Pale Betrayer Read online

  “It was to save my own skin!” he cried aloud, “to hide my filthy image. Call it blackmail, straight and simple. The rest is all delusion.”

  His mind however slipped away from the truth to still pursue the delusion: he had made of the problem posed him a game of chess such as might have been played by correspondence. He had anticipated, nay, contrived, his antagonist’s every move. Never had he felt involved with people, only pieces, except for the incidental pleasure it had given him to use Peter Bradley, the man who prided himself above all else on being the pawn of no man, of no institution, of no party.

  But Peter was dead. Possibly by chance. But if not by chance who could name his killer?

  Mather began composing in his mind a note he might leave: The man I knew called himself “Jerry.” I am sure it was not his name, for he had a partner I met later whom he introduced as “Tom.” Tom and Jerry. No wonder, having no more originality than that, they willingly accepted my brain, my imagination. Or did they? They could themselves have been no more than messengers, well-trained lackies …

  He pulled himself out of the reverie, trying to go back, back … Peter was the friend of his youth on whom in later years he had thrust his friendship and had it tolerated. Like the devotion of the buffoon he often played. Had Peter been utterly contemptuous of him? Was he persona grata to Peter only because Janet found a kind of liking for him? He would never know now, never really know. He would have forced the revelation had Peter lived. There would have come a time of reckoning. There always did between him and his attachments, a time when rejection became itself gratifying, for it left him the ultimate solace: even as a dog, he must lick his own wounds.

  Exhausted but not remotely sleepy, he pushed himself up from the couch and started for the bathroom. He realized that he was hobbling, favoring an imagined injury. He lifted the shoeless foot, the impulse to kick it violently at something, but he caught his self-image in his mind’s eye and was struck by the ridiculous figure it made of him, the man who even played his own clown. He began to laugh aloud at himself, the laughter rolling up in him irresistibly. Only when the tears came and he was reminded of the deeper need for tears was he able to control himself. He went on to the bathroom and presently took two sleeping pills. There were only two more left in the bottle, which forestalled temptation in that direction.

  He stripped, turned out the lights and groped his way through the apartment to open the window at the front. As he raised it he saw the two detectives; a few feet away—near the place where he had fallen—they were playing their flashlights over the sidewalk, searching the curb, the gutter, around the stoops. The big silent one picked something up, examined it under his light and threw it away.

  Just then Marks shot the full beam of his flashlight on the window. Mather stood in the glaring light like a man pilloried. Marks clicked off the light and said: “Better put some clothes on. You’ll catch cold.”

  Mather slammed down the window and fell away into the darkness within.

  seven

  MARKS READ THE MORNING newspapers in a cab on his way to Precinct Headquarters. He did not often allow himself the luxury of a cab, but he had not had much sleep. He lived alone in an apartment hotel just off Central Park West. He had grown up not far from there where his parents still lived in the building they had moved into when he was ten years old. He sometimes stopped to have breakfast with them. But not that morning. He would manage his coffee and Danish on the taxpayers’ time.

  Bradley’s death had made the tabloid headlines. The paper made the most of the fact that the physicist had been found outside the apartment building of an attractive female student. It was to be expected, Marks thought. The old man himself had briefed the reporters at 3:00 A.M., and while he would not deliberately throw them what he knew damned well they wanted, neither would he go out of his way to throw them off that track. No mention was made of the film at all. The story read like a clandestine love tryst in which the parties to it had got their signals crossed. Marks threw down the paper in disgust, but he thought of one of his father’s favorite dictums: As long as you’ve got an open case, keep an open mind. His father was a good lawyer, but a better human being. Fitzgerald was a good policeman.

  Marks admired him in spite of himself: the Inspector divorced facts from people. Facts never lied. People almost always did, even when they did not know they were lying, and the old man was short of patience when it came to looking for subconscious motives. The last thing he had said to Marks the night before was: “I hope to God this turns out to be a nice clean street job.” He had emphasized the irony, but he had spoken the truth of himself.

  The old man was in a better mood than Marks had expected. His eyes were bloodshot and he had cut himself in a hasty and not very efficient shave, but something in the case had gone the way he wanted it. He took Marks’s arm as they started up the deeply grooved stairs to Redmond’s office.

  “Wouldn’t you think they could do something to brighten these bloody mausoleums?”

  Marks knew what he meant: he said it of every precinct house in the city. This two-story building at Houston Street had remained virtually unchanged since the days of the Tong wars, a bleak stone edifice with iron-meshed windows the dust of which God’s own eyes could scarcely penetrate. The pea-green walls were chipped along the way, showing the pinkish taste of the previous administration.

  “They’re all waiting for us up here,” Fitzgerald said, “hoping to build a mountain on a pinhead. But mark my words: as I said last night, it’s a police case, pure and simple. We got back his wallet and briefcase this morning, the only thing missing his money, and I dare say he was carrying a fair amount. Didn’t his wife tell you that?”

  “She said it might have been,” Marks said. “Where were the things returned?”

  “At a mail deposit box on Sixty-fourth and Park Avenue. Picked up at 5:00 A.M.”

  The two double desks in Redmond’s office had been moved back, and a table usually used for a miscellany of reports and office supplies had been converted into a conference table. Six men were around it, quietly talking, smoking, laughing, except for the one Marks rightly supposed to be the University representative. He looked at his watch and then sat back staring at Bradley’s case which lay in a plastic laboratory container in the middle of the table.

  Marks took the empty chair next to him and introduced himself.

  “Arnold Bauer, chairman of the Physics Department,” the man said, shaking hands. “I should suppose we could get on now.” Then he added, nodding toward the case, “It seems incredible, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Marks said, “it always does.”

  He rose to shake hands across the table with the man opposite, Jim Anderson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A big man of about fifty, well-groomed, with a quick smile, his handshake had the grip of an iron cuff.

  Marks noticed the laboratory clearance label as Redmond picked up the bag and emptied its contents on the table. Out of the lettercase itself he took the wallet, the film box, and several pages of handwritten notes. “Missing, to our knowledge,” Redmond said, “an unknown amount of money. Dr. Bradley did not carry traveler’s checks.” Redmond summarized the police case to that hour. He turned to Bauer. “Professor Bauer has examined the film with Mr. Anderson and his colleagues. Professor?”

  Bauer gave a gentle and lucid account of the kind of research that Dr. Bradley was engaged in. Unlike Steinberg, whom Marks had talked with the night before, Bauer was accustomed to dealing with the non-scientific mind. The chairman of any university department, Marks knew, was primarily a liaison officer between ivory tower and market place. It was a pleasure to watch him dislodge the fixed concept of a man like Fitzgerald that nuclear physics was necessarily a highly secretive, war-oriented science.

  “Actually,” Bauer said, indicating the film box, “the findings of such experiment have been published for some time. Dr. Bradley and our people were looking to what we might call a byproduct in the fi
lm. We don’t know of course whether it will tell us anything we didn’t already know until we compare it with what we do know. Dr. Bradley obviously thought it might. Otherwise he and his colleagues would not have been so anxious to study the film last night. Some of the notes he had made”—Bauer indicated the handwritten papers—“suggest his high expectations.”

  “The film is intact now?” Marks asked.

  “I should think so,” Bauer said. “I shouldn’t suppose it to have been tampered with at all. It would mean nothing except to a person interested in the Pi-meson.”

  “And there can’t be many of them in the world,” Fitzgerald remarked dryly.

  The others laughed, including Bauer.

  “Let’s have another look at the container,” one of the federal men said.

  Redmond handed him the box, roughly one by one and a half by four inches. When he was through examining it inside and out, he passed it and its contents on. Marks observed the customs’ stamp overlapping the label on which Bradley’s name had been written in block letters. Inside were a half-dozen film strips of four frames each. The film was protected by coarse tissue paper. The box itself was much like that in which Marks kept color slides.

  Anderson spoke last: “The customs’ seal was broken, I understand, but Bradley himself might have broken it, or more likely the thieves, to see that they weren’t missing anything. Customs cleared the film on the spot, duplicates of it having entered the country at Boston, and Washington, D.C., as well as via another New York flight, a set on its way to San Francisco. Both the box and the film are identical with those received at the National Laboratory. We had them flown up this morning for comparison.”

  Anderson smiled, and Marks thought he was one of those characters who promoted men on the basis of how early they got up in the morning. He had the glow of the cold shower about him.

  “I want to say that the Bureau’s full facilities are at your disposal, gentlemen,” Anderson concluded. “We shall expect you to inform us of any development you feel might concern the national security. I myself am available for consultation at any hour of the day or night. But at the present stage of your investigation, I see no reason for us to enter the case.”

  More than forty detectives were assigned to the case, most of them to the hard, gritty work of door-to-door inquiry, of trying to track the victim from the moment he stepped out of his own house. The first pay-off came early: Bradley, walking alone, had stopped briefly to exchange a few words with the sexton of St. John’s Church who was closing the gate for the night. The time was nine thirty: the sexton was sure since he was performing his last chore of the day and was understandably punctual about it. He had known Bradley to have been in Greece and their exchange ran something like: “How was Greece, Professor?” To which Bradley replied: “Hot and noisy. I felt right at home.”

  The sexton “was pretty sure” Professor Bradley had continued on toward the University.

  Marks noted the name of the interrogating officer, Tom Reid, and laid the report aside. The conversation of Bradley with the sexton was certainly not that of a man aware of immediate jeopardy. Marks studied a city street map. Reaching St. John’s, Bradley had passed by three blocks the street on which Anne Russo lived. At some point between the church and the University he had either turned back or was intercepted and driven back to the building on East Tenth Street.

  The detective dug out Anne Russo’s statement. She had left her apartment at nine thirty, admitting the unidentified gum-chewer to the building. Marks returned to the map. If Bradley had been tailed from his own house—either on foot or by two or more men in a car—the man Anne had seen would have left the others at the corner of Tenth Street and Third Avenue. The time was right, and to Marks’s satisfaction, Anne’s story was corroborated by Dr. Webb’s account of the doorbell ringing. Bradley at that moment had been at the gate of St. John’s, his “tail” not far behind him.

  Marks was about to put these dovetailing circumstances before Fitzgerald when he realized that the old man could say: If the little lady is telling the truth. If there was a man in the vestibule. Find me the man or another witness who saw him. Anybody can ring a doorbell, including our missy.

  Marks made a note of his deductions and for the moment kept them to himself.

  Fitzgerald was studying the preliminary report of the medical examiner. When he finished he handed it to Marks. The blow on the back of the head was likely to have done no more than stun the victim; no serious brain injury. The mortal wound came from the knife, a neat thrust with a small, very sharp blade at the most vulnerable point, suggesting that it was inflicted while the victim was unconscious. Bradley’s clothing had been impressed in the immediate area of the wound. The absence of blood stains near the victim, the condition of clothing at the surface of the wound, suggested that a cloth or handkerchief had been put round the knife before it was withdrawn.

  “I wonder what our chances are of finding that bit of dirty linen,” Marks said.

  “If it was yours, what would you do with it?”

  “Get rid of it quick—unless it had my monogram on it.”

  Fitzgerald agreed. “If it’s a street job, we’ll find it.”

  Marks then picked up a call from the police laboratory: he could collect a size eleven pair of shoes any time, findings negative. He hadn’t expected them to be otherwise. He doubted Mather could use a weapon sharper than his tongue. It was too early in the day to check out the taverns and coffeehouses. Marks looked up the precinct duty chart. Pererro would come on in time to pick up part of that detail.

  Marks was on his way out of the building when Walter Herring caught up with him. He was in civilian clothes.

  “Promoted?” Marks said.

  “No, sir, but they don’t mind much what I wear on my day off. You know, Lieutenant, I got thinking this morning—you ought to get another man to check out that Mrs. Finney again, the woman with the dog. I hate to say this, boss, but a cop of a different complexion might get more out of her than I did.”

  Marks tried to remember her testimony. Herring explained that she had thought the victim drunk at first.

  Marks, intending to prowl the scene himself, said: “Let’s go.”

  “Yes, sir!” No nonsense about Herring. He was ambitious, and he liked the company of men in authority.

  Mrs. Finney greeted them with less enthusiasm than did her spaniel who waddled from one to the other of them, the tail wagging a lot of dog. Marks remembered having heard once that dogs were color-blind.

  “What’s so important you’d come around before a woman’s put her house in place?”

  “Officer Herring and I were trying to narrow down the time of the attack on the victim. We knew you’d want to help us if you could.” Marks said it with a straight face.

  Mrs. Finney wiped her hands in her apron and led the way into a parlor that had never been out of order, the sterile look of which was strangely heightened by the vividly colored religious pictures. The spaniel hurtled himself into the best chair.

  “A professor, by the morning paper,” Mrs. Finney said. “And will you tell me please what decent young girls are up to, living alone in this part of the city?”

  Marks cleared his throat. The question had been rhetorical.

  “Sit down,” she said, with a nod toward two straight-backed chairs. She tucked a strand of gray hair into the bun at the back of her head, and stood, her arms folded, measuring Marks with watery blue eyes. About to sit down, he waited then till she did.

  “It was me that found the body,” Mrs. Finney said, “but you wouldn’t see him mentioning that, would you?” She jerked her head toward Herring.

  “I’m sorry,” Herring said, “but you gave me the impression that you were trying to avoid publicity.”

  She made a small noise of righteousness. “I’m always ready to do my civic duty, but like everybody else I like to get credit for it.”

  “Understandable,” Marks murmured. “You were taking the dog
out, I suppose, when first you noticed the man?”

  “As a matter of fact I was,” she said, admitting now what she had denied the night before. “It’s terrible what happens to a person living in a neighborhood like this. The poor man was trying to get up, you see, and I thought he was drunk. I just gave Dandy a pull and got away as quick as I could.”

  Marks was very much afraid that this testimony was reliable: unless there had been some movement in the prone figure, she was not likely to have assumed Bradley drunk. It opened wide the possibility of two attacks, one in the vestibule of Anne’s building, and the second on the street when he was perhaps recovering from the blow on the head. If that were the case, the motive of the first attack was not robbery. Either that, or the second attackers, taking turns, as it were, got nothing.

  “Do you know what time it was when you first saw him, Mrs. Finney?”

  “Not much past ten,” she said. “Dandy just won’t wait any longer. He’s getting old, you can see. We always stop at Molloy’s on Third Avenue for a glass of beer and to watch the television, but I didn’t last night. I was thinking about that man, you see, in the back of my mind though I never knew it at the time myself. I got as far as Molloy’s and turned back without going in.”

  Marks leaned forward, inviting her confidence. “You didn’t tell anybody about him on the way, did you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve just said you were thinking about him, a little concerned perhaps that he might be hurt?”

  She thought about that, calculating the best light in which to put herself, and then shook her head. “I thought if he was still there I might call the police when I got home.”

  “Of course you would,” Marks said. “Now you and Dandy walked along Tenth Street to Third Avenue. There you would have turned north, going to Molloy’s.”