Pale Betrayer (23 page)

After the second ring, a man’s voice shouted above the noise at his end: “Margueritta Import Company,” and when Mather did not respond at once: “Hello?”

“I must have the wrong number,” Mather said and hung up. He looked up the address of Margueritta Import in the phone book. It was on DePeyster Street. He then searched for the nearest public library. The Ottendorfer branch was within walking distance.

There, in the midst of newspaper-reading derelicts, he brought his “Confession” up to date, the last words: The Margueritta Import Company, DePeyster Street.

The librarian was kind enough to give him an envelope and sell him two five-cent stamps. He addressed the envelope to Lieutenant David Marks, marked it urgent, and going out mailed it at the nearest box. Then he took the Lexington Avenue subway downtown.

M
ARKS SEARCHED THE STUDY
he had written of Mather the night before. In the margin of his pages was an occasional question mark, indicating a matter which at the time had seemed of dubious importance but which now remained unanswered. Finding the one he was looking for, he asked Redmond across the room, “Where’s Albion, Illinois? What part of the state

 “It’s a Chicago suburb, on the lake.” Clement Rossiter refused at first to talk to him over the phone. “How do I know who you are, sir? Your telling me doesn’t make it so.”

Marks said: “I’ll hang up. Then ask the operator to put through the call to me, David Marks, at the Houston Street precinct, New York City.”

To his amazement Rossiter did just that, calling him collect “I’ve been a victim once of an impersonation. I don’t propose to make the same mistake twice.”

“Eric Mather, a teacher in your employ at one time,” Marks said briskly.

“I supposed that was why you were calling. I advised him to go to the police.”

“When?”

“Yesterday,” Rossiter said.

Piece by piece, Marks got the story from him.

“Do you mind telling me the offense Mather had committed?”

“He was never prosecuted, mind you. The charge was withdrawn … but I did not feel I could withhold such information from men I presumed to be F.B.I. agents.”

“I understand,” Marks said with more patience than he felt. “The offense, sir?”

“Violating a minor of the same sex.”

It would be hard to find an offense more susceptible of blackmail, Marks thought. “Do you remember the bogus investigators well enough to give me a description of them, Mr. Rossiter?”

“Actually, I remember them the better for Mather’s having described them to me yesterday …”

“The dark, pudgy one,” Marks tried to propel him.

“And the tall, blond, all-American footballer.”

“Right,” Marks said, and thanking him, hung up.

Downstairs he picked up Detective Pierce, the most likely man available, and went directly to the University. Miss Kelly-Nobakoff was not his prime target, but because the Records Office was on the first floor, he got a newspaper from the corner vendor, and stopped off to see if Sally could identify the police composite in the morning paper. In one instance at least she had told him the truth, she had been visited by men she thought to be F.B.I. investigators.

Sally did not long withhold the story Mather had asked her to take to Lieutenant Marks. “Only I wasn’t supposed to tell it unless something happened to him.”

Marks assured her she might be saving her idol’s life, telling it now.

“Jeffrey Osterman. Remember, I told you about him that night at the Red Lantern?”

Marks remembered. Jeffrey was another of his neat question marks in the margin of the Mather story.

E
RIC MATHER LEFT THE
subway at Wall Street and climbed aboveground into a wild melee of scurrying people. Lunch hour was almost over. Clerks and brokers’ jobbers, stenographers and I.B.M.’ers rushed in and out of buildings and along the street like figures in accelerated motion pictures. Even conversations were thrown against him in bits and pieces: the familiar “So-ahs” punctuating everything. One phrase he caught and remembered: “You know, Michael the big noiser …”

Michael the big noiser, Mather thought, whom he would never know beyond that epithet. How often he had thought of following one conversation picked up on the city street or in a bus until its end. He was confused now in his directions. It did not matter for the moment. He had postponed a purchase until reaching “The Street.” Its affluence prospered the kind of store he was looking for. He walked along Broadway until he came to Billings’ Sporting Supplies. He surveyed his own reflection in the plate-glass window. He had never thought of himself as the sporting type. He went inside and asked to see a fishing knife.

“For cleaning fish?” the attendant asked.

“For killing them,” he said, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“What kind of fish, sir?”

Mather could feel the sweat starting at the small of his back. He could not think of the word. The clerk played with a tuft of hair in his ear, waiting. Mather did not want to say the word “big.” He had it then. “Game fish,” he said.

The clerk showed him a knife with an exquisite blade, having carefully removed the shield.

“Fine,” Mather said, and watched him wrap it.

On the street again, his purchase in hand, he looked up trying to gain his direction. The towering buildings swayed against the fast-rolling clouds. Rain was about to fall again. At the corner newsstand he asked the way to DePeyster Street. A few short blocks toward the waterfront, but such a difference; glass, marble and steel giving way to brick, wood and plaster. In an alleyway he removed the knife from both paper and shield and plunged the blade through the lining of his pocket to secure it, the leather hilt available to his hand. He threw the wrappings and shield into the first trash basket.

DePeyster Street was short, ending at the waterfront, where Mather could see the cargo ships lying in their slips, their funnels and derricks obscured by the elevated highway. There were not many people, and all of them, he realized, observing from a metered parking area, were about the final tasks of closing up their businesses, stacking crates, lowering grills, hosing down platforms and loading zones. He approached one of the workmen. “You’re closing up?”

“We sure are,” the man said without looking up. He was sorting fruit baskets by sizes. “We open up at 2:00
A.M
. Twelve hours is enough.”

“More than enough,” Mather murmured, going on.

The name Margueritta Import Company was lettered in flaking gold on the black wooden canopy over a loading platform. At his back as he looked across the street were the walls of a vast brick warehouse. That side of the street all the way to the corner was abandoned except for a cat worrying a fish head in the gutter. Traffic on the highway rumbled constantly. Foghorns had started their rhythmic braying in the bay. Mather studied the building for a long time. Someone remained in it. He saw the shadow moving between an office light and the window. Next door was a grill-fronted fish market, hosed and locked up. Further down was a seaman’s home. He saw old men come out of the glass-paneled door. Invariably they moved toward South Street and vanished along the docks. A panhandler ambled past him, reconsidered and turned back to ask him for a quarter. Mather gave him fifty cents and a “drink hearty!” The old lush shambled on. A spitting rain began to fall.

Mather drew a deep breath and crossed the street. He picked up the smell of rotting fruit as he neared the building, and remembered Jerry’s asking him what kind of work he thought he did. “You sell fruit.” Mather the psychic!

Baskets and crates were stacked neatly at either side of the platform. Near one of the dusty windows a pale light hung from overhead, throwing its faint rays over a cluttered desk. Mather shielded his eyes and tried to see the room better. An inside door opened on the hallway. He could see no one.

The outside door opened soundlessly to his hand. The hall beyond the office door led to what looked like a vast storage room. The smell of fruit was pungent here, no longer fetid, the sweet fresh fragrance of orange and lemon. Mather stepped into the office where a battered leather valise sat on the floor a few feet from the door. He heard voices from the storage room, faintly as from a caverned distance, droning on in conversation.

He moved quickly across to the desk and removed the phone from its receiver. He listened, thinking the voice he heard might be talking on the phone. “All right, my friend.” And after the clicks the buzzing signal. He had caught the last words in a conversation, but both the phrase and the voice he knew to be Jerry’s. To Jerry everyone was “my friend.” He left the receiver off the hook and returned to the door to listen. He could still hear voices.

Mather knelt down and tried the valise clasp. It was locked, but the bag when he took it by both handles and wrenched them apart burst open. Underwear and socks, a striped shirt … He groped through it wildly, sick, despairing of finding what he sought, the identity of the owner. He listened again for the voices. They seemed to have stopped. His own heartbeat was too loud in his ears for any but the throbbing sound. He heard a laugh then.

In a zipped side-pocket of the bag he found seaman’s papers and a passport. They belonged to Thomas Gregoris, a naturalized American, born in Greece. Even the passport photo had not disguised his good looks. The tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon-looking all-American was a Greek. Mather thrust the papers and passport into his own breast pocket and closed the bag. It refused to catch; he had to leave it open. At the desk he put the phone back in the cradle.

“Good luck, my friend!”

He heard the words ring down the hall and hard upon them the clack of approaching footfalls. Mather concealed himself the only place he could, behind the office door. Through the crack he watched, his hand on the hilt of the knife.

The big blond man came into the office and went to his knees at once to examine the open bag. Just as he called out, “Jer …” Mather in one high swift stroke drove the knife with all his power into the stooped back just beneath the left shoulder blade. The man’s cry died in mid-air. He toppled over the bag to the floor.

Mather left the knife where it was and ran into the corridor. Jerry was coming from the storeroom. Mather waited. He wanted to be seen. Then he ran toward the street, waiting again outside the window that Jerry might see him. A flash of light and an explosion splintered the glass. But Mather had begun again to move. He leaped from the platform and ran, crouched, to the end of the building. He squeezed through an opening beneath the platform and waited, his stomach revolting at the stench there.

He heard Jerry’s footfalls pounding overhead, then running back to the other end of the platform. He crawled out and poking his head above the platform called his name.

Another shot rang out, then another. Mather crouched down in momentary safety. Two men were watching now from the storehouse window across the way. And on the street beneath them a man had reached the police call-box. Mather sprinted toward the open street. He heard the singing bullet almost simultaneous to its report. He hit the ground, lay there a moment and began to crawl, trying to draw fire again. People were aware now: that was all he demanded. He wanted to die in the open with witnesses to his killing. A car, approaching from around the corner, had to stop suddenly or run over him. He heard the brakes. But instantly he felt a small sharp pain at the back of his head. Just for an instant he thought of a bee-sting and of his grandmother’s orchard. He could hear the humming from the hive, louder and louder. Then nothing.

M
ARKS HAD ALREADY STARTED
for DePeyster Street and had himself called Communications for the deployment of cars already in the area when the “All Cars” command came through. The narrow streets of the old city north of Wall Street were filling with people who responded in ever greater numbers as the police cars converged. Marks had to abandon his car a block from the scene and push his way on foot through the crowd.

Mather lay, face down, covered by a police raincoat. Marks lifted the coat for a moment and then spread it again. The sprawling legs protruded. No chance whatever now, Marks thought, of a mere stubbed toe. He had seen the wound at the back of Mather’s head.

The officer in charge gave Marks the passport and papers. “Not his, sir. His own wallet was in his hip pocket.”

The Margueritta Import Company was cordoned by police. Witnesses who had seen the killer firing from the platform were repeating their testimony … a stocky man with heavy eyebrows … The three entrances to the building were sealed off. Marks passed the word that the man was to be taken alive. Through the splintered glass of the office window Marks first glimpsed the blond prone figure on the floor there. Inspector Fitzgerald sirened his way through the crowd, not leaving the car till it reached the police cordon. Briefed by Marks, he took command.

The crowd squealed with awe, delight, whatever it is that moves a mass instinct in the presence of tragedy that is not their own, when Fitzgerald’s voice boomed out over the bull horn:

“Hear me, wherever you are in there! This is Police Inspector Fitzgerald speaking. Come out, your hands in the air! You have five minutes. In five minutes we’ll fill the building with a gas that will bring you out!” He repeated the ultimatum and then looked at his watch. “How many are in there?” he asked.

A uniformed sergeant said: “One dead and one alive—to the best of our knowledge, sir.”

Marks selected a team of three men to go in with him. The gas threat was a device only. Contaminating the building, the police would not themselves be able to enter it for hours, perhaps to then discover that their man had escaped before their arrival. Marks and the others put on armored vests beneath their coats.

The crowd fell silent as time passed, men here and there among it clocking the countdown on their own watches.

The detectives moved cautiously into the building, the others waiting, covering Marks as he went into the office to examine the victim there. He was easily identified by the passport found on Mather. The knife in his back had its own grim eloquence.