Glass Cell (20 page)

Carter sat motionless.

“What would you say if I told you that I’m going to prove you guilty beyond a shadow of doubt?” Ostreicher came close to Carter, wagging a finger.

But even Ostreicher’s attack was not real, Carter felt. It was like something Ostreicher was enacting in a play. When the play was over in a few minutes, they’d start acting like themselves again, like people not connected with each other. “I’d say, ‘go ahead and try,’” Carter said.

“Ain’t he a cool one,” Gawill said. “Good boy, Carter!” And he chuckled.

Ostreicher only glanced at Gawill. Then he removed the buckled strap from Carter’s chest. The machine had put a thin, jagged line around a drum on the desk. Carter did not look hard at it, and told himself he didn’t care what it showed. Ostreicher looked at it, bending over his desk. Then he changed the paper.

A knock came at the door.

“Come in,” said Ostreicher.

A short, dark man, who Carter supposed was Grasso, came in. He smiled at Gawill and nodded.

“Hi,” Gawill said.

“Morning, Mr. Grasso,” Ostreicher said.

“Morning,” said Grasso. He was a squat Italian with round dark eyes, expectantly lifted eyebrows, a heavy and somewhat downturned mouth, but it was a face that summed up to no particular kind of expression, and was therefore a rather good mask, Carter supposed. Grasso probably had to deadpan most of his way through life.

“Would you sit down, Mr. Grasso? Mr. O’Brien?”

O’Brien got up, removed his jacket, and sat down in the chair Carter had left. His shoulder muscles filled out his shirt and stretched it taut against his powerful deltoids. Even his waist was thick with muscle, though quite flat. A blow with half his potential force, Carter thought, might have broken Sullivan’s neck.

“Now, Friday,” Ostreicher began.

Was Gawill going to be in for it, too, Carter wondered? Gawill looked still quite unnervous and a bit bored.

“I went straight from the Rainbow Bar home,” O’Brien said in a slightly adenoidal voice. “I took a shower and had a nap. I went out about seven for something to eat. Then I saw a movie.” His voice was a colorless drone, as if he were reciting something he had learned by heart.

“Your roommate went out about five fifteen,” Ostreicher said. “You could have hopped in a taxi and got to Manhattan in less than fifteen minutes.”

O’Brien shrugged slightly. “Why should I go to Manhattan?”

“To kill Sullivan because you’re being paid for it, maybe,” Ostreicher came back.

O’Brien looked down at the floor and rubbed his nose with a forefinger, simulating unconcern.

“You’re usually at the gym Friday nights working out, you said, and so does the gym say so. Why weren’t you there Friday?”

“I thought I had a cold coming on. That’s why I took a nap Friday.”

Gawill had coached him on that, Carter thought.

“Is this your first killing, O’Brien?”

O’Brien did not answer.

Gawill laughed, barely audible.

“They don’t remember seeing you at the hamburger place.”

“Why should they?” asked O’Brien. “It was crowded.”

O’Brien was going to hang on to the money Gawill had paid him, if he possibly could. His steady nerve was comforting for Carter to see.

“Where did Sullivan live, O’Brien?” Ostreicher asked, and glanced at the slowly rotating drum.

“Manhattan.”

“Where in Manhattan? You know the address, let’s have it.”

“I don’t,” O’Brien said, looking at Ostreicher. “Why should I know his exact address?”

“Because Gawill told you to remember it and you did!” Ostreicher said.

O’Brien took cover under a squirm and a laugh. “Which one of us are you accusing, me or Carter?”

“O’Brien, whatever Gawill paid you—you’re not going to have much time to enjoy it. If any.” Ostreicher unstrapped him.

It was a weak finish for Ostreicher, and O’Brien smiled a little. So did Gawill.

“Mr. Carter, there’s no particular reason for you to stay any longer,” Ostreicher said.

Carter stood up. He went to the door, turned and said, “Good-bye.”

Ostreicher nodded, looking at Carter in a preoccupied way. “Good-bye. Oh— You’re not to leave town until you hear further from me, if you don’t mind, Mr. Carter. Your office said you were intending to take off somewhere the end of the week.”

“Yes,” Carter said. “All right, I understand.” He closed the door.

No doubt Ostreicher had had some conversations, probably face to face, with Jenkins, Field, and Butterworth over the weekend.

Butterworth came in in the afternoon, and asked Carter by telephone if he would come into his office. Carter went. Butterworth looked tired, a little puffy under his eyes. His manner was as gentle as ever as he asked Carter to sit down, and as he expressed his shock at the loss of his friend David Sullivan.

“I heard you spoke with the police this morning,” Butterworth said. “They called me again this morning. Uh— Did you find out anything more?”

“No. They were also talking to Gawill and a friend of his called O’Brien,” Carter said, sliding back in his chair, locking his fingers together as Gawill had, as he leaned forward. “They were still talking to them when I left, so I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Have you any suspicions? Any ideas?”

“Outside of some connection with Gawill, no. If there’s a connection, I’m sure they’ll find it. I don’t know if Sullivan ever talked to you about Gawill.”

“Oh, yes, he did. Several times I suggested to David that he hire a bodyguard—or first of all talk to the police about the following that was going on. But good Lord, I never thought it would come to cold-blooded murder.— And of course the other business.” Butterworth leaned on his fingers and rubbed his forehead. “I must say I was surprised at that. I take it you were, too,” Butterworth said, and looked at Carter. “I mean—David and your wife. Or is that story true?”

“Yes. It’s true. I hadn’t— Well,” Carter stammered, flushing, “I had suspected, I must admit, but I hadn’t thought—I mean—that it was still going on. I think it’s all a bit exaggerated, and I haven’t tried to question my wife about it too much, because she’s so upset by David’s death.” Carter’s face was still warm. And he realized that he was trying to cover up more for Hazel than himself. “By the way, the police told me this morning that they want me to stay in town for the next several days, so I’m afraid that lets Detroit out. I’ve already said this to Mr. Jenkins—”

“Yes, yes, I thought of that. I’ll be able to go. I spent this morning arranging it.”

Carter got up.

When they went over Carter’s notes around 4 that afternoon, the Sullivan affair was not mentioned.

Carter looked at the evening papers with great interest at 5:30, standing on the corner of 50th and Second Avenue, waiting for his bus. Sullivan had been buried today in the family plot in his hometown in Massachusetts, and there was a picture of his parents and some relatives standing by the graveside this morning with bowed heads. His father was very like Sullivan. Carter stared at their faces and tried to picture Hazel knowing them, talking to them. It was easy to imagine, and disturbing. He was glad she hadn’t gone up to attend the funeral. He had hopes for some results of Ostreicher’s talk with Gawill and Gawill’s boss Grasso, but nothing was reported except that Salvatore Grasso had been called in for questioning by the police. There was no mention of dope or of a lie-detector test having been given to him or to O’Brien. They could have been beaten with rubber truncheons and that wouldn’t have been reported, either, Carter thought. At least, O’Brien had not talked yet, or surely that would have been mentioned. Carter almost missed his bus, and jumped in just as the doors were closing.

At home, he found Hazel standing in the living room with tears in her eyes, and Timmy in his room facedown on his bed, shaking with sobs.

Carter walked toward her. “You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

She drew back a little, though he hadn’t been going to touch her. “He came home at lunchtime,” she said. “He’s been here all afternoon.”

“Oh, Christ,” Carter said. He hung up his coat, then went in to see his son. “Timmy?”

A long silence.

“What?”

Carter sat down at the foot of the bed, because Timmy was so near the edge, there was no room beside him. “What happened today? Tell me all about it.”

“They said you’re an ex-con. My dad’s an ex-con, they said.”

“Well, you’ve had that before, Timmy, and you pulled through it, didn’t you?”

Timmy drew his right leg away from Carter’s touch. “It’s what they say about David,” he said with another rush of weeping into his pillow. “They call him my uncle David. It’s got a special meaning to them.”

“Come on, Timmy, don’t cry anymore. Let’s have the rest of it.”

“Phil, do you have to make him go over it?” Hazel said. She had come to the doorway. Her face was furious.

“It’s better if he talks,” said Carter.

“He’s talked it all out to me. He doesn’t want to go over it again.”

“Well, suppose I want to hear it?” Carter said, standing up.

“Don’t you ever think about anybody else but yourself?”

“I’m thinking about Timmy, or I wouldn’t be here!”

“You might have thought of him in the past.”

Carter moved toward her, and Hazel took a step back, turned and went into the bedroom. Carter went out and closed Timmy’s door. “You might have thought of him when you started your affair with Sullivan,” Carter said. “You’ve got a hell of a right to throw something like that at me!”

Hazel said nothing.

“It’s in the papers now and you can’t face it, I suppose. Neither can Timmy. It’s the affair he’s upset about, not the ex-con business. He’s had that before.” It was plain now why she had not gone to Sullivan’s funeral. And suddenly it seemed to Carter that Timmy was literally an extension of Hazel’s flesh and blood and mind, that their tears now were for the same reason: the public knew the secret that both of them had known since the affair began. Carter blinked his stinging eyes. “Well, Hazel, it’s happened. Can’t we try to pick up the pieces instead of quarreling?”

“I don’t want the pieces,” Hazel said angrily.

“I’m talking about the pieces of Timmy—for instance. What did you tell him? That it was true?”

“Timmy doesn’t really understand what the papers are talking about.”

Carter was suddenly angry again. “He doesn’t have to. The kids’ll explain it to him in words of one syllable. Doesn’t understand! You think he’s retarded or something? Does he still like David, by the way?”

“Why do you think he’s crying?”

“That’s no answer, that’s a non sequitur. Does he still like you?”

“Oh, shut up! Just shut up!”

Carter did. He opened the bedroom door and went back into Timmy’s room. He stood looking at the back of Timmy’s head for a minute, and finally Timmy raised up. His face did not look so tearful as Carter had feared. “Timmy, we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

Timmy frowned with a start of new tears. “I just want to know is it all true.”

“What?”

“That—you killed David because you were jealous—and because you hated him.”

“I wasn’t jealous of him. I didn’t hate him.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No, Timmy,” Carter said automatically. It barely registered as a lie. If he hadn’t killed Sullivan, O’Brien would have, he thought. And what had become of his conscience? Carter shook his head and blinked.

“Is it true,” Timmy asked, “my mother and David—” He left the sentence up in the air, and his throat closed.

Carter felt suddenly weak. He swayed on his feet, walked to the door and leaned on it. “They loved each other very much,” he said.

“Does that mean—”

Carter retreated from it. He wanted to go into the bathroom and bathe his face. But he came back and said, “You should ask your mother about that.” He waited for a moment, and, getting no reply, went out again and down the hall to the bedroom.

Hazel was half reclining on the bed. Carter supposed she could have heard what he had been saying to Timmy, though she looked as if she hadn’t heard, as if she were in no mood for listening.

“Hazel—” Carter had wanted to sit down beside her, to take her hand, but one look at her eyes and he knew it would be useless.

“What?” she asked.

He took a deep breath. “I won’t be going to Detroit this weekend.”

25

C
arter reasoned that if the police could not pin the murder of Sullivan on him, it did not follow that they would pin it on O’Brien. Ostreicher might suspect both of them, but without more proof than he had, what could happen? Nothing. Nothing might happen. Police annals were full of murder cases that had never been solved. There might be a period, Carter thought, of perhaps three months when he and O’Brien and other suspects would be watched closely (the police might never really stop watching them, of course), but then the situation would cool. Perhaps by summer. Carter had not given up hope for his and Hazel’s month in Europe. He had not given up hope about Hazel. She had loved Sullivan, but his death had exploded a mountain of guilt on her head. Carter reasoned that her guilt might bring her back to him, if he were patient, and he regretted his burst of temper and spite on Monday evening, regretted all he had said in anger about her and Sullivan, and warned himself not to let it happen again. There had been enough times in the past when he had sworn he wouldn’t challenge Hazel about Sullivan—and then he had. His challenges had been on the right track, as it happened, and the truth was out now, but if he brought anything up again in anger, it would come under the heading of taunting, and be purposeless.

On Tuesday evening, Carter and Hazel kept a theater engagement of long standing with the Elliotts and Phyllis Millen. It was for a play by Beckett in the Village. They had dinner at Luigi’s first. Phyllis had brought her friend Hugh Stevens, a husky man in his early forties, whom Carter had seen once or twice before. The Elliotts and Phyllis avoided the murder subject and asked no questions. It was as if they were determined to make the evening a pleasant one on the surface, on the surface just like any other evening or the evening they had planned when they appointed Phyllis to write for tickets, a month ago. But Phyllis’s eyes were busy on Carter’s and Hazel’s faces all evening, and so were those of her stockbroker boyfriend. The Elliotts, to Carter, seemed extra warm and friendly to him, as if, because of his prison stint, they were broadmindedly giving him the benefit of the doubt about his innocence now. Hazel put up a good show of cheerfulness, but Carter had no doubt that Phyllis and Priscilla saw through it.

When Hazel and Carter got home, Hazel said, “Phil, I’d like to go away somewhere for a week. I need it badly.”

“All right,” he said, thinking that she probably meant alone. “Where?”

“Somewhere not far away. Where can one go in a week?” She shrugged tiredly, and folded her gold scarf, put it in the drawer from which Carter had got it the time she asked him to bring it to Sullivan’s.

“Up in New England, maybe.” He thought of Sullivan’s parents in New England, and wondered if Hazel was thinking of going there? “What kind of place have you got in mind?”

“Some simple hotel, where I won’t have to think about anything. We saw a few in New Hampshire that summer, remember?”

Carter remembered, most pleasantly. “That’s a good idea,” he said. He went into the bathroom and took a quick shower. When he came out, he asked, “I suppose you prefer to go alone?” He preferred to know if she did, and to know now.

“No,” she said on a rising tone. Then she looked at him. She was in her dressing gown. “I don’t prefer it. I thought we might arrange for Timmy to go, too. He’s doing well with his schoolwork—up to now. I spoke to my office. I can get next week off. We could leave Friday night or Saturday morning.”

But maybe he couldn’t, Carter thought. “I’d better be able to say exactly where I’m going.”

“Yes,” Hazel said flatly, and turned to her mirror.

Carter spent his lunch hour the next day getting information about country hotels in New Hampshire. He did not want to return to the one they had been to. He telephoned Hazel in the afternoon to discuss what he had found, and they decided on one near Concord. Then Carter called Ostreicher and asked if he could go there Saturday morning for nine days.

Ostreicher agreed, provided Carter telephoned when he arrived and stayed there without moving anywhere else.

They started off Friday evening, and spent the night in a very nice motel by a lake. The motel put a cot in the room for Timmy. Carter had asked for a separate room for him at the Hotel Continental at Concord.

The Continental was a large white building or mansion set at the top of a gently rising lawn. The place was old enough to have huge rooms, and Timmy was very pleased with his big room all to himself, and immediately lined up his schoolbooks, which Hazel and Carter had made him bring with him, on the executive-style desk between his windows. There were croquet hoops on the lawn, and a tennis court behind the hotel. The place looked promising. They had breakfast in bed the next morning, joined by Timmy, who ate his from a small table the maid had put up. Then, while Hazel washed her hair, Carter went out for a walk with Timmy. He bought Timmy a tennis racket—the hotel had rackets for the guests, but Timmy needed a new one for school—and bought for Hazel an off-white, hand-knitted sweater from Ireland.

And that night, though she seemed in a good mood, and had even laughed and joked with him at dinner, she rejected his advances in bed. Carter hesitated, then asked in a carefully quiet tone. “Well, Hazel, how long is this going to go on?”

“What?”

“Oh, you know what.”

There was a terribly long silence. Finally, she reached for a cigarette from her bed table. “Nothing is resolved yet, is it?”

He knew what she meant, but he said, “You mean about the Sullivan business.”

“Yes. What else?”

Us, he thought. There’s us, after all, just us. But she was waiting to see who killed Sullivan. Because it could be him.

“Do you ever have hallucinations, Phil? From morphine?”

“No,” Carter said. “Not even in prison when I was actually taking the stuff.” Then he remembered his daydreams of Hazel and Timmy, so real he had almost been able to reach out and touch them. Had those been hallucinations? If so, they had been mostly voluntary, and the only ones he had experienced.

“Never dreams so you didn’t know what you were doing?” she said. “Walking around—doing things?”

He knew what she meant. “No.”

They fell into an unresolved silence, just as unresolved as the Sullivan case. Hazel could have asked him outright: Did you do it when you were fully conscious, then? Why didn’t she? Because she knew quite well he had? Would she be behaving any differently now, if she knew he had? Carter couldn’t see that she would be. In Hazel’s own particular way, she wouldn’t want to call any further attention to herself by announcing her suspicions and leaving him. Hazel put her cigarette out. They did not even say good night, and Hazel eventually fell asleep, Carter knew from her breathing. She would never let him make love to her until she knew, Carter thought. If he wanted Hazel, he’d have to hang it on O’Brien. Or O’Brien would have to get hung with it. That was not impossible, of course. As for scruple—had he any? O’Brien had been going to do it. Why should he scruple? To hell with O’Brien. Carter frowned in the darkness and tried to find his own conscience. Or the void that meant the absence of it. It slipped away from him. Maybe he hadn’t any anymore. He felt no pangs of conscience because of what he had done to Sullivan—bludgeoned him to death—only a little distaste at the thought of blood that he did not even remember, and a small jolt at the fact it had been he doing the deed. He had killed another man in prison for less reason, really less reason. That had never bothered him. Mickey Castle came to his mind. He remembered saying to himself the morning of Mickey’s death, that if he’d taken the trouble to step between him and whatever it was that he rammed himself into, Mickey might not have hemorrhaged, but was he his brother’s keeper? And after a couple of days, he hadn’t thought about it. Was that what happened to men’s consciences in prison?

Carter wanted to get up and take a walk in the moonlight, but he didn’t for fear of awakening Hazel. He lay there with his thoughts turning, knowing he could not progress beyond this night, he and Hazel would not progress, though they had seven more nights to spend here. There was nothing to do but behave as pleasantly as possible, not approach Hazel again, make it as good a holiday for her as he could.

And Carter did this. His only reward was that Hazel didn’t change for the worse toward him: she was still friendly, good-humored, and the time away from New York certainly did her some good.

Carter returned to his office on Monday morning. He had explained to Mr. Jenkins that, though the police allowed him to go to New Hampshire to a specific hotel, they had not allowed him to go to Detroit, which was true. Carter had felt presumptuous asking the firm for a week off, but they had granted it pretty readily, or Mr. Jenkins had, and as to sacking him or not, Carter thought, they had probably made up their minds days ago, and taking a week off would make no difference in the scales. Like Hazel, they were probably waiting.

He telephoned Ostreicher Monday afternoon, and after three attempts, finally reached him.

“No real news,” Ostreicher said, “from your point of view. We found the dope in the apartment of one of Grasso’s friends. Gawill could be held or fined for hiding it for Grasso, but we’re letting Gawill have a little rope just now. He’s a free man,” Ostreicher said, so casually, with a sigh, that Carter suspected he wasn’t. Every move Gawill made was probably being watched, and Gawill no doubt knew it. “Unlike Grasso,” Ostreicher went on. “Grasso’s got a five-thousand-dollar fine to pay.”

“And O’Brien?” asked Carter.

“He’s got heavy expenses and no money. An interesting situation.”

Carter understood. Gawill couldn’t afford to pay him just now. Couldn’t afford to be discovered paying him. But O’Brien had been counting on the money by now. “O’Brien’s a free man, too?”

“Oh, yes,” Ostreicher said with a smile in his voice. “And you’re back on your job, Mr. Carter?”

Carter felt very uneasy when he had hung up. Ostreicher was letting them all out on strings, very long strings, to see what they would do. Ostreicher could have grilled him, Carter thought, really beaten him up the way police did hardened criminals sometimes, which was what he was supposed to be, having been in prison, or at least the newspapers implied it. People never knew, or didn’t care what happened to hardened criminals whom the law suspected of new crimes. Carter thought the reason he had been spared was because he had a reputable job now, money and a wife who worked for public welfare. News of any beating-up would get around. And of course he was being watched just as much as Gawill or O’Brien, Carter thought.

Nevertheless, Carter telephoned Gawill that Monday night. He did it while he was out buying cigarettes around 10 o’clock, but when he came back into the apartment, he said to Hazel, “I just called Gawill, and I think I’ll go over and see him. So if the police happen to call, that’s where I am.”

Hazel looked at him in surprise. She was sitting on the sofa, mending the knee of Timmy’s new corduroy trousers, bought and torn in New Hampshire. “Why?”

“I thought I might find out something. Gawill talks to me—sometimes.”

Hazel looked at her watch. “What time shall I expect you back?”

Carter relaxed a little and smiled. She seemed to care if he would get back. “By twelve, anyway. If I’m later, I’ll call you—before twelve.” Carter tossed one of the two packages of cigarettes he had bought on to the sofa, said, “Bye-bye, darling,” and went out again.

He took a taxi. Gawill had sounded rather friendly on the telephone. “Phil? What a surprise . . . Well, okay, why not?” Not too friendly, just willing to see him, which was all Carter wanted.

Gawill was alone, it seemed. The radio was on, the sofa covered with newspapers again.

“What’s on your mind? Have a seat,” Gawill said.

Carter sat, after putting his overcoat over the chair arm. Gawill was waiting. “I came to find out what you might know that I don’t,” Carter said.

Gawill snorted. “And I should tell you? As a favor?”

“You might.”

“When you did me the favor of telling them I had some dope here? I should do you a favor?”

Hazel had brought the dope up, Carter remembered. He wouldn’t have. “They’d have found out, anyway. They searched Grasso’s apartment—or apartments—on their own, didn’t they?”

“You said it was in my apartment that you got it. And saw it.”

“Sorry,” Carter said.

“I bet you are. Sullivan off your hands, you walking around in the clear—”

“I’m no more in the clear than you are.”

Gawill only smoldered faintly.

Carter waited for him to say,
You did it, and my boy or my friend O’Brien’s getting the blame
. Gawill wasn’t saying that. Carter waited. “Isn’t there a drink in the house?”

Gawill got up. “Sure there is.” He went into the kitchen.

“Next time I’ll bring you some.”

“Promises, promises.”

Carter smiled. Gawill came back with a fresh scotch and soda, plus a half-finished glass which must have been his own.

“Thank you.” Carter sipped his drink for a moment.

Each waited for the other to speak.

Gawill spoke first: “How’re you making out with Hazel?”

“That’s my business.”

“You don’t seem to be boasting about anything.”

“I wouldn’t boast,” said Carter.”

“You’d tell me if things were very rosy. It’d show—on you.”

Carter let it go. The radio annoyed him, though it was not loud, but he didn’t want to annoy Gawill by asking him to turn it off. “When’re you going to pay O’Brien?” Carter asked, the big question, and coolly sipped his drink.

“Never. O’Brien was never in that apartment. You were.” Gawill looked straight at him.

But from the way he said it, Carter knew he was lying. He was suddenly glad, very glad, that he knew Gawill this well, that he had known him since the rosy nightmare days of working for Triumph, known him since his visits to the prison, learned when Gawill was lying, exaggerating, or plain faking. This was a mixture of lying and faking. “Quit your kidding,” Carter said. “I can see through you. I know you’ve got to pay O’Brien. O’Brien’s broke, I heard from Ostreicher today. He has a lot of heavy debts. Or expenses. Isn’t he waiting for your money?”