Shadow of Guilt (6 page)

I dropped down, bending over him. Yes, there was a little cut on one of the fingers of his left hand where the smashed glass had nicked it. And, close to the wrist, the shirt was sticking to his arm, outlining its contour. Cautiously, I touched the material. The whole area of shirt around the forearm was still slightly damp and there was the familiar, sickly smell of gin.

I got up, making myself study the room. There wasn’t any disorder, no sign of a struggle. There was the phone, and there was the phone book open on a magazine-littered table. I went over to it. The exposed page was in the L’s, and, by chance, Eve’s name was the name printed at the top of the page:
lord.
I slammed the book shut as if leaving the page open would not only expose Ala but endanger all of us. Anything else? I went into the bedroom. It was dark and dismal. Flung down on the unmade bed were two large open suitcases, both of them fully packed. Surely, he couldn’t have taken all that with him to Massachusetts for the weekend. Had he then not been unpacking but packing again? Had he been planning to make a getaway? Suitcases, papers burnt in the fireplace, surely…

I went on into the bathroom. Nothing there, just a wrinkled yellow bath mat and a red towel thrown down on it, a cluttered wash basin, a clammy plastic shower curtain.

I went back to Ala. Something had happened to her in the few moments of my absence—a kind of delayed shock. The waxlike look was gone; her face was contorted with terror. The instant she saw me, she ran to me, clinging to me desperately.

“George… oh, George…”

I held her tightly, trying to soothe her. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“But they’ll know… the police. They’ll find out about yesterday, about me and Don, about… about all the things Connie said. And, when they know I was here, when they know how he…he fooled me… what’ll they think? What will they do?”

“They won’t do anything, because they won’t know.”

“Won’t know?”

“You didn’t think I was going to call them? Why? What good would it do? You don’t know anything. You can’t help. Listen, honey, I’m getting you out of here. He’s been killed, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us. What do we know about him? Or how many people wanted to get rid of him? It’s none of our business. Be quiet, honey. Just be quiet. If we can get out without anyone seeing us…”

She was all right again, suddenly, almost astoundingly calm. She looked at me for one moment from blue, almost wary eyes. Then she smiled the incredulous smile of a little girl realizing the dreaded punishment isn’t going to come after all.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Vaguely I had thought I would feel some compunction. I had never consciously done anything before which flagrantly broke the law. But now this seemed the most natural thing in the world. I was, I suppose, getting used to this new life where it was our wits we needed rather than our ethics.

I took a last look around the room, as unmoved by Don Saxby as if he’d been a sack of cement. No, there was nothing, surely, to show that Ala had been there. I went to the door and opened it a crack. The radio music still blared from behind the closed door of the neighbor’s apartment. What about the neighbors and the shots? Had the radio drowned out the noise? Or had the neighbors just been typical New Yorkers about it?
Didn’t that sound like shots? Just a car backfiring, baby.

The elevator was still at our floor. Turning, I beckoned to Ala. She slipped out with me into the corridor. I closed the door and tried it. It had locked itself. I drew back the cage door of the elevator and we rode down to the entrance hall. No one was there. Ahead of Ala I moved out onto the steps. A couple of people were strolling toward Fifth Avenue on the other side of the street, paying no attention to anything. That was all.

In a few minutes we were in the car, driving toward Madison. It was twenty minutes to five.

I had got her away, but this of course was only the beginning. When Don Saxby was found, the police would certainly trace a connection between him and my family. There would be interviews, questions, detectives to be outwitted. The whole thing would be a rat race. Now that the immediate danger was by-passed, I felt an enormous exasperation with Ala. The little idiot, blundering about, threatening us all with catastrophe!

She was sitting very close to me in the car, reminding me poignantly of the tense child who used to sit tightly wedged at my side when we drove to the shore on summer weekends, while Connie lay down the law. “Ala dear, do sit up straight.… No, darling, it’s quite absurd to want any ice cream.” Connie! I thought. Connie, the great raiser of children, Connie, Mrs. Boomerang.

For a while neither of us said anything. Then when we were headed up Park Avenue, Ala turned to look at me with shy awkwardness.

“George, I’m so terribly sorry… I mean, about getting so mad with you this morning, about everything.”

“That’s okay.”

“And you were right, weren’t you—you and Connie? I mean, Don must have been what you said he was. And that’s why somebody killed him. Somebody we don’t know—somebody with no connection with us.”

“I suppose so.”

“What a fool I was. And how awful I’ve been to poor Chuck.” She paused and then added explosively, “George—please, George, don’t tell her. I… I couldn’t face it, not if she knew I’d been there. There’d be no end. She’d go on and on. Oh, please, George.”

There had been too much happening for me to think about Connie’s reaction. How, in fact, was my wife going to take it? Wasn’t it just possible that, with her rigid canons of behavior, she would go civic-minded on us?
Of course we must tell the police everything. Of course it’s Ala’s duty as a citizen
… Then I thought: My God, if we tell Connie, I’ll have to admit I was at Eve’s. How could I explain that away? Something about the Brazilian? Could I say there were some letters I’d had to dictate? Would that sound convincing? Or rather, would I be able to make it sound convincing? I began to see all the intricacies with which I would now have to live. It was an octopus situation with tentacles stretching in every direction.

I turned to Ala. “Is there any way we could keep her from knowing?”

“Of course. She doesn’t even know I left the house. After you’d gone, she came up to my room and she made me let her in. She’d brought me something to eat, and she went on and on about the Duvreuxs, about how Don wasn’t in love with me, how he was only a crook trying to get at the Corliss money. Finally I couldn’t face any more of it from her. I simply had to go to Don and find out the truth myself. But I knew that she’d never let me go to him, so I just pretended to be tired. I begged her to go away so I could sleep. And then, after she’d gone—when it seemed to be all right—I just tiptoed out of my room, locked the door behind me and slipped out of the house. She didn’t see me. She wasn’t anywhere around. She must have been in the library doing the
Times
crossword puzzle the way she always does on Sunday.”

She put her hand coaxingly on my knee. “So… don’t you see? When we get home, I could just sneak up to my room without her knowing, and then… well, just come down again.”

If we could get away with it, that would make it all much simpler. “All right,” I said. “Fine.”

“You mean it? Oh, George, you are wonderful. But then, there’s something else, too, isn’t there? There’s Mrs. Lord.” She shot me a quick glance. “How lucky you happened to be there. But she’s all right, isn’t she? I mean, we can trust her?”

I thought of Eve waiting in that cramped apartment, tom with anxieties for me. And not only that. She’d promised me not to think any more about leaving, but I knew her so well. She
would
be thinking about it. Her conscience would still be goading her, even more powerfully now that this disaster had struck. A panic stirred in me that I’d never see her again, that even now she’d be packing, calling a taxi… I felt my hands on the wheel, sticky with sweat. I’d have to get back to her.

“George, we can trust her, can’t we?”

“Yes,” I said.

We’d reached the house then. As I looked out at its majestic Corliss facade, I thought I saw Connie in a downstairs window. It wasn’t Connie, it was just the white lining of the living-room drapes, but a bitter resentment came, a resentment which, I knew, was merely an inversion of guilt. Now I’d have to be deceiving my wife two ways, not just about Eve, but about Ala, too. Ala and I would have to launch our private lie and once it was launched…

I parked across the street. I said, “She mustn’t see you. Get down in the car. Stay here. I’ll go in first.”

I got out of the car, crossed, went up the marble steps and let myself into the hall. There was no sign of Connie. The living-room door was open. I glanced in. She wasn’t there, either. Almost certainly Ala was right. My wife was in the library at the back of the house. I went upstairs and then down again. I beckoned to Ala from the front door and she hurried over to me. We crept upstairs together. We reached her room. She opened the door with her key.

“We’ve made it!” She flung her arms around my neck. “Oh, George dear, everything’s all right now. You go find her and I’ll just come down in a few minutes. I’ll be sensible and ashamed. I’ll say I’ve realized she was right about Don and about everything. I’ll admit what a fool I’ve been. I’ll apologize. And she’ll never know.”

She was smiling exuberantly as if it had all become a sort of game to her instead of a nightmare in which the man she was supposed to have “loved madly” had been murdered in the most entangling of circumstances. I looked at her with baffled incomprehension. Did the young recover as easily as that?

I found Connie in the library, which had been her father’s pride. It was lined with leather-bound books which he had probably bought by the yard. Connie used it as a sort of shrine, withdrawing there to tap out her directives to her committees or to study her tomes on child welfare or slum clearance or racial discrimination or whatever it was she was currently being informed about. Also, on Sunday afternoons she sat there doing the
Times
crossword puzzle.

When I went in, she was sitting in a red leather chair, her gleaming head bent over the
Times
magazine section. She had her reading glasses on and a silver pencil in her hand. She glanced up with the utmost composure.

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

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.

I knew that she was totally ignorant of what had happened in Don Saxby’s apartment, but she wasn’t ignorant of all the turmoil and drama which had been going on in our house before I left for Idlewild. Her habit of reverting to normalcy the moment circumstances made it even remotely possible had always annoyed me. Now, in my state of acute tension, it was infuriating. I sat down opposite her in another of the huge red leather chairs which suggested a private athenaeum club, fighting my anxieties about Eve. Of course she wouldn’t have gone. She’d given me her promise. It was all right and somehow, later on in the evening, I’d be able to slip away to her for a little while.

“Are you sure you don’t know, dear?” said Connie. “A goddess of war beginning… Oh, well, never mind.”

She dropped the pencil, put the magazine section down on a table and took off her glasses. “Well, how was it at Lew’s?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ve talked to Ala. I’m sure she’s going to be sensible. She was tired, she said, so we won’t disturb her, but when she comes down, you will talk to her, won’t you? She’s got some silly stubborn thing about accepting it from me but she’ll accept it from you.”

“All right,” I said.

“I am glad it all worked well at Lew’s.”

There it was. She’d established just any ordinary Sunday afternoon. She started to tell me how disgracefully low the education standards were in some parts of Southern California. She must have been reading about it in the magazine section. She was still talking about it when Ala came in. I’d been dreading the moment but I needn’t have. Connie seemed more awkward than Ala, who, with a glibness which slightly appalled me, put on a flawless performance of the contrite young girl who had seen the error of her ways. In half an hour, I’d “talked” to her and Connie had “talked” to her and that was that.

“Well,” said Connie when it was all over, “I must say it’s a relief that you’re being so sensible, dear. Now let’s have a drink and celebrate.”

We had a drink. Then we had supper prepared by Connie. It was exactly as if Don Saxby had never existed in our lives at all. After supper we all sat around in the living room, being so goddamn normal that I could have yelled.

It was almost nine o’clock when the phone in the hall rang. Connie got up to answer it, but I, with a jittery premonition that it was Eve, jumped up too and managed to get to the hall ahead of her.

I shut the door and picked up the phone.

“Darling,” said Vivien Ryson. “Darling George—it’s nine, you know.”

“Nine?” I said stupidly.

Vivien’s laugh tinkled. “Really, darling, I suppose that did sound rather enigmatic, didn’t it? What I mean is—tell Chuck he’d better rush right over here if he’s going to pick up his brief case and make his plane. I do think he’s been a little naughty to spend the entire day with you. He knows how much it means to Mal to have a teeny bit of father-son goings on.” The laugh did its tinkle again. “But don’t bawl the poor boy out. I know what it is. Love, love, love.”

I’d never given Chuck the slightest thought since I’d left him sitting on the bottom step of our stairs that morning with his face hidden in his hands: Chuck, to whom Connie had, “on principle,” told everything; Chuck, who had been so frighteningly broken by the news; Chuck, who hadn’t been with us since nine-thirty in the morning and who apparently hadn’t been at the Rysons’ either.

I said, “But Vivien, he’s not here. He hasn’t been here since morning.”

“But that’s crazy, darling. He only came back from Chicago to be with Ala.”

“I know, but—”

“Then where has he been?”

“I don’t know. Wasn’t he home at all?”

“Not for a moment. And he got up at the crack of dawn. George darling, is something wrong between him and Ala?”