Pale Betrayer (8 page)

Bauer gave a gentle and lucid account of the kind of research that Dr. Bradley was engaged in. Unlike Steinberg, whom Marks had talked with the night before, Bauer was accustomed to dealing with the non-scientific mind. The chairman of any university department, Marks knew, was primarily a liaison officer between ivory tower and market place. It was a pleasure to watch him dislodge the fixed concept of a man like Fitzgerald that nuclear physics was necessarily a highly secretive, war-oriented science.

“Actually,” Bauer said, indicating the film box, “the findings of such experiment have been published for some time. Dr. Bradley and our people were looking to what we might call a byproduct in the film. We don’t know of course whether it will tell us anything we didn’t already know until we compare it with what we do know. Dr. Bradley obviously thought it might. Otherwise he and his colleagues would not have been so anxious to study the film last night. Some of the notes he had made”—Bauer indicated the handwritten papers—“suggest his high expectations.”

“The film is intact now?” Marks asked.

“I should think so,” Bauer said. “I shouldn’t suppose it to have been tampered with at all. It would mean nothing except to a person interested in the Pi-meson.”

“And there can’t be many of them in the world,” Fitzgerald remarked dryly.

The others laughed, including Bauer.

“Let’s have another look at the container,” one of the federal men said.

Redmond handed him the box, roughly one by one and a half by four inches. When he was through examining it inside and out, he passed it and its contents on. Marks observed the customs’ stamp overlapping the label on which Bradley’s name had been written in block letters. Inside were a half-dozen film strips of four frames each. The film was protected by coarse tissue paper. The box itself was much like that in which Marks kept color slides.

Anderson spoke last: “The customs’ seal was broken, I understand, but Bradley himself might have broken it, or more likely the thieves, to see that they weren’t missing anything. Customs cleared the film on the spot, duplicates of it having entered the country at Boston, and Washington, D.C., as well as via another New York flight, a set on its way to San Francisco. Both the box and the film are identical with those received at the National Laboratory. We had them flown up this morning for comparison.”

Anderson smiled, and Marks thought he was one of those characters who promoted men on the basis of how early they got up in the morning. He had the glow of the cold shower about him.

“I want to say that the Bureau’s full facilities are at your disposal, gentlemen,” Anderson concluded. “We shall expect you to inform us of any development you feel might concern the national security. I myself am available for consultation at any hour of the day or night. But at the present stage of your investigation, I see no reason for us to enter the case.”

More than forty detectives were assigned to the case, most of them to the hard, gritty work of door-to-door inquiry, of trying to track the victim from the moment he stepped out of his own house. The first pay-off came early: Bradley, walking alone, had stopped briefly to exchange a few words with the sexton of St. John’s Church who was closing the gate for the night. The time was nine thirty: the sexton was sure since he was performing his last chore of the day and was understandably punctual about it. He had known Bradley to have been in Greece and their exchange ran something like: “How was Greece, Professor?” To which Bradley replied: “Hot and noisy. I felt right at home.”

The sexton “was pretty sure” Professor Bradley had continued on toward the University.

Marks noted the name of the interrogating officer, Tom Reid, and laid the report aside. The conversation of Bradley with the sexton was certainly not that of a man aware of immediate jeopardy. Marks studied a city street map. Reaching St. John’s, Bradley had passed by three blocks the street on which Anne Russo lived. At some point between the church and the University he had either turned back or was intercepted and driven back to the building on East Tenth Street.

The detective dug out Anne Russo’s statement. She had left her apartment at nine thirty, admitting the unidentified gum-chewer to the building. Marks returned to the map. If Bradley had been tailed from his own house—either on foot or by two or more men in a car—the man Anne had seen would have left the others at the corner of Tenth Street and Third Avenue. The time was right, and to Marks’s satisfaction, Anne’s story was corroborated by Dr. Webb’s account of the doorbell ringing. Bradley at that moment had been at the gate of St. John’s, his “tail” not far behind him.

Marks was about to put these dovetailing circumstances before Fitzgerald when he realized that the old man could say:
If
the little lady is telling the truth. If there was a man in the vestibule. Find me the man or another witness who
saw
him. Anybody can ring a doorbell, including our missy.

Marks made a note of his deductions and for the moment kept them to himself.

Fitzgerald was studying the preliminary report of the medical examiner. When he finished he handed it to Marks. The blow on the back of the head was likely to have done no more than stun the victim; no serious brain injury. The mortal wound came from the knife, a neat thrust with a small, very sharp blade at the most vulnerable point, suggesting that it was inflicted while the victim was unconscious. Bradley’s clothing had been impressed in the immediate area of the wound. The absence of blood stains near the victim, the condition of clothing at the surface of the wound, suggested that a cloth or handkerchief had been put round the knife before it was withdrawn.

“I wonder what our chances are of finding that bit of dirty linen,” Marks said.

“If it was yours, what would you do with it?”

“Get rid of it quick—unless it had my monogram on it.”

Fitzgerald agreed. “If it’s a street job, we’ll find it.”

Marks then picked up a call from the police laboratory: he could collect a size eleven pair of shoes any time, findings negative. He hadn’t expected them to be otherwise. He doubted Mather could use a weapon sharper than his tongue. It was too early in the day to check out the taverns and coffeehouses. Marks looked up the precinct duty chart. Pererro would come on in time to pick up part of that detail.

Marks was on his way out of the building when Walter Herring caught up with him. He was in civilian clothes.

“Promoted?” Marks said.

“No, sir, but they don’t mind much what I wear on my day off. You know, Lieutenant, I got thinking this morning—you ought to get another man to check out that Mrs. Finney again, the woman with the dog. I hate to say this, boss, but a cop of a different complexion might get more out of her than I did.”

Marks tried to remember her testimony. Herring explained that she had thought the victim drunk at first.

Marks, intending to prowl the scene himself, said: “Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir!” No nonsense about Herring. He was ambitious, and he liked the company of men in authority.

Mrs. Finney greeted them with less enthusiasm than did her spaniel who waddled from one to the other of them, the tail wagging a lot of dog. Marks remembered having heard once that dogs were color-blind.

“What’s so important you’d come around before a woman’s put her house in place?”

“Officer Herring and I were trying to narrow down the time of the attack on the victim. We knew you’d want to help us if you could.” Marks said it with a straight face.

Mrs. Finney wiped her hands in her apron and led the way into a parlor that had never been out of order, the sterile look of which was strangely heightened by the vividly colored religious pictures. The spaniel hurtled himself into the best chair.

“A professor, by the morning paper,” Mrs. Finney said. “And will you tell me please what decent young girls are up to, living alone in this part of the city?”

Marks cleared his throat. The question had been rhetorical.

“Sit down,” she said, with a nod toward two straight-backed chairs. She tucked a strand of gray hair into the bun at the back of her head, and stood, her arms folded, measuring Marks with watery blue eyes. About to sit down, he waited then till she did.

“It was me that found the body,” Mrs. Finney said, “but you wouldn’t see him mentioning that, would you?” She jerked her head toward Herring.

“I’m sorry,” Herring said, “but you gave me the impression that you were trying to avoid publicity.”

She made a small noise of righteousness. “I’m always ready to do my civic duty, but like everybody else I like to get credit for it.”

“Understandable,” Marks murmured. “You were taking the dog out, I suppose, when first you noticed the man?”

“As a matter of fact I was,” she said, admitting now what she had denied the night before. “It’s terrible what happens to a person living in a neighborhood like this. The poor man was trying to get up, you see, and I thought he was drunk. I just gave Dandy a pull and got away as quick as I could.”

Marks was very much afraid that this testimony was reliable: unless there had been some movement in the prone figure, she was not likely to have assumed Bradley drunk. It opened wide the possibility of two attacks, one in the vestibule of Anne’s building, and the second on the street when he was perhaps recovering from the blow on the head. If that were the case, the motive of the first attack was not robbery. Either that, or the second attackers, taking turns, as it were, got nothing.

“Do you know what time it was when you first saw him, Mrs. Finney?”

“Not much past ten,” she said. “Dandy just won’t wait any longer. He’s getting old, you can see. We always stop at Molloy’s on Third Avenue for a glass of beer and to watch the television, but I didn’t last night. I was thinking about that man, you see, in the back of my mind though I never knew it at the time myself. I got as far as Molloy’s and turned back without going in.”

Marks leaned forward, inviting her confidence. “You didn’t tell anybody about him on the way, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve just said you were thinking about him, a little concerned perhaps that he might be hurt?”

She thought about that, calculating the best light in which to put herself, and then shook her head. “I thought if he was still there I might call the police when I got home.”

“Of course you would,” Marks said. “Now you and Dandy walked along Tenth Street to Third Avenue. There you would have turned north, going to Molloy’s.”

“Do you know Molloy’s?” she said, her face cracking into its first smile. You’d have thought she had discovered a long lost relative. “It’s a funny old place, but it feels like home.”

Marks nodded. “Before you reached Third Avenue, did you meet anyone?”

“I didn’t, you see, or I’d have stopped worrying.”

Marks thought: witnesses always lied even when they thought they were telling the truth.

“I remember a gang of boys when I reached Third Avenue. But I don’t know where they went. I’m scared of the gangs, I’ll tell you.”

“Is there anything you remember about them?”

“Well … they weren’t …” She gestured vaguely and gave a flit of her eyelashes toward Herring.

“Black?” he prompted.

“Colored,” she corrected him in a slightly reproachful tone.

“They were or they were not?” Marks said.

“They were not. I heard them laughing and talking. Some of them were shouting something like, ‘oleh!’ Spanish, I thought, but I didn’t see any of them close, just a sea of faces in the night.”

“One last question,” Marks said: “As you passed the entrance to the building near which the man was lying, did you notice a light in the vestibule?”

“I wouldn’t know whether there was or not, Officer, but I’ve got an idea that if there was one, I’d have been able to see him better. You mustn’t think too bad of me for passing him by. A lone woman can get into a lot of trouble. Look at the one he was supposed to be visiting. Mind, I’m not saying anything against her.”

“We’re not yet sure,” Marks said, getting up, “that he was visiting her.”

“Then they shouldn’t put it in the papers,” she said piously.

Going down in the elevator, Marks said to Herring: “There’s a saying in Yiddish that fits her: she wouldn’t touch a horse on the wall.”

Outdoors the two detectives stood on the sidewalk looking down the street toward the area still blocked off for police search although no search was in evidence at the moment. Someone had chalked “Viva Fidel!” on the sidewalk and on the side of Mrs. Finney’s building. Marks grinned, thinking how that sentiment would sit with her. More soberly, he thought: a Spanish-speaking gang …

Herring was thinking how different the street looked in the daytime from at night. There was a lumberyard across the street which with door closed at night looked like any other two-story building in the block. In the daytime you could see the courtyard within, the lumber piled up on either side. The possibilities fascinated him; he did not admit why to the Lieutenant, barely to himself: as a child he would have thought this The Most in secret hiding places.

Marks was watching the approach, from far down the street, of two detectives moving from trash basket to trash basket. They were picking up in their wake a caravan of tiny street Arabs, children too young to learn their alphabets but old hands at baiting policemen.

Herring visited the lumberyard; Marks went on to meet the search party, a couple of pretty sour cops. “How are you doing?”

“Treasure, Lieutenant. Gold and frankincense and myrrh. Smell it?”

Marks could smell over-ripe banana peel.

The young detective raised the back of his hand threateningly to a dirty-faced, black-haired midget who was chinning himself on the rim of the basket. “Get out of here, you little baboons! Go on home! You got homes, ain’t you?”

Marks tapped one of the gang on the shoulder. “You and your pals, come over here and talk to me.” He sat down on the steps of a brownstone not unlike that in which Anne Russo lived. “Know what happened on this street last night?” He looked into one suspicious pair of eyes after another.