The Pale Betrayer Read online

  “Do you know Molloy’s?” she said, her face cracking into its first smile. You’d have thought she had discovered a long lost relative. “It’s a funny old place, but it feels like home.”

  Marks nodded. “Before you reached Third Avenue, did you meet anyone?”

  “I didn’t, you see, or I’d have stopped worrying.”

  Marks thought: witnesses always lied even when they thought they were telling the truth.

  “I remember a gang of boys when I reached Third Avenue. But I don’t know where they went. I’m scared of the gangs, I’ll tell you.”

  “Is there anything you remember about them?”

  “Well … they weren’t …” She gestured vaguely and gave a flit of her eyelashes toward Herring.

  “Black?” he prompted.

  “Colored,” she corrected him in a slightly reproachful tone.

  “They were or they were not?” Marks said.

  “They were not. I heard them laughing and talking. Some of them were shouting something like, ‘oleh!’ Spanish, I thought, but I didn’t see any of them close, just a sea of faces in the night.”

  “One last question,” Marks said: “As you passed the entrance to the building near which the man was lying, did you notice a light in the vestibule?”

  “I wouldn’t know whether there was or not, Officer, but I’ve got an idea that if there was one, I’d have been able to see him better. You mustn’t think too bad of me for passing him by. A lone woman can get into a lot of trouble. Look at the one he was supposed to be visiting. Mind, I’m not saying anything against her.”

  “We’re not yet sure,” Marks said, getting up, “that he was visiting her.”

  “Then they shouldn’t put it in the papers,” she said piously.

  Going down in the elevator, Marks said to Herring: “There’s a saying in Yiddish that fits her: she wouldn’t touch a horse on the wall.”

  Outdoors the two detectives stood on the sidewalk looking down the street toward the area still blocked off for police search although no search was in evidence at the moment. Someone had chalked “Viva Fidel!” on the sidewalk and on the side of Mrs. Finney’s building. Marks grinned, thinking how that sentiment would sit with her. More soberly, he thought: a Spanish-speaking gang …

  Herring was thinking how different the street looked in the daytime from at night. There was a lumberyard across the street which with door closed at night looked like any other two-story building in the block. In the daytime you could see the courtyard within, the lumber piled up on either side. The possibilities fascinated him; he did not admit why to the Lieutenant, barely to himself: as a child he would have thought this The Most in secret hiding places.

  Marks was watching the approach, from far down the street, of two detectives moving from trash basket to trash basket. They were picking up in their wake a caravan of tiny street Arabs, children too young to learn their alphabets but old hands at baiting policemen.

  Herring visited the lumberyard; Marks went on to meet the search party, a couple of pretty sour cops. “How are you doing?”

  “Treasure, Lieutenant. Gold and frankincense and myrrh. Smell it?”

  Marks could smell over-ripe banana peel.

  The young detective raised the back of his hand threateningly to a dirty-faced, black-haired midget who was chinning himself on the rim of the basket. “Get out of here, you little baboons! Go on home! You got homes, ain’t you?”

  Marks tapped one of the gang on the shoulder. “You and your pals, come over here and talk to me.” He sat down on the steps of a brownstone not unlike that in which Anne Russo lived. “Know what happened on this street last night?” He looked into one suspicious pair of eyes after another.

  One of the youngsters made a clicking sound with his tongue, a very nasty sound when combined with the motion of snapping a switch blade. They knew.

  “Where do you live?”

  Two of them lived in the big apartment house opposite Anne Russo.

  “Do you know anyone who saw what happened?”

  The eyes grew larger, the heads wagged slowly in automatic no.

  “Let’s go and investigate,” Marks said.

  The two youngsters went with him, but with no great enthusiasm. Finally one of them looked up at him. “You’re a cop, ain’t you?”

  “I’m a detective cop,” Marks qualified. If that impressed them they didn’t show it.

  He could have predicted the greeting of the first mother: “Oh, God, what have they done now?” She called up the flight of stairs: “Maria!” and in a stream of Spanish announced that Maria’s son also was in whatever trouble had just brought a policeman to the house. Marks shook his head in vain. One of the youngsters shrugged philosophically. The other had just discovered the symbolism in the primitive art work scratched on the plaster walls. As he let out the gaseous sound of suppressed laughter, his mother picked him up by the thick, curly black hair and set him down inside the door. Marks edged his way into the apartment and crossed the room to the open window. A cushion lay on the floor beneath the sill. He was directly opposite Anne Russo’s house.

  Behind him the two mothers were exchanging sotto voce speculations about him, the curlers in their hair clacking like castanets. Marks decided to make a speech. He swung around, pointing at the same time to the street below. “A man was killed down there last night, a good man, an honest man, a teacher. Nobody behind this wall of windows saw or heard anything.” He put his finger to his eyes, to his ears. The women were watching him intently. He put the question: “Do you believe that?”

  Both shook their heads tentatively.

  “Neither do I,” he said, “but I need your help.”

  The woman to whom he had spoken first, in whose apartment they now were, came forward. She touched the cushion with her toe. “My mother-in-law,” she said. “Always she is looking out—with one eye. Otherwise she watches television.” She indicated the set across the room. The other young mother, coming timidly forward, nodded to confirm the mother-in-law’s habits. She was a lovely, dark girl, no more than twenty, proudly bearing an early pregnancy. An association brushed through Marks’s mind, too brief and fleeting to hold onto.

  “What did your mother-in-law see?” he asked.

  The girls looked from one to another, both evidently having heard the story.

  “Two men outside the building. One of them, he says ‘Come!’ and pulls the other’s arm. But the other, he don’t want to go. Then somebody calls out, ‘Doctor!’ and they all go in. After that …” Marks’s informant shrugged, “Mama looks at television. Later when the police all come she remembers and tells us.” She looked to her friend who confirmed the story with a vigorous nod.

  “Was there a car? Did the men come up to the building in a car?”

  “Mama did not say. Maybe, but maybe the car drives away?”

  The daughter-in-law, Marks thought, considered herself a reliable spokesman for Mama, and probably she was right. The testimony pleased him, a circumstance that put him on his guard. But Peter Bradley’s presence outside Anne Russo’s apartment building made a lot more sense if there was a doctor—or the pretense of a doctor involved. He could have been brought or persuaded there if he thought Anne Russo ill or injured.

  “This is very important,” Marks said. “Will your mother-in-law be able to tell us at what time this happened?”

  “What time? I will ask her.”

  Until then he had presumed she was not in the house. He followed the two young women as they scurried, chattering with each other, to the stairway. The children, he realized, had disappeared. Marks’s informant called up, cupping her mouth in her hands. “Mama Fernandez?”

  It was, even for him, a most unorthodox interview. He found himself looking up the stairwell at an enormous woman two flights up, nodding to her as she nodded back at him, and all the while a three-way exchange going on in Spanish among the women themselves. And after it all, the younger Mrs. Fernandez turned to him and sa
id: “She does not know.”

  “Ask her what was on the television?”

  The older woman’s gold tooth caught the sunlight. She understood his question herself. She did an effective pantomime of wrestling and then punctuated it by holding out two fingers as she leaned over the banister.

  “The second match?”

  “Sí!” She wagged her head, delighted that they had understood each other.

  “Gracias, señora. Buenos días.”

  It got him out just in time. He could not have gone a word further. He went to the corner phone booth and called the St. Nicholas Arena. After two dimes’ worth of transfers, he learned that the second match had gone on at nine forty. It was all over at ten thirteen. But so were a lot of other things.

  He walked slowly back to where Herring had joined the trash basket detail, the technical truck having pulled up alongside them. Using a pair of large tweezers with the delicacy of a surgeon, one of the technicians was lifting a bloodstained handkerchief from among the debris.

  eight

  MATHER’S FIRST CLASS ON Tuesday was not part of the curriculum: he coached a group of male delinquents who were having to face up to final examinations after a semester devoted to basketball and female anatomy. He found them as impossible to insult as they were to teach. They might know a member of the faculty to have been murdered the night before, but the fact that he was a physicist removed him from their personal concern as surely as if he had been a Kashmiri rug merchant. They read newspapers from back to front, starting with the sports page and reaching the comics. After that boredom set in. The only book they read in order to learn something they wanted to know was Fanny Hill. Mather watched the clock through that interminable period no less assiduously than they did.

  His second class was a different matter. Sophomores, they wanted to learn everything there was to learn at once. God help him on such days as this when he had come ill-prepared for class. But that morning they paid him the opening tribute of an awed silence when he entered the room. He reached his desk to learn that someone had placed The New York Times there, folded to the Bradley story. He caught his own name in the second column, listed as among those present at the dinner party. He scanned the faces before him, solemn, expectant boys and girls. He called them men and women, speaking to them, but they were not really. To them this death was probably romantic. They did not believe in death; they could be anti-war and anti-capital punishment, they could Remember Mississippi and pass out ban-the-bomb leaflets. But to them death had no sting. Nor had it had for him at their age. He thought briefly of the day he had saved Peter: that he might die himself jumping off that boat had not entered his mind at the time.

  He opened his briefcase and took from it a mimeographed review quiz.

  “Mr. Mather,” a silvery feminine voice requested from halfway back in the room, “would you read ‘Adonais’ aloud to us?”

  He looked at the girl without raising his head: her face shone with cherubic innocence. There were others in the class who could not so successfully dissemble. They feigned busyness.

  “I think not, Miss Adamson,” Mather said blandly, “but I should like to hear your rendition since it must be a favorite of yours.” Over the ocean-swell of protest from her classmates, Mather turned to the textbook index and said aloud: “Page one hundred seven: ‘Adonais’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Miss Adamson?”

  The next half-hour was no less an agony for Miss Adamson than for the rest of the class. For Mather the hour was simply to be got through; now a discussion of elegiac poetry would save him the humiliation of giving a stale quiz.

  As soon as he dismissed the class, Mather took the elevator to the Physics Department which occupied the entire top floor of the General Studies Building. He found Steinberg and the boys who had been at Bradley’s in a student conference room. They greeted him with some small camaraderie. He glanced at the blackboard. The names of the four of them had been written in block letters:

  ROBERT STEINBERG

  MITCHELL HOYTE

  ALVIN ROBBIE

  JAMES L. O’ROURKE

  “So the police could get them down right,” one of the boys said.

  Steinberg added: “They’ve just left.” He gestured toward a small box lying on the desk. “There’s the film we didn’t see last night.”

  “It wasn’t stolen?” Mather said carefully.

  “It was returned along with his wallet—without the money—in a public mailbox this morning.”

  “They must’ve got scared,” one of the boys said, “finding out who he was.”

  Mather did not say anything for a moment. There was no room left for doubt now that his original plan had been put into motion. “Where’s Anne?”

  “She’s gone down to the police lineup—or rogues’ gallery or whatever it is—to see if there’s anybody she recognizes.”

  Mather took a chance on the boy’s name: he was glad the names were on the board. He could never remember them. “Fill me in, will you, Robbie? I haven’t had the stomach to read the papers.”

  “I’m O’Rourke,” the young man said. “I don’t know what’s to tell, just that Annie saw a man going into her building when she went home for her glasses. The only thing she could remember about him was the smell of chewing gum when he went past her. But they took her down to the police station anyway.”

  Mather reached for his cigarettes, patting his pockets, anything to distract from his own dismay. Gum-chewing, idealistic, lovable Jerry. Let there be no more war!

  Steinberg pulled himself out of a morose lethargy. “I’m going over there now to take Louise some things. Do you want to come?”

  “I ought to see Janet,” he said. “Thanks. I’d like to go along.”

  On the way Steinberg peered out the cab window. Seeing a cluster of police cars near St. John’s Church, he asked the cab driver to stop. He motioned to one of the detectives, and asked him if he was working on the Bradley case. “You ought to have somebody question the news vendor on the corner of University and the park …”

  It was not that simple, the matter of giving a detective a lead: Steinberg had to identify himself and his connection with the case. He got out of the car. It gave the waiting cabbie a chance to tell Mather that the cops had already screened every cab coming into the area between 9:00 P.M. and 11:00 last night. “Don’t it make you wonder what they’re doing between murders, the way they’re swarming all over the place now?”

  “I can’t say that it does,” Mather said to shut him up. He supposed Jerry had a car; men in his profession were provided with what they needed.

  The cabbie was not to be put off. “It should, Mister. People like us forget the cops are civil servants. That means they work for us. Did you ever think of that? We the people.”

  Which put Mather in mind of the two detectives who had been waiting for him the night before. Better see a doctor about that toe. The city has a responsibility … They had taken his shoes. For what? Would they demand an X-ray of his toe? It occurred to him then that they had been searching the street afterwards for the knife, thinking he had taken the sprawl to get rid of it, to throw it away, the knife from Peter’s back. Could they be looking for Peter’s blood on his shoes? The thought of it made him physically ill. He rolled down the window.

  Steinberg, at the door of the cab, said: “I’m coming now.”

  In front of the Bradley house Mather stood for a moment looking up at the second-floor windows.

  “Come on,” Steinberg said.

  “I don’t know what to say to Janet.”

  “Don’t say anything. Or else say you’re sorry and you’d like to get your hands on the bastard.”

  “If you could get your hands on him, Bob, what would you do?”

  Steinberg shifted Louise’s valise from one hand to the other. “Come on. This kind of talk doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  Mather followed him up the steps. “In tribal times it was easy, wasn’t it? You just cut him off and the world o
utside devoured him. And that was fine. Men didn’t have to kill their own.” In the vestibule, waiting for the release of the lock, he added: “That’s one of the refinements of civilization, isn’t it? the ability to kill one’s own?”

  “Nonsense,” Steinberg said. “Men like to kill when they think they have to. There’s no other explanation for it, war and the whole bloody bit. You’d think that the thought of their own mortality would hold them back. It’s just the opposite. They live. Inside themselves killers live because they’ve killed.”

  The lock-release clicked and they went upstairs. Mather did not suppose Steinberg had ever spoken to him directly before. Louise hugged her husband sloppily and then gave Mather very nearly the same treatment. All emotion. Her eyes were red from weeping. Death had its intimacy for her—but so did life: the flesh was good. Louise lived with all her senses and from them evoked zest and joy and such pleasures, Mather was sure, as he had never known. Sometimes he was revolted by her, put off the more because she was one of the few people who accepted him for his own sake. He now returned her embrace with fervor, shutting out the brief insight to his own sickness.

  There were a number of people in the livingroom, Peter’s brothers who had flown out from Chicago, Louise explained. They would go back together for the funeral. Peter was to be cremated. And Janet’s family had come from Bridgeport, and Dr. Bauer was there …

  Janet came to them then, her hands outstretched, but her whole body straightened as in some invisible armor. The touch of her cold hands claiming, it seemed, the warmth in his, moved him profoundly. He rubbed them and lifted them to his lips, cherishing to his heart’s depth the little throb of response he quickened in them. Not until she had withdrawn them did she allow her eyes to directly meet his. Whatever their message, he could not probe it, for his own eyes bleared.

  Janet kissed Steinberg lightly and thanked him for his kindness, and for letting Louise stay with her. “I don’t know what I should do without her.”

  It happened without Mather’s knowing: a great sob escaped him, a cry that seemed the louder for his trying to cover it with other sounds. People turned from the far room to stare at him and their image froze in his mind, the disapproving faces peering round chairbacks, a Gothic starkness to them: it was as though the whole of his Puritan ancestry were pillorying him with their rebuke.