“Beautifully,” Marks said.
The doctor looked at his hands. “I am … distressed,” he repeated.
Marks glanced at Herring: they were coming full circle now to his and Pererro’s wild improvisations, the thing that had put him in mind of Janet Bradley’s picture. “Why did you not report so serious a loss, Doctor?”
Corrales moistened his lips. “I am not licensed to practice surgery in the United States, Lieutenant. I was afraid of that kind of investigation.”
Redmond said: “When was the surgical case stolen, Doctor?”
“Oh, it was two or three weeks ago.”
“Have you replaced it?”
“Not as yet, no.”
“Then why take such precautions in parking the car—after the fact?”
Corrales said: “Because in my other, my patriotic profession—you do not know what it means to have to be a professional patriot, sir—I am often the custodian of certain things I should prefer not to have to carry. I will speak plainly, for your men will soon discover—if the vandals who smashed the window of my car to get what they took from it had broken into the trunk that night, they would have discovered an arsenal.”
The detectives digested that bit of information for a moment. Kid gloves, Marks remembered. The same thought must have occurred to Redmond. He said: “There will be charges growing out of such possession, Doctor.”
But not of homicide, Marks thought, that whole theory seeming to crumble. They were back on the street where Fitzgerald had wanted them in the first place, looking for a gang of thugs who attacked Bradley in the moments of his recovery from the blow on the head; two separate crimes. And yet there was Mama Fernandez’s testimony: the call out of “Doctor!” But wasn’t Bradley himself very often called Doctor?
Herring spoke for the first time: “Dr. Corrales, have you been out of town at any time since Monday night?”
For the first time something happened to disconcert the man, Marks thought, something in his eyes changed. He recovered almost at once: “Ah, I see—the old watchman, Bolardo. I read the newspapers, Officer. Having certain things on my conscience—irrelevant to your investigation, but nonetheless—I did not want to risk such trouble as I am now in. I have not been in the neighborhood since. But neither did I want to call attention to myself by my absence. I telephoned Bolardo with the simple lie.”
“The surgical instrument is not irrelevant to our investigation, Doctor,” Redmond said coldly, and then because he was a man who at some point had to throw away the kid gloves, he added: “You didn’t by any chance give the thief a short course in how to use it?”
Corrales smiled blandly. “I do not understand.”
“Think it over. It may come to you.” He led the way out, Herring and Marks following.
On the wall, near the door to the office, was a picture of Corrales, younger, but with the same smile. He was in uniform. Marks lifted it from the nail. “May I borrow this, Doctor?”
“I would prefer not to have it in the newspapers. I do not wish to further jeopardize the work of our committee by my personal blundering.”
“I don’t intend to give it to the newspapers,” Marks said, and took the picture with him.
On the street, a considerable crowd now pushing the police cordon around them, the technical men had arrived and commenced their work on the car.
A forlorn chance at best, Marks thought.
Redmond was instructing Herring and Pererro. “I want every goddamned step of his itinerary checked out and clocked to the minute.”
Marks and he took a cab, leaving the car with the younger detectives. Neither of them said much on the way downtown. “What are you going to do with that?” Redmond indicated the photograph in Marks’s hands.
“Have a couple of people look at it. Janet Bradley for one.”
A few minutes later Redmond said: “Did you believe him?”
“I’ll bet he could tell it the same way again,” Marks said. “Letter perfect. You prophesied that yourself, remember?”
“So did Anderson,” Redmond growled.
“I wonder if he rehearsed him,” Marks said.
Redmond looked at him: something very close to the same thought had crossed his mind. Then he said: “I don’t think so, Dave. One of our leading physicists is not an expendable. You and I have to believe that. Otherwise …” He left the sentence unfinished.
twenty-three
IT WAS ODDLY COMFORTING to contemplate other men’s destinies when you fairly well knew your own. The plane could go down in a crash of course. Mather wondered briefly if in such a case his notebook were recovered from the wreckage what the investigators would make of it. They always looked for sabotage, the planted bomb, the suicide proposing to take with him the plane’s full complement. A small item in the Chicago paper he was still holding in his hand by the time the plane was soaring over the Allegheny Mountains told of the burial at Moncton Grove of Peter Bradley’s ashes, while the New York police were still investigating the circumstances of his murder.
This being the early flight, his companions were mostly business men, starting their day soon after the opening of the offices of their New York conferees. Their Chicago suburb families would expect them home for dinner, the children waiting up … He had always been fond of children: with them he was—what he was, their make-believe his perfect dish. He wondered then what Janet’s child was like and why there had been no others.
Moving through the terminal to the limousine he picked up a copy of the morning Times. On the second page he saw the likeness of Jerry, the police artist’s re-creation from his description. It was remarkably good, he thought. But thinking about Jerry now, he regretted having given the description, its appearance in the papers. Until now Jerry would have felt secure. He would have supposed Eric Mather sealed within the conspiracy, doubly sealed by Bradley’s death. Now he would not know how much Mather had told the police, how much he had been able to tell the police. Jerry might be on the run.
The limousine was bound in by the morning traffic, the whole of it oozing forward like a log-jam on a river, the people within the cars and buses as helpless as woodworms. What an insignificant thing a man was truly.
He forced himself to read the Times story adjacent to the picture. Inspector Joseph Fitzgerald was a garrulous Irishman, a master at saying nothing with an air of profundity. His intent seemed to be to create the impression that the police were not telling all they knew. One might hope to God that this were so, Mather thought. He turned to the page where the story was continued. At the bottom of the column he read: “Professor Eric Mather, missing from his home for twenty-four hours …” And there, maddeningly, the story was suspended, cut off mid-sentence by the compositor at the column’s end and continued nowhere.
But the possibilities were not numerous. He could himself finish the sentence easily: “… is being sought for questioning.” He wondered if Jerry would put it together that way too.
If the police were actually looking for him, however, Mather felt that he dared not go home. They might take him into custody. He would have to tell them what he knew; he would want to. It was all written in the notebook he carried now in the valise along with his overnight things, all—up to this minute. But it was not enough by which to measure anything but ignominy.
He went directly to the University. Here too they would be alerted for him possibly. But he had promised his chairman to return in time for the afternoon classes: a little time of grace might still be left him if he hurried.
Mather entered the General Studies Building by the side door, opposite the park. Two girls were talking with the door attendant, and none of them knew him by sight. A better place for anonymity than a city university would be hard to find. Now he had to take the chance of charming a giddy girl who, he knew, would recognize him. He had tried to remember her name. He had had to leave a blank in his “Confession” though he could see her vividly in memory, pawing her face, wagging her wild red head while
he had spouted Byron in the tavern. Then suddenly, opening the door to the Records Office, he had it: Sally. Sally in Our Alley …
He was not sure that it was the same girl now sitting at the desk until she looked up and recognized him. She opened her mouth, but closed it again without saying his name when he put his finger to his lips. An older woman turned from the files where she was working. Mather smiled and bowed a little toward her. With a curt nod she returned to her work and Sally came to the railing, asking loudly: “Can I help you?”
Close to him she said, scarcely above a whisper: “Mr. Mather, the police …”
He deliberately became off-hand. The girl was far too eager to conspire with him. “I’m trying to help them—in a certain matter,” he said.
“Oh.” She was disappointed.
“Sally, the boy who introduced us, Osterman?” She nodded, pleased now by the language of togetherness. “Do you see him still?”
“I don’t go out with him if that’s what you mean. Actually, it’s vice versa since that night—you know? I told you I worked in the Records Office?” Vaguely Mather remembered it now, but he had dug it sharply out of his memory needing to remember Osterman. “Common, you know. Unclean.” Sally made a face saying it that in his present disposition and relieved of this pressure he would have cherished: the girl who, for all her phony aspirations, could say that of herself. “And I thought we had a future. I do love the name Jeffrey …”
“Sally …”
“Sh …” She rolled her eyes toward the other clerk. “That’s Miss Katz. Gee, I wish I could help you, Mr. Mather.”
“Could you find Osterman for me now? I must know where he is, whatever class he’s in. I must talk to him.”
“Gee …” Sally said again, once more casting the backward glance toward Miss Katz who was now banging the file drawers, opening and closing one, then another.
“He’s an English major,” Mather prompted.
Sally drew a deep breath and called out: “I’m going out for coffee, Miss Katz. Okay?” She was on her way, Mather opening the gate for her before the woman could make up her mind what to say.
In the hallway Mather said: “I’ll watch for you here.”
“Do you want me to tell him …?”
“Nothing. Don’t even speak to him. Just come back and tell me where he is.”
Mather spent ten minutes in a booth of the men’s room halfway down the corridor. He was not a bathroom reader, but the time was interminable, the confinement with such literary examples of the college-educated as were to be read on the wall, nauseating. He took Carlyle’s Hero Worship from his bag and read a few paragraphs. Legs came and went. He heard an occasional monosyllabic greeting at the washbasins. Then the bell rang for the change of classes. He looked at his watch. It was five minutes to eleven.
On his first trip back to the Records Office, Sally had not returned. The second trip he came out in time to catch up with her in the hallway before she reached her office.
“He just went into study hall—room 408. I waited, you see, to find out where he’d go at the change of classes.”
“Bless you, Sally, you are intelligent and a princess.”
“I won’t tell anyone I saw you, Mr. Mather. But it said in the paper this morning that the police were looking for you.”
Mather wanted to go quickly. The hall was by no means deserted. But the girl put her hand on his arm to delay him, and when he stayed, she removed it quickly. “I’ve been thinking whether I ought to tell you. You know that picture of the man in The Times this morning?” Mather nodded. “I think I saw him once. Only I thought he was an F.B.I. man. He came in and asked for me, and then he wanted to see your record.”
“I know,” Mather said.
“But the thing I wanted to tell you—the reason I remembered him—it’s two or three months ago, you see—but the man that was with him, his partner?”
Mather said: “A tall handsome young man …”
Sally nodded. “I saw him with Jeffrey Osterman. I was kind of following after Jeffrey in the park. He sat down and I was going to walk by him, you know, casual? But that man came up and put his arm around Jeffrey so naturally I went the other way.”
twenty-four
MARKS CHECKED WITH THE men staking out Mather’s apartment building on Perry Street. Not hide nor hair. A second day’s mail now crowded the box. He called the chairman of Mather’s department at Central University. The chairman himself was at that hour taking Mather’s class in the Victorian novel. He called Louise Steinberg. She had not heard from Mather.
“That morning when he broke down at the Bradleys’ and ran out—what caused it? What did he say to Janet, or she to him? You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but they didn’t say anything. They just stood there and when Janet turned away, he broke down. But, Dave …”
“Yes?”
“Eric called her that same night.”
“The night before last,” Marks said. “What time?”
“It must have been close to midnight. I wasn’t going to call her to the phone, but she was still up …”
“Did you hear what was said by either of them?”
“No. Janet took the call in the bedroom and by the time I got back to the kitchen to hang up the phone they were already off the line.”
Suggesting one thing, Marks thought: a date to meet, and presumably a place. “Louise, I asked you yesterday morning …”
“I know, but you asked me if I’d seen him. And it was in the church. I couldn’t very well run after you when I thought of it.”
“I don’t always get across,” Marks said, as angry with himself as with Louise. “Where can I reach Mrs. Bradley now?”
“I can give you the flight number,” Louise said.
He was waiting at the ramp when Janet came off the plane. She was a moment recognizing him. “Lieutenant Marks,” he said.
“I remember now,” she said, and allowed him to take her suitcase. She had no other luggage. Her dark blue suit, the white blouse fluffy at her throat, became her as few widows could claim of their weeds.
“There are some questions I need to ask you. I can drive you home meanwhile.” Then, because she said nothing and he felt some commiseration, not too lugubrious, was indicated, he added: “You must be tired.”
“I’m … nothing,” Janet said, but smiled at him. A gracious lady, Marks thought, which was perhaps the most deceptive of feminine characteristics. He had known some mighty gracious bitches in his day.
He decided to tell her on the way into the city of Dr. Corrales, the fiasco he had seemed to make of the police case. He dwelt as little as possible on the weapon aspect. It could not be avoided altogether. The name was in no way familiar to Janet. “I’m reasonably sure Peter did not know him either. Peter was apolitical, you know. He had been in school when it was considerably less than fashionable. Too many of the scientists he admired got bogged down—and hurt.”
Which attitude, Marks thought, made Bradley the better instrument for the plotters. Marks opened the glove compartment of the car and took out Corrales’s picture. Janet looked at it carefully.
“I’ve never seen the man to my knowledge,” she said, and for him returned the framed photo to the compartment.
Marks said: “The picture in your book, Mrs. Bradley, the woman on the stoop looking down at the child?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a terrific picture.”
“Because the subject herself was,” Janet said. “She was a girl in trouble.”
“You talked with her?”
“Oh, yes. I gave her twenty dollars, supposedly for allowing me to use her picture. It made it easier for her to accept it.”
“Did she tell you the trouble she was in?”
“It was not hard to guess,” Janet said. “It was in her eyes, the way she looked—wanting the child.”
Marks thought for a moment. Then he asked: “How did you happen to be there?”
“I was following the child wherever he wandered—photographing him—with his mother’s permission. By that time he had become so accustomed to me, he no longer noticed.”
“Where did he live, Mrs. Bradley?”
“On Eighteenth Street near Second Avenue.”
“And he wandered all the way to Eleventh Street?” Marks said.
Janet looked at him, not understanding.
“Dr. Corrales’s clinic is on Eleventh Street.”
Janet shook her head. “I simply don’t get the connection. The picture I assume you’re talking about was taken on Eighteenth Street, no more than a half-block from the child’s home.”
“… No clinic there, no doctor’s office?” Marks was trying now to dislodge his own fixed idea.
“I couldn’t say positively,” Janet said, “but I’m fairly certain. It was an ordinary tenement house like most of the buildings in that block.”
“I could have sworn I saw a sign in the background of your picture,” Marks said.
Janet, twisting round in the seat, getting on her knees, opened her suitcase on the back seat. “Louise had the quaint idea I’d want the book with me.”
A moment later she had it open to the page in question. Marks pulled off the road to look at it. A little square of reflected sky shone in the window behind the girl. Plainly it was not a sign: it had simply become one in his imagination.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Marks said after a bit, “if the fixed idea has ruined more people than it’s improved.”
Janet smiled. “That sounds almost un-American.”
Not until they drove up to her house did he put the important question. He asked it with no particular emphasis, but watched closely to see her reaction: “Have you heard from Eric Mather in the last day or so?”
Janet hesitated, then with a faint uplift of her head—pride? defiance?—she said: “I saw him in Chicago last night.”
“He should not have left New York,” Marks said quietly. “Do you know where I can reach him?” There was no urgency in his voice, and having met Janet at the ramp of the plane he knew she had not seen the New York papers.
Pale Betrayer Page 17
