Pale Betrayer Read online

  Marks chanced a direct question: “Would you say there was any private relationship between Anne Russo and Dr. Bradley?”

  “Absolutely not. Outside of science they’d have had about as much attraction for one another as two neutrons. I think that’s right.”

  Marks leaned forward, lowering his voice: “Mrs. Bradley and Eric Mather?”

  Louise shook her head as though determined to convince herself as well. “No!”

  Marks waited.

  “He might have been helping her with her book,” Louise supplemented. “Janet’s a photographer, but really a photographer.”

  “I know,” Marks agreed.

  “They were going over the book last night while the rest of us were yakking.”

  Marks got the party picture at once: the scientists apart, Mather and Janet Bradley in a huddle. Louise, who would never be an outsider at any party, drifting to where the talk most interested her. “Who was the first to leave?” he asked.

  “Eric.”

  Curious, Marks thought, if there was anything between him and Mrs. Bradley.

  “But we were all ready to go by then. The boys were itching to look at their goddamn film. I asked Janet if she wanted to go to a movie. I guess in the last five years Janet and I have seen more movies than any two people in New York.”

  “Why didn’t you share a cab with Mather? You live in the same direction, don’t you?”

  “He didn’t ask me,” Louise said. “Besides, he wouldn’t have been going home. I don’t think he ever does these days if he can help it.”

  “Do you like him?” Marks asked. He felt as though he had known Louise for a long time and hoped she felt the same about him.

  She shrugged, something a little pitying in the gesture. “Sort of, I guess. I’m a real Yiddishe mama.”

  five

  NOTHING MATHER HAD DONE that night, no part of his wanderings, his encounters with the wits of the Village, his sudden plunges into and withdrawals from barroom arguments and coffeehouse debates, not even his exultant sobriety in the post-midnight hours when poets fumbled for the lines they had bled into being and accepted his extemporaneous suggestions as the same—flattering whom?—nothing had assuaged his restlessness. Often he had fought down the temptation to call the Bradley house on some pretext—had he left his cigarette lighter? Peter’s temper would have cooled by bedtime. The fools! he would say. The bloody idiots. Mather was sure he would not have gone to the police: it would take too much of his precious time. It would take a little of it to explain to the police in the morning how the lettercase came to be in a public mailbox.

  Mather turned into Perry Street shortly after two in the morning. He dreaded solitary confinement in his own apartment. To have one’s part in a conspiracy cut off at its critical moment was like asking an actor to play the lead in a badly constructed play, the climax coming when he was off-stage. It was not until he saw the car parked in front of his building, two men sitting in it, that he admitted to himself the true basis of his distress: fear. Its sudden, uncontrollable thrust so weakened him he had to stop. His legs were rubber. His eyes, however, searched the familiar street for the nearest police call-box. Come humiliation, come exposure, no matter: his first instinct was to save himself.

  The car rolled toward him and he forced himself to move on. But when the car was almost abreast of him, he flung himself to the ground and lay there, his face averted, the few seconds it took one of the men to reach him.

  Lieutenant Marks sprang from the car to the side of the fallen man. “Are you hurt?”

  Mather gathered himself into a sitting position. In the failure of attack upon his person, the absence of the bullets he had unreasoningly anticipated, he was appalled at his exhibition of weakness.

  “Damned city pavements,” he murmured. “I think I’ve broken my toe.” He reached for his foot and held it, and such was the strength of his imagination, a pain actually shot through his foot.

  Marks said: “Are you Eric Mather?”

  Mather looked up at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  By the light of the street lamp, Marks offered his identification, saying at the same time: “Lieutenant Marks, police department.” He nodded toward his partner, now squatting beside them. “Detective Pererro.”

  Mather took advantage of his feigned injury to try for some sort of reorientation. He had wanted a policeman and one had appeared. Two of them.

  Pererro said, as though Mather were unconscious: “What’s the matter with him?”

  Marks spoke to the man still hugging his foot. “See if you can put some weight on it, Mather. We’d like to talk with you.”

  “Where?” He was afraid he would pass out if he had to get into a car with strangers even if they called themselves police.

  Marks straightened up. “In your own house or police headquarters. It’s up to you.”

  Mather got to his feet, throwing off Marks’s offer to help. He limped a few steps, putting his weight on his heel. His left foot, he must remember, his left foot.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. He was shocked that Peter had created such a ruckus that the police were investigating at this hour. It was the juxtaposition of this rationale with his own wild fears of the previous moments that brought him for the first time in the whole compass of the scheme to concern for the physical safety of his friend, Peter Bradley.

  He was putting the key in the door to his basement apartment. The semi-darkness there and in the apartment as he groped for the nearest lamp covered his dismay. The apartment smelled of its recent disuse. He had scarcely more than slept there since the first time Jerry and Tom had fouled it with their presence. He lit the lamps on either side of the sofa and then sat down to remove his shoe. The detectives watched him massage the foot.

  “Sit down and tell me what this is all about,” he said. “It must be damned important for you to come at this hour.”

  “What do you think?” Pererro said. He had been due to go off duty at midnight, and while it was great to work closely on a case like this, he felt that during the long wait for Mather, more important things were happening elsewhere.

  Marks picked up the shoe Mather had removed and took it to the light. He could see nothing with the naked eye that looked like glass, but it was now some four hours since the attack on Bradley. He held the shoe in his hand and watched the man massaging his foot: that something was burning him up inside, the detective was sure, the gray eyes furtive, then daggerish. They might be the key to the whole man, Marks thought. Handsome in a long-haired way, he would go over great with the girls in the classroom and possibly with a few of the boys; something effete about him.

  “Do you always stay out this late on a week night?” Marks asked.

  “Often,” Mather said. “I am my own master.”

  That was something Marks very much doubted. He said: “Peter Bradley was murdered last night. That’s why we’re here.”

  Mather leaned back on the couch, his mouth open. The back of his head had gone stone numb.

  Pererro stared at him. He did not know what it was about the man, but he kept feeling that he wasn’t really there, that he wasn’t a real person. It was the damnedest feeling he’d ever had about a person. Again he spoke to Marks: “Should I get him some water?”

  Marks shook his head. He was trying to measure this performance with the sprawl on the sidewalk. This, he thought, was the real thing. What then caused the sidewalk tumble? That it was sham he was certain. An attempt at misdirection by calling attention to himself? Had he wanted to get rid of something on his person? Narcotics crossed his mind as a possibility.

  He waited for Mather to come out of the shock, taking the opportunity to measure the man further by the house he lived in. A study in red and black. The chairs were painted black, red cushions. The floor was painted red, with here and there a black throw rug. Neat as a chessboard. In no way ornate or fussy: he could have lived here himself. It seemed an unlikely nest for anyone who had
taken such an untidy fall. It would be a great shame, he thought, if Mather were not involved: he looked like an interesting nut to crack.

  Mather made a smacking noise with his lips, trying to speak, and finally said: “When?”

  “Some time before eleven o’clock,” Marks said.

  Mather pulled himself up jerkily, like a spastic. “For God’s sake, man, tell me the whole thing.”

  “If we knew the whole thing we wouldn’t be here. Or at least we would not be sitting down to a quiet exchange of information.”

  Mather threw him a sidelong glance. “Peter was a close friend of mine. I was at his house tonight.”

  Marks said: “That’s why I thought you would want to help us. Can we clear the air first by finding out how you yourself spent the evening from nine o’clock on?”

  “Will you tell me then about Bradley?” he demanded. He could not believe that Peter was dead. He dared not believe it. A shudder ran through his body. He could smell sickness in his own cold sweat.

  “Of course.”

  “I left the Bradleys’ at a few minutes after nine,” he started. “I’d promised to look in on a group of my students …” He tried to block out from his own mind the moment of watching beneath the lamp post and signaling: the kiss, the Judas kiss. He remembered now Janet in the window, and his idiotic hope that she had seen him. “Oh, God Almighty.” He buried his face in his hands.

  To Marks it was an understandable emotional break. He would give him that much. “Where was the meeting with your students?”

  Mather took his hands away, the fingertips briskly wiping the tears from beneath his eyes. He blew his nose. “Sorry. They always meet at a place called the Red Lantern on Sullivan Street. I must have spent a half-hour with them. After that … I can’t even give you the names of the places in order.”

  “We’ll put them in order,” Marks said. “Just name them as they come to mind. To start with, did you go directly to the Red Lantern?” Mather nodded. “Do you have a car?”

  “No. I walked.”

  “Let’s have the route so we can check it out.”

  That part was easy: he could walk it again in his own mind’s eye, and know exactly what went through his mind, that first joyous sense of freedom … But the detective was listening for something that wasn’t going to turn up on the list of streets his partner jotted down. He was measuring the whys of “I can’t be sure … I think I went round Gramercy …” Mather remembered where he had stopped midway to buy a package of cigarettes, and at the end decided to mention it.

  “Do you know what time you arrived at the Red Lantern?”

  “I’d have to guess—about nine thirty.”

  He watched the younger, raw-boned detective making notes, and reeled off the names of a half-dozen places he had gone afterwards, winding up at Barney’s Coffee House, less than three blocks from where he lived.

  Marks wondered if he spent many nights like that. He had not been drinking, and he now doubted the use of narcotics. He remembered Louise Steinberg’s saying he never went home if he could help it. But what kind of a teacher could he be to live so erratic an existence?

  “How long have you been at Central University … Professor, is it?”

  “My students call me Mister,” Mather said icily. He sensed the line of Marks’s reasoning. “I’ve been in the English Literature Department for three years, my first as a lecturer. Now I am an assistant professor. And to answer the question you did not ask, sir: I need less sleep than other people.”

  Marks smiled. “I wish I did. How long have you known Peter Bradley?”

  “We were in college together—just after the war. Before Bradley switched to physics. For years then I didn’t see him, not until I came East to Central University. Oh, once or twice. He’d come out to a conference in Chicago and call me. I’d kept up with his career of course. It was rather more to keep up with than my own. I suppose the fact that he was here may have influenced my decision to take the job at Central.”

  “And Mrs. Bradley, have you known her long?”

  “I met her out here. They’d been married for some years by then.” He would have liked to add something, a little more on Janet, a show of sympathy. Instead, he demanded: “You said you’d tell me what happened.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can, Professor. He was assaulted by a person or persons unknown. First a blow on the back of the head, but the cause of his death was a knife wound in the back.”

  “No!” Mather cried out the word as though he had felt the wound.

  Marks said carefully: “It occurred in the vestibule or just outside the door of Anne Russo’s building.”

  “Why there?” Mather said after a moment. “They were all going to the laboratory the last I saw of them.”

  “Miss Russo’s is not so much out of the way, is it?”

  “I neither know nor give a damn where Miss Russo lives,” Mather said.

  Marks said: “She lives on the edge of a rough neighborhood.”

  “Who doesn’t in New York City?” But Mather suddenly saw what might be the line of police investigation: if some sort of relationship were discovered between Anne and Peter, if in fact Peter’s being at her place could be accounted for, the crime could be put down to assault for the purpose of theft, the random street attack on a well-dressed man. Could it possibly be the truth? The knife was a street weapon. Jerry would not have dared … He could feel his jaws working, his own feeling of relief was so intense. He must somehow cover himself with this cop in gentleman’s clothing. He said: “I make it a point to see my students only in the classroom or in some public gathering place.”

  Marks digested that for a moment. “Do you know Miss Russo?”

  “Only from meeting her at the Bradleys’.”

  Marks gazed at him, all innocence. “Yet she was on your guest list for the dinner party. Why?”

  “Because Peter liked her,” Mather said with a small bitter smile on his lips.

  An interesting response: Mather was willing to admit his intention of inviting Anne; if someone had told the police it was his idea, he was not going to contradict it now. Marks wondered how far this Galahad would go to hide whatever it was he had to hide. Something, Marks was sure, but he was inclined to doubt that it had anything directly to do with Bradley’s death. Nor did he think he was going to find it out at this stage in the investigation. It would take a little more sweat and tears.

  “I wonder if I may have your other shoe also, Professor. For a routine laboratory check. They’ll be returned.”

  Mather shrugged. As the detectives got up he fumbled at his shoe laces, waiting for the parting shot. He felt that one had to come, something held back for when he would be least expecting it.

  Marks said: “Better see a doctor about that toe, Professor.”

  “It’s nothing. Just my clumsiness.” He handed over the shoe.

  “I’d feel better if you saw one. The city does have a responsibility—as you yourself pointed out.”

  Mather knew then why he loathed the slick bastard: Marks was the kind of man he had feared and fled from all his life, a man he suspected of seeing right through him. In his stocking feet and without the limp, he saw them to the door. There he ventured to ask: “Was Bradley robbed?”

  “Oh, yes,” Marks said. “Cleaned out. Can you think of any other motive for his murder?”

  “It’s the worst possible motive,” Mather said from an inner compulsion to pay a tardy tribute to his friend. “Peter Bradley would have given any man who needed it anything he owned.”

  Marks merely looked at him and nodded, and then went out the door, his strong and silent partner following him.

  six

  MATHER, ALONE AND HEARING the outer door click behind the detectives, tried to confront himself with the reality of Peter Bradley’s death. But nothing ever seemed real to him while he was alone, not until he could find the context in which he could see himself as he wanted other people to see him. No such contex
t was now possible: he wanted nothing so much as to disappear altogether, above all from his own view. He had worshipped Peter Bradley—worshipped, admired, envied him. What better tribute to pay a friend than envy?

  He slumped down on the couch and let his mind seek its only solace, the memory of his finest moment with Peter Bradley. Once, in their college days, they had been swimming off a boat in one of the Finger Lakes when Peter got caught beneath an abandoned fishing net. He had managed to surface long enough to cry for help before the weight of the net bore him down again. Mather was not nearly the swimmer Peter was, yet he had jumped to Peter’s rescue with no thought of his own safety, and he had carried a fishing knife with which Peter cut himself free. Peter might have died that day. The net and the knife.

  Eighteen years later, was it again the net and the knife? How curious the repetition of weapon and symbol. A poet could find no better a concept. This then was the beginning between Peter and himself. For Peter it had ended alone, a knife in the filthy hand of a stranger put there by his friend Eric. He thought then of what it would be like, to drive a knife into the warm flesh. It was the way he should die now by his own hand.

  Signifying nothing. He had not meant Peter harm: there was nothing in the scheme of things as he had planned them, as he had—so he had thought—been allowed to plan them to warrant violence. In a way it was to end a larger violence he had joined the conspiracy. But there had been no place in his lovely simple scheme for Anne Russo. He could truly say he had never in his life given Anne Russo more than a passing thought. Nor, he was sure, had Peter outside that tight little island of science.

  If he were to tell the truth now as he knew it …

  To start at the beginning, he could not, although to tell all the truth he would have to: it was to keep forever from his own mind that noisome incident—one incident in a lifetime!—and to do it he could not tolerate even Jerry’s suggestion of it—that he had entered wholeheartedly into their conspiracy. There! That much of truth he had admitted. He pinned it on the wall, that first confrontation with the stranger: the pudgy face, the ferret’s eyes, the pink tongue coming out to receive a stick of gum as though it were a communion wafer.