The Philadelphia Murder Story Read Free Page B

and in a coat as moth-eaten, took a walnut out of his pocket and gave it to him before he gave me a childlike, vacant smile and picked up my bag.
    “Mrs. Latham? Madam is in her room.” His voice had the remote quality of the very deaf.
    I followed him inside. The house was very handsome and surprisingly modern—more surprisingly so, in fact, than I then realized. There were mirrored panels in the soft beige walls. We went up a marble staircase curving gracefully to a wide foyer on the second floor. On the side wall were two more large mirrored panels, and in the space between them a decorative recess with a carved shell ceiling. A paneled library stretched across the back. The door to the room at the front stood open, and the voices coming from it, and not sounding very amicable, stopped abruptly as we came up.
    “Madam’s room,” the butler said.
    If the squirrel didn’t surprise me, Abigail Whitney did. It hadn’t occurred to me, when she’d said she did not now leave the house, that it was anything but another of the vagaries she was famous for, but in the wide room overlooking the square she sat propped up in yellow satin cushions against the yellow satin-upholstered back of an Empire swan-sleigh bed. There was a green satin cover over the blanket, and otherwise nothing of the bedroom apparent around her. The room was a drawing room, elegantly furnished, but crowded, as if she’d brought as much as possible out of her glamorous past to be there with her.
    The windows by the bed bowed slightly, so that she had a full view of the square, and I saw that she had more than that. Outside were two mirrors. One was an old Philadelphia custom I’d heard of but never seen. It was placed so that the ladies of a day when they were less mobile and more ladylike could see who was at the door in the street. The other was fixed at an angle that showed the brownstone front next door. Bed or no bed, Abigail Whitney could keep track not only of her own entrance but her brother’s too.
    “Oh, Dear Child,” she said as she held out her hand to me.
    I was aware there were other people in the room, but it was the pair of blank blue eyes in the saffron face of the old woman that focused my attention. They were blank and vague, but they sharpened with surprising intentness as she took me in from head to foot, and without a glimmer of remembrance or recognition.
    “Dear Child,” she repeated. “You haven’t changed at All. I’m so Happy to see you Again.”
    I wouldn’t have remembered her either. There was no trace of the extraordinary beauty she’d had once. She had on a black padded silk coat with an enormous burst of diamonds in the white ruching at her neck. Her nose was sharp as a hawk’s and her hair was a preposterous dye job of brilliant henna in a short fuzz all over her head.
    Abigail Whitney’s feud with her brother didn’t, it seemed, extend to his family.
    “You remember my Brother’s children, dear Child,” she said. She emphasized words the way she capitalized them when she wrote. “Elsie, and Monk, and Elsie’s husband, Sam. No, not Sam. No one remembers Sam, because no one knew him. Sam is Respectable… Come, dear Boy, I want you to meet Mrs. Latham… This is Sam Phelps, dear Child.” Respectable was the word, I thought as Sam same forward. He was very bald, with a waxed mustache, pince-nez in his hand, a high wing collar, a black coat and knife-edge-pressed, gray-striped trousers. He was forty, I imagined, and looked as if he had all the prejudices he would ever need.
    We spoke to each other. There was nothing cordial about Sam, but there wasn’t about any of the others. Philadelphians, a famous Philadelphian once said, are taller and fairer than the Chinese but not so progressive, and, he might have added, not so warmly effusive as the English. In this instance, however, looking around at the three others nodding stiffly to me, I wasn’t surprised, for they’d obviously been in the course of a