The Evening of the Good Samaritan Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

  “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

  “Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

  “Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

  “A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

  “An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

  “At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

  “Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

  “An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

  “A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

  “Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

  “Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

  “Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

  “Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

  The Evening of the Good Samaritan

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  for Harry

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1936

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART TWO

  1941

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART THREE

  1943

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  INTERLUDE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART FOUR

  1950

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  1936

  1

  ANDERS HALL WAS DATED 1887, the year Midwestern University was founded. Built of gray stone, Gothic in structure, and darkened by the soot and smoke of the seven hundred trains which daily converged on Traders City, it looked much older. In the bleak cold of mid-January, its lights remote behind the high mullioned windows, it stood as dark and formidable as a medieval stronghold, and seemed especially so to the students who were that night forbidden its proximity. Despite their banishment, they came together in threes and fours within sight of the building and talked softly among themselves. Whenever a group grew larger a uniformed policeman ambled through its midst. “Break it up, boys.” “All right, boys and girls, on your way.”

  And not so much because they were policemen as because they wore uniforms and when unoccupied with the dispersal of the students mingled and joked with the militant Legionnaires who were allowed to gather at will, they were bitterly resented by the students. The Legionnaires were out five hundred strong, “wearing their medals and their limps and their bleeding purple hearts,” determined that the red flag of Russia would not run up that night in Traders City.

  “Amerika über alles,” a student jeered, and in the black of night a legionnaire saw red. He grabbed a policeman’s stick and brought it down on the first bare head he could swing at. It was a glancing blow he struck but the man who caught it shouted:

  “For Chris’ sake, look who you’re crackin’, will you? I’m a reporter on the Dispatch.”

  A hoot went up from the students. The Traders City Dispatch was Judge Phipps’s paper, the world’s greatest by the Judge’s own admission, built on comic strips and sports news, advice to the lovelorn and vox populi; it reached, they said, its height of wit and wisdom in The Bright Comments of the Children. But over a million people read it and by and large they probably took Judge Phipps no more seriously than most Midwesterners took, say, Hitler or Mussolini at the turn of 1935.

  The police moved warily along the campus walks. Sometimes a man of them would thresh his way through the bordering shrubs while his partner stood watch in the open. It was the absence of demonstrators now that bothered them: so few in sight seemed to portend the collecting of a multitude in some undiscovered place. That the students might be simply obeying orders they could not credence. There had been a riot on the campus a few nights earlier, between—roughly speaking—the extremes of right and left among the student body although some of the boys arrested had no previous history of political activity. They had come to sustain a teacher whom they liked, they said, and had then been outraged at the invasion of the student meeting by the vigilant legionnaires who had scarcely even an “old grad” among them.

  That night in Anders Hall the annual banquet tendered the faculty by the trustees was taking place. No announcement had been made, but a definition of University policy was expected. The issue was not new, nor was it confined to Midwestern, but when during the Christmas holidays the parents of a boy had withdrawn him from the school and had publicly charged that the faculty was “rife with Communists,” it came flaring into the open. The state senate ordered an investigation, the newspapers coaxed from the boy the name of at least one teacher he believed a Communist although, lawyer-bidden, the boy himself qualified, “Communist, that is, with a small ‘c’.”

  The pitch of tempers, however, had soon gone up to high C. More than once the racial issue was introduced: Midwestern admission records did not require the statement of religious affiliation, and many had long thought that a mistake. It was the smallest of comfort to the harassed administration but some, nonetheless, that the name of the professor cited was Jonathan Miles Hogan. By no stretch of the imagination could it be said that all Hogans were Communists.

  A solitary figure, bare-headed, his coat collar turned up against the wind, the constant wind of Traders City, walked back and forth in the shadow of Anders Hall. Keeping to himself, he had escaped police detection. When he paused and lit a cigaret he drew attention to hims
elf. He was neither well-dressed nor shabby and a little old for a student by the calculation of the policeman who shone his torch in the young man’s face. The face was strong, already lined at the mouth and eyes. The mouth was dominant, large and firm, but with the hollows of easy humor at the corners. His dark brows were drawn over eyes as blue as the policeman had ever seen in a man. It would have hurt him somehow to discover that this lad was an agitator. But that was his fear.

  “Let’s see some identification.” He waited for the man to bring out his wallet. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting to see if my father comes out.”

  “Isn’t that touching,” the policeman said. Meanwhile the reporters were crowding in, six or seven of them, a press card in the hat, carte blanche. The policeman read the identification out loud because the names amused him: “Thaddeus Marcus Hogan …” His tone changed. “M.D. … Why didn’t you say you were a doctor in the first place?”

  An answer would have been lost. The reporters had picked up the name.

  “It’s Jonathan Hogan’s son.”

  “Hey, doctor, do you think your old man’ll get fired?”

  A dozen questions came in rapid sequence, most of them prefaced by “hey.”

  “Hey, doc, have you got any kids yourself? Are you married?”

  “Change the order of the question and I might answer it,” Marcus Hogan said and the men who heard him laughed.

  “Is the professor really a red, doc?”

  “He doesn’t think so. That’s what’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Would you say he’s a pink?”

  “No, sir. I would not say my father is a pink.” It was said with humor. Again the reporters laughed. Hogan himself kept looking toward the great doors of Anders Hall.

  “Doctor Hogan—is your father going to come out and speak to you?” The voice was very young and very polite for a reporter. The policeman asked him for identification. “I’m editor of the Daily Orange,” the reporter said. The Orange was the University paper.

  “On your way, sonny,” the policeman said.

  “Leave him alone, Clancy,” one of the reporters said. “He’s got credentials.”

  “My name isn’t Clancy,” the cop said.

  “Goldstein,” the newspaperman amended.

  “Shut up, you bum, or I’ll run you out of the park.”

  “Up … the rebels!” The reporter jerked his thumb in the air.

  The policeman cursed him aloud.

  Seen suddenly but having come up in an unhurried manner, students were all around them, not milling, just there, but an ominous crowd of them by the surprised policeman’s calculation as he flashed his torch over their faces. He fumbled for his whistle.

  Marcus Hogan caught his arm just before he got the whistle to his lips. “I’m sorry, officer, but isn’t that a sure way of starting trouble?”

  The policeman dropped the whistle, but he said: “You’re under arrest for laying hands on an officer.”

  Startled, Hogan hesitated an instant. Then he said quickly, raising his voice as though there was absolute logic in his words: “It’s all right. I’m a doctor. Let us through.” And he took the cop’s arm.

  A way opened for the two men and behind them the small crowd gradually fell apart, the students seeking information of one another as to what had happened. Before even the reporters realized it, Hogan was gone. One of the reporters shouted, baiting the students: “What’s the matter? You all chicken?” But they refused to be provoked.

  Several yards away the policeman said, “Get off the campus, doctor. That’s all.”

  “No arrest?”

  “Your old man’s trouble enough for the police department.”

  Marcus Hogan stood a moment staring back at Anders Hall. It was almost nine by the pale-faced clock in the tower. He had come on the chance that if he were not upheld by the University, his father was unlikely to have stayed on to the feast among his peers.

  Bon appétit, he thought, and hunching his shoulders to raise his coat collar to where it might cover his ears, he said, “Good night, officer,” and walked off trying to remember where he had parked his car.

  In the withdrawing room adjoining the banquet hall an impromptu meeting which had lasted far too long was drawing to its climax. Donald Hawkins, president of the University, was both counsel and, insofar as his administration was on trial, witness for the defense. He was by some years the youngest man present, and by some millions the poorest. He was as well the only self-made man among them with the possible exception of Alexander Winthrop. Dr. Winthrop’s wealth like that of the other trustees was inherited, but by choice he devoted himself to politics and public health. It may be said in passing the two endeavors were not merely compatible but indivisible in Traders City. Winthrop liked Hawkins. He admired both scholarship and the law. It was Hawkins’s foundation in the latter that was going to win the day for him, not so much in the persuasiveness of his argument which was considerable—he had reduced the issue to a university’s responsibility for the teachings within its walls, not the avocations of its teachers, a remarkable achievement considering the charges against Hogan—but in the confidence he evoked without directing himself to it at all that, legally, the University was on safe ground.

  It was a time in the history of the country when confidence made the man: witness (however reluctantly in present company) the success of the President of the United States. He did not call attention to it, but Hawkins was known to admire him, and something in the toss of his head made Winthrop think he more than admired, he sought to emulate him. He was almost defiantly self-confident.

  Having won his friends, albeit the vote was not yet taken, Hawkins addressed himself to the one man present who might be considered a spokesman for his enemies. Alexander Winthrop conducted a daily column in Judge Phipps’s Traders City Dispatch. “Dr. Winthrop,” Hawkins said, smiling, “if Judge Phipps were among our number, how do you suppose he would vote?”

  The wily young devil, Winthrop thought, to probe at that moment the well known inconsistency of the publisher. It was Phipps’s Dispatch which had first put the “red” charges into headlines.

  “I’m hardly a better spokesman for Phipps than Phipps himself,” Winthrop said, “but I’ll say this: many’s the time I’ve heard him speak out for academic freedom.”

  A murmur of dry, ironic laughter passed among the men around the table.

  The chairman called for a vote.

  In the banquet room itself the long tables were still pristine, row upon row of them, the linens gleaming, the silver neat, but the water in the glasses was turning beady. The smell of roasted turkey which had pleasantly smitten the nostrils of the guests arriving had now taken on the savor of left-over gravy. Cigar and cigaret smoke webbed the rafters. The faculty of Midwestern University, six hundred thirty men and women—about twenty men to every woman of them—waited restlessly. They were tired, irritable and nervous. The floors were drafty and the monastic benches along the walls chilly respite to those who had to get off their feet. They could not very well go to table ahead of their hosts.

  Few of them were principals to the controversy, no more than a half dozen members of the faculty had been mentioned—and only Jonathan Hogan consistently—but all of them were inevitably having to take sides, to defend or deny the right of a university teacher to political activity outside the classroom. The definition was likely to be that broad—political activity—to those defending the right. To those who denied it, and some did openly, confident of vindication by the University trustees, it narrowed down to Communist influence in the classroom. That the loudest condemnation came from certain Catholic teachers in a school oriented toward Presbyterianism tended to make liberal partisans of otherwise conservatives. Practical men on both sides were thinking of the school’s endowment.

  Everybody knew that Jonathan Hogan was a prime mover in something called The League Against War and Fascism. They were all against war—in the Mid
west most people were against foreigners as well as their wars—but a man did not have to share the rostrum with Communists to prove it: so went the majority thinking.

  Jonathan Hogan himself yellowed his fingers chain smoking. He felt an invisible cordon sanitaire around him through which his friends broke now and then to bring him cheer or ease his nerves. Someone—friend or enemy, he wondered afterwards—said, “Look here, Hogan, I shouldn’t worry. There are several universities in the East that’d be glad of a man of your calibre.”

  That had the calibre of a shotgun, Hogan decided and winked at the man, though unintentionally. He had a tic that worsened under strain.

  Finally the massive carved oak doors swung open and the president of the University came in, all amiability and apology, and followed by a jovial dozen of the most influential men in Traders City. A general air of sheepishness hung over the guests as they moved toward the tables.

  A trustee headed each of the twelve tables and on the dais President Hawkins greeted the professors emeriti who were especially honored on this occasion every year. He stood a moment before taking his place. A hush fell over the hall. He tossed his head, his characteristically youthful gesture, and said, “I’ve been asked to say a word of apology and welcome—I shall say a good many more words later—but on behalf of the trustees and myself, I bid you, every man and woman, welcome and good appetite! But before we go to table, I want to read to you a release I have just handed to the press: ‘For immediate release: The Board of Trustees of Midwestern University, by unanimous vote, tonight reiterated the University’s belief in its responsibility for the teachings within its classrooms, and in the right of its members, outside the classroom, to any activity consistent with moral rectitude.

  “‘The University regrets the violent partisanship recently agitating the campus; the students have been reprimanded and have subsequently shown every intention of confining themselves to peaceable demonstration.

  “‘Accordingly, President Hawkins has respectfully requested the Commissioner of Police to withdraw the men on special assignment to the University campus.

  “‘Classes will convene at the usual hour Monday morning.’”