The Innocent Flower Page 3

  “Yeah, but they’ve got no servants,” Robin was saying. “Nobody here to visit. No callers, no company all day. So it’s an inside job, if it was a job. That’s all I say.”

  Pring said, “That maybe. Somebody could get in. Place was wide open.”

  “Yeah, but, not empty. People around.”

  “If it was in the wine …” They heard Duff and his friends and were still.

  Duff asked permission for the boys’ errand, and it was granted. Pring, however, slipped his hands down over the young bodies and the pockets and gave them hard looks before he let them go. Paul looked back insolently. Alfie, however, submitted with a big grin of pure pleasure.

  Then the boys were gone into the summer twilight.

  Duff gathered around. The man with the camera slouched away. “This wine,” Duff said, “where did it, come from?”

  “It was her own wine,” Pring said. “Seems she bought it herself. The girl says she always had some around where she was, thought it was good for her. She bought a bottle yesterday, downtown, here. Had one glass earlier, and it was all right then.”

  “It stood open?”

  “Yeah, in the pantry. But there’s another bottle of the same brand. Some gone out of that, too. Don’t know where it came from. Maybe Mrs. Moriarity bought it. We gotta go up to the hospital and see her.”

  “Could you possibly not bother her tonight? Little Taffy is quite sick, you know.”

  “Well …”

  “I’m sure you can see her whenever you like, tomorrow. Then it was known that this wine belonged to Miss Brown? That she, alone, was likely to drink it? Is that the situation?”

  “I guess it was, yeah.”

  “Then if somebody put something in the wine bottle or bottles, he was definitely after Miss Brown?”

  “Sure. Or it could be. The girl says none of the rest of them liked it. Dubonnet. Tastes like medicine to her, she says.”

  “That makes it harder, doesn’t it?”

  Robin stopped chewing gum a moment and Pring said, “Huh?”

  “I mean that it could have been done any time, all day. Or at least any time after the bottle was opened. Can’t limit the opportunity.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Pring said. “It just so happens maybe we can. Also, we got fingerprints.”

  “Do you know whose?”

  “Not yet. We’ll have it by morning. We’ve got the bottles. We’ve got prints off of everybody … except Mrs. Moriarity.”

  Duff said, “Where were they all when it happened?”

  “Having supper in the dining room. The kids and Miss Brown. Seems Mrs. Moriarity was upstairs with the sick little girl, and the doctor was up there with them. Says he came down, and Miss Brown, she got up from the table and spoke to him out here in the hall. Back there. By the stairs. Right by that radiator. Now, lessee … one of the boys was still out in the yard doing some work he wanted to finish. The other boy and the little one and the two girls—Well, wait. The big girl was in the kitchen a lot. She got supper, see. Anyhow, Miss Brown was drinking wine with her supper, and one of the bottles was right there on the table, by her place. She took her glass with her into the hall, and it was all right then, because she offered some to the doc, and he took a sip. She comes back to the table, and he goes to the front door, see, gets his hat, he’s leaving. She pours herself a full glass and gulps it and screams. Doc comes running back. In five minutes it’s all over. I don’t know what’ll do that, but it did it.”

  “It was in the wine,” Robin said. “Hadda be.”

  “Did you find any poison container?

  “Did we!”

  “The place is full of poison,” Robin said glumly. “Lousy with it. Cyanide, arsenic, nicotine, bichloride of mercury—what’ll ya have?”

  “Mrs. Moriarity has quite a garden,” Pring explained. “She keeps all this stuff for killing bugs. Under lock and key in the stable out back.”

  “Yeah, but the key ain’t under lock and key,” said Robin, heaving at his own wit.

  “That’s so,” Pring said. “She locks it up so nobody can get it by accident, but the key’s hanging right there. A little bit high up, that’s all.”

  Duff felt the feather edge of danger. A shiver whistled along his nerves.

  “Has it been disturbed?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Fingerprints. Tell you tomorrow.”

  “Good,” he said. “When did Miss Brown arrive?”

  “Friday night. She’d come and stay a week or ten days. Oh, two, three times a year. She had money, didn’t have to work for a living. They say she traveled around a lot, winters in California. She’s got a little apartment in New York, but she isn’t … wasn’t often there. She showed up Friday, late in the afternoon, and was going to stay till a week from today. Say, come and take a look at her stuff. She’s gone, you know. Wagon came while you were upstairs. Let’s go up, whadda ya say?”

  “You’re being darned co-operative,” Duff said. “I hope I can do as much for you.”

  Pring grinned. His leathery face opened reluctantly, as if it hadn’t grinned often. “You and us both,” he said, “we hope. That wine bottle thing. I’m going home and write it down and kick it around awhile.”

  They took Duff up to a room at the back of the house, where Brownie had been accustomed to stay. It was a littlé bare, as if the Moriaritys had been too much in need of all the furniture they could find to spare much for the guest room. But it was a pleasant small bedroom, and Brownie’s things were spread on the narrow single bed.

  Her clothes. Sedate. Dark silks and dull prints. More health shoes. Her handkerchiefs and her toilet water. Her handbag. Checkbook, ration book, safe-deposit key, coin purse, hairpins, playing cards.

  “She had this,” Pring said. It was a snapshot, a very old one. The corners were smeared with something shiny. It was the picture of a baby sitting on a white cloth on the grass. There were flowers in a round bed behind it. The baby had a sad little face. It was swathed in clothing, although the time appeared to be summer. A bonnet with ruffles and ribbons, a beruffled coat of some sort, a white boot with tassels, embroidered skirts. The child was submerged. Babies are not dressed so any more. Even Duff knew as much. This picture was years old. And so, by now, was the baby.

  “Doc Christenson says it’s a picture of him,” Pring told Duff. “Can you imagine? Said this Miss Brown got hold of it once and likes to kid him about it.”

  “She carried it with her?” Duff said curiously.

  “Well, here it is.” Pring threw it down with a shrug. Duff studied it thoughtfully. There was no way, he reminded himself, of telling by that Victorian infant’s getup whether the child in the picture was a boy or a girl. The hair was hidden by the bonnet. Besides, boys were as likely as girls to have long curls in those days. Duff sighed.

  “And then there’s this,” Pring said. He put a newspaper clipping in Duff’s hand. It was a headline only, the heading of a small item, type not very large, one column wide. It read: “Actor Burned in Car. Woman Companion Runs Away.” That was all. No date. The paper was fairly white and crisp. Duff turned it over. On the other side was part of an advertisement for a preparation that concealed gray hair. It was the part that contained the address of the maker.

  There was a clatter on the stairs.

  “Ah,” said Duff, “our hamburgers. Would you care to join us?”

  “No,” Pring said, “no, thanks. Uh … we’re going to get out of here. We’ll have to seal the dining room. If you wanna get in there tomorrow …”

  “Of course,” Duff said. “Thanks very much.” He shook their hands.

  “I won’t leave anyone inside. But the man on the beat will keep an eye out. Just don’t sample the food, eh?”

  “We won’t,” Duff promised. “By the way, what do you know about Mr. Moriarity?”

  “Oh,” Pring, who had been poised to go, seemed to let his weight fall where he was. “Well, I dunno. He hasn’t been living here.”


  “Not for years,” Robin said.

  “I just wondered. I don’t see any head nor tail to this thing yet, do you?” Duff was airy. “As a matter of fact, perhaps it was an accident.”

  They pulled their eyes from his face. “Well, we wish you luck on it,” said Pring gloomily.

  “Be seeing you.”

  “We’ll lock up downstairs.”

  “Good night,” said Duff.

  CHAPTER 3

  The kids hadn’t opened the big paper bags yet when Duff came in. He felt that he had just missed hearing something said, and that they had meant him to miss it. They were not quite open. There was a little rustle of reserve in their greetings.

  This didn’t include Davey, who had gone to sleep. He looked, Duff thought, exactly like the Dormouse.

  Duff opened the paper bags and dealt out one round of hamburgers. Mitch took charge of Davey’s and began to pinch and poke at him. He woke up, presently, and seemed to pass without any transition at all from a state of sound sleep to a position well within the circumference of his hamburger.

  Duff looked around and announced that he needed to ask all kinds of questions. He wondered if it would ruin their appetites to start now.

  They said they didn’t think so.

  “What do we know, though?” Dinny wondered.

  “Don’t worry,” said Alfie enthusiastically. “Whatever it is, he’ll get it out of us.”

  “First, tell me about Brownie,” Duff began. “What kind of person was she?” He relaxed on one of the window seats and bit into his hamburger, appearing, he hoped, in a mood for friendly gossip.

  Dinny was curled up on the bed, leaning against the headboard. She wore a short dress of cotton plaid with big pockets in the skirt. Her saddle shoes had once been white. Her ankle socks were white and clean and pushed down in rumpled cuffs. She had fat, unshaped childish legs. Her hair was cut short and curled in a pale halo around her face, rippling at the temples like white silk. Her skin was not as miraculously clear as Taffy’s, but it had the thin, fine texture that shows the blood through. Her air was grave and dignified. Every once in a while she licked her fingers as she ate, but she did it as a lady might. Her cheeks were too round and her mouth was lost, but her nose was straight and would someday, given a chance, be lovely.

  “Oh, Brownie was all right,” she said carelessly.

  “She went to the same school as my mother,” Paul explained.

  “Practically in the family,” Alfie said. “She was a spinster.”

  Duff looked at the girl and her two big brothers. Alfie was bigger than she, like a larger edition. So grownup they were, the three of them, talking to him, giving him obvious and superficial facts. And all the time thinking … what?

  Duff realized that he wasn’t going to cut under their façade without effort, or get behind the picture they chose to give him of themselves. Young people, well-behaved, intelligent, interested, good bright children. He looked at their faces. Under a certain blandness, the intelligence was there and, he surmised, a whole world of keenly observed data, judged, weighed, synthesized by that intelligence and the fresh and unprejudiced approach of youth. Ah, yes, he thought, the grownups preach the sweetness and light, the rules and the proverbs, the shalt-nots and the platitudes … preach them to their young, although they themselves have never quite managed to live by them. And the children give back tit for tat Amiably, they reflect the pattern. They pretend to be taken in. But they aren’t, really. They reserve the right to draw other conclusions which they keep to themselves, and who can blame them?

  He felt himself to be searching for a door into their secret world. He stalked, to change the metaphor, warily the prey of their confidence. And their real opinions.

  “Did you like Brownie?” he said. “Was she pleasant to have around?”

  Dinny shrugged.

  “She brang us presents,” volunteered small David.

  “She did if you didn’t ask for them,” Dinny said a trifle scornfully. Duff raised his brows. He had a way of looking politely as if he didn’t believe what he heard. It compelled Dinny to rush into explanation. “Once Mitch asked her what she’d brought, and she said ‘nothing’ and wouldn’t give them to us. She was funny. She didn’t want to be … oh … uh … I don’t know …”

  “She wanted to make out like it was a surprise,” Alfie said.

  “No,” Dinny said “that’s not what I mean.” She leaned back and gave up, as if she felt that no one would ever know what she had meant.

  “She wanted to keep the initiative?” Duff suggested lightly.

  “That’s right!” said Dinny, sitting up again and looking surprised. “She wanted to be the one to give out stuff. And get a kick out of it. But if we just assumed she was always going to bring us presents, then she had to do it. She liked to make us wait and wonder. Sometimes she’d treat us and sometimes she wouldn’t.” Dinny’s dark eyes looked at Duff straight, and she paid him the compliment of not talking down. “She was whimsical about it,” Dinny said, “because then it made her feel powerful.”

  “I see,” Duff saw. He also felt a little shock.

  “She was darned nasty to Taffy once,” Paul said in his man’s voice, gruff and truculent.

  “What …?” said Dinny.

  “Oh, yeah, that picture thing,” said Alfie. “Yeah …”

  “Taffy’s always drawing pictures,” Paul explained. Speech came from him reluctantly. He was not as glib as the twins. “She just likes to. Well, she drew a picture of Brownie, the last time Brownie was here and wrote on it something about a witch.” Paul was in a straight chair which he tipped back, maintaining his balance with the muscles of his strong young thighs. He had on a pair of cotton trousers and a blue shirt, open at the neck. His substantial feet were in sneakers, his tanned ankles bare. He was a good-looking boy, especially if a smile lit his face. In repose, it fell into rather a glum expression, which glumness was apparent now.

  “Oh, I remember!” Mitch bounced. “‘Brownie is a witch.’ That’s what she wrote.”

  “Boy, was she mad!” Alfie said in his joyful bumbling way. Sometimes he just missed a stutter. “She hit the ceiling, didn’t she?”

  “Taffy didn’t mean anything,” Dinny said.

  Paul looked at Duff’s eyebrow and away. “Taffy’s funny,” he said. “She gets a streak on something. Asks questions and talks about it all the time until she knows everything she can find out about it. And then she’ll start asking about something else. Well, she was on witches. It was around Halloween, and she got started on witches. You see, my mother thought she’d scare herself too much. Anyhow, Mom had been trying to tell her all about good witches.”

  “Like in Oz,” cried Mitch. Mitch’s contributions were all little cries, yet she was curiously self-contained.

  “That’s right,” Dinny said. “Of course, Taffy didn’t mean to insult anybody.” Her face looked grieved.

  “Old Brownie didn’t even bother to try and find out what Taffy was thinking about,” said Paul angrily. “She just tore up the picture and made Taffy cry.”

  “Yeah, that was mean,” Alfie agreed. Alfie’s fat feet in sloppy moccasins massaged each other.

  Duff thought to himself that the Moriaritys stood together. Injure one and you injured them all.

  He said carefully to Paul, “Brownie wasn’t the type to put herself in Taffy’s place, then?”

  “Or anybody’s,” said Paul bluntly.

  “No sympathetic imagination?”

  “No,” said Paul, responding with sudden maturity. “She just blundered along, hit or miss, being herself.”

  “I see,” said Duff gratefully. Paul, embarrassed, shifted in his chair and threw his arm over the back of it.

  “What’s Taffy interested in now?” Duff asked them.

  “What …?” said Alfie, turning to his brother as if Paul would be sure to know.

  But Dinny answered. “Nurses. All about nursing. That’s because Aunt Eve goes up to the hospit
al to be a nurse’s aid. I mean, that’s how Taffy got started.”

  “Gee, Taffy’s going to have a wonderful time in the hospital,” Paul said, looking boyish and happy.

  “I’d like to get the whole sequence of the last few days,” said Duff. “Dinny, you start. Tell me when she came, when you first heard she was coming, what happened, and so forth.”

  “Mother got a letter a week ago,” Dinny said promptly. “Brownie was in California all spring. The letter came from some place on her way east. It said she was coming Friday, and she did, late in the afternoon, and we had supper, and she and Mother got up to date on the news. We didn’t do anything after supper, did we?”

  The boys shook their heads.

  “Well, Saturday morning she hung around watching Mother and me do the chores. And we had lunch. After lunch I went to the beach, so I don’t—”

  “For one thing, she went downtown with Mother, ” Alfie said.

  “That’s right, because she got the wine.”

  “This wine,” murmured Duff. “She always had a bottle of that particular brand, I understand.”

  “Oh, yes. Mother forgot, this time. We usually manage to have some all ready for her.”

  “Nobody else drinks it?”

  “Well, not usually. Sometimes. Nobody in this family. But she doesn’t offer it. She doesn’t look upon it as a social drink,” said Dinny. “She looks upon it as a tonic.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s the way she talked,” said Dinny, “but I think …”

  “Yes?”

  “I think she liked to get a little bit high. I don’t know whether she knew it or not.”

  “She sure did guzzle it, didn’t she?” Alfie said. Alfie was sitting on the window seat, leaning forward, eager and alert. His two and a half hamburgers had long since vanished. His white hair stood up like a ruff at the back. For all his air of being comical and puppyish and impulsively clumsy, Duff felt that those dark eyes in that round pink face belonged to some wiser and older soul, and that they watched, missing nothing.

  “Shaddup, Alf. One at a time,” said Paul, the orderly mind.