All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford

       All for the Love of a Lady

       Copyright © 1943, 1944, renewed 1972 by Zenith Brown. All rights reserved.

       Published by Wildside Press LLC wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

      1

      If you’ve ever lived in Washington in the summer, you know what a jar of Victory garden tomatoes feels like in a pressure cooker. The pressure would be bad enough at any time, of course, but it’s easier to take when there’s snow on Capitol Hill, and when stewing in one’s own juice is a figurative expression, applied to public heads about to roll back to private life.

      The fact that it was July and not January may have had no effect on the end of the Crane-Durbin business, but it had plenty on the beginning. If Molly Crane had been busy thawing out the drain-pipes of their small house in Georgetown, and Courtney Durbin had spent her time at the telephone, as she swore she did, trying to get an extra teacupful of oil from the ration board to heat their large house on Massachusetts Avenue, neither of them would have been at the Abbotts’ pool on that Wednesday night. Of course, better men than I—especially since I’m Grace Latham and a woman . . . widow, actually, on what a kind friend once said was the glamorous side of forty—better men than I have said that “if” is the most bootless word in any language. It’s only a point on the circumference of a vicious circle, or at best the starting place of an endless chain stretching nowhere. If Courtney Durbin had married Cass Crane, as everybody expected her to for years, she wouldn’t have married that singular but very rich newcomer to Washington with the war, Mr. D. J. Durbin. If she’d married Cass, Cass wouldn’t have married Molly. And Molly might have married Randy Fleming, who’d always adored her. And it would have saved a lot of trouble.

      Whether Colonel Primrose and his indomitable Sergeant Buck, those partners in experting crime who prowl about the ambiguous periphery where the Intelligence agencies in Washington tend to coordinate, would have been drawn, or wouldn’t have been drawn, into a murder hunt by eight o’clock the next morning, is hard to say. When one part of a pattern is gone, who can tell that any other part of it would ever have existed? Or perhaps the incident at the Abbotts’ pool was itself only part of a pattern already formed, or a chain of circumstances already grimly in motion.

      So if nobody at all had been at the Abbotts’ that night it might not have saved any blood . . . though that’s figurative too, for through the whole affair no bright red drop was ever visible, unless on the moon that night. But it would have saved something else.

      Furthermore, if enough people know you’d like to commit murder, it might get pretty hard to convince all of them you didn’t. You could never again be sure, meeting a quietly scrutinizing eye before it was turned away, across a table or a room, that that wasn’t the thought behind it. The people who think Duleep Singh is clairvoyant, and there are a lot of them, said it was behind his when he said, “There is blood on that moon.”

      He said it to me, because I was sitting next to him on the rim of the Abbotts’ pink marble fountain basin, but it was in one of those moments when everybody suddenly and inexplicably stops talking, and it reached everywhere, against a background of softly, eerily dripping water. Charlie, the Abbotts’ loathsome pet bullfrog, croaked hoarsely from under a lily pad, and when Corinne Blodgett said, “Duleep Singh says there’s blood on the moon,” her voice was more like Charlie’s than Singh’s.

      “Whose blood, I wonder?”

      Courtney Durbin’s voice was cool and soft like the dripping water.

      “—Can you tell us, Mr. Singh?”

      “You should know, Mrs. Durbin.”

      Corinne Blodgett said he emphasized the “you” ever so slightly, but I didn’t hear it that way.

      “—Aren’t men killing each other all over the world, tonight?”

      Corinne said he just added that, with a perceptible pause in between, and also that his dark eyes were fixed significantly on Courtney. But Corinne lived a year on dates, nuts and goat’s milk and cheese, and wore sandals only when the chauffeur refused to take her driving with nothing on but a coarse linen robe. Corinne’s an awful fool, in some ways, but a really sweet one, and probably makes more sense in the long run than most women do.

      Molly Crane was sitting in one of those elaborate terrace chaise longues with the rubber-tired wheels at the back. Or she had been up to that moment, with Randy Fleming perched on the end of the chaise, his new wings on his shirt, one hand playing with the gay red butterfly bow on her slipper beside him. Just then she wasn’t sitting. At the sound of Courtney Durbin’s voice her body went taut as a bowstring, and her hand holding a long glass of iced lemonade moved slowly out to put it down on the low table at her elbow. Her face in the dusk was a pointed white blur turned toward Courtney, with two spots of liquid flame where her eyes were. The blur was a charged magnetic fluid, and even Duleep Singh’s voice, suavely Oriental in spite of its Oxford accent, seemed to crackle a little as it crossed it. One foot moved from the other. She was like a cat getting ready to spring, and Courtney Durbin knew it, as did everyone else sitting there. There wasn’t only blood on the moon just then. It was in Molly’s eyes, and in Courtney’s, and in Randy Fleming’s, I think. His hand clamped down on Molly’s ankle, pinning it to the yellow leather cushion so sharply that her body quivered for an instant.

      She relaxed slowly and raised her glass to her lips again. We all relaxed, politely and unobtrusively, trying not to seem to do so, and Randy took his hand off her ankle. Courtney Durbin dropped her cigarette on the terrace and rubbed it dead with the toe of her shoe. She reached over to the ivory box on the table for another.

      “You must be frightfully excited about Cass coming home, Molly,” she said deliberately, glancing at Randy Fleming across the spurt of flame Duleep Singh held to the tip of her cigarette.

      Molly sat up abruptly, not like a cat now but like a flash of lightning.

      “Cass—coming . . . ?”

      Then she gasped. It was a tiny, barely audible sound as she realized, I suppose, that she’d stepped like a day-old lamb into a trap that was yawning for her. But it was too late.

      Courtney Durbin gasped too, but it was very different.

      “Oh, I’m sorry! Maybe it’s a military secret . . . but, darling, I thought if he sent me word, he’d certainly . . . Oh, I’m frightfully sorry! But after all, he’s your husband, isn’t he? How should I——”

      Randy Fleming’s hand closed over Molly’s ankle again.

      “He’s sent you word, all right, if he is coming,” he said, in a kind of determined drawl. “It’s just got tangled up in red tape . . .”

      “Oh, of course, darling,” Courtney said. She got up. “I must go. I hate to, it’s such fun here.”

      She looked around at Duleep Singh. “—Can I take anybody any place on my way? This is a business trip—I just stopped in on my way to the airport.”

      She hesitated an instant. “Cass wanted somebody to meet him. Would you like to come and surprise him, Molly?”

      Molly Crane was staring ahead of her, past Randy Fleming, at the big red globe of the rising moon. She started a little and turned her head.

      “No, thanks,” she said. “Just tell him to be careful. I painted the bathroom this morning, and it probably isn’t dry yet.”

      Randy Fleming got up abruptly.

      “Let’s go, Molly. It won’t be a surprise. He’s expecting you all right.”

      He held out