The Fourth Side of the Triangle (11 page)

“What bar?”

“I don't know. I had a drink and talked to the bartender, I remember that.”

“You're sure you don't know where the bar is?”

“Not even approximately, although for some reason First Avenue sticks in my head. But I can't honestly say it was there. Somewhere in the Sixties—I think. A side street, I seem to recall that, anyway. I was simply not paying any attention to things like that.” A ghost of a smile touched the rocky face. “I certainly wish now that I had.”

“And you didn't notice the name of the bar?”

“Or I've forgotten. You know, a lot of those little places have no names. Just
Bar.
”

“Have you an idea how long you were in there?”

“Quite a while. More than a few minutes. I do remember leaving the place and walking some more. Finally I took a cab—”

“I don't suppose you remember the cabbie's name or number.”

“God, no. Or when, or where, or what street I got out at. I remember getting out some blocks short of home because I suddenly wanted air. I walked the rest of the way.”

“And you can't even recall what time it was when you got home?”

“I haven't the foggiest idea, Dane.” Dane knew that his mother did not know, either, for she had told him, “I didn't know your father was home until early morning, when I woke up.”

“I'm afraid, son, the information isn't of any use.”

Dane wanted to talk about his father's having replaced the silver cigaret case; he had even thought of bringing up the whole business of his relationship with Sheila Grey; but just then the turnkey terminated his visit. The street was steaming with gasoline fumes and oily vapors, but the air seemed sweetly pure after the jail.

He went over to police headquarters and got in to see the man in charge of several phases of the Grey investigation, a birdy little man with a gray brush mustache, an inspector named Queen.

“Take a load off your feet, Mr. McKell,” said Inspector Queen, nodding toward a chair of rivuleted black leather, “and listen to the gospel. We have to go by the weight of the circumstantial evidence. The weight of the circumstantial evidence is against your father. Ballistics says the bullet that killed her came from the gun your father admits belongs to him—not that it's important whether he admits it or not; his ownership is a matter of record. He was admittedly on the scene within minutes of the exact moment of the shooting as recorded by the desk sergeant of the 17th Precinct, from hearing the shot over the phone. And while the State doesn't have to prove motive, it comes in handy, and your father's motive sticks in the old slot they all stick in when a man is having an affair with a woman not his wife—sorry I have to be blunt, but there it is. And all he offers us in rebuttal is this yarn about having been in a bar. But what bar, where, when, he can't tell us.”

Dane wondered what this little briar of an inspector would say if he were to be told about the disguise and the impotence. Probably, he thought, boot me out of here for telling bad jokes so early in the day.

“Have you tried to check out his story, Inspector?”

The Inspector said explosively, “People give me a pain. I forgive you because it's your father who's involved, and people don't think straight when they're upset. My dear Mr. McKell, you don't suppose we collect bonuses for every indictment the grand jury brings in, do you? Like fox tails in chicken country? Of course we checked it out. Or tried our damnedest to. You know how many bars there are in every square mile of Manhattan Island? I've got a pile of reports here that make my feet ache just looking at 'em.

“We checked every last bar in the neighborhood your father mentioned, and not just in the Sixties, or on First Avenue, either. We hit that whole midtown East Side area in a saturation investigation. Nobody—but
nobody—
remembers having seen him that night; and our men carried photographs. That night or any other night, I might add. So what do you suggest we do? I'm sorry, Mr. McKell, but my advice to you is to get your father the best trial lawyers money can hire.”

Dane McKell did not know what the police could or could not do, but he knew what he had to do. He had to find that bar. He went back to his parents' home, fished in the family album and, armed with a photograph of his father, set out in his MG.

He drove from street to street. He was operating on the theory that the police had interpreted “bar” too narrowly; besides, perhaps his father was in confusion or error as to the exact location of the place. The police having covered bars on the East Side midtown, he would widely extend the hunt.

He visited bars, grills, restaurants, oyster houses, steak joints, even hotels; the dark and the light, the new and old and ageless places. “Have you ever seen this man? Are you sure? He might have had a drink in here on the night of September 14th, between ten
P.M
. and midnight.”

In one dim bistro the inevitable happened.

“Sure,” the barkeep said. Dane perked up. “He's here right now. Jerry? Here's a guy looking for you.” Jerry did bear a resemblance to Ashton McKell, if Ashton McKell had spent his days boozing in a fourth-rate grogshop and shaved every third day.

Dane stumbled over another trail in a place on Second Avenue, in the upper 60s. The barman took one look at Ashton McKell's photo and grunted, “Who is this guy, everybody's rich uncle?”

Dane was tired. “What do you mean?”

“The girl.”

“What girl?”

“Ain't she working with you? First she comes in, then you. Nice-looking broad. She was in here a few minutes ago. Nah, I never seen this old duck, and that's what I told her, too.”

So a girl was combing the bars with a picture of his father, too! Could she be a policewoman? Dane did not think so. It seemed scarcely the sort of work to which a policewoman would be assigned; besides, that phase of the police investigation had been covered. Then who was she? Could there have been
two
other women in his father's life? By now Dane did not care if there had been a haremful. His own meddling had helped bring his father to a human kennel, his life in jeopardy. Only get him out of there! Nothing else mattered any longer.

The mystery of the girl was solved prosaically enough. Dane had come out of a pink-and-white barroom occupied by slender men in form-fitting clothing and had entered a white-and-pink barroom occupied by women who used too much eye make-up and who looked up quickly as he came in. The bartender was at the other end of the bar, half blocked out by the figure of a woman who was showing him something.

“No, miss,” the man was saying. “Not on September 14th or any other night.”

Dane moved toward her; she turned around and they almost collided.

“Judy!”

It was Judith Walsh, his father's secretary. He had seen nothing of Judy since the fateful night; he had supposed that in his father's trouble she was holding down the fort at the McKell offices.

“Dane, what are you doing here?”

“The same thing you are, apparently. Trying to prove Dad's alibi.”

He took her to a booth and ordered beers.

“How long have you been at this?” he asked her.

“Seems like ten years,” she said disconsolately. “I simply didn't know what else to do. I couldn't just do nothing.”

Dane nodded; he knew something—not much—of the story behind her devotion to his father. The elder McKell had given Judith Walsh her first and only job, at a time when she could see for herself nothing but the fate of most girls from her economic class—a hasty and overfertile marriage, and a life of drudgery. She had made herself indispensable to Ashton, and he had repaid her handsomely.

“Look, Judy, we're both pulling on the same oar,” Dane said. “Why don't we hook up? What places have you covered?”

“I have a list.”

“So have I. Between the two of us, we ought to turn it up.”

Judy set down her half-finished beer. “We're wasting time, Dane. Let's get back on it.”

They kept going by day and by night; after a while, in a sort of sleepwalking daze. The photographs became cracked and dog-eared.

It was bitterly interesting to see how the news of the indictment handed down by the grand jury affected people Dane knew. A girl who had been in pursuit of him since the spring, phoning him several times a week, vanished from the face of the earth. Friends these days were always hurrying somewhere, unable to chat for more than a minute or two. On the other hand, old Colonel Adolphus Phillipse, Lutetia's cousin, appeared at the McKell apartment for the first time since the funeral of Lutetia's grandmother's sister—pausing en route just long enough to whale away at a cameraman with his walking stick—and announced that he had pawned his mother's jewelry, offering the proceeds, $10,000, as a reward leading to the arrest and conviction of what he termed “the real culprit.” He was persuaded with difficulty that his generosity was not needed.

By November 1st, Dane and Judy were worn out, stumped. The only thing they did not doubt was the truth of Ashton McKell's story. As Dane said, “If for no other reason than that, if he'd made the story up, he could hardly have helped inventing a better one!”

And on November 1st, in a crowded courtroom, Judge Edgar Suarez presiding, the trial of Ashton McKell began. It was a Tuesday.

On Wednesday, after another night's fruitless search, not concluded until the bars closed, Dane insisted on taking Judy home to her West End Avenue apartment. Her eyes were deeply stamped with fatigue. Outside her building he said, “You swallow a sleeping pill, missie, and hit the sack.”

“No,” Judy said. “I want to check off the places we covered tonight against the list of licenses I have upstairs. To make sure we didn't skip one.”

She swayed, and he caught her. “Here! I'd better come up and help you tick them off. Then you're going to bed.”

He had never been in her apartment before. It was tailored but feminine, with some creditable pieces of bric-à-brac, and an impressive hi-fi set backed up by a formidable collection of recordings.

“All my money goes into it,” Judy laughed, noticing his respectful eyebrows. “I'm a frustrated musician, I guess. How are you on music?”

“Long-haired,” said Dane.

“Wonderful! Maybe we can spend an evening listening to a whole nightful of music. I mean when this is, well, over.”

“I'd like that.”

“I have some simply marvelous old 78s. Do you know the prewar Beethoven symphonies recorded by Felix Weingartner and the Vienna Philharmonic? In my opinion they're still the definitive performances …”

They checked their list of the evening. In the area they had covered, not one place that sold liquor over a bar had been passed by. “There,” Judy said, putting down her pencil. “That's done. Funny, I don't feel as tired—”

Dane took her in his arms, kissed her mouth. After one gasp of surprise, she returned the pressure.

Later, he told himself it had been inevitable. The attraction between them—how old was it? It seemed to him now that it dated from their first sight of each other, years before. He had always been drawn to a certain quality of sweet cleanliness about her, dainty and uncomplicated and altogether feminine. Why hadn't he realized it sooner? And where now was his passion for Sheila Grey? Already her memory was a vestigial relic of the past. Was he so shallow, or had his love for Sheila been no love at all?

But just as suddenly as he had begun making love to Judy, he stopped, pushed her aside, and hurried from her apartment. She was more puzzled than hurt, more tired than puzzled. As she sank into sleep the thought drifted through her head: He feels guilty about being happy while his father is in a mess, that's why. Dane was such a strange man …

They established a routine. During the day they attended the trial; the evening and night were dedicated to the hunt for the elusive bar and the invisible bartender. They took their hasty meals together. Judy was aware of a restraint on Dane's part—a hint of wariness, a drawing away. And yet there were times when he seemed to recapture something of those few minutes in her apartment that night. But these were mere glimpses into what had already become a misty remembrance of things past. It was almost as if she had dreamed the whole episode.

A chill invaded the city. The tang of hot chestnut smoke hung about Manhattan street corners, the city's equivalent of suburbia's burning leaves. Through streets fashionable and down-at-heel, clean and dirty, through areas of high-rent apartments and melting-pot neighborhoods and garbage-littered slums, they pressed their search. And still the search went unrewarded.

The trial approached its climax. Few defendants against a charge of murder had had so distinguished a group of character witnesses as paraded to the stand to testify to the probity and non-lethal nature of Ashton McKell. But Dane knew, and Judith Walsh knew, and Richard M. Heaton knew, and most of all Robert O'Brien knew—the highly capable criminal lawyer associated with Heaton for the defense—for how little all this counted. The district attorney had only to paraphrase the prosecution's words in the Richard Savage case of long ago (“Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a much greater man than you or I; that he wears much finer clothes than you or I; and that he has much more money in his pocket than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that he should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?”) for everyone to see how very little all the fine words by all the fine people added up to.

“What are my father's chances?” Dane asked O'Brien. And O'Brien looked him in the eye and said, “Very poor indeed.” Had his answer been anything else, Dane would not have believed him.

Judy wept. “There has to be something else we can do,” she wailed, “before it's too late. Couldn't you hire a private detective, Dane?”