The Simple Way of Poison (2 page)

I opened it. The paper inside was an ordinary cheap ruled tablet paper, greyish. Printed on it, in the same haphazard purple block letters, was a message, without the formality of a salutation.

DONT THINK YOURE GETTING AWAY WITH ANYTHING. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHERE YOU TWO WENT LAST TUESDAY. THIS ISNT BLACKMAIL EITHER ITS SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

A FRIEND.

It’s strange about anonymous letters. You suddenly realize that somewhere round you are malevolent eyes, watching you, that you’ve never been aware of. Even if it’s somebody you know, their eyes are still strange, because they’re sharpened with malice and venom that you’ve not thought about. It’s like going into a friendly house in the dark and realizing abruptly that something unclean is there that you can’t see but that can see you.

I put the letter back in the envelope and tossed it down on the table.

“You’ve got lovely friends,” I said. “What’s it got to do with Iris Nash?”

He picked it up and looked at it a minute. Then he flicked the wheel of his lighter and held the flame to it, over the large pewter basin in the center of the table.

“Nothing, really.”

He dropped the envelope just as the sheet of flame licked up over the purple printed letters to the tips of his carefully tended fingers.

“Except that last Tuesday I took Iris out to Great Falls to get a maple corner cupboard I knew about.—And this is the second of these sunshine greetings.”

“Where’s the other one?”

He pointed to the charred remains writhing and crackling in the pewter dish.

“What did it say?”

“Much the same. Plainer. Something about my wife… and Iris’s husband. It came the day after we went to Maryland to get a Sully portrait I’d spotted. Up in Frederick.—It may have been Barbara Frietchie.”

The clock on the mantel ticked loudly.

“Does Iris know about these letters?”

“Don’t be funny, Mrs. Latham.”

The sharp edge in his voice startled me a little.

“Or… your wife?”

He laughed. “That isn’t funny, darling. That’s stupid.”

“I should have thought both of them ought to know about it immediately.”

He didn’t say anything. I watched him move the other red dog at the other end of the mantel.

“Have you any notion who they’re from, Gil?”

I asked that abruptly, hardly aware what I was thinking until I saw something behind his eyes move sharply.

“Not the foggiest, darling.”

“Except possibly who?”

He had turned away and was looking down into the undulating waves of artificial fire behind the red coals in the grate.

“It’s too cock-eyed,” he said, changed back completely now to his casual bored self.

I was wondering. Not about Iris Nash and him but about his wife; and I thought I knew what he was thinking and why he’d burned the letters. Edith St. Martin is sixteen years older than Gilbert, very rich and not very attractive. He was a decorator in New York doing over her apartment when she married him. She opened the Georgetown shop for him when he began to spend his mornings in bed, his afternoons at various bars and his nights at whosever party he happened to fall down and nobody bothered to pick him up and call a taxi. She doesn’t like Iris Nash, and there’s no reason, I suppose, why she should, and several very good possible reasons, anyway, why she shouldn’t.

I thought of that last line: “This isn’t blackmail either; it’s something different.”

He looked up. “Can you keep something under your hat, Grace?”

“I’ve never been known to,” I said.

“This is your big chance then. I mean—well, it’s all so damn ridiculous. But I’d rather like somebody to know, if it should… well, happen to get so ridiculous as to be embarrassing. You know, you can’t ever tell about this sort of thing.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s have it.”

“I think it’s Iris Nash’s charming young stepdaughter,” he said coolly.

The sight of Sergeant Buck buying chintz ought to have inured me to any shock, but apparently it hadn’t. I’m afraid I stared perfectly open-mouthed at Gilbert St. Martin, leaning there elegantly against the pine mantel. But it wasn’t him I was seeing. It was young Lowell Nash. I was seeing her as I always see her when she first comes into my mind—taut, stormy-eyed, white-faced, the night she broke into my house as I was dressing to go out to dinner. I still hear her: “Aunt Grace! Father—
he’s married her! She’s there!”
And she flung herself on my bed in a passion of uncontrollable sobbing. “I hate her! I hate her!”

That picture faded as it always does into a slim dark curly-haired child of eighteen with a firm pointed little chin and sullen red mouth and fine sensitive nose under wide-set brown eye behind thick black surprised lashes. Which is what one first sees of Lowell Nash.

“Look, Gil,” I said. “You may be darned good at interiors, but you don’t know much about people.”

He raised one neat brow.

“That’s odd, you know. I should have said I know a hell of a lot more about people—women especially—than about decorating.”

. “I wouldn’t let that get out,” I said. “It might hurt your business.”

I didn’t mean his wife, of course, but he thought I did, and his lips tightened. That’s one of the bad things about marrying somebody for money. You’re always on the defensive, always thinking people are being purposely objectionable.

“Anyway,” I went on, “—quite apart from character—if you’d ever been a child, and had one of those printing outfits, you’d know it takes hours to print anything as long as that.”

We both looked down at the last charred flakes of the letter from a friend.

“And if you knew Lowell Nash you’d know she’s hardly got time to take a deep breath, much less go into the printing business.”

He blew the ash off his long brown cigarette. “I’m afraid you’re not a sympathetic audience,” he drawled.

“I’m afraid not,” I answered shortly. “I’ve known Lowell a long time. I know she’s unbearably spoiled. She’s willful and impudent and difficult. I know Iris hasn’t had an easy job trying to get along with her the last three years, since she married Randall Nash. But I don’t think it’s been so terribly easy for Lowell either.”

“No. I’d say they’re neck and neck,” he agreed with a judicial nod.

“Then why blame a spiteful malicious thing like this on her?”

“Because, darling, I think that’s exactly what she is—a spiteful, malicious little bitch.”

“Rot,” I said.

He raised his brows.

“I suppose you’re aware, of course, that she loathes and despises her stepmother? And that her own mother eggs her on unmercifully?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said—knowing all about it.

“Really?” He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his gold cigarette case. His eyes were fixed on mine, rather in the way a philosophical cat fixes an unpredictable and possibly recalcitrant mouse. “I suppose it wouldn’t even interest you to know that Randall Nash was over at Massachusetts Avenue this afternoon, seeing his former wife?”

“It would interest me very much,” I said, “if it were true. Which it isn’t.”

“Oh yes it is. My wife saw him coming out of her place around three. She’s got flu or something.”

“It must have been three other people, Gil,” I said.

Randall and Marie Nash’s divorce in 1930 was one of the bitterest domestic battles Washington has ever waged in the white court house at 5th and D. Lowell Nash had stayed with her father, and Angus, who’s twenty-two now, had gone with his mother. The bitterness hadn’t ended then; it had grown as the children grew. To my certain knowledge neither of them had seen the other since their final meeting at my house in P Street.

Gilbert St. Martin shrugged again.

“A lot of things have been going on this winter, while you’ve been in Nassau getting that sun tan.—It’s stunning, by the way.”

He looked me up and down with a critical eye.

“You carry your thirty-four years remarkably well, Mrs. Latham.”

“Thirty-eight,” I said. “As you know very well. Thanks just the same.”

“Not at all. I really thought it was forty and your dressmaker,” he replied. It’s that sort of thing about Gil that brings cats to mind.

“Well, thanks anyway,” I said. I hesitated. I wanted to ask him what, for instance, had been going on while I’d been away. But something in the lift of one dark eyebrow and the sardonic twist to one corner of his mouth made me stop. The stiff charred mass in the pewter basin gave a final crackle and fell apart, leaving one tiny bit of white that the flame had not touched. It was almost like a warning.

“I just got back yesterday,” I said casually. “I haven’t seen anybody yet.”

“Why don’t you drop around?—She’d be glad to see somebody.”

That in itself, of course, should have warned me. It did occur to me that it needed explanation. But just then there was a flurry at the door. A uniformed chauffeur opened it, a large lady in a vast quantity of black broadtail with a cascade of purple orchids on her bow steamed in to the jingle of the silver sleigh bells, on an icy wave of one of those heady perfumes made not for ingénues.

It was my chance to escape and I took it—regardless of the chintz and the Cape Cod lighter. But not before I had a final look at Gilbert St. Martin. All trace of the guile that had seemed to me to color his last remarks had vanished. He was too perfect. You knew that the vexing problem of whether the canary-yellow hall should be done in silver stencils with modernist furniture or in white with Empire would be solved with just the proper mixture of gravity and badinage, over a perfect number of champagne cocktails, with money no object—to the lady. I could see—if I’d not already known—why Lowell Nash hated Gilbert; and also, though perhaps it was a little harder, why Iris Nash was supposed to have felt very differently about him, once.

The flakes of snow struck sharp and cold against my face as the bells jingled behind me. A man with a live turkey in one hand, a red kiddie car in the other and several things under his arms barged into me and said “Merry Christmas!” I picked up his bundles while another man picked up mine and said “Merry Christmas, lady!”, and we all shook the snow out of our eyes and hurried away with that worried preoccupied air that seizes all family men on Christmas Eve.

My preoccupation as I turned into Beall Street was rather different. I don’t think I’m more of a busybody than most people, and if it hadn’t been for the heap of charred paper back in Gilbert St. Martin’s shop I doubt if I would have thought again of what he’d said. It isn’t that I dislike Gil; I don’t at all, really. It’s true he’s not the sort of man I’d go mad about. He’s too carefully done up for one thing, so that I find myself thinking I ought to be more careful about keeping the dogs out of the living room and wearing gloves when I’m in the garden. Or possibly it’s that indefinable malicious faculty he’s got for leaving a polite barb—better concealed at some times than at others—in virtually everything he says about women, or men either. But gossip, even apart from Gilbert St. Martin, is one thing; anonymous letters are quite another. They inject a psychopathic element into human relations that has pretty ghastly possibilities.

Even at that, it wasn’t the letters actually that bothered me. After all, Iris Nash is old enough to know what it’s all about It was the fact that Gilbert St. Martin thought, or said he thought, that Lowell Nash had written them. Because there’s very little doubt that Lowell on occasion can be capable of almost anything, and none whatever that she hates her father’s second wife with all the bitter intensity that the Nashes as a family—except young Angus—have a positive flair for. The pity of it is that it might have been so different. If her father had told her, for instance, that he was going to marry again, I think her loyalty and devotion to him would have got the best of a sort of natural jealousy. But he didn’t. She came home from Bar Harbor one summer and there was Iris, newly mistress of the house in Beall Street. More than that, Iris was only thirty and quite astonishingly beautiful with her dark burnished-copper hair and grey-green eyes and white skin. Lowell was fifteen, and a little gawky and immature, and black as a darkey from the summer sun.

I knew the hell she’d gone through during her parents’ divorce, too, when she’d decided to stay with her father and her brother Angus had gone with Marie Nash. She was twelve then, and I’d known her since she was four and my elder son three and they ran afoul of the law swiping a fine wreath of violets and lilies of the valley, after the captains and the kings had departed, from Senator McGilvray’s last caucus in the old cemetery up the hill in Rock Creek Park. That began my acquaintance with her parents too, and I’m quite sure the reason I never liked Marie Nash from the beginning was that she spanked Lowell and took away her liver-and-white spaniel puppy—not so much for taking the flowers as for saying she didn’t see what good they did the Senator. Equally I suspect the reason I’d always been fond of Randall Nash—a little, in spite of a lot of things—was that he stalked out of the house slamming the door and returned in half an hour with another liver-and-white spaniel and one of the finest funeral wreaths I’ve ever seen. Its skeleton still adorns Lowell’s bedroom in the house in Beall Street. The spaniel’s still there too—not that he adorns anything, but far from it. No fourteen-year-old spaniel is particularly beautiful, and Senator McGilvray is a horrible wheezing ill-tempered little beast… and one of the innumerable molehills that became insuperable mountains in the house when Iris Nash came there to live.

I wasn’t the only person who liked Randall Nash at times and disliked Marie always. In fact, though she did have friends, and very important ones, I never knew anyone who liked both of them. She was rich and he’d been poor when they married, and she never let him forget it even after he’d made a lot of money himself. Then, when the depression came and Randall lost virtually everything, he came home one day and found she’d moved out practically everything else— everything but his bed and a couple of chairs and Lowell. Lowell was eleven and Angus, aged fifteen, was at St. Paul’s. They spent that night at my house—I live just behind them; our back gardens adjoin—and I helped Randall Nash refurnish the old house, antiques being cheap then. Since that day Lowell had meant a lot to me, in spite of times when I could happily have wrung her neck. Especially those first months when Randall brought his second wife there, and Lowell used to spend most of her time at my place.