Shadow of Guilt (12 page)

But Chuck was innocent, too.

He’s innocent. The words, synchronizing with the steady clump of the cop’s shoes, became a rhythmic, goading jingle in my mind. He’s innocent, he’s innocent…

All this time, Connie was being almost hysterically executive, demanding a telephone, pouring indignation into the cop’s placid ear. Finally he got us downstairs into the sort of reception hall where we’d first entered. There was a telephone on the wall. Monumentally impervious, he grinned and left us. Connie ran to the phone and called the lawyer. I listened vaguely to her crisp, “committee” voice. Then she was slamming down the receiver.

“It’s all right, George. We’re to go to him right away. But I’ll have to call Mal first.”

Another clattering dime, another dialing, the brisk voice again.

“Mal? You’re still there… No, no, dear, I can’t say anything now… We’re going to the lawyer… Yes, yes, wait. I’ll be there soon. Wait, dear.”

She hung up.

“All right, George. Mr. Macguire’s at his home. Seventy-second and First Avenue. That’s where we’ve got to go.”

We started driving uptown. Connie always mixed up bustle with achievement. She had snapped right back.
She
was going to the lawyer.
She
was going to fix everything. In my state of moral deadlock, her resiliency set my teeth on edge. What did she think she was going to do? Announce to the lawyer that Chuck didn’t do it and sublimely assume that the word of Consuelo Corliss would be enough for everyone?

“There’s so much to look into. I’m sure they’re doing nothing, nothing at all. There’s that bar, for example. Where did Chuck say it was? The Red Bear, wasn’t it? On Sixty-First and Second?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“That barman, Mack, he’s bound to remember Chuck. Chuck said he was the only one in the place. He… George, didn’t they say the shots were fired sometime between two and five? Chuck wasn’t at all sure when he was actually at Don’s. Maybe it was earlier. Maybe the barman, Mack, could prove he’d arrived at the bar, say, at ten minutes to two.”

“It isn’t likely,” I said.

She swung around to glare at me. “Why are you always so defeatist? Of course it’s possible, and we’ll work on it. Yes, right now. George, get out at Sixty-First, talk to the barman. I’ll drive on to Mr. Macguire’s. There’s no need for you anyway.”

We were, in fact, in the Fifties on First. Suddenly the idea of escaping from Connie and the grueling session with the lawyer seemed wonderful to me. I didn’t have any faith in the bar enterprise, but what difference did that make?

“Okay,” I said.

“Find out everything,” she said, “absolutely everything. Then I’ll meet you back at the house.”

I got out at the corner of Sixty-First Street and First. Connie scrambled into the driving seat and drove away. I walked east down the block. The dim neon sign of The Red Bear showed on the corner of Second. It was just another Second Avenue saloon. I walked in. A straggle of men were lounging at the bar. The television was flickering with its sound off. The barman, a gaunt, balding man of around fifty, was polishing glasses close to a couple of guys who were arguing halfheartedly about something.

“Bourbon and water,” I said.

The barman came back with the drink, and I said, “Is your name Mack?”

“That’s right.” His bored eyes studied my face. “You from the cops?”

“No,” I said.

“Thought maybe you was. They just been in here asking about that Ryson kid they’re holding on a murder.”

“I’m his uncle,” I said. “I want to know when he came in here on Sunday afternoon.”

The barman flicked at the bar with his towel. “Just like them,” he said. “Well, mister, there ain’t no mystery about it. I remember real clear because I took over for the other barman Sunday afternoon. It was just a couple of minutes after I took over and I took over at two-thirty.”

So much for Connie’s inspiration. Chuck had arrived at the bar a few minutes after two-thirty. Don Saxby’s apartment was only a ten-minute walk away. The shots could have been fired at two.

The two men at the bar were arguing even more heatedly
.

The barman stood in front of me, watching me now with a sort of tired sympathy.

“It’s tough, mister. Chuck seemed like a nice kid. Always. A real nice kid.”

There was a crash. One of the arguing men had overturned his highball. Liquor was running all over the bar.

The barman started to sop up the spilled drink with his cloth.

It was as I watched the liquor seeping into the cloth that I remembered something which, until then, I’d forgotten as being of no significance whatsoever. When I’d examined Saxby’s body, the shirt sleeve of his left forearm had been damp with martini spilled from the smashed cocktail shaker. I’d actually touched the material. The cocktail shaker must certainly have been shattered when he fell. And when had I touched the shirt sleeve? Not before four-thirty at the earliest.

The barman, having cleaned up the mess, moved soberly back to me.

I said, “Have you ever spilled a shaker of martinis on your sleeve?”

The mournful eyes blinked. “Sure. Guess so. Why?”

“How long does it take to dry?”

He shrugged. “Gee, mister, I never figured it out. Not long. The gin evaporating, that don’t take long.”

I counted back. The latest moment Chuck could have been at Don Saxby’s apartment was twenty past two. Twenty past two until four-thirty. Two hours and ten minutes? Could spilled martini stay damp on a shirt sleeve for two hours and ten minutes?

It seemed impossible. And if it was impossible, Saxby must have been shot sometime after Chuck had arrived at The Red Bear. There it was—an unbreakable alibi for Chuck. I could get him released tonight. All I had to do…

All I had to do! The implications of that phrase were enormous and threatening, obliterating any sense of jubilation. All I had to do to save Chuck was to betray Ala, and to betray her now would be far more catastrophic than it had been earlier. Once Chuck was proved innocent, there would be only Ala. Their case against her would be even stronger than their case against Chuck had been.

But it wasn’t only that. Now that the cards were on the table, I could admit to myself what I’d shirked from admitting before. To tell about Ala would be to tell about Eve and me too. I could claim I’d just happened to be in her apartment when Ala’s call came through. I could say… What had I decided? That I’d had to dictate some letters concerning the Brazilian tycoon which had been too urgent to wait until Monday? But there weren’t any letters to produce, and the man I’d be trying to fool would be Lieutenant Trant. How long, given that much of a clue to intimacy, would it take Trant to hit on the truth? He’d find it out in five minutes. Then the sluice gates of scandal would be burst open for me, for Eve—yes, for Connie, too.

It was ignoble, I knew, that when there were so many much more important issues at stake, this extra complication should loom so large to me, but it did. I thought of what it would do to Eve to be dragged through the mud as a sly little secretary who had plotted to steal Consuelo Corliss’ husband, and suddenly I was filled with rage against the District Attorney and Lieutenant Trant. Why did they have to stick with such crass lack of imagination to the most obvious solution? They knew the history of Saxby and the Duvreuxs. Hadn’t it occurred to them that a man with a background like that could have any number of potential murderers who were not necessarily Rysons or Hadleys? Weren’t they investigating his past? Hadn’t they even consulted their own files or the newspaper files?

The newspapers! One of my oldest buddies was a retired newspaperman turned author. Ted Bradley was a walking encyclopedia of the more sordid aspects of life. Ted might know something, or, if he didn’t, he had a genius for finding out whatever there was to find out.

When I reached him on the phone, Ted was as unemotionally co-operative as I knew he would be.

“So this Saxby pulled a deal in Toronto and another in Quebec? Okay, I’ve got a friend in Toronto. In fact, I’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places. I’ll make a couple of calls. If I dig up anything in a hurry, shall I call you at home?”

At home? Mal and Vivien would be at Sixty-Fourth Street. Connie would be storming in from the lawyer. And I had to make a test with spilled martini.

“No,” I said. “If anything comes in in the next hour or so, call me at…” I gave him Eve’s number.

Eve’s was the place to make the test, and it was with Eve that I should make my decision about Ala.

We made the test. In her living room I fixed a shaker of martinis and slopped it all over my shirt sleeve. Then, realizing that the heat of my body would speed up evaporation, I took the shirt off and draped it over a chair. We sat together on the studio couch, watching the shirt, waiting.

The sleeve reached the degree of near-dryness in forty-five minutes. Don’s shirt could have been a little more or a little less absorbent than mine, but only to the extent of lengthening or shortening the process by, say, fifteen minutes either way. I had touched Don’s shirt at four-thirty. That meant the shots must have been fired sometime between three-thirty and four. By three-thirty, Chuck had been in The Red Bear for an hour.

“Well,” said Eve, “that proves it, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

For a moment we both stood looking at the shirt. Lying on the chair with the damp sleeve slopping over the arm, it had a spookily human quality, as if at any moment the sleeve might move. Eve turned to me. Her blue eyes were very grave.

“If you tell, they’re bound to arrest Ala, aren’t they?”

“Of course they are—unless by some miracle Ted Bradley can come up with something.”

“It would be mad to depend on that. You know it would. And even if he did find something they didn’t know about Don Saxby’s past, that isn’t going to alter the evidence.” She paused. “This—the martini—it wouldn’t help her, would it?”

“It’d make it worse. Saxby still could have been killed at four, and she was there at four. We know she was. She called you at seven minutes past.”

She gave a bleak little shrug. “But, George, you can’t really believe she did it. Ala? It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Of course I don’t think she did it. But that’s no way of being sure, is it?”

“But if she’s innocent, it would be awful to tell, cruel. It would just be switching the horror from Chuck to Ala. It would be worse almost than leaving things the way they are.” There, of course, was the crux.

“The Lieutenant’s coming tomorrow morning to question us,” I said. “Whatever happens, at least I’ll have to talk to Ala before that.”

“And let her know she can get Chuck released?”

“Isn’t it really her problem? She’s got to realize that if it wasn’t for her, this would never have happened to Chuck. Maybe, if she’s innocent and if she has enough guts, she’ll want to tell the Lieutenant anyway.”

“And if she hasn’t enough guts?” said Eve. “Or if she’s guilty?”

“Then it’ll be right back to being my problem again. I guess that’s the only way to handle it. But if we do have to tell, there’s us, you and me…”

“Us?” she echoed. “Do you think that matters any more? We can’t think about us now. We can’t…”

We sat there thinking about that until Ted Bradley telephoned. A wild hope surged through me as I heard his dry, laconic voice.

“Well, what about this for service?” he said.

“You’ve got something?”

“Trust old Bradley. It was a cinch. I called my contact in Toronto. He didn’t answer, but Bradley’s not one to be daunted. My contact has a brother in San Francisco. He’s an ex-newspaperman too. I called him and he had it all—just like that.”

“All—what?”

“About Saxby. He’d just seen his picture in the local paper and he’d recognized him right away. His name wasn’t Saxby and he wasn’t even a Canadian. He was a guy from Oregon called Don Merchant. About five years ago he and another guy, called Kramer, and a girl, Kramer’s sister, ran a blackmail racket in San Francisco. In his characterization as a painter, Saxby got in with the high-society set and dug up dirt about them. If there wasn’t any dirt, either he or the girl saw that some was provided. Then Kramer moved in for the shake-down. One of the victims finally had enough guts to turn them in. My buddy covered the case. Kramer was shot resisting arrest, Saxby got five years, they couldn’t pin anything on the girl. Incidentally, after his release, when Saxby-Merchant snuck across the border to start operating in Canada, he was breaking parole. How about that? Will that hold you for a while?”

“Terrific,” I said. “Thanks, Ted. Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “Just worship me. I’ll go on digging and keep in touch.”

I called Trant at Centre Street. He wasn’t there, but I raised a stink, and a long-suffering sergeant gave me his home number. Trant answered right away. His voice sounded as polite and friendly as ever.

“Oh, Mr. Hadley—yes.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ve just found out something about Saxby in San Francisco. His name wasn’t Saxby, he wasn’t even Canadian, he—”

“He came from Oregon,” Trant broke in, “and his name was Donald Merchant. He was convicted of running a blackmail racket with a girl and a man called Kramer. Is that what you mean? I’ve known that since yesterday. There’s a lot more, too. A later set-up in Quebec with another partner, another girl. Even a very early deal in Portland with yet another girl. Girls and dirt, Mr. Hadley. Saxby was never without them.”

I should, of course, have suspected that if an ex-newspaperman in San Francisco knew something, the police were bound to have known it earlier, but in my great need for hope I’d clung to hope. Now I felt dejected and deflated.

“But with a man like that—”

“A lot of people could have wanted to kill him? That’s hardly the point, is it, Mr. Hadley? The point in this case is that Chuck’s the one who went there to kill him with a gun, Chuck’s the one who admits he was on the scene at a time when the shots could have been fired, Chuck—”

“But, goddamnit, he’s innocent. He told us what he’d told you and my wife and I—”