Shadow of Guilt (18 page)

Bombarding me with an unbroken barrage of chatter, Vivien drove me to Sixty-Fourth Street. We were actually getting out of the car before I saw Lieutenant Trant. He appeared from nowhere, it seemed, hovering at my side like a chauffeur ready to assist the descent of an elderly employer.

“Hello, Mr. Hadley. Good evening, Mrs. Ryson.” He moved his grave smile from one to the other of us. “This is a piece of luck for me, Mr. Hadley. I’ve just been told by the maid that no one was at home.”

“They’re over at our house, Lieutenant,” said Vivien. “We’re giving a party. A celebration—after Chuck’s terrible ordeal.”

She was smiling her standard woman-to-man smile at Trant, snuggling around inside her mink. She seemed completely to have forgotten her own “terrible” ordeal when she’d ratted on Chuck. I wished I were able to forget so easily.

I said, “Did you want anything in particular, Lieutenant?”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Hadley, I want to speak to you.”

I turned to Vivien. “You go on,” I said. “I’ll come by in a minute.”

“All right, darling.” Vivien smiled at Trant again. “But don’t keep him too long. Please, Lieutenant, promise me. We need him.”

She waggled her hand at him, kissed me on the cheek and drove off. For a moment Trant stood looking after her, then he turned to me. I preceded him up the steps, opened the front door, and led him into the library.

I should by then have become used to the oppressiveness he always inspired in me, the sensation that ever since I’d first met him he had been biding his time, crouching like the most patient of tigers for a sudden, eventual pounce. But now, although his smile was as unintimidating as ever and he had in so many words that morning dismissed us completely from the case, I felt tenser than I’d ever felt before with him!

I said, “How about a drink?”

I went over to the bar and was actually pouring myself a shot of bourbon before he said, “No, thank you. I don’t think so. Not now.”

I put water in my drink. “You don’t mind if I do?”

“Of course not. You probably need one.”

He took out his cigarette case and, selecting a cigarette, inevitably tapped it on the case and fit it.

“Cartier’s,” he said, “is a very impressive store, Mr. Hadley. I’d tried a couple of other jewelers first, but less than five minutes after I’d shown them that pearl bracelet at Cartier’s, they were able to identify it as a bracelet you had them make for your wife seven years ago.”

The nightmare’s over!
Vivien and her celebration! My hand was gripping my glass so tightly that with a hallucinatory sensation I could almost feel it crushing, driving splinters into my palm.

“I can’t say I was very surprised.” The Lieutenant’s continuing voice sounded very slightly muffled as if it were coming to me through a thin barrier of paper. “There’d already been several hints. The woman who heard the shots had seen him on several occasions come into the building with a woman. She didn’t know who the woman was, of course, but the general description could very well have fitted Mrs. Hadley. And then—well, the Duvreux story established a sort of pattern, didn’t it? Begin as a protégé of the wife-switch to the daughter. Of course, Chuck confused the issue for a while, but he never sidetracked me too much. I mean, from the moment the motel owners checked in and Mrs. Fostwick called from Toronto, I had a fairly good idea who killed Don Saxby. And now, since I’ve found out about the bracelet, I would say I have a
very
good idea.”

He paused, but his eyes never left my face. I was looking back at him stupidly, I imagine, or however a rabbit is supposed to look back at a snake.

“Usually, Mr. Hadley, once you’ve found the best motive you’ve found the murderer. A man who discovers that both his wife and his daughter have been—what shall we say—betrayed?—by the same man, has a very good motive for murder, doesn’t he?”

Somehow, I suppose, in the even flow of his words, I had gathered what he was leading up to; I had realized that after the long crouch the pounce had come. But that it should have come in just this way was so staggeringly unexpected that

I felt nothing at first but astonishment merged with something that was almost amusement.

“You’re not accusing me?” I said.

“Accusing you, Mr. Hadley? No, I’m not accusing you. I’m only asking you what you would say if I did accuse you.”

“I’d say it was ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous that you would have wanted to kill a man who’d done what Saxby did to your wife and daughter?”

“No, not exactly, but—”

“But—what?”

They can’t do anything to you if you’re innocent.
How many times had I been uttering that trite reassurance in the last few days? But gradually I could feel it all as an octopus again; I could feel tentacles creeping from the right, the left, from behind.

“Well, Mr. Hadley? You admit you had the motive. What about the opportunity? Wouldn’t you say in your own defense that you couldn’t have killed him because you had an alibi?”

I’d been waiting for that, waiting with the image of Miss Taylor hovering ominously in my mind. I knew as clearly as I knew anything that a lifeline thrown by Lieutenant Trant would be suspect but I grabbed it.

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine I’d remind you that I had an alibi.”

Trant turned away from me with maddening leisureliness. He saw an ash tray on Connie’s desk and crushed his cigarette in it.

“We called Miss Taylor, Mr. Hadley. This morning when I borrowed your phone I told headquarters to get in touch with her. They got the South Carolina number. We talked to her the moment she arrived. She confirmed Mrs. Hadley’s and Miss Hadley’s alibis, of course. But when it came to you, her story was a little different from yours or your wife’s. She said that, to the best of her knowledge, when she left at four-thirty, you still hadn’t come home.”

So much for Connie’s “arrangements.” I might have known that in any contest of wits between Connie and Trant, Trant would certainly win. He had paused again, giving time for this body blow to make its effect.

Then he went on, “I’m sure that you’ve been planning to get in touch with her and ask her to include you in the alibi. For all I know, you’ve already done so. But I’m afraid I got ahead of you. And I spoke to her from the office. I have the conversation on tape. As the D. A. sees it and as I see it, Mr. Hadley, the only people, apart from yourself, who at the moment have any known immediate motive for murdering Don Saxby, were Mrs. Hadley or Miss Hadley. Miss Taylor has been able to give them both a definite alibi. But you…” He made a little gesture with his hand.

“Motive, Mr. Hadley, opportunity… and an alibi which didn’t happen to hold up very well, did it? That’s what I want you to think about. I know it’s unorthodox for a cop to show his hand, but I’ve never cared much for being orthodox. And in a case like this where the murdered man, morally if not legally, deserved what was coming to him… I feel, well, shall we say that I feel holding out on you any longer wouldn’t be cricket?”

Once again, at the least imaginable moment, he was stretching out his hand, smiling his exasperating smile of tolerance for all human frailty.

“Don’t bother to see me out. I know the way. But there’s one last thing I’d like to say. Even in cricket, I believe, the object of the game is to win. I have no actual proof yet. I’ll even be frank enough to tell you that. But now is only now. Good evening, Mr. Hadley. I won’t keep you from Mrs. Ryson’s celebration any longer.”

He went out of the library. I heard his footsteps going down the hall. Then the front door opened and closed.

I stood there with my drink half drunk in my hand. The imaginary tentacles were crawling, curling around me because I saw the decision I’d have to make. It was the same soul-destroying decision that had confronted me last night, only now it was I who had been put into the position vacated by Chuck. For, in spite of Trant’s threats, I knew there need be no danger for me at all. All I had to do was to admit I’d gone to Saxby’s and found Ala there. Once Trant knew Ala’s alibi was a fake too and that I’d actually discovered her there by the body, he would, without any shadow of doubt, forget about me. His terrible round game of “pick the murderer” would come to a remorseless close with Ala.

But knowing what I had to decide didn’t make the decision any easier. Ironically, this was supposed to be the first day of my freedom from the Corlisses; the first day of my real fife with Eve. What would happen to Tobago if I didn’t tell? But if I did tell, how would Eve and I ever be able to five with ourselves.

I took a gulp of my drink, feeling at the lowest ebb of exhaustion. There was no proof against me. Trant had admitted it. And he would never be able to get any because I wasn’t guilty. Didn’t the answer fie there? Wouldn’t Eve have to agree that there was only one thing to do? Once it had seemed possible for me to sacrifice Ala if need be, but now, after she’d so splendidly shown her courage, now at the very moment when she was being reunited with Chuck, it was something, I knew, which just couldn’t be done.

I finished my drink and put the empty glass down on Connie’s desk. What I’d put it down on was the
Times
magazine section, still opened at the crossword puzzle which Connie and Miss Taylor had done together and which Trant had studied so carefully. I glanced down at Connie’s familiar messy writing and Miss Taylor’s neat letters, legible as neon signs.

The puzzle was completely finished. That was the first thing I noticed. Then, as if drawn by magnetism, my eyes fell on the clue for number eight down. A goddess of war in seven letters. My eyes flashed up to the puzzle itself. There was the answer written in, in Miss Taylor’s unmistakable capitals:
bellona.

As I looked at the word, I felt myself spinning dizzily back in time. I was coming here into the library around five on Sunday afternoon. Connie was sitting in the red leather chair, her reading glasses on, glancing up at me with her bright, unperturbed smile.

Hello, dear. Who was a goddess of war in seven letters beginning with B?

Five o’clock! Half an hour: after Miss Taylor was supposed to have left! And Connie hadn’t known who the goddess of war was then; the puzzle hadn’t been finished then. So!

This shock was so enormous that for a moment I couldn’t force my swirling thoughts into any sense. But gradually the pattern emerged. Connie’s alibi for herself had been as fake as our alibi for Ala and our alibi for me. On Sunday Miss Taylor had never been at the house at all. Connie had merely gone to her later and made her fill in the puzzle to provide Trant at just the right moment with the magnificently casual and convincing piece of evidence of the two female buddies sitting cozily together on a family Sunday afternoon, taking turns writing in the words.

Miss Taylor hadn’t got around to lying for me, but she’d certainly lied brilliantly for Connie.

Ever since I’d left for Idlewild on Sunday morning, my wife had been alone. Ala had been physically there, of course, but she’d been locked in her bedroom at the back of the house. Connie could have gone out and come back a dozen times—and nobody would ever have known.

Eve and I were sitting together in the pink living room. I’d gone directly to her house and told her about Connie. For a while she just couldn’t believe it. That was another of the ironies. Eve was like everyone else, including me. She was so convinced of Connie’s integrity that it was beyond her powers of comprehension to grasp the fact that Connie, of all people, could have been saying one thing and doing another—forcing Ala to speak the truth while she at the same time had been hiding her own far more incriminating involvement.

“But all that about Miss Taylor and the puzzle—it wasn’t just for Trant. She told you Miss Taylor had been there long before there was any question of alibis. She’d decided on it from the beginning, hadn’t she?”

“She must have.”

“And the bracelet.”

“I know.”

She was looking at me, her eyes very solemn. “Do you think she could have been lying about that too? I mean, do you think she was really crazy about Saxby?”

Did I? Whatever else I was prepared to believe, could I possibly believe that my wife’s pathetic baring of her heart about our marriage that morning had been nothing but a theatrical sham?
It was fine. I liked it fine. But whenever it got to be five o’clock I suddenly thought: George is coming home soon…

“No,” I said. “I can’t believe that. The thing with the bracelet was faked by Saxby.”

“But even so, he could have used it against her, couldn’t he? Ala had refused to listen about the Duvreuxs. She’d said she was going to marry him anyway. If Connie had gone to Don’s determined to break it up once and for all, if she’d threatened to call the police and expose him about the Duvreuxs, couldn’t he have counter-threatened with the bracelet?
Either I marry Ala or I tell your husband you’ve been having an affair with me.
It’s awful, I know, that she was still thinking—well, that she had you. But couldn’t it have happened that way? Connie, thinking she was saving not only Ala but her marriage, picking up the gun…?”

That had occurred to me too because nothing, of course, could have been more in keeping with Connie’s character. Poor Connie, barging into yet another situation determined at all costs to save everybody singlehanded.

“George,” Eve was saying very quietly, “what are you going to do?”

Always, however hard we tried to get away from it, we had come back to that.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But if they try to arrest you…”

“How can they when they have no proof?”

“Do you really believe that still? They know you have a motive. They know you have no alibi. And you did go there. Maybe they’ll find that out, too. Oh, George, I know how you feel. She’s your wife. You feel guilty because of us. Of course you do. But—but we’ve tried, haven t we? For months we’ve been trying to put her first, trying to do the right thing. There’s got to come a time when we think about us. And if they arrested you now, now when we’re so nearly there…” Suddenly her face was out of control. She threw herself against me. “Oh, George, George darling, if they do try to arrest you, tell. Please, promise me if you have to, you’ll tell.”