Pale Betrayer Read online

  “Where do they get it? That’s what I want to know. Where do they get it?”

  The dog whimpered, straining at the leash.

  Herring could not get past them. “Ma’am, you might try the corner tavern. Let me by, please.”

  “Oh, the arrogance of some people these days,” the woman said, and to the dog: “Will you come, Dandy? Come!”

  Reid, watching from the car, saw her put a sharp toe to the dog’s most vulnerable parts. It yipped and swung around, fawning on her. Whereupon she made a great mothering fuss over it. If she had a husband, Reid thought, God pity him and his vulnerable parts.

  Herring played the light over the figure, resting it then on the man’s back. There was a small tear in the coat and around the tear a wet stain had spread. The policeman touched his finger to it although that was scarcely necessary. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly, and shone the light on the victim’s face. It had settled into repose like the face of a child about to cry. A good face, like a minister’s he thought, a good man. The hair was gray at the temples. There was a dirty lump at the back of his ear. “Son of a bitch,” he said again and then added all the vile epithets with which his own street upbringing had equipped him, a curious source of strength at such a moment. He returned to the car door.

  “Get them rolling,” he said to Reid. “It looks like a knife job.” He looked at his watch: twenty minutes to eleven, and got out his report book. Then he remembered the woman. There was not another person within two blocks. He hurried after her as she turned into the corner building and called out: “Madam, one minute, please.”

  Before he reached her she started protesting: “I saw nothing. Nothing. A person ought to be able to walk their dog without the police chasing after them.”

  “Madam, the man is dead,” Herring said.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, as cold herself as the steel of a knife.

  “When you were bringing the dog out …”

  She interrupted. “I told you, Officer, I saw nothing.”

  Herring stiffened in authority. “May I have your name and address, please?”

  “Mrs. Rose Finney, apartment 4A.”

  “The address of the building, please.” He did not look up although the number was plainly visible.

  “Eight-seven-one.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” With alacrity he opened the door and held it for her.

  She looked up at him, puzzled, suspicious, and then sailed in, yanking the dog after her. Herring showed her a beautiful set of teeth over which, when she had passed, his lips closed like the sudden drop of a curtain over footlights.

  Inspector Joseph Fitzgerald and Lieutenant Dave Marks answered the call for Homicide. They were on the scene within fifteen minutes. The medical examiner arrived shortly afterwards along with the technical squad. By then people were hanging out of windows up and down the block; fire escapes were sagging with them. The precinct men had already roped off the area.

  Fitzgerald, a veteran of twenty-four years on the detective force, ran his hand gingerly over the victim’s hip and side pockets, and then eased it beneath the man to feel his breast pockets. He glanced up at Reid who had stayed with the body. “No identification?”

  “No, sir.” He reported on the finding of the victim, the failure of the one possible witness to contribute any information.

  Fitzgerald grunted and looked up at the gallery of faces, like bobbing balloons in the eerie light of the kliegs. “All yours,” he said to the medical examiner.

  At the door of 853 Lieutenant Marks talked with the uniformed-officer, Walter Herring, while the latter held his torch to the vestibule light fixture. The bulb had been smashed and the building superintendent from across the street was on a stepladder replacing it. This sort of vandalism was not uncommon in the neighborhood, especially where the super did not live on the premises.

  The building was clean but old, a converted brownstone. The vestibule had been freshly painted. Marks threw his own flashlight on the mailboxes. There were four of them; one, the first floor, was without a nameplate, an invitation to mischief. Marks winced at the gritty sound of broken glass beneath his feet.

  “Are any of these people home?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Herring said. “Nobody’s gone in or out since we found him.”

  Marks studied the names, wondering the economic strata of the tenants. On the top floor was a Dr. A. J. Webb; then two names, neatly written in ink: Brannon, Russo—women he supposed since the first names were omitted; the next was Adam Britt and Joyce Liebling Britt, names vaguely familiar so that he speculated they might be theater people.

  The overhead light came on and Herring helped the super out the door with his ladder. Marks studied the walls and floor. The glass from the broken bulb was ground to fragments where more than one pair of feet had scuffled through it. He could see no blood anywhere and the new yellow paint would have shown it easily. He moved out of the vestibule and the photographers and print men moved in. Marks at the first opportunity examined the shoes of the victim: tiny bits of glass glistened in the light. The same would hold for the shoes of his attackers if they could be got to soon enough. He crossed the street and looked up at the building. There was light in the top apartment, but the blinds were drawn and the windows closed. Otherwise the house was in darkness. Nor was there a window open in the whole building.

  Marks was in the habit, where he could, of separating himself from the herd of detectives that converged on the scene of homicide. It was easier that night because Inspector Fitzgerald, his chief, had decided to ride with him when “the squeal” came in. Fitzgerald and the top precinct officer, Captain Redmond, whatever the ostensible business of their earnest conversation right now, were establishing lines of authority. Fitzgerald had the advantage of rank; Marks answering for Homicide would not have had it. Nor would it have troubled him—and that would have very much troubled Fitzgerald. Marks was one of the Commissioner’s “bright young men,” trained in the law. Despite the fact that he had his lieutenancy before reaching the age of thirty, he was by no means sure that he intended to make the detective force a lifetime career. It was somewhat ironic that, chiefly interested in the prevention of crime, he should have been assigned to homicide where what was past, fortunately for society, was rarely prologue.

  He was recrossing the street, intent on finding out who was home on the fourth floor, when he noticed two uniformed men trying to restrain a young woman from entering the closed area.

  “… I tell you, Officer, that’s where I live.”

  Marks quickly joined them and identified himself to Anne Russo. She gave him her name, and on his asking, told him where she had spent the evening.

  Marks walked her slowly toward the building. “A man was killed here tonight. I wonder if there’s a chance that you might be able to identify him.”

  The girl, almost his height and attractive in a non-made-up sort of way, flashed him a look of shock. For a second then, her teeth pressing her lower lip, she showed what he suspected to be a personal concern. He saw her throw it off.

  “There is someone …?” he suggested.

  Anne shook her head.

  Marks said quietly: “He’s a good-looking man in his late thirties, I’d say. He’d be the sort that you might know.”

  The girl moistened her lips. “Dr. Bradley …” She hesitated, then went on: “A group of us were to meet Dr. Bradley at the laboratory. We waited till a little while ago but he didn’t come.”

  “Dr. Bradley is a physicist?” Anne had told him the nature of her work, identifying herself.

  “Yes. He’s head of our group. He just got back today from a conference in Greece and he was going to show us some film …” Anne, having started to talk about Bradley and now full of fear for him, did not know where to stop.

  Marks was careful not to interrupt her. Standing as they were in a concentration of light, he noticed that the Negro officer had taken his report book from his pocket. At
a nod from Marks, he began unobtrusively to take down Anne’s testimony. This was how young cops got on, Marks thought fleetingly. He was himself intent on what the girl had to tell. Anne told of the supper party, the wait at the laboratory, Bob Steinberg’s call to Bradley’s home …

  Marks, getting both addresses, observed that both the laboratory and Bradley’s home were within walking distance of where Anne lived.

  “Yes, but …” Anne smiled nervously. “It’s silly of me to be telling you all this.”

  Marks said: “If it turns out that way we can be grateful, can’t we?”

  Anne nodded doubtfully.

  “Do you think you’re up to taking a look at the victim, Miss Russo? If your Dr. Bradley has not shown up yet, we’d have to ask his wife to view … this unfortunate. You can save her that.”

  Anne nodded a determined willingness but she had gone deadly pale. Marks gave her his hand which she clutched without knowing it as he guided her through the jungle of men and equipment.

  Anne was able to identify the murdered man.

  A few minutes later in Anne’s apartment, Marks filled Fitzgerald in on the girl’s story. Anne opened the windows and then sat down, trying to grasp the reality of the situation hearing her own words restated.

  Fitzgerald was impatient. He wanted a witness’s story direct, not from the soft mouth of a sympathetic policeman, especially in the witness’s presence. Himself a cop of the old school, he considered every witness hostile until proven otherwise by his testimony in court.

  “You’ll have to get in touch with his wife,” he cut in. “Take a good man with you—a precinct man. I’ll go over the young lady’s story with her.”

  Anne thought then of Janet, still waiting. “Couldn’t I be the one to tell her, Inspector?”

  Fitzgerald had a daughter Anne’s age himself. “All right,” he said, “but first I want to hear about this movie you say the doctor was going to show you tonight. Was he carrying it with him?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t a movie. It was film taken during recent experiment with …” Anne hesitated. Instinctively she knew better than tell a man like Fitzgerald that it was something he would not understand. She glanced at Marks. He nodded just a little, encouraging her. “With nuclear particles. The Soviet scientist, Grysenko provided prints of it for certain members of the conference.”

  “Did he?” Fitzgerald said. “A Russian?”

  “A scientist,” Anne said.

  Marks felt that she might be a match for the old man—which would not make things a bit easier for her. Fitzgerald himself knew he had been given an impertinence, but as with all impertinences aimed at him by females past the age of twelve, he did not know how to parry them. He looked about a room that was astonishingly neat for a college girl’s, except for the pictures on the wall: they looked to him like the salvage out of a wastepaper basket.

  “Do you live here alone, Miss Russo?”

  “No, sir. I have a roommate but she went home for two days between examinations.”

  He nodded. “Tell me, when was the last time Dr. Bradley visited you?”

  Even in her state Anne could not miss the weighty insinuation in his voice. “He never visited me, not in the way you mean it, Inspector.”

  “Oh? He was never in this house?”

  “Not alone, I don’t think.” Anne tried to remember. “He was here maybe a month ago—but the whole group was—for drinks. Then I asked Peter—Dr. Bradley—to stay a few minutes. I wanted my roommate to meet him. I’d talked so much about him. He’s great really …” She paused realizing that what she had said was no longer precisely so. Marks was convinced by that brief spontaneous burst of praise that the girl’s relationship with Bradley was worshipful—and pure. The old man sat, his arms folded, like an Irish prelate sifting truth from circumstance. Anne went on determinedly: “Afterwards, Janet—Mrs. Bradley—met the three of us and we had dinner out together.”

  “But Mrs. Bradley wasn’t here till … afterwards?” Fitzgerald said.

  The girl seemed to miss that point and Marks was glad.

  She said: “She wasn’t home the first time we called her.”

  “So, young lady, that was the only time Dr. Bradley was in your house?”

  “No. Last fall Janet—she’s a professional photographer—was taking pictures in this neighborhood, and further down. Sometimes Peter insisted on going with her—this isn’t exactly the safest part of the city, and Janet was leaving some of her equipment here.

  “All right,” Fitzgerald said. “That was last fall. What do you think he was doing here tonight?”

  “It doesn’t make sense that he should have been here. We were waiting for him at the laboratory. I’d come home to get my glasses, and I supposed …”

  Fitzgerald interrupted. “You were here in this apartment tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time?”

  “It was nine twenty-five when I left here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “It would be to your advantage, Miss, if you could think of someone to corroborate that,” Fitzgerald said.

  Anne looked from one man to the other. There seemed to have been a direct threat in Fitzgerald’s words. “We took a cab, five of us, at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue. On the way I remembered my glasses. Bob Steinberg, Dr. Bradley’s associate, and the boys were anxious to get to the lab so I said they were just to let me out on my corner and go on. I’d come along on my own. That must have been a quarter past nine. I simply picked up my glasses, stopped in the bathroom, and left. I took the bus at Ninth Street …”

  “And where was Dr. Bradley?”

  “I don’t know. We all assumed he was on his way. He always walked.”

  “This isn’t much out of the way now, is it, Miss?”

  Anne ran her long fingers rather desperately through her hair. “No, but he wouldn’t even have been thinking of me. You’ve got to believe that, sir.”

  Marks, reasoning that people who need glasses in their work generally carry them with them at all times, and remembering that if Anne had come home she had not even paused long enough to open the windows, asked: “But would you have been thinking of him, Miss Russo? Did you think that perhaps you might meet him—say on Third Avenue—and then have the opportunity of walking the rest of the way alone with him?”

  Anne shook her head. “Even if I’d thought that—even if I’d seen him I wouldn’t have joined him. It’s hard to explain, but I’d have known he wouldn’t want company or he’d have come with us in the first place.”

  Marks accepted that part of it. Fitzgerald still looked skeptical.

  “I’m terribly aware of being a woman in what’s largely a man’s world, Inspector, and sometimes I try maybe too hard not to get in the way. That’s why I wouldn’t ask them to wait in the cab for me.”

  This Fitzgerald understood. He shook his head in most fatherly fashion. “You’ll never get a husband with that attitude, Miss. All right, let’s go back to what you and the doctor were working on: tell me about the film he’d brought home from the Soviet Union.”

  Anne’s eyes blazed. She wondered why he was being deliberately provocative. She could not believe it was stupidity. Carefully she distinguished herself as but one of six scientists working on the project, and then tried again to impress on the detective that Bradley himself had been but one of several physicists in Athens, not the Soviet Union, to whom the Russian scientist had given the film clips.

  “I suppose the F.B.I. will be able to straighten me out on that,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Our research is not classified, Inspector.”

  “Isn’t it?” He pursed his lips and then said: “But you scientists wouldn’t have any of our secrets classified at all, would you now?”

  “It was in all the newspapers,” Anne said quietly. Now that she knew he was baiting her, it was easier to hold her temper.

  Fitzgerald, as though he had all the time in
the world and nowhere else to go, took a stick of gum from his pocket and unwrapped it. There was nothing the old man liked better, Marks thought, than to strain the temper of a witness.

  Anne stared at the gum: something, some association …

  “I’m sorry I don’t have another stick,” Fitzgerald said, seeing the look on her face and having put the gum in his mouth.

  Anne met his eyes. “When I went out of here tonight—I heard someone’s doorbell ring when I was at the second floor. I thought at first it was mine. Then when I got downstairs and there was a man waiting in the vestibule, I realized it was for Dr. Webb. I mean that’s as much as I thought about him, but when I opened the door to go out, he got in without having to wait for the buzzer.”

  “Why did you assume he was waiting for Dr. Webb?” Marks asked.

  “The Britts are in Europe, and the first-floor apartment is being done over before the new tenant moves in.”

  “We’d better have a description of the man,” Marks said. “Was the light on in the vestibule?”

  “Yes.” Anne thought about the stranger and shook her head. She simply had not looked at him. “A dark hat, gray suit. He wasn’t as tall as me. The only reason I thought of him just now—when he passed close to me I got a whiff of stale chewing gum.”

  The detectives looked at each other: the hopelessness of such identification.

  “I expect we ought to have a word with Dr. Webb now if he’s up there,” Marks said.

  Fitzgerald said: “For God’s sake do. And send me up somebody to take down the young lady’s information—such as it is.”

  Dr. Webb, a veterinarian, had been home all evening, but working in his study at the back of the house where there was a large fan in the window, he had heard nothing except his doorbell. He had expected no one and ignored it. He thought he heard the bell then in the downstairs apartment and was satisfied that the youngsters of the neighborhood were up to a not uncommon mischief. He could not even place the time. When Marks asked him then if it could have been nine thirty, he agreed that it might have been. This, it seemed, was as close as Anne Russo was to come to having a corroborating witness.