The Pale Betrayer Read online

  “They probably think the same of us.” Marks called the desk to see if Pererro had reported in. There was no question in his mind that Mather was the enigma in the lot.

  “Yes, sir,” the desk sergeant said. “I told him you were busy so he went in to the Captain’s round-up. I’ll get hold of him right away.”

  “Never mind,” Marks said. “I’ll come down.”

  Some twenty detectives had gathered around Redmond in the squadroom. Seeing Marks, Redmond invited him to join them. It was Marks’s first real opportunity to see the Captain in action with his men. He was halfway through briefing them on the general background of the case, the combined work of his department and homicide: the findings of the medical examiner, the nature of the assault and its possible motive, the theft and return of everything on the victim’s person except his money.

  Each man reported on his own detail, including Herring, who afterwards told Marks he had been transferred to the detective force with a second-grade rank. The admirable achievement of what Redmond called his “round-up” was that every man working on the case and not out on assignment at the time, was made aware of the full picture.

  Marks himself picked up certain information he had not known:

  Anne Russo’s story of taking the Ninth Street bus had been corroborated by the driver, a regular on the run.

  Peter Bradley had purchased a package of cigarettes at Third Avenue and St. Mark’s, which left little doubt that he had approached the laboratory building from Astor Place, a desolate stretch after business hours.

  The preliminary report on the bloodstained handkerchief had come in from the laboratory: it had undoubtedly been used by the killer—the blood type checked with Bradley’s; no identification marks; mass laundered, the laundering chemicals were now under analysis. The handkerchief had been disposed of in a trash basket half a block east and two blocks north of the scene.

  Pererro and his partner, their findings not yet evaluated, merely so reported, and at the end of the session, gave Marks the rundown he had been waiting for. Mather’s itinerary from the Red Lantern on pretty accurately checked out. The bartender at the Red Lantern was sure that Mather had been there by nine thirty.

  “How could he be sure?” Marks demanded. “Did he look at his watch? Does he keep that tight a check on all his customers?” The apparent neatness of the timing in this whole operation was infuriating.

  Pererro said: “This is how he knew, sir: at a quarter to ten there’s an intermission break at the Triangle Theater across the street and a crowd comes in for a quick drink. Mather had to fight his way out through that crowd when he was leaving, and the bartender knew he’d been there fifteen or twenty minutes before that. He was a guy you couldn’t miss, sir. He’d been reciting for the kids. You couldn’t miss him any place he was last night.”

  “Okay, okay,” Marks said, aware of Pererro’s defensive “sirs.”

  “‘He had to fight his way out.’ Is that how the witness put it?”

  Pererro consulted his shorthand. “Yes, sir. His very words.”

  Marks grunted.

  “The kids meet there every night almost, Lieutenant. They got a club they call the Imagists, whatever the hell that is.”

  Marks intended to find that out for himself. But first he wanted to pay another visit to the Bradley house.

  eleven

  MARKS STOOD A FEW moments across the street from the Bradleys’, studying the neighborhood, watching the children pass on their way home from school. There was a nineteenth-century atmosphere to the street—the graceful poplar trees, the fine old houses shoulder to shoulder, all well kept, their shutters neat and freshly painted. Most of the children went on, he noticed. This was not a street of large families. And to his back where he stood was the Armory, a city block of solid stone with high windows out of which no one ever looked. All day the police had sifted the area for anyone who might have seen Bradley leave the house. No one had yet been turned up who had seen him before he reached the gates of St. John’s Church. People were moving to and fro within the Bradley second-floor apartment. There were lights on in the middle rooms. As he crossed the street he saw Louise coming along the Bradley side with an armful of groceries. He went to meet her and took the bag.

  “Things I forgot to order. I don’t know what it is between me and the telephone. I keep feeling it’s trying to gyp me.”

  Marks held the outside door. “How’s Mrs. Bradley?”

  Louise shrugged. “Everybody’s here. Family, I mean. There’s going to be a service at St. John’s tomorrow. Then Chicago for the burial.” She glanced at the mailboxes in the vestibule while rummaging in her pocket for the door key. “Something this morning that really threw me: I came down for the mail and there was a postcard from Peter—mailed in Athens before he left there. I didn’t show it to Janet. I hid it in my purse and I’ve kept thinking about it all day—like it was something alive in there.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “It’s upstairs. I just brought my change purse.”

  Marks and Louise went directly into the kitchen. It was like being household help, Marks thought, vaguely liking it.

  “Sit down and have a cup of coffee,” Louise said.

  Marks sat at the table while Louise turned on the gas under the coffee pot. A feeling remembered from childhood came over him: coming home to something happening in the kitchen. A baked ham was cooling on the table, the glaze shining and mottled with brown crust, the juices seeping down to the plate. The aroma made his eyes as well as his mouth water. Louise surprised him staring at the roast.

  “I didn’t have any lunch,” he blurted out.

  Louise covered her mouth to stifle the laughter. She made him a sandwich, slicing directly into the middle of the ham.

  While he was eating she brought the postcard, looking first to make sure that Janet was at the front of the house.

  It was a colorful picture of the Plaka, the old section of Athens teeming with activity beneath the awesome whiteness of the Acropolis. The message read: “Even as two thousand years ago. I want to see more. And you with me next time.”

  “‘I want to see more,’” Marks said, and gave back the card which Louise returned to her purse.

  “That’s the story of his short, short life. My God. You’d think he was a poet to die so young.”

  “Poets are living longer these days,” Marks said.

  “He could have been one, you know. Maybe he was in a way. Eric always called him the Renaissance man. Peter started in literature, switched to history his last year in college, and finally to science. He took a lot of math of course all the way.”

  “Did he ever consider medicine?” Marks asked, his mind returning to the involvement of “a doctor” in his death.

  “He left that to the rest of the family. Both of his brothers are doctors.” Louise put her purse in a cupboard. “He always wanted to do more, to see more, to understand better. Janet told me once that his journal was marvelous—a thousand questions. Even his answers asked questions.” She refilled Marks’s coffee cup and poured a cup for herself. “What tears your heart out now is that all there’s left is the ‘why?’ Why did he have to die—that way?”

  Marks said: “It isn’t hard enough to give life meaning. You want death to mean something too.”

  Louise smiled ruefully, studied her coffee for a moment, then lifted the mug. “Skol.”

  “Skol,” Marks said. “The truth is, Mrs. Steinberg …”

  Louise interrupted him. “Nobody calls me Mrs. Steinberg, not even the milkman. Louise.”

  “Louise,” Marks repeated. “We’ve reached the place where we’re asking why, too. It wasn’t the money in his wallet. I’m almost sure of that. There was a plan, and when there’s a plan there’s brains at work, and they work on something already known. I keep wondering if something went wrong with somebody’s plan, if maybe it wasn’t intended that he be killed. If there was a plan that didn’t include death—what went wrong
with it? Did he recognize someone? I could be completely wrong about this, Louise, but I can’t help feeling that the most ruthless killer would still think twice before destroying a person of Dr. Bradley’s stature. I’m sure the return of the empty wallet and the briefcase was an afterthought, something intended to throw us off the track. Was somebody trying to frame him with Anne Russo? If something went wrong, what was supposed to have gone right?”

  Louise was just looking at him. Finally she said: “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I’m just thinking aloud.” Marks finished his coffee and got to his feet. “I wonder if you would ask Mrs. Bradley if I might see her husband’s journal, if I might have permission to go over her husband’s papers?”

  A few minutes later Marks sat alone in Peter Bradley’s study. Janet herself about to close the door on him turned back to where he was sitting in the swivel chair at the desk. “That chair squeaks terribly,” she said. “Peter was always going to oil it, but he never did.”

  Marks, knowing her thought to be that he never would do it now, got up carefully from the chair when she was gone and exchanged it for the straight one by the window.

  There was a lot of the adolescent in him still, Marks thought of himself, as he lifted and looked at one and another of the books on the desk and finally opened the notebook Bradley had used for his journal. In the atmosphere of scholarship, he longed to be a scholar. Much of the journal was incomprehensible to him, equations and mathematical symbols. The question marks he understood, but not the questions. He remembered that Steinberg had offered the loan of a book. What he really needed was to start school all over again. Then he lost himself in the non-scientific entries, discovering Bradley the human being. Most of his entries did end in questions. Marks was amused at his remarks on a very successful modern composer:

  “Discovered another of his sources tonight, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. He is an original composer, using the original as his source. But then, where did Beethoven pick up that theme?”

  He read on, looking for personal items, comments on family, friends, colleagues, of which there were virtually none, unless they were anecdotal, as for example the last entry in the book, written in Athens three days before:

  “After today’s session, Grysenko and I walked through the Plaka and searched out the Byron monument. All the Russians I’ve ever met love market places. I do too. We sat for a while in the little park. I tried to explain that Byron, an English poet, had fought for the Greeks in their war of independence. G. was profoundly skeptical. ‘An Englishman?’ he kept saying and he would shake his head. ‘I cannot believe that.’”

  The house was all stillness when Marks had finished. He found Louise asleep in a wing chair, her shoes tossed aside. The others had all gone away, perhaps to the funeral parlor. He stooped down and put the shoes side by side beneath the chair, and then let himself out of the apartment, the door automatically locking behind him.

  twelve

  MATHER PREPARED HIS NEXT day’s classes in the few cubic feet of space he called his office. It was actually a desk in the Department’s common room, a room generally avoided by the faculty except as a place to drop off odd encumbrances picked up throughout the day, a belatedly returned book, a picture frame, a tie that should better have gone to the cleaner’s. He put his lecture notes in comprehensible order for the substitute teacher who would take the Victorian Novel, a class scheduled for the hour at which he would be attending the memorial service for Peter Bradley.

  His desk cleared, he rummaged through a drawerful of books for one that might fit his pocket and came out with a small volume of Auden’s poems. Then, repeating a habit with him since childhood, he closed his eyes, concentrated for a moment—(his grandmother had taught him the practice in connection with Bible reading)—and opened the book at random. He had opened it to a poem in memory of Yeats which in itself seemed an omen. Or so his grandmother would have said. He scanned the page avidly seeking the deeper message.

  “But for him it was his last afternoon as himself …”

  Mather had found what he sought, a sort of poetic jolt that enabled him to contact truth. The stabbing poignancy of the words cut through him: death’s denial of life’s greatest gift, a personal, inviolate identity. He pocketed the book and walked out through the building deep within his own thoughts and with no consciousness of whom he met or what that person thought of him, with no quip on his tongue, no falseness.

  He waited outside the laboratory building for Anne Russo, having checked the sign-in book to know that she was there. It was the last frantic hour of the business day and he could feel the fire hydrant on which he sat reverberate with the rolling, throbbing traffic. Why, he wondered, had he ever allowed the city to prison him? He knew of course: the search for anonymity, the attempt to lose himself. As though one were ever lost until entirely exposed and beyond caring as only death could make him. He took the book from his pocket and opened it. A police car rolled slowly up to the curb. Aware of it at the margin of his vision, he looked up and down at the book again. Detectives, he knew, though he had not recognized them. All day he had been waiting, fearing, yet somehow craving that next encounter with the liquid-eyed Lieutenant.

  Two of the detectives got out of the car and went into the building, scarcely glancing at him as they passed. The car moved on. A moment later Anne came out of the building alone.

  “Carry your books, Miss?” he said, getting up.

  “Eric.” Anne often vacillated between Eric and Mr. Mather. Today there was no hesitancy.

  He said: “Let me buy you dinner. I want to talk.”

  “I’m dirty,” Anne said, “but I guess that doesn’t matter.”

  “We’re all dirty,” Mather said, “and it matters very much, but the question is: what can we do about it?”

  They walked to the corner and toward the park, the cursed park that was his preserve on the ridge of hell. Anne was carrying a shoulder bag of tightly woven wool, colors as vivid as the Greek flag. If he were not mistaken, it was Greek-made. “Can I carry that for you?”

  “It’s fine really,” Anne said. “I’m used to it.”

  “It looks new.” Mather could have bit his tongue.

  Anne’s color flared up and her black eyes snapped. She said nothing. Then a few seconds later at the park gate she stopped. He took her arm and gently propelled her along. “Please don’t say you’ve changed your mind. I too am under suspicion. The police still have the shoes they took off my feet last night.”

  “What would they want with them I wonder.”

  “They often tell the truth of where a man has been I should suppose. Or perhaps of where a man has not been.”

  He chose a small restaurant with decent food and very little early custom. He asked Anne if she would have a drink.

  “You bet.”

  He ordered two very dry martinis. “Right?”

  Anne nodded.

  “Anne, when you went through the police files or whatever, did you find a face you recognized?”

  She shook her head. “It was impossible. The more I think about him the less I remember what he looked like.”

  “Was there something terribly American about him?”

  Anne looked puzzled. “What’s terribly American?”

  Mather shrugged. He had hoped to spark something, and he had not even bothered to cover himself. He offered Anne a cigarette and took it himself when she refused.

  “I’m letting everybody down I know,” Anne said. “But I’m no good at this free-association bit. I’m a simple-minded, up and down, black and white thinker. I only know what I see and I didn’t really see him.”

  The martinis came. They touched glasses and Anne took a sip. “Why, Eric? Why did it happen?”

  He just stared into the glass. A little golden bead of lemon oil was floating within the crest of rind.

  “Because somebody was afraid?” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”<
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  Anne shook her hair back over her shoulders. “I don’t know how anybody kills if he’s not afraid. But how could you be afraid of Peter?”

  “Weren’t you ever afraid of him—intellectually?”

  “No,” she said with utter frankness.

  Mather grinned wryly. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s from Shakespeare …”

  “I know that,” she interrupted. “What do you mean by it? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Are you always so devastatingly forthright?” Mather took a deep pull at his drink. He could feel it right down through his loins.

  “I am direct,” she said, somewhat subdued.

  Mather laughed at the understatement. He said: “I think what I meant was that when one’s mind is the match for another person’s, the two people can make contact without all the hypocritical subterfuge in which we disguise inadequacy.”

  “What do you mean by contact?”

  Mather threw up his hand. “Nothing dirty certainly!”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to make clear,” Anne said. “There was nothing like that between Peter and me.”

  “If there had been something, would you have thought it dirty?”

  “That’s a silly question, Eric.”

  “I don’t see why you should think so.”

  “Any question based on a false assumption is pointless.”

  “Mathematically speaking,” Mather said, “but the human heart is a vast hunting ground, and the only guideposts are such hypotheses. Don’t you forget it. Now finish your drink and we’ll have another while we order dinner.”

  Anne grinned at him. “Gee,” she said, “you’re great.”

  And that reaction quite unnerved him. It was a straight and impulsive compliment from the girl. He had not sought it and he unquestioningly believed it to be sincere. The sadness he felt coming over him was unutterable: it was as though that which he had loved most had to die before he had been able to live. He thought then, looking at the blackening rind in the bottom of his empty glass, that his own sickness, like the ancient plague, had only death for its curative.