The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Page B

night. And now, if I may talk to Mrs. Nash in private a few moments…”
    I think Captain Lamb and I were outside in the hall, propelled there with the most extraordinary finesse, before either of us had clearly realized what was about to happen.
    Not, however, before I’d caught the agonized appeal in Iris Nash’s face as she realized she was about to be left alone with him.
    Captain Lamb, outside in the hall, favored me with a brief saturnine grin.
    “Next time they want a gentleman bouncer for the White House…” he said.
    I hardly heard him, for through the open library door I could hear A. J.’s dry precise voice.
    “It’s inconceivable, Mr. Yates. Utterly inconceivable. He was a man of the strongest moral fiber. Oh, I grant you he had a weakness for liquor. That was something apart—like an abscessed limb.”
    It sounded like a convenient sophistry to me. I tried to picture A. J. admitting that a bank robber had fine moral qualities entirely extraneous from his general character as an abscessed limb.
    “He had everything to live for, sir.”
    There was genuine emotion in his voice at that moment. No one, hearing that, could have doubted his devotion to the dead man, or his repugnance at the thought, apparently advanced, that he could have taken his own life.
    My heart sank… and then it sank even lower, for the large and burly figure of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck appeared in the door. The stolid gaze he bent on me was an extraordinary blend of virtually every emotion except the tenderer ones. Disgust, I should think, was paramount, but there was a large dash of resignation and a considerable amount of grim dogged determination. I hadn’t then, and haven’t now, the faintest doubt that Sergeant Buck seriously entertained the notion that I had myself, with my own hand, murdered Randall Nash just for the purpose of having Colonel Primrose in and out of the house when I would be also in and out.
    And to prove that Sergeant Buck’s general air of suspicion was not just my own guilty conscience. Captain Lamb glanced from him to me with blue eyes sharpening warily.
    “I understood you’re a friend of the family, Mrs. …”
    “Latham,” I said.
    “Mrs. Latham?—You were here when they found the body?”
    “Yes.—With Colonel Primrose. I… found it.”
    “You actually found the body?”
    I nodded.
    “But it must have been there for a long time,” I said. “I mean, I really didn’t bring it with me.”
    Sergeant Buck cleared his throat. I don’t know how disapproval could be more effectively expressed. “They’d like to speak to you, ma’am,” he said, of course out of one corner of his mouth.
    Just then Colonel Primrose came out.
    “Oh, good morning, Mrs. Latham,” he said. He looked disgustingly fit, some way… like one of the fire horses Edith St. Martin talks about, suddenly put in to harness with the bells for a six alarm fire ringing in his ears. For a moment the awful idea occurred to me that it ought to surprise people he hadn’t done in Randall Nash himself, just to liven the place up a bit. I recognized, however, that I was slightly jaundiced, with Sergeant Buck suddenly added to far too little sleep… and my breakfast curdled, absolutely, by Lowell’s spleen.
    “Good morning,” I said. His sharp black eyes twinkled and snapped as if they’d had an overcharge of electricity. It occurred to me that I’d better step warily or I’d get bogged before I knew it… for somewhere in the few steps I’d taken across the hall into the library where Randall Nash’s outline in broad white chalk still lay on the floor, I had made up my mind that even if Iris Nash, by some awful chance, was—as they say in crime books—guilty as hell, I was on her side; I would do everything in my power to help her. I don’t know whether it was Lowell’s venom, or Belden Doyle’s melodrama, Captain Lamb’s steely eye, or Sergeant Buck’s fishy one, or just Colonel Primrose’s maddening rosy