Glass Cell (24 page)

“Who went to get the drinks?”

What had Gawill said to Ostreicher? “I bought one round at the bar, I think.”

“You think?”

“Gawill bought one, and maybe a waiter brought it, I don’t know. It was crowded and noisy and a bad place to talk and that’s why I went back to see Gawill.”

“After you’d dashed to New York to meet O’Brien around eleven, killed him—you dashed back then?”

Carter calmly flicked his ash on the floor. “No.”

“Didn’t Gawill know the score, wasn’t that why he wasn’t going to pay O’Brien, and didn’t you and he agree to give you an alibi for last night if you killed O’Brien?”

Carter frowned. “Gawill was as surprised as I was when he heard O’Brien was dead.— Why don’t you check with the taxi drivers if you think I did all this dashing?”

“We’ve done that. Some driver may come up with the right information. Last night’s drivers are mostly sleeping this morning.”

It didn’t worry Carter.

“See you in a little while,” Ostreicher said, going out, closing the barred door. Ostreicher gestured, and a guard came over and turned a key in the lock.

“Can I call my wife?” Carter asked the guard.

Carter was not allowed to make any more personal calls after the one he had made, but he could call a lawyer, if he wished.

“I’ll do that,” Carter said. “Meanwhile, could you get me a package of Pall Malls, please?” He extended a fifty-cent piece through the bars.

The guard took it and went off. In about five minutes, he was back with the cigarettes and fifteen cents change. Carter then telephoned one of the three lawyers suggested by the precinct sergeant, and made an appointment for an interview that afternoon. Carter knew the bail, if there was any, would be too high for him to raise, and he was not much interested in any protection the lawyer could give him, but he wanted to engage a lawyer because it was the customary thing to do. A barber arrived to shave him at 2 p.m., and the lawyer a little later. The lawyer, Matthew Ellis, was a tall, pudgy man of about thirty with a small black mustache. He talked for twenty minutes with Carter in his cell, then assured him if no further evidence against him was discovered, he could not be held more than forty-eight hours longer. The lawyer promised to call Hazel and explain the situation to her, but he couldn’t do anything about getting permission for Hazel to visit him. Carter had asked the guard, then the sergeant, that morning, if his wife could come to see him, and the sergeant had said no, probably on instructions from Ostreicher, Carter thought.

Then it was 3 p.m. Carter wondered if Gawill were being questioned all this time. If Gawill would have the wit to say what they had been talking about last night: whether Gawill had hired O’Brien or not, and Carter’s anxiety about his own predicament. Or rather, it was what they should have been talking about, and what Carter had said to the police in front of Gawill that they had been talking about. Carter thought Gawill probably would have the wit. Gawill would try to make the status quo stay the status quo as long as it could. If Gawill talked, he would drag himself into a mess, a lesser mess than Carter’s, but still a mess, and Gawill meant to protect himself. Much as Gawill had hated Sullivan, he had never dared strike the blow against him himself, he had got someone else to do it.

Carter lay on his back and smoked and looked at the ceiling. He used his porcelain soap dish as an ashtray. He thought of the words that had rushed through his mind as he talked with Ostreicher:
The justice I have received
, etc. Well, justice was certainly the wrong word for all of it. An eye for an eye was nearer what he had felt, and yet that was not it, either, because in principle he didn’t believe in that. In principle, his killing Sullivan had been an evil act, done in anger. And the fact that he felt no guilt made it worse, in principle and in fact. His killing O’Brien had been a calculated, cold-blooded act done to clear himself of an equally evil act. Carter could admit to himself that both acts were evil, and yet he felt no pangs—or very little pangs—of conscience about either of them, or both of them together. He was sorry either of them had had to happen, but then he was also sorry Hazel had had an affair, and had been continuing it, with Sullivan. Carter swung his feet down to the floor and stood up. And would there be a next victim and a next? Every time he had a grudge or a reason for wanting somebody out of the picture, would he just kill them like a savage? Carter stared at the mirror over his basin, though he was not in front of it, and the mirror gave back a reflection of the bars of his cell door. He was sure he would not kill again. He could not account through logic for his sureness, but he knew. Because if Hazel betrayed him again, somehow, with anybody else, he would prefer simply to kill himself.

The guard came to the door. “Letter for you,” he said, sticking it through the bars.

Carter took it and opened it. It was from the lawyer, saying he had spoken with Hazel on the telephone. “She sends her love, asks you not to worry about her and will come to see you as soon as she is allowed to.” There was a world of meaning in “not to worry about her.” Carter smiled and a new strength surged in him.

He needed it for that evening. Ostreicher came in just after five, just after Carter had been served his supper on a tray.

“You can give it up, Carter. Gawill has finally spilled the beans,” Ostreicher said. “He never saw you last night till nearly midnight. You never were with him in that bar. You killed Sullivan, because O’Brien didn’t. You got there before O’Brien, if O’Brien got there at all. You . . .”

Carter shut his mind to it, and finally almost shut his ears to it. He didn’t believe it, didn’t believe Gawill had said it. And if Gawill had, what did he have to lose now by denying the truth of it? Carter took a deep breath and pulled off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar: his shirt was more like a prison shirt that way. He looked at Ostreicher calmly, with the expressionlessness, the neutrality that in prison was the best expression to have, because it concealed emotion and antagonized people the least, and also conserved energy.

After half an hour, they adjourned to a downstairs room, furnitureless except for a smallish old brown desk and two straight chairs. Carter sat on one chair, Ostreicher on the other. The light overhead was not swinging, but it was bright, fixed at the ceiling under a wide green shade painted white on the underside. First, Carter’s character was given a good blackening, though the blackening began in the prison days and was mostly imaginary on Ostreicher’s part: The effect of association with bad company for six solid years, the demoralizing effects of morphine, which Carter had taken to as all people of weak character took to it, damaging first the structure of his brain, then his moral fiber, what was left of it. Then Carter had, in the manner of a spineless man who had already lost all pride, maintained a sick, phony friendship with the man who was sleeping with his wife, and had also “accepted a job from him,” and finally in the manner of a criminal had let his emotions burst out in murder. He had gravitated towards Gawill, “a fellow conspirator” in the Triumph fraud, though Carter now denied a close friendship with him, had accepted dope twice at Gawill’s house and not mentioned the dope to the police, and had at last with the coldest premeditation murdered the only man he could not trust, Anthony O’Brien. Carter had thought, said Ostreicher, that he could trust Gawill, but there was no real honor among thieves.

And thou shalt be my rock
, Carter thought, his mind turning to platitudes and clichés, too, like Ostreicher’s. His rock was Hazel, cracked and damaged like himself, but still there, still quite enough to hang on to.
Though I am but a shred
, Carter thought tritely—and looked steadily and with his head slightly bowed, at Ostreicher.

“You’re not answering anything I say, are you Carter?” Ost-reicher said.

Carter spoke slowly. “The things you are saying are not questions. What am I supposed to answer?”

“Any normal man would talk back. Deny it or admit it. You sit there like the stone-faced criminal you are.”

Carter might have smiled at that, but he did not, and it was no effort not to, it was quite normal. Guards in prison had called him the same thing, in different words, when he’d been in prison a few weeks, before the stringing-up. “I do not admit anything you’re saying, and I have nothing more to say than what I’ve already said.”

“Where do you think you’re going to get with all this, when Gawill’s already told me the
truth
?” Ostreicher’s face pinkened and he wagged a finger at Carter.

“I doubt if he’s told you all that, because it isn’t the truth,” Carter said.

Carter and Ostreicher were in the room together until after 11 o’clock, except for twenty minutes around 9, when Ostreicher presumably went out for something to eat. Carter was hungry by 10, but said nothing about it. He was also sleepy, from the repetition of the questions and of Gawill’s alleged story. Carter did not waver, really, though he found himself two or three times beginning to believe that Gawill
had
broken down and talked, but when this happened, Carter reminded himself that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by sticking to his story, and so he did. No blows were struck, and there were no rubber truncheons in sight.

“You know what we do with people like you, Carter,” Ost-reicher said as they were finishing up, Ostreicher frayed at the edges, his eyes bleary, his tie askew. “We don’t let them rest. We finish your career—what’s left of it—we—”

“I’d like to see you print that story you said came from Gawill,” Carter said. He was standing up now, like Ostreicher his hands in his pockets, his right hand squeezing his rolled-up tie. “When I get out of here, I’ll look for it in the papers.”

Ostreicher showed his annoyance at that despite himself. But he made no comment.

Carter slept like a log, even though his thumbs hurt, and he had been out of pills for more than twenty-four hours.

Sometime before 11 the next morning, Sunday, Matthew Ellis walked up to Carter’s door smiling and said, “Your wife’s here. You can go home in a little while now.”

Carter stood at the bars, looking for her at the extreme left of the hall, toward the precinct door. A guard walked toward him, followed by Hazel. She was bareheaded. She carried something in her arms wrapped in brown paper. When she saw him, she smiled a little. Her eyes were smiling more. Her eyes spoke to him. Carter took his hands from the bars and stood up straight as the guard unlocked the door.

“Brought you a clean shirt,” Hazel said.

“Thanks, darling.” He embraced her, and tears pressed behind his shut eyes. He was reminded of his tears the night he got home from prison.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she said, quite calmly.

Something in her voice made Carter draw away and look at her, and then he realized that Hazel knew the truth, knew it all. Carter glanced at Matthew Ellis, standing in the background, and Ellis nodded and smiled—Ellis who no doubt didn’t know, because Hazel never would have told him.

“Want to put on the shirt first?” Ellis asked, gesturing with a finger to indicate he would be at the front of the station.

Hazel handed Carter the white shirt from the pinned brown-paper parcel, then some pills in a twist of wax paper from her pocketbook. She waited outside the cell, while he took off the dirty shirt. He broke the blue paper band from the laundry on the clean shirt, broke it with a faintly aching thumb. He wondered if Gawill was out? Or if they were going to grill him a few more days? Gawill would never talk, not to the police, who could do something about what he said. And Carter felt certain, too, that he and Gawill would never try to see each other again, never say a word to each other again.

Carter took only one of the Pananods at the cell basin, scooping up water in one hand, as he had often done in prison. Then he straightened and buttoned the crisp, clean shirt—symbol of a new life. He turned to Hazel, who was looking at him. Perhaps she felt exactly as he did—she must, to be looking at him the way she was now—that they’d both made awful messes, but that there was something they could still save, and that was worth saving. They had not destroyed everything. There was plenty left, even an abundance, and everything was going to be all right. At last Carter returned her smile.

Ostreicher walked by as Carter was going out of the cell. He glanced at Hazel, then looked at Carter. “We won’t stop watching you, Carter.”

“Oh, I know that,” Carter said. “I know.”

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

B
orn in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published
The Price of Salt
in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States, as has the post-humous publication of
The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.