Pale Betrayer (18 page)

“But where does the doctor come in?” Redmond said.

Marks took his time. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain to Redmond his own reaction to one of the pictures in that book. And that really was all there was to the association. But Redmond was waiting. Marks had to try. He shook out a cigarette and lit it. “The book is called
Child of the City
. There’s a little boy in most of the pictures, a grubby little kid, Italian or Puerto Rican. But there’s one picture that tore my guts out—a young woman standing on the steps of a tenement building looking down at the youngster. The more I looked at it, the more I thought, this girl’s in trouble. What a picture! You couldn’t pose that—you just had to wait for it to happen.” Marks half-expected Redmond to spout a sarcasm as he felt Fitzgerald would under the circumstances.

But the Captain said: “Is the building identifiable in the picture?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to see the picture again. This part could be my imagination, remembering something that wasn’t in it at all, but I seem to think now there was some kind of sign in the window above.”

“Dr. So and So?”

Marks said: “That’s what’s running through my mind now.”

Redmond sat back and smoked thoughtfully. After a moment he said: “So there’s the possibility that Peter Bradley was able to identify one of his assailants—or at least the assailant thought so. Let’s take a look now at what we’ve got and see if we can put together what happened to Bradley in his last hour, shall we?”

Marks nodded and both men started to speak at once. Redmond said: “You start it off.”

Marks said: “Bradley left the house at nine fifteen, tailed by this character.” He indicated the flyer. “We’ll call him A. A was probably in a car driven by B who could be our doctor. A dropped off at the corner of Tenth Street to set up things at Anne Russo’s. B tailed Bradley all the way to the lab and drove up behind him just as Bradley reached the entrance. He’d have to do that to make it seem natural, his asking: ‘Are you Dr. Bradley?’ Then he persuaded Bradley that Anne Russo was hurt—or ill.”

“But the girl had left Bradley’s house with the others,” Redmond said. “Wouldn’t Bradley assume she was at the laboratory?”

“Actually she hadn’t. Steinberg and the boys had gone downstairs ahead of her. She had to run to catch up with them. And even if she doesn’t remember it, it’s just possible she said within Bradley’s hearing: ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses. I’ll have to go home for them.’”

“In any case,” Redmond said, “Bradley seems to have got into B’s car without much protest. Go on.”

“By a quarter to ten, they were outside Anne’s house—but the car seems to have gone on quickly. The old lady looking out her window—dividing her attention between the wrestling match on television and the street, didn’t notice the car, just two men—and heard somebody call, ‘Doctor.’ Whether from inside the vestibule or on the street, we don’t know. There has to be a Mr. C involved now. Maybe he drove the doctor’s car and parked it in the lumberyard while the other two went inside with Bradley. A was already on the scene.”

“The lumberyard—that’s the stickler,” Redmond said. “Why that elaborate preparation? Why not just park the car on the street for a quicker getaway? Was it a safe place to count the money they’d taken from Bradley?” He shook his head.

Marks said: “It wasn’t his money they were after. Something bigger. Something that came with the film or in his notes. It has to be.”

“I agree,” Redmond said. He relit his pipe, long since gone out again. “Dave, suppose they didn’t get what they were looking for? Suppose Bradley had—in effect—doublecrossed them? Suppose they did use the lumberyard as a place to examine what they’d taken. Maybe they needed light, strong light—for film? A lumberyard would have an outlet for power equipment. Say they didn’t get what they were looking for. They then assumed Bradley had caught on …”

“That means he was carrying something he wasn’t supposed to know about himself,” Marks interjected. “A dummy carrier?”

“Right. At the time they were examining the film, Bradley was lying unconscious in the apartment hallway. A few minutes later the woman with the dog saw him struggling out among the ashcans. He was out there for anybody to see who looked. And
they
would have looked. If Bradley
wasn’t
carrying what they expected, he was their enemy. And in his condition at that moment, a very easy one to put a knife in.”

“That makes the doctor our hottest prospect, doesn’t it?” Marks said after a moment.

“Hot and slippery,” Redmond said. “He must have a damned good story ready for us or he wouldn’t have left so wide a trail.”

“Funny, how we started in one direction and came out another,” Marks said.

“That photograph needs to be checked all the same,” Redmond said. “We’re a long ways from home.”

There was no one at the Bradley apartment when Marks called. He knew that Janet had flown to Chicago for the interment there, but he had hoped Louise might be at the apartment. He found her at her own home, Anne Russo with her, as well as three of the wildest children it had ever been his misfortune to meet.

“They’re always like this after they’ve been with Grandma Steinberg,” Louise shouted over the din. “I just let ’em go till they’re exhausted.”

Anne, apparently on the theory that she could not lick them, had joined them. They had her tied to a diningroom chair from which she smiled up at Marks while the Steinberg Indians whooped around her.

“Joan of Arc or Pocahontas?” Marks shouted.

“Houdini!” Anne cried and broke the strings in a burst of flailing arms and legs.

The adults retreated to the kitchen, Louise closing the door behind them. Steinberg, the scientist, it was plain to see, hadn’t washed a dish during his wife’s absence.

“Do you have a key to the Bradley apartment?” Marks asked.

“I put it in the mailbox,” Louise said. “Why?”

“There’s something I want to see—Mrs. Bradley’s book.”

“It isn’t there. I packed Janet’s suitcase for her and stuck it in. There was room.”

Marks, astounded, said: “Why not the telephone book?”

Louise looked offended. “I thought she might need something like that, work—some distraction.”

Marks was beginning to understand that Louise was one of those people who organized other people’s affairs for them and her own not at all. “There’s a picture in it I wanted to see again and to ask her about.”

“She’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Mañana,” Marks said.

Then Anne said: “There’s an exhibit of Janet’s pictures in Lowell Hall. Mostly trick stuff though, you know, non-objective.”

“Are there pictures from the new book in it?”

“A few, I think,” Anne said.

“Where’s Lowell Hall?”

Louise said: “Annie, why don’t you take him there? He might have trouble getting in at this hour.”

Louise, the matchmaker, Marks thought, but he was not displeased. “Do you mind?”

Anne made a futile gesture toward the dish-filled sink.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Louise said. “I’ve got to do something till the demons wear themselves out.” She took them to the hall door. “Come back later for coffee. I’d offer you dinner, but not in this mess.” A very subtle woman, Marks thought, but the least he was going to do was take things at his own pace.

It was almost six o’clock when they reached the University and they had to get the custodian to open the lecture hall and turn on the lights.

“Should I tip him?” Marks whispered.

Anne shook her head. “Dangerous precedent.” She flashed the man a smile and Marks thought it would be a mighty poor man who wouldn’t settle for that.

They walked solemnly along the walls hung with Janet Bradley’s work: wisping trailing camera effects, light and shadow; then a group of surrealist designs started out of city skyscrapers. “I shouldn’t be enjoying this,” Marks said, “but I am.” He was aware of a group of portrait photographs which they had not yet reached.

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “She makes this city beautiful, and it’s not.”

“But there’s beauty in it if you look hard enough.”

“In the right places,” Marks said. “I don’t often get to them.”

The first portrait in a series came as a shock to Marks: it was of Anne Russo. Janet had caught her as she was looking up from her desk at home. Pencil in hand, she looked radiant, as though she had just made a marvelous discovery. Marks looked from the picture to the girl. She was almost his height, her face flushed now, self-conscious. “It doesn’t flatter you, you know. It’s just you at the right moment.”

“You should see me at some of my wrong ones,” Anne said, trying to edge him along. “I’d forgotten Janet was there that night. She was working. So was I. She didn’t tell me. Afterwards she said she’d been watching me for an hour. Most of the time I’d been biting my thumb.” Anne motioned toward a picture down the line. “There’s one from the book I think.”

It was the portrait of the dark, troubled girl on the steps which Marks had remembered. But it was the insert only, an enlargement of her face, showing nothing of the background in which Marks was at the moment most interested.

“Did Mrs. Bradley talk to you about this picture, where she took it?”

Anne shook her head. “She doesn’t talk about her pictures ever. If they don’t speak, she said once, then I don’t have anything to say either.”

In the hallway, having told the custodian that they were through in Lowell Hall, Marks said: “Anne, would you have dinner with me?”

She nodded vigorously. “I’d love to.”

A half-hour later they were sitting in the Bretagne, a restaurant Anne said she always went to with her parents when they came into town. They had the menus and a martini each before them.

Anne said: “I haven’t had much to eat lately. I always seem
about
to eat. Then something happens and I don’t want to any more.”

Marks, glimpsing the prices of the entrees, said: “You’d better eat tonight.”

“I don’t want to forget, you see, and already I’m beginning to. All day today I kept thinking: I don’t want to go on in science. I don’t care enough, not deep down inside.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to live, whatever that means.” She turned the glass round with her fingertips. Marks noticed she had put on nail polish since last he had seen her. “I want to be like that picture Janet took of me!” She bit her lip then, Marks thought charmingly. “I’m very young, aren’t I?”

“Sometimes.”

“How old are you, David? Do you mind? I shouldn’t want to be called Dave if I were David, I don’t think.”

“I’m thirty.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“I’m glad,” Anne said. “I mean—I was raised a Catholic, you see.”

“And taught not to go out with married men,” he prompted.

“It isn’t exactly going out, dinner just, is it? I mean that was presumptuous of me, saying what I did.”

Marks said: “To me, it’s going out—if there are tablecloths on the table. What do you recommend we have to eat?”

“Everything is good.”

“Would you share the Chateaubriand? Rare?”

She nodded. “You speak French, don’t you—the way you said that?”

“Waiter’s French anyway,” Marks said.

“Louise said your father is a judge.”

“A lawyer.”

“That’s like Louise. She always pushes people a step ahead of themselves. Everybody’s the greatest.” After a moment she added: “I wish I thought Bob Steinberg was. I don’t.”

Marks lifted his glass. “You’re comparing him with Peter Bradley. Not many men could stand up to that comparison.”

“Most of them don’t even try.” She sipped her drink and watched Marks while, by an old habit, he took his pencil and lightly checked off items on the menu.

He said then: “Clams, onion soup, Chateaubriand and salad. How’s that? And an inexpensive claret—if there is such a thing any more.” He gave the order to the waiter.

“I wonder if Eric will now,” Anne said.

Marks was a moment remembering the sequence of her remark.

“Try to measure up to Peter,” she added.

“With Janet?”

Anne nodded. “I know he’s terribly fond of her—at least I’m reasonably sure of it. Only he hates himself so. But now with Peter gone, maybe he won’t feel so inferior.”

Marks said: “Anne, didn’t I ask you about this once before, the possibility of Mather and Janet Bradley?”

“No.”

He had asked Louise, he realized, and considered her a better judge of relationships than Anne Russo.

“I probably wouldn’t have told you anyway,” Anne said. “I mean, I was guessing and there wasn’t anything between them actually. Just what Eric called his fantasy …” She finished her drink, remembering the martinis she had had with Mather. It seemed years before. “I think Eric is one of the lost people in this world. He tries to hate, I think, because he’s afraid of being hurt in love.”

What Eric called his fantasy, Marks thought … And here was yet another woman presuming to understand him, making allowances. Why? Marks motioned for another round of drinks. He was no psychologist. But the man Mather was psychopathic. He, too, David Marks, policeman, had been making allowances, subconsciously condemning that catch-all scapegoat, society. Society was the people who composed it, the Eric Mathers along with the rest. Because a sophisticated group of people could accept him, he was not cured automatically! In fact, acceptance might compound his malady—if he had to strive too hard to get it.

Marks concealed his own uneasiness. He tried to make the question he now asked sound casual: “When did it first occur to you that Eric might be in love with Janet?”

Anne thought for a moment. “That night … the awful one. Only earlier. I was just going to leave. Eric had already gone. But I wanted to tell Janet how much I’d liked the show at Lowell Hall. She was at the front window looking down. Eric was crossing the street. I didn’t see him at first, but—this all happened in a minute—I saw him turn under the street lamp there and put his fingers to his lips … you know?” Anne repeated the gesture telling it: the fingertips of both hands from her lips toward Marks. “And that wasn’t anything really. I mean I wouldn’t even have thought about—Eric’s like that to everybody—except that Janet, well, there were tears in her eyes when she turned around—and the way she caught my hands and hung onto them for a minute.” Anne looked down at her own hands now. “I’m not very good at a time like that. I run. I’m a funny sort to be an Italian. I’m supposed to be emotional.”