Torrant stared for an instant. Then he said deliberately, “Oh, come.”
“ ‘Come’?” repeated Simeon. He sounded laboredly quiet, as though he had just gotten over a flash of anger. He stared back at Torrant out of tired eyes. “It sounds melodramatic, I suppose. But Gerald nearly died from poisoning a night or two before they left for Chauncy.”
CHAPTER 7
UNHURRIEDLY, TORRANT raised his glass and finished his drink; the gesture covered the jolt Simeon’s last words had given him. He had known the other man would start a fresh hare as a matter of course; he hadn’t thought it would be anything as bold as this.
He said bluntly, putting down his glass, “How nearly—and what kind of poisoning?”
“Very nearly, I gather, though you could get an official opinion on that from the house doctor at the Hotel Cranford in St. Louis. As to the kind of poisoning . . .” Simeon shrugged and looked down at the table. “The—evidence had been cleaned up very neatly by Mrs. Mallow by the time the doctor arrived.”
“Not unnaturally, in a hotel room.”
“No?” Simeon smiled faintly. “Perhaps I ought to explain that Louise Mallow was the only child of a wealthy Chicago family, Mr. Torrant, and had been brought up to expect a great deal of service. It would never have occurred to her, normally, to scrub a hotel rug simply in order to save some chambermaid a rather unpleasant job. However, to go on . . .
He himself, Simeon said, had been staying at the Hotel Cranford for a few days before departing for Florida. He had seen the Mallows in the late afternoon of December fifteenth, and had learned that as Louise was complaining of a headache they were to dine alone in their suite—which they did.
He learned later, from a cluster of excited hotel employees, that Gerald Mallow had been stricken with violent cramps and nausea about an hour and a half after his dinner. Fortunately his stomach had emptied itself, but the acuteness of the attack had affected an already tricky heart. When the house doctor arrived on the scene in answer to Mrs. Mallow’s summons, Gerald was in a state of collapse on the floor in the bedroom, the sitting-room rug was damp but clean, and the dishes from which they had eaten had long since gone their way back to the hotel kitchen. There was nothing from which to make an analysis.
“I went up to the Mallows’ suite as soon as I heard, of course. Mrs. Mallow met me at the door. She said,” said Simeon, his voice wry, “ ‘Gerald would eat lobster.’ ”
Lobster. Torrant had an instant sense of release; it was like looking closely at a scorpion and finding it to be a tangle of wool instead. That must have showed on his face, because Simeon said, “Ptomaine? It’s always possible, although I’ve eaten lobster with Gerald countless times and the Cranford is known for its kitchen . . . But you see, I’m being fair, Mr. Torrant. What I’m getting at is that only a short time after the attack, Gerald left his estate away from his wife. So that it comes down to what he thought—or had reason to think.” Torrant had listened in silence. He felt, from the queer vividness of the telling and the meticulous detailing of facts, that all this was true; the inferences to be drawn from it were something else again. He said, making it a polite question, “After poisoning and a heart attack, Mallow proceeded East the next day?”
“The day after that—as planned. Whatever Gerald had planned, he did, no matter who or what stood in the way,” said Simeon slowly, and again this had the indefinable ring of truth. “I suppose he was ruthless, in a sense. I know that Miss Blair tried to talk him into postponing the trip, but—” Simeon stopped short. Torrant said pleasantly, “Oh, Miss Blair was there, was she?”
“Later in the evening, on some business connected with the closing of the office. In all the confusion,” said Simeon, shrugging, ‘‘no one had thought to call her and put it off.”
At Torrant’s elbow the waitress said briskly, “Lamb chops?” and thrust a menu at Simeon. Simeon shook his head, smiling, and asked for his check. When the girl had departed he glanced at his watch and moved out of the booth, shouldering into his raincoat. “I’m dining with Miss Blair, as it happens, and I’ll just about make it . . . Thanks for letting me join you, Mr. Torrant.”
Torrant nodded casually. He said, “Remember me to Miss Blair.”
He had coffee and, rarely for him and for the Bluebird Cafe, brandy. The snow was slowing when he went out to the Renault, but enough of it had filtered through the slotted rear covering to soak the spark plugs thoroughly. Eddie Judd had evidently not been unprepared for this kind of emergency; under the hood Torrant found a much-soiled length of cotton waste. He dried the spark plugs like a mother, and eventually the Renault started.
He drove out along Vanguard Street before he returned to Mrs. Judd’s. The willow grove, cloaked in snow, looked like a circle of hunched and secret gossips. The light from Maria Rowan’s apartment window glowed down and across Simeon s car, parked close to the bank in front of the Mallow house.
He wished as he drove back towards town that he could shake off the illogical feeling that, whatever his previous connection with Annabelle Blair, Simeon had been shocked by the sudden death of the Mallows and was quietly speculating, too.
The storm ended during the night, but for Torrant it left an aftermath that didn’t melt under the morning sun; it left him with the dark faceless figure of Louise Mallow.
Attempted murder, during that quiet dinner alone in their hotel suite? Or, for Annabelle Blair, the happiest of accidents? She had already proved
