Shadow of Guilt (16 page)

For a moment we all stared.

“Chuck!” gasped Ala.

Connie took a quick step toward him.

“It’s okay, Connie,” he said. “Everything’s fine. They’ve let me go.”

He grinned at Trant, then he turned to Ala, the grin fading into a shy, tentative smile. “Hi, Ala.”

Trant took out a cigarette case. He opened it, selected a cigarette and tapped it on the case.

“As I told you last night, Mr. Hadley, it was all a question of the time of death. Right after I spoke to you, I went to see the woman who lives on Saxby’s floor. She’d been away when I’d tried her before, but she’d come back. She was, in fact, just about to get in touch with me.”

He lit the cigarette, watching us all with quiet benignity. “On Sunday she’d been right here in New York having lunch with friends. She got back to Fifty-Fourth Street at exactly three twenty-five. The taxi driver asked her the time when she paid the fare so she’s quite positive of that. She passed his door on the way to her apartment. She knew Saxby well enough to recognize his voice and she heard him. She’s perfectly sure of that, too. He was in the apartment talking very loudly as if he were quarreling with someone. She didn’t hear any other voice because she was there only a second before she went down the hall to her own apartment. A few moments after she’d got there, she heard what she thought was backfiring in the street. As it tinned out, the evidence is as exact as any evidence can be. Don Saxby was alive at three twenty-five and he was shot at three-thirty. By three-thirty, Chuck had been at The Red Bear for almost an hour.”

Thanks to this staggering piece of good fortune, there was no need for Ala’s great gesture after all. We were all right. Miraculously, we had been saved.

Ala gave a little sob and ran to Chuck.

“Chuck, Chuck darling… It’s so wonderful. I can hardly believe it. Oh, Chuck, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I’ve been such a monster. But—but I would have helped. I swear it. If there was anything I could have done…”

“Ala baby, it’s okay.”

“But—”

“It’s okay, I said.”

His arm was around her. His young face under the cropped, yellow-gold hair was touchingly protective. “Are you crazy, trying to blame yourself? I was the one who did it, wasn’t I? I was the dumb jerk.”

“But, Chuck, if you knew…”

“I know all that matters. I know you’re you. That’s all I ever wanted.”

Trant had been watching them with an indulgent “youth-youth” expression. At this point he said, “I guess you two kids have quite a lot to say to each other. Why don’t you go off for a while—and relax?”

Ala turned to him incredulously. “You don’t want to—to ask me anything?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Ala grabbed Chuck’s hand. Together they hurried out of the room.

“Well,” said Trant the moment the door had closed behind them, “that’s very pleasant, but I’m afraid it’s only a beginning for me. Chuck’s been eliminated as a suspect, but that doesn’t eliminate the murder, does it?”

His voice couldn’t have been more friendly, but it brought its intended chill. Connie’s face had gone wary. I stood waiting for the blow. I knew Trant well enough by then to be sure there would be one.

With elaborate politeness he said, “Do you think we could sit down, Mrs. Hadley?”

“But—but, of course.”

He waited until Connie and I were seated, then he chose the same leather chair he had taken before.

“Well, Mrs. Hadley, now we all know something about Don Saxby’s past record. A man like Saxby will always be very murder prone. Any number of people in Oregon, San Francisco, Quebec, Toronto, even New York at some time or other must have been very eager to get at him with a gun. But as I tried to tell Mr. Hadley last night, the D. A. isn’t apt to be too interested in abstract theories. He’s a realist and a realist with fixed ideas. Last night he was convinced from the evidence that Chuck was guilty, and even now, when Chuck’s alibi has shown up, he’s still more interested in the present than in any lurid past. And the present, I’m afraid, is the Hadley family, isn’t it?”

He looked down at his hands and then up again.

“Which is my kind of roundabout introduction to the fact that what the D. A. is most concerned about at the moment is your alibis… alibis for the two of you and Miss Hadley. Since we know quite definitely that Saxby was killed at three-thirty, it shouldn’t be too difficult to clear this up, and once we’ve done so, that’ll put you out of the picture, won’t it? And the D. A. can start getting interested in—well, shall we say the person who actually killed Saxby?”

His amiability had never been so silken. Everything today was the D. A. That was his new gimmick, his new device for making himself seem absolutely harmless, a mere underling and a sympathetic underling at that, carrying out the tyrannical instructions of the D. A.

“Well, Mr. Hadley,” he was saying, “shall we start with you? Would you mind telling me where you were at three-thirty on Sunday afternoon?”

As always, his attack had come from a direction against which I was least protected. We were fairly safe with Ala. Connie could make the blanket statement that she and Ala had been in the house all afternoon. But what about me? I’d left Lew Parker just before three, I’d driven the Brazilian to his hotel. That had taken about ten minutes. And after that? At the crucial moment I’d been driving at random around New York trying to make up my mind whether to go to Saxby or not.

This realization was awkward, to say the least. But before I could get started on any floundering improvisation, Connie broke in.

“Why don’t you start with me, Lieutenant? In my case and Ala’s, it’s really so terribly simple. As it happens, we were in the house all day. We never left it.”

To my intense and grateful relief, Trant turned away from me to her.

“The servants were here, I suppose, Mrs. Hadley?”

“Why, no, Lieutenant. They never come in on Sundays.”

“So it’s just what we call a family alibi. I don’t want to alarm you, Mrs. Hadley. Family alibis usually hold up with the D. A. But I’m afraid they do carry a little more weight if they’re supported by someone from outside the family.” Connie was wearing her gracious, slightly patronizing smile. “But Sunday afternoon is such a family time, Lieutenant. We hardly ever have anyone in. We just had lunch. Ala sat around reading and… well, there was Miss Taylor, of course. But I don’t suppose she’d count because she’s virtually one of the family too.”

“And who is Miss Taylor?” Trant said.

“She’s the secretary of one of my committees. But to all intents and purposes, she’s my secretary too. I invited her to lunch and after lunch…” Connie was sitting by the library table, and on it, right beside her, was the copy of the
New York Times
magazine section. She rested her hand on it. “As I said, Ala sat around reading and Miss Taylor and I did the puzzle. We were still doing it, weren’t we, George, when you came back?”

Connie had given me not only a breathing space but my cue. She was saying to me: Don’t worry. I can call Miss Taylor and get her to include you. The relief and gratitude grew even more intense. For a moment she and Trant sat looking at each other. Then very casually Trant rose, went to the table and picked up the puzzle. He stood studying it with the same bland smile.

“You both worked on it, I see,” he said. “There’s one lot of very neat capitals—and another lot that aren’t so neat.”

“Oh, the messy ones are mine, I’m afraid,” said Connie. “Miss Taylor invented neatness.”

Trant dropped the paper back on the desk. “Well, Mrs. Hadley, I’d say this makes it a lot better from the D. A.’s point of view. Where can I find Miss Taylor?”

Connie gave him Miss Taylor’s address. He took it down. “By the way, Mrs. Hadley, just when did she leave?”

“When was it?” said Connie. “I can’t quite be positive. Do you remember, George? Wasn’t it around four-thirty?”

Once again she was giving me my cue. “Yes,” I said. “I think it was around then.”

Trant turned to me. “So you’d been out, Mr. Hadley. And when you got back, Miss Taylor was still here?”

“That’s right.”

“Then perhaps you’d tell me where you’d been.”

I told him about Lew Parker and the Brazilian. Thanks to Connie, it was easy to say I’d come home right after the Brazilian. That put me safely in the house by three-thirty at the latest.

After I’d finished, Trant said, “Good,” and then abruptly, “May I use your phone to call headquarters?” Without waiting for us to say yes, he went out into the hall. Within a few minutes he was back.

“So,” he said, sitting down again. “That does it, doesn’t it? I’ll talk to Miss Taylor, of course, but this seems to take care of the whole family. Under the circumstances, I doubt whether I’ll even have to talk to Miss Hadley. Alibis were what the D. A. wanted, and alibis are what we’ve got, aren’t they, Mr. Hadley?”

I should have felt relief. Once again Lieutenant Trant seemed to have accepted the flimsiest evidence in our favor as if it were overpoweringly strong. And yet, once again, instead of relief came a sensation, gnawing like a rat, that he had believed us no more than he’d believed us the first time, that this whole new pose was an act, an almost insultingly obvious camouflage set up to cover some hidden intention of his own.

I felt it even more when he smiled. His gaze was still on my face, but the smile, so natural, so spontaneous, seemed to have nothing to do with his eyes.

“Well, Mr. Hadley, now that the ordeal’s over, you might be interested to hear a new development that just came up. I thought of you right away because you were the one who felt so strongly that we should broaden our interest in Mr. Saxby. Of course, this may have nothing to do with the case, but at least it’s indicative of the line which we and the D. A. will now have to follow. This morning early, Don Saxby’s cleaning woman, Mrs. Cassidy, came to pay me a visit.”

Connie leaned forward tensely in her chair.

“She’s the woman who discovered the body. When I first interviewed her, she was very rattled. She gave her testimony and that seemed to be that. But early this morning she showed up at headquarters. Mrs. Cassidy, apparently, is a woman of very high principles. She’d come to unburden her conscience, she said. She also brought with her a bracelet she’d found in Saxby’s apartment.”

“In the light of Saxby’s record,” I said, “there’s nothing strange about finding a bracelet in his apartment.”

“There’s nothing particularly strange about it, but her story is quite strange. Apparently, about six weeks ago, when she was making the bed in Saxby’s bedroom, she pulled it out from the wall to fix the sheets and she found the bracelet. It had fallen to the floor between the bed and the wall; quite a valuable bracelet. She was standing there with it in her hand when Saxby came back into the apartment. He saw the bracelet in her hand and he told her to keep it. ‘Finders, keepers!’ he said. Mrs. Cassidy protested that it was much too valuable, but he insisted. He said, ‘It’s about time I gave you a little present. But just one thing. It belonged to a lady, a married lady. She won’t want it back, I’m sure. But if ever I ask you to come and meet her, I’d like you to tell her just where you found it.’ ”

Trant paused with a suddenness that seemed consciously dramatic.

“Mrs. Cassidy, of course, isn’t the brightest woman in the world and she was longing to keep the bracelet. She either didn’t understand or kidded herself she didn’t. But we understand, don’t we? Don Saxby was back at his very dirty tricks. A married woman had compromised herself. And now he had a witness. Whenever in the future he wanted to put the screws on her, he could always produce Mrs. Cassidy as a threat. Pay up—or my cleaning woman can tell your husband she found your bracelet in my bed. There’s motive for murder there, isn’t there? And, of course, it’s only one instance we happen to have stumbled on. From now on we’ll have to go in for a thorough investigation of Don Saxby’s other professional activities in New York, and I’m sure that eventually we’ll find that one particular blackmail victim who saw Chuck’s gun there, picked it up in a moment of rage—and killed him.”

He rose. Connie and I got up too. He went to Connie, holding out his hand for one of his abrupt, unexpected leave-takings.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hadley, that you and your family have had to bear the brunt of the scandal. Let’s hope it’ll all die down now and that your names will be out of the papers. I’ll do everything I can.”

Connie took his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

“There’s nothing to thank me for. I’m supposed to be the discreet cop, the cop with the velvet touch. They kid the hell out of me for it at headquarters. But this time, I’m afraid, I’ve been the cop with the ham hand.”

He turned to me, holding out the very unhamlike hand to me too. But then, just before I could take it, he withdrew it again. “Oh, by the way, perhaps you’d like to see the bracelet.”

As his hand went into his pocket, his gaze was still on my face. This time the smile was in his eyes too—a steady, indestructibly friendly smile, directed from his eyes to mine. There was really nothing to worry me. A bracelet was a bracelet. It was unlikely that I should have felt uneasiness, coiling and uncoiling, in the pit of my stomach, but I did.

His hand came out of his pocket. Lying over its palm was a bracelet of baroque pearls, the bracelet I had given to Connie on our fifth wedding anniversary.

He put the bracelet back in his pocket. He shifted the smile to Connie for a moment, then he moved toward the door. I opened it for him and went with him down the hall. On the steps I watched him stroll down to the street and into his black police car. He waved and drove away. I went back into the library, feeling numb.

Connie had risen. She was standing in front of the broad ribbons of leather-bound books with Mr. Corliss’ classic busts—Homer, Julius Caesar, a lady with large blind eyes, Sappho?—standing in imperious chilliness above them. She was as cold, as marmoreally still as the statues.

I looked at her; not, I hoped, as an accusing husband. To have accused her, in my circumstances, would have been revolting.