Shadow of Guilt (14 page)

She said that with a bitterness which was almost tough, a tone which was utterly unlike anything I connected with Ala.

I said, “You mean because you spent the night with Don in that motel? They already know that.”

“But they don’t know I’m what you might call a second offender. You don’t know, either. You weren’t even here. You were off somewhere on one of your business trips. Where was it… about this time last year…? South America?”

“Last year when I was in Brazil?”

“That’s it, I guess.” There was a pack of cigarettes by the bed. She reached over for it, took a cigarette and fit it with a hand that was shaking slightly.

“When you came home, I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d understand a bit, but Connie wouldn’t let me. She made me swear never to mention it to a soul.”

“Connie?” I said. “Connie was in this too?”

“Up to the neck—descending like a goddess from the heavens, hurtling south in her Lincoln Continental to rescue her prodigal baby daughter—her prodigal adopted baby daughter.”

The bitterness in her voice had an even sharper edge. “And it was all her fault as much as mine. I know you’ll think I’m just trying to excuse myself, but it’s true. I swear it. If you knew what it was like, being eighteen, and having her treat me as if I were an idiot child of twelve. And not only that. There was Chuck, too—always Chuck. She’d never for a single minute stop promoting Chuck. ‘Chuck’s coming to dinner tonight.’ ‘I bought two tickets for the theater tonight. I thought you and Chuck might like to go.’ I had Chuck running out of my ears. I might have loved him. For all I knew I did, but with Connie pushing, pushing, how could I tell? All I wanted was to be left alone, to try to find out about living for myself. And then there was this party. It was in the Village. Needless to say, I wasn’t supposed to be there. You know how Connie feels about the Village. But I’d wangled it and I met Gene.”

“Who’s Gene?”

“You’ve never even heard of him, have you? Well, he wasn’t anything much, just a typical Village character, I suppose. But he was charming, amusing, all the things Connie had always taught me were shoddy, superficial, dreadfully unCorliss. That was enough to make him seem fascinating. I knew he had a wife and that they were separated, but that didn’t make any difference because—well, it wasn’t anything serious. He’d take me out to lunch. If I could sneak out at night, we’d go dancing in the Village. It was just frivolous, just fun—someone I’d found for myself, someone that made me feel grown-up. And, most of all, there was the wonderful sense of thumbing my nose at Connie.”

She flicked ash from the cigarette onto a tray. “And then a chance for a weekend came up. He had some friends near Richmond. They’d heard about me. He thought I’d like them. That was all. It was just a weekend with his friends and, well, I made up some excuse for Connie the way I did later with Don and we drove south. When we got there, it was fine, wonderful. For the first time in my life, I felt I was really doing something on my own. Then suddenly it was all ghastly because Gene’s wife showed up. Some people in New York had told her Gene had taken me there. She was a drunk. I’d never known that. And she was wild with jealousy. She had a gun. There was a hideous fight. We were all mixed up in it, the wife, Gene, me, everyone. Finally the gun went off. I don’t quite know how, but it did and it shot the wife in the arm. Some neighbors heard the shot and called the police. We were all hauled off to jail. Gene was hopeless; he just collapsed. As it turned out, he was pretty much of a heel anyway.”

She shivered. “I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, in despair, I called Connie. She came, of course. She came galloping to save me. I don’t know what she did. Promised convertibles to a couple of cops, I suppose, but she got it all hushed up, she got me home—and, of course, she’d finally got me where she wanted me, too. Even I had enough sense to see that.”

She stubbed the cigarette in the ash tray. “She’s incredible, really. She didn’t even bawl me out. There wasn’t a single word of reproof. She was just infinitely understanding. Now I would see how she’d always been right. Now I’d learned my lesson. In future I’d be a reformed character and worthy to be a lovely, contrite bride for Chuck. It sounds awful, I know, after she’d saved me and everything, but I hated her for it, hated her much more than if she’d just washed her hands of me. But there was everything to be said for her side, of course, and nothing for mine. I realized that. So from then on I played it her way. I knew I’d have to marry Chuck and try to be a good wife. But, as Connie would say, I’ll never learn, will I? Don came along and there I was, all starry-eyed, all ready to be me again.”

She looked straight at me, her mouth twisted in a pale little self-mocking smile.

“Mel” she said. “What a mess I turned out to be. You sure had a brilliant instinct for adopting daughters, didn’t you?”

There were so many things for me to feel: amazement that all this could have happened without my having the slightest suspicion; understanding of the deadlock between Ala and Connie which had made something like this episode and the Saxby episode almost inevitable; and deep sympathy, too, for Ala, whose pathetic, if shabby, attempts at independence had had such disastrous results. But, most of all, what I felt was anger against Connie. Why hadn’t she told me? If she’d told me, I’d never for an instant have let the Saxby business get started. But, oh, no, Connie believed in handling things herself. Drive south, pay off the cops, hush things up. The wedding must go on. Of course it must. Nothing must stop the wedding,
her
wedding. And then, when Saxby appeared on the scene… handle that, too. Make a fuss, try and stop Ala from seeing him, but don’t tell George. There isn’t any need for George.

“George.” Ala’s voice came through to me. “You do see, don’t you? They never knew who was actually holding the gun when it went off. It could have been me. Certainly they’d say it was me, wouldn’t they? I mean, if they knew I was at Don’s, if they arrest me… I wouldn’t have a chance, would I?”

I looked back at her, thinking again of the only thing that mattered at the moment—Lieutenant Trant.

“No,” I said. “I guess you wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Then—then you won’t tell?”

“No. Not now. We’ll have to think of some other way for helping Chuck.”

“Oh, George, if you knew how terrified I’ve been.” She threw her arms around my neck. “When I saw Don lying there, it was Richmond again only much, much worse. I thought I’d die. Before I called Mrs. Lord and you came and made it all right, I’d—I’d decided I’d have to kill myself. Oh, it’s terrible about Chuck. I know it’s all my fault he’s arrested. I know I ought to tell and—and let him go free. But I can’t. I just can’t… George, please, please, don’t think I’m too awful.”

I held her very tight in my arms. Her young body, under the white pajamas, was trembling. Poor kid, I thought; whatever she might have deserved, she certainly hadn’t deserved this.

“It’s Connie,” she was babbling. “It’s all Connie. I didn’t want to be wild. If only she’d trusted me, if only she’d let me feel I had a soul of my own, I’d—I’d have loved Chuck. I’d have been all right. I know I would. But because of her, everything got screwed up. It isn’t her fault, I guess. She’s always thought she was doing the right thing. But—”

The door opened then. Ala jumped away from me. I swung around on the bed. Connie, in a long pink wrapper, was moving into the room, looking very grim and purposeful, almost as if Ala had conjured her up in her own image of her as “the boss lady.”

“George,” she said. “Do you mind if I talk to Ala alone for a moment?”

“No.” Ala, staring at her, was instantly ready with her defiance. “George, please, whatever she wants to say—stay.”

“You mean that?” said Connie.

“Of course I do.”

“All right. It’s probably just as well anyway.” For a long moment my wife stood by the bed, watching Ala with a kind of weary resignation. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary to bring this up. Even when they arrested Chuck, I tried to fool myself that there must be some other way. But there isn’t. I see it now. After the horrors of last night—well, I’ve decided and that’s that.”

She shifted the steady gaze of her eyes to me. “Maybe I should have told you. I almost did, but I felt it would only make it worse for you without doing any good for anyone. Even last night, when I was almost sure of what I’d have to do, I thought I’d talk to Ala first.”

She paused. “On Sunday afternoon around four I went up to her room again. I thought she might have woken up but I didn’t want to disturb her if she was still sleeping. I tried the door. It was locked, but the key wasn’t in the lock. I looked through the keyhole. I could see the bed and she wasn’t in it. I started banging on the door. I banged for about five minutes. I knew then, of course, that she couldn’t be there. She’d locked the door and slipped out.”

She turned back to Ala and her face was implacable, the face of the Goddess of Justice. “I knew you’d gone to Don’s. Where else could you possibly have gone with all those elaborate precautions of locking the door and pretending you wanted to sleep? But at the time it didn’t seem to matter much. In fact, I decided it was probably best for you to go to him and have it out in your own way, and if you wanted to be secretive about it, that was all right too. If you’d stayed away long I’d have come after you, but you came back right after George and it seemed all right—until, of course, I heard that Don was dead.”

She paused again. “You can imagine what I felt then. I knew I ought to challenge you, but I couldn’t. I suppose I was scared. I didn’t want to know the truth. If she needs me, I thought, she’ll come to me. I left it at that. Then they arrested Chuck and you still didn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem possible that you could let them arrest him and just stand by doing nothing. But you did, didn’t you? It was the same old thing again—Ala saving her own skin.”

She gave the faintest shrug of her shoulders, a shrug which indicated total resignation to a truth which once and for all had to be faced.

“I’ve done my best for you. You can’t say I haven’t been protecting you to the point of idiocy. But that’s all over now. When Lieutenant Trant comes this morning, you’re going to tell him. You understand? Whatever you did, whatever wretched mess you’ve got yourself into, you’re going to tell Lieutenant Trant everything. If you don’t, I will.”

That Connie had known all the time wasn’t surprising, of course. What could have been more typical of her than to have gone upstairs again to “make Ala see sense,” and then when she found she wasn’t there, to have kept it to herself, once more to have shouldered the responsibility of her “problem” daughter singlehanded?

Ala was sitting on the bed with her back against the wall, looking at Connie as if she were her doom.

“Well,” said Connie, “you might as well admit it now. You did go to Don’s, didn’t you?”

I knew it would be absurd, worse than absurd to lie to her any more. Surely Ala must realize it too. I stood looking at her, waiting for her to speak for herself, but she didn’t. Her face had closed in on itself with the old, bitterly resentful antagonism.

Well, I thought, here it comes.

“You’re right, Connie,” I said. “She was there.”

“George!” cried Ala.

“It’s no good now, Ala. You’ve got to see that. She was there, Connie. And so was I. I found her there. Saxby was dead. She hadn’t killed him. She’d just let herself in with keys he’d given her and discovered him dead. I got her away. I didn’t tell you—well, for the same reasons that you didn’t tell me.”

Connie’s mouth was so tight that she seemed to have no lips at all. In the beautiful, sculpt face, it was just a line—a line slashed with a chisel.

“You actually knew she was there? You saw her there in the apartment with the body—and you didn’t tell? Not even after Chuck was arrested? Didn’t it occur to you that there might have been something you didn’t even notice which could have given Trant a clue—something which could have saved Chuck? Didn’t you think of that?”

“There was something,” I said.

I told Connie about the martini. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ala. I kept my eyes on my wife’s face, knowing that whatever it might involve, this at least was owing to her.

When I was through, she said, “And it was only last night you realized the spilled drink could save Chuck?”

“Yes.”

“But the moment you’d thought of it, you knew you’d have to tell Trant.”

Connie said that without the slightest indication of a query in her tone. It was a statement, letting me know that, from her point of view, no one but a monster could have made any other decision.

I did look at Ala then. She was even more deeply withdrawn behind the white, unrevealing mask. The blindness in her eyes was utterly denying me.

I said, “We can’t tell Trant, Connie.”

“Can’t?”

“Not possibly. You must see that more than anyone. Ala’s just let me know about Richmond.”

I’d thought that might soften her, but it didn’t.

“All right. So you know about Richmond. What difference does that make?”

“What difference? Once they let Chuck go, they’ll arrest Ala. They’ll have all the evidence in the world against her. And when, on top of everything else, they find out she was involved with the shooting of another man’s wife—”

“Well, she was involved, wasn’t she? It happened. She let it happen. No one made her go off with that man, any more than anyone made her go off with Don Saxby. My God, there’s a limit, isn’t there? There’s got to be a limit somewhere.”

Connie’s voice was rasping now with bitterness. “Protect them. That’s what they say. Protect the rotten people. Stand up for them, cover up for them, understand them, straighten them out. It isn’t their fault. Oh, no, something went wrong. If an eighteen-year-old girl lies to her family, sneaks off with a married man… if that same girl, only a year later, when she’s about to marry as fine a boy as she’ll ever meet, sneaks off again with a shoddy criminal blackmailer who gets himself murdered… Protect her! If you knew how sick I am of protecting her.”