The Woman in Black

Chapter 2

2It was on a Monday evening, that Enoch B. Stubblefield slipped quietly into Washington, D. C., on his private plane, and I mean quietly like a herd of bull elephants trumpeting through a garden of night-blooming stock in technicolor. His press agent—or I suppose I should say the Executive Assistant for Public Relations, Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises—may have whispered it, of course, to a deaf friend at the Press Club bar. Anyway, it would have been hard for everybody to miss the four limousines that drove up to his hotel bearing him and his impedimenta, which included his wife, his top advisers, his secretary, his bodyguard, his advisers’ secretaries, everybody’s baggage, Scotch oil in cases for the throats of any stray c******n and the better parts of two prize steers for the stomach of Enoch B. Stubblefield, the Colossus of the Assembly Line and America’s One-Man Industrial Revolution. It must have been by private arrangement with the Weather Man too, because it quit raining for the first time all week, just long enough for the ceiling to rise so his plane could land and not have to go on to New York or Richmond.

It didn’t stop long enough for the carrier to deliver me a legible newspaper the next morning. There was only one opaque spot on the sodden gray sheets spread out to dry on the living-room floor when I came downstairs. Either by miracle or perhaps by special effort of the Assistant Executive for Public Relations, it was the spot that had Enoch B. Stubblefield’s picture on it. He was at the bottom of the steps by his mammoth four-motored plane, shaking hands with his pilot, having already shaken hands, apparently, with his Chief Assistant Executive Mr. Ellery Seymour, who was there to welcome him. Everybody was beaming happily. The general air of triumph extended even to the caption writer. “Rain Floods Georgetown Basements, but Stops for Industrialist to Land at National Airport,” I read.

It was a triumph that fell sour on the ears of one Mrs. Grace Latham. I live in Georgetown. My basement kitchen has been flooding all the years I’ve been there, every time there’s a long or particularly heavy downpour, but this morning was little short of domestic calamity. All the sugar we have until the next stamp comes due had been carefully stored in the bottom of the cupboard, and was now being swept out to sweeten the lives of whatever creatures live down the overtaxed area drain. I could hear the dark mutterings of Lilac, my cook, downstairs, and the violent swish-swish of her broom. In our twenty years of mutual oppression, she’s never learned any more philosophy than I have.

I left the morning paper to go down and help her, my interest in any case in Mr. Stubblefield’s triumph over the elements being practically nil. My interest in his Chief Assistant Executive, in fact, was much more. I’d never met Mr. Stubblefield, but I’d met Ellery Seymour a number of times, and recently, now that the gossip connecting him with Dorothy Hallet, who’s an old friend of mine, had risen well above whispering, I’d been getting curious about him. He’d been around the Hallets’ house a good deal for the last six or seven years—a charming, quiet man with an unexpected sense of humor and nothing Don Juanish about him that I’d ever seen. I couldn’t remember that there’d been a lot of talk about the two of them until Theodore Hallet, Dorothy’s husband, had got the odd if brilliant idea, that it would be a good thing if Enoch B. Stubblefield was President of the United States, with Theodore Hallet, naturally, the Zeus from whose forehead he should spring full-grown to Presidential timber. I believe Theodore called it “spearheading a popular movement.”

What was odd about it was that Theodore was usually thought of, in the jargon of my two sons, as a drip. For a man who’d started with the cards heavily stacked in his favor, he’d done precisely nothing to date. With all the family background and money in the world, he spent his time, busy as a beaver, rushing to his New York office and rushing back to his Washington office, which consisted of one secretary he made sound like six, who clipped newspapers, and wrote to congressmen, and gave Theodore the illusion that he was the very center of the maelstrom of politics and diplomacy. He was a rather comic figure, on the whole, but he’d never reached actual absurdity until recently, when he’d cast himself in the role of king-maker. I’d heard he’d always wanted to be an ambassador, but this was the first time he’d done anything that might bring him that reward of services rendered. And of course a distinguished name and a considerable fortune weren’t negligible services, however absurd Theodore himself might seem to people who knew him. I was wondering about it, a little amused, as I went downstairs.

Lilac gave the bottom step another violent swish. “You keep outa here. You keep outa my kitchen.”

It was long habit to obey, but even if it hadn’t been I would have stopped where I was. When anything’s wrong in the kitchen it’s always mine, not hers. But she could have it. I started upstairs again. The phone jingling cut off whatever else she was planning to say behind my back. She took it up, said “Hobart 6363,” and put it down against her checked apron.

“It’s for you. It’s that girl. She been callin’ up, an’ she been comin’ here. They somethin’ on her mind. You go talk to her.”

“What girl, Lilac?” I asked, which was a mistake.

“How I know what girl? She don’ say and I don’ ask. I don’ want no more trouble than I already got. That’s your apartment. An’ you watch you’self, hear?”

Whether or not it was my department, there was some truth in what she said, I had to admit. From the beginning of my presumably friendly association with Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. Army (Retired), and not very friendly association with his Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, also Retired, there certainly has been a good deal of trouble, of one kind or another, in and around the house. Living below me on the other side of P Street, in the yellow brick house that a Primrose built and successive Primroses have lived in for some hundred and fifty years, the Colonel and his Sergeant carry on a subterranean private investigation business, for the Treasury sometimes, sometimes for the State Department, and for various other Government agencies, all very hush-hush, a sort of private pre-OSS cloak-and-dagger enterprise. But they’re professionals, of course, and while it’s true that I’ve been mixed up in one or two murder cases, through no fault of my own, under their double-headed aegis, it never occurred to me as I went upstairs that any one could possibly think I could be a partner in the firm . . . except of course Sergeant Buck, who thinks I’d like to be one via the marriage trail with his Colonel, which is neither here nor there. However, some one else did seem to think so. That’s why I said “My what?” as abruptly as I did. I’d already picked up the phone on my desk in the living room and said “Hello.”

“Mrs. Latham? This is Susan Kent—Mrs. William Kent. What . . . what time are your office hours?”

“My what?”

“Your office hours, Mrs. Latham.”

That’s what I thought I’d heard. It may have been the heady atmosphere downstairs affecting me, or maybe I was just stupid. The name Susan Kent meant nothing to me, and the idea of office hours was greatly reminiscent of friends who think it’s funny to call up in the course of a late, and usually cheerful, evening to tell me a corpse has been found in the guest-room closet. I’ve sometimes regretted ever having known Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have office hours. Who is this again, please?”

“Susan Kent.” It was a young voice, and not a very steady one. “I don’t think you remember me. We live in the Theodore Hallets’ cottage. I’ve met you at Dorothy’s a number of times.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I remember you very well.”

As a matter of fact I didn’t remember her as well as I remembered a picture of her I’d seen a couple of days before in the “This Week’s Beauty” series on the society page of the morning paper. I’d thought she was several cuts above the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel that any continued series of local beauties is bound to bring up sooner or later, but it was the note about her that had amused me. “The Bill Kents live in the attractively redecorated stable of the Theodore Hallet mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. Susan Kent’s lovely gray-blue eyes light up when she recalls how lucky they were to get it. ‘It’s been like a dream,’ she says.” I was amused because I’d just read it when Dorothy Hallet called up to find out the name of our exterminator. “It’s that damned stable, Grace. All the rats are back again.”

Susan Kent, however, wouldn’t be asking about my office hours for information about rat control.

“Could . . . I see you?” she said then. Her voice was more than unsteady. “It’s a friend of mine. She’s in a . . . a bad spot, and she really needs some advice.”

Well, of course I love to give people advice. It’s a weakness I share with humanity, and with about as high an average of takes. On the other hand I was busy. I hesitated.

“It won’t take very long, Mrs. Latham. I could come right away.”

“All right,” I said. “Come along.”

At that I didn’t expect her to be there before I got the papers picked up—she must have been calling from the drugstore down the street. She put her raincoat on the chair in the hall and followed me along to the living room opening onto the garden at the back of the house. The rain had un-upswept her dark curly hair into a tiny fringe of tightly wound tendrils around her face and neck. She was very nervous, or even scared, and she was doing her best to conceal it under a mannered exterior that was a bad imitation of Dorothy Hallet, who’s one of those superlatively sleek and lovely women that make most other women look like the pictures you see of Tibetan camels in the moulting season after a long cold winter. Not that Susan Kent looked like that. She was too young and fresh, except that she had purple shadows now under her eyes, which really were lovely gray-blue, wide-set under her long dark lashes. They would have been lovelier if they’d been a little more tranquil.

She had on a gray linen dress that the rain hadn’t done much for, and her lipstick had suffered, as if she’d been holding her lips tight together to keep them from trembling. It was so obvious that the “friend” was a fiction that I wondered how long she was going to attempt to keep it up. She seemed too straightforward and intelligent to try to fool either of us, but she was also genuinely frightened, and frightened people do odd things. It’s odd, too, how fear makes people shrink into themselves. She looked very small and alone, sitting there on the edge of the sofa, trying to be a composed and articulate woman of the world.

“Somebody told me you could help me,” she said. “I don’t know about fees . . .”

I tried to interrupt her, but she’d rehearsed her speech and went quickly on.

“But that doesn’t matter. This friend of mine has got herself into a sort of jam, and she . . . she doesn’t know what to do. Her husband’s a chemical engineer, like mine, and he’s with the Rubber Reserve, too. That’s how I know her. And she’s done an awful thing.”

I decided the matter of my fee could wait, but I couldn’t help wondering what Colonel Primrose would have thought. I dare say Theodore Hallet’s rôle of President-maker was no more preposterous than my own, just then.

“What has she done?” I asked, when she hesitated. She was so badly upset that I tried to ask it as gently as I could.

“Well, it’s . . . it’s . . .”

The prepared speech had bogged down already. She was desperately trying to search for words to take its place. “This friend . . .”

“Why don’t we drop the friend, Susan?” I said.

She started up like a wild little thing caught suddenly in a flash of unexpected light. Her eyes got wider, and she swallowed and moistened her lips.

“You . . . you know already, Mrs. Latham? Has somebody . . .”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t know. I just don’t think people get as emotionally upset as you are about other people’s troubles.”

She seemed to shrink even more, but she abandoned her imitation of Dorothy Hallet and started being what she was—a girl in a jam and scared out of her wits.

“I am pretty upset,” she said simply. She sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa, her hands tightly clasped over her white bag, looking down at the floor. “Well, this is what’s happened, Mrs. Latham. When we first came here, we thought seventy-five hundred dollars a year was an awful lot of money.”

She stopped, and moistened her lips again. “That’s not really the way to start, because that isn’t it exactly. It’s this way. Bill’s awfully good in his field. He’s first rate. I’m not just saying it. Everybody he works with knows it. But he didn’t want to come here—he’d much rather have gone in the Navy. But somebody in the Rubber Reserve persuaded him he could do more there, and I wanted to come to Washington. He taught at a little college—Ottawan in Nebraska—and I got the head of his department to talk to him. Well, he came, and we lived in a horrible, crowded place over in Arlington. I hardly ever saw him. He found a man here he’d known who had a private laboratory, and he worked there Saturday afternoons when he could get away, and Sundays and a lot of nights. He worked all the time.”

Her hands tightened in her lap.

“I didn’t mind that. I wanted him to get something out of it, though, not just finish the war and go back to Ottawan. I thought if I met the right people, I could do something. It was just a matter of somebody important knowing about him. So I . . . well, I did meet some people. They were awfully interested in what I told them. I . . . I guess I told them too much. They wanted to see what he was doing, but I explained how he was set on going back to Ottawan. They only laughed at that. They said he could really go places in industry. There were big jobs waiting for men like him. That was all I wanted. Anyway . . .”

She was finding it really hard going, but she kept on, her voice tight and not steady.

“Bill used to bring his work papers home at night and put them in the wastebasket for me to take down to the incinerator in the building we lived in. I . . . I showed them to . . . to these people. They were terribly excited. They . . . well, they wanted to . . . to subsidize him. And I thought, if we had more money, we could live nearer the lab, and . . .”

Her voice trailed off. I looked at her, a little puzzled.

“You mean, you took money from them?”

She nodded. “I know it sounds awful, now, but it sounded all right the way these people put it. They were . . . terribly nice.”

“And that’s when you moved to the Hallets’ stable?”

If I’d thought about it at all I’d have assumed that the Bill Kents had an independent income, knowing as I did that even with the OPA the Hallets’ stable rented for a ridiculous amount. I was thinking of that when I added, “But didn’t your husband notice you were——”

I didn’t have to finish. She shook her head quickly.

“He wouldn’t notice such things. He’s too . . . too unworldly. Anyway, he . . . he trusts me about everything. It wouldn’t ever occur to him to check on anything.”

I said, “Oh.”

“And anyway, I didn’t mean to get involved in any . . . any trouble. All I thought was, he’d get used to nice things and interesting people, and he wouldn’t want to go back to Ottawan. I hate it there. But now I’m . . . I’m beginning to see what I’ve done. A lot of the experiments weren’t his. They were from the research pool established for the war. He was checking for the Government; it was part of his job. They’re all trying to find a new polymer to make synthetic rubber better and cheaper. He’s been working on it ever since he started at Ottawan. Not doing it for himself, but for the war, and the Government now the war’s over. I knew what he was doing, but I thought if he’d found it, it would be his own. The new polymer, I mean.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea what a polymer was, but she seemed to know, and I gathered that if it was something that would make synthetic rubber better and cheaper, and if you found it, you would really have found something. It was also plain that Bill Kent of course had no idea at all of what his little lady had been doing. I could see that, depending on what kind of people “these people” were, she had plenty of reason for being frightened, and perhaps on more grounds than one. In fact, as I sat there listening to her, I was a little scared myself.

“But now,” she said. Her eyes strained wide open. “There’s two things. First, all these Senate investigations you read about. What if they found out that Bill had been taking money from a private source while he’s in a . . . a confidential place? Of course, he didn’t—but it would look that way, wouldn’t it?”

She looked up at me for really the first time. “It would . . . ruin him, professionally, wouldn’t it? They’d . . . they’d make hash of him, wouldn’t they? The papers, and everything?”

“I’m afraid they could,” I said.

She was making a desperate effort to hold on to herself, and for a moment she couldn’t go on. Then she said, “And . . . these people I’m talking about. I . . . I’m afraid they think he’s got more than he really has got. I just found out, just the other day, that they’re trying to get a copolymer plant from the War Assets Administration—that’s a plant where they make synthetic rubber. Some of Bill’s friends were laughing about it—except one of them who knows these . . . these people’s chief technical man. He said if that man thought he had something, he probably had it, to let them get themselves out on such . . . such a high-priced limb.”

She stopped again, and then she said, “And I don’t know what to do!”

If it hadn’t been so genuinely moving, it would have sounded like a small pathetic wail, at the end of such a story.

There was a clear and definite answer to it, however, and the only one that made any sense, so far as I could see. “I can tell you what to do, Susan,” I said.

She started up, hopefully, and shrank into herself again, suspecting a catch in it before I even said what it was.

“What you do is go home, and get hold of your husband, and tell him the whole truth, right away.”

She was already shaking her head. “Oh, no.” It was hardly audible, no more than a terrified breath she was exhaling. “You don’t know him. He’d never forgive me. I wouldn’t care if he’d kill me, but he wouldn’t. He’d just look at me, and pack his things and leave. He’d never come back. He’d hate me. I can’t tell him—I’ve tried to do that, but I can’t.”

“But you’ve got to, Susan,” I said. “He’s bound to find it out sooner or later, isn’t he? It’s better if you tell him.”

“Oh, he mustn’t find it out!” she cried. “That’s the point. That’s what I’ve got to keep from ever happening, ever.”

“But you can’t possibly. You can’t believe that ‘these people’ are . . . philanthropists—that they’ll sit quietly and let you take them for . . . whatever it’s been. They’ve put cash on the line. You’ve sold them something. Your husband’s responsible, financially—and I doubt if his moral responsibility would ever be considered. Nobody would believe him in the first place. You’ve done a pretty dreadful thing, and——”

She sprang to her feet in a sudden panic of apprehension. Whether it was what I’d said or whether her ears were strained to a sharper alert than mine and she’d already heard Lilac coming up the steps, I don’t know. She was standing there trembling, trying to say something, when the doorbell rang. Lilac came in from the kitchen stairway.

“It’s Mis’ Hallet, Mis’ Grace. She in her big car, today.”

Susan Kent flashed breathlessly around to me. “Oh, please, Mrs. Latham—don’t let her see me here! I’ve got to get out. I don’t want her to know anything’s wrong—that would wreck everything! Let me out before she comes!”

It was Lilac who took over, not me.

“You come downstairs with me, child,” she said. She took Susan by the arm. “Mis’ Grace’ll go to the door herself. You settle you’self and come with me.”

Sometimes I think it’s three-quarters angel instead of half that Lilac has mixed with the devil in her. I heard the two of them going down as I went to open the front door for Dorothy Hallet. I was too upset to notice Susan’s raincoat on the chair by the dining-room door.