Free The Murder of a Fifth Columnist by Leslie Ford Page A

been. We hurried through the door. She closed it after us.
    “We’ve got to call the police, at once,” I said. My voice was hardly above a whisper.
    She didn’t speak. When I turned to look at her she put her hand out and took hold of my arm again.
    “I’ll call them,” she said. Her hand tightened. “Grace—I don’t know how to ask you. But you will—please, I know you will—take her to your apartment. Now—before the police and the newspaper people come.”
    Her voice had that desperate quality in it again, but it was no longer imagined fear of what might happen. It was realistic now, and stark. “—I can’t explain it to you—I will later. She mustn’t be touched by this. You can understand that, can’t you? You do see, don’t you?”
    I saw, very clearly—more clearly, probably, than she did, knowing so well how far blood spatters when once a good sensational reporter catches the scent. And Barbara Shipley had had nothing to do with it. There was no reason I could see not to save her from the consequences of it if I could.
    “But everybody knows she was here,” I said.
    “I can tell them she left. She can slip away the first thing in the morning.”
    “Or I could say she’d gone to my apartment earlier—if worst comes to worst.”
    “No, no!” she said quickly. “She mustn’t come into it at all!”
    “All right,” I said. I wasn’t so sure, because I’ve learned to have a lot of respect for the police. But there was no use getting her desperate again. “We’ve got to hurry. We can’t put off calling the police any longer. You get her up and explain to her, and I’ll see if the coast is clear.”
    Normally the prospect of circumventing the authorities is rather like a heady wine to me. This time it wasn’t. I was a little scared, actually. All I could see—besides the dark huddled figure of Corliss Marshall under the tub of evergreens— was Sylvia Peele wiping off the glass top of the table over there by the library door. All I could hear—besides the awful silence that brooded over the terrace—was the casual lilt of her voice saying, “Just a little housewife at heart.” It couldn’t mean she was deliberately wiping off the fingerprints of whoever had taken the jeweled stiletto, it couldn’t possibly, I kept telling myself—and all the time I knew it could. I knew it couldn’t mean anything else, actually, because whatever Sylvia Peele was at heart it wasn’t a housewife.
    I was trying desperately not to put another name to it… and I didn’t want to get mixed up in my loyalties, however dubious they might prove to be. I stood there anxiously, thinking about that, trying not to look at Corliss Marshall’s hat and overcoat and black-and-white muffler with his initials embroidered on it… or at the table top under the lamp by the door. I started for the stairs. I was suddenly so tired I could hardly drag one foot after the other up the soft gray-carpeted steps.
    Then I stopped and leaned against the iron rail and looked behind me. The idea that I was still tracking the dark stain of Corliss’s blood wherever I trod made me a little sick. I looked at the step just below. Then I looked at my feet. On the thin sole of my right slipper there was a brown spot. The stain had gone in, however, so I wouldn’t leave traces of it along the hall to my apartment and back again, after I’d left Barbara there to go to bed, and to sleep if she could. I went on up the steps, opened the door and looked out. The corridor was empty. I shut the door and waited.
    I could hear Ruth talking quietly to Barbara, and then the sound of a suitcase clicking shut. It seemed hours that I stood there, trying now not to look at the telephone on the table against the wall. It seemed to take on some insistent kind of animate quality that made the time drag interminably. I ought to pick it up and call the police myself, I thought— not wait for Ruth. I knew I should do that, and because I didn’t I