The Pale Betrayer Read online

  Janet did not look back; her body a little stiffer, she moved steadily toward the brethren. Mather turned and went out the door, moving quickly so that Louise might not follow him. He ran down the stairs. Solace would be more than he could stand, as was love—if that was what was rising in him above the dirge. If Janet loved him—could love him—and he could love. What did it mean, simply to love? Unashamed and unresisting, letting the heart’s song soar?

  Was it Saul on his knees, blind and humble, crying out: “I believe!”

  nine

  OFFICER WALTER HERRING COULD not say why that lumberyard so fascinated him. It was not simply that he liked the smell of new wood, though he did that. One of the things he longed most for was a house he could walk into that was all wood, new shining wood. No plaster, no steel foundations, no thousand other families moving in on the same day. Just a house made of wood and a yard with trees. Something nagged at him about the lumberyard. The more he thought about it, the surer he was that he had known that it was there all the time but had forgotten about it until this morning. Why that mattered he couldn’t figure out either. He tried to explain to Marks the way the thing kept nagging at him.

  “I guess it’s what you call a hunch. What I’d like to do, sir, I got the address of a guy who does a watchman’s job there nights—works some other places round here too—I’d just like to check him out.”

  “Go to it,” Marks said. They were on their way back to headquarters, Marks driving a precinct car that seemed to be missing on at least two cylinders. “What’s the address and I’ll see if this old dog can get us there?”

  Herring gave him the address. “Did you read about the guy who bought the old police car at auction? Before he got it to the paint shop he’d been stopped by five patrol cars. Lieutenant, oughtn’t I to check in the station first?”

  “I’ll check you in with Redmond when I get back. The Captain’s a decent sort, isn’t he?”

  “They don’t come any decenter than Captain Redmond. No, sir.”

  “Then get something,” Marks said, “and do us all some good.”

  A half-hour later Herring had something. He brought Fred Bolardo in for questioning. Marks and Captain Redmond listened to the watchman give his statement, Herring handling the interrogation.

  “About two weeks ago I was closing up the yard for the night. I always do that, checking in the last truck, sometimes as late as seven o’clock. Then I padlocks the door. I come around again about midnight after that, just checking up. Kids broke in there once. Stole a keg of nails …”

  Herring sat, his arms folded, just letting the man talk. The testimony was feeding into a tape recorder. Herring even smiled a little when Bolardo, a melancholy string of a man with a fringe of white hair, added: “Little bastards only wanted the keg, dumped the nails in the driveway.” Marks observed that Redmond was measuring his precinct cop.

  “You were going to tell us what happened two weeks ago,” Herring prompted gently.

  “I don’t get paid much … Hell, I told it to you once. I ain’t going to get into any more trouble, telling it again, am I?” Herring shook his head. “This doctor came up to me and asked me if I couldn’t let him park his car in the drive there nights. Just early nights—say seven o’clock till nine or ten while he was seeing patients in the neighborhood …”

  Marks and Redmond looked at each other. Mama Fernandez’s “doctor?”

  Herring held the witness to his story:

  “We worked it out. I got him a key made for the padlock, and he paid me ten bucks for the first month. I was chiseling, sure. But there wasn’t any harm. I kind of thought I was doing good, giving a doctor a place to park. His car’d been broken into, and he was scared, the way the crazy kids these days are doing anything to lay their hands on drugs and things.”

  “Try and give us a description of the car, Mr. Bolardo.”

  “Like I told you at the house, I didn’t look much at the car—a black sedan is all I can tell you. Four doors maybe.”

  Herring smiled. “That’s something you didn’t remember up till now.”

  “I remember him opening the back door for something. And I looked to make sure there was an M.D. on the license plate. You know the funny thing was, he almost scotched the deal talking about the drugs he had to carry. I got thinking maybe he was looking for some kind of a hideout, or maybe a meeting place.”

  “You didn’t see the license number?”

  “I seen it but I don’t remember except it was New York and the M.D. on it.”

  “Do you think you could tell us anything about the man?”

  “Not much more than I already did. Kind of skinny and sallow. Not much of a dresser. Like his car, a little rundown you might say. Never got a name for him either. I just called him Doctor and he called me doc.”

  Marks hated to do it to Herring, but he moved in. “Fred, tell us the truth now. Deep down, weren’t you hoping that he was in fact peddling the drugs?” The witness began to shake his head. “Weren’t you counting on that possibility as a way to get more than a measly ten dollars a month from him? Don’t ask us to believe you’d have been willing to put your job on the line for a lousy ten bucks.”

  “You’re wrong, Mister. Ten bucks may be lousy to you, but that was going to bring up to thirty what I was taking home from the Eastside Lumber Company.”

  “Okay,” Marks said. “We had to find out. Was he the conversational type? Did he talk much?”

  “He was mighty careful how he talked, the words, you know? Like maybe he was a foreigner. I’m not saying he was, but I got that feeling.”

  “There’s plenty of them in that neighborhood,” Redmond said. “I suppose they got some of their own doctors among them.”

  “I don’t figure he lived in the neighborhood,” Bolardo said. “Don’t seem he’d need a place to park like that if he did.”

  Herring, without looking at his superiors and having planned his own line of attack which he did not want broken, said: “Now about early this morning, Mr. Bolardo, the call from your boss. Tell us about that.”

  “Well, sir. I don’t know what it means after what happened down the street …”

  “Just tell it the best you can,” Herring said. “Don’t worry what it means.”

  “The boss called up at 8:00 A.M. He was mighty sore and I can’t blame him none. That damn-fool absentminded doctor forgot to padlock the door last night. He closed it all right, but forgot to snap the padlock on it. The boss thought it was me, you see, and I’d just as soon he didn’t find out.”

  The situation suggested just one thing to the policemen: whoever had taken the car out was in a hurry.

  Herring snapped off the machine and rolled up the tape. He took it along to have transcribed for Bolardo to sign.

  Redmond and Marks left the watchman with a hasp of “Wanted” flyers to see if he could find a familiar face among them. Redmond could think offhand of several known criminals who sometimes passed themselves off as doctors. A check was made to learn whether any M.D. license plates had been reported stolen. The results on both lines of inquiry: negative.

  Fitzgerald put his finger on what proved the most significant link between testimonies to the hour: the precision of the wound and the nature of the weapon. A surgical knife fit the description perfectly, and it would very nearly have required a doctor’s hand to do so clean a job. There was no report yet on the bloodstained handkerchief.

  “Surgeons don’t ordinarily carry instruments out of the hospital, do they?” Redmond mused aloud.

  “Only when they have homicide on their minds,” Fitzgerald said, and curled his lip nastily.

  Redmond colored to the roots of his dark red hair. He said nothing, but went to his desk and set noisily about the routine of his command. Marks sympathized with him. Technically in charge of the investigation, he was not really on his own until Fitzgerald let go, and this the old man showed no signs of doing at the moment. Marks put another yellow-headed pin on the area m
ap, marking the location of the Eastside Lumber Company, and wrote the legend for it on a card for the chart.

  Fitzgerald watched till he was through. “This one’s got everything, Dave. Even spooks. What do you make of this?” He handed Marks the interrogation report on the news vendor at the corner of the University and the park. Hank Zabrisky’s testimony read in part:

  “Q. Do you mean Dr. Steinberg?

  A. The one with the glasses, yes. He come by the stand about ten thirty and asks me if I’d seen Professor Bradley. I says at first I had. Then I remembered it was the young lady, Miss Russo, I seen. But there’s something screwy about it. I don’t remember seeing him and yet I felt at the time I did, you know? …”

  Fitzgerald said: “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “It might be worth another try,” Marks said. He wanted to go over the university ground himself anyway. He thought of asking Redmond for the use of a better car. The time didn’t seem right somehow.

  Marks took seven feet of bus stop in which to park. A young student leaning on the route sign, an open book dangling from his hand, watched him cynically. The boy’s eyes wandered toward the corner restaurant: the cop enjoying illegal parking privileges. Marks wondered if he would ever get over the little twinges of guilt he felt at such moments. He had thought of lunch, seeing the restaurant. But not now. Go parse your nouns, sonny: he took a long slow look at him, and the boy moved away.

  This was the corner at which Anne Russo had got off the bus. The newsstand was across the street. And across the street in the other direction was the public phone booth. The laboratory building was two blocks beyond the main university building, its entrance around the corner and out of sight from where Marks stood. He passed up the news vendor for the moment, and followed what he assumed to have been Anne Russo’s route of the night before. From the park east, once you had passed the University, this became as tough an area as any in the city. It had been for over a hundred years. The Astor Place Riots of 1849 had been partially fought through here.

  Mark went into the building, the ground floor a warehouse. An old man was sitting on a stool outside the elevator cage working over the day’s entries at Aqueduct.

  “The Physics Laboratory?” Marks asked.

  “Nobody down there now,” the man said.

  Down. Somehow he had expected up. He consulted the sign-in book on the ledger stand. Steinberg and Bauer had signed in at seven forty that morning along with two other names Marks supposed to be government investigators. They had signed out again at eight ten; that was how long it would have taken them to look at the film.

  He turned back the page to look at the sign-ins of the night before: Steinberg, Hoyte, O’Rourke, Robbie at nine twenty-five, Russo at nine fifty. The boys had been questioned that morning; they were due at the precinct house late in the afternoon when he would go over the dinner party with them himself. They had all signed out at ten forty-five the night before.

  Marks went outside again. Up the street a group of teen-agers were playing cards on an open stoop. In the momentary lull of traffic he could hear the ping of coins on cement. A drunk was kibitzing the game, trying to connect with the winner for the price of a jug of smoke. The Bowery spilled its overflow into this particular stretch of off-Broadway. A truck driver, trying to get his ton of paving blocks past a game of stick ball had to pull up and wait the kids’ convenience. Marks wondered that the youngsters were not in school and then realized that the day was getting on. The truck driver blasted away with his horn and the street became a tunnel of noise. Gristle and nerve against stone and machine. Marks noted the east to west pattern of traffic: one way.

  He walked back to the newsstand. Its owner was garrulous and minus at least six front teeth. He would dart the tip of his tongue through the yellow archway of his molars by way of giving emphasis—or wit—to what he had to say.

  “You’re the third man what asked me this, you know, and all youse are doing is driving the whole picture out of my mind.”

  “Do you have a picture?” Marks said.

  “Of course I got a picture. You don’t think I’m making it up as I go along?” The tongue darted out and in. “I seen Miss Russo getting off the bus. Now mind, I didn’t see her get off the bus, but when the bus passed, then I seen her cross the street. Then the truck came with the Timeses, and he shouts out the window to me …” The tongue came to rest and the vendor just stared at Marks, a look of awe on his face. Slowly he nodded his head: he was remembering something hitherto forgotten.

  “The window, the car window,” he said with mounting excitement. “I did see the Professor. I knew I’d seen him! He come by here in a car.”

  “Professor Bradley? Are you sure? Did he wave to you?”

  “I’m sure but I wouldn’t swear. It looked like him. But I never seen him in a car before. He always come walking by and reminding me to save him a Times.”

  “Did he wave to you?” Marks repeated.

  “No, nothing like that. He was just sitting and another guy was driving …”

  “Coming toward you?” Marks interrupted, indicating the direction.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Against the traffic on a one-way street?”

  “They must’ve been but there wasn’t no traffic.” Hank was holding fast to the picture in his mind’s eye.

  “Then you’d have got a good look at the car,” Marks said.

  Hank shook his head. “It was just over, you know, in a few seconds. I didn’t even think about it till people started asking questions, just a plain ordinary sedan. Black maybe. I don’t remember no color.”

  Marks studied the street. Whoever had picked Bradley up had probably done so directly in front of the laboratory, both of them having reached there by coming from the easterly direction. If Bradley had passed this spot, walking, Hank would have known it. “Was it before or after Miss Russo got off the bus that you saw the Professor, Hank?”

  “If I did see him,” Hank said, now full of doubts again, “it must’ve been before. Once the Timeses come in, you see …”

  It was remarkable, Marks thought, driving away and once more forgetting lunch, how the events of the night seemed to dovetail. And as Inspector Fitzgerald would be the first to point out, it was amazing how Miss Russo had avoided bumping into Bradley himself. Hers had been the one unpredicted—unchartered—course so far as Bradley’s assailants were concerned. Or had it been? Without stronger proof, no reasonable detective could eliminate her from complicity.

  It now, more than ever, had to come down to motive.

  ten

  BY MID-AFTERNOON MARKS was able to compare the statements of all those who had attended the Bradley dinner. The physics group had been invited through Bob Steinberg whom Louise had called at the office just before lunch. “Janet wants us to come up for a drink and a bite to eat about six. Peter will be home.” The wording of Steinberg’s announcement to the group did not vary much from one man’s version to another’s. Nor indeed did any other testimony, including Anne’s and Bob Steinberg’s.

  They had all known about the film, but until talking with Peter, they had tended to be suspicious of a gift the Russians were making such good propaganda out of. Peter, however, as young O’Rourke put it, had caught fire in Athens. He had a hunch they might have been given something worthwhile.

  None of them had arrived for dinner thinking they would be going on to the laboratory afterwards. But none of them was surprised when it was decided to go. The curious thing was—and Marks had been particularly careful in his uniform phrasing of the question to each of them—no one was able to say positively who had brought the matter to a head. Anne thought it happened when Louise said: “You aren’t going to the lab tonight, are you?” Steinberg assumed they were going from the moment Bradley himself said: “It wouldn’t take long after setting up.” O’Rourke had suggested that he and the other fellows would go along early and set up. Steinberg said they would all go together. It was understood that Bradley wou
ld come later, so thoroughly understood that not even a passing reference was made to the fact.

  No one remembered Eric Mather to have been in on any part of their conversation. But then not one of the scientists mentioned Mather in his statement beyond listing him among those present, except Anne. Two of the boys could not even remember his name. Anne recalled having facetiously invited him to come along and see the film.

  Marks probed her on why she had asked him.

  Anne bit at her thumb while she thought about it. She looked so earnest, Marks thought, so eager to help, he would turn in his badge if she were in any way implicated. “I guess I must have thought he would say something clever,” she answered finally.

  “And did he?”

  “Not very. He said Russian movies were too hammy. Something like that.”

  Marks was also particularly careful in the way he asked: “If the dinner party had been given at Mather’s, say, would you have gone?”

  The answer was the same from all of them: if the party had been given for Peter Bradley, yes. But the three young men added that if it had been given there they did not think they would have been invited. Steinberg had been at Mather’s place on a few occasions. He had had a couple of good chess games with Mather. Except for that, he said, he’d rather go to the Dean of Women’s tea party. For one thing you got as much to eat there as at Mather’s.

  The three male students had not been out of each other’s presence from the time of their arrival at Bradley’s until they left the laboratory at ten forty-five. Marks saw no need to involve them further in the investigation, and Fitzgerald agreed.

  “They’re a tribe to themselves, aren’t they?” the Inspector remarked.