Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The big blond man came into the office and went to his knees at once to examine the open bag. Just as he called out, “Jer …” Mather in one high swift stroke drove the knife with all his power into the stooped back just beneath the left shoulder blade. The man’s cry died in mid-air. He toppled over the bag to the floor.

  Mather left the knife where it was and ran into the corridor. Jerry was coming from the storeroom. Mather waited. He wanted to be seen. Then he ran toward the street, waiting again outside the window that Jerry might see him. A flash of light and an explosion splintered the glass. But Mather had begun again to move. He leaped from the platform and ran, crouched, to the end of the building. He squeezed through an opening beneath the platform and waited, his stomach revolting at the stench there.

  He heard Jerry’s footfalls pounding overhead, then running back to the other end of the platform. He crawled out and poking his head above the platform called his name.

  Another shot rang out, then another. Mather crouched down in momentary safety. Two men were watching now from the storehouse window across the way. And on the street beneath them a man had reached the police call-box. Mather sprinted toward the open street. He heard the singing bullet almost simultaneous to its report. He hit the ground, lay there a moment and began to crawl, trying to draw fire again. People were aware now: that was all he demanded. He wanted to die in the open with witnesses to his killing. A car, approaching from around the corner, had to stop suddenly or run over him. He heard the brakes. But instantly he felt a small sharp pain at the back of his head. Just for an instant he thought of a bee-sting and of his grandmother’s orchard. He could hear the humming from the hive, louder and louder. Then nothing.

  twenty-eight

  MARKS HAD ALREADY STARTED for DePeyster Street and had himself called Communications for the deployment of cars already in the area when the “All Cars” command came through. The narrow streets of the old city north of Wall Street were filling with people who responded in ever greater numbers as the police cars converged. Marks had to abandon his car a block from the scene and push his way on foot through the crowd.

  Mather lay, face down, covered by a police raincoat. Marks lifted the coat for a moment and then spread it again. The sprawling legs protruded. No chance whatever now, Marks thought, of a mere stubbed toe. He had seen the wound at the back of Mather’s head.

  The officer in charge gave Marks the passport and papers. “Not his, sir. His own wallet was in his hip pocket.”

  The Margueritta Import Company was cordoned by police. Witnesses who had seen the killer firing from the platform were repeating their testimony … a stocky man with heavy eyebrows … The three entrances to the building were sealed off. Marks passed the word that the man was to be taken alive. Through the splintered glass of the office window Marks first glimpsed the blond prone figure on the floor there. Inspector Fitzgerald sirened his way through the crowd, not leaving the car till it reached the police cordon. Briefed by Marks, he took command.

  The crowd squealed with awe, delight, whatever it is that moves a mass instinct in the presence of tragedy that is not their own, when Fitzgerald’s voice boomed out over the bull horn:

  “Hear me, wherever you are in there! This is Police Inspector Fitzgerald speaking. Come out, your hands in the air! You have five minutes. In five minutes we’ll fill the building with a gas that will bring you out!” He repeated the ultimatum and then looked at his watch. “How many are in there?” he asked.

  A uniformed sergeant said: “One dead and one alive—to the best of our knowledge, sir.”

  Marks selected a team of three men to go in with him. The gas threat was a device only. Contaminating the building, the police would not themselves be able to enter it for hours, perhaps to then discover that their man had escaped before their arrival. Marks and the others put on armored vests beneath their coats.

  The crowd fell silent as time passed, men here and there among it clocking the countdown on their own watches.

  The detectives moved cautiously into the building, the others waiting, covering Marks as he went into the office to examine the victim there. He was easily identified by the passport found on Mather. The knife in his back had its own grim eloquence.

  Marks rejoined the men in the hall and they moved along it, spaced to cover one another, Marks in the lead. From the door to the storage room he saw the man he wanted, and holstered his own gun. Jerry was slumped over a desk, his hand dangling at his side, the revolver on the floor.

  Marks moved quickly. He was sick of the sight and smell of blood, but he wanted to know the name of the man. His wallet yielded the identity: Jerome Freeman, born in Boise, Idaho, forty-seven years before. Marks returned the wallet to the owner’s hip pocket. He briskly searched the jacket pockets—a package of chewing gum, a ring of keys, and one small key, loose, that might fit a mailbox or a bank deposit box or a locker. He took that with him, leaving the rest to be inventoried at the morgue.

  twenty-nine

  “I TELL YOU, CAPTAIN, if that doc’s straight I’m crooked as a boomerang,” Herring said.

  Pererro added: “It was a mighty slippery story to check out, sir.”

  “And look, man—the knife, his story how he lost it.”

  “Forget the knife!” Redmond exploded. “We don’t have the knife. We can’t prove the murder weapon was a surgical knife.”

  “Yes, sir. All we got’s a might-have-been. And that’s the way his story checks out too. It might’ve been the way he told it to us this A.M. And then again it might not.”

  “Let’s have it, point by point,” Redmond said. “Then you can add this to it.” He shoved the technical report on Corrales’s Chevrolet across the desk. Findings: negative.

  Pererro gave Dr. Corrales’s statements, Herring the check-out on them.

  “I was there (at the Eleventh Street Clinic) until eight o’clock.”

  Herring: “Corroborated by Dr. Moore at the clinic. He came on duty when Corrales left. Corrales, by the way, didn’t join the clinic staff until two months ago.”

  “Go on,” Redmond said.

  “Las Palmas Restaurant on Fourteenth Street.”

  “Dr. Corrales ate a full-course dinner, Mexican style. Nobody clocked him, but the waiter says it took an hour at the very least.”

  “That’s nine fifteen, give a few minutes either way,” Redmond said. “Bradley had left his house by then.”

  “Next stop,” Pererro said. “Misericordia Children’s Home, Lenox Avenue and 103rd Street.”

  “A half-hour’s drive,” Redmond said. “A quarter to ten. Bradley was in Miss Russo’s vestibule.”

  Herring said: “Miss Juanita Franco, age sixty-nine, on night duty at the children’s home, quote: ‘Dr. Corrales comes, he looks at the child, then he goes and calls the ambulance. Then he curses me for not doing it sooner. But I am not a doctor.’

  “Question: ‘Did you go to the phone with the doctor?’

  “Answer: ‘I stayed with the child.’

  “‘So that you did not actually hear him make the call?’

  “‘That is so.’

  “Question: ‘What time did the doctor arrive, Miss Franco?’

  “‘I do not remember. By eleven o’clock everybody was gone. I went back upstairs to clean the room.’”

  Redmond grunted. “He was falling behind schedule, wasn’t he?”

  Herring said: “The call for the ambulance was made at ten fifteen.”

  Redmond said: “Bradley was dead by at least fifteen minutes.”

  “The ambulance rolled at ten twenty. It took them eighteen minutes to get there.”

  “Where’s the Reid Hospital?”

  “On York Avenue.”

  “But God’s teeth, man. The Harlem hospital is virtually next door to that orphanage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Herring said. “They get more customers than most, but we checked, and Monday night they could have answered immediately if Corrales had called them. That child did
n’t last the night, Captain. Maybe that’s why I’m on him. But I think he’s lying to us all the way.”

  Redmond said: “All right. Let’s hear your version of what happened.”

  “I got to start from the beginning. The doc says he picked up his car at the lumberyard. I say he walked to the restaurant straight from the clinic. The other boys picked up his car and used it to tail and pick up Bradley. Corrales had plenty of time to enjoy his dinner, man. He wasn’t needed at Miss Russo’s apartment until half-past nine. It was only a five-minutes walk. He did his ‘good deed’ there and drove his own car north. He was moving then, but he took time at Park and Sixty-fourth Street to throw Bradley’s wallet and briefcase in a mailbox. And here’s the thing, Captain: I say he called for the ambulance before he ever got to the orphanage. Maybe one of the other partners even called. Corrales must’ve known all day how sick that child was. He’d seen her in the morning.”

  Redmond shook his head. “I’m not saying it couldn’t be that way, Wally. But we can’t use it, not without witnesses.”

  “Give us time and we’ll get ’em. I swear we’ll get ’em.”

  Redmond said: “Go on with Corrales’s story.”

  “The rest checks out. The funeral parlor on 108th Street and the Liberation meeting. Just like he said.”

  “It seems odd,” Redmond said, “when he was late for a meeting where he was scheduled to speak that he’d stop at a wake on the way.”

  “I don’t think you exactly call it a wake, Captain.” Herring grinned. “This was one of the old-time Latin American revolutionaries, eighty-nine years old. He’s been here since 1927, but they’ve shipped him back to Mexico for burial.”

  Redmond looked at him sharply. “When?”

  Herring glanced at Pererro. They had in that small particular failed to check. “We’ll have to find out, sir.”

  “Get onto it.”

  The phone was ringing on Redmond’s desk when the two detectives left his office. When they reached the squadroom downstairs, the report was coming in on the killings in DePeyster Street.

  thirty

  MARKS WAS NOT LIKELY ever to forget the ride back to Houston Street with Fitzgerald. The targets of the Inspector’s abuse were as wide as the range of police officialdom, from the Commissioner and his bright young men to the bright young men themselves. “I’ll take a cop with his nose to the ground over one with it in the air any day. Wasn’t it crime prevention you were interested in, Lieutenant? And look at the bloody slaughter back there. If corpses were blessings, we’d be lined up now for all eternity.”

  Marks, his eyes straight ahead as he took the lashing, saw young Detective Pierce’s ears turn from pink to a dark glowing red. Marks knew he had failed badly on Eric Mather, trying to think his way through the man. There had been a point, he remembered, where he had himself thought of the virtues of so-called dumb cops. That Fitzgerald was right made the situation that much more uncomfortable. But that one reason for his failure lay in the fact, he was sure, that Eric Mather had wanted to die was something he could not tell Fitzgerald, certainly not in the old man’s present mood.

  They reached the station house and pushed through the reporters and photographers, and over the wires and cables servicing the sound media.

  “I’ll be up in a few minutes, Inspector,” Marks shouted.

  Whether or not Fitzgerald heard him, or whether he cared if Marks ever came up, he did not know. The old man, his stone face moving like a wedge before him, was saying over and over again: “Not now, boys. Nothing for now.”

  Marks picked up Herring in the squadroom and went back to the car where he had asked Pierce to wait. “Tenth Street. Go up Third Avenue.”

  In the car he asked Herring how Corrales’s story had checked out.

  “Lousy by me, Lieutenant, but we can’t prove it, not till we go over it with a fine tooth comb. By me you could drive a Mack truck through it.”

  “Or a Chevy sedan? Anything in the car?”

  “Negative,” Herring said.

  “We got to it several days late,” Marks said. “Still …”

  “Look, man, that doc wouldn’t have been in the hall after the light bulb was broken, not according to my way of seeing it. He was gone by the time they busted it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Marks said.

  “You know, don’t you, Lieutenant, the feds are in this up to here?” Herring indicated eye level.

  “Yes,” Marks said, “we may not see them, but they’re in it.”

  Herring told him of Redmond’s orders to track down the casket destined for Mexican burial. “You know how far I got? The Baltimore and Ohio freightyard. No information. Then the Captain calls me up and says we’re to make no further inquiries into it. How do you like that, man?”

  “They must have their reasons,” Marks said, “but what I don’t understand is their failure to act in the case themselves.”

  “It’s like they wanted to get things botched up.”

  “If that’s what they wanted,” Marks said, “they got it.”

  Herring said: “We just got to tie the doc in now, and we got to do it ourselves.”

  “Is the stake-out still on him?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Redmond don’t like him any more than I do.”

  They had reached Tenth Street and turned east. As they passed Anne Russo’s apartment, Marks said: “Are you a praying man, Wally?”

  “Like most of us, on occasion, Lieutenant.”

  “We aren’t going to have a better one.” Then to Pierce, Marks said: “Pull up at the lumberyard there where the gate’s open.”

  Two men were working in the yard with a power saw as Marks and Herring got out of the car. Marks took out the key he had removed from the suicide Jerome Freeman’s pocket and gave it to Herring. “Try this on the padlock while I speak to the men in back.”

  Marks walked through the yard, and when one of the men turned off the saw, Marks said: “It’s all right. I just wanted to check the electrical outlet.” It was at the side of the wall, available to anyone with access to the yard itself.

  As he turned back, Herring came to meet him, the padlock and key in his hand, a wide grin on his face. “They fit, man. They were made for each other.”

  Marks put his arm around Herring. “Like you and me, Wally. Get yourself a warrant and bring in Corrales.”

  When Marks walked into Redmond’s office a few minutes later it was to an unexpected silence. Men were moving in and out, and the noise from downstairs could not be shut out, but Fitzgerald and Redmond were sitting side by side at Redmond’s desk, reading the same material.

  Fitzgerald glanced up. “We’re reading your mail, Lieutenant.” He indicated the envelope on the desk. “It wasn’t marked personal.”

  Marks picked it up, the envelope Mather had addressed to him from the public library.

  thirty-one

  CORRALES HAD NOT TALKED by eight o’clock that night, at which hour the police principals in the case as well as the district attorney met with Jim Anderson in his Manhattan apartment. They met there for the simple expedient of avoiding, for the time being, the understandably clamorous press. One reason Corrales had not talked was because Anderson had requested that he not be questioned until the security picture could be put before the police.

  Anderson’s wife served coffee, then took her purse and gloves and went out, putting Marks in mind of Louise Steinberg’s remark that she and Janet had probably seen more movies over the years than any other two women in New York.

  In the middle of the highly polished diningroom table, around which the men gathered, lay several Xeroxed copies of Eric Mather’s confession.

  Anderson started by saying that Jerome Freeman’s true identity had not yet been established. He had not been born in Boise, Idaho, as his identification papers showed. Apparently he had manufactured an American identity which had served him for at least eleven years. Of his death Anderson said: “A man in his business kills himself for
one of two reasons: he is afraid he will crack under interrogation, or he knows that the government he served—and failed—will deal as harshly with him as would the enemy if he had succeeded.”

  “I take it you don’t mean the produce business,” Fitzgerald said dryly.

  “I don’t, though I understand he ran a profitable American enterprise in the Margueritta Import Company. An excellent cover, afternoons and evenings free, accessible to the waterfront … As for the Greek, on whom we have no file either—the Immigration Department does have a record. But that is all. I think you have another lead to him in this …”

  Anderson picked up a copy of Mather’s confession. “Gentlemen, I say it sadly, believe me, but to us this document is virtually worthless, though I must say it reads like a work of art. It was largely fantasy, the part Mather thought he played in their conspiracy. I don’t mean they didn’t set him up and use him: they did. And we may suppose that they followed his program—the identification in Athens of Bradley as their man by his visit to the Byron monument. But they would not have left it to chance that Bradley would go there because his friend Eric Mather had suggested it.

  “The scene at that end would have gone something like this: Grysenko would have said to each of the American physicists to whom he was to give a copy of the experiment film—casually of course: ‘There is a monument to the poet, Byron, which I should like to see while I am in Athens.’ In fact, we know he did say just that to Sylvester of Boston. Sylvester’s response was: ‘Better ask the hall porter how to get there.’ Bradley, on the other hand, would have said: ‘A friend of mine told me to be sure to see it.’ The reverse, you see, of Mather’s plan. But to Grysenko it established Bradley as the ‘carrier.’

  “But as for the story they told Mather—intercepting vital Soviet secrets intended for transmission to the United States—for their evaluation here—is that how he put it? Only a very naive man would believe that—or one who felt he had to believe it because he was hooked anyway. To risk sending into this country such valuable information as we spend fortunes supporting an apparatus to obtain? And what was the scheduled courier supposed to do? To intercept such information means it was intended for someone else. Presumably this contact would inform his superiors at once. Or dead, his death itself would be expected to start the grisly wheels of the C.I.A. in motion.” He smiled at Connolly, sitting in the background.