity and kindliness that was really beautiful. It hadn’t been her smile entirely. Her voice was so sweet, and so clear and gentle in an almost childlike way that the smile was only the completing of the whole illusion of youth and loveliness—if it was illusory, if it wasn’t the flesh that was the illusion and the spirit the true reality.

“I’m very fond of boys,” she said. “I have a picture of our two. Would you like to. . . .”

“I’d like to very much, Mrs. Brent,” I said.

She undid the catch of her green straw bag. “It was a Mother’s Day present. They went down together and had it taken for me.”

She opened the folder she’d taken out, her face shining with the tenderness mothers are supposed to have and often don’t, or conceal because it isn’t very fashionable any more. “That’s Rufie Jr. on the left, and Robbie.”

And fine looking lads they were, clean-cut, alert and intelligent. You could see they were having their pictures taken as a labor of love and having fun while they were at it. But it was the middle picture I was most absorbed in, and utterly astonished by.

“They’re wonderful,” I said. “And is this your daughter?”

It would be less than the truth to pretend I wasn’t curious about the picture I’d heard of, at the beauty shop and again at dinner. Between the two boys was a girl, seventeen, I’d say, no lipstick, her hair, lightish in the picture and probably red as her mother’s had no doubt once been and indeed still was, slicked back and tied with a ribbon, and about as weedy and unglamorous as the dreary school uniform she wore. She was holding her lips pressed together, to keep from laughing or to cover up the braces on her teeth perhaps, or maybe both. Her eyes had a scared half-twinkle in them, as if her brothers were also invisibly on the sidelines there trying to make her laugh, as do or die she kept her eyes resolutely glued on the camera. But it was not the face of a girl who’d be around gangster hangouts. It was a lovely young face, sweet and very sensitive, but with a firm little chin half-tilted, determined not to let her brothers make her grin and spoil the picture.

“She’s sweet,” I said.

“That’s . . . that’s Molly. She’s all—” She bent her head, the radiant joy gone from her face. “Oh, I don’t know what happens to people!” she said suddenly, and with such naked poignancy that it made my spine quiver. “You do everything you can for your children, but there’s nothing you can do to help them. They still have to suffer, you can’t ever do anything to save them!”

She took the folder quickly from my hand. “Oh, forgive me, please!” she said. “I didn’t mean to distress you, talking about my children. That’s not why I came. Marjorie Seaton’s been begging me to come, but I . . . I was’ afraid. Then I heard some people talking about you, and I saw your name on the list they sent us of the garden party tomorrow. It’s being given for us, you know.”

I didn’t know, and what’s more I didn’t know there was anybody left in Washington who could keep that kind of secret, with all the people who’d give their right arm to meet the head man of the Industrial Techniques Commission.

“—Gate crashers,” she added, no doubt at the look on my face. It sounded so strange in that incredibly gentle voice of hers that I blinked as if she’d used one of Sergeant Buck’s favorite outdoor words. “We haven’t been going out,” she said. “But they thought we should, just to . . . to let people see we aren’t really peculiar. And I thought you wouldn’t mind, perhaps, if I came before I met you.” Her look was an appeal as well as an apology. “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind. . . .”

“Not at all, Mrs. Brent,” I said. It was difficult for me too.

“You see, Marjorie says you know a Colonel Primrose she thinks you could persuade to . . . to help me, Mrs. Latham. And I do need help. I need it desperately.”

She didn’t have to tell me, though I didn’t know how desperately she did need it, even then, when I could see what she was going through, trying to control herself.

“You can’t know what it’s been like, these last months,” she said. “I didn’t want my husband to come to Washington, and he didn’t want to come. They persuaded him it was his duty. He knew he’d be attacked, of course. But he didn’t expect all the personal vilification Mr. Vair is heaping on him—But it isn’t only that.”

She said that hurriedly, as if I’d get up and ask her to leave if she didn’t explain.

“It’s the time it wastes, and the lack of confidence that other men in the industrial fields who don’t know him are bound to have, whether they realize it or not. And my husband’s a hard man, Mrs. Latham, but he can be hurt. He doesn’t mind about the wart on his nose.” The little smile she gave me lasted only for that instant. “He is upset when Mr. Vair says his father died alone in a state institution. It wasn’t an insane hospital, as Mr. Vair implies. It was consumption he had, and the family paid everything they could, when he was moved there for special care. My husband was just eleven years old then . . . and everybody dies alone, Mrs. Latham.

“And he’s terribly upset about the Brentool Plant out in Taber City. I don’t know whether you know that’s where Mr. Vair comes from. You see, my husband didn’t want to take that plant either, but friends in the Air Force were terribly worried, the way the Congress was closing everything down. They knew the war wasn’t really over. When Mr. Vair attacks them as well as him, as thieves and traitors, it’s not easy. And the men at the plant stop work, and their children throw rocks and mud at the superintendent’s car.”

She fumbled at her bag to get her handkerchief out.

“But it’s not even that that frightens me Mrs. Latham,” she said simply. “It’s. . . . Molly, our daughter, that I’m frightened about.” She hesitated painfully. “She had a . . . a very serious accident, a terrible accident, really, and she hasn’t got over it. That’s why she isn’t here with us. And you can’t know what it’s like, Mrs. Latham, having people around, prying and snooping. It’s been worse since we’ve been here. My husband doesn’t know . . . about all that, and about the anonymous letters. I burn them so he won’t see them. And the telephone calls. I try to keep all that away from him. Because . . . that’s what terrifies me. My husband adores Molly. He worships her. She’s all he lives for, really. And now, there’s some photograph of her. . . .”

That, I remembered, had been the final unbearable thing, at the beauty shop, and I’d wondered whether she’d even be able to bring it up.

“I can’t imagine Molly being in any . . . dreadful place, but she may have been out with other people, when her brothers weren’t at home. I don’t know what it was, and I can’t ask her, now. But you see, if they’re passing such a photograph around, they’re just doing it to hurt my husband, they’re hurting Molly to hurt him. I know Mr. Vair’s trying to make it look as if my husband is an enemy of the people, and I thought at first it was just to help get himself elected to the Senate. But I think now he really hates my husband and enjoys trying to destroy him. And if he’s trying to do it by hurting Molly . . . my husband has great patience, too, Mrs. Latham—but that’s the one thing he wouldn’t stand.”

She got up and stood opening and closing her hands on the green straw bag. “That’s why I hoped you . . . you’d get Colonel Primrose to help me. I hoped, some way, he could make them let Molly alone. Because, if they don’t. . . . Will you get him, Mrs. Latham?”

“I’ll try, Mrs. Brent,” I said. I forgot all about never going to try to get him for anybody ever again. “But . . . I don’t know what he could do. To stop Vair from saying these things would be a miracle, and even Colonel Primrose—”

“Oh, but I believe in miracles, Mrs. Latham.” Her blue eyes widened like a child’s. “I believe they do happen,” she said, and I knew she meant it, and literally meant it. “I see them constantly in other people’s lives. I couldn’t go on if I didn’t know that.”

I got up too. “I can see what he says, Mrs. Brent. But he’s out of town right now.”

Her face and body seemed to sag with such utter hopelessness that it startled me. I hadn’t realized how much hope she’d built up, in Colonel Primrose’s ability really to perform some miracle for her.

“I wish I weren’t so . . . so desperately afraid.” She steadied herself against the chair. “I’m so frightened I can’t bear to think about it. Surely there . . . there must be somebody who can save him.”

I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard what she said. I hadn’t realized that fear was such a part of what she was suffering. I saw it then, so naked and real it was almost tangible.

“You don’t believe Mr. Brent is . . .” I stopped, too confused to go on. She couldn’t really mean she thought her husband’s life was threatened. But still the idea was there . . . of death, in the room, pallid fingers tapping their frightening code. It was unmistakable, what was there in her mind.

“Mrs. Brent,” I said, “it’s . . . it’s not . . . murder, you’re talking about, is it? You’re surely not afraid——”

She raised her head and looked at me, not startled, and not shocked at all. Her face cleared and the normal color came slowly back into it.

“Murder?” It was the word she seemed to question as she repeated it. Then she shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe he’d ever think of it that way, Mrs. Latham. You don’t call it murder when you kill a rattlesnake that’s striking someone you love very dearly, do you? That’s the way he’d look at it, Mrs. Latham. That’s the way my husband would think about it. And that’s why I’ve got to have somebody to help me. Somebody’s got to save him from killing Hamilton Vair.”