Pale Betrayer (7 page)

Marks smiled. “I wish I did. How long have you known Peter Bradley?”

“We were in college together—just after the war. Before Bradley switched to physics. For years then I didn’t see him, not until I came East to Central University. Oh, once or twice. He’d come out to a conference in Chicago and call me. I’d kept up with his career of course. It was rather more to keep up with than my own. I suppose the fact that he was here may have influenced my decision to take the job at Central.”

“And Mrs. Bradley, have you known her long?”

“I met her out here. They’d been married for some years by then.” He would have liked to add something, a little more on Janet, a show of sympathy. Instead, he demanded: “You said you’d tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you what I can, Professor. He was assaulted by a person or persons unknown. First a blow on the back of the head, but the cause of his death was a knife wound in the back.”

“No!” Mather cried out the word as though he had felt the wound.

Marks said carefully: “It occurred in the vestibule or just outside the door of Anne Russo’s building.”

“Why there?” Mather said after a moment. “They were all going to the laboratory the last I saw of them.”

“Miss Russo’s is not so much out of the way, is it?”

“I neither know nor give a damn where Miss Russo lives,” Mather said.

Marks said: “She lives on the edge of a rough neighborhood.”

“Who doesn’t in New York City?” But Mather suddenly saw what might be the line of police investigation: if some sort of relationship were discovered between Anne and Peter, if in fact Peter’s being at her place could be accounted for, the crime could be put down to assault for the purpose of theft, the random street attack on a well-dressed man. Could it possibly be the truth? The knife was a street weapon. Jerry would not have dared … He could feel his jaws working, his own feeling of relief was so intense. He must somehow cover himself with this cop in gentleman’s clothing. He said: “I make it a point to see
my
students only in the classroom or in some public gathering place.”

Marks digested that for a moment. “Do you know Miss Russo?”

“Only from meeting her at the Bradleys’.”

Marks gazed at him, all innocence. “Yet she was on your guest list for the dinner party. Why?”

“Because Peter liked her,” Mather said with a small bitter smile on his lips.

An interesting response: Mather was willing to admit his intention of inviting Anne; if someone had told the police it was his idea, he was not going to contradict it now. Marks wondered how far this Galahad would go to hide whatever it was he had to hide. Something, Marks was sure, but he was inclined to doubt that it had anything directly to do with Bradley’s death. Nor did he think he was going to find it out at this stage in the investigation. It would take a little more sweat and tears.

“I wonder if I may have your other shoe also, Professor. For a routine laboratory check. They’ll be returned.”

Mather shrugged. As the detectives got up he fumbled at his shoe laces, waiting for the parting shot. He felt that one had to come, something held back for when he would be least expecting it.

Marks said: “Better see a doctor about that toe, Professor.”

“It’s nothing. Just my clumsiness.” He handed over the shoe.

“I’d feel better if you saw one. The city does have a responsibility—as you yourself pointed out.”

Mather knew then why he loathed the slick bastard: Marks was the kind of man he had feared and fled from all his life, a man he suspected of seeing right through him. In his stocking feet and without the limp, he saw them to the door. There he ventured to ask: “Was Bradley robbed?”

“Oh, yes,” Marks said. “Cleaned out. Can you think of any other motive for his murder?”

“It’s the worst possible motive,” Mather said from an inner compulsion to pay a tardy tribute to his friend. “Peter Bradley would have given any man who needed it anything he owned.”

Marks merely looked at him and nodded, and then went out the door, his strong and silent partner following him.

M
ATHER, ALONE AND HEARING
the outer door click behind the detectives, tried to confront himself with the reality of Peter Bradley’s death. But nothing ever seemed real to him while he was alone, not until he could find the context in which he could see himself as he wanted other people to see him. No such context was now possible: he wanted nothing so much as to disappear altogether, above all from his own view. He had worshipped Peter Bradley—worshipped, admired, envied him. What better tribute to pay a friend than envy?

He slumped down on the couch and let his mind seek its only solace, the memory of his finest moment with Peter Bradley. Once, in their college days, they had been swimming off a boat in one of the Finger Lakes when Peter got caught beneath an abandoned fishing net. He had managed to surface long enough to cry for help before the weight of the net bore him down again. Mather was not nearly the swimmer Peter was, yet he had jumped to Peter’s rescue with no thought of his own safety, and he had carried a fishing knife with which Peter cut himself free. Peter might have died that day. The net and the knife.

Eighteen years later, was it again the net and the knife? How curious the repetition of weapon and symbol. A poet could find no better a concept. This then was the beginning between Peter and himself. For Peter it had ended alone, a knife in the filthy hand of a stranger put there by his friend Eric. He thought then of what it would be like, to drive a knife into the warm flesh. It was the way
he
should die now by his own hand.

Signifying nothing. He had not meant Peter harm: there was nothing in the scheme of things as he had planned them, as he had—so he had thought—been allowed to plan them to warrant violence. In a way it was to end a larger violence he had joined the conspiracy. But there had been no place in his lovely simple scheme for Anne Russo. He could truly say he had never in his life given Anne Russo more than a passing thought. Nor, he was sure, had Peter outside that tight little island of science.

If he were to tell the truth now as he knew it …

To start at the beginning, he could not, although to tell all the truth he would have to: it was to keep forever from his own mind that noisome incident—one incident in a lifetime!—and to do it he could not tolerate even Jerry’s suggestion of it—that he had entered wholeheartedly into their conspiracy. There! That much of truth he had admitted. He pinned it on the wall, that first confrontation with the stranger: the pudgy face, the ferret’s eyes, the pink tongue coming out to receive a stick of gum as though it were a communion wafer.

“It was to save my own skin!” he cried aloud, “to hide my filthy image. Call it blackmail, straight and simple. The rest is all delusion.”

His mind however slipped away from the truth to still pursue the delusion: he had made of the problem posed him a game of chess such as might have been played by correspondence. He had anticipated, nay, contrived, his antagonist’s every move. Never had he felt involved with people, only pieces, except for the incidental pleasure it had given him to use Peter Bradley, the man who prided himself above all else on being the pawn of no man, of no institution, of no party.

But Peter was dead. Possibly by chance. But if not by chance who could name his killer?

Mather began composing in his mind a note he might leave: The man I knew called himself “Jerry.” I am sure it was not his name, for he had a partner I met later whom he introduced as “Tom.” Tom and Jerry. No wonder, having no more originality than that, they willingly accepted my brain, my imagination. Or did they? They could themselves have been no more than messengers, well-trained lackies …

He pulled himself out of the reverie, trying to go back, back … Peter was the friend of his youth on whom in later years he had thrust his friendship and had it tolerated. Like the devotion of the buffoon he often played. Had Peter been utterly contemptuous of him? Was he
persona grata
to Peter only because Janet found a kind of liking for him? He would never know now, never really know. He would have forced the revelation had Peter lived. There would have come a time of reckoning. There always did between him and his attachments, a time when rejection became itself gratifying, for it left him the ultimate solace: even as a dog, he must lick his own wounds.

Exhausted but not remotely sleepy, he pushed himself up from the couch and started for the bathroom. He realized that he was hobbling, favoring an imagined injury. He lifted the shoeless foot, the impulse to kick it violently at something, but he caught his self-image in his mind’s eye and was struck by the ridiculous figure it made of him, the man who even played his own clown. He began to laugh aloud at himself, the laughter rolling up in him irresistibly. Only when the tears came and he was reminded of the deeper need for tears was he able to control himself. He went on to the bathroom and presently took two sleeping pills. There were only two more left in the bottle, which forestalled temptation in that direction.

He stripped, turned out the lights and groped his way through the apartment to open the window at the front. As he raised it he saw the two detectives; a few feet away—near the place where he had fallen—they were playing their flashlights over the sidewalk, searching the curb, the gutter, around the stoops. The big silent one picked something up, examined it under his light and threw it away.

Just then Marks shot the full beam of his flashlight on the window. Mather stood in the glaring light like a man pilloried. Marks clicked off the light and said: “Better put some clothes on. You’ll catch cold.”

Mather slammed down the window and fell away into the darkness within.

M
ARKS READ THE MORNING
newspapers in a cab on his way to Precinct Headquarters. He did not often allow himself the luxury of a cab, but he had not had much sleep. He lived alone in an apartment hotel just off Central Park West. He had grown up not far from there where his parents still lived in the building they had moved into when he was ten years old. He sometimes stopped to have breakfast with them. But not that morning. He would manage his coffee and Danish on the taxpayers’ time.

Bradley’s death had made the tabloid headlines. The paper made the most of the fact that the physicist had been found outside the apartment building of an attractive female student. It was to be expected, Marks thought. The old man himself had briefed the reporters at 3:00
A.M.
, and while he would not deliberately throw them what he knew damned well they wanted, neither would he go out of his way to throw them off that track. No mention was made of the film at all. The story read like a clandestine love tryst in which the parties to it had got their signals crossed. Marks threw down the paper in disgust, but he thought of one of his father’s favorite dictums: As long as you’ve got an open case, keep an open mind. His father was a good lawyer, but a better human being. Fitzgerald was a good policeman.

Marks admired him in spite of himself: the Inspector divorced facts from people. Facts never lied. People almost always did, even when they did not know they were lying, and the old man was short of patience when it came to looking for subconscious motives. The last thing he had said to Marks the night before was: “I hope to God this turns out to be a nice clean street job.” He had emphasized the irony, but he had spoken the truth of himself.

The old man was in a better mood than Marks had expected. His eyes were bloodshot and he had cut himself in a hasty and not very efficient shave, but something in the case had gone the way he wanted it. He took Marks’s arm as they started up the deeply grooved stairs to Redmond’s office.

“Wouldn’t you think they could do something to brighten these bloody mausoleums?”

Marks knew what he meant: he said it of every precinct house in the city. This two-story building at Houston Street had remained virtually unchanged since the days of the Tong wars, a bleak stone edifice with iron-meshed windows the dust of which God’s own eyes could scarcely penetrate. The pea-green walls were chipped along the way, showing the pinkish taste of the previous administration.

“They’re all waiting for us up here,” Fitzgerald said, “hoping to build a mountain on a pinhead. But mark my words: as I said last night, it’s a police case, pure and simple. We got back his wallet and briefcase this morning, the only thing missing his money, and I dare say he was carrying a fair amount. Didn’t his wife tell you that?”

“She said it might have been,” Marks said. “Where were the things returned?”

“At a mail deposit box on Sixty-fourth and Park Avenue. Picked up at 5:00
A.M
.”

The two double desks in Redmond’s office had been moved back, and a table usually used for a miscellany of reports and office supplies had been converted into a conference table. Six men were around it, quietly talking, smoking, laughing, except for the one Marks rightly supposed to be the University representative. He looked at his watch and then sat back staring at Bradley’s case which lay in a plastic laboratory container in the middle of the table.

Marks took the empty chair next to him and introduced himself.

“Arnold Bauer, chairman of the Physics Department,” the man said, shaking hands. “I should suppose we could get on now.” Then he added, nodding toward the case, “It seems incredible, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Marks said, “it always does.”

He rose to shake hands across the table with the man opposite, Jim Anderson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A big man of about fifty, well-groomed, with a quick smile, his handshake had the grip of an iron cuff.

Marks noticed the laboratory clearance label as Redmond picked up the bag and emptied its contents on the table. Out of the lettercase itself he took the wallet, the film box, and several pages of handwritten notes. “Missing, to our knowledge,” Redmond said, “an unknown amount of money. Dr. Bradley did not carry traveler’s checks.” Redmond summarized the police case to that hour. He turned to Bauer. “Professor Bauer has examined the film with Mr. Anderson and his colleagues. Professor?”