The Faceless Adversary Read online

  He stopped. John was still shaking his head. He hardly heard Grady over the pounding of the questions in his mind—the roaring of doubt in his mind. Are you sure? something demanded in his mind, shouted in his mind. Were you never here before? When you stood on the platform of the foyer you felt the place familiar. Because it was like other apartments of a common kind? Or—because you have been here before? Have forgotten you were here before?

  Fantasy of doubt swirled in his mind. Surely it was fantasy. It was not—it was mad to think it might be—that he had lived this other life and, somehow, because of some slippage of the mind, forgotten he had lived it. Had known the girl. Had—killed the girl. And that his mind, recoiling from the decision it had made, from the act itself, had blotted out, in a frantic effort to hide, all the part of his life which had led up to this unbearable horror.

  The mind is strange, John thought. Already, in these hours, I have discovered the strangeness of the mind—have learned that order is not certain; that logic is a façade only. Because all the logic points—

  It was as if the swirling fear, the nightmare in his mind, had been a bubble, and suddenly the bubble broke. His mind moved slowly, heavily, back to what was real. (Only a flicker remained; only the echo of a question. Are you certain? Are you certain beyond all doubt?)

  “The murderer must have put it there,” John said, his voice low, each word spoken carefully.

  Grady laughed.

  III

  They took him from the living room into a bedroom with twin beds. They asked him whether the room did not refresh his memory. They took him into the bathroom, and pointed to a big bath towel which lay huddled on the floor. Nora Evans had dried herself on the towel, stepping hurriedly from the bath. She had dropped the towel on the floor, in her haste. Grady bent and touched it with the tips of his fingers. “Still a little damp,” he said. John said nothing.

  Grady opened a medicine cabinet. He pointed to an electric razor on one of the shelves. “Yours, isn’t it?” he said, and then John said, “No,” and, to Shapiro, “I told you I’d never used one.”

  “That’s right,” Shapiro said. “That’s what you told me.”

  “You could see I wasn’t familiar with it,” John said.

  “That’s right,” Shapiro said. “That’s the way it looked.”

  They took him into a small kitchen off the living room. There was a breakfast table there. “Used to stay to breakfast, probably,” Grady said. John shook his head.

  They took him back into the bedroom and opened a large closet, with a girl’s clothes hanging in it. “Things you bought her, aren’t they?” Grady said, and John did not answer.

  Grady pointed to a bathrobe, hanging on a hook in the back wall of the closet. “Yours, isn’t it?” he said. This time, John said, “No,” and Grady merely shrugged. There probably wasn’t, John thought, anything to connect him with the bathrobe. That was why they had left it there; why Grady did no more than shrug. That was something. Obviously, it wasn’t much.

  They took him out of the apartment, and down in the elevator. The fat man and his vacuum cleaner were gone from the small lobby. Presumably, John thought, the fat man had been told to be there at a certain time, had left afterward to go about whatever affairs he had to go about.

  They went back to the station house and John Hayward, white, age thirty-two years, was booked on suspicion of homicide. He was fingerprinted. He was told that, now, he could make a telephone call, and a booth was pointed out to him. He reached into empty pockets, and Shapiro gave him a dime. He went into the booth and put the dime in the slot and started to dial the number of the one person he wanted to talk to. But he dialed only the exchange letters and numeral, and then hung the receiver up. The dime rattled into the metal pocket at the bottom of the instrument and John took it out and gave it back to Shapiro.

  “Don’t answer,” John said. “I’ll try again later.”

  They took him back to the cell, then, and locked him into it. He sat on the cot for a time, shielding his eyes with his hands, trying to make his mind work. Then he lay back on the cot and went to sleep, and, though he slept in a turmoil of dreams, he could not, when he wakened, remember more of them than a montage of faces. He could not remember the faces.

  Some sound awakened him. He looked at his watch, and found it was after five o’clock. They had left him alone for hours—for almost seven hours. For a moment, between sleep and wakefulness, he had a fear—which he knew to be irrational even while it flared in his mind—that they had forgotten him—locked him up and forgotten him. In that instant, he had a great impulse to stand at the locked door and beat on it. But that passed as quickly as it had come. He sat on the cot, and lighted a cigarette, and his mind was much clearer than it had been. His belief in logic, in essential order, crept back.

  It was not a mistake. That was evident, now. This was something which had, deliberately, been done to him—something which had been thought out, carefully, step by step, from first conception to the final crushing force of hands on a girl’s throat. Something which had been done to him, and to a slender, pretty girl, who might have thought, in the instant before she knew, that the hands were lover’s hands. (It was planned. Remember that. Hold to that.)

  For, if a thing is planned, thought out, the plan can be discerned. The course of the thought can be retraced. That was what he had to do. Because—and this, now, was entirely clear—they had enough, had been given enough. They had the proof, made up of little things, and big things. It was proof of a lie, but it could be proof enough. Against it, he had only the nakedness of denial. He must have more.

  Shapiro opened the door. He asked John if he was getting hungry, and John found he was. Once more he “sent out”—actually, Shapiro made a telephone call for him—to the lunchroom and got back more cigarettes, and tasteless food which he ate hungrily. When he had finished, Shapiro came back and said the captain wanted to see him.

  The captain was Miller. He was alone at a desk in a small office. Miller was very broad behind the desk. He was looking at papers, and then putting them in baskets.

  He continued to do this for several minutes after John had come into the office, and Shapiro had closed the door, leaving him alone with Miller. Then Miller looked up and said, “Sit down, Mr. Hayward,” and looked at several more papers. He wore glasses while he looked at the papers. Then he took the glasses off and looked at John.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve had time to think things over. To see where you stand.”

  “You’ve all made it clear where I stand,” John said.

  To that, Miller said, “Good.” Then he said, “The boys have treated you all right? Haven’t pushed you around?”

  John said the boys had been all right.

  “Just doing what we’re hired to do,” Miller said. “You’re a reasonable man. You see that.”

  “All right,” John said.

  “Then why the hell,” Miller said, “supposing you’re a reasonable man, do you stick to this god-damn’ crummy story?” He said this without raising, without in any way changing, his soft voice.

  “Because there isn’t any other story,” John said.

  Miller tilted back in his chair. He looked at John for what seemed a long time. Then he told John he didn’t get it.

  “We give you outs,” he said. “We give you a line. We don’t promise anything, but we give you a line. You’re scuffling with the girl, the way people do sometimes, and you choke her, but don’t mean to. Then you get panicky. What’s the matter with that?”

  “Nothing,” John said. “Only, it didn’t happen. I never saw the girl alive.”

  “Or,” Miller said, “maybe the girl came at you with something. When she found out you were going to ditch her. A knife, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. All you meant to do was hold her off. What’s the matter with that?”

  John merely shook his head.

  “I don’t say I’d believe it,” Miller said. “But somebody might. Nobody was th
ere but you two. How’d anybody know what happened? I’ve seen juries swallow more than that.”

  “No,” John said.

  “You think maybe I’m trying to trap you,” Miller said. “You’ve heard that people in a jam like yours ought to just clam up.” He paused. John said nothing. “All right,” Miller said, “say I am trying to trap you. I don’t say I’m not. All the same, I’m giving you an out. Showing you where there is an out. This other way—what chance have you got? You ought to see that. Look, we know you were keeping the Evans girl. We know you want to marry this other girl. We know you went to the apartment yesterday afternoon. Look—that much we know” For the first time there was emphasis in the soft voice. “Why don’t you give yourself a break?”

  He had leaned forward with his hands on the desk top. Now he tilted back again in his chair. The chair creaked.

  “I never—” John began, and stopped. “There’s not much use in saying it again, is there?”

  “No,” Miller said.

  “If you’re as sure as you say,” John said, “why don’t you just let it ride?”

  For some seconds, Miller merely looked at him. “I’m damned if I know,” Miller said then, and the chair squeaked down. Miller pressed a button on his desk, and almost at once Shapiro opened the door. “Put him back,” Miller said.

  John stood up. “I’ve got a telephone call coming,” he said.

  “Let him make his call,” Miller said to Shapiro, not looking at John.

  John Hayward (age thirty-two, banker by profession, resident of East Thirty-sixth Street, City of New York) was arraigned in Felony Court on Monday, April 25, as a material witness to the murder of Nora Evans (age early twenties, resident of East Eleventh Street.) He was ordered held in $20,000 bail. The proceedings were brief, perfunctory—and to John Hayward, entirely puzzling.

  “Why?” he asked his attorney. His attorney, reached by telephone the evening before just as he was about to leave for a cocktail party, said he was damned if he knew. He said, “I told you, Johnny, this isn’t my line of country.” Richard Still, associate of the firm of Laughton, Murphy and Wahlstein, added that he had never been in a magistrate’s court before in his life and repeated that he had told John that. He added that he didn’t think anybody connected with Laughton, Murphy and Wahlstein had been in a magistrate’s court in his—or her, as the case might be—life.

  “All the same,” John said, “you are a lawyer. Why material witness? They booked me for murder.”

  “Suspicion of homicide,” Still said. “Comes to the same thing, or near enough. I suppose the D. A. changed his mind—or the cops got him to change his mind.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Still said again. “And, if I were you, I wouldn’t insist on finding out. A material witness can get bailed out. Homicide, you stay in.”

  Richard Still was Harvard. He was thirty-three years old. He was close to six feet tall and he weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty pounds. He had light brown hair, which was cut short, and not parted. He had a pleasant face and a pleasant manner and he got his clothes at Brooks Brothers. Nobody he knew had ever, before, been accused of murder. What it came to—you didn’t know people who got accused of murder. Or were suspected of homicide.

  His voice had betrayed this on the telephone; his manner betrayed it now. And John Hayward, to his own surprise—and even slightly to his own bewilderment—was faintly amused.

  “I know it’s off your beat, Dick,” he said. “You were the only lawyer I could think of offhand.”

  “Sure,” Still said. “Sure, Johnny.”

  “You can arrange about the bail?”

  “Sure,” Richard Still said. “That I can do. Take an hour or so. Then—” He paused. “Look, Johnny,” he said, “you need somebody in the criminal end. You realize that? It’s not that I—”

  “You’re not on the hook, Dick,” John Hayward said, and there was still a faint flicker of amusement in his mind. (And it was a hell of a time to be amused.) “You fix it about bail.” It was almost noon, then. In Shapiro’s custody, John went back to the station house to wait. (As they walked from the court into the sun, flashlight bulbs spurted all around.) At the station house he was not this time put in a cell. He waited in the room where, the night before, he had endlessly answered the same question. He assumed that the door was locked, but he did not try it to find out. Again food was brought from the lunchroom, and more cigarettes.

  It was two o’clock when Shapiro, and this time Grady was with him, opened the door. Grady carried a brown envelope, and spilled from it to the table John’s keys and wallet, his notebook and fountain pen. “You owe us for the food,” Grady said. “Breakfast yesterday, dinner last night, breakfast this morning. Three packages of cigarettes. Three seventy-five.” He looked at a slip of paper in his hand. “That’s right,” he said. “They charge for room service.”

  John took four dollar-bills from his billfold. Grady gave him back a quarter. John started to put the billfold in his pocket.

  “Count it,” Grady said. “See it’s all there.”

  John counted it. Since he had not known within ten dollars or so what he had had, the careful counting was pointless. He did not say so. He said it was all right.

  “Then sign this,” Grady said, and John signed a receipt.

  “And away you go,” Shapiro said.

  “Oh,” Grady said, “we’ll be seeing him, Nate. We’ll be seeing Mr. Hayward.”

  Detective Nathan Shapiro said sadly, that he shouldn’t wonder.

  The April day was still bright, still warm. John blinked for a moment in the fight. He got a cab and went to his apartment house, and up in the elevator. (The day operator said, “Afternoon, Mr. Hayward,” in a voice without any expression whatever—and looked at him with widened, unbelieving eyes.) John put the key in the lock, and nobody stopped him, and went into his small apartment and locked the door after him. Mail had been stuck under the door, and John picked it up carefully and put it on a table without looking at it. Methodically, in the bedroom, he took things out of the pockets of the suit he had been wearing and put them, in orderly fashion, on the chest of drawers. In a jacket pocket, there were the stubs of two theater tickets. He tore those into small pieces and put the pieces in the wastebasket.

  He went into the bathroom and showered, and after that he shaved, feeling the smooth certainty of the sharp blade on his face. After he had finished shaving, had dressed again in clean clothes—clothes into which the smells of the mortuary had not entered, nor the smoky staleness of the room at the police station—after that, he would begin to try to work things out. After that, he would think about what to do next.

  But the thoughts would not wait. He dried his face, and ran fingers over it against the beard-grain, and then he looked at his face. He thought, whoever it was must look like me, and for almost the first time in his life tried seriously to decide what he did look like. It had never before seemed particularly important.

  He had not ever—at least so far as he could now recall—been particularly self-conscious, and to bother too much over appearance was, if you were a man, to be self-conscious. He had never had to ponder what clothes to wear. Convention decided all but a few small matters, and those of little importance. There were, of course, some areas of latitude—primarily in the choice of neckties. But as a banker, who habitually wore white shirts in the city, the latitude allowed, even there, was slight. One did not wear flamboyant neckties, even if one’s taste ran to them (as John’s did not) any more than one neglected a bi-weekly haircut.

  These things were, John thought, only incidental—and at the moment, since he was wearing only a pair of white shorts, irrelevant. He tried to discover the relevant likeness—the relevancies on which a certain likeness, which logically must exist, was based. He found it very difficult for some time to make any progress, since the face he looked at in the mirror was inevitable—was not, in a real sense, a face. It was merely himself. I
t was not “like” anything. It was sui generis. It was merely the reflection of Me.

  Yet it was, as other faces were, made up of features. In this case the features were regular. The nose was straight. The mouth was neither particularly large, nor noticeably small; the lips were sharply enough outlined, but not so sharply outlined that anyone, unprompted, would have thought of it twice; the brown eyes were of only moderate size, neither especially close together nor wide apart. There was no curl in his brown hair, which, now still damp from the shower, was disorderly, but was usually orderly enough.

  The skin of his face was ruddy, but not red; he looked like a man who spent some time out of doors, but not a great deal—like a man who had not been gravely ill, who had not at any time lacked proper food, nor been under especial nervous strain. He did not look like a man who “drank too much” or one who could, conceivably, be fanatical about anything—including a reasonable amount of drinking. At the moment, there was a faint film of weariness on his face, but only that. If marks were to be left by this thing which was happening, they would appear later, had not yet appeared.

  “I look,” John Hayward said, and spoke aloud, to the image in the mirror, “like damn near everybody I know.”

  He was mildly surprised to discover this, having never before bothered to think about it. Dressed, he thought, I look more like a banker than, say, an advertising man. A banker or a youngish corporation lawyer. Like Richard Still. He thought about Still … Still was about his height, about his weight. Still’s hair was a little darker; his chin was somewhat more rounded. (Or was it? John rubbed his own chin.) Still was about his age—perhaps a year older. (He had been a year ahead at Harvard.) Oh yes—Dick Still didn’t part his hair. (At least, John didn’t remember that he did.)

  He thought of others—of Al Curtis; of Henry Roberts, who had a desk near his at the bank; of Forrest Carrington (although Carrington was “in” steel); of Russ Norton (although Russ was Princeton); good Lord, he thought—even Pit Woodson.

  If, before the self-scrutiny of that afternoon, John Hayward had been told he was a “type” he would, without resentment, have said, sure, he supposed he was. He would have wondered, for a few minutes, why anyone thought the point one worth making, and would then have dismissed the matter from his mind. One was what one was. There were worse ways to be, as certainly it could be argued there were better. Some men (although obviously not many) were destined to be Winston Churchills; others (probably even fewer) Robert Frosts. The majority were more typical, if that was the word one preferred.