Pale Betrayer (5 page)

Marks, as though reading her mind, said: “His wife is going to know why we’re there the minute she sees us, Miss Russo. It’s just going to be a matter of helping her through the shock.”

He proved to be right. Janet released the door lock downstairs before they had a chance to ring the bell. She was waiting on the landing, holding fast to the banister.

Anne, rounding the stairs and looking up, said just the name, “Janet …”

Janet sank to the floor, fainting for the first time in her life. Marks carried her to the livingroom couch and got her head down. Anne found some brandy.

Janet’s first words when she regained consciousness were: “Peter’s dead.”

Anne nodded.

“I knew. When Bob did not call back, I knew then …”

Marks wandered softly about the room, leaving the burden of these moments to Anne Russo. For a man whose job it was to crowd the door of the bereaved, he felt utterly incompetent. There was no dignity in any death, much less the violent, but he was far less troubled looking at a naked corpse than into a face he should be watching that he might judge the true emotion from the simulated.

Pererro was better at it. His young face a mask of earnest concern, he stood at Anne’s side, a glass of water in hand, his eyes never straying from the afflicted woman.

Marks picked up the dummied book,
Child of the City
, by Janet Hill Bradley. He opened it at random: a child on the city street bending over a dead cat. The child’s expression seemed to say: why doesn’t it get up? Marks felt a knot in his throat. God in heaven! What made him think he was a cop? He turned the page to another picture: the same child, now earnestly building a castle of beer cans on the pavement. But in the background was a young woman, photographed at the moment she had paused on the steps of a building to look down at him; her expression, anguished longing. Marks put the book down and studied the room itself, modern lines, the furniture probably Danish. Somewhere he had picked up the notion that most artists were conservative in their tastes in other arts than their own. He had no more grounds for it than for another of his assumptions: that all scientists liked Bach. But wandering to the shelf of records, he did find a preponderance of Bach.

He went to the window and looked down at the street below. It was not a well-lighted street. The haze caused a halo around the lamp across the street. Bradley had left the house after nine. If the attack on him had been planned beforehand, it had to have been carefully planned, and with considerable knowledge of Bradley’s habits and his own plans for that night.

Anne came up behind him and said: “Mrs. Bradley thinks she can talk to you now, Lieutenant Marks. Could I call the Steinbergs? I ought to. They’re really closer to Janet than I am. Louise would come and stay all night I think.”

Marks looked at his watch. It was almost twelve. “Ask them both to come. You said there were three other students. Please give their names to Pererro.” He did not suppose he would get to them that night unless a necessity for it showed up in the questioning of Mrs. Bradley or the Steinbergs. “Who else was here?”

“Eric Mather.”

Anne’s voice carried across the room. Marks thought he saw Mrs. Bradley’s head bob up. He could not be sure.

“Another physicist?”

“He teaches literature I think,” Anne said. “I don’t know him very well.”

Marks nodded. “I’ll want to talk to Mrs. Bradley alone.”

“I know. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Marks drew up a chair next to Janet Bradley. She was still pale. He murmured his apologies for having to ask questions at a time like this. Pererro sat near Marks, his notebook open.

“I’ll be all right,” Janet said. “Just tell me what I have to know.”

“I’m afraid it’s the other way around,” Marks said softly. “Your husband was attacked by a person or persons unknown either inside Miss Russo’s building or very near by. You may speak freely. Miss Russo is in the kitchen.”

“It … doesn’t make sense,” Janet said.

Anne Russo’s own words, if Marks was not mistaken. “That he should have been there? Or that he was attacked?”

“Either. They were all going to the laboratory, including Anne.” Janet moistened her lips and Marks offered her the glass of water on the side-table. She motioned that she did not want it. A little color was returning to her cheeks. She was very feminine, he thought, with a great deal of poise—and sensitivity. He thought of the book of photographs. He was not good at judging women’s ages until they were well past his own, but he supposed her to be not more than thirty.

“I’d like to start, if you don’t mind,” Marks said, “from the time Dr. Bradley came home this afternoon.”

“He came directly from the air terminal,” Janet said.

“You met him?”

“No. But I’d called and his flight was on time. He was home by five o’clock. He was very tired but, well, elated is a strong word for Peter. He had learned something …”

“In his work you mean?”

A flicker of a smile touched her lips. To Marks it was as though she had said on her husband’s behalf: what else is there?

“Yes. I’d been a little uneasy as to how he would feel about people coming, but he was pleased.”

“Forgive me if I interrupt you, Mrs. Bradley. If you felt he might not be pleased, why did you plan the dinner party? I don’t ask that in criticism. I just want to get it clear who was here and why they were here.”

“I understand,” Janet said, but tentatively. It was borne home to her in that instant that everyone in the house that night was suspect to the police—suspect of Peter’s murder. A little shudder ran through her. “Actually, I hadn’t planned the party. Louise Steinberg—Peter’s associate’s wife—we’re all good friends, you see—Louise called earlier and said she and Bob would like to have a few friends. I knew Peter would be tired so I suggested that we have it here.”

“Who did the inviting?”

“Bob, I think, at the laboratory.”

“Everyone who was here?”

“Everyone, I suppose … except Eric.”

Marks waited.

“Louise must have invited him. He’s a family friend. He went to school with Peter. He’s not a scientist. Eric Mather.”

Marks tried to weigh the significance of her adding, piece by piece, the information on Mather. It might simply be due, as she said, to his not being a scientist. Or it might be due to a personal need to justify his presence.

Now Janet was waiting. Marks said: “Was Dr. Bradley carrying much money when he left home tonight?” He had purposely broken the line of questioning to see if she would show a feeling of reprieve. He could not tell.

“It might have been a fair amount,” Janet said. “He did not like to carry traveler’s checks.”

“And the film he had brought home, when did you first hear mention of that?”

“I’d already read about it in
The Times
, but from Peter, almost as soon as he got into the house. It was part of an exchange program very dear to Peter’s heart. He had supposed at the beginning you see, that the Americans were going to have to give more than they received for a long time. There is nothing classified in Peter’s work, you understand.”

Marks nodded.

“This really isn’t anything I’m qualified to talk about. Bob Steinberg could tell you better—or Anne.”

“Please go on. I want to know what your husband felt about what he’d got.”

“Well, as I understand it, the Russians who conducted the experiment were looking for something they wanted to know. But it occurred to—whoever it was—that there might be something in the film that would contribute to Peter’s work. A Swedish physicist is onto the same thing. And somebody at California. They were also given prints. The Russians made great propaganda of it.”

“At what point in the evening, Mrs. Bradley, was it decided that they would look at the film tonight?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Janet said after a moment’s thought. “I didn’t know about it until after dinner. Anne and the boys were washing up. They always do, and I was putting away. Peter asked me if I minded his going to the lab for an hour. He wasn’t in the habit of consulting me but he’d been away.” Again she qualified, as though anxious that Marks not think there were tensions between them: “By that I mean that long ago in our marriage, I’d come to know his way of pursuing an idea from the moment it occurred to him until he could use it—or throw it away.”

“Anyone who knew him well would know that, wouldn’t they?” Janet nodded and Marks went on: “You must help me work out a timetable, and tell me any suggestion you might have on the route he would ordinarily have taken. I understand he was accustomed to walking to the University?”

“Always, no matter what the weather. After Bob Steinberg called tonight, I remember thinking that Peter might have stopped at St. John’s Church. He often did. Not to pray. It was just that sometimes he liked a Gothic darkness. And Athens is a very bright city. I don’t even know what he saw of it …” She almost broke then. “He wanted me to go with him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It seemed like a great deal of money to spend for so little time, not even a week. And I needed to be here—or thought so then … a book that seemed important.”

“
Child of the City
?”

Janet nodded.

“Do you have any children, Mrs. Bradley?”

“We had a son. He died.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

Janet shrugged and then covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God. Will nothing make this real? Or would that be too much to bear?”

Marks glanced at Pererro. Notebook in hand, and pencil suspended, he looked like an automaton. The clock rasped, and as Marks started to speak again, it struck twelve.

“Who, besides those present, would have known that Dr. Bradley was leaving the house at nine fifteen tonight?”

“I shouldn’t think anyone else,” Janet said.

“No one would have had to open the laboratory building?”

“Most all of the group had keys.”

“After the others left—Miss Russo was stopping home,” Marks said. “Did your husband mention stopping to pick her up?”

“No. He said simply that I should wait up because he wasn’t going to stay very long.”

Marks asked then about Bradley’s activity from the time he got home until the guests arrived. His only phone call had been to Professor Bauer, chairman of the Physics Department.

A few minutes later the doorbell rang and Anne poked her head out the kitchen doorway. “Shall I go? It’s probably the Steinbergs.”

Janet moaned and turned away. “If only I could be alone … Where did they take Peter?”

“We’ll let you know,” Marks said. “There must be an autopsy.” Anne had gone into the hallway. “Mrs. Bradley, there had to be some circumstance under which your husband would have gone to Anne Russo’s apartment.”

“Only if he were told that Anne was ill—or hurt. I can think of no other reason.”

“You are absolutely certain?”

“I am. Peter had a very strong sense of propriety.”

“That’s all for now,” Marks said, getting up. “I want to talk with the Steinbergs—in your kitchen if you don’t mind?”

But Janet had withdrawn mentally. She sat very straight and looked almost prim and childlike, her hands in her lap folded tightly into one another. Marks remembered her husband’s very young face—seemingly turned that way by death—which had no right to make its captives young—and the remark of the Negro cop who had found him: “He looks like a preacher to me, a good man.”

Marks and Pererro waited in the kitchen while the Steinbergs spoke to Janet. Pererro looked into the darkroom, the door to which was open.

“Jees,” he said, “what a way to do up a pantry.”

Marks looked into the room. A gallon bottle of acetic acid stood on the shelf near the door, the poison label clearly visible. “Makes you kind of thirsty, doesn’t it?”

Steinberg joined them and tried his best to describe the kind of research Bradley and his group were engaged in. He was a heavy-built man who, Marks thought, like his work was a reservoir of latent energy. He wore thick-lensed glasses and probably wore them so much of the time that only his wife would immediately recognize him without them. He would be Marks’s last candidate for a man likely to be involved in physical violence. Steinberg forgot everything else, talking of physics, even for a moment the death of the man with whom he had shared the enthusiasm. Marks, his attention divided, was unable to grasp the concept Steinberg had just said was so simple. He glanced at Pererro’s suspended notes and was surprised at the three dots and an exclamation point representing Steinberg’s testimony. He had learned something about Pererro if not about elementary particles. Finally Steinberg said:

“I’ll loan you a book if you come round to the laboratory.”

“Thank you,” Marks said gravely. “I’d be interested. I want to ask you now about what happened at the laboratory tonight.”

“Not a damned thing. We got there—myself and three of the graduate students working with us: we signed in at nine twenty, took about ten minutes setting up and then just stood around waiting.”

“What time did Miss Russo arrive?”

“Twenty to ten maybe. It’s in the check-in book. When Bradley didn’t show by ten thirty, I went out and called Janet.”

Marks probed him on the business of Anne Russo’s glasses. Steinberg’s recollection of it was essentially the same as Anne had told.

“Does she wear her glasses regularly?”

“For work, yes. That’s why she forgets them so much.” It seemed a non sequitur to Marks but it satisfied him that there was not anything too unusual in the girl’s having to stop for them that night.

“What’s the connection?” Steinberg asked.

He had not been told, Marks realized, where Bradley was found. “Dr. Bradley was assaulted in the vestibule or just outside Miss Russo’s building.”

Steinberg’s eyes blinked rapidly behind the glasses. “How did he get
there
?”

“That is our most difficult question at the moment. How or why.”

Steinberg shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he go there?”

“You can think of no reason?” Marks persisted, conscious of melodramatic overtones that made him sound like Fitzgerald.