“Where was your husband?”

  Her face showed a kind of stupid horror. “My . . . husband?”

  “Was he in bed too?”

  She sat up sharply erect, her cheeks coloring angrily.

  “Don’t be absolutely crazy! My husband never heard of Bertha Taylor. He never saw the gun. He hasn’t any——”

  “All I asked was if he was home in bed, Mrs. Kent. Was he? Or wasn’t he?”

  There was something rather terrible about her then, the way she looked blindly about her, not meeting anybody’s eyes, as though really trapped, so seriously trapped that she didn’t dare not tell the truth.

  “No. He wasn’t. He’d gone back to his laboratory. He didn’t come in until . . .”

  “Until when, Mrs. Kent?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! Around three, I think. But I don’t know! He was working, at his laboratory!”

  “Just take it easy,” Captain Lamb said. “It’s easy to check. There’s no use your getting all upset, if you’re telling the truth.”

  But she was upset, terribly.

  “You and your husband hadn’t had a quarrel, had you, Mrs. Kent? Would that be why he wasn’t home?”

  Susan sat back in her chair again, wearily, and closed her eyes for a moment. “No,” she said, at last. “It wasn’t a quarrel. He never quarrels. He just went out. But it hadn’t anything to do with Bertha Taylor. He doesn’t know Bertha Taylor. Can’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? He never laid his eyes on Bertha Taylor. Or the gun. Or anything.”

  “The gun wasn’t in the hall at three o’clock this morning, then, or when he came home, Mrs. Kent?”

  “I don’t know. It couldn’t have been. He’d have seen it if it was.”

  I thought it was beginning to be a kind of third degree that couldn’t go on any longer. Susan Kent was in such a terror that she plainly didn’t know what she was saying. She was trembling from head to foot and clutching her hands desperately together. It looked to me like a mild case of actual shock.

  “I think Mrs. Kent ought to have a lawyer, if you’re going to ask her any more questions, Captain Lamb,” I said warmly.

  “Oh, no! I don’t want a lawyer! I’m telling you the truth. I don’t need a lawyer—I just want to tell the truth and go home!”

  She was struggling up out of her chair, a pathetic little figure as near collapse as she could be and still control the movement of her slim body. Captain Lamb watched her, not unkindly but detached and without personal sympathy of any kind.

  “That’s all I want, Mrs. Kent. You tell the truth, and the whole truth, and you can go on home. But I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth. You must see how this story of yours sounds. People don’t just find guns lying on their floor and then run and try to fling ’em in the Potomac.”

  “But that’s really just . . . just the way everything was.”

  Captain Lamb nodded politely. “All right. You go on home, Mrs. Kent. One of the boys’ll drop you at your front door. And you stay right there, hear? Don’t go running away anywhere, because he’ll stick around and go with you any place you go.”

  “I . . . won’t,” Susan said. She was holding on to the back of the chair to steady herself. “But . . . please don’t bring my husband into this. He doesn’t——”

  “You’ve told me that. You’ll have more chance to prove it if you want to. You’ll have to be franker than you have been, Mrs. Kent. You can go now.”

  I’d have liked to go with her, but I knew before Captain Lamb looked at me there wasn’t a prayer. She went out with him.

  “You hadn’t ought to have been so hard on the little lady,” Sergeant Buck said suddenly, when Lamb came back.

  He turned his head and spat very precisely into where the fireplace should have been. It was just a piece of board now, with wallpaper pasted on it, but the roses looked pretty spotted so I guess they were used to it.

  “I wouldn’t of done it, if I was you.”

  I wished he hadn’t said it. Captain Lamb looks mild and fatherly but inside he’s tough. And I knew he knew that inside Buck’s concrete exterior, fortified and iron-girt, he’s nothing but a quivering mass of sentimental jelly when anybody with blue eyes and curly hair and in her early twenties is concerned, in spite of well-known statistics on juvenile crime. And as, in Colonel Primrose’s view at any rate, his feeling for some one like that has the slightest possible connection with their innocence, for him to feel sorry now for Susan Kent was practically the grand jury handing her over for trial Monday a week.

  “Are we going to the Preston Hotel?” I asked, to try to shift the emphasis, knowing nothing about the Preston Hotel except that the Sergeant appeared to think they ought to go there.

  “I’m waiting for a report on that gun,” Captain Lamb said. “They won’t be long.”

  He went out into the hall.

  “It really is too bad,” I said. “I hope they don’t have to drag her husband in. He’s a nice guy.”

  Sergeant Buck spat again. That being an unsuccessful conversational gambit, I tried another.

  “It’s too bad Colonel Primrose has the measles.”

  He gave me a dour glare. “Maybe you’d ought to go home and call him up on the telephone, ma’am.”

  “Instead of hanging around where I’m not wanted, you mean, Sergeant?” I inquired agreeably.

  He turned that odd tarnished-brass color again, but he didn’t spit, I imagine because he’d spotted the wall-paper roses, I mean figuratively this time, and had not yet spotted the cuspidor across the room by the couch.

  Captain Lamb jerked the door open and came in, his face showing an odd mixture of triumph and perplexity.

  “Well, here we are,” he said. He looked down at the report in his hand. “The gun Mrs. Kent was trying to toss in the river is the gun that shot that woman upstairs here. There were two shells left in it. No doubt at all, didn’t take ’em a minute to check. I’m afraid the little lady’s going to have to kick through with more than she’s given us so far.”

  He looked at me. I’d sat down on the crochet-covered arm of the club chair again.

  “You’d better start talking too, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “This story about the gun, now, that you and Mrs. Hallet tried to hold out. What’s the whole story on that?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Captain. I haven’t the faintest idea that this is the gun Mr. Hallet was talking about, and neither have you. I just don’t know anything about it, at all.”

  He looked at me without irritation, or visible irritation anyway.

  “You attorney for the defense, Mrs. Latham? Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it. It would be a help if you’d play it different. As a matter of fact, lady, have you figured out who you’re the defense for? You want you and Mrs. Hallet to wake up with your skull knocked in some morning?”

  As a matter of fact, I wondered, who was it I thought I was defending? I tried to figure it out as we left the house. Captain Lamb stopped and talked briefly to a group of reporters who came down on him at the gate like locusts. I sat in back and Sergeant Buck took his rigid place by the driver. And I couldn’t say, even to myself, who it was I thought I was blocking for. Dorothy Hallet in part, of course; it was her gun, or there was a gun involved in the picture somewhere that was hers, and she was my friend. Milton Minor, perhaps. It was possible for him to have taken it, though hardly conceivable he’d have used it the way it apparently had been used. Then there were the two Kents, Bill and Susan.

  That was something else again, and it was Bill Kent rather than Susan who was important. It seemed to me imperative to keep Bill, as far as I could, from any shattering illusion. Failing that, I had to keep as much faith as I could with Susan Kent. It wasn’t her fault she’d come to me in the first place and told the story she did. At the same time, I didn’t personally want to get knocked in the head, nor did I want Dorothy Hallet to . . . though already it seemed a long time ago, instead of a very short time ago, that I’d stood there in the doorway of Number 6 with a metallic taste in my mouth, being told the danger Dorothy and I could be in.

  The driver left the big car to go over to where Captain Lamb was for a moment. I saw one side of Sergeant Buck’s jaw move, the other stationary as if paralyzed, and the brassy voice, pitched low for him, said, “You don’t need to worry none about the little Kent lady shootin’ the Livingstone woman, ma’am. She couldn’ta done it. She wasn’t shot in bed, she was put over there. They got the lead outa the wall. She couldn’t of lifted her neither. Keep quiet about it, but you don’t need to worry, ma’am.”

  I said, “Thank you, Sergeant.” It didn’t seem to matter, really, that that wasn’t what was worrying me. I was grateful for what seemed to me a surprising mark of confidence from one who’d regarded me as a plain sieve, always to be viewed with the jaundiced and bilious eye of mistrust. But it had never seriously entered my mind that Susan had shot Betty Livingstone, puzzling as it was that she’d known her and had actually been at this house. It wouldn’t make sense. I wondered again, then, about her saying she didn’t know whether she was going to shoot Mr. Stubblefield or not. I wished now I hadn’t been so abrupt and had been a little more patient, and found out what she thought she meant, what she had been really trying to say when she said it. It seemed very involved and bewildering, and I doubted, with her violent resentment toward me, that I’d ever get a chance to have her clear it up.

  “You might tip her off some—so she don’t need to act so scared,” Sergeant Buck said.

  What was it I’d thanked him for? It didn’t matter, and the record was set straight again. It was Susan Kent he didn’t want to worry—not me. No matter where Colonel Primrose was, Sergeant Buck was still on the side of the angels. He was still the same malleable old putty in the hands of a blue-eyed damsel in distress.

  “Okay,” I said. But when Captain Lamb finally came and we started up toward the Hill I said, “I guess maybe I’d better tell you about the gun.”

  So I told him. I didn’t tell him it was Dorothy Hallet’s, or that Ellery Seymour had got it for her. I didn’t tell him that Milton Minor had seen Susan Kent pick it up off the floor and move across to behind the library door with it aimed at the broad rear exposure of the One-Man Assembly Line . . . assuming Milton really had seen her and wasn’t creating some spur-of-the-moment fictional biography. I glossed that part over, using Susan’s version of the story and Mr. Stubblefield’s acceptance of it, and then told him the rest as literally as I could—even the part about Mr. Joe Kramer’s pretending to unload the gun, and Dorothy’s taking it later, and hiding it under the cushion of the love seat Milton Minor and I were sitting on.

  Captain Lamb listened in silence, looking at me a little oddly.

  “So Kramer thought she was getting ready to let the Big Boss have it, did he?” he said when I’d finished. “And you’re sure he didn’t unload the gun when he pretended to?”

  “I’m not sure of anything I didn’t see myself,” I said. “Mrs. Hallet told me that. I don’t see she’d have any reason not to tell the truth about it. She wasn’t called on to mention it at all, to me.”

  “Queer, though, wasn’t it?”

  I suppose I have the all-time low in batting averages on figuring the correct time to open my mouth and the correct time to keep it shut. What I managed to do by opening it at this point was cut myself out of the trip to the Preston Hotel. Unless, of course, Lamb was being cagier than I’d thought and never actually intended to let me go in the first place, but on the other hand was just leading me on till I told him what he wanted to know before he jettisoned me. Which is what he now promptly did—on the corner of Seventh and D, in front of the Court House.

  “You can get a taxi here, Mrs. Latham,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ve changed my mind. We’re putting the cart before the horse. I’ll look into a couple of things. You go on home like I told you.”

  He did whistle down a taxi for me, which was nice of him, and gave the driver my address on P Street. He didn’t know, I supposed, about the guarded left-handed order I had from the Sergeant to give Susan Kent a hint . . . which was all the excuse I needed to go back up to Massachusetts Avenue instead of to Georgetown and P Street.

  16

  I got out at the Hallets’ entrance, but I didn’t go into their house. I hurried around the flagstoned path to the redecorated stables, forgetting until I got to the door that the place was permanently under observation by one of Lamb’s men. I didn’t, however, see him around anywhere, and there’d been no one out in the street that I recalled. The door was standing open and the screen unhooked. I rang the bell, and then I went on into the hall.

  I called “Susan!” and waited a moment without any answer, so I called again. This time I thought I heard some one in the living room. I went over and pushed the door open. “Susan?” I said. But it wasn’t. It was Bill Kent. He was sitting in the big wing chair by the side of the fireplace. The coal grate, that might be supplementary heating except that in the winter the place would freeze without it, was half-full of cigarette stubs and two empty twisted packs. Unless Susan was a rotten housekeeper, Bill Kent’s morning was fairly written out even before I had more than a first look at his face.

  “Why, Bill . . . what on earth!”

  I couldn’t help exclaiming it. He looked awful, his eyes dark and smouldering and unhappy, staring at the door and waiting, not for me or any stranger but for Susan herself to come in. He made a jerky forward motion and got to his feet.

  “She isn’t here,” he said curtly. “I’m just hanging around—a man’s supposed to come fix the hot-water heater. What’s wrong with that? Can’t a man sit in his own living room?”

  “Well, surely,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you looked sick or something. I guess it was the light.”

  But it wasn’t. He looked worse now there was more of it, with his face out of the shadow of the wing-back chair. He was a totally different person from the casual pleasant young man who’d come up to me and Milton Minor on the Hallets’ balcony the evening before. The easy half-humorous amiability he’d had then was entirely gone. What was here now was tough bedrock, implacable, in its way as ruthless as the cold light that was behind Enoch B. Stubblefield’s genial kindliness when the kindliness slipped for a moment. His mouth was hard and his jaw was harder. I could see what Susan Kent meant. Seeing it, I wondered what ever could have made her think she could go on fooling him for very long. She must have seen this side of him from time to time. I suppose because she’d never seen it directed at her, she’d thought it never could be, when she first began.

  “Sorry, I’ll have to shove,” he said shortly. “I’ve wasted too much time already.”

  “Don’t go on my account,” I said. “I’m leaving right away. Unless you’d like me to wait for the heater man.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. Suit yourself.”

  He went across the room to a table by the leaded glass casement windows at the side of the house. It was a reproduction Phyfe job with a lyre pedestal and a top that was opened up, with a sewing basket and some papers in it. He put it down, lifted up a lamp that normally stood there and was on the floor now, and put it back where it belonged.

  “If Susan comes before you go, will you tell her I won’t be home for dinner? I’ll be here later. Tell her I’d like her to stick around till I get home, will you?”

  I nodded. His voice was like the rest of him. When he went implacable it was no half-way journey. He went to the desk against the wall by the chimney breast, took a red paper letter file tied with a black string, stuck it into his brief case and snapped the brief case shut. He bent down then. It was the first time I’d noticed the battered gladstone bag on the floor by the desk. He was leaving. It was what Susan had said he’d do. She’d said, however, that he’d leave without saying anything, and my impression of him sitting as he’d been when I came in, with his somber smoldering gaze on the door, was that he’d intended saying plenty before he left this time. Which was fine, of course. What wasn’t fine was for him to go out now and hole in somewhere with Captain Lamb on his trail. It would give Susan a lot more to explain, when she already had enough.

  “Bill,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you leave that, and pick it up tonight? It would be a lot better all around.”

  For a moment I thought I’d made him actively sore. I didn’t much like the look in his eye. You don’t think of research scientists being particularly violent or hot-tempered, but this one was. Then the incandescent points went dull again as quickly as they’d burned up. He put the suitcase in the middle of the floor, and picked up his hat off the chair.

  “Sorry,” he said curtly. “May I ask what the hell business it is of yours, Mrs. Latham?”

  “None at all,” I said. “It’s just a bit of highly gratuitous advice that you can take or leave. No obligation of any kind. It’s in the interest of the scientific spirit, is all. Aren’t you supposed to examine all the controlling factors before you proceed with any action?”

  “I have examined all the controlling factors I need, thanks, Mrs. Latham,” he said more calmly. “Also I’m the kind of guy that knows how to ask for advice when he needs it. But thanks, just the same.”

  He picked up the bag again. It sagged heavily. I had the uncomfortable idea, for an instant, that it was only books and it was me that had ignored the controlling factors, not him. But then I saw a couple of inches of white-fringed pajama tape sticking out.

  “Leave that bag here, Bill,” I said deliberately. I was still in front of the door and I stayed there. “As a personal favor to me, if for nothing else. Don’t take it now.”

  “One side, please, Mrs. Latham,” he said evenly. “I’d hate to knock a lady down in my own house. Or is it?”

  I thought I’d better move then, so I did.

  “Sure it’s your house,” I said. “And if you want to be a crazy hot-headed fool it’s your privilege. Sorry I ever brought it up, any of it.”

 

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