The Simple Way of Poison (7 page)

“Why don’t you all come in and have a drink?” Iris said. “That’s an excellent idea,” Colonel Primrose said promptly, so promptly that I couldn’t really say no.

I still wonder what difference it might have made in the days that followed if I’d not been so spineless and had gone home as I should have done. It’s impossible to tell, of course, and anyway we did go in. The door into the library, at the foot of the stairs to the right, was half open. The room was dark except for the small circle of white light thrown by the glass-shaded reading lamp on the dark green and gold leather pad on Randall Nash’s broad flat mahogany desk at the far side, between the windows. In the circle of light was an open book. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay on it, the ear bows extended as if they had just been put there.

But that was not all, nor did any of it explain the sudden, almost imperceptible stiffening in the muscles of Iris’s smooth bare back as Steve Donaldson took her ermine cape and she glanced in through the half-open door. On the desk beside the pad, just out of the circle of light, was a round silver tray, with a decanter of whisky and a soda syphon. Beside the tray an amber highball glass with a silver rim lay on the desk, on its side.

Iris glanced from the spot of light and the overturned glass up the stairs ahead of us, and took a deep controlled breath. I saw Colonel Primrose cock his head down and follow her gaze with his bright sharp black eyes. I thought he shook his head a little.

It took only a second or two, all this, before Iris said, quite normally—and if I hadn’t known the danger signals I’d never have noticed anything not perfectly normal about any of this—“Please go in by the fire. I’ll bring the decanter.”

Colonel Primrose had just taken my coat. He was still standing with it over his arm. We all stood there a moment. Iris went into the library, picked up the glass and put it on the tray, wiped up the spot on the polished mahogany with her handkerchief, and came out again with the tray in her hands.

She handed it to me. “Take it in, Grace, will you? I’ll just put this in the kitchen.”

She took the glass. I started into the drawing room with the tray.

“Wait a second,” she said. “Is there any soda?”

She came back, put the glass under the syphon and pressed the trigger. A hissing spurt of the gas brought out a couple of drops of charged water.

“I’ll fill it,” she said. She took the syphon and glass, and went out with Colonel Primrose to the kitchen.

I went on into the drawing room where Steve Donaldson was standing in front of the fire, staring down into it. He glanced up, the expectant light in his eyes dying when he saw it was only me. I took a potato chip out of the silver bowl on the low Chippendale table in front of the fire and scooped a little of the fresh caviar from the block of ice in the thermos tub. We didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, and were content not to try to make anything up. So we just sat there until Iris and Colonel Primrose came back with the syphon, one of those patent arrangements with cartridges for carbonating your own tap water.

After that it was very pleasant, and when I suddenly looked at the French clock on the mantel it was after three o’clock. I remembered my children.

“Don’t go,” Iris said.

“I must. They’re at the age when they don’t approve of me being out after two-thirty.”

“Why don’t you phone and see if they’re in?—My child ought to be in in a moment,” she added with a smile at Steve Donaldson. “There’s a phone in the library.”

I hesitated.

“Nobody wants to go home, Mrs. Latham,” Steve said with a grin.

I glanced at Colonel Primrose and got up. He came with me into the hall. The green shaded lamp on the library desk was still on. I pulled up the chair behind the desk and dialed my number. Then, as I waited, my eyes got used to the dark outer rim of the light. And as the book-lined walls and the mahogany mantel became visible, something else became visible too… just as I heard Lilac’s sleepy voice at the other end. I put the telephone down without speaking, staring in silent terror at the thing on the floor.

When I said “Colonel Primrose!” the first time I couldn’t have more than whispered it, for he didn’t come. The second time he came quickly. I saw him in the door, saw the alarmed anxious expression on his face as he stopped abruptly and stood looking down at me. I pointed to the floor, my throat too paralyzed to speak. In an instant he was there, down on one knee, his hand on Randall Nash’s limp wrist, then moving under his coat to his heart.

Then I realized that that second time I must have screamed, for Iris Nash was there in the room, with Steve Donaldson behind her. I saw Steve reach back to the switch beside the door, and the room was full of light. Colonel Primrose got to his feet, his head cocked down, his bright black eyes moving intently about the room. It seemed an incredible time to me before they came to Iris Nash, staring down in horror at the prone figure, its dead glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling, its teeth bared in a sardonic grin, as if the last laugh was Randall Nash’s… and a bitter one too.

Steve Donaldson was behind her, holding both her arms close to her, steadying her, giving her his own strength. She seemed unaware of him or of us—only of the dreadful grinning figure of her husband on the floor.

Colonel Primrose came to the desk and took up the telephone.

“I’m going to call the police, Iris,” he said gently.

She looked silently at him, her wide-set green eyes dazed and uncomprehending. It was almost as if she had not heard him speaking at all.

Colonel Primrose put the telephone down. He hesitated a moment, and turned toward her again.

“Where is the glass he was drinking from, Iris?” he asked quietly.

Something sharp and sudden cut through the blank dazed expression in her eyes and caught the breath in her bare throat. The words were scarcely audible as her blanched lips moved: “I… washed it, and put it away.”

I can’t believe that any of us then—except perhaps Colonel Primrose, used to this sort of thing and prejudiced against Iris Nash from the beginning—realized the full appalling significance of what she had said. If her voice sounded like a death knell in the horrible silence of that room there was reason enough, Heaven knows, in Randall Nash’s lifeless figure lying there on the oriental carpet, grinning glassy-eyed into eternity.

It was Steve Donaldson, knowing about the law, who saw the potential danger of her position quicker by far than I did. He released his hold on her arms slowly, looking at Colonel Primrose, his eyes sharpened with a sort of vigilant wariness, his lean jaw set. We all stood there silently for a moment, Colonel Primrose’s black parrot eyes deliberately—I thought—not meeting Iris’s.

And it was Iris, oddly enough, who broke the silence at last. She raised one hand to her forehead and smoothed back her copper-colored hair, looking frail and tired suddenly, like a hothouse tiger lily exposed too long to the sun.

“What do I do?” she asked, in a dazed unreal voice.

“You don’t do anything,” Steve Donaldson said brusquely. He started to go on, and stopped. He had not taken his eyes off Colonel Primrose, still standing by the telephone. I saw something flicker in the bright black eyes Colonel Primrose turned to him.

“The fewer conclusions anybody jumps at the better, Mr. Donaldson,” he said, with a restrained suavity that I’m sure must have taken some effort.

Steve Donaldson flushed darkly. He took a step closer to Iris. He was behind her, so she could not know, I thought suddenly, how much like a sword and shield he looked, looming there, in spite of his white tie and tails. Nor could Colonel Primrose have known how much to the point what he had just said was going to be.

Outside the sound of a car stopping, followed by heavy feet stamping off the snow on the porch, brought us all sharply to attention. Colonel Primrose went to the door and opened it. I heard a low rumble of voices, and in a moment there were four sober-faced keen-eyed men in the room, two of whom we were to see a lot of before we were through with Randall Nash. I had never seen any of them, so I knew they weren’t from the Seventh Precinct Headquarters in Volta Place. They all seemed to know Colonel Primrose.

One of them, the surgeon obviously, came forward with his black bag and knelt beside Randall Nash. He straightened up in a minute, put his stethoscope back in his inside pocket and glanced up at Colonel Primrose, drawing his thin lower lip under his long teeth with an odd sucking sound.

At that point, I suppose, the die was cast already, and nothing could have saved us from any part of the fate that seemed to be hanging on the footsteps of everyone who entered the yellow brick house on Beall Street, dogging it as relentlessly as if the awful crime of that long dead Nash had laid on it a curse for which only blood could atone. And yet… I have nothing but admiration and respect for the District of Columbia police. I doubt if anywhere in the world any group of men handed the job that Captain Lamb and his men were handed that night would have done it better, or with more devotion not only to duty but to decency. But if they were human, they couldn’t possibly have failed to be affected by the sudden and appallingly dramatic entrance on the scene that happened at the very moment Dr. Maxton folded his stethoscope and looked up, sucking in his lower lip.

We were all so shocked at what was going on in front of us that none of us—except, I suppose, Colonel Primrose, who always notices everything, and perhaps Captain Lamb—heard the front door open and saw Lowell Nash come in. And I doubt if even they saw Mac there behind her. She must have stood in the doorway for a long moment, taking in the dreadful significance of what was going on for instants, before she shot forward, dropping her red velvet evening coat off her shoulders to the floor as she came, sure and swift and razor-sharp, her dark eyes burning and all the color drained from her cheeks, facing her stepmother.

Her voice came out low and hard and cruel: “Then you
did
poison him… and you’ve poisoned my father too!”

Even Colonel Primrose caught his breath sharply. I didn’t dare look at any of the others. I couldn’t blame them for thinking anything. The searing icy hatred in Lowell Nash’s voice was enough to curdle anyone’s blood. And she was almost unbelievably lovely to look at, in a low-cut flame-colored dance frock with a skirt of yards and yards of crisp net swirling about her young body as she moved, and above it each black curl sculptured close to her small elegant head like the locks of a young Medusa. That’s what she seemed too, just then: a young Medusa, not knowing her power, turning every one of us to stone.

Then as suddenly she broke away and flung herself down beside her father.

“Dad! Dad! Oh, it’s Lowell! Answer me—answer me, daddy!”

She burst into a torrent of weeping, her dark head on the stiff starched bosom of his shirt.

It was then, I think, that we all became aware of Mac. He came forward, knelt down beside her and put his arm around her gently.

“Don’t, Lowell. Please don’t. Please, honey!”

He looked up helplessly as she shook passionately away from him. Colonel Primrose took a step forward. Suddenly Iris said, in a voice nearly as cool and detached as it had been two hours before, “You take her upstairs, Steve. Grace will show you the way.”

Which should, I suppose, have shown that Iris Nash had a surer insight into the complex and I think quite unconscious springs of her stepdaughter’s soul than anyone else had. Steve Donaldson picked her up bodily, unresisting, and carried her up the broad stairs. We stood there in her room for a moment, looking down at her, sobbing quietly on the high four-poster bed, her head in her arms.

“Poor little kid!” Steve said gently. He smoothed her dark silky curls. “Buck up, old chap!” he said.

I turned on the light by the mahogany table by the windows and switched off the light by her bed. Steve was still standing there, one of her limp hands in his.

I shook my head involuntarily. “You’ve given yourself a pretty tough assignment, my friend,” I thought… not seeing how anybody could possibly be a friend of Lowell and Iris Nash at the same time. It seems to be a characteristic of the Nash difficulties. You’ve got to be on one side or the other. It was true with Randall and Marie’s divorce, it was true of the two children, it seemed to be almost nauseatingly true of Iris Nash and her stepdaughter, though of Iris only because Lowell forced it to be that way.

I was glad when the door opened and the doctor came in.

“This’ll quiet her,” he said. “Severe shock.”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

He jerked his head over his shoulder in the direction of the stair well.

“Other one’s holding up all right.”

There was a sardonic inflection in his voice that should have told me more than it did. But it seemed to me then that it must have been perfectly apparent to all of them that Iris Nash was going on her nerve… and on the sure knowledge that everybody in the place couldn’t indulge in the luxury of cracking up and sleeping off the first frightful hours of this with a shot in the arm. That’s being rather hard on Lowell, I suppose; but I really didn’t feel that her virulent attack on her stepmother before the assembled police had any justification in shock or nerves or anything else. If she’d thought what she said, and I suppose she really did, she should never have said it. This flying to bits every time anything didn’t please her was more like her mother, really, than like Lowell. Marie Nash’s life with Randall, I knew, had been one stormy scene after another, with a ninety mile gale raging at the drop of a hat. Lowell’s scenes had hitherto been like her father’s—the product of a carefully designed plan of action that could seize an opportunity and make the most of it, as Randall Nash had done on Christmas Eve when he’d told the story of the Nash vault. The business downstairs fitted in so perfectly with what had gone on at my house after the dog was found dead that I was really alarmed. If Lowell had set out to get even with Iris, she had certainly scored a strike with her first ball. There was no doubt of that.

However, there was also no use wasting moral indignation on anyone so completely and outrageously pagan as a modern eighteen-year-old. The interesting thing to me was seeing how my sympathy, that had been with Lowell since she was four and swiped the funeral wreath, had changed since the Christmas Eve scenes, and veered completely to Iris with her final attack a few minutes before. After all, you don’t just go about accusing people you happen to dislike because they married your father of poisoning your dog, much less of poisoning your father. No matter how richly it’s deserved— either the poison or the accusation.