The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Page A

there be to lunch, madame?”
    “Prepare for six, please.”
    He bowed and went out.
    “Why don’t you sack that man?” I demanded.
    “I’m afraid to.”
    “Then I’ll do it for you. He gives me the creeps.”
    She shook her head.
    It happens to be absolutely infuriating to me the way servants and head waiters and hairdressers can and do intimidate women. I couldn’t say definitely what it was about Wilkins that affected me as a snake affects a horse on a country bridle path. It may have been his too steady eyes, his moon-like face and white fat hands, or his silent padded feet. It was something, certainly. I may of course have only fancied there was a veiled insolence in his manner when he spoke to Iris; I can fancy astonishingly unreal things. However, the mere fact that Iris was afraid to fire him was alarming, if all my feeling about him was the result of too little sleep.
    Iris’s cold fingers tightened on my arm.
    “Don’t leave me yet,” she whispered.
    Wilkins opened the door. Captain Lamb came in—tall, lanky, hard blue eyes, long upper lip. Behind him was Belden Doyle, New York criminal lawyer who gets off all his women clients and three-fourths of his men, who prides himself—or so they say—on never having taken a customer he believed was innocent, or cheated the gallows of one he finally believed was guilty. The point, I suppose, being that if he could convince himself he was wrong the jury would be a pushover. I’d known all this, vaguely, but I hadn’t really realized its significance until Belden Doyle came forward silently past Captain Lamb, took Iris’s chin in his hand and looked down penetratingly into her stricken face for a long full moment. It struck me with a horrible sudden clearness that if Colonel Primrose had suggested this man of all possible people, then Iris Nash’s position was just about as dangerous as it was possible for it to be. I think she must have realized it too, just at that moment; she shrank away from him, less in control of herself than I’d yet seen her.
    Doyle turned to Captain Lamb—grave, easy and competent, with his high bulging forehead and huge nose, and the almost hypnotic eyes and long mobile mouth that suggested a supreme actor on a desperate stage.
    “My client understands, Captain, that her husband was poisoned with cyanide of potassium,” he said.
    His voice was mobile too, and even in a sentence like that, spoken with no judge or jury present, evenly and directly and without a sideways glance at anyone, it ranged a whole gamut of theatrical effects, rich and compelling. I couldn’t help but see that stagey as it was, it was awfully, awfully good—for its purpose. But the clear sharp realization of what its purpose was sent a thrill of horror down my spine… for nobody could fail to come to the obvious conclusion, that an innocent person had no need of so superb a defender.
    Iris Nash gasped. I saw her hands grip the arm of the cherry damask wing chair as she steadied herself against it. Captain Lamb could not have seen her, for Belden Doyle was standing just in front of her and very close, quite obviously for the purpose of keeping Captain Lamb from seeing her. And that was a mistake, for unless Iris is a far better actress than I should have thought—or unless Captain Lamb had eyes that could see further into human duplicity than mine—I could have sworn it would have been as obvious to him as to me that that information came to her as a dreadful surprise.
    “It has not as yet been determined—as I understand it— whether that poison was administered by his own hand… or even that it was administered in this house.”
    Doyle moved away, towards Captain Lamb.
    “My client understands of course, Captain, that she will have an opportunity of talking with the District Attorney at the earliest possible moment… as she is of course laboring under the greatest possible anguish in her desire to know what led up to the circumstances of last