“What do you know about the Pomeroys?” I asked when the butler had disappeared.
“What everybody knows. They’re not that mysterious. He came to Talisman City in the late Thirties and set up a factory … I suppose he had some capital to start with … he manufactured explosives. When the war came along he made a lot of money and the factory grew very big and he grew with it, got to be quite a power politically. Then the war ended, business fell off and he lost his contract with the government, or so I was told yesterday.”
“By whom?”
“By my father.” She paused thoughtfully; then she swallowed the rest of the Scotch.
“Did he … did your father seem nervous to you?”
“You know, Peter, you’re beginning to sound like that police Lieutenant … only not as pretty.”
“I’ve got a job to do,” I said, and I explained to her about the Globe, told her that she had to help me, that I needed someone who could give me the necessary facts about the people involved.
“You’re an awfully fast operator,” she said.
“That makes two of us.”
She laughed; then she sat down beside me on the couch. “I’m afraid I’ve been away too long to be much help … besides, you know what I think or rather what I don’t think about politics.”
“I have a hunch that the murder doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”
“Your guess is as good as anybody’s,” said Ellen and she helped herself to another drink.
“What about Mrs. Pomeroy?”
“What about her?”
“What’s her relationship to your family … I gather she knew the Senator before she married Pomeroy.”
“That’s right. I remember her as a child … when I was a child, that is. She’s about twenty years older than I am, though I’m sure she’d never admit that, even to her plastic surgeon.”
“Plastic surgeon?”
“Yes, darling; she’s had her face lifted … don’t you know about those things? There are two little scars near her ears, under the hair.…”
“How was I supposed to see those?”
“I noticed them; I know all about those things. But that’s beside the point. She’s been around ever since I can remember. Her family were very close to ours … used to live right down the street, as a matter of fact: she was always coming over for dinner and things like that … usually alone. Her father was an undertaker and not very agreeable. Her mother didn’t get on very well with my mother so we seldom saw much of her.…”
“Just the daughter?”
“Yes, just Camilla. She was always organizing the Young People’s Voter Association for Father, things like that. She used to be quite a bug on politics, until she married Roger. After that we saw less of her … I suppose because Roger didn’t get on with Father.”
“I’ve got a theory that Mrs. Pomeroy and the Senator were having an affair.”
Ellen looked quite startled; then she laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Now that is an idea.”
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” I don’t like my intuitions to be discredited so scornfully.
“Well, I don’t know … it just seems terribly unlikely. Father was never interested in women … as far as I know. She might have had a crush on him: that often happened when he was younger. There was always some dedicated young woman around the house doing odd jobs, but I’m sure nothing ever happened. Mother always kept a sharp eye on Father.”
“I still think something might have happened.”
“Well, what if it did?”
“It would give Pomeroy another reason for wanting to kill your father.”
“So, after fifteen years, he decides to be a jealous husband because of something which happened before he met Camilla? Not very likely, darling. Besides, he had just about all the motive he needed without dragging that sheep in. You know, Peter, I think you’re probably very romantic at heart: you think love is at the root of everything.”
“Go shove it,” I said lapsing into military talk; I was very put out with her … also with myself: the Pomeroy business didn’t make sense … it almost did but not quite. There was something a little off. The motive was there but the situation itself was all wrong. You just don’t kill a man in his own house with your own weapon right after having a perfectly open quarrel with him over business matters. I was sure that Mrs. Pomeroy was involved but, for the life of me, I couldn’t fit her in. I began, rather reluctantly, to consider other possibilities, other suspects.
“But I love it,” said Ellen cozily. “It shows the side of you I like the best.” And we tussled for a few minutes; then, recalling that in the next few hours I would have to have some sort of a story for the Globe, I disentangled myself and left Ellen to her Scotch.
As I walked down the hall, the door to Langdon’s room opened and he motioned for me to come in. The presence of the plain-clothes man at the other end of the hall, guarding the study, made me nervous: he could see everything that happened on the second floor.
Langdon’s room was like my own, only larger, American maple and chintz, that sort of thing. On the desk his typewriter was open and crumpled pieces of paper littered the floor about it: he had been composing, not too successfully.
“Say, I hope I didn’t bother you … my being in Miss Rhodes’ room like that.” He was very nervous.
“Bother me?” I laughed. “Why should it?”
“Well, your being engaged to her and all that.”
“I’m no more engaged to her than you are. She’s engaged to the whole male sex.”
“Oh.” He looked surprised; I decided he wasn’t a very worldly young man … I knew the type: serious, earnest, idealistic … the sort who have wonderful memories and who pass college examinations with great ease.
“No, I should probably apologize to you for barging in like that just as you were getting along so nicely.” He blushed. I pointed to the typewriter, to change the subject. “Are you writing your piece?”
“Well, yes and no,” he sighed. “I called New York this morning and asked them what they wanted me to do now: they sounded awfully indefinite, I mean, we never write about murders … that’s hardly our line. On the other hand, there is probably some political significance in this, maybe a great deal, and it would be quite a break for me if I could do something about it … a Huey Long kind of thing.”
“I used to work on the Globe,” I said helpfully. “But of course we handled crime differently. You’re right, I suspect, about the political angle but it won’t be easy to track down.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Langdon with sudden vehemence. “He was a dangerous man.”
“How long did it take you to figure that out?”
“One day, exactly. I’ve been here four days now … in that time I’ve found out things which, if you’d told me about them, I would never have believed possible, in this country anyway.”
“Such as?”
“Did you see the names of some of those people supporting Rhodes for President? Every fascist in the country was on that list … every witch hunter in public life was backing his candidacy.”
“You must have suspected all that when you came down here.”
Langdon sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette; I sat opposite him, at his desk. “Well, naturally, we were on to him in a way. He was a buffoon … you know what I mean: an old-fashioned, narrow-minded demagogue always talking about Americanism.… Now our specialty is doing satirical articles about reactionaries … the sort of piece that isn’t openly hostile, that allows the subject to hang himself in his own words. You have no idea how easy it is. Those people are usually well-protected, by secretaries … even by the press … people who straighten their grammar and their facts, make them seem more rational than they really are. So what I do is take down a verbatim account of some great man’s conversation, selected of course, and publish it with all the bad grammar and so on. I thought that’s what I’d be doing here but I soon found that Rhodes wasn’t really a windbag, after all. He was a clever man and hard to trap.”