Shadow of Guilt (10 page)

Suddenly he was crying. He had thrown his hands up to cover his face, but I could hear the choked, squeaky sobs.

Connie hurried to him and sat on the arm of his chair, running her hand over his coarse gray hair.

“Mal,” she said, “Mal dear. It’ll be all right. It’s got to be all right.”

“But—but if he didn’t do it, then why can’t he tell the truth? Doesn’t he realize? That Lieutenant… he said… if he goes on like this, if he refuses to talk, that’s going to be enough for the District Attorney to arrest him, to bring him to trial, to charge him with—”

The phone in the hall rang. I started toward the door, but Connie was ahead of me.

Mal didn’t seem to realize she had gone. Very slowly, his hands came down from his face and he was looking at me—not as me but just as anyone who happened to be there. The tears were sliding down his cheeks. “Why did I buy that gun? It wasn’t necessary. There were Vivien’s jewels, but what difference does that make? They’re insured. I’ve always been very particular about insurance. I’ve always been…”

His thoughts got too muddled. He’d lost track of the sentence. I’d never felt at ease with Mal. As a brother-in-law, he’d always seemed too impressive, too consciously a personage for any intimacies. Seeing him stripped like this made me feel uncomfortable and inadequate.

“Sitting there,” he said, “hour after hour, saying absolutely nothing. Just like his mother. Don’t tell Connie. I wouldn’t want her to worry. But when I looked at him, sitting there on that chair, he reminded me of Sally. That’s always been my dread, ever since it happened to Sally, that maybe Chuck…”

All the time, I’d been straining my ears to catch the murmuring sound of Connie’s voice on the phone outside. Now I heard a faint clatter as she put down the receiver. In a second she was hurrying into the room.

“It was Trant,” she said. “We’ve got to go to Centre Street, you and I, George. He wants to see us.”

“Did he say why?” I said, thinking of a dozen reasons each more alarming than the last.

“I don’t know. He just said we must come right away.”

Connie’s executive personality had returned in full spate. I knew her so well. The only thing that totally defeated her was inaction. Now, hopeless as the situation must have seemed to her, there was something to do and she was herself again.

“The car’s outside, George. I used it this afternoon.” She turned to Mal. “Mal dear, you’ll want to hear what’s happened. Why don’t you stay here? Just sit quietly until we come back. You can call Vivien if you like and have her come over, too. Ala’s upstairs, but I know she doesn’t want to inflict herself on you, so there’ll be no one to disturb you. And you mustn’t worry. Please. It’s all going to be all right. I’ll do something. I’ll speak to the District Attorney. I’ll make him realize there’s been some mistake.”

In a surge of vitality, she organized us all, and in a few minutes she and I were driving downtown. She sat next to me, instructing me all the way. For once I wasn’t irritated by all that excess self-confidence. I even got some comfort from her idiotic optimism.

“It’s all going to work out. We’ve just got to make them
see
.
”

I’d never been in Centre Street before. It was much as I had imagined it to be—cops, detectives, and that barracklike bleakness which goes with all institutions.

We were expected. A plain-clothes man led us through a warren of public rooms and corridors and up two flights into a small bare room on the third floor.

Lieutenant Trant was sitting there behind a plain wooden desk. I suppose it was his office. With its bleak, surely excessive austerity, it was more like a monk’s cell. And Lieutenant Trant, in spite of his elegant suit, his button-down shirt, his black knitted necktie, looked even more like a priest than I’d remembered him. As he rose to greet us, he wasn’t actually smiling but there was a suggestion of a smile in his eyes, a maddeningly tolerant expression indicating unlimited understanding of human nature and its frailties.

“Good evening, Mrs. Hadley, Mr. Hadley. You’ve been very prompt.”

“Where is he?” demanded Connie.

“Your nephew’s here, Mrs. Hadley.”

“You’re going to let us see him?”

“Of course. In fact, he’s asked to see you. That’s one of the reasons why I called. But first, I’m afraid, we’ve got a little talking to do.”

There were two beat-up wooden chairs on our side of the desk. He gestured toward them. I sat down. After a moment’s hesitation, Connie sat down, too. Then Trant resumed his seat behind the desk. He picked up a pencil. It was a worn-down yellow stub. For a moment he just sat there, twirling the pencil in his fingers.

Then he said, “Well, Mrs. Hadley, you weren’t very cooperative with me yesterday, were you?”

I’d realized, of course, that by now he was almost bound to have discovered that, but I don’t think Connie had even let herself speculate along those lines. Now her “I’ll talk to the District Attorney” personality was severely jolted. A flush started to stain the skin under her cheekbones.

“Let me tell you,” continued Trant in his voice of mild admonition, “just what we’ve found out. That should make it easier for you to know where we stand. In the first place, some people who own a motel in New York State got in touch with us. They recognized Miss Hadley’s picture in the paper as the girl who arrived there with a man on Saturday night and registered with him as Mr. and Mrs. Donald Saxby.”

He paused, watching Connie as the flush in her cheeks deepened. The suggestion of the smile was still there in his very clear, very alert eyes. “And not only that. A few minutes ago a call from Canada came in. It was from a rather emotional lady, a Mrs. Fostwick. She said she felt it was her duty to communicate with us. She told us the whole episode concerning the daughter of the Duvreuxs. She also told us that on Sunday morning Mr. Hadley called her in a very agitated state, as she put it, to inquire about these people. So. I may be wrong, but I’d say I have a pretty clear picture of Don Saxby’s relationship with your family, don’t I?”

That wasn’t just a rhetorical question. He was waiting for Connie to answer.

She squirmed uncomfortably on her chair. Then she stammered, “Why, yes, Lieutenant, I’d say you do. But you must understand—”

“How embarrassing it was for you? Of course I understand that, Mrs. Hadley. Your daughter, presumably, was infatuated with a most undesirable man; she spent the night with him in a motel; and almost immediately afterwards he got himself murdered. Even the most public-spirited citizen should be excused for lying to the police under those circumstances.”

It was strange. Everything he said should have had the bite of sarcasm to it, but it didn’t. He couldn’t have been much older than we. For all I knew, he was younger, and yet he was gently, almost affectionately reproving us like a long-suffering uncle. It made him completely unorthodox as a policeman; it should also have made him seem unalarming. But in fact he had managed to intimidate me far more than an ordinary cop with an ordinary cop’s crassness would have done.

Even Connie was feeling it, I could tell, although with her, embarrassment merely manifested itself as a heightening of the grand manner.

With a great effort at dignity, she said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I realize now it was very wrong of us.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Trant, “and I’m sure that you and your husband will now be ready to co-operate.”

“Of course,” said Connie.

“Good. Then I’ll be around at your house tomorrow morning.”

“You mean you’re finished with us for now?”

“For the moment, Mrs. Hadley. The D. A.’s waiting for me and—”

Instantly Connie was the “boss lady” again. “In that case, please let us see Chuck right away. His father tells us he refuses to say what he was doing on Sunday afternoon. I know there’s some perfectly good explanation and I’m quite certain I can persuade him to tell you the truth.”

“I’m quite certain you could, too,” said Trant, “but, as it happens, there’s no longer any need for your kind offices as an aunt. Chuck has already given us a full statement.”

Connie sat up very straight in her chair. “He has?”

“The lawyer his father hired for him, Mr. Macguire, was present at the time. He made the statement quite voluntarily, and I assure you it was all aboveboard.” Trant paused, still studying Connie’s face with his bland, unwinking attention. “His reasons, by the way, for not having talked earlier were touching. It was all a rather romantic attempt to protect Miss Hadley.”

A sudden image came to me of Ala in that mustard-colored little room, standing like a dummy by Don Saxby’s body with her gloved hands clutched together over the middle button of her coat. Was it conceivable then that Chuck could have known she’d been there?

“Protect Ala?” I said sharply.

Trant turned to me. It was the first time during the interview that he had shown any interest in me at all.

“Yes, Mr. Hadley. He was trying to protect her from scandal. Since he knew he could rely on you and your family not to say anything, he felt that if he didn’t say anything either, Miss Hadley’s relationship with Mr. Saxby might never come out at all. It was quixotic of him, of course, but he seems to love her very much indeed. That’s why he refused to say a word, even to his father, until I told him about the motel owners and Mrs. Fostwick. Then, of course, he realized there was nothing he could do any more, so he talked. He gave us a pretty full report of the episode between Miss Hadley and Saxby. He also told us exactly how Mr. Ryson’s gun happened to get into Saxby’s apartment.”

“But he didn’t kill him.” The words came in anguish from Connie. “He didn’t, did he? It’s all been explained. He had nothing to do with it at all.”

Lieutenant Trant looked down at the pencil. When he looked up again, his face was very solemn, almost, it seemed to me, commiserative.

“The moment it was ready, a typed copy of Chuck’s statement was rushed to the D. A., Mrs. Hadley. I’m sorry to tell you this, but the D. A.’s just been on the phone to me. He’s read the statement and, on the strength of the statement, he is having us issue a warrant for Chuck’s arrest. He will be formally charged with the murder.”

“No!” cried Connie. “No.”

She got up. Her gloves fell off her lap onto the floor. She looked down at them dazedly as if the act of picking them up again was something far too complicated for her. Trant had got up too. Coming quickly around the desk, he bent, retrieved the gloves and held them out to her.

“I’m glad you’re here, Mrs. Hadley,” he said. “I think it would be easier for Chuck if it is you and your husband who break the news to him…”

He turned away from her and pressed a buzzer on the desk. A policeman came in.

Trant said, “Take Mr. and Mrs. Hadley to Chuck Ryson.”

I took Connie’s arm. She went meekly with me like a little girl. The policeman led us down the corridor and up in an elevator. There was another bare corridor with the same featureless dinginess. We came to a door. A second policeman was standing in front of it. He let us into a bare room almost identical with Trant’s and locked the door behind us.

Chuck was there, sitting on one of the flimsy wooden chairs. I’d been infected by Mal’s and Connie’s dread of the family insanity and I’d steeled myself to see something quite different from what I saw. Chuck looked exhausted and he hadn’t shaved. The golden stubble on his jaw glinted in the light from the single grimy ceiling bulb, but, so far as I could see, there wasn’t the slightest sign of any mental instability. What he looked most of all was scared, very scared and very young.

He jumped up. For one moment he stood looking at us, then Connie took a step toward him and he was running to her, throwing his arms around her.

“Connie. Gee, Connie.”

“Chuck—Chuck dear.”

“How is she? How’s Ala?”

“She’s—she’s all right.”

“I mean, she knows about Saxby now? She knows what sort of a heel—”

“Of course she does.”

“Then maybe later, I mean when she’s straightened out and all, maybe it’ll be okay between us again?”

He drew a little away from Connie, looking down at her with pathetic, dogged hopefulness as if there was nothing in the world to worry anybody but the state of Ala’s feelings. Connie was looking back at him blindly, then she turned her head and threw a desperate glance at me.

I said, “We’ve been talking to Trant, you know, Chuck.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“He says you’ve made a full statement.”

His eyes, on my face now, were suddenly embarrassed. “I did my best. Honestly, I did. I wasn’t going to say a word until I had to. Then… then he found out about the motel and everything, so I told him. At least it’s over now. We’ve just got to wait till the D. A. reads the statement. With any luck I’ll be out of here in a couple of hours.”

As he said that, he smiled a quick, sunny smile. I’d got up the courage to tell him the truth, but his naive self-confidence undermined me.

I hedged. “But, Chuck, is that what your lawyer told you?”

“Oh, lawyers! You know what lawyers are like. Always looking on the black side, always yakking about technicalities. But what’s to stop me getting out of here? I told them the truth.”

“The truth!” cried Connie. The wild, afflicted look was still in her eyes but somehow—I suppose because she realized how important it was for Chuck—she’d got control of herself again. “Then, Chuck—you mean, you didn’t do it?”

“Do it? Kill Saxby?” He gave a bleak little shrug. “I wanted to. But wanting to and doing it… well, it seems like they’re two very different things.”

“But—” I began.

Quickly, before I could say what had to be said, Connie threw me another desperate warning glance.

“No, George.” She turned back to Chuck. “You didn’t do it. Then tell us. Tell us what you told the Lieutenant.”

“Okay,” said Chuck. “Okay, sure.”

Connie crossed to me then. She put her hand on my arm, firmly, making it even more plain to me that she wanted me to keep my mouth shut. She said, “But you did take Mal’s gun?”

Chuck’s face was very solemn now. He looked down at the carpetless floor, then he dropped back in his chair.