Weak Poison
"One of your party, eh?" said H. M. meditatively. Been sending her poisoned chocolates. Well. Did she eat 'em?”
I'm getting ahead of the story. The poisoned-chocolates business occurred only yesterday morning, and it's nearly a month ago that Tait arrived in New York. I never expected to come to England, you see; I never thought I should meet the party again once I had gone back to Washington; and it wasn't as though I had made particular friends with any of them. But it was that damned atmosphere. It stuck in your mind. I don't want to make the thing sound too subtle,
H. M. grunted.
"Bah. Subtlety," he said, "is only statin' a self-evident truth in language nobody can understand. And there's nothing subtle about trying to poison somebody. Have another drink. Then how did you come to be tied up with these people later?"
That, Bennett tried to explain, was the curious thing: the metamorphosis of John Bohun. No sooner had the errand boy returned to Washington, than he was despatched with Washington's platitudinous goodwill letter to Westminster in the role of dummy diplomat. A dummy diplomat had no job: all he must do was say the wise, right, and sensible thing on all occasions. He sailed on the Berengaria, on a bitter gray day when the skyline was smoky purple etched out with pin pricks of light, and the wind cut raw across a choppy harbor. He had noticed a more than usual chatter, a more than usual quickened excitement aboard. They were just out of sight of the handkerchiefs at the end of the pier when he came face to face with Marcia Tait. She wore smoked glasses, which meant that she was incognito, and was swathed in unwieldy furs, smiling. On one side of her walked Bohun, and on the other side Canifest. Canifest was already looking pale with the motion. He went to his cabin at lunch, and did not return. Rainger and Emery seldom left their own cabins until the liner was a day out of Southampton.
"Which," said Bennett, "threw Marcia and Bohun and myself together for the crossing. And — this is what puzzled me — Bohun was a different man. It was as though he had felt uneasy and a stranger in New York. He could talk, and he seemed to develop a sense of humor. The tension was gone while only the three of us were together. I suddenly discovered that Bohun had wild romantic ideas about this play he was going to produce. So far as I can gather, both he and his brother are steeped in seventeenth-century lore. And with reason. This house of theirs, the White Priory, was owned by the Bohuns in the time of Charles the Second. The contemporary Bohun kept `merry house'; he was a friend of the King, and, when Charles came down to Epsom for the racing, he stayed at the White Priory."
H. M., who was filling the glasses again, scowled.
"Funny old place, Epsom. `Merry house.' H'm. Ain't that where Nell Gwynn and Buckhurst lived before Charles picked her up? And this White Priory — hold on! I'm thinkin' Look here, it seems to me I remember reading about some house there; a pavilion or the like, attached to the White Priory, that they won't let tourists see… "
"That's it. They call it The Queen's Mirror. Bohun says that the mania for importing marble into England and building imitation temples on ornamental sheets of water is traceable to the Bohuns who built the place. That's not true, by the way. The craze didn't start until a hundred years later, in eighteenth-century fashions. But Bohun violently believes it. Anyhow, it seems that ancestor George Bohun built it about 1664 for the convenience and splendor of Charles's all-alluring charmer Lady Castlemaine. It's a marble pavilion that contains only two or three rooms, and stands in the middle of a small artificial lake; hence the name. One of the scenes of Maurice's play is laid there.
"John described it to me one afternoon when he and Marcia and I were sitting on deck. He's a secretive sort, and-I should think — nervous. He always says, 'Maurice has the intelligence of the family; I haven't; I wish I could write a play like that,' and then smiling casually while he looks at people (especially Marcia) as though he were waiting for them to deny it. But he's got a flair for description, and an artist's eye for effect. I should think he'd made a damned good director. When he got through talking, you could see the path going down through lines of evergreens, and the clear water with the cypresses round its edge, and the ghostly pavilion where Lady Castlemaine's silk cushions still keep their color. Then he said, as though he were talking to himself, `By God, I'd like to play the part of Charles myself. I could and stopped. Marcia looked up at him in a queer way; she said, quietly, that they had got Jervis Willard, hadn't they? He whirled round and looked at her. I didn't like that expression, I didn't like the soft way she half-closed her eyes as though she were thinking of something from which he was excluded; so I asked La Tait whether she had ever seen Queen's Mirror. And Bohun smiled. He put his hand over hers and said, `Oh, yes. That was where we first met.'
"I tell you, it didn't mean anything, but for a second it gave me a creepy feeling. We were alone on the deck, with the sea booming past and the deck-chairs sliding: and those two faces, either of which might have come out of canvas in an old gallery, looking at me in the twilight. But the next minute, along came Tim Emery, looking a little green but determined. He tried to be boisterous, and couldn't quite manage it. But it closed Bohun's mouth. Bohun detested both Emery and Rainger, and didn't trouble to conceal it."
"About," observed H. M. in a thoughtful rumble, "about Messrs. Rainger and Emery. Do you mean to tell me that a highly paid director, well known in his own name, threw up a good job to chase across the ocean with this wench?"
"Oh, no. He's on leave after two years without a vacation. But he chose to spend his vacation trying to persuade Marcia not to be a fool." Bennett hesitated, remembering the fat expressionless face with its cropped black hair, and the shrewd eyes that missed no detail. "Maybe," Bennett said, "somebody knows what that man thinks about. I don't. He's intelligent, he seems to guess your thoughts, and he's as cynical as a taxi-driver."
"But interested in Tait?"
"Well possibly."
"Signs of manifest doubt. You're very innocent, son," said H. M., extinguishing the stump of his cigar. "H'm. And this fella Emery?"
"Emery's more willing to talk than the others. Personally, I like him. He buttonholes me continually, because the others like to sit on him and he frankly detests 'em. He's the hopping, arm-flinging sort who can't sit still; and he's worried, because his job depends on getting Tait back to the studio. That's why he's there."
"Attitude?"
"He seems to have a wife back in California whose opinions he brings into every conversation. No. Interested in Tait as the late Mr. Frankenstein was interested: as something he'd created or helped create. Then, yesterday -
The poisoned chocolates.” As he began to speak, the heavy gong-voice of Big Ben rose and beat in vibrating notes along the Embankment. It was a reminder. Another city, with its blue dusks and deathly lights where top-hats made faces look like masks, and where Marcia Tait's welcome had been as tumultuous as in New York. The liner had docked day before yesterday. In the crush as the boat-train drew into Waterloo station, he had not had the opportunity for a leave-taking. But John Bohun had elbowed through the corridor for a parting handshake. "Look here," he said, scribbling on a card, "here's the address." Once in London atmosphere, he was himself again; brisk, efficient, humorous-eyed, because he was at home. "Marcia will go to the Savoy for one night, as a blind; she'll slip away tomorrow morning to this address. Nobody else knows it. We, shall see you, of course?"
Bennett said of course. He knew that Bohun and Marcia had had a sharp battle about that address before it was given to Rainger and Emery. "But it will go to Lord Canifest," said Marcia Tait, "of course?" As he fought his way to a taxi, Bennett looked back to see Tait leaning out of a trainwindow in the sooty dimness, smiling, receiving flowers, and shaking hands with some man who had his back turned. A voice somewhere said, "That's Jervis Willard"; and flashlights flickered. Lord Canifest, very benign, was being photographed with his daughter on his arm.
Speeding along Waterloo Bridge in a yellow December afternoon, Bennett wondered whether he would see any of them again. Ship's coteries break up immediately, and are forgotten. He went to the American Embassy, where there was solemn pomp and handshaking; then to fulfill his mission at Whitehall, amid more of the same. It was all done in a couple of hours. They put a two-seater Morris at his disposal, and he accepted two or three invitations that were his duties. Afterwards he felt lonely as the devil.
The next morning he was still more depressed, with Marcia Tait haunting his mind. In contrast to the easy comradeship of the liner, this dun-colored town was even more bleak. He was hesitating whether to go out to 16a Hamilton Place, the address on the card, and prowling aimlessly round Piccadilly Circus, when the matter was decided for him. At the mouth of Shaftesbury Avenue he heard a voice bellow his name, with friendly profanity, and he was almost run down by a big yellow car. People were staring at the car. From its massive silvered radiator-cap to the streamlined letters CINEARTS STUDIOS, INC., painted along the side, it was conspicuous enough even for the eye of Tim Emery, who drove it. Emery yelled to him to climb aboard, and Emery was in a bad humor. Bennett glanced sideways at the sharp-featured face, with its discontented mouth and sandy eyebrows, as they shot up Piccadilly.
"God," said Emery, "she's batty. The woman's gone clear batty, I tell you!" He hammered his fist on the steeringwheel, and then swerved sharply to avoid a bus. "I never saw her like it before. Soon as she gets to this town, she goes high-hat. No publicity, she says. No publicity, mind you." His voice rose to a yelp. He was genuinely bewildered and worried. "I've just been round to see our English branch. Wardour Street bunch. Swell lot of help they are! Even if she did walk off the lot, I've still got to see she gets the breaks in the papers. Can you imagine, now-can you just imagine, I ask you-any woman who…"
"Tim," said Bennett, "it's none of my business, but you must realize by this time she's determined to put on that play."
"But why? Why?"
"Well, revenge. Did you see the papers this morning?"
"Say," observed Emery in an awed voice, "she's sure got it in for these Limey managers, hasn't she? That won't do her any good. But why bother about what they say in this town, when she can pull down two thousand a week in a real place? God, that's what burns me up! As though she'd got a…h’mm," said Emery, muttering to himself. "Woman With A Purpose. That'd make a swell lead. You could get a great publicity story out of it. If I could shoot the works on that but I can't. I've got to stop it."
"Short of hitting her over the head and kidnapping her," said Bennett, "I don't see what you can do about it."
Emery peered sideways. The rims of his eyes were red, and his breath in the sharp air was heavily alcoholic. Bennett saw the signs of an embarrassing and theatrical, if honest, attack of sentimentality.
«Listen," said Emery, breathing hard. He had treated the suggestion with the utmost seriousness. "Kidnap her? Man, I wouldn't ruffle a hair of that girl's head, I wouldn't hurt her little finger so much as, for one split second in the world; and Lord help the man who tries it, that's all I've got to say. Yes. I love that woman like she was my own Margarette, and I want to see her have everything in the world…"
"Watch the road," said Bennett sharply. "Where are we going?"
"Out to reason with her, if she's there." "His white, fiercely earnest face turned away again. "She went shopping this morning — in a wig, mind you. A wig. But I was telling you: if she wants to make a picture of this Charles-the-Second thing, all right. Why not? It's swell box-office. Radiant Pictures did one like that last year, and it got top rating from Variety. (That's the show you put Nell Gwynn in, isn't it? Uh-huh. I thought so.) All right. We'll fix it up with Baumann. We'll shoot a million dollars into production. A million-dollars," said Emery, savoring the words, "Yes, and so everything's right we'll bring over some of these Oxford guys to act as technical advisers. You think I don't want an artistic success? Well, I do. That's just what I do want," he said fiercely, and the car swerved again. He meant it. Jerking his neck sharply, he went on: "If that's what she wants, she'll get it. But not here. What kind of a guy is this Bohun, I'm asking you? — when he don't know his own mind from one minute to the next? Soft. That's Bohun. And here's their trick. To get her away from me, in case I'd make her see reason, they're taking her down to this place in the country; then we've lost her, see? But I won't bother with that end of it. She can go to the country. But there may be ways of queering their game right here in London."
"How?"
"Oh, ways." He wrinkled up his forehead and lowered his voice. "Look. Keep this under your hat. Do you know who's putting up the money for this show? Eh?"
"Well?"
"It's Canifest," said Emery. "This is where we turn:'
He maneuvered through the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, and swung into the courtyard of a white-stone block of flats overlooking the brown earth and spiky trees of the Park. Emery beat the hall-porter into submission about not announcing their names; then growled and slid a banknote into his hand. They went up through a cathedral dimness to a landing where the door of Number 12 stood open. "Like a funeral," said Emery, sniffing the thick odor of flowers; but he stopped as he heard voices inside.
In a blue drawing-room, bright with wintry sun through wide windows, were three men. One of them, who leaned back in a window-seat smoking a cigarette, was a stranger to Bennett. On a table among a litter of crushed orchids lay a brown-paper parcel unwound from its wrappings, showing gaudy ribbon and a gaudily colored nude siren painted on the lid of a five-pound chocolate box. John Bohun stood on one side of the table, Carl Rainger on the other. And, as Bennett watched them, he knew that there was danger here. You had only to come into the rooms of Marcia Tait, among her belongings and things that she had touched, to feel the damnable atmosphere tightening again.
"I don't know whether you are aware of it," John Bohun's voice rose sharply, hornet-like in suggestion, and lowered again. "It is customary to allow people to open their own parcels. Manners, we sometimes call it. Did you ever hear anything of the sort?"
"Oh, I don't know;" said Rainger stolidly. He had a cigar between his teeth, and did not lift his eyes from the box. He reached out and touched the ribbons. "I was curious."
"Were you really?" said Bohun without inflection. He leaned over the table. "Get away from that box, my friend, or I'll smash your fat face in. Is that clear?"
The man in the window-seat said, "Look here!" Extinguishing his cigarette with a hurried motion, he got up. Rainger did back away from the table then. He was still composed, his eyes motionless.
"It seems to me, John," the third man observed, in a sort of humorous rumble which might have cooled any animosities but these, "that you're kicking up the devil of a row over this thing, aren't you?" He came up to the table, a big man of slow movements, and fished among the wrappings. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Rainger, speculatively. "And yet after all, Mr. Mr. Rainger, it's only a box of chocolates. Here's the card. From an admirer who has no doubts. Does Miss Tait get so few presents that you're suspicious of this one? I say, you didn't think it was a bomb, did you?"
"If that fool," said Rainger, pointing his cigar at Bohun, "is sane enough to let me explain. "
Bohun had taken a step forward when Emery knocked perfunctorily at the open door and hurried in. Bennett followed him. The others jerked round to look at them. Momentarily this interruption broke the tension, but it was as though the room were full of wasps, and you could hear the buzzing.
"Hello, Tim," said Rainger. The malice crept into his voice, though he tried to keep it out. "Good morning, Mr. Bennett. You're in time to hear something interesting."
"By the way, Rainger," Bohun remarked coolly, "why don't you get out of here?"
The other raised his black eyebrows. He said: "Why should I? I'm a guest here, too. But I happen to be interested in Marcia, and her health. That's why I'm willing to explain even to you and Mr.," he imitated the other's manner, "Mr. Willard. There's something wrong with those chocolates."
John Bohun stopped and looked back at the table. So did the man called Willard, his eyes narrowing. He had a square, shrewd, humorous face, deeply lined round the mouth, with a jutting forehead and heavy grayish hair. "Wrong?" he repeated — slowly.
"It wasn't," Rainger went on, his eyes never moving while he spoke with sudden sharpness, "it wasn't any unknown London admirer who sent that. Take a look at the address. Miss Marcia Tait, Suite 12, The Hertford, Hamilton Place, W. 1. Only half-a-dozen people know she intended to come here. No report could have got around even now, and yet this box was mailed last night before she had even come here. One of her — we'll say her friends sent this. One of us. Why?"
After a silence Bohun said violently: "It looks to me like a joke in damned bad taste. Anybody who knows Marcia would know she never eats sweets. And this cheap tuppenny affair, with a nude on the cover-" he stopped.
"Yes. Do you think," said Willard, and slowly knocked his knuckles on the box, "it might have been intended as a warning of some sort?"
"Are you trying to tell me," Bohun snapped, "that those chocolates are poisoned?"
Rainger was looking at him with a dull stare. "Well, well, well," he said, and mouthed his cigar in unpleasant mirth. "Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody said anything about poison except you. You're either too much of a fool or you're too discerning. Very well. If you think there's nothing wrong with them, why don't you eat one?"
"All right," said Bohun, after a pause. "By God, I will!" And he lifted the cover off the box.
"Steady, John," Willard said. He laughed, and the sound of that deep, common-sense mockery restored them for a moment to sane values. "Now look here, old boy. It's no good getting the wind up over nothing at all. We're acting like a pack of fools. There's probably nothing whatever wrong with the box. If you think there is, have it sent to be analyzed. If you don't, eat all you like.
Bohun nodded. He took a dropsical-looking chocolate from the box, and there was a curious light in his eyes when he looked round the group. He smiled thinly.
"Right," he said. "As a matter of fact, we're all going to eat one."
High up in the dingy room at the War Office, Bennett paused in his narrative as this time the gong-voice of Big Ben clanged out the quarter-hour. He jumped a little. The remembrance had been almost as real, while he stared at the hypnotic light on H. M.'s desk as the room here. Again he became aware of H. M.'s sour moon-face blinking in the gloom.
"Well, strike me blind!" boomed H. M., as hoarsely as the clock. He made sputtering noises. "Of all the eternal scarlet fatheads I've heard about in a long time, this John Bohun is the worst. 'We're all goin' to eat one,' eh? Silly dummy. The idea being, I suppose, that if somebody had poisoned the top layer, and that somebody was in the room-which, by the way, hasn't been proved at all, at all-then that somebody would refuse to take a snack? Uh-huh. If every one of the top layer of chocolates was loaded — which would be improbable-you poison the whole crowd. If only about half the top layer was loaded — which would be very likely-all you could be sure of was that the man who had doctored the box would be devilish careful not to take a poisoned one. Crazy idea. Do you mean to tell me Bohun made 'em do it?"
"Well, sir, we were all pretty worked up. And everybody was looking at everybody else…"
"Gor," said H. M., opening his eyes wide. "Not you too?"
"I had to. There was nothing else for it. Rainger objected; he said he was a sensible man-"
"And so he was. Quite."
"But you could see his own bogey had scared him. After pointing out several good reasons why he shouldn't, he nearly flew off the handle at the way Bohun was smiling. Emery, who was drunker than he looked, got mad and threatened to cram the whole lot down his throat if he refused. Finally he took one. So did Emery. So did Willard, who was thoroughly amused. So did I. It was the first time I ever saw Rainger shaken out of his cynical stolidity. I admit," said Bennett, feeling a retrospective shiver, "it was an absurd performance. But it wasn't funny to me. The minute I bit into that chocolate it tasted so queer that I could have sworn…"
"Uh. I bet they all did. What happened?"
"Nothing, at the moment. We stood and looked at each other: not feeling any too good. The person we all detested I don't know why — was Rainger, who was standing there with a kind of sickly sneer on his face and smoking hard. But he got his own back. He nodded his head and, said pleasantly, 'I trust the experiment will prove satisfactory to all of you,' and then put on his hat and coat and went out. A few minutes afterwards Marcia came in from shopping, under a fancy incognito, and we felt like a lot of kids caught in a jam cupboard. Willard burst out laughing, which restored the balance."
"Did you tell her?"
"No. We didn't believe the yarn, but. You see? When we heard her in the hall, Bohun swept up the box and wrappings and hid 'em under his overcoat. Then we had lunch there. -At six o'clock yesterday evening Bohun phoned me at my hotel to come round to a nursing-home in South, Audley Street for a council of war. About two hours after lunch Tim Emery had collapsed in a bar, and the doctor found strychnine poisoning."
There was a silence.
"No," said Bennett, answering the unspoken question. "Not death or near death. He hadn't swallowed a sufficient quantity. They pulled him through; but none of us felt pleasant about our little experiment: The thing was: what was to be done? None of us wanted to call in the police, except Emery, and that wasn't on account of himself. He kept babbling that it was the finest publicity of the age, and ought to be in all the papers: he was talking like that this morning. It was Rainger who shut him up. Rainger pointed out at least he didn't crow over us — that, if the police were called in there'd be an investigation and they might not get Tait back to the States in the three weeks' grace allowed by the studio. They're both fanatically set on that."
"And Tait?"
"Didn't turn a hair. In fact," replied Bennett uneasily, remembering the faint smile on the small full lips and the veiled dark eyes under heavy lids, "she seemed rather pleased. But she nearly made good old sentimental hard-boiled Emery weep by the way she fluttered over him. Incidentally, Bohun seems the most flustered of the lot. There was another council of war this morning over too many cocktails. There was an effort to make it flippant, but everybody realized that someone-maybe someone present had…" He made a significant gesture.
"H'm, yes. Now wait a bit. D'you have those chocolates analyzed?"
`Bohun did. Two of them on the top layer, including the one Emery ate, were poisoned. Both together contained just a little less than enough strychnine to mean certain death. One was squashed a bit along one side, we noticed afterwards, as though the person hadn't known how to do his job quite well. Also, they were set so far apart that one person, except by an unholy coincidence of bad luck, wouldn't be likely to eat both. In other words, sir, it must have been what Willard suggested: a warning of some kind. "
H. M.'s swivel-chair creaked. One hand shaded his eyes, and his big glasses gleamed inscrutably from its shadow. He was silent a long time.
"Uh-huh. I see. What was decided at the council of war?"
"Maurice Bohun was to be in London this afternoon to take Marcia down to the White Priory, and incidentally go over the script. Willard was to go with them-by train. John is driving down late tonight in his car; he's got a business appointment in town, and won't get home until late. They wanted me to go down with the party, but I can't get away until late myself; another of those duty receptions."
"You goin' down tonight?"
"Yes, if the party doesn't break up too late. I'll get my bags packed beforehand to be ready. -Anyway, there's the situation, sir." For a moment Bennett struggled between a feeling that he was making a fool of himself, and the feeling that a deadlier thing lay behind this. "I've taken up a lot of your time. I've talked interminably. Maybe for nothing "
"Or maybe not," said H. M. He leaned forward ponderously. "Listen to me, now."
Big Ben struck six-thirty.