The Simple Way of Poison Read Free

not a sympathetic audience,” he drawled.
    “I’m afraid not,” I answered shortly. “I’ve known Lowell a long time. I know she’s unbearably spoiled. She’s willful and impudent and difficult. I know Iris hasn’t had an easy job trying to get along with her the last three years, since she married Randall Nash. But I don’t think it’s been so terribly easy for Lowell either.”
    “No. I’d say they’re neck and neck,” he agreed with a judicial nod.
    “Then why blame a spiteful malicious thing like this on her?”
    “Because, darling, I think that’s exactly what she is—a spiteful, malicious little bitch.”
    “Rot,” I said.
    He raised his brows.
    “I suppose you’re aware, of course, that she loathes and despises her stepmother? And that her own mother eggs her on unmercifully?”
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said—knowing all about it.
    “Really?” He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his gold cigarette case. His eyes were fixed on mine, rather in the way a philosophical cat fixes an unpredictable and possibly recalcitrant mouse. “I suppose it wouldn’t even interest you to know that Randall Nash was over at Massachusetts Avenue this afternoon, seeing his former wife?”
    “It would interest me very much,” I said, “if it were true. Which it isn’t.”
    “Oh yes it is. My wife saw him coming out of her place around three. She’s got flu or something.”
    “It must have been three other people, Gil,” I said.
    Randall and Marie Nash’s divorce in 1930 was one of the bitterest domestic battles Washington has ever waged in the white court house at 5th and D. Lowell Nash had stayed with her father, and Angus, who’s twenty-two now, had gone with his mother. The bitterness hadn’t ended then; it had grown as the children grew. To my certain knowledge neither of them had seen the other since their final meeting at my house in P Street.
    Gilbert St. Martin shrugged again.
    “A lot of things have been going on this winter, while you’ve been in Nassau getting that sun tan.—It’s stunning, by the way.”
    He looked me up and down with a critical eye.
    “You carry your thirty-four years remarkably well, Mrs. Latham.”
    “Thirty-eight,” I said. “As you know very well. Thanks just the same.”
    “Not at all. I really thought it was forty and your dressmaker,” he replied. It’s that sort of thing about Gil that brings cats to mind.
    “Well, thanks anyway,” I said. I hesitated. I wanted to ask him what, for instance, had been going on while I’d been away. But something in the lift of one dark eyebrow and the sardonic twist to one corner of his mouth made me stop. The stiff charred mass in the pewter basin gave a final crackle and fell apart, leaving one tiny bit of white that the flame had not touched. It was almost like a warning.
    “I just got back yesterday,” I said casually. “I haven’t seen anybody yet.”
    “Why don’t you drop around?—She’d be glad to see somebody.”
    That in itself, of course, should have warned me. It did occur to me that it needed explanation. But just then there was a flurry at the door. A uniformed chauffeur opened it, a large lady in a vast quantity of black broadtail with a cascade of purple orchids on her bow steamed in to the jingle of the silver sleigh bells, on an icy wave of one of those heady perfumes made not for ingénues.
    It was my chance to escape and I took it—regardless of the chintz and the Cape Cod lighter. But not before I had a final look at Gilbert St. Martin. All trace of the guile that had seemed to me to color his last remarks had vanished. He was too perfect. You knew that the vexing problem of whether the canary-yellow hall should be done in silver stencils with modernist furniture or in white with Empire would be solved with just the proper mixture of gravity and badinage, over a perfect number of champagne cocktails, with money no object—to the lady. I could see—if I’d not