LITMIR.BIZ

      DEDICATION

      To

      Janet’s March Wind

      who is NOT a spavined hack

       False to Any Man

      Copyright © 1939, renewed 1967, by Zenith Brown.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      1

      The fact that I’d seen Karen Lunt tripping gaily out of the polished granite façade of the Commonwealth Trust Building in K Street meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Everybody one knows in Alexandria spends most of the time in Washington anyway, at a job or shopping or going to parties. It certainly never crossed my mind that she might be coming out of Philander Doyle’s imposing suite of walnut-panelled offices that occupy the entire rear end of the second floor. For one thing, it’s commonly assumed that Philander Doyle’s clients never use the K Street entrance. People who don’t approve of him say they come and go through the alley, and that’s why the back stairs of the Commonwealth Trust Building are full of recesses and so dark that only a mole—or something used to prowling by night—could find its way there.

      If I had any mental process at all, it was simply to think how enchanting Karen looked, laughing and batting her long black lashes to keep the snow out of her enormous blue eyes, and to wonder vaguely who the exceptionally good-looking young man was, leaning out holding open the door of his car for her. I saw both ideas reflected an instant later in the face of the other young man who came out of the Commonwealth Trust portals just then . . . and I thought something else too, as he saw Karen duck her high mink hat and bright corn-colored curls into the low car, followed by the rest of her, also swathed in mink. Even then I didn’t connect her with Philander Doyle, largely, I suppose, because I didn’t then know that Roger Doyle was in his father’s office. Certainly the look on his face as he pulled his hat down against the snow wasn’t one a lawyer ordinarily gives a departing client, not one who looked as enormously pleased with life as the girl in mink, anyway. Roger Doyle’s face as he set out toward Connecticut Avenue was definitely what his aunt, Miss Isabel Doyle, would refer to as “a study, my dear, I assure you, a real study.”

      I went on into the bank. For a moment I couldn’t get that almost savage look in Roger Doyle’s lean, good-looking but rather complex face out of my mind. It was a little puzzling, too, for one heard so often, around places, that wasn’t it too bad Karen hadn’t had better luck with Roger. Like most marriageable girls in Washington the last five years since the Doyles had come back from New York, she’d tried and failed . . . leaving Roger, friendly but casual and definitely not interested, still loose in the sea. It would be ironical, I thought as I waited in line at the teller’s window, and rather like life, if he was interested now that she wasn’t.

      Then I caught a glimpse of the green alarm clock on the teller’s desk, and promptly forgot all about the two of them. I was already half an hour late for lunch with Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), at the Army and Navy Club a block away through the snow and ice. While he wouldn’t mind, his self-styled “functotum”—guard, philosopher and friend, as the Colonel puts it—Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A. (Retired), would mind intensely, if it isn’t absurd to speak of a slab of frozen granite as being intense. I could see him—he lives with Colonel Primrose in their house on my street in Georgetown, as a kind of social, financial and spiritual manager—looking at his large gold turnip of a watch, won like most of his other very considerable worldly goods at the old Army game, his granite face, not smooth and polished like the façade of the Commonwealth Trust Building but harsh and seamed and fissured like the side of Mt. McKinley, congealing a notch lower, his viscid fishy slits of eyes in his lantern-jawed face glinting a colder grey. I’ve known for some time now that Sergeant Buck conceals, or rather doesn’t conceal, behind that stony dead pan of his a deep-seated aversion to any potentially marriageable woman. If he could do it, I don’t think he’d hesitate a minute to clap his Colonel into a monastery run on military lines and keep him there, never allowing him out to see one.—Not to lunch with one, anyway, and certainly not to be married by one when he wasn’t looking. And least of all by me, Grace Latham, widow, aged thirty-eight.

      So for a moment, with that gauntlet to run, I forgot Karen Lunt and Roger Doyle and the way Roger had pulled his hat down, watching her go off with the other man. It wasn’t till Philander Doyle’s name came up casually in the luncheon conversation, with the curried shrimps and chutney—which Colonel Primrose always orders at the Army and Navy Club and I steadily loathe—that I thought of them again.

      “Do you know Karen Lunt?” I asked, apparently out of a clear sky.

      Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and around—a bullet in the neck at the Argonne makes him do that, and he looks exactly like a parrot when he does—and looked at me with those sparkling black X-ray eyes of his, a little surprised.

      “I’ve seen her around,” he said. “She’s quite fascinating, I suppose. I’m always surprised when I see her that she isn’t married to somebody. However, I imagine she’d be pretty realistic about anything like love in a two-room apartment.”

      “Roger Doyle wouldn’t present that problem,” I observed.

      He laughed shortly. “No, I should think not. Not with that father he’s got. Is that the way it is?”

      “Not that I know of,” I said. “But about Karen?”

      He shook his head.

      “All I know is that she’s Judge Candler’s ward, and lives out in Alexandria in the Candlers’ old carriage house.”

      He picked up the pack of cigarettes I’d opened carefully at one corner and tore the blue revenue stamp across its face. “If I don’t, Buck will,” he remarked with a smile. “He thinks laymen encourage crime.”

      I don’t know why that came into my mind again as I passed their house on my way home that evening and saw Sergeant Buck, back from whatever fascinating thing his Colonel was doing for the F. B. I., clearing the snow off the sidewalk. I could hear his shovel ring against the uneven brick, the only sound in the street, as I let myself in my own front door. The snow had stopped, the road was still white, covered with the dry carpet that in a few more moments would be churned black by home-coming cars. I stopped for a moment on the doorstep. P Street in Georgetown looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card, and when I closed the door behind me I could hear the chains of passing cars like hollow sleighbells.

      I shook the snow off my hat, listened to its sharp sizzle in the crackling fire in the living room, and drew the curtains aside to look out on the snow-covered back garden. The room, the fire, the snow-peaked frames over the dark boxwood, the patches of warm light from the window, the inside, the tea-tray on the low table in front of the

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