Shadow of Guilt (7 page)

“There may be. I wouldn’t know.”

“Last night he seemed terribly strange. Even Mal noticed it. And then, getting up so early and not being with you… But George, his plane leaves at eleven and there’s his brief case with all his papers and things.”

“He must have decided he can leave them behind.”

“How most extraordinary. Really, George, it is a bit odd. He was so strange last night,
most
peculiar. Right after dinner he disappeared for ages. Finally I went to look for him and he was in Mal’s and my bedroom, sitting on my bed. It seemed so odd. I mean, why our bedroom? Why not his own? I was worried. I really was. Well, I suppose, it’s just some lover’s tiff. They happen all the time, don’t they? It’s silly to get hysterical. He’s bound to call later. Good-bye, darling.”

“Good-bye, Vivien.”

“I won’t tell Mal. You know how he is. Love to Connie.”

“Yes.”

As I put down the receiver, my thoughts jittered around Chuck. I forced them into control. It was stupid to worry, of course it was. He wouldn’t have gone home anyway. He’d been broken up, miserable. He wouldn’t have wanted to face his family. He’d gone off somewhere by himself to a bar or to a movie or… I felt my anxiety fading and, as it did so, I looked at the phone and the simplest of devices came to me. Why hadn’t I thought of it hours ago? I picked up the receiver again and dialed Eve’s number. She answered right away.

“Call me back,” I said.

I dropped the receiver and almost immediately her call came through. I knew that although they could hear the phone ring in the living room, they couldn’t hear what I said, but I went through the motions.

“Yes?” I said. “Yes? Okay. Sure. I’ll be right over. In fifteen minutes.”

I hung up. When I went back into the living room, both Connie and Ala glanced up.

“What on earth was all that?” asked Connie.

“It was Vivien,” I said, “and then Lew.”

“Vivien?” said Connie. “What did Vivien want?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “She was just exercising her vocal cords—as usual. But I’m afraid Lew wants me to go right around. Something’s come up about the Brazilian, something we’ve got to straighten out before morning.”

Ala was watching me brightly as if she had seen through me, but Connie just smiled her usual understanding-wife smile.

“At nine o’clock?” she said. “You poor dear. Well, it can’t be helped, I suppose. But do try not to have him keep you too late.”

“All right,” I said.

“Give him my love.”

In less than twenty minutes I was with Eve. From the first second that she was in my arms, nothing mattered any more. I told her everything, but it was just a story, something that could have happened to somebody else, for the thought of her leaving me was now as unthinkable to her as it had been to me. If I needed her, it was with me she would stay. It was as simple as that. The magic had come, our magic which brought its miracle, obliterating the old festering guilt about Connie, transcending anxiety and fear—even time.

“George, it’s eleven.”

“It can’t be. It can’t possibly be.”

“It’s eleven. You must go.”

“No, darling. No—not yet.”

“Yes, darling.”

“But it’s all right again, isn’t it?”

“It was never wrong. I couldn’t ever have left—not when it came to the point. I wouldn’t have had the courage.”

“We’ll wait. We’ll go on waiting and everything will get cleared up.”

“Yes.”

“They’re going to find him. Tomorrow probably. It’ll be in the papers. It’ll all begin.”

“But Ala’s safe. There’s nothing else that’s really bad, is there?”

Chuck…? “No,” I said.

“Then let it begin.”

“Let it begin…”

It began on the afternoon of the next day. Eve brought the
World-Telegram,
to my office after lunch. There was a paragraph on a middle page. It wasn’t much. It merely announced that Donald Saxby, an employee of the Ellerman Art Galleries, had been discovered dead in his apartment that morning by his cleaning woman. He had, the paragraph said, been shot twice. The gun from which the shots had been fired had been lying beside the body. That was all.

While Eve stood behind me, I looked at it uneasily. Thousands of people all over Manhattan were glancing at it right now, giving it a bored second, moving on to something else. But there it was. Donald Saxby, employee of the Ellerman Galleries. Mr. Ellerman…

The phone rang and Eve picked it up. “Mr. Hadley’s office… oh, yes, just a moment.” She put her hand on my shoulder, looking at me warningly. “Connie,” she whispered.

I took the phone. I knew what was coming.

“George, have you seen the afternoon paper?” My wife went right on without waiting for my answer. “George, please. Keep calm. Whatever you do, don’t lose your head. It’s Don Saxby. He’s dead.”

Eve’s hand on my shoulder was warm, reassuring.

“He’s been found in his apartment,” said Connie. “Shot. Twice. Twice, George. Someone must have killed him.”

It wasn’t hard to sound rattled, and sounding rattled, I knew, would do just as well as sounding surprised.

“Killed?” I echoed.

“It’s only a little paragraph. I just happened to see it. George—what are we going to do? Don’t you see? It mentions the Ellerman Galleries. Mr. Ellerman will tell the police I got Don the job. They’ll come to us and… and what are we going to do about Ala? We can’t tell them the truth. How can we? George, can you get away now? Please. Can you?”

“Of course.”

“Make some excuse for Mrs. Lord and everybody. Don’t let her know. Don’t let anyone know. Just come home right away. We’ll have to think.”

I was home in twenty minutes at exactly twenty past three. Connie was waiting for me in the hall. There was no longer any indication of lack of control. She looked even handsomer and more capable than usual. Ala wasn’t there. With incredible frivolity, so it seemed to me, she was having lunch and spending the afternoon with Rosemary Clark. My wife hustled me into the library. She hurried to her desk, picked up a neatly folded newspaper and brought it to me, making me read the paragraph.

“Don’t you see?” Her gray level gaze was fixed on my face with her overbearing “committee” look. “The police are bound to know he was an—an acquaintance of ours. But that’s not all. What about those people in Massachusetts? The Greens? What’s to stop them calling the police and letting them know Ala and Don were there for Friday night?”

There was, of course, nothing to stop the Greens. It seemed inconceivable that I hadn’t prepared myself for that.

“So,” said Connie, “there’s only one thing to do. He’s dead. It doesn’t matter who killed him. Anyone might want to kill a man like that. It’s nothing to do with us. But we’ve got to think out a story and stick to it—you, me and Ala. We’ve absolutely got to. If it all came out about Ala, it could ruin her whole life.”

As I looked at my wife, I thought how invariably I got her wrong. Connie wasn’t going to be civic-minded at all. All that civic-mindedness was reserved for juvenile delinquents, museum directors and slum-property owners. To her this was a family affair. All her clashes and tensions with Ala were forgotten because Ala was a Corliss, even though a pseudo one, and for the Corlisses Connie would fight as relentlessly and unscrupulously as old Charlie Corliss himself.

“Listen,” she said, “I’ve thought it out and I’m sure it’ll be all right. Thank heavens we don’t have to worry about the time he was killed. Sunday, I mean. We both know Ala was here in the house all day. Of course, she was locked in her room most of the time, but we don’t have to tell the police that. We can just say she was here for the whole day, and you and I and Milly Taylor can prove it.”

“Milly Taylor?” I said. “Was she here?”

Connie gave a little impatient shrug. “Didn’t I tell you? After you’d gone to Idlewild, I called her. I knew she probably had nothing to do. I invited her for lunch and we did the crossword together. She left only a few minutes before you came back. So that’s settled. There’s just the other tiling—the trip to the Greens’.”

Just the trip to the Greens’! Nothing more than that! I thought: If only she knew. She went on, making it into a neat little pattern like one of her agenda.

“Now, this is what I’ve decided. We’ll have to rehearse Ala, of course, when she gets back. But listen, George. We have to admit she and Don went to the Greens’ on Friday. We can’t get out of that. But we can say that she just knew Don slightly, that she met the Greens at some party and the Greens invited them both to Massachusetts. They went but Ala got bored. She asked Don to bring her home. We’ll say Don brought her home Saturday evening and that was the end of everything.” She paused, watching me rather severely. “Why should the police have to know there was this—this crazy infatuation? Or that ridiculous motel episode? What possible need is there? Can’t we do it that way? Isn’t that all right?”

Although it was taking a terrible chance of being found out later in a lie, it was, I supposed, as all right as anything could be. At least, it would have been except for one thing.

I said, “What about Chuck? Where was he yesterday? I didn’t tell you, but when Vivien called last night, she said he hadn’t been home at all.”

“He… Chuck…” Suddenly Connie looked completely different. The skin of her cheeks had gone a grayish-white. “George, are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then where… where was he? What…? George, you don’t think… you can’t…” She took a quick step toward me and grabbed my arm. “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you let me know earlier? I told him to go home. I made him promise. I never for a moment—”

She broke off abruptly because Mary had come in. She stood by the door, straightening her hideous Corliss maid’s cap on the messy gray bird’s nest of her hair.

“There’s a gentleman to see you, Miss Connie,” she said. “He says he’s from the police.”

It had, of course, to happen then. In a way it was more alarming right in the middle of our planning than if he’d arrived before we’d even started. And suppose Ala came home while the policeman was still here. If she barged in unrehearsed! How could I have been such a moron as not to have anticipated this and got some sort of story straight with her?

Connie and I looked at each other gauntly.

“What about Ala?” I said.

“She didn’t say when she’d be back. She might—”

“Tell him you aren’t in.”

“Yes.” Connie spun around to Mary. “Tell him I’m not here, Mary. Tell him you don’t know when I’ll be back. Say…”

She must have heard the footsteps a fraction of a second before I did, for she stopped. We both turned to the library door as a man walked in, a tall, youngish man in a neat gray suit.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I hope you’ll excuse me for following the maid in like this.”

He smiled. It was a pleasant—much too pleasant—smile, and his face, composed, with very bright, intelligent eyes, wasn’t like a policeman’s face at all. It was—what? A priest’s face, perhaps? A face which would have gone with one of those quiet, ascetic monks painted by Zurbaran.

He was looking at Connie. “Mrs. Hadley?”

“Yes,” said Connie.

The eyes—were they blue or gray?—turned to me. “And Mr. Hadley?”

I nodded.

“I’m Lieutenant Trant,” he said, “from the Homicide Division. I’m lucky, Mr. Hadley, to find you home so early from work.”

There was nothing ominous in the way he made that remark, nothing on which I could put my finger. But, suddenly, I realized that outwitting the police wasn’t going to be at all the sort of thing I’d expected it to be.
Let it begin…
I remembered the carefree way in which I’d said that last night when Eve had been in my arms.

Lieutenant Trant was looking around the room, summing it up and summing us up, I felt, through it.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve come on a rather unpleasant mission.”

Connie had gone grand. She always did with people whose presence in the house wasn’t strictly social—with piano tuners and fund raisers and men come to fix the plumbing. Although I knew it was only a nervous habit, it invariably jarred me, but now I welcomed it as probably the most effective defense in our most indefensible circumstances. Very much
the
Consuelo Corliss, she gave the detective a gracious, almost patronizing smile.

“Do sit down, Lieutenant… er…”

“Trant,” said the Lieutenant and, smiling back at her with equal steadiness, spelled it out. “T—R—A—N—T.”

He gestured to indicate a chair for her. She hesitated and then sat down. He sat down, too. It had been a tiny exchange, but the Lieutenant had definitely won it. For a moment he watched my wife with his quiet smile, paying no attention to me at all.

Then he said, “I understand, Mrs. Hadley, that you’ve made rather a protégé of a young Canadian called Donald Saxby.”

Still being gracious, Connie said, “We’ve read the evening papers, Lieutenant. It’s quite terrible.”

“So you know he’s been murdered?”

“Murdered?” echoed Connie. “Of course, we were afraid it might be that. The papers mentioned two shots. How awful. Isn’t that awful, George? But, of course, Lieutenant, if there’s any possible way in which either my husband or I can help…” She let a small movement of her hand complete the sentence.

For a brief, uninterested moment, Lieutenant Trant glanced at me, then he turned his attention back to Connie. “I’m certainly hoping you will be able to help me, Mrs. Hadley. You see, I’ve just been talking with Mr. Ellerman of the Ellerman Galleries and he tells me that it was as a favor to you that he gave Mr. Saxby a job. He says you had been very interested in the young man and—”

“That’s rather an exaggeration, I’m afraid,” Connie broke in. “I understood Mr. Ellerman employed him because he thought he’d be suitable for the job. All I did was to arrange an interview. My acquaintance with Mr. Saxby—with Don—was really very slight.”

“Oh, it was, was it?” Trant’s eyes widened, showing a lot of white around the irises. “I hadn’t realized that.”

“We just met casually at some private view. He happened to have met a friend of mine in Toronto. We talked. It came out that he needed a job. He seemed very pleasant—and very competent. So I thought of Mr. Ellerman.”