Pale Betrayer (3 page)

Mather laughed dryly at his own expense: the temptation should be easily overcome. Bradley simply would not believe him; he would call it a splendid tale, worthy of Mather’s imagination, fiction patterned to coincidence. Free? He was locked within his own contrivance.

His pace slowed with the diminished sense of triumph. The fact that Bradley would not believe him if he could tell the story rankled fiercely. Bradley did not know him that well. Nobody did. It sometimes troubled him that he suspected no one wanted to. Yet, he was welcomed in all company, even that of scientists. He could choose at that moment among a half-dozen groups of young intellectuals meeting by chance or habit at some Village shop or bar and find a welcome. He could retrace his steps to the house he had just left. Would Janet welcome him? She would want to. Or had a moment alone again with Peter cast the tempter from her mind?

When he reached the Red Lantern, the Imagists were in full flower: the word struck him as particularly apt. These were a group of young men distinguished by their carefulness of speech, their elegance of clothes and manner. Mather was amused by the affectation: to pursue elegance for its own sake on today’s campus, among the consciously sloppy and unwashed, took its own kind of courage. The dark-paneled, hazily lighted tavern was crowded, tourist trade at most of the tables and the regulars squaring their backs to it at the bar. He ambled toward his young friends. The only girl among them, wearing a scalloped paisley shawl and with her hair loosely nested on the top of her head—or was it a wig?—stuck out her tongue as a wolf-whistler paid her tribute on his way to the washroom. Sweeney among the nightingales.

The young people edged together to make as much room as Mather wanted, which was a whole bench to himself. Most of them called him Eric, off-campus. He often sat among them, sideways, a knee drawn up to his chin, his eyes closed as he listened to their talk. He bought his welcome possibly with his ability to quote from memory whole passages of poetry to either bolster or defeat the point in the making. Tonight it
was
“Sweeney” again. He would not stay long. He had always found Sweeney a bore as well as a boor.

Suddenly he opened his eyes and began reciting, the conversation falling off beneath his onslaught. He was as startled himself by his choice of lines as were his listeners. They had come from deep within his own subconscious and were as remote from Sweeney as London from the Dardanelles. In fact, until he found himself reciting them he had not been aware of knowing them at all:

“Snatch from the ashes of your sires

The embers of their former fires;

And he who in the strife expires

Will add to theirs a name of fear

That tyranny all quake to hear …”

Having started, he found the impulse to carry on too strong to resist. He poured out stanza after stanza, plummeting the strange and hidden recesses of his own memory for them. And as he tumbled out the words, his delivery far more eloquent than the poem, he loosened his tie and then removed it, unbuttoned his shirt and spread the collar.

The young people watched him, fascinated, their eyes a mixture of amused puzzlement. Eliot? Surely not. Some of them could scarcely suppress laughter, and others let it go thinking it would prove them knowledgeable of the jingo he was counterpoising to Eliot’s sardonicism.

He stopped abruptly. His listeners waited silently. He said: “Who?”

More silence. Then the girl giggled. “I know,” she said with a grating drawl. “It’s Byron.”

“How could you tell?” he mocked.

Grinning vacuously, she gestured with her limp hand at her own neck, indicating his open collar, that bit of manly flair for which the romantic poet had been remembered when his lines were long forgotten.

“The testimony of fair woman,” Mather again mocked. “The poet is soonest recognized who bares his throat to her fangs.”

He gathered his long legs under him and slid out of the booth. “Forgive the interruption, gentlemen. Live, Sweeney! Agamemnon died tonight.”

He moved quickly out of the tavern, pushing his way through the incoming crowd, ignoring the bartender’s friendly salute. He was possessed of a wild restlessness, the need to do something flamboyant, to lose himself by calling attention to himself. Agamemnon died tonight! Well, hadn’t he with honor’s death? He began then a round of the taverns and coffee shops, conjuring a welcome from one group, then another with his fierce exuberance.

J
ANET WAS IN THE
darkroom, which had probably served a previous tenant as a maid’s room, when the phone rang. She was a few seconds getting used to the light as she stepped into the kitchen. The thought ran through her mind that Peter had become involved: something had turned up in the film which he and his group had not observed before. To Janet photography meant a study of persons, objects. Sometimes she experimented with non-objective effects—she had an exhibit of such studies showing now—but to Peter, a high-energy physicist, in his work film was the record of possible mathematical significants achieved in nuclear experiment.

It was Bob Steinberg on the phone. “Janet? Where the hell is Peter? We’ve been waiting here for over an hour and I’ve got an eight o’clock class in the morning.”

“He left just after you did,” Janet said. “I expected him home soon.” The University was a brisk twenty minutes’ walk.

“Did he say he was stopping any place?”

“No. And he was tired, Bob. He wanted to get home.”

“Huh.” Then as though to allay her concern by citing the seeming illogic which was sometimes characteristic of her husband, Steinberg added: “When he’s tired, that’s when he goes walking. Don’t worry about him, Janet. He picked up a lot to think about in the last few days.”

“If he doesn’t come soon …”

“I’ll call you,” Steinberg interrupted. “We’ll break up soon if he doesn’t come and I’ll call you.”

“Thank you, Bob.” Janet looked at her watch as she hung up the phone. It was twenty minutes to eleven. The latest it could have been when Peter had left the house was nine fifteen. He was not a man to hold to a timetable, but he was considerate of other people’s time. He might have stopped for a few minutes at St. John’s Church if it were open. He often did. Not that he was religious. It was just a place he liked to stop. She wondered if he might have fallen asleep, sitting there. They might even have locked him in! She gave a little laugh aloud at the thought. But even to herself the sound was edged with hysteria.

She returned to the darkroom and put away the materials with which she had been working when the phone rang. There was nothing she could do but wait. Peter would be annoyed if she started phoning. And where? The vicarage at St. John’s? Peter would definitely be annoyed. There was no phone at the laboratory. Bob Steinberg would have had to go out to a corner box. She had ought to have become accustomed in eight years. She began to think of the circumstances under which Peter had instructed her she was not to worry: his staying an hour and a half in the bathtub; his failure to show up at mealtime or at bedtime. Onto something, he had on occasion stayed until dawn at the laboratory—and then walked to the tip of Manhattan where he bought fresh fish and brought it home for breakfast.

Worry about Peter, Janet thought as she sat down to it in earnest, had one sure if somewhat miserable advantage: it took her mind off Eric Mather—and off herself in her disgust at thinking so much about him.

Steinberg, leaving the public phone booth, stopped briefly at the corner newsstand. The vendor was folding copies of
The Times
. He had the only stand in the city, he liked to boast, that sold more “
Timeses
than
Newse
s.”

“Have you seen Dr. Bradley tonight, Hank?”

“Yeah,” Hank said. Then he scratched his head. “No, I guess not. It was Miss Russo I seen—a little while ago.”

It was a damned funny confusion, Steinberg thought. He remembered then that Anne had stopped home to get her glasses, arriving at the laboratory some time after the rest of them. He had never liked the idea of Anne’s walking alone the two blocks from the newsstand to the laboratory. He didn’t like to do it himself. Soon they would have a new building, but just now the laboratory was in a warehouse on the edge of one of the worst slums in the city. It was the rare landlord who wanted to have a cyclotron in his building, even a baby cyclotron.

P
ATROL CAR THIRTY-SEVEN,
operating out of the Houston Street precinct, cruised into East Tenth Street, Officer Tom Reid at the wheel. His partner, Wally Herring, was a Negro. They had long since ceased to be conscious of one another’s color, but they were both very much aware of the mixtures in color and language of most of their territory. This part of Tenth Street represented its upper class, a conglomeration of old family houses long since converted to apartments, ten-year-old apartment buildings which from the day of construction had lacked charm, much less dignity, and were already half-slums, and a string of shops which Herring kept his eyes on, watching for signs of forced entry—antique shops, a shoemaker, a taxidermist, Spanish delicatessen, art galleries … The two men were due to go off duty at midnight. So far it had been one of their quieter nights: good weather seemed to make good neighbors.

Herring spotted the figure slumped among the ashcans at the mouth of an arcade near the entrance to 853. A woman was trying to pull a fat spaniel away. Reid parked at the curb. Herring got out, flashlight in hand. The woman began at once to berate the policeman, blocking his way.

“Where do they get it? That’s what I want to know.
Where
do they get it?”

The dog whimpered, straining at the leash.

Herring could not get past them. “Ma’am, you might try the corner tavern. Let me by, please.”

“Oh, the arrogance of some people these days,” the woman said, and to the dog: “
Will
you come, Dandy? Come!”

Reid, watching from the car, saw her put a sharp toe to the dog’s most vulnerable parts. It yipped and swung around, fawning on her. Whereupon she made a great mothering fuss over it. If she had a husband, Reid thought, God pity him and his vulnerable parts.

Herring played the light over the figure, resting it then on the man’s back. There was a small tear in the coat and around the tear a wet stain had spread. The policeman touched his finger to it although that was scarcely necessary. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly, and shone the light on the victim’s face. It had settled into repose like the face of a child about to cry. A good face, like a minister’s he thought, a good man. The hair was gray at the temples. There was a dirty lump at the back of his ear. “Son of a bitch,” he said again and then added all the vile epithets with which his own street upbringing had equipped him, a curious source of strength at such a moment. He returned to the car door.

“Get them rolling,” he said to Reid. “It looks like a knife job.” He looked at his watch: twenty minutes to eleven, and got out his report book. Then he remembered the woman. There was not another person within two blocks. He hurried after her as she turned into the corner building and called out: “Madam, one minute, please.”

Before he reached her she started protesting: “I saw nothing. Nothing. A person ought to be able to walk their dog without the police chasing after them.”

“Madam, the man is dead,” Herring said.

“I’m not surprised,” she said, as cold herself as the steel of a knife.

“When you were bringing the dog out …”

She interrupted. “I told you, Officer, I saw nothing.”

Herring stiffened in authority. “May I have your name and address, please?”

“Mrs. Rose Finney, apartment 4A.”

“The address of the building, please.” He did not look up although the number was plainly visible.

“Eight-seven-one.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.” With alacrity he opened the door and held it for her.

She looked up at him, puzzled, suspicious, and then sailed in, yanking the dog after her. Herring showed her a beautiful set of teeth over which, when she had passed, his lips closed like the sudden drop of a curtain over footlights.

Inspector Joseph Fitzgerald and Lieutenant Dave Marks answered the call for Homicide. They were on the scene within fifteen minutes. The medical examiner arrived shortly afterwards along with the technical squad. By then people were hanging out of windows up and down the block; fire escapes were sagging with them. The precinct men had already roped off the area.

Fitzgerald, a veteran of twenty-four years on the detective force, ran his hand gingerly over the victim’s hip and side pockets, and then eased it beneath the man to feel his breast pockets. He glanced up at Reid who had stayed with the body. “No identification?”

“No, sir.” He reported on the finding of the victim, the failure of the one possible witness to contribute any information.

Fitzgerald grunted and looked up at the gallery of faces, like bobbing balloons in the eerie light of the kliegs. “All yours,” he said to the medical examiner.

At the door of 853 Lieutenant Marks talked with the uniformed-officer, Walter Herring, while the latter held his torch to the vestibule light fixture. The bulb had been smashed and the building superintendent from across the street was on a stepladder replacing it. This sort of vandalism was not uncommon in the neighborhood, especially where the super did not live on the premises.

The building was clean but old, a converted brownstone. The vestibule had been freshly painted. Marks threw his own flashlight on the mailboxes. There were four of them; one, the first floor, was without a nameplate, an invitation to mischief. Marks winced at the gritty sound of broken glass beneath his feet.

“Are any of these people home?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Herring said. “Nobody’s gone in or out since we found him.”

Marks studied the names, wondering the economic strata of the tenants. On the top floor was a Dr. A. J. Webb; then two names, neatly written in ink: Brannon, Russo—women he supposed since the first names were omitted; the next was Adam Britt and Joyce Liebling Britt, names vaguely familiar so that he speculated they might be theater people.