After the First Death (7 page)

How had I missed it before? It was extraordinary. And yet when one’s mind has been painfully, tortuously conditioned to accept something as fact, one is not quick to challenge that fact thereafter.

I walked. A policeman glanced my way, then returned to the job of directing traffic. I shivered at his glance. I lowered my head, concentrated on my walk, my shoulders stooped, my head bowed, my feet covering the ground more slowly than usual I walked to my hotel, and I walked past my hotel, and I turned at the corner and headed downtown.

From an outdoor phone booth at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street I called a man many miles away. I had heard that most pay phones in Manhattan are tapped, but I didn’t really believe it could be dangerous. The police could not possibly have the personnel to listen to all of the phones all of the time. I didn’t care. I got his number from Information, and I dialed it direct, hoping he’d be in his office. He was.

I said, all in a rush, “Warden Pillion, this is Alex Penn, I have to talk to you, I didn’t kill that girl I never killed anybody—”

“Where are you, Alex?”

“Chicago.” Never trust anyone. “I have to—”

“You’d better turn yourself in, Alex.”

“I didn’t kill that girl, Warden. I was framed. I can’t prove it and I can’t expect anyone to believe it, but I
know
it I saw someone else kill her just before I passed out Damn it I
remember
it. And—”

“The police will—”

“The police will throw me in a cell. I wouldn’t blame them a bit You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Well, I—”

“No reason why you should. Warden, Just let me talk a minute, that’s all I know. I didn’t kill the girl Or the first one, Evangeline Grant I never could believe that I had done it I never remembered it and the pattern’s the same, someone must have framed me. Because there’s no reason for anyone to frame me now. I’m nothing, I’m not even a person, nobody even knows me, but I used to be somebody and have things and somebody framed me then, some son of a bitch did it to me, and did it again the night before last and—”

“What do you want me to say, Alex?”

“I don’t know.”

I have to tell you to turn yourself in. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“Of course you don’t have to do what you’re told, do you?”

“Thank you, Warden.”

“Be very careful. Don’t expose yourself unnecessarily. And don’t … don’t do anything violent. Keep away from liquor. Am I telling you anything you hadn’t figured out for yourself?”

“No”

I thought not For the record, I don’t believe you. I think you killed Evangeline Grant and I think you killed Robin Canelli. I think you’re a very dangerous man. I have to think that you know that.”

“Yes.”

“I hope that you’re right and I’m wrong. Why did you call me?”

“I had to talk to someone. I’m going crazy, I had to talk to someone. I couldn’t think of anyone else.”

“Did it help?”

“Yes, I think so—”

The operator cut in to tell me my three minutes were up. I hung up immediately and left the booth. I wondered whether he would trace the call. It would be possible, I think; he had the operator there on the line, and it seemed probable that an operator could check the source of a long-distance call even after the connection had been broken. Would he call the New York police? Probably, if only to cover himself.

He wanted me to be innocent. He even wanted me to try to solve things on my own. Even so, he didn’t believe me.

He would, though. Once I found the bastard who jobbed me, once I nailed him down, they’d all believe me.

8

I
SAT IN MY HOTEL ROOM WRITING OUT IDIOT LISTS. IT WAS AN
old habit, a hangover from my undergraduate days. Whenever I was trying to organize a paper or plan a line of research, I wrote down long lists of words and names and phrases and focused on them like Buddha on his navel. Later on I developed my lectures the same way. I had to have something on paper, something I could look at and read.

Pete Landis. Don Fischer. Doug MacEwan. Gwen. Gwen’s second husband
—

What was his name? And had he been seeing Gwen
before
Evangeline Grant’s throat was slashed? And wielded the knife to get me out of the way?

Would a man commit murder to become head of the history department? I suppose men have killed for less. I would have eventually become head of the department, with any luck at all. Cameron Welles would sooner or later have retired, and it had been more or less taken for granted that I would have his post once he left it. I was a year or two junior to
Warren Hayden
(whose name I now added to my list) but was publishing more, had a somewhat wider range of historical interest, and was very definitely his superior in campus politics.

While I was in prison, and thus removed from the race, old Cam Welles retired, to be succeeded by Hayden. So he certainly had had no reason to regret my disappearance from the scene. But did a man murder for such a reason?

And why, then, would he have done it a second time? He might have killed Evangeline Grant to frame me, but once it had worked, why on earth repeat it? Why kill Robin in the bargain? I was well out of things, no continuing threat to him. Of course he might have worried that I suspected him, that I would seek him out and obtain some strange sort of revenge, but why?

Peter Landis had gone with Gwen before I married her. The two of them had had a protracted affair, complicated, Gwen had later told me, by a false pregnancy which very nearly led them to the altar. Then they broke up, and went back together again, and broke up again, and then I met Gwen and married her.

Jealousy?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been seeing Pete while we were married, perhaps he thought he could have her again if I were only out of the way. He was married himself by then, and Gwen and I had played bridge with the Landises, gone to concerts with them, sat up long evenings at their place or ours, drinking and talking the night away. Pete had been a customer’s man with a rather good brokerage firm, and had seemed to be doing very well at it. Mary Landis was a shy thing, soft of voice and unsure of opinion, prettier than one realized at first or even second glance, with a propensity for getting slightly smashed on two drinks and passing the rest of the night in perfect silence.

Pete and Gwen. I wondered if he and Mary were still married. And if he and Gwen had ever resumed their affair. And if he might have hated me over the years, certain that he and Gwen would have gotten back together but for me.

Her new husband. Where precisely had he come from? How had she found him? Of course a vibrant woman like Gwen would not be the sort to wait patiently for her husband to finish serving a life sentence—I’d taken as much for granted, and had not been particularly astonished when she divorced me and married again. (Although, to be honest, the news had depressed me rather more than I cared to admit.)

She was an attractive woman. She could find a man easily enough. But suppose this new husband—I would really have to find out his name—had been someone she knew of old. Suppose they had been having an affair before I got framed for murder.

Why wouldn’t she simply divorce me? God knows I had given her grounds, and if she knew enough to have me set up for Evangeline Grant’s murder, she also knew enough to obtain evidence of adultery.

Nor could I see her as a killer, or as a party to murder. I thought of her behavior at the trial and before, and it struck me as inconceivable that she could have been faking all of that. Unless she actually knew nothing about it—

That was possible. Suppose this new husband of hers had wanted her to divorce me and marry him. And suppose she wouldn’t go along with it. As far as Gwen knew at the time, she and I had a damned good marriage. If she found herself caught up in an affair, she might go along with it (just as I went and chased whores) while remaining quietly determined to keep our marriage intact.

And, if the son of a bitch was sufficiently determined, he would want to get me out of the way so that he could have her. The easiest way to do that would be by killing me, and maybe he had planned as much. He could have followed me with that in mind, followed me right up into the hotel where I’d gone with Evangeline Grant. And then, seeing me passed out and the girl so defenseless, he might have realized that he’d have to kill the girl in any case, to cover his own trail, and that he was far better off letting me live just long enough to hang for the murder.

With me a murder victim, he might have had trouble getting to Gwen; many widows turn out to be far more loyal to their husband’s memory than they were to his own live self. But with me exposed and condemned as an adulterer and a murderer, my hold on Gwen would stop—as it indeed had stopped.

I lit a cigarette and paced around the hotel room, smoking furiously. My mind had hold of the picture now. Myself passed out in post-coital alcoholic coma. And he, in the room, the door closed, knife in hand, advancing on the girl. His mind playing with possibilities, realizing that the girl must the in any case, realizing next that the girl’s death was enough in itself.

And the knife flashing—

And then he must have stood at the side of the bed, the knife ready to Work again, while he went over it all. If I had awakened then, the knife would have done its work. But I slept on, and he saw that it was far safer to leave things as they were, with me tagged for the murder, than to kill me in the bargain and leave the police with a killer to pursue. And so he dropped the knife, and left, and that was that.

I finished the cigarette, stubbed it out. I was out of prison now, and that must have rattled him. He had to be insanely possessive to kill for Gwen when it would have been easier in the long run to convince her to divorce me. He had killed once, and it had worked, and then I was out of prison and a threat to him.

My freedom must have tortured him. I had never tried to get in touch with Gwen after my release—masochism, after all has its limits—but he must have worried that I would come for her eventually, and that I would take her away from him.

Or that I might work it all out in my mind, even as I was working it out now, and that he would be in danger.

While I was in prison his marriage was safe. But a technicality had freed me, and now I was once again a threat to him. As long as I was alive and free he could not rest. I might come for Gwen. I might learn what he had done. I had to be disposed of, once and for all.

And so he must have flown to New York from California, and then he must have found me. I had never attempted to make myself hard to find; it had never occurred to me that anyone might have been trying to find me, and almost everyone I knew was going to great lengths to avoid me.

He found me, he followed me. Once again he had a knife. Did he plan merely to kill me this time, cut my throat as he had cut Evangeline Grant’s? He couldn’t have started off by planning another frame, couldn’t have known how inordinately cooperative I would be. Perhaps he just wanted to kill me, maybe faking a suicide, something of the sort.

(If I were the least bit suicidal I would not have lived this long, God knows. But the police, I am sure, would have willingly written me off as a suicide. And would have shed no tears for me in the bargain.)

He must have been following me that Saturday. And it must have delighted him when I started to drink. By then he must have grown very sure of himself, knowing that I would not spot him on my trail and that, when he made his move, I would be in no condition to do anything about it. He took his time, certainly. I wandered drunk for hours. Until at last he saw me pick up Robin just as I had picked up Evangeline Grant once before, and he trailed us to the room at the Maxfield—

The poetic justice of it must have appealed to him. Once again I had set myself up nicely for him, and once again he did not have to kill me. Easier by far merely to kill the girl, to leave me just where I had been before, and then to fly back to California while I was left with a murder rap I could not possibly shake,
PLAYGIRL SLAYER DOES IT AGAIN
. And doesn’t get out through a loophole this time, but gets the chair instead.

Of course it didn’t have to be him. It might have been any of the others on my list, each supplied with a hazy conjectural motive. But at the moment I liked the way he checked out. There was a pattern to it all, and I could see the pattern clearly.

His name—

I had Gwen’s last letter somewhere around my own room. Some masochistic impulse had made me keep it in prison, so that I could read it over from time to time to remind myself that I no longer had a wife, among other things. I couldn’t remember the damned name. I paced around and smoked cigarettes and closed my eyes in an attempt to bring the letter into focus, and I couldn’t get hold of it I needed his name and address for a starting place. It was all in the letter, and the letter was in a cardboard carton full of letters and books and such, and the carton was in the closet in my apartment on East Ninth Street, and I couldn’t go there, I didn’t dare go there.

They would certainly have the place staked out The police are not fools, and they know that criminals all too frequently try to go home, however unsafe it is. There was sure to be a prowl car on permanent stakeout outside my building, maybe even a cop perched on a chair in the hallway. And, even if the stakeout had been lifted or never established in the first place, there were still my neighbors to be considered. Neighbors in New York are traditionally anxious not to get involved, and those in my neighborhood have little love for the police, but I was no ordinary criminal, I was the mad playgirl slayer, and if someone spotted me there was a better than average chance that the police would be called.

Of course Gwen’s sister would know. I looked her up in the Manhattan book, and there was no listing. Which meant that she had moved out of the city or married someone new or switched to an unlisted number or died—any number of things could happen in all those years.

In any event, I didn’t think she would welcome me with open arms.